Henri Martin: From Druidic Traditions to Republican Politics

Abstract

As a historian and political leader of the early Third Republic, Henri Martin was once widely known. He was as closely identified with the regime's values and historical philosophy as Guizot was with the July Monarchy and Lamartine with the early Second Republic. Many acclaimed him France's 'national historian', and upon his death in 1883 the Republic gave him a funeral at national expense. Yet since then he has been virtually lost in the shadow cast by his great contemporary, Jules Michelet, whose career Martin's own paralleled in a number of respects. Like Michelet, Martin was a passionately patriotic, popular historian; like Michelet, he worked on a multi-volume history of France for almost five decades, beginning in the I83os; like Michelet, he had strong republican convictions and found 'political uses' for his histories in the manner so common in his time. But, more than Michelet, he played an active, sustained, and multi-faceted role in French political life of the period. However, neither his fame as politician nor his fame as historian has endured. Part of the reason for the neglect of his historical work is undoubtedly its rather undistinguished literary quality. Martin's style had little of the poetic power of Michelet's, and his interpretative ability was inferior as well. Hence his works have not been reprinted again and again since his death, as Michelet's have been. For our time Martin's writings may serve as a convenient sourcebook of nineteenth-century republican and nationalist thought, but as history and literature they have not aroused enthusiasm outside his circle of friends.