He was a professor at Istanbul University, École pratique des hautes études and the Collège de France, and a member of the Académie Française.

[2] In the 19th century, philologists such as Franz Felix Adalbert Kuhn, Max Müller and Elard Hugo Meyer (who had influenced Bréal) had conducted notable work on comparative mythology, but their theories had since been found to be mostly untenable.

Inspired by the works of Ernst Kuhn, the thesis examined ritual drinks in Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic and Italic religion.

Dumézil's early writings were also inspired by the research of James George Frazer, whose views were however becoming discredited due to advances in the field of anthropology.

Mauss and Hubert were both socialists in the spirit of Jean Jaurès, who actively used their academic influence to advance their own political ideology.

[3][9] Dumézil returned to France in 1933, where he through the assistance of Sylvain Lévi, a friend of Meillet, was able to gain a position at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE).

Iranologists who influenced Dumézil in this approach include Arthur Christensen, James Darmesteter, Hermann Güntert and Herman Lommel.

[11] In the early 1930s, under the pseudonym "Georges Marcenay", he wrote some articles for the right-wing newspapers Candide and Le Jour, where he advocated an alliance between France and Italy against Nazi Germany.

[9] It was while lecturing on the Indo-European component in Germanic religion at Uppsala University in the spring of 1938 that Dumézil made a major discovery which was to revolutionize his future research.

Through the assistance of Maxime Weygand, a friend of his father, Dumézil was in April 1940 posted to the French military mission in Ankara, Turkey, where he remained during the Battle of France.

[18] During the war, Dumézil significantly reformulated his theories, and applied his trifunctional hypothesis to the study of Indo-Iranians, most notably in his work Mitra-Varuna (1940).

In this work, Dumézil suggested that the Indo-Iranian gods Mitra and Varuna represented juridical and religious sovereignty respectively, and that these functions were relics of an earlier Indo-European tradition also manifested in Roman and Norse mythology.

[2] From the late 1940s onwards, the comparative study of Vedic, Roman and Norse mythology and society would constitute the main focus of Dumézil's research.

[2] In the years immediately after World War II, Dumézil recruited Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mircea Eliade to EPHE, and both became close friends whom he strongly influenced.

[20] Notable works published by Dumézil in the late 1940s include Tarpeia (1947), Loki (1948), L'Héritage Indo-Européen à Rome (1949) and Le Troisième souverain (1949).

The spread of Dumézil's theories was greatly aided by support he received from friends such as Émile Benveniste, Stig Wikander, Otto Höfler and Jan de Vries.

[22] Notable Iranologists who adopted Dumézil's theories include Benveniste, Wikander, Geo Widengren, Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin and Marijan Mole.

[2] In 1955, Dumézil spent several months as a visiting professor at the University of Lima, during which he dedicated much time the study of the language and mythology of the Quechua people.

[27][28] From the late 1960s towards the end of his life, Dumézil's research came to be widely celebrated in the United States, where many of his works on Indo-European mythology were translated into English and published.

Additional works inspired by Dumézil's theories were also published in the United States by scholars such as Jaan Puhvel, C. Scott Littleton, Donald J.

His theories on Indo-European society were celebrated by Nouvelle Droite figures such as Alain de Benoist, Michel Poniatowski and Jean Haudry, but Dumézil was careful to distance himself from them.

[33] Many of these critics pointed out that Dumézil's lifelong close friend Pierre Gaxotte had been the secretary of Action Française leader Charles Maurras,[29] and that his work had been influential on members of the European New Right, including Alain de Benoist, Jean Haudry, or Roger Pearson, who used his theories to support far-right political positions, with an "Indo-European race" (conflated with white people) being seen as superior to all other peoples.

[34] Bruce Lincoln has argued that Dumézil "maintained a cautiously ambiguous relation" with Nouvelle Droite figures like de Benoist and Haudry, "both of whom courted him avidly".

While he held for a while Benito Mussolini in high regard,[36] he steadfastly opposed Nazism and voiced as a journalist his opposition to the growing danger posed by German nationalism.

"[6] Furthermore, Dumézil joined the Free Masonry in the early 1930s as a member of the Portique lodge of the Grande Loge de France of the Scottish Rite, and was consequently dismissed from his teaching positions and from the civil service by the collaborationist Vichy State during World War II.

[37][38][39] They also accused Dumézil's trifunctional hypothesis of similarity with Fascism, and wrote that his reconstruction of Indo-European society was motivated by a desire to abolish "Judeo-Christian" values.

[5][31] Dumézil was also defended by many colleagues, including C. Scott Littleton, Jaan Puhvel, Edgar C. Polomé, Dean A. Miller, Udo Strutynski, and most notably by Didier Eribon.

[41] In order to clarify his political position, he declared to Éribon in 1987: "the principle, not simply monarchical, but dynastic, which protects the highest office of the State from caprices and ambitions, seemed to me, and still seems to me, preferable to the generalized election in which we have been living since Danton and Bonaparte.

[32][42] Similar accusations have also been leveled by the Swedish Marxist historian Stefan Arvidsson, who hopes that the "exposure" of Dumézil's alleged political Fascist sympathies may lead to the abolishment ("Ragnarök") of the concept of Indo-European mythology .

[2] Prominent scholars heavily influenced by Dumézil include Emile Benveniste, Stig Wikander, Jan de Vries, Gabriel Turville-Petre, Werner Betz, Edgar C. Polomé, Jaan Puvhvel, Joël Grisward, Nicholas Allen, Georges Charachidzé, François-Xavier Dillmann, Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, Daniel Dubuisson [fr], Lucien Gerschel, Emily Lyle, Dean A. Miller, Alwyn Rees, Brinley Rees, Robert Schilling, Bernard Sergent, Udo Strutynski, Donald J.