The French monarchy had had a long tradition of court historiography, and history was one of the most prestigious genres in the field of belles-lettres. Key texts in the run-up range from humanist antiquarianism (e.g. Hotman’s Franco-Gallia) to Voltaire (Annales de l’Empire depuis Charlemagne, 1753; Le siècle de Louis XIV, 1751). An important innovation came with methodically organized documentary source criticism (Mabillon, De re diplomatica, 1681). This enabled the great enterprises of the Benedictines of St Maur, notably the Histoire littéraire de France, the initial 12 volumes of which appeared between 1739 and 1763. In 1814 the work, interrupted during the Revolution, was taken up again, now under the auspices of the Académie des inscriptions, and contributed much to a post-Restoration interest in the Middle Ages. Government support for the enterprise was also channelled through the Ecole des Chartes, which was established in 1818 with the express aim of training archivists, paleographers, and textual scholars. One of the most momentous medieval interests to be triggered in the Restoration years was the figure of Joan of Arc, mocked by Voltaire and vindicated by Schiller in the preceding decades. An Histoire de Jeanne d’Arc, surnommée la Pucelle d’Orléans, by Philippe-Alexandre Le Brun de Charmettes, appeared in 4 volumes in 1817. After Guizot had established the Société de l’histoire de France, Jules Quicherat was entrusted with editing the original trial records; these appeared as Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc dite la Pucelle between 1841 and 1849, unleashed a vogue of starry-eyed historiographical and literary celebrations of the national saviour/martyr, and boosted her canonization process (set in motion in 1855, beatification 1909, canonization 1920). The cult intensified, as did so many other Romantic-national trends, in the revanchist climate of 1871-1914.

One of the key texts celebrating Jeanne was Jeanne d’Arc (1853) by Jules Michelet (1798–1874), an outtake of the author’s Histoire de France. Michelet by then was the established leader of the Romantic school of French history-writing. Together with other Romantics like Prosper de Barante and the brothers Augustin Thierry and Amédée Thierry, these historians had started their career in the medievalist climate of the Restoration, had learned the power of archival research in an attempt to get closer to a first-hand, direct sensation of being in contact with the past, and in this agenda had gone beyond the official governmental records to recover the experience of the wider sections of the population. For Michelet and other democrats, these wider sections were “the people”, which, in proper Romantic mode, also counted as the true embodiment of an abstract-ideal principle of “La France”, the spirit of the nation. Hence the national histories written by such Romantic historians were at the same time democratic (celebrating the people-at-large, denouncing their oppression, and making their collective experiences the organizing principles of their historical narrative) and nationally-transcendent (seeing in the acts and struggles of the people the workings of an eternal, spiritual principle of True Frenchness).

The Geneva-born Simonde de Sismondi had previously delivered an Enlightenment-Patriotic celebration of the city republics and civic municipalities of the Ancien Régime, especially in the Midi; his Histoire des Français (30 vols, 1821-44) appeared in tandem with a Histoire des républiques italiennes du Moyen-Âge, which was influential source of inspiration in the risorgimento. For other historians, like the Thierry brothers and, later, Henri Martin, “the people” were also an ethnic or even racial group: an amalgam of successive Gaulish, Roman, and Frankish inhabitants of the French territory, each with their own temperament and character, each formative of the destiny of their successor-nation, modern France. Augustin Thierry was indebted for this ethnohistorical model to Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which had described medieval England as a bi-ethnic society consisting of conquering Normans and conquered Anglo-Saxons. Thierry applied this to a Frankish-Gaulish view of French history (Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands, 1825), and this view would later be adapted to the Belgian situation, with French overlords and Flemish peasants and townspeople, by Kervyn de Lettenhove and Hendrik Conscience. Given the democratic-mindedness of these historians, their political sympathies were usually with the oppressed but irrepressible Gauls, whom they saw as ancestors of the country’s popular classes, and opposed to the aristocracy as descendants of the conquering Franks. The Gauls were canonized into “our ancestors” (schoolbooks beginning with the hallowed phrase Nos ancêtres les Gaulois), Merovingian and medieval times were evoked as a period of cruelty, court intrigue, and brutality (as per Thierry’s Récits des temps mérovingiens, 1840).

The view of French history as a long-drawn-out ethnic conflict between an oppressed Gaulish-descended common people and Frankish-descended aristocrats was sharpened further by the popular historian Henri Martin (1810–1883). His massive multi-volume, heavily source-anchored but deeply anecdotal and melodramatic Histoire de France (16 vols, 1833-36; continued in 8 more vols, 1878-83) eventually earned him a seat on the Académie française. His vision of France as a Celtic country temperamentally and historically destined to be at war with its neighbouring Teutons influenced both a more broadly cultural production (Eugène Sue, Les mystères du peuple; Alexandre Dumas, Francs et Gaulois) and the political climate after 1871. Archeologists and early-period historians following Fustel de Coulanges and Camille Jullian would write against the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and aganst the aggressor of 1914 with a set of historical ethnotypes essentially derived from Martin. For his part, Martin contributed a drama Vercingetorix to Napoleon III’s archeological cult of that chieftain in 1865, published his Etudes d’archéologie celtique in 1871, and became founding president of the Ligue des Patriotes in 1874.

However, the towering achievement of total-survey histories of France is Jules Michelet’s Histoire de France (19 vols, 1837-67); and in Michelet’s work, the focus is not only on the ethnic or national-popular foundation of the country’s history, but above all the on great crisis moment of the French Revolution, the fulcrum also of his own historiographical career (Histoire de la Révolution francaise, 7 vols, 1847-53). Michelet had moved steadily to the left and into a more anticlerical direction in the early parts of his career, and his 1838 appointment at the Collège de France, alongside Edgar Quinet and Adam Mickiewicz, made him one of the three great (and embattled) intellectual leaders of radical-democratic Liberalism in the turbulent 1840s. Michelet confronted the Revolution, a period of considerable unease in the country’s fractious politics, as a crucible in which the French nation, despite its inner enmities and setbacks, rose to the sublimest heights of its historical mission: the spread of brotherhood and democracy. This decidedly Romantic view of the Revolution helped to reclaim its programme and memories for future political use, and formed the great historiographical sounding-board, together with Lamartine’s and Louis Blanc’s Revolution histories, against which the events of 1848 were played out. Michelet spread his vision of the meaning of the past with the help of his considerable rhetorical talent, writing in a lyrical and oratorical style, relying on empathy with the past as much as on source documentation, and aiming to move as well as to convince his readers.

Even so, Michelet was a child of the archival revolution of the early 1800s. Like Thierry, he relied on access to original sources which the library and archive reforms of the Revolutionary and Napeolonic decades had systematized and made publicly accessible – he had been made head of the historical section of the Archives nationales by Guizot in 1830. His successors Gabriel Monod (founder of the Revue historique in 1876), Ernest Lavisse, Charles Seignobos, and Charles-Victor Langlois would take this new professionalism into a more positivistic and methodic direction, away from Michelet’s Romantic-literary style. Michelet’s last great successor was possibly the political leader Jean Jaurès, whose Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française (1901-08) aimed, as Jaurès put it, to combine Marx’s materialism with Michelet’s mystique. As elsewhere in Europe, France’s Romantic historians were academically ousted by their positivistic successors; but their hold on the public imagination proved enduring.