English
In an 1874 pamphlet, former missionary to China Paul Perny accused the marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, professor of Chinese at the Collège de France, and his predecessor Stanislas Julien of being imposters. Perny’s Charlatanisme littéraire dévoilé (Literary Charlatanism Revealed) ultimately got him convicted of libel. The complexity of the affair, mixing the practices of learned controversies, the struggle between two rival branches of Sinology, and recourse to the influence of public opinion, allows us to review a century of the conflictual institutionalization of Sinology in France.