DUBOIS, JEAN ANTOINE (1765-1848), French Catholic missionary in India, was ordained in the diocese of Viviers in 1792, and sailed for India in the same year under the direction of the Missions Étrangères. He was at first attached to the Pondicherry mission, and worked in the southern districts of the present Madras Presidency. On the fall of Seringapatam in 1799 he went to Mysore to reorganize the Christian community that had been shattered by Tipu Sultan. Among the benefits which he conferred upon his impoverished flock were the founding of agricultural colonies and the introduction of vaccination as a preventive of smallpox. But his great work was his record of Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies. Immediately on his arrival in India he saw that the work of a Christian missionary should be based on a thorough acquaintance with the innermost life and character of the native population. Accordingly he abjured European society, adopted the native style of clothing, and made himself in habit and costume as much like a Hindu as he could. He gained an extraordinary welcome amongst people of all castes and conditions, and is still spoken of in many parts of South India with affection and esteem as “the prince’s son, the noblest of Europeans.” Although Dubois modestly disclaimed the rank of an author, his collections were not so much drawn from the Hindu sacred books as from his own careful and vivid observations, and it is this, united to a remarkable prescience, that makes his work so valuable. It is divided into three parts: (1) a general view of society in India, and especially of the caste system; (2) the four states of Brahminical life; (3) religion—feasts, temples, objects of worship. Not only does the abbé give a shrewd, clear-sighted, candid account of the manners and customs of the Hindus, but he provides a very sound estimate of the British position in India, and makes some eminently just observations on the difficulties of administering the Empire according to Western notions of civilization and progress with the limited resources that are available. Dubois’s French MS. was purchased for eight thousand rupees by Lord William Bentinck for the East India Company in 1807; in 1816 an English translation was published, and of this edition about 1864 a curtailed reprint was issued. The abbé, however, largely recast his work, and of this revised text (now in the India Office) an edition with notes was published in 1897 by H.K. Beauchamp. Dubois left India in January 1823, with a special pension conferred on him by the East India Company, and on reaching Paris was appointed director of the Missions Étrangères, of which he afterwards became superior (1836-1839). He translated into French the famous book of Hindu fables called Panchatantra, and also a work called The Exploits of the Guru Paramarta. Of more interest were his Letters on the State of Christianity in India, in which he asserted his opinion that under existing circumstances there was no human possibility of so overcoming the invincible barrier of Brahminical prejudice as to convert the Hindus as a nation to any sect of Christianity. He acknowledged that low castes and outcastes might be converted in large numbers, but of the higher castes he wrote: “Should the intercourse between individuals of both nations, by becoming more intimate and more friendly, produce a change in the religion and usages of the country, it will not be to turn Christians that they will forsake their own religion, but rather ... to become mere atheists.” He died in 1848.
DUBOIS, PAUL (1829-1905), French sculptor and painter, was born at Nogent-sur-Seine on the 18th of July 1829. He studied law to please his family, and art to please himself, and finally adopted the latter, and placed himself under Toussaint. After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts, Dubois went to Rome. His first contributions to the Paris Salon (1860) were busts of “The Countess de B.” and “A Child.” For his first statues, “St John the Baptist” and “Narcissus at the Bath” (1863), he was awarded a medal of the second class. The statue of “The Infant St John,” which had been modelled in Florence in 1860, was exhibited in Paris in bronze, and was acquired by the Luxemburg. “A Florentine Singer of the Fifteenth Century,” one of the most popular statuettes in Europe, was shown in 1865; “The Virgin and Child” appeared in the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1867; “The Birth of Eve” was produced in 1873, and was followed by striking busts of Henner, Dr Parrot, Paul Baudry, Pasteur, Gounod and Bonnat, remarkable alike for life, vivacity, likeness, refinement and subtle handling. The chief work of Paul Dubois was “The Tomb of General Lamoricière” in the cathedral of Nantes, a brilliant masterpiece conceived in the Renaissance spirit, with allegorical figures and groups representing Warlike Courage, Charity, Faith and Meditation, as well as bas-reliefs and enrichments; the two first-named works were separately exhibited in the Salon of 1877. The medallions represent Wisdom, Hope, Justice, Force, Rhetoric, Prudence and Religion. The statue of the “Constable Anne de Montmorency” was executed for Chantilly, and that of “Joan of Arc” (1889) for the town of Reims. The Italian influence which characterized the earlier work of Dubois disappeared as his own individuality became clearly asserted. As a painter he restricted himself mainly to portraiture. “My Children” (1876) being probably his most noteworthy achievement. His drawings and copies after the Old Masters are of peculiar excellence: they include “The Dead Christ” (after Sebastian del Piombo) and “Adam and Eve” (after Raphael). In 1873 Dubois was appointed keeper of the Luxemburg Museum. He succeeded Guillaume as director of the École des Beaux-Arts, 1878, and Perraud as member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Twice at the Salon he obtained the medal of honour (1865 and 1876), and once at the Universal Exhibition (1878). He also won numerous other distinctions, and was appointed grand cross of the Legion of Honour. He was made a member of several European orders, and in 1895 was elected an honorary foreign academician of the Royal Academy of London. He died at Paris in 1905.
