Jean-Pierre Brisset

Who was Jean-Pierre Brisset?

Jean-Pierre Brisset was a French writer.

Born into a farming family of La Sauvagère, Brisset was an outsider writer, much as Henri Rousseau was an outsider artist. He is a saint on the 'Pataphysics calendar. His writings are in publication as of 2004.

Brisset was an autodidact. Having left school at age twelve to help on the family farm, he apprenticed as a pastry chef in Paris three years later. In 1855, he enlisted in the army for seven years and fought in the Crimean War. En 1859, he learned Italian thanks to the war in Italy against the Austrians. After he was wounded at the Battle of Magenta, he was taken prisoner. During the Franco-Prussian War, he was a second lieutenant in the 50ᵉ régiment d'infanterie de ligne. Taken prisoner again, he was sent to Magdeburg in Saxony where he learned German.

In 1871 he published La natation ou l’art de nager appris seul en moins d’une heure before resigning from the Army and moving to Marseilles, where he filed the patent for the "airlift swimming trunks and belt with a double compensatory reservoir". This commercial endeavor was a complete failure.