Jules Michelet

Jules Michelet (; 21 August 1798 – 9 February 1874) was a French historian and writer. He is best known for his multivolume work '' Histoire de France'' (History of France). Michelet was influenced by Giambattista Vico; he admired Vico's emphasis on the role of people and their customs in shaping history, which was a major departure from the then-prominent emphasis on political and military leaders. Michelet also drew inspiration from Vico's concept of the "", the cyclical nature of history, in which societies rise and fall in a recurring pattern.

In , Michelet coined the term Renaissance (meaning "rebirth" in French) as a period in Europe's cultural history that reflected a clear break away from the Middle Ages. This subsequently created a modern understanding of humanity and its place in the newly 'reborn' world. The term "rebirth" and its association with the Renaissance can be traced to a work published in 1550 by the Italian art historian Giorgio Vasari. Vasari used this term to describe the advent of a new manner of painting that began with the work of Giotto, as the "rebirth () of the arts". Michelet became the first historian to use and define the French translation of the term, ''Renaissance,''Murray, P. and Murray, L. (1963) ''The Art of the Renaissance''. London: Thames & Hudson (World of Art), p. 9. as the label for the post-Medieval era in Europe's cultural history that followed the Middle Ages.

Historian François Furet described ''Histoire de France'' as "the cornerstone of revolutionary historiography" and "a literary monument."

Early life and education

Michelet's father was a master printer and Michelet would assist him with his work. At one point, he was offered a spot at the imperial printing office but instead chose to attend the famous Collège of Lycée Charlemagne. He passed the university examination in 1821 and was soon appointed to a professorship of history in the Collège Rollin.

In 1824, he married Pauline Rousseau. Michelet had many patrons, including Abel-François Villemain, Victor Cousin, and others.

Since childhood, he is said to have embraced republicanism and a peculiar variety of romantic free thought. He was an ardent politician, a man of letters and a history scholar. His earliest works were school textbooks.

Between 1825 and 1827, he produced various drafts, chronological tables and other works relating to modern history. He published an important overview of modern history in 1827 entitled ''Précis d’histoire moderne''. In the same year, he was appointed a univeristy lecturer (''maître de conférences)'' at the École normale supérieure. He wrote his four years later, in 1831.

Record Office

The events of the July Revolution of 1830 put Michelet in a better position for his research. He secured a position at the Record Office and served as deputy professor under historian François Guizot in the literary faculty of the University of France. Soon afterward, he began his magnum opus, the , which would take 30 years to complete. He also published numerous other books, such as the , the , the , and somewhat later, the .

In 1838, Michelet's studies reinforced his natural aversion to the principles of authority and ecclesiasticism. During the revival of Jesuit activity in France, he was appointed to the chair of history at the Collège de France. Assisted by his friend Edgar Quinet, he began a polemic against the religious order and the principles that it represented.

He published ''Histoire Romaine'' in 1839, the same year his first wife died. The results of his lectures appeared in the volumes '','' and . These books do not display the dramatic style (partly borrowed from Lamennais) that characterizes Michelet's later works. However, they contain many of his core beliefs — a mixture of sentimentalism, communism, and anti-sacerdotalism.

Michelet, along with many others, propagated the principles that led to the outbreaks of 1848. When the revolution broke out, instead of attempting to enter active political life, he devoted himself to his literary work. Besides continuing the ''Histoire de France'', he also wrote during the years between the downfall of Louis Philippe and the final establishment of Napoleon III.

In 1849, at 51, he married his second wife, the 23-year-old Athénaïs Michelet (née Mialaret). She was a natural history writer and memoirist and had republican sympathies. She had been a teacher in Saint Petersburg before their extensive correspondence led to marriage. They entered into a shared literary life and she would assist him significantly in his endeavors. He openly acknowledged this, although she was never given credit in his works.

Minor works

After the ascendance of Napoleon III in 1852, Michelet lost his position in the Record Office when he refused to swear fealty to the new emperor. This caused him to become more republican in outlook, helped by his marriage to the republican Athénaïs. While his ''Histoire'' remained his main pursuit, a number of lesser works accompanied and diversified it. Sometimes, they were expanded versions of its episodes, called commentaries or companion volumes.

The first was (1854). followed and was succeeded by (1859), one of Michelet's most popular books.

In the next, (1856), Michelet ventured into natural history, a new subject for him, introduced by Athénaïs. was treated from the point of view of Michelet's pantheism, rather than a scientific perspective.

