Augustin Thierry

Augustin Thierry.

Jacques Nicolas Augustin Thierry (born May 10, 1795 in Blois , † May 22, 1856 in Paris ) was a French historian. He was one of the first to place the highest value on source work for his works and stood out for his lively writing style. Thierry edited a large number of medieval sources. There was a legend that he went blind while studying sources intensively in the archive.

life and work

Thierry went to school in Blois and studied from 1811 at the École normal supérieure . In 1813 he went to Compiègne for a short time as a teacher (professor) . He was an avid supporter of Henri de Saint-Simon and became his secretary. Later he was a supporter of the July Revolution of 1830 . From 1817 to 1820 he published in the Censeur européen and in 1820 Lettres sur l'histoire de France . In his historiography he was influenced by romantic literature, such as Les Martyres by François-René de Chateaubriand and the novels by Walter Scott , but also learned to study sources closely with Claude Charles Fauriel .

Augustin Thierry and François Guizot took the view that the story was based on a sequence of class struggles . Karl Marx called Thierry "le père des 'class struggle' in French historiography". In Thierry's version of the class struggle, the bourgeoisie, the descendants of the Celts who were free before the Germanic immigration to France , fought against the nobility, the descendants of the Frankish conquerors. In the French Revolution of 1789, Thierry (and others) said, the citizens / Gauls freed themselves from the nobles / Franks. This strange combination of the (bourgeois-liberal, not Marxist) class struggle with older, mythical ideas about a Gaulish prehistoric age, to whose conditions one returned with the revolution and the regaining of "Celtic" freedom, dominated French historiography until the end of the 19th century. Century, represented similar ideas u. a. Jules Michelet .

Similar to the history of France, he also treated the Norman conquest of England : Anglo-Saxon freedom was threatened by the Norman conquerors and ultimately prevailed in parliamentarianism. The work, which was enthusiastically received at the time, required several years of intensive study of the sources, and a year after publication he went partially blind, but continued his work with the help of secretaries and probably especially his wife Suzanne Julie Thierry , née de Quérangal (1802-1844), whom he continued Married in 1831 and who had previously enthusiastically read his works.

In 1841 he received the first Grand Prix Gobert , which he received every year until his death. Since 1836 he was a foreign member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

At last he was sickly; the revolution of 1848 was an unwelcome shock to him. He turned to more Catholic views and in this regard softened his story of the Norman conquest of England in a new edition.

He was the older brother of the historian and journalist Amédée Simon Dominique Thierry (1797–1873).

Fonts

L'Histoire de la conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands , 3 volumes, 1825
Lettres sur l'histoire de France . Paris, 1820, 1827
Dix ans d'études historiques . Paris, 1834 (essays from the Censeur européen and Courrier français)
Essai sur l'histoire de la formation et des progrès du tiers état, suivi de deux fragments du recueil des monuments inédits de cette histoire . Meline, Cans et Cie, 1853 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
Récits des temps mérovingiens, précédés de considérations sur l'histoire de France. 2 volumes. Garnier, Paris 1840 (first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, German: Kings and Queens of the Merovingians. Hallwag, Bern 1938; translated by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer . The same book was also published under the title Tales from the Merovingian Times , Manesse, Zurich 1972 .)
Recueil des monuments inédits de l'histoire du Tiers Etat , 4 volumes, 1850 to 1870

literature

Anne Denieul Cormier: Augustin Thierry. L'histoire autrement. Publisud, Paris 1996, ISBN 2-86600-795-6 .
Winfried Engler : Lexicon of French Literature (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 388). 2nd, improved and enlarged edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-520-38802-2 , sv “Thierry” .
Dietrich Gerhard : Guizot, Augustin Thierry and the role of the animal budget in French history. In: Historical magazine . Vol. 190, 1960, pp. 290-310, doi : 10.1524 / hzhz.1960.190.jg.290 .
Lionel Gossmann: Augustin Thierry and liberal historiography (= History and Theory. Studies in the Philosophy of History. Supplement 15, ISSN 0440-9841 ). Wesleyan University Press, Middletown CT 1976, JSTOR i342907 .
Ruth Leners: Historiography of Romanticism in the field of tension between historical novel and drama. Studies on Augustin Thierry and the historical theater of his time (= Bonn Romanistic works. Vol. 23). Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1987, ISBN 978-3-8204-1070-9 (at the same time: Bonn, University, dissertation, 1986).
Rulon Nephi Smithson: Augustin Thierry. Social and Political Consciousness in the Evolution of a Historical Method (= Histoire des Idées et Critique Littéraire. 129, ISSN 0073-2397 ). Droz, Geneva 1973.
Peter Stadler : Historiography and historical thinking in France. 1789-1871. Report house publishing house, Zurich 1958.

Web links

Encyclopedia Britannica 1911

Individual evidence

↑ D. Gerhard: Guizot, Augustin Thierry and the role of the animal budget in French history. In: Historical magazine. Vol. 190, 1960, pp. 290-310.
^ Marx to Engels in Manchester, July 27, 1854. MEW 28, p. 381 ff.
↑ Augsburger Tagblatt. No. 197. Friday, July 19, 1844, p. 843: "An excellent and admirable woman, the wife of the famous writer Augustin Thierry, recently died in Paris. She was the daughter of Admiral Querangal [Pierre Maurice Julien de Quérangal (1758–1840)], read Thierry's excellent writings with admiration, and when she learned that he was blind, she made the heroic resolution to alleviate his sufferings and to serve him as his faithful guide in the darkness of life. She became his wife and did what she had set out to do She was her husband's eye through which he studied the ancient sources of history, she was his hand through which he wrote down what he had explored and thought up, and found time to act as a writer herself. At her funeral, all the literary celebrities of France, Chateaubriand at the top, followed her coffin. " As a digitized version [1] , accessed on August 20, 2020.

personal data
SURNAME	Thierry, Augustin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Thierry, Jacques Nicolas Augustin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	French historian
DATE OF BIRTH	May 10, 1795
PLACE OF BIRTH	Blois
DATE OF DEATH	May 22, 1856
Place of death	Paris

[1] D. Gerhard: Guizot, Augustin Thierry and the role of the animal budget in French history. In: Historical magazine. Vol. 190, 1960, pp. 290-310.

[2] Marx to Engels in Manchester, July 27, 1854. MEW 28, p. 381 ff.

[3] Augsburger Tagblatt. No. 197. Friday, July 19, 1844, p. 843: "An excellent and admirable woman, the wife of the famous writer Augustin Thierry, recently died in Paris. She was the daughter of Admiral Querangal [Pierre Maurice Julien de Quérangal (1758–1840)], read Thierry's excellent writings with admiration, and when she learned that he was blind, she made the heroic resolution to alleviate his sufferings and to serve him as his faithful guide in the darkness of life. She became his wife and did what she had set out to do She was her husband's eye through which he studied the ancient sources of history, she was his hand through which he wrote down what he had explored and thought up, and found time to act as a writer herself. At her funeral, all the literary celebrities of France, Chateaubriand at the top, followed her coffin. " As a digitized version [1] , accessed on August 20, 2020.