hat Jules Michelet’s History of France is a masterpiece and a great reading experience has been said by other critics (primarily other historians.) The argument (as I make a project of reviewing this massive work) I wish to make is that the book’s greatness can be attributed to Michelet’s sublime synthesis of two different ongoing trends in the history of historiography. (Just to clarify for the lay reader, by history I mean the events that actually happened. By historiography I mean the art and occupation of writing about it.) The two trends Michelet so powerfully fuses are that of the picturesque history and the scientific history. (Forgive me if I now go on at tedious length introducing them.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have a number of reading “projects” going on all at once, groupings of books I feel it will be necessary for me to have read in order to not be at sea when discussing related subjects; it is often claimed that a thorough knowledge of the Bible is necessary for an appreciation for literature, though I think it more necessary to have a thorough-going knowledge of history (and if like me you wish to learn about French history in order to better understand the history and culture behind the literature, reading Michelet’s opus seems like a great way to learn.) I value history not because I feel we are “doomed to repeat it” (just as I was now doomed to invoke that insipid line), though I will allow that historical knowledge can enhance our sense of what’s possible, what already happened and therefore is at least not physically impossible to happen again, even if each “repetition” has its own particularities that historical knowledge should not tyrannize us against noting and being adaptive to—this, however, is certainly not the main reason to read history. Historic catastrophe prevention, while a sexy topic suitable to both politics and Hollywood (and time travel stories), is also one of the least interesting aspects of history to me. If Hitler, the Holocaust, the Civil War, slavery, the war you or granddad fought in, or Napoleon Buonapart dominate our historical awareness to the exclusion of most other historical topics, are we really learning about history?

I like to think of significant historical events in much the way I think of the classics: context is big part of the significance; too often what is emphasized is the isolated fact—X is a classic, X is on a Barnes and Noble display table, its status corporately ratified—and not the historic context that makes that fact part of a chain of related, meaningful facts; that Napoleon was exiled to the isle of St. Helena in 1815 seems significant but without any context, we can’t speculate on its significance or even enter into discussions about cause and effect or evaluate the quality of the evidence, much less form any real moral feelings for the prime actors—which is what we must ultimately get to if we are to understand history—and so history comes off (to the uninitiated) as dry, irrelevant—this doesn’t speak to me, now; I can’t envision it, I can’t put myself there, as if we will only enter into the book’s world on the condition that it enters into ours, a transactional relationship, a ruthless capitalism in our reading that is unsurprising when you consider how hard we fail at empathizing with people from different backgrounds in our own times; how can we not then fail to empathize with people long dead? (There is also an opposite tendency, I notice, to treat the past as hallowed and precious, a gallery of porcelain statuettes—a maudlin, textureless past.)

But the past was neither textureless nor old to those living in it, nor to the many of us who love and appreciate history today—whether by reading actual history books or by being collectors or dealers in things that are old. We implicitly understand the point William Hazlitt made about the past in his essay “On Antiquity,”

The “olden times” are only such in reference to us. The past is rendered strange, mysterious, visionary, awful from this great gap in time that parts us from it, and the long perspective of waning years. Things gone by and almost forgotten, look dim and dull, uncouth and quaint, from our ignorance of them, and the mutability of customs. But in their day—they were fresh, unimpaired, in full vigour, familiar and glossy.

The unending thought that brings us back to museums and antiques malls and flea markets is this one: the past was real. Those people really lived and breathed, ate and shat, felt elation and fear. People were really firing these pistols, using these razor blades, writing and printing and binding these books. Hand-marbling the flyleaves.

What we most need in historical writing are books that can enliven history by making it real, concrete; make it fresh and vigorous and glossy, yes, but also (where necessary) putrid, filthy, and painfully tedious—above all, we need to feel the reality of history, experience its thingness—a dry recitation of the facts simply will not do. Though he died in 1830, we can assume by his own writings that Hazlitt believed in the colorful, details-based delineation of character that would characterize the so-called Picturesque Historians. What he perhaps died too early to see the development of was a concurrent (and longer-lasting) movement in the field of History towards scientific history.