DUBOIS, PIERRE (c. 1250-c. 1312), French publicist in the reign of Philip the Fair, was the author of a series of political pamphlets embodying original and daring views. He was known to Jean du Tillet in the 16th, and to Pierre Dupuy in the 17th century, but remained practically forgotten until the middle of the 19th century, when his history was reconstructed from his works. He was a Norman by birth, probably a native of Coutances, where he exercised the functions of royal advocate of the bailliage and procurator of the university. He was educated at the university of Paris, where he heard St Thomas Aquinas and Siger of Brabant. He was, nevertheless, no adherent of the scholastic philosophy, and appears to have been conversant with the works of Roger Bacon. Although he never held any important political office, he must have been in the confidence of the court when, in 1300, he wrote his anonymous Summaria, brevis et compendiosa doctrina felicis expedicionis et abbreviationis guerrarum et litium regni Francorum, which is extant in a unique MS., but is analysed by N. de Wailly in the Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes (2nd series, vol. iii.). In the contest between Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII. Dubois identified himself completely with the secularizing policy of Philip, and poured forth a series of anti-clerical pamphlets, which did not cease even with the death of Boniface. His Supplication du pueble de France au roy contre le pape Boniface le VIIIe, printed in 1614 in Acta inter Bonifacium VIII. et Philippum Pulchrum, dates from 1304, and is a heated indictment of the temporal power. He represented Coutances in the states-general of 1302, but in 1306 he was serving Edward I. as an advocate in Guienne, without apparently abandoning his Norman practice by which he had become a rich man. The most important of his works, his treatise De recuperatione terrae sanctae,[1] was written in 1306, and dedicated in its extant form to Edward I., though it is certainly addressed to Philip. Dubois outlines the conditions necessary to a successful crusade—the establishment and enforcement of a state of peace among the Christian nations of the West by a council of the church; the reform of the monastic, and especially of the military, orders; the reduction of their revenues; the instruction of a number of young men and women in oriental languages and the natural sciences with a view to the government of Eastern peoples; and the establishment of Philip of Valois as emperor of the East. The king of France was in fact, when once the pope was deprived of the temporal power, to become the suzerain of the Western nations, and in a later and separate memoir Dubois proposed that he should cause himself to be made emperor by Clement V. His zeal for the crusade was probably subordinate to the desire to secure the wealth of the monastic orders for the royal treasury, and to transfer the ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the crown. His ideas on education, on the celibacy of the clergy, and his schemes for the codification of French law, were far in advance of his time. He was an early and violent “Gallican,” and the first of the great French lawyers who occupied themselves with high politics. In 1308 he attended the states-general at Tours. He is generally credited with Quaedam proposita papae a rege super facto Templariorum, a draft epistle supposed to be addressed to Clement by Philip. This was followed by other pamphlets in the same tone, in one of which he proposed that a kingdom founded on the property of the Templars in the East should be established on behalf of Philip the Tall.
See an article by E. Renan in Hist. litt. de la France, vol. xxvi. pp. 471-536; P. Dupuy Hist. de la condamnation ... des Templiers (Brussels, 1713), and Hist. du différend entre le pape Boniface VIII et Philippe le Bel (Paris 1655); and Notices et extraits de manuscrits, vol. xx.
[1] Printed in Collections à servir à l’étude de l’histoire (1891).