Augustin Thierry was a French historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

.

He was born in Blois

Blois

Blois is the capital of Loir-et-Cher department in central France, situated on the banks of the lower river Loire between Orléans and Tours.-History:...

, Loir-et-Cher

Loir-et-Cher

Loir-et-Cher is a département in north-central France named after the rivers Loir and Cher.-History:Loir-et-Cher is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on 4 March 1790. It was created from parts of the former provinces of Orléanais and...

, the elder brother of Amédée Simon Dominique Thierry

Amedée Simon Dominique Thierry

Amédée Simon Dominique Thierry , French journalist and historian, was the younger brother of Augustin.- Biography :Thierry was born in Blois, Loir-et-Cher....

. He had no advantages of birth or fortune, but was distinguished at the Blois Grammar School, and entered the École Normale Supérieure

École Normale Supérieure

The École normale supérieure is one of the most prestigious French grandes écoles...

 in 1811. In 1813 he was sent as a professor to Compiègne

Compiègne

Compiègne is a city in northern France. It is designated municipally as a commune within the département of Oise.The city is located along the Oise River...

, but stayed there a very short time.

Thierry enthusiastically embraced the ideals of the French Revolution

French Revolution

The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

 and Saint Simon

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, often referred to as Henri de Saint-Simon was a French early socialist theorist whose thought influenced the foundations of various 19th century philosophies; perhaps most notably Marxism, positivism and the discipline of sociology...

's vision of an ideal future society. He became Saint-Simon's secretary and "adopted son"; but while most of Saint-Simon's followers applied his theories to present-day matters of political economy, Thierry turned to history instead.

Thierry was also inspired by Romantic literature

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

, such as Chateaubriand

François-René de Chateaubriand

François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian. He is considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature.-Early life and exile:...

's Les Martyrs, and Walter Scott

Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....

's novels. Though Thierry did not actually write romances, his conception of history recognized the dramatic element (for instance, Les Martyrs dramatizes the clash of the Roman Empire

Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....

 with Early Christianity

Early Christianity

Early Christianity is generally considered as Christianity before 325. The New Testament's Book of Acts and Epistle to the Galatians records that the first Christian community was centered in Jerusalem and its leaders included James, Peter and John....

).

Thierry's main ideas on the Germanic invasions, the Norman Conquest, the formation of the Communes, the gradual ascent of the nations towards free government and parliamentary institutions, are set forth in the articles he contributed to the Censeur européen (1817–20), and later in his Lettres sur l'histoire de France (1820). From Claude Charles Fauriel

Claude Charles Fauriel

Claude Charles Fauriel was a French historian, philologist and critic.-Biography:He was born at Saint-Étienne, Loire, the son of a poor joiner, but received a good education in the Oratorian colleges of Tournon and Lyon...

 he learned to use primary source

Primary source

Primary source is a term used in a number of disciplines to describe source material that is closest to the person, information, period, or idea being studied....

s; and by the aid of the Latin chronicles and the collection of Anglo-Saxon law

Anglo-Saxon law

Anglo-Saxon law is a body of written rules and customs that were in place during the Anglo-Saxon period in England, before the Norman conquest. This body of law, along with early Scandinavian law and continental Germanic law, descended from a family of ancient Germanic custom and legal thought...

s, he wrote Histoire de la Conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands (History of the Conquest of England by the Normans), the appearance of which was greeted with great enthusiasm (1825). It was written in a style at once precise and picturesque, and was dominated by a theory of Anglo-Saxon liberty resisting the invasions of northern barbarians, and eventually reviving in the parliamentary monarchy. His artistic talent as a writer makes the weaknesses and deficiencies of his scholarship less obvious. This work, the preparation of which had required several years of hard work, cost Thierry his eyesight; in 1826 he was obliged to engage secretaries and eventually became quite blind. Notwithstanding, he continued to write.

In 1827 he republished his Lettres sur l'histoire de France, with the addition of fifteen new ones, in which he described some of the more striking episodes in the history of the rise of the medieval communes. The chronicles of the 11th and 12th centuries and a few communal charters provided him with materials for a solid work. For this reason his work on the communes has not become so out of date as his Norman Conquest; but he was too apt to generalize from the facts furnished by a few striking cases which occurred in a small portion of France, and helped to spread among the public, and even among professional historians, mistaken ideas concerning one of the most complex problems relating to the social origins of France.

Thierry ardently supported the July Revolution

July Revolution

The French Revolution of 1830, also known as the July Revolution or in French, saw the overthrow of King Charles X of France, the French Bourbon monarch, and the ascent of his cousin Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, who himself, after 18 precarious years on the throne, would in turn be overthrown...

 and the triumph of liberal ideas; at this time, too, his brother Amédée

Amedée Simon Dominique Thierry

Amédée Simon Dominique Thierry , French journalist and historian, was the younger brother of Augustin.- Biography :Thierry was born in Blois, Loir-et-Cher....

 was appointed prefect, and he went to live with him for four years. He now re-edited, under the title of Dix ans d'études historiques, his first essays in the Censeur européen and the Courrier français (1834), and composed his Récits des temps mérovingiens, in which he vividly presented some of the stories of Gregory of Tours

Gregory of Tours

Saint Gregory of Tours was a Gallo-Roman historian and Bishop of Tours, which made him a leading prelate of Gaul. He was born Georgius Florentius, later adding the name Gregorius in honour of his maternal great-grandfather...

. These Récits appeared first in the Revue des deux mondes

Revue des deux mondes

The Revue des deux Mondes is a French language monthly literary and cultural affairs magazine that has been published in Paris since 1829....

; when collected in volume form, they were preceded by long Considerations sur l'histoire de France.

From 7 May 1830, Thierry had already been a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres; in 1841, on the motion of Villemain

Villemain

Villemain is a commune in the Deux-Sèvres department in western France.-References:*...

, the Académie française

Académie française

L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...

 awarded him the first Prix Gobert. He continued to receive this prize for the next fifteen years. Moreover, he had been asked to edit a volume of the series Documents inédits containing a selection of acts bearing on the history of the Third Estate. Helped by collaborators (including Bourquelot and Louandre) he compiled, in four volumes, Recueil des monuments inédits de l'histoire du Tiers Etat (1850–70), which, however, bear only on the northern part of France. The preface appeared afterwards in a separate volume under the title of Histoire du Tiers Etat.

To Thierry belongs the credit for inaugurating in France the really critical study of the communal institutions. The last years of his life were clouded by domestic griefs and by illness. In 1844 he lost his wife, Julie de Querengal, who had been a capable and devoted collaborator in his studies. The Revolution of 1848 inflicted on him a final blow by overturning the regime of the Liberal bourgeoisie

Bourgeoisie

In sociology and political science, bourgeoisie describes a range of groups across history. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture." A member of the...

, whose triumph he had hailed and justified as the necessary outcome of the whole course of French history. Thierry began to abandon the strict rationalism that had hitherto estranged him from the Catholic Church. When Catholic writers criticized the "historical errors" in his writings he promised to correct them, and in the final edition of his Histoire de la Conquête his severe judgments of Vatican policies are eliminated. Though he did not renounce his liberal friends, he sought the company of enlightened priests, and just before his death seems disposed to reentering the Church. He died in Paris in 1856.