Jules Michelet

Jules Michelet (Paris, 1798 – Hyères, 1874) was a French historian and writer, one of the founders of modern historiography. A Romantic and a republican, he saw history as the story of a people striving for liberty rather than a chronicle of kings and battles. His multi-volume History of France made him one of the most influential narrators of the nineteenth century.

The son of a Calvinist printer, he studied at the Lycée Charlemagne and passed the university examination in 1821. He soon became a history professor at the Collège Rollin and, in 1827, a lecturer at the École normale supérieure. In 1831 he published his Introduction to Universal History, in which history appears as a long struggle between freedom and fate.

The July Revolution of 1830 opened the archives to him and secured a deputy post beside François Guizot at the Sorbonne. There he began his History of France, a project that would absorb about thirty years. In 1838 he took the history chair at the Collège de France, from which he attacked the Jesuits and ecclesiastical authority. His lectures were as popular as they were inflammatory, and the course was eventually banned.

His outlook blended republicanism, sentimentality and hostility to priestly power. He placed ordinary people, their customs and their liberties at the centre of the story, and regarded the Middle Ages as an age to be overcome. Readers find his books more stirring than reliable, since his imagination and his religious and political convictions push him to see events from an unusual angle.

During the 1848 upheaval he kept out of active politics and concentrated on writing. After the coup of 1851 he lost his post at the Archives for refusing to honour the new Empire. He had married Athénaïs in 1849; she shared his literary life and helped his work, though her name never appears in it. Together they produced pantheistic books on natural history, including The Bird and The Sea.

He completed the History of France in 1867, in nineteen volumes, and died at Hyères in 1874 before finishing his History of the Nineteenth Century, which barely reached Waterloo. His influence has lasted: he helped establish the word Renaissance as the name for a whole era, and he gave the common people a voice in historical writing. The historian François Furet called his History of the French Revolution the cornerstone of revolutionary historiography.