Louis de Beaufort (6 October 1703 – 11 August 1795) was a French-Dutch historian best known for his critical approach to the history of Rome.
[1] In 1738 he published at Utrecht the Dissertation sur l'incertitude des cinq prèmiers siècles de l'histoire romaine (A Dissertation Upon the Uncertainty of the First Five Centuries of Roman History), in which he questioned the value of even the classical sources of the highest repute, such as Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, for writing the history of the origins of ancient Rome, and pointed out by what methods and by the aid of what documents a truly scientific basis might be given to its history.
While this was not an unprecedented argument, Beaufort made his case particularly forcefully and pushed against the traditional and less critical approaches adopted by esteemed historians of the time such as Charles Rollin.
A German, Christopher Saxius, endeavoured to refute Beaufort's argument in a series of articles published in vols.
Though not a scholar of the first rank, Beaufort has at least the merit of having been a pioneer in raising the question, afterwards elaborated by Niebuhr, as to the credibility of early Roman history and the importance of source criticism.