1. Fustel de Coulanges
Author(s): H. A. L. Fisher
Source: The English Historical Review, Vol. 5, No. 17 (Jan., 1890), pp. 1-6
Published by: Oxford University Press
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2. THE ENGLISH
HISTORICAL REVIEW
NO. XVII.-JANUARY I890
FEistelde Coudazges
BYthe death of Fustel de Coulanges, a very notable figure
passes away from the ranks of historians. Fustel de
Coulanges was not only a man of wide and exact erudition; he
was one of those powerful and coherent thinkers who have the
force to shape out a path for themselves, and the faith to abide by
it. Drawn instinctively towards the most delicate and the most
contested points of history, he has left everywhere an abundance
of new lights. Indeed, wherever he has trodden, he seems to have
changed the centre of gravity, so that, in proportion to the bulk of
their writings, few men have effected more. His lofty almost con-
temptuous indeperndencewas due to no vulgar hostility or love of
parade. It sprang from a sustained faith in the value of an
historical method from which he believed that other historians
had departed. To read all the available texts and to report upon
them strictly, such was, in the eyes of Fustel de Coulanges, the
function of the historian. If every word in the text has been given
its due weight, the truth will be disengaged not hypothetically
but necessarily. After an exhaustive analysis of institutions as
presented to us by all the existing documents, their affinities will
emerge by a sequence as imperious as that which exists between
the flash and report of a cannon. History is not an art, but the
most arduous of sciences, in which subjective elements have no
place. 11 se peut sans doutte,he says, qu'une certaine philosophie se
degage de cette histoire scientifique, mais il faut qu'elle se degage
naturellement,d'elle-meme, presqute dehors de larolonte de l'historien.
en
In an article written for the Revue des deux Mondes in September
1872, entitled 'La Maniere d'ecrire l'Histoire en France et en
Allemagne,' he complains, in tones which are perhaps too rancorous,
that German history is throughout infected by patriotism. He was

3. 2 FUSTEL DE COULANGES Jan.
animated by a profound belief that the origins of medieval history
had been written on wrong lines to serve the ends of Teutonic
self-glorification, that the texts had been insufficiently studied,
and that a large amount of interested speculation had been im-
ported to fill up the lacunae. Sweeping away the Teutonic tradi-
tion, he set himself to build up history anew from its very base,
and to correct the results of German erudition by a fresh and
thorough investigation of the texts. He possessed important quali-
fications for the task, a keen logical understanding, a subtle sense
of nice distinctions both of language and law, and untiring industry.
The one virtue on which he prided himself, that of absolute
scientific impartiality, is the one virtue which experience does not
allow us to assign to those historians who give to burning questions
a burning answer. The fact is that Fustel de Coulanges was a
logician first and an historian afterwards. He has a wonderful eye
for the unity of history, for the common properties of institutions,
for the widely distributed consequences of some remote force. But
he missed the complexity of events, and was, in the process of simpli-
fication, apt to ignore the plurality of causes. Determined to
extract a clear answer from the darkest oracles of the past, he often
submitted his texts to unwilling tortures. In his treatment of
institutions he was prone to overlook the political circumstances
whiich contributed to their growth arid gave them their distinctive
colour, to view them in an unreal and stationary isolation, and to
insist too strongly on those features which appeared to harmonise
with his own dominating convictions. Always a clear and incisive
writer, he excelled especially in the exposition and elucidation of
texts. No one has better understood the art of eliciting the maxi-
mum of meaning out of the minimum of text, of developing the result
into all its logical consequences, and of exhibiting the process in an
attractive and exhilarating form. Although every one of his works
was in part, if not in entirety, a polemic, and sustained by a back-
ground of intense personal feeling, he rarely departed from that
sobriety which is the true note of genius. He is trenchant without
bluster, imperious without insolence.
Fustel de Coulanges was born at Paris on 18 March 1830.
In 1850 he entered the Ecole Normale, and on his exit three years
later was named professor of rhetoric at the Lycee of Amiens.
Agrege in 1857, he was doctor of letters in 1858, presenting for
his doctorat the usual two theses, one in French entitled 'Polybe
ou la Grece conquise par les Romains,' the other in Latin, 'Quid
Vestae cultus in institutis veterum privatis publicisque valuerit.' In
1859 he was named professor suappleantat the Lycee St. Louis,
and in 1861 he was appointed to the chair of history at Strassburg.
'La Cite Antique' appeared in 1864, three years after Sir Henry
Maine's ' Ancient Law.' The subject was suggested by the Latin

