A gathering of passages from the French historian who put the common people at the center of history
What the Work Is
Selected Pages from the Great Writers — Jules Michelet is a compilation drawn from the writings of the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet. The source material does not specify the compiler, the date, or the place of the collection’s first appearance, and it does not describe the volume’s contents in detail. What can be said with confidence is that it belongs to the broader category of “selected pages” anthologies — volumes that present excerpts from an author’s body of work rather than a single continuous text. Because the collection gathers material from across Michelet’s career, understanding it requires understanding the range of his writing, which the sources describe at length.
What the Book Is About
The collection draws on the work of a historian whose central conviction was that history should concern itself with ordinary people, not merely with rulers and institutions. Michelet spent decades researching printed authorities and manuscripts for his monumental Histoire de France, and his insistence that the past be told through the experience of “the people” was, according to the sources, unique in historical scholarship at the time. He was influenced in this outlook by Giambattista Vico, particularly by Vico’s emphasis on the customs and daily life of common people as forces that shape historical narratives, and by Vico’s concept of corsi e ricorsi — the idea that societies rise and fall in recurring cycles.
A reader coming to a selection of Michelet’s pages therefore encounters a historian who treated the past as a living drama of struggle, and who believed that the story of a nation could not be separated from the story of its ordinary inhabitants.
Key Ideas and Themes
Several recurring themes run through Michelet’s writing, and the sources identify them with unusual specificity.
History as struggle. Michelet framed history as an unending conflict. In his own words, as quoted in the sources, “With the world began a war which will end only with the world: war of man against nature, spirit against matter, liberty against fatality. History is nothing other than the record of this interminable struggle.” The intellectual historian David Nirenberg characterized this as a “Manichaean dualism.” Michelet’s framing of history as a contest between Christian spirit and liberty on one side and Jewish matter, fatality, and tyranny on the other has been described by Nirenberg as an example of anti-Judaism functioning as a constituent conceptual tool in Western thought. This is a significant and troubling dimension of Michelet’s intellectual framework, and any selection of his pages will reflect it.
Paired and opposing forces. The sources describe Michelet’s themes as falling into three categories: maleficent, beneficent, and paired. Among the paired themes is the recurring opposition of grace and justice — grace associated with the feminine, justice with the masculine. He also returned frequently to ideas of union and unity, both in human history and in the natural world.
The maleficent themes. Michelet catalogued what he regarded as negative forces under several headings. Themes of “the dry” included the machine, the Jesuits, scribes, the electric, irony (which he associated with Goethe), the Scholastics, public safety, and fatalism (linked to Hobbes, Molinos, Spinoza, and Hegel). Themes of “the empty and the turgid” included the Middle Ages, imitation, tedium, the novel, narcotics, Alexander, and a condition he called “plethoric” (engorged blood). He also wrote of themes of “the indeterminate,” among them the Honnêtes-Hommes, Condé, Chantilly Sade, gambling, phantasmagoria, Italian comedy, white blood, and sealed blood.
The Renaissance as rupture. Michelet coined the French term Renaissance (“rebirth”) to describe the cultural movement that marked a clear departure from the Middle Ages. Although the Italian art historian Giorgio Vasari had used the term in 1550 to describe the revival of classical art beginning with Giotto, Michelet was the first historian to apply the French equivalent systematically to a broader historical era. His use of the term established the modern interpretation of the period as a time of renewed humanism, artistic flourishing, and intellectual transformation in post-medieval Europe. Michelet abhorred the Middle Ages and celebrated their end as a radical transformation; he sought to explain how a lively Renaissance could emerge from what he saw as an ossified medieval culture.
Machines and the laboring poor. During his career Michelet wrote a pamphlet on the condition of France’s popular masses in relation to the growth of machinery. He argued that machines had brought positive developments alongside negative ones. While he was well aware that machines enslaved and demeaned their workers, he noticed that machine products improved the general condition of the laboring poor, among whom peasants and artisans were still far more numerous than industrial workers. Machines, he argued, had made it financially possible for whole classes to obtain household items they had never possessed before — curtains, body linen, bed and table linen. He illustrated the point with the observation that where once a woman wore a single blue or black gown for ten years without washing it, for fear it would fall to shreds, now her husband, a poor working man, could for one day’s wages cover her with a garment of flowers.
Natural history and pantheism. Michelet also produced a series of books on natural history, beginning with L’Oiseau (1856) and continuing with L’Insecte (1858), La Mer (1861), and La Montagne (1868). These works reflected his pantheistic worldview rather than a strictly scientific approach, and were partly inspired by his second wife, Athénaïs. In La Montagne, Michelet adopted a more lyrical style than his typical historical narratives, employing a staccato technique with short, fragmented sentences to build emotional tension.
Personal relationships and the role of women. Two further works from this period, L’Amour (1859) and La Femme (1860), explored personal relationships and the evolving role of women in society, generating debate for their detailed treatment of these subjects. Vincent van Gogh referenced La Femme in his drawing Sorrow, inscribing it with the question: “How can there be on earth a woman alone?”
Structure and Approach
The sources do not describe the internal organization of Selected Pages from the Great Writers — Jules Michelet — how the excerpts are arranged, what editorial apparatus accompanies them, or which works are represented. What the sources do make clear is the character of Michelet’s writing across the works from which such a selection would be drawn. He was perhaps the first historian to devote himself to anything resembling a picturesque history of the Middle Ages, and his account remains one of the most vivid that exists. He spent extensive time researching printed authorities and manuscripts for his Histoire de France, though his many personal biases — both political and religious — reduced the book’s objectivity. He gave certain parts of history more weight than others, but his insistence that history should concentrate on “the people, and not only its leaders or its institutions” was unique in historical scholarship at the time.
Significance and Influence
Michelet’s importance rests on several foundations. His Histoire de France, completed in 1867 in nineteen volumes, was his magnum opus and took thirty years to complete. The historian François Furet described Michelet’s The History of the French Revolution as “the cornerstone of revolutionary historiography” and “a literary monument.” Michelet’s coinage of the term Renaissance established the modern understanding of that period. His emphasis on ordinary people as the proper subject of history was, according to the sources, unique in his time.
The sources also note that Michelet’s later works received less critical attention than his earlier publications. La Bible de l’humanité (1864), a historical overview of world religions, did not achieve the same level of readership in the twentieth century as his earlier books. His natural history series and his works on personal relationships represent thematic directions that generated debate but did not attain the lasting influence of his historical writing.
A collection of selected pages from Michelet thus offers access to a body of work that shaped how the Renaissance is understood, that pioneered a people-centered approach to history, and that continues to be studied for both its literary power and its ideological complexities.
Michelet’s father was a master printer, and Michelet often assisted him in his work. He was later offered a position at the imperial printing office but chose instead to study at the Lycée Charlemagne, a prestigious secondary school in Paris. He passed the university examination in 1821 and was soon appointed to a professorship of history at the Collège Rollin.
In 1824, Michelet married Pauline Rousseau. The couple had their first child, Adèle, the same year. Among Michelet’s notable patrons were Abel-François Villemain and Victor Cousin, who supported his early academic career. Since childhood, he is said to have embraced republicanism and a distinctive form of romantic free thought. He was an active political thinker, a man of letters, and a committed historian. His first published works were school textbooks.
Between 1825 and 1827, he produced a series of drafts, chronological tables, and preparatory materials relating to modern history. In 1827, he published Précis d’histoire moderne, an influential overview of contemporary history. That same year, he was appointed as a maître de conférences at the École normale supérieure. He followed this with Introduction à l’histoire universelle in 1831.
Record Office and Early Major Works
The events of the July Revolution of 1830 put Michelet in a better position for his research. He secured a position at the Record Office and served as deputy professor under historian François Guizot in the literary faculty of the University of France. Soon afterwards, he began his magnum opus, the Histoire de France, which would take 30 years to complete. He also published numerous other books, such as the Œuvres choisies de Vico, the Mémoires de Luther écrits par lui-même, the Origines du droit français, and somewhat later, the le Procès des Templiers.
In 1838, Michelet’s studies reinforced his natural aversion to the principles of authority and ecclesiasticism. During the revival of Jesuit activity in France, he was appointed to the chair of history at the Collège de France. Assisted by his friend Edgar Quinet, he began a polemic against the religious order and the principles that it represented. He published Histoire Romaine in 1839, the same year his first wife died. The results of his lectures appeared in the volumes Du prêtre, de la femme et de la famille and Le peuple. These books do not display the dramatic style (partly borrowed from Lamennais) that characterizes Michelet’s later works. However, they contain many of his core beliefs—a mixture of sentimentalism, communism, and anti-sacerdotalism.
Michelet, along with many others, propagated the principles that led to the outbreaks of 1848. When the revolution broke out, instead of attempting to enter active political life, he devoted himself to his literary work. Besides continuing the Histoire de France, he also wrote Histoire de la Révolution française during the years between the downfall of Louis Philippe and the final establishment of Napoleon III.
In 1849, at 51, he married his second wife, the 23-year-old Athénaïs Michelet (née Mialaret). She was a natural history writer and memoirist and had republican sympathies. She had been a teacher in Saint Petersburg before their extensive correspondence led to marriage. They entered into a shared literary life and she would assist him significantly in his endeavors. He openly acknowledged this, although she was never given credit in his works.
