MICHELET, JULES. - Historian, b. at Ménilmontant (Paris) on 21 Aug. 1798, d. at Hyères on 9 Feb. 1874. The son of a printer, after a very hard childhood he obtained a chair at the Collège Ste-Barbe, where he had studied. In 1827, having become enthusiastic about Vico, he published a selection of the Scienza nuova which earned him the chair at the Normale.
The Histoire romaine (1831) is Vichian in inspiration, though in it M. took account of Niebuhr's criticism. From the same year is the Introduction à l'histoire universelle, in which to that of Vico is added the influence of Herder and of his conception of history as an opposition of freedom and fatality. M. edited and promoted, in accordance with the tendency of the time, publications of documents, on the basis of which he wrote the first 2 vols. of his Histoire de France (1833), devoted to the Middle Ages. In the four following ones, however, he abandoned erudite analysis to return to broad philosophical syntheses enlivened by his coloristic art. His Middle Ages is seen in national terms; religion, understood as popular sentiment, is regarded with sympathy, despite the radical and lay origins of M.'s thought. But, having entered into conflict with Guizot, he accentuated his democratic and anticlerical bent, which he proclaimed from the chair of the Collège de France, to which he had been called as early as 1838, in his courses: Les Jésuites (1843); Du prêtre, de la femme, de la famille (1845); Le peuple (1846); L'étudiant (1848). These motifs return in the Histoire de la Révolution Française (1847-53), whose vast documentation is chosen according to partisan criteria. The hero of this national epic is the people, mystically felt as a divine incarnation. This history, rich in romantic pathos, is not only a literary product but, even with its scientific limitations, a milestone in the history of historiography on the French Revolution, inasmuch as it remains the typical representation of the revolution understood as a product of misery, a thesis that would later be combated by Jaurès (v.), who saw in revolutions the political vindication of bourgeois wealth. Deprived of his chair in 1851 by the Bonapartist coup d'état, he continued his Histoire de France (1855-62) down to 1789. By now a polemicist more than a historian, he saw in the monarchy and in the Church the evil, giving great importance to scandalous details. At the same time he turned to sociological studies with the essays L'amour (1858), La femme (1859), Nos fils (1869) and fixed his superconfessional, antidogmatic and philanthropic religious creed in the Bible de l'humanité (1864), which links him back to Rousseau, as does also his vivid pantheistic sense of nature. Placed on the Index are M.'s: Mémoires de Luther (decree 6 Apr. 1840); Du prêtre, de la femme, de la famille (decree 5 Apr. 1845); L'amour (decree 11 Apr. 1859); La sorcière (decree 26 Jan. 1863); La Bible de l'humanité (decree 11 June 1866); Le prêtre... and Les Jésuites (decree 21 Aug. 1896).
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Sergio Cotta