MICHELET, JULES

MICHELET, JULES (1798–1874), often considered France's greatest historian and the country's preeminent Romantic historian.

Jules Michelet was born and educated in Paris, the only child in a loving family of poor printers. Largely self-taught in his early years, the apprentice turned student entered the prestigious Charlemagne College in 1813 and had to repeat his first year. Then he sped forward. Baccalaureate in 1817, doctor of letters from the Sorbonne in 1819, and lycée professor in 1821, Michelet launched a brilliant academic career, and he lived up to his promise. Thus Michelet is sometimes presented as a sort of nouveau riche, a man who entered the bourgeoisie by profession, income, and social contacts. Yet Michelet always claimed that he remained true to the common people, and a careful reading of his life and work confirms his self-definition.

The young Michelet was strongly influenced by the still largely ignored Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744), who viewed history as the development of societies and human institutions, as opposed to the biography of great men or the work of divine providence. Translating and commenting on the Italian's work in an 1827 publication and thereby contributing to Vico's discovery in the nineteenth century, Michelet wrote introductions to both modern and universal history and was rewarded with an appointment to the École Normale Supèrieure. Then, after completing a two-volume History of the Roman Republic (1831), Michelet turned his focus from antiquity to medieval France. Motivated by the Gothic revival and Romantic nationalism, Michelet's decision also reflected his appointment as director of the historical section of the National Archives shortly after the Revolution of 1830. This allowed him to combine teaching and writing with intense research in still largely unexplored documentary collections and tell what he believed would be the genuine history of his country and its people. Many historians, though not Michelet himself, believe that his history of France in the Middle Ages, published between 1833 and 1844 and becoming the first six volumes in his multivolume History of France (1833–1867), is his most solid, useful, and lasting accomplishment. They single out his vast knowledge of the sources, his uncanny evocation of times and places, and his empathetic and balanced understanding of different views and individuals. Michelet explained in 1835, "it is an indispensable condition for the historian to enter into all doctrines, to understand all forces, and to be passionately involved in every state of mind" (quoted in Monod, p. 30). His treatment of the national revival under Joan of Arc in the fifteenth century is a famous example of his early work.

As Michelet was finishing his history of the Middle Ages, he experienced personal challenges, and he became increasingly impassioned and partisan. Moving from the École Normale in 1837 to teach at the Collège de France, he left working closely with a small elite to lecturing to a large, excitable crowd that preferred eloquent language and sweeping synthesis to precise analysis. Increasingly France's past seemed important to Michelet as the long, difficult preparation for the French Revolution, when the French people reached maturity and began the liberation of mankind. Committed historian and man of the people, he would now concentrate his feelings on the side of popular forces and guard against his earlier generous, but impartial and therefore superficial, sympathy for all.

This critical turning point in the historian's development is reflected in Michelet's The People (1846), written just before Michelet jumped from the Middle Ages to his white-hot History of the French Revolution (1847–1853). Drawing in The People upon personal experience, history, and contemporary debates, Michelet paints a vivid picture of French society and the social dislocation that afflicts all classes. Then, after rejecting socialism, he offers a solution in the form of republican nationalism and egalitarian secular education that will teach the Revolution of 1789 and heal a fractured France. Sickened by the failure of the Revolution of 1848 and refusing to swear allegiance to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (later Napoleon III; r. 1852–1871), Michelet lost his government positions and turned to full-time writing. He completed his seven-volume history of the French Revolution, filled in the early modern period history of France with another eleven volumes, and wrote popular impressions of nature and anticlerical polemics. Michelet's later history is often criticized for being overly emotional and biased against the monarchy, the nobility, and the clergy, while idealizing popular forces and revolutionary upheaval. A great individualist, Michelet had many admirers but few disciples. He survives as a gifted writer with a grand, heartfelt historical narrative of compassionate nationhood for a noble people.

See alsoFrance; Revolutions of 1848; Romanticism; Tocqueville, Alexis de.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Michelet, Jules. The People. Translated with an introduction by John P. McKay. Urbana, Ill., 1973.

Secondary Sources

Fauquet, Eric. Michelet, ou, La gloire du professeur d'histoire. Paris, 1990.

Mitzman, Arthur. Michelet, Historian: Rebirth and Romanticism in Nineteenth-Century France. New Haven, Conn., 1990.

Monod, Gabriel. Jules Michelet. Paris, 1875.

John P. McKay