The career of the historian Jules Michelet (Paris 1798 – Hyères 1874), a major figure in the development of French historiography, spanned the politically turbulent period from the Restoration, through the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, to the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870. His cultural significance lies in the first instance in his historiographical work, which however was also deeply entangled with his role as a public intellectual, educator, and spokesman for a republican-inflected and anticlerical nationalism rooted in the secular ideals of the Revolution of 1789-92. This was particularly the case in the late 1840s when, together with his colleagues Edgar Quinet (1803–1875) and the exiled Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), he used his position at the Collège de France to propagate the values of the secular republic based on the sovereignty of the peuple (an idea he articulated in his polemical Le peuple of 1846). This radical anticlerical republicanism brought him into disfavour with the regime both in the run-up to the 1848 revolution and in the Second Empire which followed it; but it also meant that Michelet would subsequently become an icon of the principles of popular sovereignty and the legacy of the First Republic of 1792-1804. This status was reflected in the public ceremony to mark his 1874 interment at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris (attended by an estimated crowd of 10,000 supporters), and at the centenary of his birth in 1898, when an official ceremony at the Panthéon sealed the close association between the historian, his view of French history, and the Third Republic. Not surprisingly, his Histoire de la Révolution Française (1847-53) went through no fewer than 11 editions in the last decades of the 19th century.

Michelet has often been designated as a “child of the Revolution”, referring both to the decade of his birth and to the modest prosperity that his father, a printer, gained from the production of revolutionary paper money (assignats). Although this prosperity came to an end in 1808, the young Michelet was able nevertheless to profit from the social mobility of the time to go on for further education, ultimately obtaining a doctorate, a teaching position at the École préparatoire (as of 1826 renamed the École normale supérieure), and, as of 1838, a history chair at the Collège de France, which he held until the fall of the Second Republic in 1852. Despite Michelet’s rise into the intellectual and academic elite, the historian remained true to his familial roots: throughout his career he promoted, as did so many other Romantics, the idea that the nation is best exemplified by skilled workers involved in traditional crafts and deploying traditional knowledge, be this in the city or the country, rather than by the industrial workers who were fast becoming the face of modernity.

Michelet’s career also coincided with the growing institutionalization of historiography and historical enquiry as a pillar of national culture. In 1830 he was appointed head of the historical section of the newly constituted National Archives and contributed from this position to expanding and consolidating this archival repository of the new regime’s collective memory. In this way, he also helped to consolidate the shift towards archive-based historiography that was such a vital part of the professionalization of historians in this period (Michelet’s student Gabriel Monod would in 1876 found the Revue historique, the premier French forum for academic history). Though philology was never a primary concern for Michelet, he did contribute occasionally to the collecting of medieval and other manuscripts of historical interest from regional repositories, as part of a major archiving and editorial drive initiated by fellow-historian Francois Guizot (1787–1874), minister of public instruction in the July Monarchy (1832-37).

Michelet’s earliest achievements were inspired by foreign examples and acts of cultural transfer. He was responsible for the first translation into French of Giambattista Vico’s La Scienza nuova (La science nouvelle, ou Principes de la philosophie de l’Histoire, 1835), and thus played an important role in transferring knowledge of Vico’s ideas about the mission of cultural history to a new generation of Romantic historians. His Origines du droit français (1837), a historical account of the cultural foundations of French law, was overtly endebted to the work of the German legal historian Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779–1861) and the German folklorist and philologist Jacob Grimm, with whom Michelet also corresponded.

Also in the late 1830s, Michelet embarked on his magnum opus: a multivolume Histoire de France which would only be completed in 1867. Over the course of some 17 volumes, this vast work covered the entire history of France up to the Revolution. A separate study on the 19th century was in progress at the time of his death in 1874, while an intercalated series, devoted specifically to the Revolution, was published between 1847 (on the eve of the 1848 Revolution) and 1853 (by which time the historian had gone into self-imposed exile and resigned his academic position). In addition to these historical works, Michelet also produced historical essays with a more polemical and political thrust, such as the above-mentioned Le peuple or his various works on the oppression of Poland, including the Polish sections of the Légendes démocratiques du Nord (1854; reissued as La Pologne martyre in 1863). Finally, Michelet’s oeuvre also included a series of a experimental writings combining history, philosophy, and poetry; some of these highlighted the role of women in history (La femme, 1858; La sorcière, 1862), while other works might best be described as poetical natural histories or works of proto-environmentalism (La mer, 1861; La montagne, 1868).

At least four themes cut through this enormous oeuvre. To begin with, Michelet was a pioneer of Romantic historicism in France, and one who went even further than contemporaries like Augustin Thierry (1795–1856) in conceptualizing the pursuit of history as a source of collective identity and of a powerful communitas. On various occasions, he advocated the writing of a history which would in effect have no proper names since its collective subject would be the anonymous people-at-large, in whose service he was writing. In the preface to the second volume of his unfinished history of the 19th century, he transferred the Romantic idea of the poet-as-visionary to the domain of history by depicting himself in vatic terms as a seer who, through the power of his imagination, knowledge of the archives, and commitment to social justice, could reach across the generations and resurrect the dead:

[L’histoire] donne une nouvelle vie à ces morts, les ressuscite. Sa justice associe ainsi ceux qui n’ont pas vécu en même temps, fait réparation à plusieurs qui n’avaient paru qu’un moment pour disparaître. [...] Ainsi se fait une famille, une cité commune entre les vivants et les morts.

Secondly, the imagined historical community or communitas that Michelet envisaged was a profoundly nationalized one: in line with Hegelian historicism, he invoked the existence of a nation (with its essence in the popular classes, the peuple) whose long-term history consisted of a titanic struggle against injustice in order to fulfil its spiritual destiny as a nation. That struggle had finally succeeded in the Revolution of 1789 and the Republic of 1792 (although it then ran into new forces of resistance and reaction, so that the national struggle was still ongoing in the 19th century).

Thirdly, Michelet’s historicism was profoundly concerned with the “Others” of history – the victims, the oppressed, the forgotten, the marginalized, the dispossessed: all those who had been left out of earlier accounts written by the victorious parties of the past. Writing in the aftermath of a revolution which had brought the peuple to power, he believed that history had a new mission to re-instate those whose lives had been erased from earlier accounts – including women, to whom, as indicated above, Michelet paid considerable attention. While an interest in history’s “Others” was a regular feature of Romanticism as it was practised in a variety of genres across Europe, Michelet infused this theme with a remarkable ethical and political urgency that was reflected in his poetic, quasi-evangelical style of writing.

Finally, this concern with history’s “Others” led him into pioneering work in the field of popular culture and everyday life, for which there were as yet no archives. As he indicated in the general preface to his Histoire de France (written in 1869), he aimed for no less than a “resurrection of life as a whole” (une résurrection de la vie intégrale). As a result, he experimented with narrative forms, alternative sources, and imaginative recreations in order to “resurrect” the largely undocumented past of popular experience. The latter was most notable in his influential work on witchcraft, La sorcière, which, inspired by Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie of 1835 and arguably also by Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), has since come to be seen as a foundational work both of women’s history and the history of mentalities. As his later interest in natural history indicates, as well as his famous “Tableau de la France” (1861), Michelet can thus also be seen as the founder of a more ecological approach to the nation and to its history, in which material and physical conditions, forms of knowledge, cultural practices, and political action are all tied up with each other. This multi-faceted creativity has ensured Michelet’s cultural survival long after his actual histories have been overtaken.