Marcel Bataillon

Marcel Édouard Bataillon (Dijon, 20 May 1895 – Paris, 4 June 1977) was a French Hispanicist who specialized in the philosophy and spirituality of sixteenth-century Spain.

Career He began his studies in 1913 at the École Normale Supérieure. This was followed by a term at l'École des Hautes Études Hispaniques in Madrid where he was a delegate to the "International Committee of Allied Propaganda".

He remained at the Sorbonne until 1945 when he transferred to the Collège de France, where he became the chair of the department for "Languages and Literatures of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin-America", a position he held for twenty years. He was the college's Administrator from 1955 to 1965.

The Iberoamerican studies library at the Sorbonne has been named after him. In 1972, the Marcel Bataillon Professorship in Comparative Literature was established at the University of North Carolina. He became the second recipient of the Alfonso Reyes International Prize in 1974.

Selected works La Celestine Selon Fernando de Rojas, Marcel Didier (1961) Novedad y Fecundidad del Lazarillo de Tormes, Anaya (1973) El Padre Las Casas y la Defensa de los Indios, Ariel (1976) La Vie de Lazarillo de Tormès, Flammarion (1993) Erasmo y España: Estudios Sobre la Historia Espiritual del Siglo XVI, Fondo de Cultura Económica (1997) (French: Erasme et l'Espagne, Librairie Droz (1998) ) Originally published in 1937, during the height of the Spanish Civil War, this is considered to be Bataillon's magnum opus. Close to one thousand pages long and seventeen years in the writing, it received little critical attention until it was translated into Spanish in 1950. Les Jésuites dans l’Espagne du XVIe Siècle, preface by Gilles Bataillon, Belles Lettres (2009)