Charles-Edouard Levillain
Charles-Édouard Levillain (born 1971) is a French historian of early modern Britain and the Low Countries. He is currently professor of British history at University of Paris (U Paris). Education and career. Levillain was educated at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He holds a BA in History from the Sorbonne (Paris 1) and a degree in Public Law and Administration from Sciences Po. He obtained his PhD from the in 2003. Levillain has held fellowships at King's College London (1999-2000), the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (2007-2008), Yale University (James Osborne Fellow , 2008-2009), Churchill College, Cambridge (2011), the Casa de Velázquez (2011), the Leibniz Institute of European History (2014), the Humboldt Foundation (2017-2018) and New College, Oxford (2018). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2016. He was Vice President for International Strategy at University of Paris in the founding year of the university (2020). Scholarship. Levillain’s work focuses primarily on the history of Anglo-Franco-Dutch relations under the late Stuarts, with special interest in the figure of Stadholder-King William III (1650-1702). His first book, (2010), about the emergence of the Anglo -Dutch alliance against Louis XIV, was awarded the Prix Guizot by the French Academy (2011). His second book, (2014), tells the story of militia debates in Stuart England, explaining that the distinction between standing armies and militias has been exaggerated since the seventeenth century for reasons of political convenience. It was praised as a “clear-headed and engrossingly heretical” contribution to historians' knowledge of standing army debates. More recently, Levillain published "Le procès de Louis XIV. François-Paul de Lisola (1613-1674), ennemi de la France et citoyen du monde" (2015), which charts the intellectual career of the diplomat and  Imperial publicist François-Paul de Lisola, one of Louis XIV’s fiercest early critics in Europe. Levillain also co-edited a volume on the reception of Louis XIV’s images outside France between 1661 and 1715, with Tony Claydon. Another co-edited volume followed in 2018 on the long-term legacy of Louis XIV’s reign in Europe (1715-2015). In 2021, he was awarded the Descartes-Huygens Prize.