Biography
Louis - Ernest Leroux was the son of a pork butcher from Saint-Quentin. In 1871, he founded the "Librairie Ernest Leroux" in Paris, at 28 rue Bonaparte, in which he presented himself as an expert in old books from the Far East, particularly Japanese prints .
Little by little, he began to publish under the imprint "Ernest Leroux, Éditeur" works dealing mainly with orientalism and archaeology, developing a whole fund of erudition that the rise of colonialism would favor. Philosophy, the history of religions, and soon, ethnology and anthropology are fields that Leroux welcomes into his house.
On the periodical side, in 1876 he took charge of La Revue critique d'histoire et de littérature founded ten years earlier by Paul Meyer and Gaston Paris. In 1900, he became the main publisher of scholarly journals, with more than 25 in his catalogue, including the Revue de l'histoire des religions.
For his services to research and scholarship, Leroux was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1888.
In the 1920s, the fund gradually came under the management of the Presses universitaires de France : the sinologist Paul Pelliot and Louis Eisenmann were responsible for the Leroux editions on the board of directors of the Presses, which ended up ratifying the merger in 1939. (Source Accessed Oct 9, 2024)
