An education among antiquities
Born in Paris in 1837, Lenormant grew up in a family deeply engaged with scholarship. His father, Charles Lenormant, worked with the antiquities and coins of the Bibliothèque nationale and directed his son’s early education. His mother was the writer Amélie Lenormant. François published on Greek tablets while still in his teens and developed interests in languages, inscriptions and the material remains of the ancient world.
In 1857 he received a law qualification and won an academic prize for a study of the coinage of the Ptolemies. Travel soon became an important part of his training. He visited Italy with his father and accompanied him to Greece in 1859. Charles died during that journey; François returned to France with his body before resuming work in Greece.
Lenormant excavated at Eleusis and travelled elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. He became a sub-librarian at the Institut de France in 1862 and professor of archaeology at the Bibliothèque nationale in 1874. With Jean de Witte he founded the Gazette archéologique in 1875.
Wide interests and a damaged reputation
Lenormant wrote extensively on ancient coins, the history of the Near East, biblical traditions and the archaeology of southern Italy. His travels in Apulia, Lucania and Calabria produced books that combined history, topography, monuments and observations of local life. He also urged the protection and recording of antiquities exposed by building work at Taranto.
His record includes serious scholarly misconduct. The epigraphist Olivier Masson identified the false inscriptions associated with the Chapelle-Saint-Éloi in Lenormant’s youth and later Greek inscriptions that he fabricated or adapted from existing forgeries. These were mixed with authentic material, making individual assessment necessary. Masson nevertheless recognized the importance of his numismatic work and his pioneering studies of southern Italy.
