Stanislas Aignan Julien (13 April 179714 February 1873) was a French sinologist who served as the Chair of Chinese at the Collège de France for over 40 years and was one of the most academically respected sinologists in French scholarship. Julien was a student of Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, and succeeded him as the chair of Chinese at the Collège de France upon Rémusat's death in 1832. The quantity and quality of Julien's scholarship earned him wide renown, and caused him to become the leading European scholar of China during the 19th century. Along with Sebastien Couvreur and among 19th-century scholars of China, Julien's academic reputation was rivaled only by the Scottish sinologist James Legge, and no sinologist equaled his academic reputation until Édouard Chavannes at the turn of the 20th century. Notwithstanding his academic rigor and gifted intellect, Julien had a notoriously thorny personality and publicly feuded with most of his contemporaries, earning broad academic respect but equally broad personal dislike from those who knew him. Biography Born at Orléans on 13 April 1797, Julien initially struggled to obtain higher education due to his family's relative poverty. He studied at the college in Orléans before transferring to the Collège de France, where he initially focused on Greek language and literature before branching out into Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Sanskrit. In 1821 he was appointed assistant professor of Greek. In the same year he published an edition of The Rape of Helen of Coluthus, with versions in French, Latin, English, German, Italian and Spanish. He attended the lectures of Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat on Chinese. In late 1823 Julien met Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, the first-ever professor of Chinese at the Collège de France, and began studying Chinese with him. In 1824, only six months after meeting Rémusat, Julien began a Latin translation of the Mencius, working from eight different Chinese editions and two Manchu editions, Julien having simultaneously begun studying Manchu. The work was published in Paris with the lengthy title Meng Tseu vel Mencium inter Sinenses philosophos, ingenio, doctrina, nominisque claritate Confucio proximum, edidit, Latina interpretatione, ad interpretationem Tartaricam utramque recensita, instruixit, et perpetuo commentario, e Sinicis deprompto, illustravit Stanislaus Julien. Julien's attention to textual variants among different editions was remarkable for his era, and was lauded by his teacher Rémusat, whose review gave such praises as: "M. Julien s'est livré à une lecture assidue du texte de Mencius; il a étudié le style