Fustel de Coulanges

Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (French: [kulɑ̃ʒ]; 18 March 1830 – 12 September 1889) was a French historian and religious scholar best known for his work on ancient society and primitive religion.

Biography

Fustel de Coulanges was born in Paris and was of Breton descent. After studying at the École Normale Supérieure, he attended the French School at Athens.

Career

In 1853, he directed some excavations in Chios and wrote a historical account of the island.

After his return, he held various educational positions and earned his doctorate degree with two theses: Quid Vestae cultus in institutis veterum privatis publicisque valuerit and Polybe, ou la Grèce conquise par les Romains (1858). His knowledge of Greek and Roman institutions and skepticism of contemporary scholars led him to rely on original texts. Once he formed a clear idea from the sources, he treated it as truth.

From 1860 to 1870, he was a professor of history at the faculty of letters at Strasbourg, 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.

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 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 attracted his attention to the Germanic invasions under the Roman Empire. Pursuing the theory of J.-B. Dubos, 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 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.