Picturesque history is more or less the introduction of the narrative techniques of fiction into the field of non-fiction. These histories, often written in an dramatic, highly rhetorical style, seek to both educate and entertain the reader. They accentuate the most colorful details, painting in bold strokes, focusing on the actions of major figures in history and treating them almost like literary characters with their own narrative arcs and point-of-view narration. The term “Picturesque Historians” is typically used to refer to the school of highly popular (and highly rhetorical) American historians including William H. Prescott (History of the Conquest of Mexico), his protege John Lothrop Motley (The Rise of the Dutch Republic), and Francis Parkman (Oregon Trail), though these Americans had important European precursors. Voltaire had introduced a note of satire into historical writing in the 18th century, but in the aftermath of the French Revolution there was an even greater public hunger for electrifying, opinionated, colorful historical writing. The French journalist and future politician Adolphe Thiers took up the cause of defending the Revolution in his stylistically ornate 1827 History of the French Revolution. Friedrich Christoph Schlosser won a following in Germany primarily for the grandiose style of his histories of the world and of his history of the intellectual development of 18th century Europe. Thomas Carlyle, perhaps the most famous example for English-speaking readers, became an overnight sensation with his racy The French Revolution (1834). In each of these cases, these writers immediately attracted public notice with their style, but have sometimes come in for heavy criticism for playing fast and loose with the facts. (Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James II is yet another example of this; the famous histories, the ones that people remember as classics and reread long after the historical methods have become antiquated, are distinguished by their style.)

Concurrent with the development of picturesque history was the rise of a trend that has had probably far more lasting effects on the field of Historiography, namely scientific history, which began primarily in Germany. Johann Joachim Winckelmann was the first to combine the discipline of art history with archaeological exploration, and his work was advanced upon in Reinhold Niebuhr’s studies of ancient Rome, for which Niebur innovated new philological techniques to tease the subtle meanings out of ancient texts and uncover startling truths about the past. In the field of jurisprudence Friedrich Carl von Savigny upended centuries of received wisdom about the meaning of Roman law, and Leopold von Ranke gained access to the ancient records of Germany and used them to write his pioneering History of the Reformation in Germany (1854 – 1857). Ranke expressed the methodological vision of the new historiography when he wrote in the preface to this history:

I see the time approach in which we shall no longer have to found modem history on the reports even of contemporary historians, except in so far as they were in possession of personal and immediate knowledge of facts; still less, on works yet more remote from the source; but on the narratives of eye-witnesses, and the genuine and original documents.

The scientific historian, by contrast to the picturesque one, did not feel the need to be showy or especially stylistic; it was sufficient that his work be scholarly; he would let his documentation and forests of footnotes do the talking. The result of this emphasis on substance over style (an entirely new substance in its time, granted, the careful examination of archives and primary source documents) unfortunately has been the production of many histories that scholars consider authoritative, even if the general reader finds them dry and ponderous.

Jules Michelet’s History of France, by contrast, is anything but dry, though the depth of research it reflects in its thickly footnoted paragraphs impresses equally as much as—indeed, in concert with—the eloquence of the prose. It is both a scholarly opus and a literary masterpiece—great in both style and substance. Michelet wrote the first six volumes of this “monumental” work (which is how Britannica describes it) from 1833 to 1843, concluding at the beginning of the Renaissance. He interrupted this work to write a fairly imposing history of the French Revolution, and then wrote eleven more volumes to finish this amazing feat of historical writing during the years 1855 to 1867. (Due to the sheer size of the thing, I hope the reader will forgive the book-by-book, incremental approach I am taking to reviewing it.)

The synthesis of art and scholarship extends to the very genesis, the very writing of the book itself, which Michelet explains in a note attached to the second volume of the history as the outcome of the centuries of events which produced the great palaces of the National Archives, where the young historian was given a post as curator in 1830:

The destinies of this precious deposit were no other than those which attended the monarchy and, whenever royalty displayed strength and vigor, the Record Office—a real treasury, from which titles, castles, and often provinces could be fished out—partook of the movement.

The height of the archives’ glory was during the French Revolution, which “did little to advance knowledge by the critical examination of ancient monuments,” but “was of immense benefit by concentrating all such treasures. It blew aside the dust of centuries, and emptied the contents of monasteries, castles, and other receptacles on one common floor.” Michelet vividly describes how the Louvre was filled up from floor to ceiling with documents and manuscripts.

