Claude Fleury and His Career

Abstract

Claude Fleury (1640–1723), an educator, historian, jurist, cleric, royal tutor, and immortel of the Académie Française, was renowned for a twenty-volume Histoire Ecclésiastique. Voltaire, with uncharacteristic benevolence, described this massive work quite simply as “the best which has even been done.”¹ Fleury’s reputation as an erudite and versatile author and scholar was enhanced by several other works he wrote on civil and ecclesiastical law as well as by works on politics, history, and spirituality.² But Fleury is of particular interest as an educational historiographer and thinker. His treatise on education, the Traité du Choix et de la Méthode des Etudes, made interesting and significant proposals for a radical reform of education in seventeenth-century France. It also included a survey of educational history that Monroe and Kandel considered as, very likely, the first general work on the history of education.³ Cultural and educational history was one of Fleury’s abiding interests, and he wrote on this subject in several of his other works.⁴