Fustel de CoulangesAuthor(s): H. A. L. FisherSource: The English Historical Review, Vol. 5, No. 17 (Jan., 1890), pp. 1-6Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/546552 .Accessed: 02/02/2011 16:31

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The EnglishHistorical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

THE ENGLISH

HISTORICAL REVIEW

NO. XVII.-JANUARY I890

FEistel de Coudazges

BY the 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 indeperndence was 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 en dehors de larolonte de l'historien. 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

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 suappleant at 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

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, on the origin of priestly families-and which infuse 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

4 FUSTEL DE CO ULANGES 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

1890 FUSTEL DE CO ULANGES 5

indications that the object existed. They relied upon the words ager, mark, allmend, commntnia, but had never examined their history or tested their meaning. It was clear that before any sound result could be attained, the problem must be divested of its dazzling accessories, and submitted to critical tests in a narrowed area. The question for the historian is not, ' what was the primitive state of man ?' but, ' what do our documents relate of the early German ?' Fustel de Coulanges aimed at showing that, on the existing textual evidence, the Teutonic tradition is not only not proven but posi- tively contradicted. On the one hand all the agricultural character- istics of the manor existed under the empire, and are again dis- coverable under the earliest Merovingians. On the other hand the Germans, so far from imposing their free institutions 'on con- quered Gaul, never, in historical times at least, possessed those institutions, and would in any case have been powerless to impose them.

In the admirable essay on the Colonat, in which he traces the serfdom of the Polyptiques to 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 before the conquest, an account of the invasion, and a comprehensive yet minute study of the institutions which prevailed 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 rendered to historical inquiry. Although we may hesitate to believe that the Germans of 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 Germans had been settled in Gaul, both as cultivators and as soldiers, long before the conquest, and that the Merovingian monarchy aped the nomenclature of Constantinople. Although Fustel de Coulanges was wrong in supposing that the pope did not intervene in the concerns of the Merovingian dioceses, he was right in pointing out that the bishop was always nominated by the king. Criticisms may 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 recalled social history from hasty inference and 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 accurately noted, through documents covering a period of six cen-

6 FUSTEL DE COULANGEIS Jan.

turies, the varying significance of the terms marca, covnnunia, allviend, alodis. He has worked new 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 world is to possess a definitive account of the origins of feudalism in France, we suspect that the author will owe his opportunity to Fustel de Coulanges.

H. A. L. FISHER.