Deux comparatistes ambitieux. La « découverte » de la tripartition fonctionnelle par Émile Benveniste et Georges Dumézil

This article traces Georges Dumézil’s re-founding of comparative mythology and, more specifically, the development of his theory of functional tripartition through the prism of his relationship with the linguist Émile Benveniste. The fundamental role played by the latter in Dumézil’s election to the Collège de France can be explained by the hitherto little-studied evolution of the relationship between the two scholars. From being openly hostile to Dumézil’s early work on comparative mythology, Benveniste came to embrace the theory of functional tripartition after the Second World War, even going so far as to claim paternity for it. The question of comparison as a method of research thus becomes the ground on which to measure the affinities and divergences between the ideas of two thinkers fundamental to French culture in the second half of the 20th century.