HALPHEN, LOUIS

HALPHEN, LOUIS (1880–1950), French historian. Born in Paris, he taught medieval history at the University of Bordeaux from 1910 until 1928 when he became a lecturer in the Paris Ecole des Hautes Etudes and later professor of medieval history at the University of Paris. In 1940 he fled to unoccupied France and taught at the University of Grenoble from 1941 until 1943, after which the Nazis took the city and he went into hiding. In 1944 he returned to Paris and resumed his teaching career at the Sorbonne. Halphen first gained importance as a medieval historian through two publications, Le Comté d'Anjou au XIe siècle (1906) and Etudes sur l'administration de Rome au Moyen Age 751–1252 (1907). He adhered strictly to the sources, of which he had full command. In his Initiationaux études d'histoire du Moyen Age (1940, 19523), he provided an exposition of his methodology as a guide for young scholars. Among his works of broader scope are L'essor de l'Europe,   XIe–XIIIe siècles (1932, 19483), and Les Barbares (1926; 19485) which he wrote for the series Peuples et Civilisations. In these books he emphasized the importance of relating European history to Asian and Islamic history. He also wrote Charlemagne et l'empire Carolingien (1947). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mélanges d'histoire du Moyen Age dédiés à la mémoire de Louis Halphen (1951), xv–xxiii (list of his publications). (Joseph Baruch Sermoneta)