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In the first half of the 20th century in France, Indianism, Orientalism and the professionalisation of teaching all contributed to the growing popularity of yoga.
More than a century before Vivekananda's arrival in Chicago (1893) and Paris (1900), European academics were interested in the great Sanskrit texts. In 1814, Antoine Léonard Chézy presented fragments of the Ramayana, and occupied the first Chair of Sanskrit Language and Literature created at the Collège de France. In 1829, Victor Cousin devoted lessons V and VI of his Cours d'histoire de la philosophie to India, the twelfth edition of 1884 of which included Kapila's Sankhya and Patandjali's Sankhya schools of philosophy. In 1898, Alfred Foucher brought back a manuscript of the Patañjali yoga-sūtras from a mission to Kashmir. The Bhagavad Gîtâ, in which yoga plays a major role, attracted the attention of Emile Burnouf (1861 and 1905), Sylvain Lévi (with J. T. Stickney, 1938) and Emile Sénart (1922). As early as 1913, Paul Masson-Oursel wrote articles on yoga that were precursors to his Que sais-je ? (1954). The young ophthalmologist Jean Filliozat, who began his career as an Indianist with a thesis at the École pratique des hautes études, devoted his first article to La concentration oculaire dans le yoga (Focusing the eyes in yoga) (1931). With Louis Renou, he co-edited L'Inde classique : manuel des études indiennes, Volume I of which appeared in 1949, and Volume II, which included a study of the Darshana, in 1953.
Academic studies, which focused on the philosophical dimension of yoga, left the development of its practical aspects to a heterogeneous orientalist milieu. Theosophy played a major role in the esoteric development of these academic studies, with Annie Besant publishing French. In the wake of Vivekananda, various authors translated the Yoga Sutrasas Rāja yoga, and saw Hatha Yoga as a magico-religious practice. These authors included Paul Sédir (Le Fakirisme hindou et les Yogas, 1906), Ernest Bosc (Traité de Yoga, 1907; Yoghisme et Fakirisme Hindou, 1913) and Michel Sage (La Yoga, ou le chemin de l'union divine, 1915).
The young Georgian dancer Youri Hahoutoff, who emigrated to Paris in 1917, became the disciple of a Bengali yogi, Hiranmoy Chandra Ghosh, who trained him in various styles of yoga (Hatha, Jñāna, Laya, Kundalini, Swari, etc.). Changing his name to Nil Hahoutoff, he taught yoga and was active in the French hygienist movement. Maryse Choisy, a multi-faceted personality who discovered yoga with Rabindranath Tagore in 1924 in Shantiniketan, launched the discipline in the journals of occultism she directed, and published La Métaphysique des Yogas (1948), and Yogas et psychanalyse (1949). In 1952, accompanying Dr. Thérèse Brosse to India, she met Swami Shivananda. Constant Kerneïz, born Félix Guyot, was a French philosopher, journalist and astrologer, who settled in London in 1928 and who practised with an Indian master, learning philosophy and texts from Max Müller's The Sacred Books of the East. In Paris, he taught Hatha Yoga, which he introduced to many female readers through his articles in women's magazines. Often considered the father of "French-style" yoga, he emphasised its moral (yama and niyama) and spiritual role. In 1948, his pupil Lucien Ferrer opened the Académie Occidentale de Yoga and created a "somascetic clinic", where he practised as a healer, drawing on a variety of sources. Swami Siddheswarananda, a monk of the Ramakrishna Missions, founded the Vedantic centre at Gretz, near Paris, in 1948. His compatriot and future disciple, Shri Mahesh Ghatradyal, a champion runner who represented India at the Paris University Olympic Games (1947), settled there permanently. In 1952, at Françoise Dolto's invitation, he presented poses at the Sorbonne amphitheatre, two years after Goswami and his disciple Parmanick.
This spread of the practice of yoga in Europe was accompanied by a literary interest in the Indian masters. Romain Rolland published two major biographies: Vie de Râmakrishna (1929) and Vie de Vivekananda (1930). In the same year, Jean Herbert, UN interpreter and author of Spiritualité hindoue (1947), created the famous Spiritualités vivantes collection published by Albin Michel, devoted to the teachings of numerous Indian sages of the first half of the 20th century, including Ramana Maharshi, Ma Ananda Moyi, Swami Ramdas and Sri Aurobindo.
In addition to Alain Daniélou's short treatise Yoga, méthode de réintégration (1951), Mircea Eliade's work is particularly noteworthy. After studying Sanskrit and philosophy with Surendranath Dasgupta in Calcutta from 1928 to 1930, and a short stay at Swami Shivananda's ashram, he defended his thesis Techniques du yoga in 1933 (French edition 1948, revised and expanded in 1954 under the title Le Yoga. Immortalité et Liberté). Combining academic and popular knowledge, Indianism and comparatism, Eliade's works marked a new stage in the understanding of yoga.
Published in january 2023.