Name Michel Fourmont | ||
the exterminator of ancient Sparta
Michel Fourmont (1690–1746) was a French antiquarian and classical scholar, Catholic priest and traveller. A member of the Academie 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 having presented as genuine some forged inscriptions.
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Life
His father was Etienne Fourmont of Herblay in the Paris region, a surgeon and official; Etienne 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 College royal in 1720. He was admitted as an associate of the Academie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1724.
In 1728 Fourmont was sent by Louis XV to Constantinople and Greece, leaving in 1729 with Francois Sevin. They were under instructions from Jean-Paul Bignon to search out surviving Byzantine manuscripts, and the journey was supported by the Comte de Maurepas, for the greater glory of French scholarship.
While Sevin tried networking in Constantinople, Fourmont travelled in Greece and around the Aegean Sea. His first goal was manuscripts, and he built up good contacts in Athens. He collected hundreds of inscriptions, and ran a dig at ancient Sparta.
Back in France, Fourmont published only a short report. He was elected a member of the Royal Society on 4 November 1742. His claims about the discovery of inscriptions at Sparta were fraudulent, as was uncovered in 1791 and since he destroyed the original inscriptions. Fourmont's posthumous reputation then collapsed.
Legacy
In 1791 Richard Payne Knight published An Analytical Essay on the Greek Alphabet, in which he argued that Fourmont himself was the author of forged inscriptions in his collection. A controversy began. Fourmont's collection of inscriptions was transcribed in 1815 by Immanuel Bekker. The collection of 26 from Amyclae, about which doubts had been raised, were shown to be forgeries by August Bockh. All his published work was then invalidated; but there remained a substantially larger collection of unpublished material.