Jules Michelet’s Nos fils (“Our Sons”) is a work of moral and educational argument, published in Paris in 1869, in which the historian turns from the national past to the intimate future: the raising of children, the fixity of marriage, and the moral foundations of the fatherland. It is a companion to his earlier books on love, woman, and the family, and it belongs to the same lifelong project as his natural histories and his history of France. Written in the last years of the Second Empire, it treats education as identical with life itself, beginning before birth and following the child into the “rude gymnastics” of public life.
“Ce livre est plus qu’un livre; c’est moi-même.”
The Core Argument
Michelet’s central claim is that the child cannot live unless the home is placed on firm ground. Justice must be reconciled with love, or the fatherland perishes and the household totters; where parents live in discord, marriage slides toward divorce, and a child born into that division dies or remains, in his image, a “dried fruit” for whom education is impossible. Against the literature of his day, which he says calmly took the opposite road, he upheld what he calls the enormous paradox of the fixity of marriage, resting it on two bases: nature itself, and the heart of a citizen. Without morals there is no public life; a man cannot be free while keeping the morals of a slave.
From this he derives his theory of education. The child is born innocent, not guilty. The old myth of original sin, which made the newborn a creature of the Devil unless exorcised and damned even in its nurse’s arms, must give way to the verses of Jeremiah and Ezekiel: no more “our fathers ate green grapes”; each answers for himself. Education, then, is not correction of a bad nature but development of a principle. It is identical to life, and its object is man — not only the man sleeping in the cradle but man in the great combat, “you, me, and all of us,” thrown into an unforeseen world. The book was prepared over many years, but it arrives, Michelet says, on the grave day of social transformation: earlier it would have been a book, today it is an act.
Inside the Book
To Edgar Quinet: The Book as a Life
Michelet opens with a dedication to Edgar Quinet, dated 24 January 1846, insisting the book is not merely a book but himself—and that it belongs to Quinet because their thoughts always agree, rooted in the sentiment of France and the idea of the Fatherland. Their origins complement each other: Quinet’s military lineage, Michelet’s industrial one, together representing the two modern faces of the People. Michelet made the work from his own life, heart, experience, friendships, and above all memories of youth. He claims the true name of modern man is worker: before writing books he physically composed them, assembling letters before ideas, knowing the melancholy of the workshop. He recalls the last years of the Empire, when family, fortune, and fatherland seemed to perish. From those trials came a deep feeling for the People and knowledge of its treasure—the virtue of sacrifice. He closed books that contradicted his memories and reimmersed himself in the crowd, beginning an inquiry at Lyon about ten years earlier, continued in other cities and among practical men, studying the neglected countryside. Conversation with the People, unlike that of salons, enlarged his heart. He cites the immense acquisition of cotton linen by poor households around 1842, despite falling wages, as proof of growing fixity in household and family, and of woman’s influence—woman being economy, order, providence. A footnote notes savings banks receive less from workers than servants, and that the taste for flowers descends into classes near poverty.
Against Statistics and Self-Denigration
Michelet argues statistics are insufficient and misleading. He criticizes writers and artists whose works, popular across Europe, showed France only through vices and ugliness, harming the nation abroad; France, being centralized, shows herself naked, her defects magnified into monsters that aristocracies exploit. He cites novels portraying no family in France, works depicting cities as convict colonies, a genre painter labeling a hideous cabaret with the name of most French inhabitants. He warns against self-denigration, invoking Machiavelli’s Italy. A footnote warns philosophers, socialists, and politicians who diminish the idea of France, noting the Revolution’s glories were denied by all governments for fifty years. He calls on writers and artists to abandon sad paradoxes and reveal France to the People. He blames romantics who located art in the ugly, preferring wandering love to family, theft to work, the bagne to the workshop. He asserts his own authority, having lived and worked with the People, and announces he will oppose all with the People’s personality, understood from within and through historical origins. The People’s eminent trait is richness of sentiment and goodness of heart, rarer than in rich classes—during cholera, the poor adopted orphans. He measures men by the faculty of devotion and sacrifice, and answers the objection that the People are improvident by citing persevering devotion across generations.
The Two Families and the Printing House
Michelet tells his own family’s story: two families, one Picard, one Ardennais, originally peasants mixing cultivation with industry; numerous children, many siblings refusing marriage to fund the education of boys sent to college. In his maternal family, sisters served as humble servants to their brothers, buried in the village; one told frontier stories like Walter Scott. He mentions priests among cousins, and a great-uncle burned for making a certain book. His paternal grandfather, a music master at Laon, saved money after the Terror and came to Paris, where Michelet’s father worked at the assignats printing house; instead of buying land, he entrusted his savings to his eldest son and put everything into a printing house amid the Revolution’s hazards. A brother and sister of his father did not marry to facilitate the arrangement, but his father married one of the serious Ardennais ladies. Michelet was born in 1798 in the choir of a nuns’ church then occupied by their printing house—occupied, not profaned, since the Press is the modern ark. The printing house prospered, fed by assembly debates and army news, but around 1800 was struck by the great suppression of newspapers. His father was permitted only an ecclesiastical journal, and the authorization was abruptly withdrawn to be given to a priest Napoleon thought reliable, who soon betrayed him. Napoleon was punished by the priests themselves for believing Rome’s consecration better than France’s; in 1810 his wrath fell on the Press, struck by sixteen decrees in two years. His father, half-ruined for the priests’ benefit, was then fully ruined in expiation of their fault. One morning a polite gentleman informed them the Emperor had reduced printers to sixty; the largest were kept, the small suppressed, with indemnity roughly four sous for four francs. They were among the small ones; they had debts, and the Emperor gave no respite against the Jews as in Alsace. Their only means was to print for creditors some works belonging to his father. With no workers left, they did the work themselves: his father handled outside affairs; his mother, ill, became a stitcher, cutting and folding; Michelet, a child, composed; his grandfather, very weak and old, took up the press and printed with trembling hands.
The Malady of Infinite Sensitivity
Michelet begins from a simple premise: if love is life, then the upper classes barely live at all. Measured by national feeling—by the man who extends his own life through the whole great life of France—the higher one climbs, the less alive one becomes. He doubts the rich are compensated by duller suffering, greater freedom, or happiness. The great manufacturer stands far above the wretched small proprietor, yet is just as much a slave to the banker. The small merchant who stakes his savings and family on commerce, withering in anxious waiting and envy, fares little better than the worker—while the single worker who can salt away thirty sous from a four-franc day is gayer and freer than the shopkeeper. The rich man suffers from his vices, yes, but add boredom, moral failure, and the sense of having been worth more, until he sinks from Frenchman to cosmopolitan, from man to mollusk.
He is not claiming the poor are happy or that all destinies are equal; such a thesis would kill the heart and comfort egoism. Physical suffering rarely excludes moral suffering—the two terrible sisters crush the poor together, as the fate of women in indigent quarters shows, bearing children almost only for death.
This society carries a malady of its own: it has become infinitely sensitive. Ordinary ills have diminished, but only finitely, while sensitivity has grown without limit. Enlarged thought opened a new sphere to pain; love and family ties gave fortune new holds. No one would surrender these dear occasions of suffering, yet they make life more anxious—one aches not only from the present but from the future and the possible, sensing evils in advance, sometimes ones that never come.
Worse, this age of extreme individual sensitivity is precisely the one where everything is done by collective means least suited to sparing the individual. Action centralizes around some great force, and man enters the whirlwind willy-nilly. What becomes of his dearest thoughts in these vast impersonal systems? The immense, majestic, indifferent machine rolls on, not even knowing that its little cogs, so harshly crushed, are living men. Do these animated wheels at least know one another? Their necessary cooperation produces no moral relation. The strange mystery of the age: the time when men act most together is perhaps when hearts are least united. Collective means for sharing thought have never been greater; isolation has never been deeper.
Machinism and Its Origins
The mystery yields only to historical observation of the system producing it, which Michelet calls Machinism. The Middle Ages posed a formula of love and produced only hatred; it consecrated inequality, making love impossible. The violent reaction of love and nature called the Renaissance founded no new order and appeared a disorder. The world, needing order, then said: let us not love; one experiment of a thousand years suffices. Let us seek order and force in the union of forces; we will find machines holding men assembled without love, framing and tightening them—nailed, riveted, screwed—so that, hating one another, they act together. Thus administrative machines were rebuilt, analogous to the old Roman Empire: bureaucracy à la Colbert, armies à la Louvois. These machines used man as a regular force, life minus its caprices and inequalities.
