Thierry, Augustin

(1795-1856)

   writer, historian

   Born in Blois, Augustin Thierry was the secretary to the count of saint-simon before collaborating on his liberal journals. Having felt early the vocation of historian (after reading the Martyrs of rené de chateaubriand), he dedicated himself in 1821 to writing his Histoire de la conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands (1825), in which he demonstrated his theory of a people's (conquering and conquered) secular struggles explaining their history. The same struggle, this time between the Romans and the Franks, between "the spirit of civil discipline and the violent instincts of the barbarian," appeared in his Récits des temps mérovingiens (1840), an evocative tableau of sixth-century Gaul that reached a wide audience with its skilled combination of erudition and imagination. Although he became blind in 1833, he continued his historical writings and published his essay Histoire de la formation et des progress du tiers état (1850), in which he presented his ideas on exactitude and precision in research methodology. A master of the lively narrative of events, Thierry through his care in reconstructing local color as well as the psychology of his evocative characters, remains a great literary historian.