Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges
Encyclopedia
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
.
Born in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, of Breton
Brittany
Brittany is a cultural and administrative region in the north-west of France. Previously a kingdom and then a duchy, Brittany was united to the Kingdom of France in 1532 as a province. Brittany has also been referred to as Less, Lesser or Little Britain...
descent, after studying at the École Normale Supérieure
École Normale Supérieure
The École normale supérieure is one of the most prestigious French grandes écoles...
he was sent to the French School at Athens in 1853, he directed some excavations in Chios
Chios
Chios is the fifth largest of the Greek islands, situated in the Aegean Sea, seven kilometres off the Asia Minor coast. The island is separated from Turkey by the Chios Strait. The island is noted for its strong merchant shipping community, its unique mastic gum and its medieval villages...
, and wrote an historical account of the island.
After his return he filled various educational offices, and took his doctor's degree with two theses, Quid Vestae cultus in institutis veterum privatis publicisque valuerit and Polybe, ou la Grèce conquise par les Romains (1858). In these works his distinctive qualities were already revealed. His minute knowledge of the language of the Greek and Roman institutions, coupled with his low estimate of the conclusions of contemporary scholars, led him to go direct to the original texts, which he read without political or religious bias.
When, however, he had succeeded in extracting from the sources a general idea that seemed to him clear and simple, he attached himself to it as if to the truth itself. From 1860 to 1870 he was professor of history at the faculty of letters at Strasbourg
University of Strasbourg
The University of Strasbourg in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, is the largest university in France, with about 43,000 students and over 4,000 researchers....
, where he had a brilliant career as a teacher, but never yielded to the influence exercised by the German universities in the field of classical and Germanic antiquities.
It was at Strasbourg that he published his remarkable volume La Cité antique
La Cité antique
The Ancient City , published in 1864, is the most famous book of the French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges...
(1864), in which he showed forcibly the part played by religion in the political and social evolution of Greece
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
and Rome
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
. The book was so consistent throughout, so full of ingenious ideas, and written in so striking a style, that it ranks as one of the masterpieces of the French language
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
in the 19th century. By this literary merit Fustel set little store, but he clung tenaciously to his theories. When he revised the book in 1875, his modifications were very slight, and it is conceivable that, had he recast it, as he often expressed the desire to do in the last years of his life, he would not have abandoned any part of his fundamental thesis. The work is now largely superseded.
Fustel de Coulanges was appointed to a lectureship at the École Normale Supérieure in February 1870, to a professorship at the Paris faculty of letters in 1875, and to the chair of medieval history created for him at the Sorbonne
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
in 1878, he applied himself to the study of the political institutions of ancient France. The invasion of France by the German armies during the Franco-Prussian War
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...
attracted his attention to the Germanic invasions under the Roman Empire. Pursuing the theory of JB Dubos
Jean-Baptiste Dubos
Jean-Baptiste Dubos , also referred to as l'Abbé Du Bos, was a French author.-Life:He was born in Beauvais. After studying theology, he gave it up in favour of public law and politics. He was employed by M...
, but also transforming it, he maintained that those invasions were not marked by the violent and destructive character usually attributed to them; that the penetration of the German barbarians into Gaul
Gaul
Gaul was a region of Western Europe during the Iron Age and Roman era, encompassing present day France, Luxembourg and Belgium, most of Switzerland, the western part of Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the left bank of the Rhine. The Gauls were the speakers of...
was a slow process; that the Germans submitted to the imperial administration; that the political institutions of the Merovingians had their origins in the Roman laws at least as much as, if not more than, in German usages; and, consequently, that there was no conquest of Gaul by the Germans.
This thesis he sustained in his Histoire des institutions politiques de l'ancienne France, the first volume of which appeared in 1874. It was the author's original intention to complete this work in four volumes, but as the first volume was keenly attacked in Germany as well as in France, Fustel was forced in self-defence to recast the book entirely. He re-examined all the texts and wrote a number of dissertations, which were dominated by his general idea and characterized by a total disregard for the results of such historical disciplines as diplomatic. From this crucible issued an entirely new work, less well arranged than the original, but rich in facts and critical comments. The first volume was expanded into three volumes, La Gaule romaine (1891), L'Invasion germanique et la fin de l'empire (1891) and La Monarchie franque (1888), followed by three other volumes, L'Alleu et le domaine rural pendant l'époque mérovingienne (1889), Les Origines du système féodal: le bénéfice et le patronat ... (1890) and Les Transformations de la royauté pendant l'époque carolingienne (1892).
Thus, in six volumes, he had carried the work no farther than the Carolingian period. The dissertations not embodied in his work were collected by himself and (after his death) by his pupil, Camille Jullian
Camille Jullian
Camille Jullian was a French historian, philologist, archaeologist and historian of French literature, student of Fustel de Coulanges, whose posthumous work he published.-Biography:Jullian was born in Marseille...
, and published as volumes of miscellanies: Recherches sur quelques problèmes d'Histoire (1885), dealing with the Roman colonate, the land system in Normandy
Normandy
Normandy is a geographical region corresponding to the former Duchy of Normandy. It is in France.The continental territory covers 30,627 km² and forms the preponderant part of Normandy and roughly 5% of the territory of France. It is divided for administrative purposes into two régions:...
