Ernest Lavisse

Born Dec. 17, 1842, in Nouvion-en-Thiérache; died Aug. 18, 1922, in Paris. French historian. Member of the Académie Française (1892).

Lavisse graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1865. He was a professor at the Sorbonne from 1888, and he directed the Ecole Normale Supérieure from 1904 to 1919.

After the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Lavisse devoted particular attention to the study of the history of Germany, primarily Prussia, seeking to discover the explanation of its military and political success. A historian of the bourgeois-liberal strain, Lavisse did not base his conclusions on the analysis of socioeconomic factors, but on the phenomena derived from them—in particular, the organization of higher education in Germany.

Lavisse was editor and coauthor of multivolume works on world history and the history of France. The Universal History From the Fourth Century to the Present, published under the joint editorship of Lavisse and A. Rambaud, became famous (vols. 1–12, 1893–1901). The first eight volumes were published in Russian translation under the same title (1897–1903); the remaining volumes of the French edition were published in Russian as The History of the Nineteenth Century (vols. 1–8, 2nd ed., 1938–39).