Henri Hubert

Henri Hubert (1872 to 1927) was a French archaeologist and sociologist of comparative religion, best known for his work on the Celts and for his collaboration with Marcel Mauss and the other members of the Année Sociologique circle around Émile Durkheim. Born and raised in Paris, he attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where the school chaplain stirred his interest in religion, entered the École Normale Supérieure and passed the agrégation in history in 1895 after studying the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Byzantine Empire and iconoclasm; his doctoral thesis concerned pre-Christian religion in Asia Minor. He chose research over teaching, working at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and, from 1898, at the Musée des Antiquités, and he became responsible for the section on the sociology of religion in the Année Sociologique. With Mauss he wrote Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (1899) and Outline of a General Theory of Magic (1904). His later books include The Rise of the Celts and The Greatness and Decline of the Celts, and a posthumous study of the Germanic peoples, Les Germains (1952). He died in 1927.