4. 1890 FUSTEL DE CO ULANGES 3
thesis on the cult of Vesta which Fustel sent up for his doctorat
six years before. From that time onward he had devoted himself
to the study of the institutions of Greece and Rome, taking them
one by one, and submitting each to a rigorous analysis. He was
then struck by the fact that all the institutions of the ancient Aryan
world bore signs of a common origin in the primitive cult of dead an-
cestors. The remarkable cohesion of the family group in early times,
the primitive inalienability of property, the phenomena of agnation,
adoption, and female disabilities were all explicable on the hypothesis
that the social evolution of the race was controlled by a particular
order of religious belief and observance. A federal union of patri-
archal families, each worshipping a common ancestor, the ancient
city passed through the successive stages of monarchy, aristocracy,
plutocracy, and democracy, each of which marks a point in the pro-
gressive decomposition of the primitive family group. The appear-
ance of the archon and the consul, of the strategus and the tribune,
the Solonian revolution and the twelve tables are parallel steps in
the break-up of the familiar system, which yields to the pressure of
a growing non-privileged population. It is obvious that in this
conception of antiquity, pieced together though it largely is by a
medley of fragments of dateless and doubtful application, there .is
much that is true as well as striking. But its value depends not
so much on the amount of ascertained truth which it may contain,
as upon the new angle at which it presents every fact and institu-
tion of the ancient world. It is a lantern held up from an untried
corner, in the light of which familiar shapes assume new relations,
one of those fertilising conceptions which produce on every side
a fresh crop of suggestive views-on the lot at Athens, on the
Solonian otpot, the origin of priestly families-and which infuse
on
a new sap into the great reconstruction of the past.
Between ' La Cite Antique' and the first volume of ' Les Institu-
tions Politiques de l'Ancienne France,' there elapses a period of
eleven years, broken by occasional contributions to the Reeite des
deux Mondes, three of which have been substantially incorporated in
later works. In 1870 Fustel de Coulanges was summoned back to
the Ecole Normale as professor, to become its director in 1880, and
in 1875 he was admitted into the Acad6mie des Sciences Morales et
Politiques. During all these years he had been making an enthu-
siastic and unintermittent study of all the texts bearing upon Roman
and Germanic institutions. He boasted that he was the only
scholar who had studied, penl in hand, all the Latin texts from the
sixth century B.C. to the tenth century A.D., and certainly there is
no higher authority on the social history of the later Roman empire.
Four works have already appeared as the result of this great labour.
In 1875 he issued his 'Institutions Politiques de l'Ancienne France,'
in 1885 the ' Recherches sur quelques Problemes d'Histoire,' and in

5. 4 FUSTEL DE COULANGES Jan.
1888 'La Monarchie Franque.' Since his death a fourth volume
has been published, entitled 'L 'Alleu et le Domaine Rural pendant
l'Epoque Merovingienne,' and three more volumes are in prepara-
tion, two of which, 'La Gaule Romaine' and IL'Invasion Ger-
manique,' will cover in a more matured form the ground occupied
by the volume of 1875, while the third, ' Le Benefice de l'Epoque
Merovingienne,' will complete the account of the Frank land system.
We have thus not yet reaped the full harvest of Fustel's labours,
but if we may judge from the striking work which he never lived to
complete, the store which is yet in reserve will be a rich one.
The question of the primitive form of landed property had, until
quite lately, received but one answer. In 1848, J. M. Kemble
asserted that the mark is the original basis upon which all Teutonic
society rests, and his view was worked out in detail by Maurer with
reference to Germany, and by Nasse with reference to England.
Sir Henry Maine, M. de Laveleye, M. Paul Viollet, M. d'Arbois de
Jubainville, all accepted the results of the Teutonic theory, and veri-
fied them from additional sources. In 'La Cite Antique' Fustel
de Coulanges had expressed his opinion that although communism
may have been the original form of landed property, there was no
existing Greek or Latin text which indicated its existence. The
proposition, as it stands in ' La Cite Antique,' is still disputable,
but it indicates the line of attack which Fustel de Coulanges after-
wards adopted with such great results in another field. In 1844,
Guerard in his prolegomena to the 'Polyptique d'Irminon' had
attempted to trace the chief features of the manor to the legisla-
tion of the later Roman Empire, but he had not, as far as we are
aware, received any notable support until Fustel de Coulanges
opened up the whole question of the Germanic invasion and the
organisation of justice under the Merovingians in articles written
to the Revue des deux Mondes in 1871 and 1872.
The task which Fustel de Coulanges set himself was strictly
critical. The Teutonic school had in the first place overlooked the
Roman evidence, and had in the second place read the Teutonic
documents in the light of national or philosophical prepossessions.
With the leaven of Jean-Jacques still fermenting in their brains,
they had confused a positive historical problem with a speculative
ethnological hypothesis. They had run, too, into the easy excesses
opened out by the new comparative method. They had eagerly
annexed the Russian mir, which, whatever it may have been before
1592, has ever since that date been subject to a lord, and the
Javanese sawahs, concerning which the earliest quoted document
dates from 1804. Wherever they had discovered either joint
familiar holdings, or indivisibility of tenure, or village common
lands, or joint agricultural exploitation, they either boldly identified
them with the object of their quest, or treated them as sure

