FUSTEL DE COULANGES, NUMA-DENYS. — Historian, born in Paris on 18 March 1830, died at Massy (Seine-et-Oise) on 12 September 1889. He was professor of medieval history at the Sorbonne from 1878 and director of the École Normale from 1880 to 1882. After the Franco-Prussian War, he defended the French character of Alsace.
He holds a primary place in the history of 19th-century European historiography, particularly for *La Cité antique* (1864) and *Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France* (1884, 1894). In the former work, he illustrates the history of the city-state in the classical world as centered on the cult of the dead: the city-state, which was eminently sacred, felt the religion of death with an intensity surpassing that of the cult of the major deities. As religion declined, so did the tone of political life. Following these ideas, Fustel de Coulanges studies the dissolution of the union between the religious and political-legal factors, a dissolution marked by the rise of the lower classes, the crisis of the priestly class, and so on. Renewal came only with Christianity, which replaced the fear of the gods with the arms of God and abolished the concept of family, caste, and lineage-based religion.
In the latter work, he examines the Roman legal legacy within the state and governmental system that emerged after the Germanic invasions. The barbarians destroyed or imposed little; instead, they were amalgamated by Roman institutions (a striking example of how the barbarians did not disrupt Roman civilization or respect for the Latin language). Moreover, according to Fustel de Coulanges, the Germans exerted no appreciable influence on religion. That the Germans had no influence on feudalism is shown by the fact that the Gallo-German fusion preceded the institution of feudalism itself.
Many of Fustel de Coulanges’ ideas have been abandoned by modern criticism, particularly regarding the classical world (though he sometimes employed sources naively). This does not diminish the importance of his having posed certain solutions with a lucid realism that was already beyond Romantic idealism and, if not entirely free from partiality, aligned with the positivist movement.