GUIZOT, FRANÇOIS-PIERRE-GUILLAUME. - French statesman, b. 4 Oct. 1787 at Nîmes, d. 12 Oct. 1874 at Val-Richer (Calvados). A Calvinist, son of a lawyer executed during the Revolution, he spent his childhood, together with his mother, in Geneva, devoting himself to the study of German, English and Italian literature, of the classical languages and of the exact sciences. Having later come to Paris, he was a tutor in the household of the former Swiss minister to the French government Stapfer, and in 1812 he married Pauline de Meulan, a marriage which, through his wife's connections with the royalist party, later opened up a political career for him.
A professor of modern history in the faculty of letters (1812), two years later he became secretary-general of the Ministry of the Interior and played an important part in the preparation of the press law of 23 Oct. 1814. During the Hundred Days he took refuge in Ghent and, with the second restoration, he was secretary-general at the Ministry of Justice until 1816. An advocate of a rigorously constitutional policy, opposed as much to the reactionaries as to the liberals, he passed decisively into opposition against the actions of the absolutist ministries. Thus outside militant politics, he published a series of historical works, some of a programmatic character, others of a rather general-cultural character. After the fall of the Bourbons (1830), he was a deputy and remained one uninterruptedly until 1848. Minister of public instruction from 1832 to 1837, he prepared the law on primary instruction (1833), which stands at the basis of the subsequent French school system. Minister of foreign affairs in 1840, in 1845 he sent Pellegrino Rossi to Rome to negotiate with the Holy See an arrangement concerning the removal of the Jesuits from France, and until the fall of the July monarchy he remained the true director of French policy. Opposed to any reform of the electoral law, which according to him would have broken the balance of internal forces, G. brought about by his obstinacy the Parisian revolution of Feb. 1848, which forced him to take refuge in England. He returned to France the following year but no longer took part in political life. In 1862, presiding over the meeting of a Protestant society, he spoke out in favour of maintaining the temporal power of the Pope and against French intervention in Italy. Although not a Catholic, he upheld the necessity of a close alliance between the civil authority and the clergy in order to confront the moral and political crisis of the country.
Among his works are remembered: Hist. de la révolution d'Angleterre (2 vols., Paris 1826-27); Hist. de la République d'Angleterre et d'Olivier Cronwell (ibid. 1854); Hist. du protectorat de Richard Cronwell et du rétablissement des Stuarts (ibid. 1856); Hist. générale de la civilisation en Europe (5th ed., ibid. 1845); Hist. de la civilisation en France (5th ed., ibid. 1845); Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de mon temps, 9 vols. (ibid. 1858-68).