Fustel de Coulanges

Fustel de Coulanges, NUMA DENIS, was born at Paris 18th March 1830, and after filling chairs successively at Amiens, Paris, and Strasbourg, was transferred in 1875 to the Ecole Normale at Paris, and became a member of the Institute in the same year. He died September 12, 1889. His earlier writings, Mémoire sur l'île de Chio (1857) and Polybe, ou la Grèce conquise par les Romains (1858), had hardly prepared the reading public for the altogether exceptional importance of his brilliant book La Cité antique (1864; 10th ed. 1885), which threw a flood of fresh light on the social and religious institutions of antiquity. The work was crowned by the French Academy, as was also his profoundly learned and luminous Histoire des Institutions politiques de l'ancienne France (vol. i. 1875).