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Michel Fourmont
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Michel Fourmont
Michel Fourmont (1690–1746) was a French antiquarian and classical scholar, Catholic priest and traveller. A member of the Académie des Inscriptions, he was one of the scholars sent by Louis XV to the eastern Mediterranean to collect inscriptions and manuscripts. He is now best remembered for the destruction of the antiquities in Ancient Sparta and for having presented as genuine some forged inscriptions.
His father was Étienne Fourmont of Herblay in the Paris region, a surgeon and official; Étienne Fourmont (1683–1745) was his brother. He became a Catholic priest, and an orientalist pupil of his brother in Paris.
Fourmont became a private tutor, and was given the Chair of Syriac at the Collège royal in 1720. He was admitted as an associate of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1724.
In 1728 Fourmont was sent by Louis XV to Constantinople and Greece, leaving in 1729 with François Sevin. They were under instructions from Jean-Paul Bignon, the king's librarian, to search out surviving Byzantine manuscripts, and the journey was supported by the Comte de Maurepas, for the greater glory of French scholarship.
Fourmont traveled in Greece and the Aegean Sea for over a year, but had little luck in finding early manuscripts of ancient authors sitting in monastic libraries. He would report to Maurepas in February 1730:
Since I have been in the Morea and the buyurdi (written order) of the muhassil-aga (senior Ottoman official) was sent, I have visited all the monasteries of the Argolid, of Sicyonia, of Achaea, of Arcadia, of Messenia, and some of Elis and Tsakonia. In more than sixty abbeys, Monseigneur, and more than 150 metochia or priories, I have not found a single book that merited entering the Royal Library.
Therefore, Fourmont made collecting ancient Greek inscriptions his primary focus. Fourmont would report to Count Maurepas that he copied 1,500 ancient inscriptions (300 in Sparta). His technique was brutally direct. Workmen were hired to dismantle any structure that might contain ancient stones with letters on them. Fourmont reported paying 1,200 man-days of labour to dismantle monuments in search of ancient marbles. In a letter to Bignon dated 20 April 1730, Fourmont wrote:
For more a month, although ill, I am working with 30 laborers for the complete destruction of Sparta; hardly a day goes by without finding something, and some days have produced as many as 20 inscriptions. If I could do at Tegea, Antigonia (Mantineia), Nemea and one or two other cities what I have done at Hermione, Troezen, and Sparta, it wouldn't be necessary to send anyone here. There would be nothing left. I have not been able to knock down the remains of the former places, because of the plague, without which they would be totally destroyed. For lack of books, these destructions shall be the only way to make illustrious a voyage which has caused such a stir.
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Michel Fourmont
Michel Fourmont (1690–1746) was a French antiquarian and classical scholar, Catholic priest and traveller. A member of the Académie des Inscriptions, he was one of the scholars sent by Louis XV to the eastern Mediterranean to collect inscriptions and manuscripts. He is now best remembered for the destruction of the antiquities in Ancient Sparta and for having presented as genuine some forged inscriptions.
His father was Étienne Fourmont of Herblay in the Paris region, a surgeon and official; Étienne Fourmont (1683–1745) was his brother. He became a Catholic priest, and an orientalist pupil of his brother in Paris.
Fourmont became a private tutor, and was given the Chair of Syriac at the Collège royal in 1720. He was admitted as an associate of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1724.
In 1728 Fourmont was sent by Louis XV to Constantinople and Greece, leaving in 1729 with François Sevin. They were under instructions from Jean-Paul Bignon, the king's librarian, to search out surviving Byzantine manuscripts, and the journey was supported by the Comte de Maurepas, for the greater glory of French scholarship.
Fourmont traveled in Greece and the Aegean Sea for over a year, but had little luck in finding early manuscripts of ancient authors sitting in monastic libraries. He would report to Maurepas in February 1730:
Since I have been in the Morea and the buyurdi (written order) of the muhassil-aga (senior Ottoman official) was sent, I have visited all the monasteries of the Argolid, of Sicyonia, of Achaea, of Arcadia, of Messenia, and some of Elis and Tsakonia. In more than sixty abbeys, Monseigneur, and more than 150 metochia or priories, I have not found a single book that merited entering the Royal Library.
Therefore, Fourmont made collecting ancient Greek inscriptions his primary focus. Fourmont would report to Count Maurepas that he copied 1,500 ancient inscriptions (300 in Sparta). His technique was brutally direct. Workmen were hired to dismantle any structure that might contain ancient stones with letters on them. Fourmont reported paying 1,200 man-days of labour to dismantle monuments in search of ancient marbles. In a letter to Bignon dated 20 April 1730, Fourmont wrote:
For more a month, although ill, I am working with 30 laborers for the complete destruction of Sparta; hardly a day goes by without finding something, and some days have produced as many as 20 inscriptions. If I could do at Tegea, Antigonia (Mantineia), Nemea and one or two other cities what I have done at Hermione, Troezen, and Sparta, it wouldn't be necessary to send anyone here. There would be nothing left. I have not been able to knock down the remains of the former places, because of the plague, without which they would be totally destroyed. For lack of books, these destructions shall be the only way to make illustrious a voyage which has caused such a stir.