Father Louis Badet (1873-1933). Courtesy of Father Charles Libois, S.J., Collège de la Sainte-Famille, Cairo, and Lebanon.
Born in 1873, Louis Badet was a French Jesuit priest like his predecessor, Father Jules Blin (1853-1891). Father Badet eventually came to live in Egypt and, like Father Blin, he taught at the Collège de la Sainte-Famille (College of the Holy Family) in Cairo and devoted himself to the study and transcription of Coptic music. Father Badet spent about ten years in the Near East, where he received his early religious training at Ghazir, in present-day Lebanon, from 1891 to 1895, as a novice and juveniste, a juveniste being a scholastic who has taken his first vows and who then spends about two years studying classics under the Jesuits and receives the equivalent of a bachelor's degree.
Beginning in 1895 and until 1899, he served as a supervisor, professor and choirmaster in Cairo, and was the assistant director of the Coptic Seminary there from 1898 to1899. It was while he was in Cairo, in 1899, that Father Badet published a book on Coptic music entitled, Chants liturgiques des coptés, notés et mis en ordre (Liturgical chants of the Copts, notated and placed in order...), which continued the work of Father Blin, and in which he attempted to explain and correct his predecessor's work. From 1899 to 1901, Father Badet returned to Ghazir to study philosophy. He died on 4 February 1933 at Villefranche-sur-Saône, in the department of the Rhône in east central France.
The biography on Father Badet presented here is based on that given in Henri Jalabert, S.J. Jésuites au Proche-Orient (Jesuits in the Near East). Beirut: Dar el-Machreq sarl, 1987, p. 405. African and Middle Eastern Division, Library of Congress. Call number: BX3746.1J35 1987.
The image (shown above) of the Collège de la Sainte-Famille comes from J.-B. Piolet, S.J., Les Missions Catholiques Françaises au XIXe Siècle. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1901, vol. 1, p. 417. Call number: BV2210.P6.