Jean Haudry

Jean Haudry (28 May 1934 – 23 May 2023) was a French linguist and Indo-Europeanist.

Jean Haudry was born on 28 May 1934 in Le Perreux-sur-Marne in the eastern suburbs of Paris.

He became agrégé in grammar studies at the École Normale Supérieure in 1959 and earned a PhD in linguistics in 1975 after a thesis on Vedic Sanskrit grammatical cases.

Haudry was a member of the Institute of Formation of the Front National (FN) of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Haudry was generally regarded as a distinguished linguist by other scholars, Haudry's L'Indo-Européen, published in 1979, remains the reference introduction to the Proto-Indo-European language written in French.

In 1980, he co-founded with GRECE members Jean-Paul Allard and Jean Varenne the "Institute of Indo-European Studies" (IEIE) at the Jean Moulin University Lyon 3.

Under his leadership between 1982 and 1998, the IEIE published the journal Études indo-européennes.

He was a professor of Sanskrit and dean of the faculty of letters at the University Lyon 3 and a directeur d'études at the 4th section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études.

In his most important work on comparative mythology, La Religion cosmique des Indo-Européens (1987; "The Cosmic Religion of Indo-Europeans"), Haudry argued that Proto-Indo-European cosmogony featured three 'skies' (diurnal, nocturnal and liminal) each having its own set of deities and colours (white, red, and dark).

The proposition is often mentioned in handbooks, although it has been criticized by some scholars as an "overinterpretation" of available data.

He also served in the Scientific Council of the FN until the late 1990s when he decided to follow Bruno Mégret and his splinter party Mouvement National Républicain.

In 1995, he participated in the founding of the nativist movement Terre et Peuple, along with Pierre Vial and Jean Mabire, and served as its vice president.

Soon after Haudry's retirement, the French Ministry of Education appointed a commission to investigate whether Haudry's institute was too closely associated with the far-right.

The work of the commission was mooted when Haudry's successor, Jean-Paul Allard, dissolved the institute and reconstituted it as an association free from state supervision.

He was a director of the Association of French Friends of South African Communities.

Haudry died on 23 May 2023, five days before his 89th birthday.

He became professor emeritus in 2002.

Haudry practiced a version of modern paganism that put heavy emphasis on ethnicity.

He described this paganism: "each [pagan] religion belongs specifically to the corresponding ethnic and linguistic community, which, far from seeking to convert foreigners, jealously guards the benefits of its religion for its members".

In Haudry's 2009 essay entitled The Triad: thought, word, action, in the Indo-European tradition, he stated that the formula "thought, word, action" had a wide distribution in all of the ancient literatures of Indo-European languages in antiquity.

According to Haudry, there is a connection between the triad of "thought, word, action" and fire or light.

He said that the presence of "divine fires" is in several Indo-European mythologies, such as the figure of Loki in Norse mythology.

For Alberto De Antoni, this study, which is "very scholarly and elaborate from a linguistic point of view, with an extensive bibliography and a critical apparatus", allows Haudry, thanks to the multiplicity of sources within the Indo-European world and due to Haudry's "excellent linguistic expertise" to reconstitute the verbs and nouns of the triadic formula.

Haudry supported the Arctic hypothesis of the origin of Indo-Europeans.

However, he believed that the Kurgan culture was probably the center of diffusion.