# Jules Michelet

Jules Michelet (French:; 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), which is considered a foundational text in modern historiography. 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 "corsi e ricorsi", or the cyclical nature of history, in which societies rise and fall in a recurring pattern.
In Histoire de France, 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 new, "re-birthed" 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 the term to describe the advent of a new manner of painting that began with the work of Giotto, as the "rebirth (rinascita) of the arts". Michelet thereby became the first historian to use and define the French translation of the term, Renaissance, to identify the period 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

Michelet's father was a master printer, and Jules 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, where he distinguished himself. 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. This period was considered a very favourable time for scholars in France, and Michelet had many powerful patrons including Abel-François Villemain and Victor Cousin, among others. Since childhood, he is said to have embraced republicanism and a peculiar variety of romantic free thought. He was an ardent politician, as well as a man of letters and an inquirer into the history of the past. His earliest works were school textbooks.
Between 1825 and 1827, he produced diverse sketches, chronological tables and other works relating to modern history. His précis of the subject was published in 1827. In the same year, he was appointed maître de conférences at the École normale supérieure. Four years later, in 1831, he wrote his Introduction à l'histoire universelle.

## Record Office

The events of the July Revolution of 1830 had placed Michelet in a better position for study than before. He obtained a place in the Record Office and a deputy-professorship under the historian Guizot in the literary faculty of the university. Soon afterward, he began his magnum opus, the Histoire de France, which would take 30 years to complete. He also published numerous other books, chiefly of erudition, such as the Œuvres choisies de Vico, the Mémoires de Luther écrits par lui-même, the Origines du droit français, and somewhat later, the le Procès des Templiers.
In 1838, Michelet's studies had fed 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 violent polemic against the religious order and the principles that it represented. This polemic made the lectures, especially Michelet's, among the most popular of the day.
He published Histoire Romaine in 1839, the same year his first wife died. The results of his lectures appeared in the volumes Du prêtre, de la femme et de la famille and Le peuple. These books do not display the apocalyptic style (partly borrowed from Lamennais) which characterizes Michelet's later works, but 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: his original lectures were of so incendiary a kind that the course had to be interdicted. When the revolution broke out, instead of attempting to enter active political life, he devoted himself more strenuously to his literary work. Besides continuing the Histoire de France, he also wrote Histoire de la Révolution française during the years between the downfall of Louis Philippe and the final establishment of Napoleon III.
In 1849, at the age of 51, he married his second wife, 23-year-old Athénaïs Michelet (née Mialaret). She was a woman of some literary capacity as a natural history writer and memoirist, and also 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 end up assisting 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 crowd of lesser works accompanied and diversified it. Sometimes they were expanded versions of its episodes, what may be called commentaries or companion volumes.
The first of these was Les Femmes de la Révolution (1854), in which Michelet's dithyrambic often gives way to tedious and inconclusive writing. L'Insecte followed and was then succeeded by L'Amour (1859), one of Michelet's most popular books.
In the next, L'Oiseau (1856), Michelet ventured into natural history, a subject new to him, having been introduced to it by Athénaïs. L'Oiseau 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 notably inscribed a quote he took from La Femme on his drawing, Sorrow. It reads, "Comment se fait-il qu'il y ait sur la terre une femme seule?" (How can there be on earth a woman alone?).
La Mer followed in 1861, which represented a happier return to natural history. It was written in a lyrical vein and influenced by his wife.
The next year (1862), one of Michelet's more successful minor works, Satanism and Witchcraft, was published. Developed out of an episode of history, it has strong hints of Michelet's more unusual views. It was eventually adapted by 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 Bible de l'humanité (1864), a historical sketch of religions, was not well received. In La Montagne (1868), the last of the natural history series, Michelet uses the staccato style, which creates short and disjointed sentences, but creates tension.
Nos fils (1869), the last of the smaller books published during Michelet's life, is a tractate on education, written with knowledge in a manner that highlights Michelet's research capabilities. Contenporary critics disliked the book, saying it highlighted Michelet's decreasing capability to express himself. However, in a book published posthumously, Le Banquet, later critics do not mention this.
Les Soldats de la révolution and Légendes démocratiques du nord are two other collections of Michelet's pieces that were published at different times.
Michelet's Origines du droit français, cherchées dans les symboles et les formules du droit universel 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, partly in Italy, and was accustomed to spending the winter on the Riviera, chiefly at Hyères.

## Histoire de France

In 1867, Michelet completed his magnum opus, the Histoire de France, 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 Renaissance and Reforme. 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 that occur 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 additionally used union and unity often in his discussions about history, both human and natural. In terms of the maleficent themes, there were subcategories these were: 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, the imitation, tedium, the novel, narcotics, Alexander, and plethoric (engorged blood). Michelet also touches on themes of the indeterminate such as the Honnete-Hommes, Conde', 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 in the midst of 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 "l'âge me presse" ("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 St. Petersburg and was an author in the field of 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. After winning a court challenge to this bequeathment, Athénaïs retained the papers and publishing rights. An author of memoirs, she later published several books about her husband and his family that were based on extracts and journals he had left her.
Athénaïs bequeathed that literary legacy to Gabriel Monod, a historian who founded the journal Revue historique. A potentially misogynistic effort to discount the contributions of Athénaïs is noted by a historian, Bonnie Smith, who notes, "Michelet scholarship, like other historiographical debates, has taken great pains to establish the priority of the male over the female in writing history."