The mature Michelet is a strange phenomenon. He is in many ways more comparable to a novelist like Balzac than to the ordinary historian. He had the novelists social interest and grasp of character, the poet’s imagination and passion. All this, by some unique combination of chances, instead of exercising itself freely on contemporary life, had been turned backward upon history and was united with a scientific appetite for facts which drove him into arduous researches.
He had grown up in isolation from his fellows and much thrown in on his own resources. Michelet’s early life had been sad, poor and hard. Born in a dark and damp old church which had been deserted for many years and let in the wind and rain through broken windows, but which his father had got cheap for a printing office, he spent his youth and a good deal of his young manhood amidst surroundings peculiarly depressing. “I grew up,” he wrote, “like a weed without sun between two paving stones of Paris.” Up to the time that Jules Michelet was fifteen, the family had no meat and no wine; they lived on boiled vegetables and bread. And in the basement in which they were lodging during the years when Jules was going to school, they spent winter after winter without heat. Jules’s hands got so badly chapped that he kept the scars all the rest of his life. Living at close quarters, the father and mother quarreled constantly, and the boy had to witness these quarrels. When he was seventeen, his mother died of cancer. At school, he was weakly, queer and shy, and a butt for the other boys. He could not make friends among them; he came to them out of a different world. When the other boys left school, it was to go home to bourgeois comfort and leisure; when Jules went home, it was to work on the press. He had learned to set type at twelve.
But near the press in that bleak and unhealthy basement, he was building up for himself his own empire. In proportion as he was hungry and cold, so was he forced in for food and heat on his own mind and imagination. After all, he was an only child of whom his parents expected much and for whom they procured such advantages as they could. Later in life, he was to write to his son-in-law on the question of his grandson’s schooling: “The most important matter is Etienne. I must hand on to him what my parents did for me in providing me by unexampled sacrifices with freedom, freedom to have time for my work. Let us not indulge in false democratic attitudes. The worker is a slave either of the will of others or of fate. I escaped that, thanks to my father and mother.” And, after all, although, as we shall see, the damp and chill winters of Paris put their blight on all Michelet’s youth, he was a Parisian, and that was to mean to him all his life to have been born to a great intellectual inheritance. He speaks in one of his letters of his eagerness to get back to “our Paris, that great keyboard with its hundred thousand keys that one can play on every day—I mean by that its innumerable intellectual resources,”
And finally—what provided Michelet with a special kind of outlook and training—the Michelets were a family of printers, who had their printing press to give them a common interest and a sort of esprit de corps. The press was to become for Michelet the great symbol of the advance of modern thought, and printing a veritable religion. There was something in the Michelets still of the spirit of the great Renaissance printers such as the Etiennes and the Alduses, of whom Michelet gives so stirring an account—those extraordinary learned families who, transported by the discovery of antiquity and hardly stopping to sleep at night, managed not merely to set up the classics but to edit and elucidate them, too. So, up to the time of his death, Michelet’s father worked with him over his history. And Michelet’s interest in the freedom of the press and the progress of human science is that of a man to whom printing is still an adventure and a conquest. It is an essential part of Michelet’s strength and charm that he should seem less like a nineteenth-century scholar than like the last great man of letters of the Renaissance. In his early years he mastered Latin and Greek with a thoroughness which was at that time already rare; and he later acquired English, Italian and German and devoured the literature and learning of those languages. With small means, he succeeded in traveling pretty much all over Western Europe, and those regions, such as the Slavic East, to which his actual travels did not penetrate, his insatiable mind invaded. The impression he makes on us is quite different from that of the ordinary modern scholar who has specialized in some narrowly delimited subject and gotten it up in a graduate school: we feel that Michelet has read all the books, been to look at all the monuments and pictures, interviewed personally all the authorities, and explored all the libraries and archives of Europe; and that he has it all under his hat. The Goncourts said that Michelet’s attractiveness lay in the fact that his works “seem to be written by hand. They are free from the banality and impersonality which the printed thing has; they are like the autograph of a thought.” But what Michelet really goes back to is an earlier stage of printing before either the journalistic or the academic formulas had come between first-hand knowledge and us. He is simply a man going to the sources and trying to get down on record what can be learned from them; and this role, which claims for itself, on the one hand, no academic sanctions, involves, on the other hand, a more direct responsibility to the reader.
Michelet thus learned from the beginning to fortify himself inside an intellectual citadel impregnable to hardship or disaster. The external circumstances of his life continued to be somber and distressing. After the death of Mme. Michelet, Jules’s father was given an odd kind of employment presiding over an institution which was half boarding-house, half insane asylum. There Michelet spent some eight years of his youth in the company of cracked and impoverished persons left over from the old regime, and of the doctors and attendants who took care of them. Jules married the young companion of an old and feebleminded marquise. She had little in common with Michelet and after fifteen years died of consumption, leaving him with two children. During these years, as a young professor, Michelet would get up at four in the morning and read, write and teach all day: he even took a book on his afternoon walk. He had made one close friend, a medical student, with whom he shared the intellectual passions which, as he said, “devoured” his youth; but this young man, to Michelet’s anguish, had also come down with consumption, had sickened and wasted and died.
