FUSTEL DE COULANGES, NUMA DENIS (183o 1889), French historian, was born in Paris on March 18, 1830, of Breton descent. After studying at the Ecole Nofmale Supe rieure he was sent to the French school at Athens in 1853, directed some excavations in Chios, and wrote an historical account of the island. From 186o to 1870 he was professor of history at the faculty of letters at Strasbourg, where he had a brilliant career as a teacher.
In La Cite antique (Strasbourg, 1864; rev. ed. 1875) he showed forcibly the part played by religion in the political and social evolution of Greece and Rome. Although in making religion the sole factor of this evolution he perverted the historical facts, the book was so consistent throughout, so full of ingenious ideas, and written in so striking a style, that it ranks as one of the master pieces of the French language in the 19th century.
Appointed to a lectureship at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Feb. 1870, to a professorship at the Paris faculty of letters in 1875, to the chair of mediaeval history created for him at the Sorbonne in 1878 and in 188o to the directorship of the Ecole Normale, he applied himself to the study of the political institu tions of ancient France, and, under the influence of the events of 1870-71, to the Germanic invasions under the Roman empire. He maintained that those invasions were not marked by the vio lent 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 administra tion ; 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. This thesis he sustained brilliantly in his Histoire des institutions politiques de l'ancienne France, the first volume of which appeared in 1874. As the first volume was keenly attacked in Germany as well as in France, Fustel recast the book entirely. He re-examined all the texts and wrote a num ber of dissertations, of which, though several (e.g., those on the Germanic mark and on the allodium and bene ficium) were models of learning and sagacity, all were dominated by his general idea. From this crucible issued an entirely new work, less well arranged than the original, but richer 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'epoque merovingienne (1889), Les Origines du systeme f eodal: le benefice et le patronat . . . (189o) and Les Transformations de la royaute pendant l'epoque carolingienne (1892). Thus, in six volumes, he had car ried the work no farther than the Carolingian period. The result of this enormous labour, albeit worthy of a great historian, showed little sense of historical propor tion. The dissertations not em bodied in his great work were col lected by himself and (after his death) by his pupil, Camille Jul lian, and published as volumes of miscellanies : Recherches sur quel ques problemes d'histoire (1885), dealing with the Roman colonate, the land system in Normandy, the Germanic mark, and the judi ciary organization in the king dom of the Franks ; Nouvelles recherclies sur quelques prob lemes d'histoire (1891) ; and Questions historiques ( I 893 ) which contains his paper on Chios and his thesis on Polybius.
He died at Massy (Seine-et Oise) on Sept. 12, 1889.