MICHELET, JULES. — Historian, born at Ménilmontant (Paris) on 21 August 1798, died at Hyères on 9 February 1874. The son of a printer, after a very difficult 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 from the Scienza nuova, which earned him the chair at the École Normale.
The Histoire romaine (1831) is inspired by Vico, although M. also took account of Niebuhr’s criticism. From the same year dates the Introduction à l'histoire universelle, in which Vico’s influence is joined by that of Herder and his conception of history as an opposition between freedom and necessity. In keeping with the tendency of the period, M. organized and promoted the publication of documents, on the basis of which he wrote the first two volumes of his Histoire de France (1833), devoted to the Middle Ages. In the following four volumes, however, he abandoned learned analysis in order to return to broad philosophical syntheses enlivened by his colorful art. His Middle Ages are viewed in a national context; religion, understood as a popular sentiment, is regarded sympathetically, despite the radical and secular origins of M.’s thought. But, having entered into conflict with Guizot, he accentuated his democratic and anticlerical orientation, which he proclaimed in his courses at the Collège de France, to which he had been appointed as early as 1838: Les Jésuites (1843); Du prêtre, de la femme, de la famille (1845); Le peuple (1846); L'étudiant (1848). These themes recur in the Histoire de la Révolution Française (1847–53), whose extensive documentation was selected according to partisan criteria. The hero of this national epic is the people, mystically experienced as a divine incarnation. This history, rich in Romantic pathos, is not merely a literary product but, despite its scientific limitations, also a stage in the history of historiography on the French Revolution, insofar as it remains the typical representation of the revolution understood as a product of misery, 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) up to 1789. By then more a polemicist than a historian, he saw evil in the monarchy and the Church, attaching 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 set out his superconfessional, antidogmatic, and philanthropic religious creed in the Bible de l'humanité (1864), which links him to Rousseau, as does his vivid pantheistic sense of nature. The following works by M. are on the Index: Mémoires de Luther (decree of 6 April 1840); Du prêtre, de la femme, de la famille (decree of 5 April 1845); L'amour (decree of 11 April 1859); La sorcière (decree of 26 January 1863); La Bible de l'humanité (decree of 11 June 1866); Le prêtre... and Les Jésuites (decree of 21 August 1896).