HISTORY AS A NATIONAL EPIC: Michelet

Abstract

[The only son of an impoverished printer whom Napoleon had persecuted, Jules Michelet (1798–1874) became the foremost historian of the French people. His historical works were highly personal creations, combining an immediate sympathy with the past—aroused first by his childhood visits to the Lenoir National Museum—a broad philosophical interest, a scrupulous attention to neglected primary sources, a rich, poetic style, and an ardent patriotism which led him to personify the object of his love, France, and to glorify equally, in his first works at least, each period of its history. In 1824 Michelet discovered by chance and immediately translated Vico’s Scienza Nuova which gave philosophic sanction to his spontaneous belief that the people, and not only its leaders or its institutions, shaped history. An enthusiastic teacher, he published in 1827 a Precis d’histoire moderne, a brief, but highly original, essay on the unity of modern history, which until 1850 guided historical instruction in French schools. After a History of Rome, Michelet wrote the first six volumes of his History of France (1833–1843; eleven other, less judicious volumes, 1855–1867); eleven other, less judicious volumes, 1855–1867); these early volumes depicted in a series of tableaux the unfolding life of the French people, its physical environment, its spirit and its heroes, and ended with the poignant portrait of Saint Joan.