David Sturdy (1940-2009)

Abstract

David Sturdy, whom many members of the Society and readers of French History will have known as a historian of early modern France, died of a heart attack on 5 March 2009, at a time when he was still engaged in significant academic projects. He was born in Middlesbrough and attended university at Hull (1959–62), before moving to Trinity College, Dublin, where he took his PhD (1969) and served as a junior lecturer from 1965 to 1970. He then moved to the new University of Ulster's Coleraine campus, where he remained for the rest of his career, becoming a full professor in 1999. In his early years there he threw himself into teaching, inside and outside of the University, and became the Chief Examiner for A-Level History examinations in Northern Ireland; he was also the author, from 1973 onwards, of textbooks designed for school History. Such typically public-spirited pursuits meant that his post-doctoral research projects took some time to appear: his first significant publication in French history, a monograph on the D'Aligre de la Rivière, was published in 1986. It was a careful reconstruction, one of the earliest of its type in English, of the evolution of a major robe family, which produced a chancellor of France under both Louis XIII and Louis XIV. His interests were broader than the subject suggests, including outsiders’ views of France – the subject of his PhD – and the symbolism and rituals of monarchy. His second monograph, Science and Social Status (1995), was a weighty and well-researched study of the members of the Académie des Sciences from its inception in 1666 to 1750. It provided a comprehensive account of the cultural and political/patronage environment in which scientists operated, and is a mine of useful information and analysis. One prominent figure in this account was the abbé Jean-Paul Bignon, who was successively secretary and president of the Academy, as well as royal librarian. David's last project, near completion at his death, was a full-scale study of this little-known but powerful and ubiquitous figure who inhabited the worlds of high politics and scholarship for over four decades and who, had he inhabited twenty-first century Britain, would probably have gone from a vice-chancellorship to a life peerage via the AHRC and/or HEFCE. In late 2008, along with Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère, the archiviste of the Académie des Sciences, David published a hitherto unknown but major document, L'enquête du régent, 1716–1718: sciences, techniques et politique dans la France pré-industrielle, the results of a nation-wide enquiry launched by Philippe d'Orléans in 1715 into the technological and natural resources (particularly minerals) of the kingdom. This unfinished enquiry deserves to become at least as well known as the other, more administrative enquiries of Louis XIV's reign.