The French historian Ernest Lavisse (1842-1922) was active in educational reform and edited two multivolume histories of France.

Ernest Lavisse was born on Dec. 17, 1842, in the village of Nouvion-en-Thiérache. He retained a lifelong fondness for his native town and even as professor at the Sorbonne returned each year to address the school's graduating class. After secondary school in the nearby city of Laon, Lavisse continued his education at the Lycée Charlemagne in Paris and the École Normale Supérieure.

After a short student flirtation with republican politics, Lavisse returned to the Bonapartist sympathies he had learned from his family and in 1868 became secretary to Napoleon III's minister of education. Soon afterward he was named private tutor to the prince imperial, with whom he maintained a correspondence for many years after his teaching job was ended by the War of 1870.

Convinced by the...