Born the August 11th 1877 with Saint-Father-in-Retz (close to Saint-Nazaire), Francis Aupiais enters in 1901 to the Great seminar of the Company of the African Missions of Lyon (SMA).

Ordered priest in 1902, it is affected the following year at the School of the Mission of Porto-Novo (Dahomey, current Bénin) where it is charged with enseignement.

Mobilized during the war, it is used as male nurse at the hospital as Dakar (1915-1918) and meets, during its Senegalese stay, Maurice Delafosse and Georges Hardy. Of return to the Dahomey, it is named higher Mission of Porto-Novo and the school directs from there. Gradually, Francis Aupiais is essential like a specialist recognized in the religions and traditional habits dahoméennes. Thus one charges it, in 1923-1924, with constituting a collection of art dahoméen for the the Vatican.

In parallel, it gathers around him well-read men dahoméens, in order to “dissipate the ambiguity by which one makes an absolute superiority of the difference which exists between “the civilized” state known as and the state known as “primitive” with the service of the first”. This principle is stated by Francis Aupiais as of the first number of a review, which is practically written only by of Dahoméens, the African Recognition (1925). It returns the following year to France in order to give a series of conference against the racism and for the promotion of the African companies. It conceives, moreover, a road show of decorative art dahoméen (1927).

Provincial elected official of the SMA (1928), Francis Aupiais settles definitively in France, giving courses to the catholic Institute of Paris and collaborating in the countryside of the International office of work (the ILO) against the forced labor (1929).

Near to Paul Rivet, Lucien Levy-Bruhl and Marcel Mauss, he attends the Institute of Ethnology assiduously and, by their intermediary, meets Albert Kahn. This rich person philanthropist had put, since 1910, his fortune with the service of an immense project of safeguard of the memory of the daily life of humanity by photography and the cinema: Files of Planet. From December 1929 in June 1930, financed and accompanied by an operator by Albert Kahn, Francis Aupiais leads a photographic and cinematographic mission in Ivory Coast and with the Dahomey.

But the choice of the Father Francis Aupiais to present the African traditional religions as evidence of the moralism of the Blacks causes a conflict with its superior, the Chabert Father. It is however proven that it is well at the request of the president of the Republic Gaston Doumergue, exceeded by the critics of the missionary towards the French colonial system and the forced labor, that it is dislocated of his religious high positions. Sanctioned, Francis Aupiais is named, in September 1931, apostolic principal of Baudonne-in-Tarnos (Moors). It remains there until 1937 when, against any waiting, it is again elected Provincial.

Member of the colonial Academy of Science (1939), it passes the essence of the world war to the service of the SMA and sponsors the Committee France-Empire, principal colonial lobby of the Régime of Vichy.

Elected official appointed of the Dahomey-Togo to the first Constituent one of the Fourth Republic (1945), Francis Aupiais dies in Paris in the night from December 14th to 15th 1945 of a crisis of uraemia aigue.

An establishment of secondary education deprived with denominational vocation, the Catholic Collège Father Aupiais bears his name. There regularly provides results impressive to the school examinations and remains famous to have formed most of the intellectual elite of BENIGN post-colonial ---- Cf:

BALARD Mr., Dahomey 1930: catholic mission and worship vodoun. The work of Francis Aupiais (1877-1945) missionary and ethnographer, Paris, Harmattan, coll Tropics between myth and reality, 1999.

HARDY G., an apostle of today: the R.P. Aupiais, provincial of the African Missions of Lyon , Paris, Larose, 1949

AUPIAIS D. the Reverend Père Francis Aupiais, humanistic Breton for a African recognition. (memory of Master under the direction of S. SMOKED, directing of pulpit UNESCO of the Indian Ocean) University of the Meeting, 2006

• Company of the African Missions