TITLE: Élie Cartan's paper "Les groupes réels simples, finis et continus" of 1914
QUESTION [7 upvotes]: Question 1.
Does Élie Cartan's paper
Les groupes réels simples, finis et continus,
Ann. Sci. École Norm. Sup. (3) 31 (1914), 263–355
contain a classification of  $\Bbb C$-linear involutions of simple complex Lie algebras?
Question 2.
If not, what kind of a similar/related classification does it contain?
Question 3.
In what book/paper is this Cartan's paper discussed?
MathSciNet contains only the title, while zbMATH
contains a review: a translation into German of a few lines from the introduction.

REPLY [9 votes]: The paper and its progeny are discussed at length in Helgason (1978, p. 537):

In his paper [2] Cartan classifies the simple Lie algebras over R. His method, which required formidable computations, used the signature of the Killing form although it often happens that two nonisomorphic real forms of the same complex algebra have the same signature. Cartan's statement ([2], p. 263): “Les groupes réels d'ordre $r$ qui correspondent à une même type complexe d’ordre $r$ se classent en général complètement d’après leur caractère,” is therefore not to be taken literally; cf. Lardy ([1], p. 195). After noticing the equivalence of problems B and B' (§1) Cartan (in [12]) simplified his original treatment (see also Lardy [1]). Following his general theory [1] of automorphism of complex simple Lie groups, Gantmacher [2] gave a simplified treatment of the real classification. For further developments of this method see Murakami [3], Wallach [2], and Freudenthal and de Vries [1]. While Gantmacher used a Cartan subalgebra $\mathfrak h$ of $\mathfrak g$ whose “toral part” $\mathfrak h\cap\mathfrak k$ is maximal abelian in $\mathfrak k$, Araki develops in [1] a new method using a Cartan subalgebra $\mathfrak h\subset\mathfrak g$ whose “vector part” $\mathfrak h\cap\mathfrak p$ is maximal abelian in $\mathfrak p$. In addition to a solution to problem B' (§1) this method gives valuable information about the restricted roots and their multiplicities (cf. Exercises F). A modification is given by Sugiura [2]. In the present work we use the method of Kac [1] which at the same time gives a rather explicit description of the automorphism $\sigma$ of finite order.