FAUKIEL, CLAUDE CHARLES French historian, philologist and critic, was born at St. Etienne. Though the son of a poor joiner, he received a good education in the Oratorian colleges of Tournon and Lyons. He was twice in the army and from 1799 to 18o 1 he was private secretary to Fouche (q.v.). Some articles which Fauriel published in the Decade philo sophique (i 800) on a work of Madame de Stael's—De la littera tare consideree dons ses rapports avec les institutions sociales led to an intimate friendship with her. About 1802 he contracted with Madame de Condorcet a liaison which lasted till her death (1822).
At the revolution of July, 183o, he became professor of foreign literature at the Sorbonne. The Histoire de la Gaule meridionale sous la domination des conquerants germains (4 vols., 1836) was the only completed section of a general history of southern Gaul which he had projected. In 1836 he was elected a member of the Academy of Inscriptions, and in 1837 he published a translation of a Provencal poem on the Albigensian war. He died on July 15, 1844. After his death his friend Mary Clarke (afterwards Madame J. Motel) published his Histoire de la litterature provencale (3 vols., 1846)—his lectures for 1831-32. Fauriel was biased in this work by his preconceived and somewhat fanciful theory that Provence was the cradle of the chansons de geste and even of the Round Table romances ; but he gave a great stimulus to the scien tific study of Old French and Provencal. Dante et les origines de la langue et de la litterature italiennes (2 vois.) was published in 1854.
Fauriel's Memoires, found with Condorcet's papers, are in the Institute library. They were written at latest in 1804, and include some interesting fragments on the close of the consulate, Moreau, etc. Though anonymous, Lalanne, who published them (Les Derniers fours du Consulat, 1886), proved them to be in the same handwriting as a letter of Fauriel's in 1803. The same library has Fauriel's corre spondence, catalogued by Ad. Regnier (Iwo). For Fauriel's corre spondence with Guizot see Nouvelle Rev. (Dec. 1, 1901, by V. Glach ant) , and for his love-letters to Miss Clarke (1822-44) the Revue des deux mondes (19o8—o9, by E. Rod) . See further Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, ii.; A. Guillois, Le Salon de Mine. Helvetius (1894) and La Marquise de Condorcet (1897) ; O'Meara, Un Salon a Paris: Mme. Motel (undated) ; and J. B. Galley, Claude Fauriel