Later Career and Political Life
After Napoleon III’s rise to power in 1852, Jules Michelet lost his position at the Record Office due to his refusal to swear loyalty to the new emperor. This event further aligned him with republican ideals, a perspective likely influenced by his marriage to Athénaïs, who also supported republicanism. While Michelet’s primary focus remained on his major work, Histoire de France, he also produced additional writings during this period. Some of these were expanded versions of specific episodes from Histoire, presented as commentaries or companion volumes. One such example is Les Femmes de la Révolution (1854), which examined the role of women in the French Revolution, covering the period from 1780 to 1794.
In 1862, Michelet published La Sorcière (Satanism and Witchcraft), a book that developed from a historical topic and reflected some of his more unconventional views. In 1973, the work was adapted into an animated art film, Belladonna of Sadness, directed by Eiichi Yamamoto and produced by Mushi Production.
The writing and publication of these works, along with the completion of Histoire de France, occupied Michelet throughout both decades of the Second Empire. During this time, he lived partly in France and partly in Italy, frequently spending winters on the French Riviera, particularly in Hyères.
The fall of Napoleon in 1870 amid France’s defeat by Prussia, followed by the rise and fall of the Paris Commune the next year, once more stimulated Michelet to activity. While he wrote letters and pamphlets during the struggle, upon its conclusion he became determined to add a 19th volume (French: XIXe siècle) to his Histoires which covered the Napoleonic Wars. He did not, however, live to carry it further than the Battle of Waterloo, and his health was beginning to fail: he opened the 19th volume with the words “l’âge me presse” (“age hurries me”). The new republic was not altogether a restoration for Michelet; his professorship at the Collège de France, of which he always contended he had been unjustly deprived, was not given back to him.
The Histoire de France
In 1867, Michelet completed his magnum opus, the Histoire de France, comprising 19 volumes. The first of these deals with early French history up to the death of Charlemagne; the second with the flourishing time of feudal France; the third with the thirteenth century; the fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes with the Hundred Years’ War; the seventh and eighth with the establishment of the royal power under Charles VII and Louis XI. The 16th and 17th centuries have four volumes apiece, much of which is very distantly connected with French history proper, especially in the two volumes entitled Renaissance and Reforme. The last three volumes carry on the history of the eighteenth century to the outbreak of the Revolution.
Marriages and Family
As a young man, Michelet married Pauline Rousseau in 1824. The couple had two children, Adèle and Charles, in 1824 and 1829, respectively. His first wife died of tuberculosis in 1839 at the age of 48.
Michelet married his second wife, Athénaïs Michelet, in 1849. She had been a teacher in Saint Petersburg and was an author in natural history and memoirs. She had opened a correspondence with him arising from her ardent admiration of his ideas that ensued for years. They became engaged before they had seen each other. After their marriage, the couple had one child, Yves Jean Lazare, in 1850. She collaborated with Michelet in his labors albeit without formal credit, introduced him to natural history, inspired him on themes, and was preparing a new work, La nature, at the time of his death in 1874. She lived until 1899.
Death and Burials
Upon his death from a heart attack at Hyères on 9 February 1874, Michelet was interred there. At his widow’s request, a Paris court granted permission for his body to be exhumed on 13 May 1876 so he could be buried in Paris. On 16 May, his coffin arrived for reburial at Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Michelet’s monument was built there, designed by architect Jean-Louis Pascal, was erected in 1893 through public subscription.
Bequest of Literary Rights
Michelet bequeathed Athénaïs literary rights to his books and papers before he died, acknowledging the significant role she had in what he published during his later years. After winning a court challenge to this bequest, Athénaïs retained the papers and publishing rights. A memoirist, she later published several books about her husband and his family based on extracts and journals he had left her. Athénaïs bequeathed that literary legacy to Gabriel Monod, a historian who founded the Revue historique journal. The historian Bonnie Smith notes the potentially misogynistic effort to discount the contributions of Athénaïs. Smith writes: “Michelet scholarship, like other historiographical debates, has taken great pains to establish the priority of the male over the female in writing history.”
Selected Works
Among Michelet’s listed works are Histoire de la révolution française (1847–1853, 7 vols.), with an English translation by Charles Cocks published in 1847; Histoire romaine (1831, 2 vols.), translated into English by William Hazlitt in 1847; and Histoire de France (1833–1867, 19 vols.), translated into English by W. K. Kelly, though only volumes 1 and 2. A collection titled On History: Introduction to World History (1831); Opening Address at the Faculty of Letters (1834); Preface to History of France (1869) was translated by Flora Kimmich, Lionel Gossman and Edward K. Kaplan and published by Open Book Publishers in 2013. The Œuvres complètes (Complete works) began publication in 1971, edited by Paul Viallaneix, with volumes 1–9, 16–18, and 20–21 published.
