Jules Michelet and the Promise of Emancipatory History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Wednesday 21 August 2024 is the 226th anniversary of the birth of Jules Michelet (21 August 1798–09 February 1874), who was born in Paris on this date in 1798.
In my episode on Napoleon I quoted Bertrand Russell to the effect that men of action like Napoleon can shape philosophy more than philosophers themselves. Michelet is an example of a man whose life was shaped by Napoleon. He grew up in the aftermath of the French Revolution and came to maturity during the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars. His father had a printing shop that was raided for Jacobin literature before Michelet was born, and was shut down by Napoleon’s censors after Napoleon came to power.
In his 1831 “On History — Introduction to World History,” from immediately following the Napoleonic era, Michelet begins on a dramatic note:
“With the world, a war began that will end with the world, and not before: the war of man against nature, of spirit against matter, of liberty against fatality. History is nothing but the story of this endless struggle.”
The essay that follows is this primarily about human freedom, and Michelet announced his theme and his aim immediately after his dramatic opening:
“In recent years fatality has seemed to be taking possession of knowledge no less than of the world. It has been quietly infiltrating philosophy and history. Liberty has demanded its place in society; it is time for it to claim its place in knowledge too. If this introduction achieves its aim, history will be revealed as an enduring protest, as the progressive triumph of liberty.”
As a true believer in the French Revolution and its ideals, Michelet wanted to put forward what we could call an emancipatory account of history. Hayden White noted as much in regard to Michelet:
“Michelet emplotted his histories as dramas of disclosure, of the liberation of a spiritual power fighting to free itself from the forces of darkness, a redemption. And his conception of his task as a historian was to serve as the preserver of what is redeemed.”
An emancipatory account of history goes a step beyond the Enlightenment conception of history in terms of human progress, arguing that the specific form of progress realized in history has been human emancipation. In this sense this is a narrower conception of history than what we could call a baseline Enlightenment history, which might identify many different forms of progress in history. Michelet and other emancipatory historians wanted to show human history as specifically being an account of the progress of human freedom. This should be familiar to all of us, since the emancipatory theme has only grown and accelerated over the past two centuries, to the point that it’s almost mandatory in our time. Hegel, too was concerned with human freedom, and it would be an interesting exercise in the philosophy of history to make a detailed and exhaustive analysis of the ways in which the Hegelian conception of history as the progress of human freedom differs from the emancipatory historians’ conception of history as the progress of human freedom. I will leave this as an exercise for the listener, though I reserve the right to someday return to this, as I expect that mining this vein would more than repay the labor that would need to be invested. This inquiry promises a high return on investment.
Michelet was very much a literary historian. He did not preach that history should be scientific and he did not attempt to practice scientific history. On the contrary, his literary style is distinctive and sometimes overpowers the historical narrative. Sometimes he is called a romantic, sometimes a republican, sometimes a realist, and many other labels besides. If the medium is the message, then Michelet’s message is that history is the material for history books, but the form that the history takes is the historian’s own. If this sounds familiar, that’s because this was one of Hayden White’s central ideas. I’ve already quoted White on Michelet since Michelet has a prominent role to play in White’s Metahistory: The History Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe.
White identifies Michelet, Ranke, de Toqueville, and Burckhardt all as historical realists, but he argues that Michelet writes history as romance, Ranke writes history as comedy, Toqueville writes history as tragedy, and Burckhardt writes history as satire. Thus all of them being historical realists is in some sense less significant than the narrative devices they employ to present history. White wrote:
“The French historian and philosopher of history Jules Michelet represented a different position within the Romantic movement apropos of its conception of the historical process. In the first place, Michelet purported to have discovered the means by which to raise the Romantic apprehension of the world to the status of a scientific insight. For him, a poetic sensibility critically self-conscious, provided the accesses to a specifically ‘realistic’ apprehension of the world.”
I find it interesting that Hayden White mentioned Fustel de Coulanges only once in his Metahistory, and that in an end note, as a kind of afterthought, not meriting the same attention as Michelet, Ranke, Toqueville, and Burckhardt. Marc Bloch, however, did mention Michelet together with Fustel de Coulanges, in order to contrast their distinctive methods, which nevertheless converge on a holism appropriate to history. Bloch quoted Michelet in The Historian’s Craft as saying:
“If I had introduced only political history into my narrative, if I had taken no account of the diverse elements of history (religion, law, geography, literature, art, etc.), my procedure would have been quite different. But a great vital movement was needed, because all these diverse elements gravitated together in the unity of the story.”
Then Bloch quoted Fustel de Coulanges:
“Supposing a hundred specialists had divided the past of France according to lot, do you think that, in the end, they would have written the history of France? I very much doubt it. At the very least, they should miss the linkage of facts: now, this linkage is itself a historical truth.”