There is perhaps no more amazing example in literature of the expansion of a limited individual experience into a great work of the imagination. When the frail and solitary printer’s son came to turn himself inside out in his books, he gave the world, not, as his romantic contemporaries did, personal exaltations and despairs swollen to heroic volume, but the agonizing drama of the emergence of the modern world out of feudalism. His history of France, immense though it is and with all its complexity, variation and detail, displays a bold emotional design which is easily referable to Michelet’s own experience. The centuries which lead up to the Revolution are like a long and solitary youth waiting year after year for self-expression, release, the assertion of unacknowledged rights, the free association with others. The climax of the story is the moment of the founding of the Federations in the year after the taking of the Bastille, when communities all over France met together to swear fraternity and devotion to the Revolution. Michelet had been the first historian to investigate and emphasize this phenomenon. “At no other time, I believe,” he wrote, “has the heart of man been wider and more spacious—at no other time have distinctions of class, of fortune and of party been more completely forgotten.” But it was a moment only; after that, the back-flow of old instincts and interests among the purposes and hopes of the new was to bring years of confusion and disorder. The leaders were to find themselves undone by their own internal contradictions between the new and the old—as Michelet, before making his stand, had found himself between his royal patrons and his revolutionary tradition. Michelet was himself the child of that period of paradoxes; and he was to become par excellence the historian of the perplexed personalities and political anomalies peculiar to an age of social change. This idea of contradictions inside a social system, which is to play, as we shall see, such a prominent role in later social-economic thought, already pervades Michelet to such an extent that we may trace to it the habit of verbal paradox which grew on him in the later-written volumes of his history, where he is dealing with the impasses of the old regime. With Michelet, the typical internal antithesis —which splits up and prevents from functioning the individual or the political body—is between class solidarity on the one hand and patriotic duty on the other; and beyond it, one is always aware of the two opposite emotional poles which magnetize Michelet’s world and give it its moral system: a cold and anti-social egoism and the impulse toward human solidarity.
To return again to Michelet’s own century, the Revolution of 1848 had come and gone before Michelet had finished his history of the Revolution of 1789. In 1848, on the eve of the February revolution, Michelet’s lectures had been considered so inflammatory that his course had been suspended; but after the revolution, he had been reinstated in his chair. When Louis Bonaparte made himself Emperor in 1851, Michelet was dismissed without a pension, and when he refused to take the oath of allegiance, was deprived of his post at the Archives. He was a poor man again now after a period of relative prosperity; and from a position of direct public influence, he found himself alone with his history. “He who knows how to be poor knows everything,” he wrote. He had ended the History of the Revolution with the fall of Robespierre, and now he set himself to fill up the gap between the death of Louis XI and the taking of the Bastille. When he had done that, he picked up the story again at the fall of Robespierre and brought it down through Waterloo.
And as the years went on and volume after volume made the long continuity of the History of France, Michelet, living out three-quarters of the century, came to impress himself upon it profoundly. He was the man who, above all others, had supplied the French of his time with a past. He was read with enthusiasm by writers as different as Lamartine, Montalembert, Victor Hugo, Heine, Herzen, Proudhon, Béranger, Renan, Taine, the Goncourts and Flaubert. He was an artist as well as a thinker, and so penetrated to parts of the intellectual world widely remote from one another and influenced a variety of writers in a curious variety of ways.
What Michelet regarded as his gospel we may leave for discussion later: his ideas were always expounded on a level more or less distinct from that on which his narrative was developed. Let us consider his history as a work of art and in its philosophical implications.
Two principal problems confronted Michelet in writing history in such a way as to render the organic character of society, of that “humanity creating itself” of which he had caught the conception from Vico. One of these was the nerve-trying task under which we have seen him gasping in his letters: that of fusing disparate materials, of indicating the interrelations between diverse forms of human activity. The other was to recapture, as it were, the peculiar shape and color of history as it must have seemed to the men who lived it—to return into the past as if it were present and see the world without definite foreknowledge of the as yet uncreated future. And in conceiving and carrying out these feats, Michelet seems to me to have proved himself a great intellect and a great artist.
