Victor Duruy

Who was Victor Duruy?

Jean Victor Duruy was a French historian and statesman.

Duruy was born in Paris, the son of a factory worker, and at first intended for his father's trade. Having passed brilliantly through the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied under Jules Michelet, he accompanied Michelet as secretary in his travels through France, supplying for him at the École Normale in 1836, when only twenty-four. Ill-health forced him to resign, and poverty caused him to undertake an extensive series of school textbooks which made him well known.

He devoted himself to secondary school education, holding his chair in the College Henri IV at Paris for over a quarter of a century. Already known as a historian by his Histoire des Romains et des peuples soumis à leur domination, he was chosen by Napoleon III to assist him in his biography of Julius Caesar, and his abilities being thus brought under the emperor's notice, he was in 1863 appointed minister of education. In this position he worked incessantly, attempting broad and liberal reforms which aroused the bitter hostility of the clerical party. Ironically, despite open domestic opposition to his views in education, in 1868, he was instrumental in the reformation of Galatasaray High School in strict concordance with his secular views, as the first Western-style state higher education institution in Ottoman Empire.