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Jean Delvert

Portrait of Jean   Delvert

Jean Laurent Delvert (19 May 1921, Vincennes, France — 24 June 2005, Paris) was a French geographer and ethnologist who spent ten years in Cambodia as part of his academic career and wrote extensively about Southeast Asia and tropical geography.

Delvert was appointed assistant professor in geography in 1946, spent one year at Saigon Institut des Lettres and moved to Phnom Penh in 1949, first as principal of Sisowath Lyceum, then as principal of Descartes Lyceum (1950 – 1958.) During his time as head of the French Cultural Mission in Cambodia from 1949 to 1959, he studied the social fabric of Cambodia’s countryside, publishing his reference study, Le Paysan cambodgien, in 1961. He also worked on the origin and specifics of sandstone used for the monuments of Angkor (1963). 

His approach to Asia combined physical and social geography, centering on ancestral agricultural practices such as burnt-land and flooded-land cultures. Considering the traditional village structure and the nexus of relations between farmers, Delvert came to the conclusion that ​“a rural democracy, quite exceptional in Asia”, was an essential trait of the Cambodian society. As researcher Mathieu Guérin has noted, 

dès les années 1980, des chercheurs ont remis en cause la vision idyllique de la société rurale cambodgienne présentée par Jean Delvert. En réhabilitant les travaux de Hou Yuon, auteur d’une thèse sur la paysannerie cambodgienne en 1955, puis dirigeant khmer rouge, et en s’appuyant sur des centaines de sources orales, l’historien australien Ben Kiernan tend à montrer qu’il existe bien un prolétariat rural au Cambodge que l’on peut faire remonter au moins jusqu’au protectorat français. [“De l’engagé pour dettes au vagabond, Les paysans pauvres cambodgiens sous protectorat français”, in Les petites gens de la terre. Paysans, ouvriers et domestiques du néolithique à 2014”, AHSR, Histoire & sociétés rurales et Pôle rural de la MRSH de Caen, Oct 2014, Caen, France]. [since the 1980s, researchers have called into question the idyllic vision of Cambodian rural society put forward by Jean Delvert. By rehabilitating the work of Hou Yuon, the author of a thesis on the Cambodian peasantry in 1955 who became a Khmer Rouge leader, and relying on hundreds of oral sources, the Australian historian Ben Kiernan tends to show that there is indeed a rural proletariat in Cambodia that can be traced back at least to the French protectorate.]

Later on, Jean Delvert was a professor of tropical geograpjy at Sorbonne University from 1964 to 1970, Emeritus Professor in 1980, and a member of Académie des sciences d’outré-mer.

Publications

  • Le Paysan cambodgien, Paris, Mouton-De Gruyter, 1961, 740 p; 2nd ed. Paris, L’Harmattan, 1994. ENG: The Cambodian Peasant, U.S. Department of Commerce, Office of Technical Services, Joint Publications Research Service, 1962, 3 vols. 
  • “Recherches sur l’“érosion” des grès des monuments d’Angkor,” BEFEO 51 – 2, 1963, pp 453 – 534.
  • Géographie de l’Asie du Sud-Est, 1967, 2e éd. 1974.
  • Le Japon, ​“Les Cours de La Sorbonne”, 2 vols, Paris, Centre de documentation universitaire (CDU), 1970 and 1971, 230+179 p; repub. 1980.
  • L’Asie du Sud, Paris, CDU, 1971.
  • Culture en eau, culture inondée et culture irriguée en Asie tropicale, Paris, CDU-SEDES, 1980, 84 p.
  • L’Indonésie: Geographie, ​“Les Cours de la Sorbonne”, Paris, CDU, 1979; digitized Fenixx, 2021.
  • L’Asie méridionale, Paris, CDU-SEDES, 1981, 153 p. 
  • L’Asie tropicale, Paris, CDU, 1983.
  • Le Cambodge, Paris, PUF, 1983, 128 p.; 2nd ed. 1998; 3d ed. 2009.

Aspects du monde tropical et asiatique : hommage à Jean Delvert, ed. Raymond Baldanet, Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 1991, 382 p.