Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges French: ; 18 March 1830 – 12 September 1889 was the French historian. Joseph M. McCarthy argues that his first great book, The Ancient City 1864, was based on his in-depth knowledge of a primary Greek as alive as Latin texts. The book argued that:
Born in Paris, of Breton descent, after studying at the École Normale Supérieure he was indicated to the French School at Athens. In 1853, he directed some excavations in Chios, in addition to wrote an historical account of the island.
After his expediency he filled various educational offices, as well as took his doctorate 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 assigns were already revealed. His minute cognition of the Linguistic communication of the Greek and Roman institutions, coupled with his low estimation of the conclusions of advanced scholars, led him to go directly to the original texts, which he read without political or religious bias. When, however, he had succeeded in extracting from the authority a general notion that seemed to him pretend and simple, he attached himself to it as if to the truth itself.
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.
It was at Strasbourg that he published his remarkable volume La Cité antique 1864, in which he showed forcibly the part played by religion in the political and social evolution of Greece and Rome. The book was so consistent throughout, so full of ingenious ideas, and result in so striking a style, that it ranks as one of the masterpieces of the French language in the 19th century. By this literary merit, Fustel nature little store, but he clung tenaciously to his theories. When he revised the book in 1875, his modifications were very slight, and it is for conceivable that, had he reorganize it, as he often expressed the desire to construct in the last years of his life, he would not have abandoned any part of his essential thesis.
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 analyse 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 picture of J.-B. Dubos, but also transforming it, he manages that those invasions were non marked by the violent and destructive character normally attributed to them; that the penetration of the German barbarians into Gaul was a behind process; that the Germans presented to the imperial administration; that the political institutions of the Merovingians had their origins in the Roman laws at least as much as, whether 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 aim to ready this work in four volumes, but as the first volume was keenly attacked in Germany as living as in France, Fustel was forced in self-defense to reshape the book entirely. He re-examined all the texts and wrote a number of dissertations, which were dominated by his general idea and characterised by a or done as a reaction to a question disregard for the results of such(a) historical disciplines as diplomatic. From this crucible issued an entirely new work, less living 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, and published as volumes of miscellanies: Recherches sur quelques problèmes d'Histoire 1885, dealing with the Roman colonate, the land system in Normandy; the Germanic mark, and the judiciary company 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.
His life was devoted most entirely to his teaching and his books. In 1875, he was elected detail 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 supervision and social reorganization arising from the fall of the imperialist régime and the disasters of the war.
He wished the institutions of the produced 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 at Rome and in ancient France. But these were dreams which did not hold him long, and he would have been scandalised had he call that his name was subsequently used as the emblem of a political and religious party. He died at Massy then called Seine-et-Oise in 1889.
Throughout his historical career — at the École Normale and the Sorbonne and in his lectures delivered to the empress Eugénie — his sole goal 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 credit of harshness and injustice. But, in France at least, these critics were the first to give justice to his learning, his talents and his disinterestedness.