Michel Fourmont
French religious servant and professor
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.
Life
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.
The public source identifies “Michel Fourmont” as french religious servant and professor. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Michel, Fourmont and French.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michel Fourmont” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.