Allan Kardec

Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail was born in Lyon on 3 October 1804, the son of a lawyer. He studied in Switzerland, at Yverdon, in the institute of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi — one of the century's great educators, for whom teaching meant forming the whole person rather than drilling lessons. Rivail was not merely a pupil there: he became a collaborator.

He returned to France and spent his life teaching. From 1828 he published didactic works on arithmetic, geometry, grammar, chemistry, physics, astronomy and physiology. He spoke German, English, Italian and Spanish besides his native French. In 1832 he married Amélie Boudet, a teacher like him, who would stay with him to the end.

That detail explains much of what followed. The man who assembled the Codification was no mystic: he was an educator in the habit of asking, checking and ordering.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Paris was amused by tables that moved and rapped out answers. Rivail was taken to one of those gatherings out of curiosity and responded as he would to any phenomenon: if it was real, it must obey laws, and laws can be investigated.

The method he chose was the one he always used. He put thousands of questions, submitted them to different mediums in different places, and compared what came back. He treated as settled only what recurred coherently across sources that did not know one another — what the Doctrine would come to call the universal control of the teaching of the Spirits.

It was on publishing the result of that work that he took the name Allan Kardec, leaving his teacher's signature to the school books.

Between 1857 and 1868 Kardec published the five works that form the Codification. They are not five volumes of one treatise: each answers a different question. The first sets out the philosophy; the second, the practice and its risks; the third, the morals; the fourth, divine justice; the fifth, the relation to science.

Alongside that, he sustained the movement. The Revue Spirite first appeared on 1 January 1858, and on 1 April of the same year he founded the Société parisienne des études spirites. He directed both until the end of his life.

He died in Paris on 31 March 1869, aged 64, still working. He is buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery, in the 44th division, beneath a granite dolmen — and Amélie rests with him.

The line carved there sums up what he spent eleven years trying to demonstrate: to be born, to die, to be reborn again and to progress without end — such is the law.