GUIZOT, FRANcOIS PIERRE GUILLAUME (1787 1874), French historian and statesman, was born at Nimes on Oct. 4, 1787, of Protestant parents. His father perished on the scaffold (April 8, 1794), and the boy was brought up by his mother in Geneva. In 18o5 he began the study of law in Paris, liv ing in the house of M. Stapfer, formerly Swiss minister in France, as tutor. He also contributed to the Publiciste, and married (1812) Pauline Meulan, who was also a contributor to Suard's journal. After her death, in 1827, Guizot married her niece, Elisa Dillon (d. 1833). The son of this marriage, Maurice Guillaume (1833-1892) became a well known scholar and writer.
Under the Empire, Guizot devoted himself exclusively to lit erary works, which included, among others, a translation of Gib bon's Decline and Fall. This work led to his appointment (1812) to the chair of modern history at the Sorbonne. But, though he took no public part in politics, he was closely associated with leading Liberals, notably with Royer-Collard, who secured for him the position of secretary-general of the Ministry of the In terior at the first Restoration. During the Hundred Days he re turned to his literary pursuits. He then went to see Louis XVIII. at Ghent, and, in the name of the Liberal Party, told him frankly that the open adoption of a liberal policy was the essential con dition of a permanent monarchy. The advice was ill-received by the king's advisers, and the visit itself brought him into disgrace with the Bonapartists.
After the second Restoration Guizot had two short spells of official work, as secretary-general of the Ministry of Justice (1815-16) and as a director at the Ministry of the Interior (1819-2o). He was one of the leaders of the Doctrinaires, mon archists who desired a juste milieu between absolutism and de mocracy. Their motives were honourable. Their views were phil osophical. But they were opposed alike to the democratic spirit of the age, to the military traditions of the empire, and to the bigotry and absolutism of the court. They lived by a policy of resistance; they perished by another revolution (183o) . They are remembered more for their constant opposition to popular demands than by their undoubted services.
In 182o, when the reaction was at its height after the murder of the duc de Berri and the fall of the ministry of the duc Decazes, Guizot was deprived of his offices, and from 1822 to 1828 even his course of lectures were interdicted. He was now one of the leaders of the Liberal opposition to the Government of Charles X. His numerous works at this period include : Histoire des origines du gouvernement representati f (1821-22, 2 vols. ; Eng. trans.
1852) ; Histoire de la revolution d'Angleterre depuis Charles Pr a Charles II. (2 vols., 1826-27; Eng. trans., 1838), revised by him in his later years; Histoire de la civilisation en Europe (1828; Eng. trans. by W. Hazlitt, 3 vols., 1846) ; and Histoire de la civili sation en France (4 vols., 183o) . In addition he published during this period two great collections of sources for English and French history, a revised translation of Shakespeare, essays and pam phlets.
Hitherto Guizot's fame rested on his merits as a writer on public affairs and as a lecturer on modern history. In Jan. 1830 he was elected by Lisieux to the Chamber of Deputies, and he re tained that seat during the whole of his political life. His first speech in the chamber was in defence of the celebrated address of the 221, in answer to the menacing speech from the throne, which was followed by the dissolution of the chamber, and was the precursor of another revolution. On July 27 Guizot was called upon by his friends Casimir-Perier, Laffitte, Villemain and Dupin to draw up the protest of the Liberal deputies against the royal ordinances of July, whilst he applied himself with them to control the revolutionary character of the late contest. Personally, Guizot deprecated a change in the hereditary line of succession. But once convinced that it was inevitable, he became one of the most ardent supporters of Louis-Philippe. From August to No vember Guizot was minister of the interior. He had now passed into the ranks of the Conservatives, and for the next 18 years was the most determined foe of democracy, the unyielding champion of "a monarchy limited by a limited number of bourgeois." In Marshal Soult's Government formed on Oct. 11, 1832, Guizot was minister of public instruction. Guizot applied himself in the first instance to carry the law of June 28, 1833, establishing and organizing primary education. The branch of the Institute of France known as the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, suppressed by Napoleon, was revived by Guizot. Some of the old members of this learned body—Talleyrand, Sieyes, Roederer and Lakanal—again took their seats there, and new members were elected. The "Societe de 1'Histoire de France" was founded for the publication of historical works; and a vast publication of mediaeval chronicles and diplomatic papers was undertaken at the expense of the State (see HISTORY ; and FRANCE, History) .
The object of the cabinet of Oct. 1832 was to organize a Con servative Party, and to resist the Republican faction, which threatened the existence of the monarchy. The real strength of the ministry lay not in its nominal heads, but in the fact that in this Government and this alone, Guizot and Thiers acted in cordial co-operation. But in 1840 parliamentary difficulties arose and Guizot was not sorry to accept the post of ambassador in London, which withdrew him for a time from parliamentary contests. This was in the spring of 184o, and Thiers succeeded shortly afterwards to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Thiers' policy regarding the Syrian question led France to the brink of war, until the king put an end to the crisis by refusing his assent to the military preparations of Thiers, and by summoning Guizot from London to form a ministry and to aid his majesty in what he termed "ma lutte tenace contre l'anarchie." Thus be gan, under dark and adverse circumstances, on Oct. 29, 1840, the administration in which Guizot remained the master-spirit for nearly eight years. He himself took the portfolio of foreign affairs, to which he added some years later, on Soult's retirement, the ostensible rank of prime minister. His first care was the restoration of amicable relations with the other Powers of Europe. His success in calming the troubled elements and healing the wounded pride of France was due mainly to the indomitable cour age and splendid eloquence with which he faced a raging opposi tion, gave unity and strength to the Conservative Party, and ap pealed to the thrift and prudence of the nation rather than to their vanity and their ambition. In his pacific task he was fortunately seconded by the formation of the Peel administration in England, in the autumn of 1841. Lord Palmerston held (as it appears from his own letters) that war between England and France was, sooner or later, inevitable. Guizot held that such a war would be the greatest of all calamities, and certainly never contemplated it. In Lord Aberdeen, the foreign secretary, Guizot found a friend and an ally. Both of them held the common interest of peace and friendship to be paramount ; and when differences arose, as they did arise, in remote parts of the world—in Tahiti, in Morocco, on the Gold Coast—they were reduced by this principle to their proper insignificance.
