FUSTEL DE COULANGES, N. D. (1830–1889), was a French historian, best known as author of La cité antique (1864). Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges would perhaps be surprised to find himself the subject of an entry in this encyclopedia. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1850, and chafed under the strictly conventional classical education imposed by the regime of Napoléon III; if the revolutionary movements of 1848 left him with a lasting fear of civil war and violence, as expressed above all in his thesis on Polybius's approval of the Roman conquest of Greece (1858), the counterreaction engendered his equally persistent anticlericalism.

Fustel taught in Strasbourg from 1861 to 1870, then in Paris at the Sorbonne and the École Normale, of which he was director from 1880 to 1883. He saw himself as a scientific historian, examining evidence systematically and without preconceptions. Throughout his...