; the Germanic mark, and the judiciary organization in the kingdom of the Franks; Nouvelles recherches sur quelques problèmes d'histoire (1891); and Questions historiques (1893), which contains his paper on Chios and his thesis on Polybius
Polybius
Polybius , Greek ) was a Greek historian of the Hellenistic Period noted for his work, The Histories, which covered the period of 220–146 BC in detail. The work describes in part the rise of the Roman Republic and its gradual domination over Greece...
.
His life was devoted almost entirely to his teaching and his books. In 1875 he was elected member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and in 1880 reluctantly accepted the post of director of the École Normale. Without intervening personally in French politics, he took a keen interest in the questions of administration and social reorganization arising from the fall of the imperialist régime and the disasters of the war.
He wished the institutions of the present to approximate more closely to those of the past, and devised for the new French constitution a body of reforms which reflected the opinions he had formed upon the democracy
Democracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
at Rome and in ancient France. But these were dreams which did not hold him long, and he would have been scandalized had he known that his name was subsequently used as the emblem of a political and religious party. He died at Massy (then called Seine-et-Oise
Seine-et-Oise
Seine-et-Oise was a département of France encompassing the western, northern, and southern parts of the metropolitan area of Paris. Its préfecture was Versailles and its official number was 78. Seine-et-Oise was abolished in 1968....
) in 1889.
Throughout his historical career — at the École Normale and the Sorbonne and in his lectures delivered to the empress Eugénie
Eugénie de Montijo
Doña María Eugenia Ignacia Augustina de Palafox-Portocarrero de Guzmán y Kirkpatrick, 16th Countess of Teba and 15th Marquise of Ardales; 5 May 1826 – 11 July 1920), known as Eugénie de Montijo , was the last Empress consort of the French from 1853 to 1871 as the wife of Napoleon III, Emperor of...
— his sole aim was to ascertain the truth, and in the defence of truth his polemics against what he imagined to be the blindness and insincerity of his critics sometimes assumed a character of harshness and injustice. But, in France at least, these critics were the first to render justice to his learning, his talents and his disinterestedness.
Further Readings
- Camille JullianCamille JullianCamille Jullian was a French historian, philologist, archaeologist and historian of French literature, student of Fustel de Coulanges, whose posthumous work he published.-Biography:Jullian was born in Marseille...
, Extraits des historiens français du XIXème siècle ; publiés, annotés et précédés d'une introduction sur l'histoire en France, Paris, Hachette, 1913. - Paul GuiraudPaul GuiraudPaul Guiraud was a French historian who was born in Cenne-Monestiés, a commune located in the department of Aude....
, Fustel de Coulanges (1896) - H d'Arbois de JubainvilleMarie Henri d'Arbois de JubainvilleMarie Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville , was a French historian and philologist.He was born at Nancy. In 1851 he left the École des Chartes with the degree of palaeographic archivist...
, Deux Manières d'écrire l'Histoire: critique de Bossuet, d'Augustin Thierry et de Fustel de Coulanges (1896), Paris, Hachette, 1896. - Gabriel MonodGabriel MonodGabriel Monod was a French historian, the nephew of Adolphe Monod.-Biography:Born in Ingouville, Seine-Maritime, he was educated at Le Havre then went to Paris to complete his education, lodging with the de Pressensé family...
, Portraits et souvenirs (1897) - Jane Herrick The historical thought of Fustel de Coulanges, Catholic University of America, Washington D.C 1954.
- Félix Bourriot, Recherche sur la nature du Genos, Paris, Honoré Champion, 1976.
- Moses I. FinleyMoses I. FinleySir Moses I. Finley CBE, FBA was an American and English classical scholar. His most notable work is The Ancient Economy , where he argued that status and civic ideology governed the economy in antiquity rather than rational economic motivations.-Early life and career:He was born in 1912 in New...
, « La Cité antique. De Fustel de Coulanges à Max WeberMax WeberKarl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
et au-delà » in Mythe, Mémoire, Histoire, Paris, Flammarion, 1981, pp. 89-120. - Arnaldo MomiglianoArnaldo MomiglianoArnaldo Dante Momigliano KBE was an Italian historian known for his work in historiography, characterized by Donald Kagan as the "world’s leading student of the writing of history in the ancient world." He became Professor of Roman history at the University of Turin in 1936, but as a Jew soon lost...
, « La Cité antique de Fustel de Coulanges » in Problèmes d'historiographie ancienne et moderne, Paris, Gallimard, 1983, pp. 402-423. - François Hartog, Le XIXème siècle et l'histoire. Le cas Fustel de Coulanges, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1988.
- Pierre Vidal-NaquetPierre Vidal-NaquetPierre Emmanuel Vidal-Naquet was a French historian who began teaching at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in 1969....
, Préface à L'invention de la politique, de Moses.I.Finley. Flammarion 1985. - Claude Nicolet, La fabrique d'une nation. La France entre Rome et les Germains, Paris, 2003 : Fustel de Coulanges ou le refus de la conquête.
External links
- La Cité antique, in The Roman Law Library (Varia).
- The Ancient City at the McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought
- The Origins of Property in Land at the McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought