There had become dominant with the eighteenth century Enlightenment and the French Revolution an idea which is not to be found in Vico, though it already existed in germ in his master Bacon: the idea of human progress, of the capacity of mankind for self-improvement. Vico, for all his originality, had never thoroughly emancipated himself from the theological point of view, which put the goal of improvement in Heaven, making salvation an individual matter dependent on the grace of God. He had been able to see that human societies pass through successive phases of development, but he seems to have imagined history as a series of repetitive cycles.
But Michelet, born in 1798, had the tradition of the Revolution. He had grown up under Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration, and in his teens he had had himself baptized a Catholic; he had accepted the post of tutor to the young Princess de Parme at the Tuileries. But he had been poor: his family on both sides had belonged to the cultivated small bourgeoisie—one of his grandfathers had been organist in the Cathedral at Laon—and his father, a printer, had been ruined by Napoleon’s suppression of the press. Two years before Jules was born, the printing shop had been raided for Jacobin literature: an incriminating manifesto, which would have cost Furcy Michelet his head, was lying in plain sight on the table and the inspector never thought to examine it; but Mme. Michelet, who was pregnant at the time, always believed that the stillbirth of her baby had been due to the shock of the raid. When Jules Michelet was ten, his father was arrested for debt, and he went along with his mother while she accompanied her husband to jail. Later, Napoleon’s police put the seals on the Michelets’ press; and the incident caused Jules such anguish that he afterwards made a stipulation in his will that his wife should not be obliged to seal his coffin. The principles of the Revolution were never far below the surface in Michelet, even in those years of his early manhood when they appeared somewhat varnished over by what had come to be the conventional bourgeois opinions.
In the July of 1830, the reaction against Charles X resulted in an uprising of workers and students which held Paris for three days and drove the white flag back into exile. Michelet, still full of Vico, became possessed by a vision of his own, in which the reawakening idealism of the tradition of the great Revolution gave purpose to Vico’s cycles. In a burst of emotion, he wrote at top speed an Introduction to Universal History. It had been dashed off, he said, “on the burning pavements” of Paris; and it opened with the following declaration: “With the world began a war which will end only with the world: the war of man against nature, of spirit against matter, of liberty against fatality. History is nothing other than the record of this interminable struggle.” Christianity has given the world the moral gospel; now France must preach the social gospel. “The solutions to social and intellectual problems are always ineffective in Europe until they have been interpreted, translated, popularized, by France.”
But the victory of the workers was premature; the provinces failed to support Paris; and the liberal bourgeoisie, instead of restoring the republic, sold out to the Orleanist party, who set up the constitutional monarch, Louis-Philippe. Michelet went back to the Tuileries, where he now had a new princess to tutor, Louis-Philippe’s daughter. But he got also an appointment more important to him: he was made Conservateur des Archives, head of the Record Office. And with the charters, the statutes and the official correspondence of ancient France at his disposal, he embarked on his History of the Middle Ages.
When Michelet went into the Records, with Vico and the echoes of July in his head, a new past, for the first time the real past of France, seemed to revive for the imagination. The first volume or two of Michelet’s history, dealing with the early races of Gaul, a period where documents are few and as to which, even in the light of later scholarship, we still remain considerably in the dark, were not particularly successful as “resurrection” of the past, the phrase Michelet applied to his method. It is only with the chapter called Map of France and devoted to the description of the country, that the characteristic Michelet appears. But as we get on into the ages where the materials are more plentiful, the miracle begins to take place.
Michelet’s letters during this period supply a remarkable picture of his conception of his historian’s task and the passion with which he attacked it.
“I believe I have found,” he writes, “through concentration and reverberation, a flame sufficiently intense to melt down all the apparent diversities, to restore to them in history the unity they had in life… . I have not been able to interpret the least social fact without calling all the departments of human activity to my aid, and coming more and more to realize that our classifications do not hold… . To undertake to combine so many elements alien to one another is to harbor within oneself a great disturbing force. To reproduce so many passions is not to calm one’s own. A lamp which is hot enough to fuse whole peoples is hot enough to consume its very hearth… . I have never yet [he is writing of the Renaissance now] lifted so great a mass, combined in a living unity so many apparently discordant elements… . I am trying to twist those threads which have never been woven together in science: law, art, etc., to show how a certain statue, a certain picture, is an event in the history of law, to follow the social movement from the stocky serf who upholds the niches of the feudal saints to the fantasy of the court (Goujon’s Diana), even to Béranger. This double thread is twisted of industry and religion. It is easy for the imagination to catch a glimpse of this interaction, but to determine with any certitude the manner, the quantity, of the action, to found so new a theory scientifically, requires no small effort.”
Behind the chronicles and legends of the Middle Ages, which that flame had rendered transparent, there now narrowed down into focus a new and distinct panorama. No one had really explored the French archives before; the histories had mostly been written from other histories. Michelet tells how in those “solitary galleries, where I wandered twenty years, in that deep silence, there had come to me the whispers of the souls who had suffered so long ago and who were smothered now in the past”—all the soldiers fallen in all the wars, reminding him of the hard reality and demanding of him bitterly whether he had come there to write romances in the manner of Walter Scott, prompting him to put into the record what had been left out by Monstrelet and Froissart, the “hired chroniclers” of the age of chivalry. One has heard Michelet called a romantic; and his history has plenty of movement and color and, in its early phases, passages of wordy rhetoric. But Michelet’s fundamental attitude is certainly, as he insists, realistic and not romantic. He worked by himself, he says—the romantic movement “passed him by.” “We are all more or less romantics,” he had written in his journal at twenty-two. “It is a disease in the air we breathe. He is lucky who has equipped himself early with enough good sense and natural feeling to react against it.”
