For students interested in historiography, Michelet is one of the earliest truly successful literary readings of an historical text. . . . For all of us who are interested in this field it is a classic."--Lionel Gossman, author of Between History and Literature
The Revolution, according to Jules Michelet (1798-1874), is the "tardy advent of Eternal Justice" against the tyranny of the monarchy. It is personified by the People, whose joy and misery Michelet evokes in every page of this "romantic history" of unprecedented social upheaval. Charles Cocks' translation of 1864 includes the first four Books of Michelet's Histoire de la Revolution Française, covering events from the earliest indications of the Revolution to the King's flight in 1791.
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Edited by Lionel Gossman, this volume contains three programmatic essays by Michelet. The first two are available here for the first time in English translation. The third, the Preface to the 1869 edition of the Histoire de France, originally published in its first English translation by Edward K. Kaplan in his Michelet’s Poetic Vision (1977), has been revised by the translator for this volume. One of the greatest Romantic historians and immensely popular during his lifetime, Jules Michelet (1798-1874) fell into disfavour among the positivist historians who came after him and who regarded his work with disdain as "literature." In the 1920s and 30s, however, he began to be rediscovered and rehabilitated by the members of the influential Annales school. The objects of Michelet’s interest—living conditions, popular mentalities, laws and the arts, the historian’s relation to the objects of his study, no less than political history—have since come to occupy a central place in modern historical research. A free online-only supplement contains an essay on Michelet by John Stuart Mill from the Edinburgh Review (January 1844) and several studies of Michelet by Lionel Gossman.
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