Though the end of the revolution brought about a dimunition of the archives, as each province and nation became jealous to preserve their own historical documents (including, presumably, the scientific Germans like von Ranke), Michelet still describes the archives in grandiose, almost Gothic terms, as “these catacombs of manuscripts, this wonderful necropolis of national monuments,” and moreover, the consuming passion of Michelet’s life, the pervading atmosphere which rendered the writing of the History of France “the almost necessary result of the circumstances” of his being there.

Then Michelet magnificently—and eerily—describes how the spirits of the French past rose up before him in those stacks, demanding they be revivified in his book:

However, I was not slow to discern in the midst of the apparent silence of these galleries, a movement and a murmur which were not those of death. These papers and parchments, so long deserted, desired no better than to be restored to the light of day; yet are they not papers, but lives of men, of provinces, and of nations. First, the families and the fiefs, blazoned in their dust, protested against their being forgotten. The provinces rose up, alleging that centralization had been deceived in supposing them annihilated. The ordonnances of our kings asserted that they had not been repealed by the multitude of modern laws. Had one listened to them all, as the grave-digger observed of a field of battle, not one ought to have been dead. All lived and spoke, and surrounded the author with an army speaking a hundred tongues, which were roughly silenced by the loud voice of the Republic and of the Empire.

He goes on to dramatically apostrophize these spirits in the next paragraph, emphasizing their heterogeneous and “unsightly” nature:

Softly, my dear friends, let us proceed in order, if you please. All of you have your claim on history. The individual is good, that is, as individual; the general, as general. Feudalism is in the right, the monarchy more so, and, still more, the Empire. I’m yours, Godfrey—yours, Richelieu—yours, Bonaparte!

He will neglect no aspect of French history to serve the politics of the moment, but rather celebrate French history in all its phases, with Godfrey of Bulloigne, Cardinal Richelieu, and Napoleon serving as avatars of these different phases.

The province shall revive; differences of France will be characterized by strongly-defined geographical distinctions: it shall revive, but only on condition of allowing these differences gradually to wear out, and a homogeneous whole, or country, to succeed.

Ultimately France will be presented as a unity, but not before Michelet presents its manifold parts with all their distinct histories and idiosyncrasies, which (as he will begin to flesh out in the classic “Tableau de France” section of Book 3) are rooted in geography. Yet it is also of great importance for Michelet to be picturesque, to be demonstrative, to present the ghosts en vive:

And, as I breathed on their dust, I saw them rise up. They raised from this sepulchre, one the hand, the other the head, as in the Last Judgment of Michel-Angelo, or in the Dance of Death. This galvanic dance, which they performed around me, I have essayed to reproduce in this work.

This mission statement of Michelet’s promises a history that both presents the past picturesquely and honors the documentary record as well. It is an amazing, Romantic vision: scientific history and picturesque history not opposed, but complementary. Michelet promises to show his readers a French past not oversimplified and homogenized, but diverse, of a many-strained Gothic complexion; which diversity will only prove more glorious as the parts are woven together into a single French nation (which, Michelet being a nationalist and patriotic Frenchman—and this being the 19th century—is what this all tends towards.)

Another fixation of the 19th century was race—not quite in the terms we understand it, however. Certainly there was the binary of white and black, African and European, with all the evil it was used to justify; but within Europe there was also an intensified nationalism, a perpetual competition for dominion between “the German race,” “the French race,” the Austrian, the Italian, and so on. These differences, so the story went, were characterological and each race needed to put forward arguments—roo-ha!—for why it was better than the other ones. (Which, we may surmise, is why the opponents of France took their records back from France at the end of the Napoleonic Wars; there was inherent propaganda value, it was felt, in being able to write your own history.) Certainly Michelet was not immune to such homerism, but he is at the very least someone with more of a fidelity to the truth than to some convenient notion of racial purity.

