DE VOGUÉ, CHARLES-JEAN-MELCHIOR. — Archaeologist, born in Paris into an ancient noble family of the Vivarese on 18 October 1829, and died there on 10 November 1916. In 1853–54 he undertook a journey through Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, collecting abundant information and drawings of the monuments and inscriptions of those regions; he augmented this collection on a second journey, made in 1861–62 together with Waddington and the architect E. C. Duthoit. On that occasion he also visited Cyprus, where he likewise took an interest in the buildings of the early Christian period and those of the age of the Crusades; in Jerusalem he was able to obtain permission to study the sacred enclosure of the Temple (baram af-šarīf).
The publications that followed led to his being appointed a member of the Académie des inscriptions in 1868. After 1870 he entered the diplomatic service: in 1871 he was sent as ambassador to Constantinople, and then in 1875 to Vienna, where he remained until 1879. Thus, in the second period of his life, he turned to the study of modern history, to which he made some worthwhile contributions (Le maréchal de Villars, d'après sa correspondance et des documents inédits, 1888; Mémoires de Villars, 1889; Le duc de Bourgogne et le duc de Beau Villiers, 1900), but he never abandoned the field he had previously cultivated, continuing, among other things, to concern himself with directing the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum. In 1891 he was elected to the Académie française.
His works on Eastern archaeology and epigraphy, and especially those on the Christian buildings of Syria and Palestine—Syrie centrale. Architecture civile et religieuse du Ier au VIIe siècle (Paris 1865–77); Eglises de la Terre Sainte (1859); Temple de Jérusalem and Essai sur la topographie de la ville sainte (1864–65)—still remain fundamental today for the study of the early Christian architecture of these regions and of the influences exerted by them on Byzantine and medieval architecture: an influence that D.V., and many others with him, perhaps exaggerated, almost overwhelmed by the revelation of a world that had previously been nearly unknown, to the detriment of Roman and Western influences.
Other works by him, besides many minor contributions in periodicals and academic proceedings, are: Mélanges d'architecture orientale (1868); Événements de Syrie (1860); Syrie centrale-Inscriptions sémitiques (1869–77); Inscriptions hébraïques de Jérusalem (1864), etc.