Jules Michelet

Jules Michelet: The Historian Who Resurrected the Dead

A printer's son who once set type by hand went on to write nineteen volumes attempting, in his own words, to give history back its people rather than its kings. Jules Michelet's method was less to record the past than to reinhabit it — "an attempt to resurrect the past by immersing his own personality in his narrative," as later assessment put it — and the result made him both France's most read historian and its most argued-over.

A Printer's Son at the Lycée

Michelet was born in Paris on August 21, 1798, into a working-class household; his father ran a small printing business, and the boy spent his childhood years helping set type before choosing academic study over the family trade. He turned down a post at the imperial printing office to attend the Lycée Charlemagne, passed his university examinations in 1821, and secured a professorship of history at the Collège Rollin while still in his early twenties. Patrons Abel-François Villemain and Victor Cousin backed his rise, and by 1827 he was teaching at the École Normale Supérieure. His path from typesetter's apprentice to the country's most prominent chair of history was itself an argument for the kind of history he would go on to write — one built from below, not handed down from above.

Thirty Years on One Book

Michelet's magnum opus, the *Histoire de France*, occupied him from 1833 to 1867 — thirty years and nineteen volumes carrying French history from its earliest origins through Charlemagne, the feudal era, the Hundred Years' War, the consolidation of royal power under Charles VII and Louis XI, the Renaissance and Reformation, and on to the eve of the Revolution. He is credited with popularizing the modern use of the French word "Renaissance" itself, fixing the term to describe a period of renewed humanism and artistic rebirth in a sense historians still use. Running alongside this life's work was his *Histoire de la Révolution française* (1847–1853), a seven-volume account of the Revolution that the historian François Furet later called "the cornerstone of revolutionary historiography." Michelet had reached the chair of history at the Collège de France in 1838, a position that gave him a national platform — and one he lost in 1852 for refusing to swear loyalty to Napoleon III after the coup that made him emperor. It was never restored, even after the empire fell.

History From Below

What set Michelet apart from the historians of his day was a conviction, drawn partly from the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, that history belonged to "the people, and not only its leaders or its institutions." Where his contemporaries wrote of treaties, dynasties, and battles, Michelet reached for the customs, beliefs, and sufferings of ordinary French men and women, and wrote about the Middle Ages with an evocative vividness that few historians before him had attempted, even as he made no secret of his contempt for the period and celebrated its passing. He organized his sprawling narrative around dramatic oppositions — grace against justice, spirit against matter, liberty against fatality — famously compressing his whole philosophy of history into a single sentence: "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." Scholars have since noted that this dualism carried a darker edge, framing Christian "spirit" against a caricatured Jewish "matter" — a strand of his thought that later intellectual historians, including David Nirenberg, have identified as genuinely anti-Judaic rather than merely rhetorical.

Republican by Temperament

Michelet's politics were inseparable from his scholarship. A committed republican and free thinker from an early age, he grew increasingly hostile to ecclesiastical authority through the late 1830s, and his lectures and writing helped stoke the political mood that erupted in the 1848 revolution. His refusal to pledge loyalty to Napoleon III in 1852 cost him both his Collège de France chair and his post at the Record Office, and he spent the Second Empire largely shut out of official institutions, a price he seems to have accepted as the cost of consistency.

Two Marriages, One Uncredited Collaborator

Michelet married Pauline Rousseau in 1824; they had two children before Pauline died of tuberculosis in 1839. In 1849, at fifty-one, he married Athénaïs Mialaret, a twenty-three-year-old writer and former teacher who had lived in Saint Petersburg. Athénaïs shaped much of his later output — especially the lyrical natural-history volumes on birds, insects, and the sea that Michelet began publishing in 1856 — yet received no formal credit during his lifetime. Michelet left her the literary rights to his work, which she defended in court after his death and held until her own, in 1899; historian Bonnie Smith has since documented how later Michelet scholarship worked to keep her contribution in the historian's shadow even as evidence of her collaborative role accumulated.

Late Works and Final Years

In his last two decades Michelet turned to subjects further from conventional history: *L'Amour* (1859) and *La Femme* (1860) — the latter later quoted by Vincent van Gogh in his drawing *Sorrow* — and *La Sorcière* (1862), a study of witchcraft eventually adapted into the 1973 animated film *Belladonna of Sadness*. After the fall of Napoleon III in 1870 and the upheaval of the Paris Commune, an aging Michelet began a twentieth volume of the *Histoire de France* covering the Napoleonic wars, prefacing it with the line "l'âge me presse" — age hurries me. He died of a heart attack in Hyères on February 9, 1874, having gotten only as far as Waterloo. He was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris in 1876.

Why Jules Is Called a Genius

Michelet's claim to genius is a claim about historical imagination rather than pure erudition: he read the archives as thoroughly as any scholar of his generation, but his distinctive gift was the capacity to inhabit the past emotionally and render it, in Britannica's phrase, with "great dramatic power" — to make ordinary medieval and early-modern lives feel present rather than catalogued. That is a literary skill as much as a scholarly one, and it is exactly where the honest counter-case begins. His contemporaries and later historians alike have faulted the *Histoire de France* for the very qualities that make it vivid: pronounced political bias, uneven treatment of periods he found distasteful, and a philosophical schema — his war of spirit against matter — that modern scholars read as carrying anti-Judaic undertones. Michelet was less an objective compiler of fact than a historian who wrote with his convictions fully visible, and whether that constitutes genius or a serious methodological flaw has been argued for a century and a half without resolution.

Legacy

Michelet's insistence that history belongs to the people, not merely their rulers, anticipated the social history that would flourish a century later, and his coining of "Renaissance" as a period term remains embedded in how the era is still taught. His natural-history and late lyrical works faded from readership faster than his historical volumes, but the *Histoire de France* and *Histoire de la Révolution française* remain touchstones for how romantic historiography can be — for better and worse — a literature of feeling as much as a record of fact.

Achievements

• Knight of the Legion of Honour — 1833
• Notable work: Introduction à l'Histoire universelle
• Notable work: Histoire de France
• Notable work: Histoire de la revolution francaise
• Notable work: Satanism and Witchcraft
• Affiliated with Collège-lycée Jacques-Decour, École Normale Supérieure and Archives nationales
• Worked as historian, writer and diarist