Michelet continued to publish similar works every 12 months for around five to six years: the next was ''La Femme'' (1860). This was a critique of French literature and character.

Vincent van Gogh inscribed a quote he took from ''La Femme'' on his drawing, '' Sorrow''. It reads, ''""'' (''How can there be on earth a woman alone?'').

followed in 1861, a return to natural history. It was written in a lyrical vein and influenced by his wife.

In 1862, one of Michelet's more successful minor works, ''Satanism and Witchcraft'', was published. Developed out of a history episode, it has strong hints of Michelet's more unusual views. It was eventually adapted by the animation studio Mushi Production into an animated art film, Belladonna of Sadness, directed by Eiichi Yamamoto.

While Michelet was not yet finished publishing works in this style, the later volumes were less critically acclaimed. The (1864), a historical sketch of religions, was not received well. In (1868), the last of the natural history series, Michelet uses the staccato style, which creates short and disjointed sentences, and a lot of tension.

(1869), the last of the smaller books published during Michelet's life, is a tractate on education, written with knowledge that highlights Michelet's research capabilities. Contemporary critics disliked the book, saying it highlighted Michelet's decreasing ability to express himself. However, in a book published posthumously, , later critics do not mention this.

Michelet's was edited by Émile Faguet in 1890 and a second edition was printed in 1900. The publication of this series of books, and the completion of his history, occupied Michelet during both decades of the empire. During this time he lived partly in France, and partly in Italy, and was accustomed to spending the winter on the Riviera, chiefly at Hyères.

In 1867, Michelet completed his magnum opus, the , comprising 19 volumes. The first of these deals with early French history up to the death of

Charlemagne; the second with the flourishing time of feudal France; the third with the thirteenth century; the fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes with the Hundred Years' War; the seventh and eighth with the establishment of the royal power under Charles VII and Louis XI. The 16th and 17th centuries have four volumes apiece, much of which is very distantly connected with French history proper, especially in the two volumes entitled and . The last three volumes carry on the history of the eighteenth century to the outbreak of the Revolution.

Michelet abhorred the Middle Ages and celebrated their end as a radical transformation. He attempted to clarify how a lively Renaissance could originate from an ossified medieval culture.

Themes

Michelet had several themes running throughout his works, which included the following three categories: maleficent, beneficent, and paired. Within each of the three themes, there are subsets of ideas occurring throughout Michelet's various works. One of these themes was the idea of paired themes; for example, in many of his works, he writes on grace and justice, grace being the woman or feminine, and justice being more of a masculine idea. Michelet often used union and unity in his discussions about history, both human and natural.

In terms of the maleficent themes, there were subcategories: themes of the dry, which included concepts such as the machine, the Jesuits, scribes, the electric, irony (Goethe), the Scholastics, public safety, and fatalism (Hobbes, Molinos, Spinoza, Hegel). Themes of the empty and the turgid included the Middle Ages, imitation, tedium, the novel, narcotics, Alexander, and plethoric (engorged blood). Michelet also touches on themes of the indeterminate such as the Honnêtes-Hommes, Condé, Chantilly Sade, gambling, phantasmagoria, Italian comedy, white blood, and sealed blood.

Martial dualism is a prominent theme for him. He wrote, "With the world began a war which will end only with the world: war of man against nature, spirit against matter, liberty against fatality. History is nothing other than the record of this interminable struggle." Intellectual historian David Nirenberg describes this as a " Manichaean dualism." His framing of history as a struggle between Christian spirit and liberty against Jewish matter, fatality, and tyranny, is seen by Nirenberg as an example of anti-Judaism as a constituent conceptual tool in western thought.

Academic reception

Michelet was perhaps the first historian to devote himself to anything resembling a picturesque history of the Middle Ages and his account is still one of the most vivid that exists. He spent extensive time researching printed authorities and manuscripts for his ''Histoire de France'', however, his many personal biases (both political and religious) reduced the book's objectivity.

Michelet gave certain parts of history more weight than others, however his insistence that history should concentrate on "the people, and not only its leaders or its institutions", was unique in historical scholarship at the time.

