Ernest Babelon trained from 1874 to 1878 to be an archivist at the École Nationale des Chartes. He wrote his thesis on Les bourgeois du roi au Moyen Âge. From 1878 he worked for the Cabinet des Médailles. With Salomon Reinach he led excavations in North Africa in 1883. In 1890 he was appointed Deputy to the Director of the Cabinet des Médailles, Henri Michel Lavoix; two years later he was himself appointed Director of the museum and he remained in that position for 32 years, until his death in 1924. His successor was Adolphe Dieudonné. During the First World War he was responsible for sending the artistic treasures of the museum away for safekeeping and for gathering them back after the war. In 1902 he received an additional appointment as Lecturer for Numismatics and Glyptics, in 1908 he was appointed Professor with the chair for the Cours de numismatique antique et médiévale at the Collège de France. That same year he was also appointed President of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. His son Jean Babelon was also Director of the Cabinet des Médailles. Babelon devoted himself initially to Medieval studies. His interest soon expanded to ancient numismatics, where he became a respected expert. In addition he was also a specialist in Ancient Near Eastern languages, working closely with his friend François Lenormant. Babelon became a central figure in French archaeology. He sat on several important committees and was co-editor of the Gazette archéologique. His numismatic work had two focuses: on the one hand he wrote numismatic catalogues and on the other he wrote syntheses of his individual studies in comprehensive works. His handbook Traité des monnaies grecques et romaines remained incomplete, he planned an account of all numismatic knowledge of his time based on the collection of William Henry Waddington. His corpus Recueil général des monnaies grecques d’Asie mineure, produced with Théodore Reinach, in which he synthesised all the mints of Asia Minor also remains incomplete. To this day the work is important to scholarship because of its comprehensiveness. At the end of the First World War he intervened in the political discourse about the Saargebiet with a two volume work about Rome and the Germans called Le Rhin dans l'histoire.. He was one of the leaders of the Comité d’études which existed from 1917 to 1918 and advanced the argument for the Saar belonging to France. Following the work of Paul Vidal de la Blache, he favoured a military protectorate, but misquoted Paul Vidal de la Blache.
Traité des monnaies grecques et romaines. 11 Volumes. Leroux, Paris 1901–1933.
Recueil général des monnaies grecques d’Asie mineure, began by William Henry Waddington; continued and completed by Ernest Babelon and Théodore Reinach. Leroux, Paris 1908–1925.
Le Rhin dans l'histoire. Leroux, Paris 1916–1917.
*Bd. 1: L'antiquité: Gaulois et Germains. 1916.
*Bd. 2: Les Francs de l'Est: Français et Allemands. 1917.
See also L' Oeuvre numismatique d'Ernest Babelon, by A. Dieudonné
