MICHAUD, JOSEPH-FRANÇOIS. — Historian and publicist, born on 19 June 1767 at Albens (Savoy), died on 30 September 1839 at Passy.
He was a journalist in Paris and contributed to two newspapers subsidized by the court, the Gazette universelle and the Postillon de la guerre, which had to suspend publication after 10 August 1792. In 1794, after the fall of Robespierre, he contributed to the Gazette française and La quotidienne. Sentenced to death in absentia in 1795 for his ultra-royalism, he returned to Paris after 18 Brumaire. In agreement with his printer brother, he began in 1806 the celebrated Biographie universelle, which subsequently appeared in a 2nd edition, in 45 volumes, from 1842 to 1865. Having had the opportunity to study documents on the subject, he published the successful Histoire des Croisades (3 vols., Paris 1812–17; 6th ed. in 6 vols., ibid. 1841, Italian version Milan 1894), in which he appears as an innovator and follower of the historical school that sought to restore the Middle Ages to honor; but the documentation is insufficient and the style excessively Romantic in coloring, and he sometimes lapses into falsehood. M. accompanied this work with Bibliothèque des Croisades (4 vols., Paris 1821), a French translation of documents on the Crusades.
Favorable to the Bourbons, he was nevertheless not unwilling to accept Napoleon’s favors, and in 1813 he was appointed a member of the Académie française. After the Restoration he became a royal censor, and in May 1815 he was elected deputy for the department of Ain. Editor-in-chief of La quotidienne in 1817, he continued to contribute to it after 1830, when the newspaper became the organ of the legitimists. In collaboration with J. J. F. Poujoulat he published the Collection des mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de France depuis le XIIIe siècle jusqu'au XVIIIe, in 23 volumes.