Yet these are still men, retaining something of humanity. The marvel of Machinism would be to dispense with men entirely: forces that, once set moving by us, act without us. Moved by us? That is still man, a defect. Let nature furnish not only the machine’s elements but the motor. Then came those iron workers which, with a hundred thousand arms and teeth, comb, weave, spin, open in every way; they take force, like Antaeus, from their mother nature, from falling water or water captive and distended into steam. Political machines make our social acts uniformly automatic and dispense us from patriotism; industrial machines multiply monotonous products infinitely and dispense us from being artists every day. Man no longer appears much. Yet Machinism wants more; man is not yet mechanized deeply enough.
He retains solitary reflection, philosophical meditation, the pure thought of the True. There he cannot be reached unless a borrowed scholasticism draws him out of himself into its formulas. Once he sets foot in that wheel turning empty, the thinking Machine, meshed with the political machine, will roll triumphant and call itself philosophy of State. Fantasy remains free—vain poetry that loves and creates at caprice. Useless movement, unfortunate loss of forces! Are the objects fantasy follows so numerous that, classifying them well, one could not strike a mold for each class, into which we need only pour, as needed, such novel or drama, any work commanded? Then no more men in literary work, no more passion, no more caprice. English economy dreamed, as industrial ideal, of a single machine, a single man to wind it.
The École Normale and the Central Schools
The three adopted education projects are praised as grand and meaningful: they organize the top and bottom, normal schools and primary schools, casting light first into the vast depths of the people, then filling the intermediate space with central schools where the rich may rise. Everything is created as a whole, since a living work is not made piece by piece. Two months after 9 Thermidor, people began believing in life again. France, emerging from the tomb, suddenly matured by twenty centuries, called all her children to receive the sovereign teaching of her great experience: “Come and see.” The chief fruit of that experience, the text argues, is that human blood has a terrible virtue against those who shed it. It would be too easy to claim France was saved despite the Terror. The terrorists did immense and lasting harm; in the remotest cottage of Europe one finds this memory and curse. Kings coldly killed far more men, but the victims of the Terror remain bloody in the thought of peoples. The armies’ momentum alone saved France, seconded by the Committee of Public Safety’s excellent military administrators, whom Robespierre hated and would have killed if he could have done without them. The purest generals found only malevolence and obstacles in Robespierre and his friends. The author wishes reprinters of Roux and Buchez’s compilation would remove their sad paradoxes: apology for 2 September and Saint-Barthélemy, satire of Charlotte Corday, and praise of Marat, who demanded two hundred thousand heads at once. Such follies spread by cheap journals among workers who lack time to examine them.
When the Convention’s rapporteur pronounced that “time alone could be the professor of the Republic,” eyes filled with tears; all had dearly paid time’s lesson. After these trials, there seemed a moment of silence for human passions. The highest men in the state and science accepted the humblest teaching functions: Lagrange and Laplace taught arithmetic. Original professors of the central schools included Sieyès, Daunou, Roederer, Haüy, Cabanis, Legendre, Lacroix, Bossut, Saussure, Cuvier, Fontanes, Ginguené, Laharpe, and Laromiguière. Fifteen hundred students, grown men, several already illustrious, sat on the benches of the École normale to learn to teach, coming in full winter amid poverty and famine. Over the ruins of all material things hovered alone the majesty of the spirit. The great school’s chair was occupied by creative geniuses: Berthollet and Morvau had just founded chemistry; Laplace and Lagrange had steadied the world system. Never did spiritual power appear more incontestable. And how the heart joined in when one saw a precious head that had almost fallen, that of good Haüy, saved by Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire.
A great citizen, Carnot, who organized victory, divined Hoche and Bonaparte, and saved France despite the Terror, was the true founder of the École polytechnique. They learned as one fights, doing three years of courses in three months. After six, Monge declared they had not only received science but advanced it. Imagine Lagrange stopping suddenly amid teaching, dreaming; all waited in silence; he awoke and delivered the young invention, still burning. Everything lacked except genius. Students could not have come without a travel allowance of four sous per day. One master, Clouet, wanted only a corner of land in the plain of Sablons and lived on vegetables he grew there.