The great mediaeval stories are in Michelet, and they are made vivid with a peculiar intensity; but the effect of the historian’s treatment is to clear up the haze of myth about them. And they are presented in relation to a background of economic and social processes quite unknown to the school of romantic fiction of which Michelet disapproved. It was characteristic of the romantics to be interested in remarkable individuals for their own sake; Michelet was interested in remarkable individuals as representatives of movements and groups. The stately language of the old chronicles no longer gave its tapestry remoteness to the Crusades and the Hundred Years’ War. Michelet made them take place on the same stage and pitched them at the same level of dignity as the wars of drilled regiments and artillery. What interests the historian more than the feats of individual prowess is the developing technique of warfare.
And we remember the terrible description of the peasants in the chapter on the peasant revolts when we have forgotten Philippe de Valois and Philippe le Bel: “Today,” Michelet writes, “there are few châteaux left. The decrees of Richelieu and the Revolution have seen to that. Yet when we find ourselves even now in our travels under the walls of Taillebourg or Tancarville, when in the depths of the Ardennes forest, in the Montcornet gorge, we catch sight above our heads, of the squinting oblique eye watching us pass, our heart contracts and we feel something of the sufferings of those who for so many centuries wasted at the foot of those towers. To know it we do not even need to have read the old histories. The souls of our fathers still throb in us for pains that have been forgotten, almost as the man who has been wounded feels an ache in the hand he has lost.”
Michelet has done a good deal, it is true, to make Jeanne d’Arc popular and famous; but it was as the spokesman for the national sense of the people, not as a mystic or a saint, that she interested him. “What legend is more beautiful,” he writes, “than this incontestable story? But one must be careful not to make it into a legend. One must piously preserve all its circumstances, even the most human; one must respect its touching and terrible humanity… . However deeply the historian may have been moved in writing this gospel, he has kept a firm hold on the real and never yielded to the temptation of idealism.” And he insisted that Jeanne d’Arc had established the modern type of hero of action, “contrary to passive Christianity.” His approach was thus entirely rational, based squarely on the philosophy of the eighteenth century—anti-clerical, democratic. And for this reason, the History of the Middle Ages, important as it is, and for all its acute insight and its passages of marvelous eloquence, seems to me less satisfactory than the other parts of Michelet’s history. What Michelet really admires are not the virtues which the chivalrous and Christian centuries cultivated, but the heroisms of the scientist and the artist, the Protestant in religion and politics, the efforts of man to understand his situation and rationally to control his development. Throughout the Middle Ages, Michelet is impatient for the Renaissance.
The reign of Louis XI, letting him down after Jeanne d’Arc, is too much for Michelet: though he is never precisely dull, he makes us feel during the periods which do not interest him his fatigue and his lack of sympathy. In the middle of Louis XI, he heaves a great sigh of oppression: “The history of the fifteenth century is a long history,” he writes, “—long are its years and long its hours. They were so for those who lived them, and they are so for him who has to begin them again and relive them. I mean, for the historian, who, taking history as something more than a game, makes the effort in good faith to enter into the life of the past… . For where is the life here? Who can say here which are the living and which are the dead? In what party am I to take an interest? Is there one among these various figures who is not either dubious or false? Is there one on whom the eye may rest and find expressed in him clearly the ideas, the principles, on which the heart of man lives? We have descended low indeed into indifference and moral death. And we must descend lower still.”
In the meantime, in Michelet’s own century, the struggle between the reaction and the republic is pressing to an issue again. The clergy are denouncing Michelet’s history; and the child of the Revolution is called again to vindicate its principles. The Princess Clémentine gets married, and Michelet resigns his post as tutor; and in his course at the Collège de France, where he is now a popular figure, he begins a series of lectures against the Jesuits. Among his colleagues were the militant Quinet and the exiled Polish patriot Mickiewicz. “Action, action!” Michelet wrote in July, 1842, “action alone can console us! We owe it not only to man, but to all that lower nature which struggles up toward man, which contains the potentiality of his thought—to carry on vigorously thought and action.” From 1843 on, Michelet follows a definite and uncompromising line. He turns his back on the Middle Ages, having given them, as he believes, all the sympathetic attention they deserve. It has become dangerous now to idealize them; the cult of that past only leads to reaction; the old tyrannies come back with the romance. And Michelet, although he did not engage in political action, jumped his history forward from the fifteenth century to the French Revolution, whose purposes and achievements he felt had been obscured by the confusion of events which had followed it. He was now at the height of his power; and, under pressure of the mounting passion which was to burst forth in 1848, he threw himself into the epic of three centuries which was to occupy him all the rest of his life and to which the History of the Middle Ages was to serve as scarcely more than an introduction.