The history of Guizot's administration is dealt with in the article FRANCE ; History. It was the longest and the last which existed under the constitutional monarchy of France, and bears the stamp of the great qualities and the great defects of his political character, for he was throughout the master-spirit of that Gov ernment. He united and disciplined the Conservative Party, which had been broken up by previous dissensions and ministerial changes. No one ever doubted the purity and disinterestedness of Guizot's own conduct. He despised money ; he lived and died poor; and though he encouraged the fever of money-getting in the French nation, his own habits retained their primitive simplicity. But some of his instruments were mean; he employed them to deal with meanness of ter its kind. Gross abuses and breaches of trust came to light, and under an incorruptible minister the administra tion was denounced as corrupt.
Of his parliamentary eloquence it is impossible to speak too highly. It was terse, austere, demonstrative and commanding— not persuasive, not humorous, seldom adorned, but condensed with the force of a supreme authority in the fewest words. He was essentially a ministerial speaker, far more powerful in defence than in opposition. Like Pitt he was the type of authority and resistance, unmoved by the brilliant charges, the wit, the gaiety, the irony and the discursive power of his great rival. Nor was he less a master of parliamentary tactics and of those sudden changes and movements in debate which, as in a battle, sometimes change the fortune of the day. His confidence in himself, and in the majority of the chamber which he had moulded to his will, was unbounded; and long success and the habit of authority led him to forget that in a country like France there was a people outside the chamber elected by a small constituency, to which the minister and the king himself were held responsible.
After the fall of the monarchy in 1848 Guizot found a tempor ary refuge in Paris and then escaped via Belgium to London, where he arrived on March 3.
He stayed in England about a year, devoting himself again to history. He published two more volumes on the English revolu tion, and in 18J4 his Histoire de la republique d'Angleterre et de Cromwell (2 vols., 18S4), then his Histoire du protectorat de Cromwell et du retablissement des Stuarts (2 vols., 1856). He also published an essay on Peel, and the extensive Memoires pour servir a l'histoire de mon temps (9 vols., 1858-68). His speeches were included in his Histoire parlementaire de la France (5 vols., 1863).
Guizot survived the fall of the monarchy and the Government he had served 26 years. He was of no party, a member of no political body ; no murmur of disappointed ambition, no language of asperity, ever passed his lips; it seemed as if the fever of ora torical debate and ministerial power had passed from him and left him a greater man than he had been before, in the pursuit of letters, in the conversation of his friends, and as head of the patriarchal circle of those he loved. The greater part of the year he spent at his residence at Val Richer, an Augustine monastery near Lisieux in Normandy, which had been sold at the time of the first Revolution. His two daughters, who married two descend ants of the illustrious Dutch family of De Witt, kept his house. One of his sons-in-law farmed the estate. And here Guizot de voted his later years with undiminished energy to literary labour, which was in fact his chief means of subsistence. Proud, inde pendent, simple and contented he remained to the last ; and these years of retirement were perhaps the happiest and most serene portion of his life. He was a member of three of the five acade mies into which the Institute of France is divided. In these learned bodies Guizot continued for nearly 4o years to take a lively interest and to exercise a powerful influence. He was the jealous champion of their independence. His voice had the greatest weight in the choice of new candidates ; the younger generation of French writers never looked in vain to him for encouragement ; and his constant aim was to maintain the dignity and purity of the pro fession of letters. In the consistory of the Protestant church in Paris Guizot exercised a similar influence. He remained through life a firm believer in the truths of revelation, and a volume of Meditations on the Christian Religion was one of his latest works.
As his grandchildren grew up around him, Guizot began to direct their attention to the history of their country. From these lessons sprang his last and not his least work, the Histoire de France racontee a vies petits enfants, which came down to 1789, and was continued to 1870 by his daughter Madame Guizot de Witt from her father's notes (7 vols., 187o). Guizot died on Sept. 12, 1874.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. See his own Memoires pour servir a l'histoire de Bibliography. See his own Memoires pour servir a l'histoire de morn temps 9 vols., 1858-68; Lettres de M. Guizot a sa famille et a ses amis (1884) ; C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi (vol. i., and Nouveaux Lundis (vols. i. and ix., 1863-72) ; E. Scherer, Etudes critiques sur la litterature contemporaine (vol. iv., 1873) ; Mme. de Witt, Guizot dans sa famille (188o) ; Jules Simon, Thiers, Guizot et Remusat (1885) ; E. Faguet, Politiques et moralistes au XIXe siecle (1891) ; G. Bardoux, Guizot (1894) in the series of "Les Grands Ecrivains francais"; Maurice Guizot, Les Annees de retraite de M. Guizot (1901) ; Ponthas, Guizot pendant la Restauration (1923) ; and for a long list of books and articles on Guizot in .periodicals see H. P. Thieme, Guide bibliographique de la litterature francaise de i800 a iqo6 (s.v. Guizot, Paris, 1907) . For a notice of his first wife see C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de f emmes (1884) , and Ch. de Remusat, Critiques et etudes litteraires (vol. ii., •