On the different images that these two historians employ to justify a holist account of history, Bloch wrote:
“Michelet thought and felt in terms of the organic; Fustel, son of an age for which the Newtonian universe seemed to furnish the ultimate scientific pattern, took his metaphors from space. Their fundamental agreement is all the more impressive. These two great historians were too great to overlook the fact that a civilization, like a person, is no mechanically arranged game of solitaire; the knowledge of fragments, studied by turns, each for its own sake, will never produce the knowledge of the whole; it will not even produce that of the fragments themselves.”
The holism that includes religion, law, geography, literature, art, and all the elements of human activity as a part of history derives from another influence which may have turned Michelet toward this idea of a poetic sensibility that provides privileged access to a realistic apprehension of the world. In addition to being a famous historian, Michelet is famous for rediscovering and re-introducing into the history of ideas the work of Giambattista Vico. Edmund Wilson’s 1940 book To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History begins with Michelet’s discovery of Vico:
“One day in the January of 1824, a young French professor named Jules Michelet, who was teaching philosophy and history, found the name of Giovanni Vico in a translator’s note to a book he was reading. The reference to Vico interested him so much that he immediately set out to learn Italian… By July, he had gotten to Vico, and he read the first volume through without stopping. From the collision of Michelet’s mind with Vico’s, it is hardly too much to say that a whole new philosophical-artistic world was born: the world of re-created social history.”
Wilson quotes Michelet as saying:
“I had no other master but Vico. His principle of living force, of humanity creating itself, made both my book and my teaching.”
Edmund Wilson also said of Michelet
“…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.”
This appeal to the recurrences of history is also a theme of Vico, but, seen in a different light, it is Fernand Braudel’s longue durée. Michelet is something of a transitional figure between Vico, who still incorporates ancient motifs of cyclical history in his work, and Braudel, who gives us a modern and naturalistic structure of history, no longer subject to the fatality from which Michelet saw humanity emancipating itself. Vico was the inception of this idea, Michelet was the selective force that acted on the idea, and Braudel was the end upon which the idea was converging. This is longue durée history of the longue durée.
We can find Vico in Michelet if we look closely enough, but one of the lessons we can take away from Vico’s influence on Michelet is how completely Michelet transformed Vico even as he was being influenced by Vico. If Vico influenced Michelet, and he certainly did, it was only after Michelet took over Vico and made him entirely his own. When I read Michelet, I don’t find Vico unless I look for him, but Michelet is written plainly across every page. One can say that Vico laid the foundations of a social history that was to come, and the foundations also of a microhistory that was to follow from the preoccupations of social historians, but it was Michelet who made Vico into a nascent social historian. Vico’s work might have been rediscovered by another historian and developed in a very different direction, and this counterfactual would have been no less an expression of Vico’s originality in the philosophy of history. In Vico’s house there are many mansions, and Michelet built one of these mansions.
We can see Michelet’s own nascent vision of social history in Michelet’s book The People, which I could call a kaleidoscopic if not hallucinatory plunge by Michelet into the mass of the French populace. Earlier I said that Michelet didn’t even make a pretence to scientific history, but he was evidently aware of what others were doing in a more quantitative spirit in his time. It might be saying too much to say that Michelet rebelled against any quantitative approach to history, but part of what he got from Vico was the idea of a poetic science that had distinctive methods of its own. In The People, written in 1845 and published in 1846, Michelet presents his method, if it is a method, in contrast to the methods of economists, other historians, and statisticians. He says that he wanted to understand,
“…the true situation of the rural districts so much neglected by our economists.”
And that,
“My varied studies of history had revealed to me facts of the greatest interest, unnoticed by historians.”
And,
“My inquiry among living documents taught me likewise many things that are not in our statistics.”
He described the origins of his book in a kind of disillusionment with what had been written up to his time, in part because he remembered the people differently than he found them as they were portrayed in works of history:
“When the progress of my history led me to study the questions of the day, and I cast my eyes upon the books in which they are discussed, I confess I was surprised to find them almost all in contradiction to my memory. I then shut the books, and placed myself among the people to the best of my power; the lonely writer plunged again into the crowd, listened to their noise, noted their words. They were perfectly the same people, changed only in outward appearance; my memory did not deceive me. I went about, therefore, consulting men, listening to their account of their own condition, and gathering from their lips, what is not always to be found in the most brilliant writers, the words of common sense.”
We might, on this basis, call Michelet a populist of sorts, and add this to the many labels that have been applied to him. There are other labels me might use as well. I’ve mentioned a lot of themes in relation to Michelet. There is the revival and influence of Vico; there is Michelet’s interest in producing an emancipatory history; there is the comparison of Michelet to his contemporary Hegel, though the two took no notice of each other; there is Bloch’s comparison of Michelet to Fustel de Coulanges on the basis of their shared historical holism; and there is the comparison I made to Braudel and the longue durée. Michelet, in comprehending all of these influences, focused in himself many of the most prominent and important themes of historical thought of his time. His historical thought, in turn, teeming as it was with all these influences, spread out after him in succeeding generations and shaped what history become in the 20th century.
