The most recent biographies dedicated to William the Conqueror by David Douglas, Paul Zumthor, Michel de Boüard, and David Bates, as well as by Mark Hagger, have offered a vision of the duke of Normandy and king of England that is the fruit of research that we have confidence is scholarly.2 Yet if our present tools for the historical criticism of documentary sources render the works of the historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries without practical value, they are nonetheless indispensable as elements of the historiographical elaboration of the Conqueror. This article therefore seeks to understand the context in which a number of biographical studies on William the Conqueror were written between the years 1830 and 1945, and intends to be a contribution to the history of his representation. Because biographical writing obeys rules that have evolved over the ages, I will investigate the conditions under which the many historians worked who composed biographies of the duke-king.

Following the dislocations of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods from 1789 to 1815, the five departments of the region of Normandy – which corresponded roughly to the principality established by the Rollonid dynasty and governed by William the Bastard, later the Conqueror, from 1035 to 1087 – began to revive economically in the 1830s.3 The early years of the nineteenth century had witnessed the beginnings of a revolution in transportation and communication,4 and such developments helped transport the region’s agricultural riches to a broader market. During the intervening decades, the Association normande, founded in 1829 or 1831, grew to almost 2,500 members, including an elite of distinguished agriculturalists.5 Resort tourism was also beginning to grow as a source of prosperity.

A populous region thanks to strong internal migration, Normandy was also one of the most literate regions in all of France. Indeed, by 1827, seventy percent of the population could read and write.6 Normandy was also the most legally sophisticated part of France,7 and stood at the forefront of contemporary cultural endeavors, whether in the study of philology, geology, history, archaeology, or the moral and political sciences. Indeed, Jules Michelet, during a visit to Caen when he was elected to the Société des Antiquaires de Normandie in 1831, wrote in his diary that ‘nowhere is the zeal for science more impartial and more abundant than in Normandy’.