Charles-Edouard LEVILLAIN FRHistS, MAE

I was trained at the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) in Paris, where I specialized in British studies. I hold a BA in History from the Sorbonne (Paris I) and a degree in Public Law and Administration from Sciences Po Paris, where I picked up an enduring interest in legal and constitutional history. I was a Visiting Fellow at King’s College London in 1999-2000, where I worked under the supervision of the late Conrad Russell, before completing my Ph-D at the Sorbonne in 2003. My growing appetite for Dutch history led me to spend a year as a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study (2007-2008). The year after, I was very fortunate to spend a year at Yale University as a Beinecke Fellow (2008-2009). I was a by-Fellow at Churchill College (2011). More recently, I broadened my research interests to the history of the Holy Roman Empire by taking research leaves in Mainz (2014) and Heidelberg (2017-18). I also held a visiting fellowship from New College Oxford in the spring of 2018. I was elected member of the Academia Europaea in 2021.

I’m a historian of early modern Britain and Europe, working primarily on Anglo-Dutch politics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (1650-1720). I also take a growing interest in the history of Spanish Flanders, which attracts little attention outside the field of Spanish and Belgian historiography. Published with Champ Vallon in 2010, my first book is entitled Vaincre Louis XIV. Angleterre-Hollande-France. Histoire d’une relation triangulaire 1665-1688 and deals mainly with Anglo-Dutch perceptions of Louis XIV’s foreign policy in the early part of the Sun King’s reign. Published in 2014 with Honoré Champion, my second book deals with militia debates in Stuart England between 1640 and 1690. Published in 2015 with Tallandier and called Le procès de Louis XIV, my third book examines the role played by the Imperial diplomat and publicist François-Paul de Lisola (1613-1674) in the emergence of an anti-French culture in the 1660s and 1670s. In 2015, I co-edited (with Tony Claydon) a volume on the images of the Sun King outside France, focussing in particular on the British Isles and the Dutch Republic. More recently, I co-edited with my German colleague Sven Externbrink a volume on the legacy of Louis XIV's reign in post-1715 Europe (Honoré Champion, 2018). I was awarded the Descartes-Huygens Prize by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021. I’m now working on a biography of Stadholder-King William III (1650-1702).