6. 1890 FUSTEL DE COULANGES 5
indications that the object existed. They relied upon the words
ager, mark, allmend, commntnia, had never examined their history
but
or tested their meaning. It was clear that beforeany sound result
could be attained, the problem must be divested of its dazzling
accessories,and submittedto critical tests in a narrowedarea. The
question for the historian is not, ' what was the primitive state of
man ?' but, ' what do our documentsrelate of the early German?'
Fustel de Coulangesaimed at showingthat, on the existing textual
evidence, the Teutonic tradition is not only not proven but posi-
tively contradicted. Onthe one hand all the agriculturalcharacter-
istics of the manor existed under the empire, and are again dis-
coverableunder the earliest Merovingians. On the other hand the
Germans, so far from imposing their free institutions 'on con-
queredGaul, never, in historical times at least, possessed those
institutions, and would in any case have been powerlessto impose
them.
In the admirable essay on the Colonat,in which he traces the
serfdomof the Polyptiquesto its varied origins under the Roman
empire, and in the no less admirable chapters in 'L'Alleu et le
Benefice,' in which the structure of the Roman and Merovingian
land system is analysed, Fustel de Coulanges has satisfactorily
established the first half of his contention. The second half is
larger and more complex. It involves a dissection of the Germanic
institutions beforethe conquest,an account of the invasion, and a
comprehensive minute study of the institutions which prevailed
yet
in France during the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries. No one
can have read the four volumes which deal with these questions
without feeling the immense service which Fustel de Coulanges
has renderedto historical inquiry. Although we may hesitate to
believe that the Germansof the fifth century were the debris d'une
race epuisee, or that Clovis ruled as a delegate of the Roman empire,
it is certainly true that Germanshad been settled in Gaul, both as
cultivatorsand as soldiers, long before the conquest, and that the
Merovingianmonarchyaped the nomenclature of Constantinople.
Although Fustel de Coulanges was wrong in supposing that the
pope did not intervene in the concernsof the Merovingian dioceses,
he was right in pointing out that the bishop was always nominated
by the king. Criticismsmay be made, and those not sparingly,on
his treatment of evidence,but they are unavailing to shake the
solid fabric of his work.
He has not only recalledsocial history from hasty inferenceand
flimsy analogy to the study of the texts, but he has investigated
and largely determined the use of the terminology which serves
as its datum. Among the- many debts which we owe to
Fustel de Coulanges,it is not the least that he has traced and
accuratelynoted, through documents covering a period of six cen-

7. 6 FUSTEL DE COULANGEIS Jan.
turies, the varying significance of the terms marca, covnnunia,
allviend,alodis. He has workednew and untried veins of inquiry,
and has placed every detail of his investigations before the eye of
the reader. He has not only written history in his own way, but
he is at pains to show how the thing is done. If ever the worldis
to possessa definitiveaccount of the origins of feudalismin France,
we suspect that the author will owe his opportunityto Fustel de
Coulanges.
H. A. L. FISHER.