MICHAUD, JOSEPH-FRANÇOIS. - Historian and publicist, b. June 19, 1767 at Albens (Savoy), d. Sept. 30, 1839 at Passy.
He was a journalist in Paris and collaborated on two newspapers subsidized by the court, the Gazette universelle and the Postillon de la guerre, which had to suspend their publications after Aug. 10, 1792. In 1794, after the fall of Robespierre, he collaborated on the Gazette française and La quotidienne. Condemned to death in absentia in 1795 for his ultra-royalism, he returned to Paris after the 18th Brumaire. In agreement with his brother, a printer, he began in 1806 the well-known Biographie universelle, which then came out in a 2nd ed. in 45 vols. in 1842-65. 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 trans. Milan 1894), in which he shows himself an innovator, a follower of the historical school that aimed to bring the Middle Ages back into esteem; but the documentation is insufficient and the style of an excessively romantic coloring, and it sometimes lapses into falsehood. M. accompanied this work with the Bibliothèque des Croisades (4 vols., Paris 1821), a French translation of documents on the Crusades.
Favorable to the Bourbons, he was nevertheless not averse to accepting the favors of Napoleon and in 1813 received the office of academician of France. After the Restoration he became royal censor and in May 1815 was elected deputy in the department of the Ain. Editor-in-chief of La quotidienne in 1817, he also collaborated on it after 1830, when this 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 vols.