Michel Fourmont facts for kids

Michel Fourmont (born 1690, died 1746) was a French antiquarian and scholar who studied ancient times. He was also a Catholic priest and a traveler. As a member of the important Académie des Inscriptions, he was one of the experts sent by King Louis XV to the eastern Mediterranean Sea. His job was to find and copy ancient writings and old books. Today, he is mostly remembered for damaging ancient sites in Ancient Sparta and for presenting some fake writings as real.

Early Life and Studies

Michel Fourmont was born in 1690. His father, Étienne Fourmont, was a surgeon. Michel also had a brother named Étienne Fourmont (1683–1745). Michel became a Catholic priest and studied ancient Eastern languages in Paris, learning from his brother.

He worked as a private teacher. In 1720, he was given a special teaching position at the Collège royal, where he taught Syriac, an ancient language. In 1724, he became a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, a famous group of scholars.

Journey to Greece

In 1728, King Louis XV sent Fourmont to Constantinople and Greece. He left in 1729 with another scholar, François Sevin. Their mission was to find old Byzantine manuscripts (ancient handwritten books). This trip was supported by important people in France to bring more glory to French scholarship.

Fourmont traveled around Greece and the Aegean Sea for more than a year. However, he didn't find many old manuscripts in the monasteries as he had hoped.

Searching for Inscriptions

Because finding manuscripts was difficult, Fourmont decided to focus on collecting ancient Greek inscriptions. These were writings carved into stone. He told Count Maurepas, who supported his trip, that he had copied 1,500 ancient inscriptions. About 300 of these were from Sparta.

Fourmont's method for finding these stones was very direct. He hired workers to take apart any old buildings or structures that might have ancient stones with letters on them. He reported paying for 1,200 days of work to dismantle monuments just to find these ancient marbles.

Fourmont was called back to France before he could visit ancient Olympia, which he had planned to do. Back in France, he only published a short report about his findings. On November 4, 1742, he became a member of the Royal Society, a respected group of scientists and scholars.

What Happened to His Work?

Later travelers who visited Greece were shocked by Fourmont's descriptions of the ancient monuments he had damaged. Some people claimed that Fourmont wrote in his letters that he had destroyed certain inscriptions after he copied them.

Doubts and Forgeries

Over time, scholars became suspicious of Fourmont's work. For example, some of his most important inscriptions from a place called Amyclae could not be found again. This made people wonder if he had made them up or copied them incorrectly.

In 1791, a scholar named Richard Payne Knight wrote a book suggesting that Fourmont had faked some of the inscriptions in his collection. This started a big debate. In 1815, another scholar, Immanuel Bekker, copied Fourmont's collection of inscriptions. Later, August Böckh looked at 26 texts from Amyclae that were doubted and confirmed they were forgeries.

When scholars could find the original inscriptions that Fourmont had copied, they often found that his copies were not accurate. Böckh described them as "Corrupt, like most of the Fourmontiana," meaning they were full of errors.

Because of these problems, all of Fourmont's published work was seen as unreliable. However, he still had a lot of unpublished material. One scholar, Dodwell, gave a harsh but likely true opinion of Fourmont: "Great ambition, and a little learning, with an unfeeling indifference for the monuments of antiquity, incited him to destroy some of the most venerable and interesting records of ancient history." This means Fourmont was very ambitious but didn't know enough, and he didn't care about preserving ancient sites, which led him to destroy valuable historical records.