Jean-Baptiste Pérès

Who was Jean-Baptiste Pérès?

Jean-Baptiste Pérès was a French physicist best known for his 1827 pamphlet Grand Erratum, a polemical satire, translated into many European languages, that attempted "in the interest of conservative theology, to reduce to an absurdity the purely negative tendencies of the rationalistic criticism of the Scriptures then in vogue" through humorously suggesting ways in which the history of Napoleon Bonaparte could be shown to be an expression of an ancient sun myth.

Pérès was professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Lyon, later a government attorney and finally librarian at Agen.