What a fall afterward! Reading, after the reports to the Convention, those of Fourcroy and Fontanes, one falls in a few years from virility to decrepit old age. One man had the rare courage under the Empire to reclaim the Convention’s organization of teaching: Lacroix, in his Essais sur l’enseignement of 1805. It is distressing to see this heroic momentum collapse so soon. The glorious École normale bears no fruit. One is little surprised when the sciences of man abdicate and deny themselves. The history professor Volney taught that history is the science of dead facts; the philosophy professor Garat said philosophy is only the study of signs. Signs for signs, mathematics had the advantage. Thus revolutionary France, in the great school meant to teach the sciences of man, found those sciences ashamed of themselves.
The Author’s Preface: Justice, Love, and the Home
The author opens by insisting that unless justice is reconciled with love, the fatherland perishes and the home totters; marriage becomes divorce, and if the home is not firm, the child will not live. A child born into parental discord dies or remains a “dried fruit,” making education impossible. Two currents of his time opposed each other: Science, whose discoveries establish the strength of marriage, and Literature, which calmly went the opposite way. When his books warned of this, Literature was almost as indignant as the priest. He names three attacked books—l’Amour, la Femme, le Prêtre et la Famille—which upheld the “enormous paradox” of the fixity of marriage, resting on two bases: scientific and moral. Without morals, he says, there is no public life; in l’Amour he asked light-minded men who speak of the Fatherland whether they can be free with the morals of slaves.
All his books gravitated toward today’s book. His natural-history works were exactly in his line. At the start of la Femme he said education, especially of girls, would proceed gently in communion with Nature; near the end of la Montagne he led the young man to the Alps and Pyrenees, strengthening him through virile courses and noble gymnastics, with the proud aspiration “Higher!” These little books, born of the home itself, were adopted in France and elsewhere as Sunday books, evening books, and after-supper books—thus as educational books. He reaches his goal by legitimate, patient paths his predecessors thought they could skip.
The Schoolmaster’s Hell
Outside Paris, beyond the model schools shown to visiting foreigners, the author insists, the reality is a schoolmaster striking children because he cannot do otherwise. The gentleness on display is false, and it exposes the teacher cruelly: his days are painful and endless, filled with the noise of children, his life a harsh monastic isolation without consolation. He grows sour, irritated, open to every bad instinct. Is he made of wood or stone, the author asks, and can one be astonished when he loses control and the Demon passes from victim to executioner? The letters of the superior Étienne, written in 1854, 1860 and 1861, along with the countless lawsuits that followed, have illuminated this lamentable subject. The author refuses to add to these unfortunates’ shame. Their life is a hell, and they preserve the painful image of what lasted for long centuries in the darkness of the Middle Ages.
The Human Age: Rabelais and Montaigne
The word Humanity opens the next chapter, and it had immense effect when it was rediscovered after the Middle Ages. Man had forgotten even his own name during that funereal dream; emerging from the tomb, he touched himself and cried out. Italy employed this word of divine sweetness, goodness and kindly culture, turning first from barbarous darkness toward the serene, luminous Antiquity. As early as the thirteenth century the shepherd Giotto, who took to painting, had an idea foreign to the Middle Ages: he first put goodness into art, leaving behind the inflexible, insensible, inhuman types of Byzantine tradition and daring to paint nature. Antiquity was his faithful reflection. Petrarch took Homer for his Bible, spent his old age on that poetry of eternal youth, and died with his head on the Iliad and Odyssey.
The word that had blocked all invention, dominating and sterilizing the Middle Ages—the Imitation—perished. A strange, admirable trait of the new time is that one wants to imitate but no longer can. Petrarch wishes to be Latin, to remake Cicero, yet is Italian and writes beautiful sonnets. Rabelais, most learned of the learned, is the newest and most original. Jeanne Darc believes she follows the past and legend, yet is an ideal of the new people and the future; dying, she opposes the inner voice to the Church, and at the stake of Rouen the author salutes the Revolution. Luther likewise imitates, wishing to renew the primitive Church, yet begins a new world; he copies the sunset and makes a dawn. Amid dark dogmas, the serene, victorious spirit of the Renaissance illuminates all; against passive sadness it preaches the hero’s highest virtue: Joy.
