FUSTEL de COULANGES, NUMA-DENYS. - Historian, b. in Paris on 18 March 1830, d. at Massy (Seine et Oise) on 12 Sept. 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 European historiography of the 19th century for the Cité antique (1864) and the Histoire des institutions politiques de l'ancienne France (1884 ff.). In the first work he sets out the history of the city in the classical world as centered on the cult of the dead: the city-state, which is an eminently sacral state, felt the religion of death with an intensity greater than the cult of the major deities; as religion decays, the tone of political life decays: following these ideas, F. de C. studies the dissolution of the union of the religious factor with the political-juridical one, a dissolution brought to maturity with the awakening of the lower classes, with the crisis of the priestly class, etc.; the awakening came only with Christianity, which replaced the fear of the gods with the love of God and abolished the concept of the religion of the family, of castes, of lineages.
In the other work he studies the Roman juridical heritage in the system of state and government subsequent to the Germanic invasions. The barbarians destroyed or imposed very little; instead they were amalgamated by Roman institutions (a glaring example that the barbarians did not undermine Roman civilization is the preservation of the Latin language); moreover, for F. de C. the Germans had no appreciable influence on religion. That the Germans did not influence feudalism is shown by the fact that the Gallo-Germanic fusion precedes the institution of feudalism itself.
Many of F. de C.'s ideas have been abandoned by criticism, especially as regards the classical world (moreover, he naively employs the sources); this does not diminish the importance of his having posed certain solutions with a lucid realism that is by now outside Romantic idealism, and that, if not parallel to, coincides with the positivist movement.
Bibliography7 works
Massimo Petrocchi