There are many ways to tell your Memories, once you have reached the age of exercise. You can choose the most academic chronological form. We can also prefer to insist on the outstanding works that we have accomplished and which deserve to be read. And then, there is the Yves Coppens way, original at will: write down memories of meetings with the greats of this world, like a sort of princely herbarium where the 85-year-old Breton paleoanthropologist categorizes the French heads of state then strangers crossed during his career, continent by continent, but also kings and queens and even popes. “I realized while preparing this book that I came to a total of fifty: a good number that perhaps deserved that I do something with it.” Yves Coppens was thus in direct contact with all the presidents of the French Republic from Pompidou, but also with the Queen of England, the emperors of Japan and Ethiopia, the former empress of Iran, the popes Benedict XVI and François ... It was either a brief exchange, during official ceremonies, or less rushed and more intimate moments, sometimes funny.
"I am fortunate to practice a profession that fascinates just about anyone in the world, and that does not exclude men of power or princes or queens," observes Yves Coppens with some amusement. “There is a natural, almost childish, interest in each of us, in the idea of observing the remains of our very distant ancestors. In this game, I am the intermediary, a kind of recreation in the tumult of their lives. ” Faced with fossilized human bones millions of years old, nuclear officials like the resident of Buckingham Palace let their guard down, wide-eyed and half-opened mouth, all reduced to the condition of Homo sapiens. Equal to our common origins. “Paleoanthropology is a school of humility”, recognizes one of the masters of the discipline. (…)
"Jacques Chirac was an astonishing character, it was with him that I most saw the contrast between the stature of a man of power and the simple and ordinary man who sometimes hides behind the suit."
Find the rest of this article in Bretons magazine n ° 163 of April 2020
The Savant, the Fossil and the Prince , Yves Coppens, Odile Jacob, 480 p., € 24.90
This article is produced by Bretons magazine and hosted by 20 Minutes.
- Jacques Chirac
- Pope Francis
- Queen Elizabeth II
- Bretons
- Reindeer
- World