Symbol, Legend, and History: Michelet as Folklorist-Historian

Abstract

Jules Michelet is widely known as a historian and nationalist, a prophet and poet, a student and translator of Giambattista Vico. He deserves to be known also as a Romantic folklorist. For in very foyer of a strong Cartesian and Enlightenment tradition, he undertook to publish and to interpret traditions that educated Frenchmen still commonly dismissed as crude, superstitious, or erroneous. The results of Michelet's interest in folklore and folklore theory may be seen in his historical thought and writing throughout his entire career. Understanding historian whom Gordon Wright has called France's favorite entails understanding his folklorist efforts. Michelet was no means first or only scholar in Restoration France to recognize need for a new serious treatment of traditions. During early 1820's, Louis-Antoine-Francois de Marchangy, magistrate and man of letters, set out to create first Dictionary of French Mythology and National Fables. Instead of ridiculing traditions in manner of a philosophe, he intended to treat them as the secret source of our character, our strength, our virtue, and our glory.' Impressed unprecedented activity of such foreign scholars as Grimms, Marchangy deplored fact that there was no French work devoted strictly to popular fables and French mythology. Most Frenchmen seemed blind, when not hostile, to their folklore. A respected scholar named Francois Noel, for example, had written a Dictionnaire de toutes les mythologies, yet by an unfortunate accident, remarked Marchangy, he forgot to include his own, French.2 Marchangy himself did not live to publish or even