One of the primary aspects of the fusing process was the relation of the individual to the mass; and Michelet’s handling of this has probably never been surpassed, even in fiction. “Another thing,” he wrote in the History of the Revolution, “which this History will clearly establish and which holds true in every connection, is that the people were usually more important than the leaders. The deeper I have excavated, the more surely I have satisfied myself that the best was underneath, in the obscure depths. And I have realized that it is quite wrong to take these brilliant and powerful talkers, who expressed the thought of the masses, for the sole actors in the drama. They were given the impulse by others much more than they gave it themselves. The principal actor is the people. To find the people again and put it back in its proper role, I have been obliged to reduce to their proportions the ambitious marionettes whose strings it manipulated and in whom hitherto we have looked for and thought to see the secret play of history.” And in regard to remarkable persons in general, Michelet always shows them in their relation to the social group which has molded them and whose feelings they are finding expression for, whose needs they are attempting to satisfy. Yet even the personalities of the revolutionary leaders are made vivid and idiosyncratic; they are at intervals brought so close to us that we can note a change in their health or morale, their manner or their way of dressing; we follow their private relationships, enter into their love affairs. Michelet is equally successful in dealing with individuals and communities. The special personality of a city or a locality—Lyons, Avignon, the Vendée—is rendered with the same masterly sense of character; and the various social elements which compose it are shown in their interaction like the elements in a single human character. And then there are the persons of secondary importance, like Ravaillac, the assassin of Henri IV, or Madame Guyon, the eighteenth-century mystic, or the totally obscure persons like Grainville, the unfortunate schoolmaster of Amiens, who seemed to concentrate in his destiny all the disillusion and despair of the aftermath of the Revolution—those minor figures of whom Michelet will give us a portrait in a chapter, making us see clearly in the single cell some function or some malady of the body.
Michelet’s skill at shifting back and forth between the close-up of the individual, the movement of the local group and the analytic survey of the whole, is one of the features of a technical virtuosity which becomes more and more amazing.
Michelet first begins really to master his method toward the middle of the History of the Revolution, where he has to range over an immense keyboard in relating the developments in the provinces to political events in Paris. I cannot allow Lytton Strachey’s opinion that the centuries leading up to the Revolution are the most successful section of Michelet (the volumes on the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were written after the volumes on the Revolution). The Revolution is a much more disorderly and much more difficult subject; and the very crowdedness and jaggedness of Michelet’s treatment of it are the signs of a determination to lay hold of a complex reality which had been simplified to make texts for many, sermons, revolutionary and reactionary alike. It was with justice that Michelet claimed that, though there had been royalist and Robespierre histories of the Revolution—both “monarchist” versions, he insisted—he had written the first republican history. Yet in the volumes which deal with the centuries preceding, where Michelet has a clear stretch of slow developments, the great rhythmic recurrences of history are interwoven with a cumulative force and a symphonic effect which surely represent the extreme limit of the capacity of the artist to use historical fact as material. Michelet manipulates his themes, dropping them and picking them up at intervals, as if he were braiding a rope: the periodical assemblies of the States-General, gradually acquiring a new significance; the progressive sterilization and incompetence of the Court; the technical development of warfare; the books that mark the dawn of the Enlightenment; the episodes of the Protestant persecution; the series of witchcraft trials which show the decay of Catholicism in the convents. Yet the plaiting of a rope is too coarse an image. No image except that of life itself can convey the penetrating intelligence and the masterly skill of presentation with which, in the volumes on Louis XIV, for example, Michelet interrelates the intrigues of the Court, the subjects of Molière’s comedies and the economic condition of France; or the completeness of the volume on the Regency—Michelet groans over his travail with this in his letters: “Nothing more difficult, more dispersed, more arduous to reconstruct!”—in which the good intentions of the liberal Regent are so subtly shown to prove ineffective by reason of his inextricable entanglement with the dying class to which he belongs—a story ending with one of those sharp incidents which Michelet is so good at finding to nail down a situation: the Duc d’Orléans, his reforms come to nothing and with only the solace of dissipation left, exclaiming bitterly, “Poor damned country, governed by a drunkard and a pimp!”