Joy bursts immense with a powerful laugh, stronger than thunder, from Gargantua’s cradle. Every word is a thunderbolt—light of the future, anathema to the past. First thirst and famine: hatred of the famished time when only words were swallowed. Humanity, reduced to a skeleton, wakes with long teeth in horrible hunger. The second word is the solemn decree, the major excommunication, under which the Past falls head-down like a stone, never to rise, bearing its true name that kills it: Anti-Nature. No book was more reprinted—sixty editions, translations into every language; in two months more were sold than Bibles in ten years. Jean Du Bellay called it simply the Book. Few understood it was a book of education or guessed its foundation: “Return to nature.” Rousseau said this too, but Rabelais does not start from an abstract axiom like Émile; he starts from life’s reality, the morals of the time, its coarse thought. His conception is that of the people—the enormously, gigantically material man, a giant; the aim is to make a good giant. A burlesque prologue introduces the book, as farces and fêtes of the ass preceded Christmas songs. Man then was of very low materiality; Rabelais took him as he was. The child, badly tended from the cradle, then cultivated wrongly, is a perfect mirror of what to avoid; to a bad beginning scholastic education adds vices, laziness, bad morals, vain sciences. This starting point was necessary. Given that, Rabelais’s superiority over Montaigne, Fénelon and Rousseau is evident: his plan of education remains the most complete and reasonable, especially fertile and positive. He believes, against the Middle Ages, that man is good and that nature must be developed entirely—heart, mind, body. He believes, against the modern age, against reasoners and critics like Montaigne and Rousseau, that education must not begin by being reasoning and critical. Rousseau and Montaigne put their pupil on dry bread for fear he eats too much; Rabelais gives his all God’s good nourishments—nature and science nurse him at full breasts, filling the blessed cradle with fruits and flowers. One may say this education is too rich, too full, too learned, but art and nature charm science: music, botany, industry in all branches, all bodily exercises are relaxation. Religion is born of the true and nature to warm and fertilize the heart. In the evening, master and disciple, having summarized the day, went in full night to the most open place of their lodging to see the face of the sky and observe the aspects of the stars. They prayed God the creator, adoring and ratifying their faith in him, glorifying him for his immense goodness, rendering thanks for all past time and commending themselves to his divine clemency for all the future. That done, they entered their rest.
Rousseau’s Conscience and the Gospel of Pestalozzi
This education bears fruit. Rousseau rescued an indecisive century through the cry “Conscience! conscience!”—a magnificent act that restored the straight path.
The Apostle of Lyon and the Mirage of Miracles
Under the Restoration, readers devoured reprints of Voltaire, though they read him confusedly; distilling the true spirit of the previous century’s polemical bibles demanded rare judgment. July and the years that followed produced a volcano of books—a troubled eruption of utopias and socialist novels, new bibles even more muddled, mixing ingenious ideas with touching chimeras. The men, Michelet insists, were better than their books. In 1839 at Lyon, led by a very good man who inspired no distrust, he saw a moving sight: the bare room of an apostle of these ideas, a poor workman without bread, his children thin and stunted, his wife—a true lioness—roaming for the family’s food. He had exhausted money and health buying, giving, spreading the little books meant to make all happy. Everything crushed him, especially his wife, who shrugged. Yet his serenity and gentleness were incomparable; his communism was to give everything, himself and his life. He was lost, gravely ill in the chest, always smiling, kind, without hatred of society. On his table lay a pile of brochures, and reading them, what struck Michelet was that all started from the idea of a miracle—seriously proposing to erase one world with a stroke and remake another. This is a singular, incurable malady of the human mind. Since 2 December, the flood of novels invading France, far muddier, is dominated by adventures, improbable happiness, gross lottery, the Californian idea of the jackpot and gold ingot—always blind faith in miracle, chance, the coup d’état of fate, dispensing with effort, work, perseverance.