In Book I, Chapter I, Michelet gives us a colorful description of the Gauls, the ancient inhabitants of France. He’s refreshingly light-hearted in admitting that France and the French did not begin as what they are now. (Indeed, as he later admits in Book II, the French are very much a mixed-race people!) He begins by quoting Strabo, who says (rather condescendingly) of the ancient Gauls, that they are “universally madly fond of war, hot in temper, and quick to fight; in all other respects simple, and void of malice. Hence, when provoked, they march multitudinously, openly, and incautiously straight against the enemy, so as to be easily out-generalled.” These oafish primitives are however “susceptible of culture and literary instruction.” “Such,” Michelet comments wryly, “is the first glance cast by philosophy on the most sympathetic and perfectible of the races of man.”

The ancient Gauls in Michelet’s depiction were free-spirited, utterly simplistic people, afraid of nothing and noone.

Heaven itself had little terror for them; they returned its thunders with flights of arrows. Did ocean rise and invade the land, they did not refuse its challenge, but marched upon it sword in hand. Never to give way was their point of honor: they would scorn to quit a house in flames. No people held their lives cheaper. There were of them who would undertake to die for a trifle of money or a little wine, would step upon their sleeping places, distribute the wine or money among their friends, lie down on their shields, and offer their throat to the knife.

Equally as impressive as the rolling lilt of such paragraphs as this is that virtually every sentence is backed by a textual reference to some ancient source. Michelet is a model for great historical writing in part because he transmutes a thorough scholarship with a tremendous sense of style and artistry that shows itself in the deft use of rhetorical devices, such as this paragraph contrasting the Gauls with their southern neighbors, the Iberians:

The Gauls and the Iberians were a complete contrast: the latter with their rough black garments, and hair-woven boots ; the Gaul, arrayed in showy stuffs, fond of bright and varied colors, such as compose the plaid of the modern Scottish Gael, or else almost naked, but with their white chests and gigantic limbs laden with massive golden chains. The Iberians were divided into petty mountain tribes, which, according to Strabo, seldom contracted alliance, through an excess of confidence in their own strength. The Gauls, on the contrary, readily collected in large hordes, encamping in large villages, in large exposed plains, and talkers, laughers, and haranguers as they were, willingly associated with strangers, and became intimate with new faces, mingling with all and in all, dissolute through levity, and blindly and at random abandoning themselves to infamous pleasures; (the brutality of drunkenness was rather the failing of the German stock;) in short, theirs were all the qualities and vices that result from quick sympathy.

In this day and age, it is not necessarily as acceptable as it was in Michelet’s time to talk in broad, sweeping terms about the character traits of entire peoples. And yet these pictuesque details—the rough woolen garments of the Iberians, the colorful plaid and massive gold chains of the Gauls—help the reader to envision these people, to see them as real rather than mere names in a history book.

There is a certain level of poetry in how Michelet represents the early Gauls as a free flowing liquid which permeated whatever container available, now sloshing into the corners of Spain, now spilling into Italy along the valley of the Po, its edges checked only by hardy mountains and mountain residing people like the Iberians, the Ligurians, and the Etruscans. Perhaps this characterization is more poetic, more metaphorical than what a 20th century historian would provide; certainly there would be more of an archaeological record available to the latter, more of a corpus of artifacts and less reliance on purely textual sources; in lieu of those things, Michelet’s vivid metaphors certainly seem like truth. (Though I suppose that was one defining characteristic of Romantic literature in general: it felt true, especially compared to the perceived artificiality of what had come before.)

While Michelet is narrating these events he does not neglect to talk about the politics and religion of the Gallic tribes. We are introduced to the centers of power in ancient cities such as Alesia and Auvergne and their correspondence with particular Gallic tribes; slowly a sense of France’s geographical divisions begins to form in the reader’s mind. Another interesting development in this chapter is Michelet’s depiction of Druidism as a more highly developed, doctrinaire religion in comparison the the indigenous faith of the Gauls. Certainly the interaction of the Druids with the population of Gaul is a much more complex relationship than our stereotypical view, which is that Druidism was the basic, original faith of the people in these lands; which is not to say that the Druids did not have some freakish religious customs like human sacrifice or howling orgies in the light of the full moon.

