Laudator Temporis Acti

Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 477 with note on p. 691:

Another spiritual descendant of Niebuhr, but as patriotic a Frenchman as Mommsen was a German, was Numa-Denys Fustel de Coulanges (1830-89). Just as Ranke made his reputation by going behind the historians to the archives and reading the actual reports of the Venetian ambassadors, so Fustel de Coulanges demanded evidence, in the shape of a Greek or Roman document, for any assertion about ancient history. His favorite question was 'Avez-vous un texte?' and he boasted of being the only man who had read every Latin text from the sixth century B.C. to the tenth century of the Christian era.<sup>15

15</sup> Fustel's fault as a historian, which is apparent as early as La Cité antique, was that although he insisted that every assertion must be supported by a document, he did not criticize the documents themselves so far as to recognize that even a contemporary narrative may be vitiated by mistakes, or lies, or interpolations. There is a good description of his work by C. Seignobos in Petit de Julleville's Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française, 8. 279-96.

But "Avez-vous un texte?" for the assertion that Fustel said "Avez-vous un texte?"?

Seignobos (op. cit., published in 1899) doesn't quote these words. The closest he comes is on p. 284:

Très défiant à l'égard des systèmes qui dans notre siècle ont encombré l'histoire au point de cacher la vue du passé, il rejetait systématiquement toute étude de seconde main et s'astreignait à chercher toujours les faits dans l'analyse des documents. «L'historien, dit-il, doit se borner aux textes attentivement observés.» — «Lire les textes» ou «Cela n'est pas dans les textes», ces formules revenaient comme un refrain dans ses ouvrages et dans son enseignement.

The earliest attribution of "Avez-vous un texte?" to Fustel in Ogle Books (what a friend calls Google Books when it offers only a "snippet view") dates from 1915, viz., Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), La science allemande (Paris: A. Hermann, 1915), p. 90. This is more than 25 years after Fustel's death, but must be given great weight, as Duhem was a student at the École normale when Fustel was director.

I also find a first-hand quotation of something very much like "Avez-vous un texte?" in Salomon Reinach, Cultes, mythes et religions, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1908), p. 196:

Ayant eu l'occasion, à plusieurs reprises, d'exprimer à M. d'Arbois de Jubainville la pensée que le druidisme avait été hostile aux images, j'ai toujours reçu du maître des études celtiques en France cette réponse un peu décourageante: «Avez-vous un texte qui le prouve»?

Marie Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville lived from 1827 to 1910. He criticized Fustel harshly in Deux manières d'écrire l'histoire (Paris: Émile Bouillon, 1896).

The scholar's insistence on a text is a trait that lends itself to mockery, e.g.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal (June 1855): "A scholar is a man with this inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know."
  
• Montaigne, Essais 1.25 (tr. E.J. Trechmann): "I know one who, when I question him on what he knows, asks me for a book to show it me, and will not venture to tell me he has an itchy backside without straightway consulting his lexicon to find the meaning of 'itchy' and of 'backside'."

Hat tip: Brandon Watson at Siris, to whom I offer congratulations on six years of blogging.