Fustel de Coulanges

Numa Denys Fustel de Coulanges (Paris, March 18th 1830 - Massy, September 12th 1889) is a French historian. Its name remains attached to a work which made date, the ancient City , appeared in 1864.

Biography

Numa Denys Fustel de Coulanges is resulting from a family from Brittany installed in Paris. It has as a father a lieutenant which dies shortly after the birth of his/her son. Fustel is then collected by his/her grandfather who, thanks to the friendship which it maintains with the headmaster, the fact of admitting with the Lycée Charlemagne in Paris. According to any appearance, it is this same director who deals with the school fees of Fustel.

Young high-school pupil, it reads with greed the lessons of Guizot on the Civilization in France , which will have a strong influence on its future of historian. Fairly gifted pupil, it is allowed with the National university “with a poor row”, according to his pupil and biographer Paul Guiraud. In the one ideologically disturbed period environment, he attends with assiduity the library of the School. Named member of the French School of Athens, it directs, at the time of its stay to Greece, of the archaeological excavations in the island of Tap-hole.

It supports in 1858 a thesis on the Greek historian Polybe and another on the Vesta, at one moment when the questions concerning the Indo-European origins are very discussed. In 1860, it is named professor of history at the university of Strasbourg, where it formats its notes of courses which will make the matter of the Ancient City , major work in which it can highlight the part played by the religion in the political and social evolution of Greece and Rome. The imperial college of Strasbourg, being next to the cathedral was baptized Lycée Fustel de Coulanges in 1919, in memory of the professor of history of the university of the city.

Obliged to leave Strasbourg because of annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine by the Germans in 1870, it is named university lecturer in 1870 at the National university, of which he will be the director in 1883. In 1875, it obtains a pulpit of professor to the Sorbonne and it is elected member of the Academy of Science morals and political.

Curiously, and even if some questions touching with Antiquity worry it, in particular that of the property and its transmission, Fustel de Coulanges will turn to the medieval history, on the one hand to show how much the French institutions in common do not have large thing with the Germanic right (France is then in full conflict with Germany) and on the other hand to sit a certain number of its methodological intuitions.

Teacher able to attract with him many disciples by the quality of his work and intellectual asceticism to which it is subjected, Fustel is an innovator who engages French historiography on new ways. For him, the political commitment, expensive in Michelet or Thierry, must be isolated in order to avoid any preconceived idea and to support as much as possible historical truth.

It exposes, in 1888, in famous foreword of Monarchy Franque (Volume II of its monumental Histoire of the political institutions of old France whose publication started ten years earlier), requirements of a historical method that the historian must respect the eyes " only fixed on the sciences".

Fustel projettait to set up a work which would cover the period active of the end of the Roman empire until the French revolution. Unfortunately, patient, it, with his death in 1889, hardly had outlined the placement of the immense materials which it had joined together for more than twenty years. Unfinished, its Histoire of the political institutions of old France (6 volumes) was going to be piously completed by its disciple Camille Jullian (future specialist in the history of Gaulle).

Certain volumes, already entirely written by the Master, required only little recovery, thus Gaulle Roman and the Origins of the feudal mode , others hardly started ( transformations of the royalty during the Carolingian time , published in 1891) were almost entirely recomposed starting from scattered notes. Though exceeded today taking into account recent research, the work of Fustel remains still invaluable by its intrinsic quality but especially by the efforts of the author to reconstitute with the most possible exactitude the feelings and the needs for the men of last time. Its influence is important, in particular as regards the interpretation of the fundamental role which the religions in the structuring of the companies would play. The sociologist Emile Durkheim will dedicate his thesis of university to the memory of Fustel de Coulanges.

The ancient City

the ancient City is very early a best-seller, distributed as of before 1870 during the annual handing-over of the school outstanding commendation award in the colleges of France. Fustel clarifies at it a question which interests it in the most point: the relationship between the property and the institutions politico-nuns. According to him, the old ones knew neither the freedom of the private life, neither the freedom of education, nor the religious liberty. The human person counted for well little thing with respect to this holy and almost divine authority which one called the fatherland or the State.

Works

the ancient City , Paris, Durand, 1864. Modified at the time of the 7th edition, Hatchet.
History of the institutions of France , Paris, 1874. Begun again in several volumes in History of the old French institutions , Paris, Hatchet, 1901-1914.
Research on some problems of history , Paris, Hatchet, 1885.
Monarchy Franque , Paris, Hatchet, 1888.
the Freehold and the rural Field for the period mérovingienne , Paris, Hatchet, 1889.
historical Questions, Re-examined and supplemented according to the notes of the author by Camille Jullian , Paris, Hatchet, 1893.
New Research about some problems of history , Paris, Hatchet, 1891
contemporary Questions , Paris, Hatchet, 1919.
" Gaulle romaine" , Paris, Editions of Fallois, 1998

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