That the Gauls were like an uncontainable, unstoppable force of nature gives us perspective for understanding how magnatudinous was the centuries long struggle for the Greco-Roman world to contain, compete with, and finally subjugate them, and Chapter 2 of Book 1 is devoted to describing this lengthy struggle. The first beach-head of that world into the Gallic one was the foundation of the Greek colony of Massilia (modern day Marseilles) around 600 B.C. Surrounded by hostiles on all sides—the Gauls and Ligurians on land, the Carthaginians and Etruscans by sea—Massilia’s survival was nothing short of a miracle, in Michelet’s view, and it was later followed by further Italian settlements in Toulouse and Aqua Sextiae (Aix). The various tribes of Gauls were continually on the move; at one point during the 3rd century B.C., when the successor kingdoms of Alexander the Great were fighting among themselves, a large horde of the Gaul swept in from the west, leaving a trail of destruction through Greece and Asia Minor. Even as late as 102 B.C., an enormous Gallic horde threatened to take over Italy, and it was only by the military genius of Gauis Marius at a battle outside Aix that disaster was averted.

It was left for Julius Caesar, 50 years later, to complete the Roman conquest of Gaul. Michelet passes briefly over this campaign, but expresses a yearning to have been an eyewitness to it, an enthusiasm the reader cannot help but share in:

I have elsewhere spoken of Caesar, and of the motives which decided that marvellous man to abandon Rome so long for Gaul, and exile himself that he might return master. Italy was exhausted; Spain untameable; Gaul was essential to the subjugation of the world. Fain would I have seen that fair and pale countenance, prematurely aged by the debaucheries of the capital—fain have seen that delicate and epileptic man, marching in the rains of Gaul at the head of his legions, and swimming across our rivers; litters in which his secretaries were carried, dictating even six letters at a time, shaking Rome from the extremity of Belgium, sweeping from his path two millions of men, and subduing in ten years Gaul, the Rhine, and the ocean of the north.

But Michelet goes further and describes the internal politics of the Gallic tribes, how differences in the popular and Druidical religions which enabled Caesar’s victory also led to persisting rivalries that would continue to reverberate over the centuries, such as the rivaly between the Burgundians (the Aedui) and Franche-Comte (the Arverni and the Sequani); thus Michelet begins to lay down the tapestry of regional and geographic differences which will become so important to his narrative.

Michelet’s narration of this campaign has a rollicking, Game of Thrones-like aspect to it; here is how, for example, Michelet describes Caesar’s war upon the hardly coastal tribes of the Iron Islands Brittany:

This amphibious race inhabited neither the land nor the water. Their forts, erected on peninsulas alternately inundated and deserted by the tide, could be besieged neither by the one nor the other. The Veneti maintained a constant communication with the other Britain, and was supplied from it. To reduce them, it was necessary to be master of the sea. Nothing checked Caesar. He built vessels, formed sailors, and taught them to secure the Breton ships by using grappling irons, and cutting their ropes. He treated hardly this hard people; but the lesser Britain could only be conquered through the greater. Caesar made up his mind to invade it.

Michelet flies into raptures describing the positive effects being conquered by Caesar had on Gaul. Here is how he begins Book 1, Chapter 3:

Alexander and Caesar have had this in common: to be loved and wept by the conquered, and to perish by the hands of their own countrymen. Such men have no country; they belong to the world.

Caesar had not destroyed liberty, (it had long been dead;) rather, he had compromised Roman nationality. The Romans had witnessed with shame and anguish a Gallic army under the eagles; Gallic senators sitting between Cicero and Brutus. In reality, it was the conquered who profited by the victory. If Caesar had lived, it is probable that all the barbarian nations would have found their way into the army and the senate. He had already taken a Spanish guard; and the Spaniard, Balbus, was one of his principal counsellors.

Being the booster of Gallic pride that he is, Michelet makes a point of marking the influence of Gaul on Rome, the various Roman luminaries who originated in Roman Gaul. In something like the proud manner of African-American anthologies of the 1920s, he names and eulogizes poets, politicians, orators, generals, and even emperors who may plausibly be ascribed to the Gallic race.

