A nineteenth-century French historian’s sweeping account of the modern era
What the Work Is
The Compendium of Modern History is a historical work by the French historian Jules Michelet. Michelet, who lived from 1798 to 1874, is best known for his multi-volume Histoire de France (History of France), which chronicles French history from its earliest origins to the French Revolution. The Compendium of Modern History represents his effort to present the history of the modern period in a condensed, accessible form.
What the Book Is About
The Compendium of Modern History addresses the broad sweep of modern historical development. As a work of synthesis by a historian whose approach was shaped by his engagement with the ideas of Giambattista Vico, Michelet’s historical writing emphasized the role of ordinary people and their customs in shaping historical narratives, in contrast to the traditional focus on political and military elites. This perspective informs the Compendium as it surveys the modern era.
Key Ideas and Themes
Michelet’s historical method, evident throughout his major works including the Compendium, was influenced significantly by Giambattista Vico. From Vico, Michelet drew particularly on the concept of corsi e ricorsi—the cyclical nature of history—in which societies rise and fall in recurring patterns. This cyclical understanding of historical development shaped Michelet’s interpretation of how civilizations and peoples move through phases of growth, maturity, and decline.
Central to Michelet’s approach was his attention to the common people rather than exclusively to rulers and generals. His histories sought to capture the lived experience and customs of ordinary individuals as forces that shaped the course of events. This democratic orientation in historiography was distinctive for his time and reflected his conviction that history belonged to the people as much as to their leaders.
Significance and Influence
Michelet’s work as a historian, including his efforts to analyze and understand phenomena such as the Black Mass in his book Satanism and Witchcraft (1862), positioned him as one of the first scholars to examine such subjects seriously. His broader historical project, of which the Compendium of Modern History forms a part, contributed to shaping nineteenth-century French historical writing and its emphasis on the experiences of ordinary people alongside traditional political narratives.
The source material on the Black Mass identifies Michelet as one of the first to analyze and attempt to understand the Black Mass, writing two chapters about it in Satanism and Witchcraft (1862). The Black Mass itself is described as a ceremony celebrated by various Satanic groups—alleged by Christian sources to have existed for centuries in different forms, though only its modern forms are attested—intentionally a sacrilegious and blasphemous parody of a Catholic Mass. In the nineteenth century the Black Mass became popularized in French literature, in books such as Michelet’s Satanism and Witchcraft and Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Là-bas.
Early Attestations and Heretical Masses
The Catholic Church regards the Mass as its most important ritual, going back to apostolic times, generally following the outline of Liturgy of the Word, Offertory, Liturgy of the Eucharist and Benediction. As early Christianity became more established, early Church Fathers described heretical groups practicing their own versions of Masses, some of a sexual nature. The fourth-century heresiologist Epiphanius of Salamis claims that a libertine Gnostic sect known as the Borborites engaged in a version of the Eucharist in which they smeared their hands with menstrual blood and semen and consumed them as the blood and body of Christ respectively; he also alleges that whenever one of the women in their church was experiencing her period, they would take her menstrual blood and everyone in the church would eat it as part of a sacred ritual. Saint Augustine, also writing in the fourth century, describes a group referred to as “Catharistas” (“purifiers”), who added a mixture of male and female sexual fluids to flour to create a “Sacrament” which they ate, believing they were purifying the substance through eating it.
Medieval Parodies and Additions
Within the Church, the rite of the Mass was not completely fixed, and there were places at the end of the Offertory for the Secret prayers, when the priest could insert private prayers for various personal needs—practices that became especially prevalent in France. As these personal prayers spread, the institution of the Low Mass became quite common, where priests hired out their services to perform Votive Masses for clients’ needs, such as blessing crops or cattle, achieving success in some enterprise, obtaining love, or cursing enemies (one method being to insert the enemy’s name in a Mass for the dead, accompanied by burying an image of the enemy). Although condemned by Church authorities as superstitious and sacrilegious abuses, these practices still occurred secretively. In the 12th and 13th centuries there was a great surplus of clerics and monks who might be inclined to perform these Masses, as younger sons were often sent to religious universities and afterward needed to find a livelihood. The ritual of the Mass was sometimes reworked into light-hearted parodies for certain festivities, some quasi-tolerated though never accepted by official Church authorities—such as “The Feast of Asses”, in which Balaam’s ass would begin talking and saying parts of the Mass, and the similar Feast of Fools. Practitioners of such activities, called “Goliards”, continued despite the Church’s disapproval.
Another result of the surplus of clerical students was the appearance of Latin writings of the Goliards and wandering clerics (clerici vagantes). More cynical and heretical parodies of the Mass appeared, written in ecclesiastical Latin, known as “drinkers’ Masses” and “gamblers’ Masses,” which lamented the situation of drunk, gambling monks and instead of calling to “Deus” called to “Bacchus” and “Decius.” Some of the earliest of these Latin parody works are found in the Carmina Burana, written around 1230. At the time these wandering clerics were spreading their writings, the Cathars, who also spread their teachings through wandering clerics, were also active; due to the proximity in time and location of the Goliards, the Cathars, and the witches, some historians have postulated that these wandering clerics may have at times offered their services for performing heretical, or “black,” Masses.
A further source of late Medieval and Early Modern involvement with parodies of the Mass were the writings of the European witch-hunt, which saw witches as agents of the Devil who inverted the Christian Mass and employed the stolen Host for diabolical ends. Witch-hunter’s manuals such as the Malleus Maleficarum (1487) and the Compendium Maleficarum (1608) allude to these supposed practices. The first complete depiction of a blasphemy of the Mass in connection with the Witches’ Sabbath was given in Florimond de Raemond’s 1597 French work The Antichrist, written as a Catholic response to the Protestant claim that the Pope was the Antichrist.