What is needed are books contrary to the idea of miracle: books of action, teaching one to act, to count on oneself, faith only in the effects of work and will. First, true books. Life is short; children instinctively ask, “Is it true?” Travel books are good when they give raw reality, not romantic fortunes won without effort. Robinson is a very true story compiled from real facts. The Robinsons of industry—Jacquart and Stephenson—are our saints. But above all Michelet wants the Bible of France, the history of the long effort by which the people made itself; no poor worker following his fathers’ path will succumb. Three things are required for popular books: genius and charm; fine, sure tact of experience; and divine innocence, infantile sublimity. The problem: to be old and young, sage and child. He was born of the people, had the people in his heart; in 1846 he posed the people’s right, in 1864 its long religious tradition—but its language was inaccessible to him. After 24 June 1848, he told Béranger: who will speak to the people? Béranger replied: “Patience! it is they who will make their books.” Eighteen years have passed—where are those books?
Public Life and the Spontaneous Magistracy
The most fecund book is action, the living book the Fatherland, spelled out in the commune, then departments, provinces. The current awakening dismisses the humanitarian fools of 1848 who said “suppress the caste Fatherland,” and artists who said “No more France! the world!” Each fatherland is a special organ of Europe’s life and an educational system for its nationals. This becomes real as each country freely creates its administration from commune to sovereign assembly, a progressive ladder of public magistracy. In normal-life countries like the United States this happens naturally: recently Europe watched a boatman, a tailor, a brewer lead a great empire, armies of five hundred thousand, assemblies harder still to maneuver. More cultivated societies will have their own procedures; education will play a greater role. Turgot wanted school to prepare the commune, passing without shock from one to the other. Dupont-White objects that the modern commune’s small municipal life hardly prepares for governmental functions. Michelet answers: nothing is small in what decides man’s fate; local miseries are the real, living man. The young lord from Oxford or Cambridge going straight to the Chamber of Peers is worse off; the French student benefits from bending his mind to things grasped one by one. The smallest circle demands order, economy, patience, dexterity; high interests and imperial diplomacy are often less thorny. Seeing close, one distinguishes men beneath figures, gains respect for life, and avoids cruel abstractions of political big heads who exterminate a world in battle or revolution.
The book is not politics; it notes only that the greatest combat is at the lowest degree, local and communal life, where will is exercised and character fixed. The man is taken when, established in his locality, recently married or about to be, he decides how to position himself—a capital moment determining his whole private and public life. Often the worst counsel comes from family, trembling at the beginnings of “this dear friend,” instilling miserable, timid, then cowardly things—the crime of Cham. The young man is urged to make a firm heart against base counsel and base prudence, which sees only today; the powers for which one is asked to be cowardly are fate’s playthings.
Advancing the Poor Pupil
The child should not feel too supported or singled out. He should be followed closely but without softness, shown only that persistence will let him learn more, even be sent to a higher school. On the decisive day one must act frankly, bringing to light his solid merits, which might otherwise be evaded. Objections that another child is clever or answered well are answered by trusting written examinations and the year’s marks. The claim that another’s father rendered services does not suffice: a father’s services are no title for a child who does not merit, to displace a worthier one.
The poor laborer’s heart is lifted if the deserving child is sent by the commune to a higher departmental school. But this father, without means and tied to work, can hardly help or often visit him.
Key Ideas
Machinism. Michelet’s name for the system that produces the isolation of his age. The Middle Ages posed a formula of love and produced only hatred; the Renaissance founded no new order; the world then resolved not to love, and sought order in the union of forces — administrative machines after Colbert, armies after Louvois, and finally iron workers that draw their force from nature itself, from falling water or captive steam. The strange mystery of the age is that the time when men act most together is perhaps when hearts are least united: collective means for circulating thought have never been greater, isolation never deeper.
The child as the people. The child embodies the people in its native truth, before deformation — without vulgarity, rudeness, or envy. Like young peoples, the child is concrete and living, narrating even abstract ideas, and his naive questions present the insoluble knot of things. From four to twelve is the reasoning age. Passing too quickly from instinctive to reflective life is progress and a fall at once: the child becomes a man, and he was a little god. Childhood is not only an age but a people — the innocent people.
The duality of genius. Genius unites the two sexes of the mind: the instinct of the simple and the reflection of the wise. Only the complete man engenders; the simple person is half a man, the critic is half a man, and the neutrals, having neither sex, are sterile. Genius’s privilege is that inspiration acts before reflection, filling the interval — a flash of eternity. Its fecundity rests on the gentleness with which it welcomes the weak attempts of instinct, both in itself and in the world.
