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MICHELET, JULES
MICHELET, JULES (1798-1874) A prolific historian who viewed the
Great French Revolution of 1789 as a product of the misery of the
masses and who was recognized in the twentieth century as a
forerunner of the Annales school of French historical
scholarship. Born the son of a printer August 21, 1798 in Paris,
he lived his early life in intermittent poverty. Through education
he rose in social standing. After obtaining his doctorate of
letters from the Sorbonne in 1819, he entered the teaching
profession. Following an assignment at the Collège
Sainte-Barbe, he was appointed in 1827 as a lecturer at the
Ecole normale supèrieure. In 1830 he became
head of the historical section of the National Archives, and in
1834 he replaced Guizot at the Sorbonne. Then, in 1838 he was
appointed professor at the Collège de France,
where he held the chair of History and Ethics. From the late 1820s
until 1843, he served as a tutor to the ruling elite, first tutor
for the Duchess of Berry and then Princess Clémentine,
daughter of Louis-Philippe. However, given his sympathies for the
Revolution of 1848, the government of Napoleon III suspended his
popular lectures at the Collège de France in
1851. After refusing to take an oath of allegiance to Emperor
Napoleon III, who terminated the Second Republic, Michelet lost his
position at the Collège de France and at the
National Archives, living the rest of his life with his second wife
(Athénaïs Mialaret) in relative poverty. Among his numerous books
are the following: Introduction à l'Histoire Universelle (1831); Histoire
romaine (2 vols., 1831); Histoire de France (a
multi-volume work the included the Moyen Age, 6 vols.,
1833-44); Histoire de la Révolution
française (7 vols., 1847-53); Temps
Modernes (7 vols., 1857-67); Histoire du XIX siècle
(3 vols., 1872-73); and Le Peuple
(1846). He also authored works on a variety of other subjects,
such as Vico, love, women, witchcraft, students, and anti-clericalism.
Le Peuple., first published in 1846, is often
considered his best single volume. On its initial day of
publication Le Peuple sold a thousand copies and was
immediately translated into English. It discussed various economic
and political transformations as France and Europe shifted from an
agrarian to an industrial society and examined the condition of the
social classes. According to Michelet, modernization and
industrialization were heightening political and ideological
conflict. He called for a love of one's country to solve many of
France's problems and placed faith in the innate goodness of the
masses, seeing "the people" as the source of progress in history.
In many ways, Le Peuple and his other historical works
expressed the romanticism of his age and reflected the credo of the
liberal petite bourgeoisie. He believed in the federation of the
social classes and not their disappearance, in the nation state, in
improved relations between capital and labor, in Deism, in anti-clericalism, and in the infallibility
of the people. Although theMarxists criticized him because of his faith in the reconciliation
of classes and the permanence of the nation state, the twentieth
historian Lucien Febvre, a founder of the Annales
school, viewed his work as an inspiration for a new variety of
history because of Michelet's concern for "a total history" and
"la longue durée" in history. Consequently,
there has been a revival of interest in Michelet, an historian
whose works reflect many of the changes, conflicts, trends, and
hopes of the nineteenth century. Thus, he has had a significant
impact on French historiography in both the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
Wayne Northcutt
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. Michelet, trans by Richard Howard
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1987).
Fauquet, Eric. Michelet ou la Glorie du professeur
d'histoire. (Paris: Cerf, 1990).
Michelet, Jules. The People, trans by John P. McKay
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973).
Michelet, Jules. Oeuvres complètes. (Paris:
Flammarion, 1980).
Mitzman, Arthur. Michelet, Historian: Rebirth and Romanticism
in Nineteenth Century France. (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1990).
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