Chapter 3 follows events of the Roman Empire from the Gallic perspective. Michelet describes what initially had been a very mutually beneficial relationship between Rome and her province as one that eventually, during the latter years of the empire, turned into the bitterest oppression, as land was hastily agglomerated by the large landowners and the rest of the population was reduced to either virtual or actual slavery. And it is here that Michelet, writing in the mid-19th century, uses the past to pointedly comment on the present:

Tyranny, the tyranny of the princes, and the tyranny of the magistrates—different in kind and far more burdensome was not the principal cause of the ruin of the empire. The real evil which undermined it proceeded neither from the government nor the administration. Had it been simply of an administrative nature, so many good and great emperors would have found a remedy for it. But it was a social evil; and its source was not to be dried up by less than an entire renovation of the social system. Slavery was this evil. The other ills of the empire—most of them at least, as the all-devouring taxation and constantly increasing demands of the military government—were only, as we shall see, a consequence: a direct or indirect effect.

Taken on its face here, Michelet is talking about imperial Rome. But he is careful and abstract enough in his wording that he could as easily be talking about France before the Revolution. He goes on to describe the attempts of the Christian emperor Constantine to relieve the exactions of landowners and tax collectors upon the general populace, and yet as he describes the ineffectiveness of these measures it is hard to believe Michelet is speaking only of conditions in Roman Gaul:

However, Christianity could do nothing for the material sufferings of society; which were as feebly remedied by the Christian emperors as by their predecessors. The result of every attempt at amelioration was but to show the certain powerlessness of the law, which could only revolve in the same fruitless circle. At one time, alarmed by the rapid depopulation of the country, it would attempt to ameliorate the fate of the laborer, and protect him against the proprietor; and then the latter protested that he could not pay his taxes. At another, it would abandon the laborer, deliver him up to the proprietor, sink him in slavery, try to root him to the soil : but the wretch died or fled, and the land was a desert.

As a sidenote, it is rather striking to see modern political arguments about labor and taxation play out so consistently in their broad outlines in antiquity.

As the ROMAN Empire collapsed, beset by internal divisions and ravaged from without by invaders, still Michelet is full of praise for what Roman civilization gave to Gaul. In spite of the immense hardship suffered by the average citizen in Roman Gaul, Michelet is not one who needs to ask, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” as anything other than a rhetorical question:

The barbarians arrive. The ancient social system is condemned. The long work of conquest, slavery, and depopulation touches its term. Must we conclude, then, that all this has been wrought in vain, and that devouring Rome leaves nothing in this land of Gaul, which she is about to evacuate?
What remains of her, is every thing. She leaves them organization, government. She has founded the city ; before her, Gaul had only villages, or, at the most, towns. These theatres, circuses, aqueducts, roads, which we still admire, are the lasting symbol of civilization established by the Romans, the justification of their conquest of Gaul.

Moreover, Michelet argues that the influence of Roman rule would end up being so profound that it would set in motion the chain of events that ultimately led (after a millenium and a half) to the French Revolution and liberty for the French people:

And such is the power of the organization so introduced, that even when life shall appear to desert it, and its destruction by the barbarians inevitable, they will submit to its yoke. Despite themselves, they must dwell under the everlasting roofs which mock their efforts at destruction: they will bow the head, and, victors as they are, receive laws from vanquished Rome. The great name of empire—the idea of equality under a monarch—so opposed to the aristocratical principle of Germany, has been bequeathed by Rome to this our country. The barbarian kings will take advantage of it. They are only hindered by the impossibility of carrying their little huts with them.” The Cultivated by the Church, and received into the popular mind, it will move onward with Charlemagne and St. Louis, until it will gradually lead us to the annihilation of aristocracy, and to the equality and equity of modern times.

Such is the work of civil order.

This seems to me like a tenuous thread, but it is a mark of the breath and fineness of Michelet’s historical vision that he manages to sift it out of this morass of history and present it as a continuity (and a plausible one). It is of a piece with the romantic notions of the 19th century: blood and soil, the characters and destinies of nations. So what if centuries of despotism formed the not at all insignificant interval between Roman Gaul and the French Republic? To Michelet and likeminded 19th century European writers, these eras and distant events can all be tied together in nationalistic, subracial strains of causality.

Which makes it all the more hilariously problematic that, at the end of the Roman Empire, events unfolded in such a way as to turn the French into—what’s a polite way to say this?—a mongrel race. But that’s for next time, when I review Book 2 on the invasion of the Germans. (And perhaps more books along with that.)