François Pierre Guillaume Guizot, a former administrator…

François Pierre Guillaume Guizot, a former administrator in Louis XVIII’s restored Bourbon government has, since his dismissal a decade ago, increasingly involved himself in opposition politics.

Guizot had in the 1820s played an important part among the leaders of the liberal opposition to the government of Charles X, although he had not yet entered parliament, and this was the time of his greatest literary activity.

In 1822, he had published his lectures on representative government (Histoire des origines du gouvernernent représentatif, 1821-1822, 2 vols.; Eng. trans. 1852); also a work on capital punishment for political offenses and several important political pamphlets.

From 1822 to 1830, he has published two important collections of historical sources, the memoirs of the history of England in twenty-six volumes, and the memoirs of the history of France in thirty-one volumes, and a revised translation of Shakespeare, and a volume of essays on the history of France.

Written from his own pen during this period was the first part of his Histoire de la révolution d'Angleterre depuis Charles I à Charles II (2 vols., 1826-1827; Eng. trans., two vols., Oxford, 1838), which he is to resume and complete during his exile in England after 1848.

The Martignac administration had restored Guizot in 1828 to his professor's chair and to the council of state.

During his time at the University of Paris, his lectures had earned him a reputation as a historian of note.

These lectures formed the basis of his general Histoire de la civilisation en Europe (1828; Eng. trans. by William Hazlitt, 3 vols., 1846), and of his Histoire de la civilisation en France (4 vols., 1830).