At intervals, Michelet halts his narrative to give a description of the general life of the time: the habits, the costumes, the moral atmosphere; and he here displays his peculiar genius for identifying himself with each period as he passes through it. This is one of the main differences between Michelet’s method and the method of the ordinary historian. The ordinary historian knows what is going to happen in the course of his historical narrative, because he knows what has really happened; but Michelet is able to put us back at upper stages of the stream of time, so that we grope with the people of the past themselves, share their heroic faiths, are dismayed by their unexpected catastrophes, feel, for all our knowledge of after-the-event, that we do not know precisely what is coming. Michelet responds with the sensitivity of a poet to every change of tempo, movement or scope; and he develops an infinitely varied technique to register different phases. The genius which has been admired in his books on natural history and which enabled him to render the humming-bird’s darting, the flap of the frigate bird, the lightness and song of the lark, the muffled swoop of the owl, with an accuracy almost Tennysonian, appears in his treatment of history in a much more extraordinary way. The processes which lead up to the Revolution are presented, as I have described, in a rotating series of episodes; we are made to see how things are going, without very much comment by Michelet, as we observe certain tendencies recurring and growing gradually more pronounced in the behavior of various individuals or groups. I do not know of anything in literature more remarkable in its way than the skill with which Michelet leads us, as we follow generation after generation of kings, to feel the old virtue passing out of them, the lapsing of their contact with the people. The great rooms of Fontainebleau and Versailles seem to get colder and larger and the figures smaller and more alone; they are not usually made odious so much as wretched—Michelet remembered the poor queer relics of the sanitarium in which he had lived; and we are finally startled but not surprised to find Louis the Sun King himself eclipsed in his windowless inside room, bored with the old and deaf Madame de Maintenon, nagged by the quarrels of the monks and losing his magnificent manners at last in his fury against the obstinate parliament. To give us a final symbol for the monarchy, Michelet has only to describe without comment the expense and the clumsy complication of the great waterworks at Marly which make the Versailles fountains play and which fill the air for miles around with their agonized creakings and groanings.
The chapters on the Federations are rhapsodic; the chapters on the last days of the Terror have an infernal, an almost intolerable intensity: with the overloaded cemeteries of Paris planted unbreathably in the background of our minds, Michelet confines us for chapter after chapter among the mutually repellent human units, in the constantly tightening atmosphere of panic of the committee rooms and assemblies of the capital. “I have already begun changing the rhythm of my history,” he writes in one of his letters. “There are no more big chapters, but little sections, speeding by one after the other. The prodigious acceleration of pulse is the dominant phenomenon of the Terror.” He takes history now day by day, instead of year by year or month by month—making even the weather play its part in the complex, when he can find out what it is: “October thirtieth dawned pale and rainy”—of the day when the Girondists were guillotined—“one of those livid days which have the weariness of winter but not its sinew, its salutary austerity. On those sad nerveless days the fiber weakens; many persons sink below themselves. And they took care to forbid that any stimulant be administered to the condemned.” … Then the relief and awakening life of the Directory. The people coming out of the houses and going about the streets. And the great opening out of the scope and speeding up of the pace with Napoleon—till, lifted high above political bodies, we can look out on the breadth of Europe, taking it in from Ireland to Russia, and understand that we have to do with processes which involve the whole of the West.
One remarkable device of Michelet’s has since been exploited and made famous by the novelist Marcel Proust. Proust, who invokes Michelet (though in a different connection) and who obviously owes a good deal in his volumes on Sodom and Gomorrah to Michelet’s picture of the processes of decadence, seems to have taken from him also the cue for his theory of the relativity of character. The more important actors in Michelet’s history often produce sharply varying impressions as they are shown us at different ages and in different situations—that is, each is made to appear at any given moment in the particular role that he is playing at the moment, without reference to the roles he is later to play. Michelet explains what he is doing at the end of the fifth book of the Revolution—“History is time,” he says; and this evidently contributed in Proust’s case, along with other influences such as Tolstoy, to his deliberate adoption of that method of presenting his characters in a series of dramatically contrasting aspects by which he produces the effect of the long lines on economics charts fluctuating back through time. Michelet apparently, however, had arrived at his method naturally before he thought to take account of it and justify it, in the process of identifying himself so closely with the developing organism of society that he had come to see historical personalities as they appeared at the moment to their contemporaries, or, more accurately, to give them the value which they possessed at the moment for society. And he aims at making points by his contrasts quite different from the points of Proust. For he shows us, especially in dealing with the period of the Revolution, how the value of an individual may change, how his very personality may seem to vary, during the transition from one system to another. So Voltaire, between the refinement of the old regime and the pressing necessity for the new, is seen first as a clever young man like another playing the game of one of the cliques about the Court; then, after his beating by the Chevalier de Rohan and his flight to and return from England, as an intensely serious person, hiding himself away from society, shutting himself up to write; then, later, during his early years at Ferney, under the influence of his conventional niece, passing into intellectual eclipse as he allows her to establish about him on the precarious borders of France a miniature court of his own like the one he has left behind; then aroused to violent activity, as the new enlightened conscience of mankind, for the defense of Sirven and Calas; then, finally, after his death, when in 1791 the new generation have his body transferred to the Pantheon, rising gigantically out of his grave as the genius of the Revolution which he had only dimly apprehended. So the Abbé Sieyès appears formidable when he publishes under the old regime his pamphlet on the Third Estate; but later, in the Convention, feeble and timid. So even in the case of Napoleon, whom Michelet intensely dislikes and whose role he systematically belittles, we see him suddenly, under favorable conditions, expand to a moment of greatness at the time of his campaign in Egypt.