Édouard des Places, the only son of a cavalry officer, initially received private lessons and then attended the Jesuit school in
Montpellier, the
Notre Dame de Mongré High School in
Villefranche-sur-Saône and the Jesuit school in
Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon. After graduating from school, he decided to work as a teacher in Jesuit schools himself. In the First World War he did not take part as a soldier, but he taught
rhetoric at the Jesuit school in
Beirut as part of military service. After a visit to the
Holy Land (1921) he was sent to the island of
Jersey. From 1924 he taught
Ancient Greek at the Jesuit school in
Yzeure and at the same time prepared his doctorate at the
Sorbonne in Paris. On 6 June 1929 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on
grammatical particles in
Plato supervised by
Paul Mazon. When the
Second World War broke out, des Places was in Germany and volunteered as a
chaplain to the
240th Infantry Regiment. In May and June 1940 he was praised for his work. At the
Battle of Dunkirk he was taken prisoner by the Germans and taken together with other French soldiers and officers to the internment camp in
Klomino near
Gdańsk. While in captivity, Des Places held lectures with
Paul Ricœur and others for the French prisoners of war. After his repatriation in January 1941, des Places taught first in Mongré, and from 1944 again in Yzeure. In 1945 he worked for a short time as a
chaplain in
French-occupied Germany. From 1946 he held representative positions at the
Institut Catholique de Paris and at the
Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques. In 1948 he got a permanent job at the
Pontifical Biblical Institute in
Rome, where he was library director until his retirement (1966). In addition to this activity, he also held lectures at the institute until 1982. In 1995, at the age of 95, he moved to Paris, where he died on 19 January 2000, at age 99. == Works ==