Political life

The fall of Napoleon in 1870 amid France's defeat by Prussia, followed by the rise and fall of the Paris Commune the next year, once more stimulated Michelet to activity. While he wrote letters and pamphlets during the struggle, upon its conclusion he became determined to add a 19th volume ( French: ''XIXe siècle'') to his ''Histoires'' which covered the Napoleonic Wars. He did not, however, live to carry it further than the Battle of Waterloo, and his health was beginning to fail: he opened the 19th volume with the words "" ("age hurries me").

The new republic was not altogether a restoration for Michelet; his professorship at the Collège de France, of which he always contended he had been unjustly deprived, was not given back to him.

Marriages

As a young man, Michelet married Pauline Rousseau in 1824. She died in 1839. Michelet married his second wife, Athénaïs Michelet, in 1849. His second wife had been a teacher in Saint Petersburg and was an author in natural history and memoirs. She had opened a correspondence with him arising from her ardent admiration of his ideas that ensued for years. They became engaged before they had seen each other. After their marriage, she collaborated with him in his labors albeit without formal credit, introduced him to natural history, inspired him on themes, and was preparing a new work, ''La nature'', at the time of his death in 1874. She lived until 1899.

Death and burials

Upon his death from a heart attack at Hyères on 9 February 1874, Michelet was interred there. At his widow's request, a Paris court granted permission for his body to be exhumed on 13 May 1876 so he could be buried in Paris.

On 16 May, his coffin arrived for reburial at Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Michelet's monument there, designed by architect Jean-Louis Pascal, was erected in 1893 through public subscription.

Bequeathment of literary rights

Michelet accorded Athénaïs literary rights to his books and papers before he died, acknowledging the significant role she had in what he published during his later years.Smith, Bonnie. Historiography, Objectivity, and the Case of the Abusive Widow. ''History and theory'' 31: 22. After winning a court challenge to this bequeathment, Athénaïs retained the papers and publishing rights. A memoirist, she later published several books about her husband and his family based on extracts and journals he had left her.

Athénaïs bequeathed that literary legacy to Gabriel Monod, a historian who founded the '' Revue historique'' journal. The historian Bonnie Smith notes the potentially misogynistic efford to discount the contributions of Athénaïs. Smith writes: "Michelet scholarship, like other historiographical debates, has taken great pains to establish the priority of the male over the female in writing history.Smith, Bonnie. Historiography, Objectivity, and the Case of the Abusive Widow. ''History and theory'' 31: 15–32.

Bibliography

* Michelet, Jules. ''The History of the French Revolution'' (Charles Cocks, trans., 1847
online
* Michelet, Jules. ''History of the Roman Republic'' (William Hazlitt, trans., 1847
online
* Michelet, Jules (1844). ''The History of France''. Trans. by W. K. Kelly (vol. 1–2 only).
* Michelet, Jules. ''On History: Introduction to World History'' (1831); ''Opening Address at the Faculty of Letters'' (1834); ''Preface to History of France'' (1869). Trans. Flora Kimmich, Lionel Gossman and Edward K. Kaplan. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2013.

''History of France'' v 1 English translation

''History of France'' v 2 English translation

See also

* Historiography of the French Revolution

References

*

Further reading

* Barthes, Roland. ''Michelet'' (1978); English translation by Richard Howard (1992).
* Burrows, Toby. "Michelet in English". ''Bulletin'' (Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand) 16.1 (1992): 23+
online
; reviews all the translations into English.
*
* Gossman, Lionel. "Jules Michelet and Romantic Historiography" in ''Scribner's European Writers'', eds. Jacques Barzun and George Stade (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985), vol. 5, 571–606
* Gossman, Lionel. "Michelet and Natural History: The Alibi of Nature" in ''Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society'', vol. 145 (2001), 283–333
* Haac, Oscar A. ''Jules Michelet'' (G.K. Hall, 1982).
* Johnson, Douglas. ''Michelet and the French Revolution'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
* Kippur, Stephen A. ''Jules Michelet: A Study of Mind and Sensibility'' (State University of New York Press, 1981).
* Rigney, Ann. ''The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution'' (Cambridge University Press, 2002) covers Alphonse de Lamartine, Jules Michelet and Louis Blanc.
* Wilson, Edmund. '' To the Finland Station'' (1940) (Chapter 3)

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Michelet, Jules
1798 births
1874 deaths
19th-century French historians
Writers from Paris
Academic staff of the Collège de France
Historians of France
Historians of the Renaissance
Historians of the French Revolution
Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery
Academic staff of the École Normale Supérieure
French male non-fiction writers
19th-century French male writers
University of Paris alumni