Association. True association is moral and social, not merely economic. The cheese-makers of the Jura, who pool milk and share profits, require no closeness of heart; the fishermen of Normandy, whose boats are staked by a young woman’s savings before her heart, prepare the natural bond of the family. France, Michelet says, is hard to associate precisely because the individual Frenchman has great value; the only possible union is a union of spirits, and the dominant question is whether the associates love one another.
The fatherland. Nationalities will not disappear; they characterize themselves ever more morally, becoming persons. Climate, food, and natural productions form national characters, and a people’s soul must fix on a central point. The fatherland is the necessary initiation to the universal fatherland. In the bagnes and prisons, among dead men, Michelet found France still — the last spark.
Themes
The book is, among other things, a spiritual autobiography of a historian who insists that his natural histories, his moral books, and his national history were never divergent paths. He tells his own family’s story to make his authority: two peasant families mixing cultivation with industry, many siblings refusing marriage so that a boy could be sent to college, sisters serving as humble servants to their brothers, a great-uncle burned for making a certain book. He was born in 1798 in the choir of a nuns’ church then occupied by his father’s printing house — occupied, not profaned, since the Press is the modern ark. When Napoleon reduced the printers to sixty, the family did the work themselves: his mother, ill, became a stitcher; the child composed; his old grandfather took up the press with trembling hands.
Against the writers and artists who showed France only through vices and ugliness, Michelet sets the People’s eminent trait: richness of sentiment and goodness of heart, rarer than in the rich classes. During cholera, the poor adopted orphans. He measures men by the faculty of devotion and sacrifice. The peasant’s love of land is a passion for liberty and virtue, not mere materialism — the sweat and deadly privation behind the words “the peasant buys,” the shipwrecked man gripping the rock with bloody hands. The industrial worker’s sensuality and vices arise from his condition, not from human nature: the manufactory is a world of iron, and the man who feels so little a man there seeks the most vivid exaltation once out. Yet Villermé, a cold observer, testified that among workers he found one virtue in higher degree than in happier classes: a natural disposition to help and succor others. The least happy are the most charitable, keeping a heart free of hate in external servitude.
Running through all of it is a meditation on servitude in its many forms — the peasant’s, the worker’s, the functionary’s, the schoolmaster’s — and on the oblique, indirect dependence that descends from high to low, penetrating detail, wanting to govern even the soul. The customs officer passes every other night on the frontier without shelter but his cloak; the schoolmaster, paid less than a baker’s boy, is the priest’s valet, and his multiplied children are held up as proof of his morals. The Convention, which declared teaching a priesthood and wanted fifty-four million for primary instruction, is the lost standard against which the present is measured.
Why It Matters
Nos fils closes on the physical fatality that becomes, in humankind, a great morality and the law of salvation for the child. Of the two persons from whom the child comes, the more mobile and loving one modifies and assimilates herself, producing the unity that truly constitutes marriage and makes the cradle perfectly fixed. The woman, changed by the man, in turn changes him; the habits with which she enlaces him create an ascendancy that compensates and exceeds the first transformation. Marriage thus gains a prodigious force — divine if one loves, terrible if one hates. The man, favored by nature, must strive to be worthy and, by tenderness, make her accept this fatality, so that the law of nature, willed rather than suffered, becomes the union’s happiness.
Michelet concedes that the union can in some cases be such horrible torture that it must be broken at any price; above nature subsists the right of the soul. But the detestable middle term called separation is immorality itself, giving rise to a hundred crimes, many infanticides and suppressions of status, and lost children worse than dead. Divorce is a hundred times better, yet difficult, and above all delayed — often the spouses reflect, since so many loved things and common habits vibrate strongly when separated. The most docile and silent women are not always those who best accept the law of unity; under resignation they may brood an infinite romance, as sometimes with the Englishwoman, while the Frenchwoman, who puts everything outside and contradicts loudly, is often more faithful than she sounds.
The book endures as a document of a historian who believed that the smallest unit of national life — a child, a hearth, a marriage — carried the same weight as the great movements he had spent his life narrating. Its faith in the innocence of the child, its anger at the servitudes of the poor and the forgotten schoolmaster, and its insistence that education is not preparation for life but life itself, give it a place among the nineteenth century’s most personal and most public meditations on what a republic owes its sons.
