author
Henri Duveyrier
1840–1892
Drawn to North Africa while still very young, he became one of the best-known French explorers of the Sahara and helped introduce European readers to the Tuareg world. His travel writing mixed adventure, geography, and close observation of the people he met.
2 Audiobooks
Journal de route de Henri Duveyrier
by Henri Duveyrier
Les Touâreg du nord
by Henri Duveyrier
About the author
Born in Paris on February 28, 1840, Henri Duveyrier grew up in a cultured family and spent part of his youth in London, where he encountered the African explorer Heinrich Barth. He learned Arabic early and, while still a teenager, set out on the journeys that would define his life.
His most famous travels took him across the northern Sahara, and the knowledge he gathered made him an important figure in French geography and African ethnology. He is especially remembered for Exploration du Sahara: Les Touâreg du nord (1864), a book that brought together his observations on the land and on Tuareg society.
Duveyrier died in Sèvres on April 25, 1892. Although his work was shaped by the colonial attitudes of his era, it remains part of the history of nineteenth-century exploration and of Europe's attempts to understand the Sahara.