Jules Michelet gave the Renaissance its name as an entire historical era
Giorgio Vasari spoke of a rebirth in art back in 1550, but Jules Michelet was the first historian to apply the French word Renaissance systematically to a whole age. He did it inside a History of France that took him three decades and 19 volumes to complete.
Born on 21 August 1798, Michelet grew up helping his father, a master printer, and turned down a job at the imperial printing office to study at the Lycée Charlemagne. He passed the university examination in 1821 and taught history at the Collège Rollin. School textbooks were his first publications, followed by a survey of modern history in 1827, the year he began lecturing at the École normale supérieure.
The July Revolution of 1830 won him a post at the Record Office, and he started the Histoire de France. From Giambattista Vico, whose selected works he edited, he took two convictions: that ordinary people and their customs shape events as much as elites do, and that societies rise and fall in cycles. His focus on the people, not merely rulers and institutions, was unusual then, although political and religious bias dented his objectivity. Given the history chair at the Collège de France in 1838, he joined his friend Edgar Quinet in a polemic against the Jesuits.
Refusing to swear loyalty to Napoleon III cost him the Record Office job in 1852. By then he had married, at 51, the 23-year-old natural history writer Athénaïs Mialaret, who helped with his work but never received credit in it. Partly inspired by her, he wrote pantheistic nature books, beginning with L'Oiseau in 1856 and moving on to insects, the sea and mountains. La Femme supplied the line Vincent van Gogh inscribed on his drawing Sorrow, asking how a woman can be alone on earth, and La Sorcière of 1862 became the 1973 animated film Belladonna of Sadness.
He finished the Histoire de France in 1867, carrying it from earliest times to the eve of the Revolution, alongside a separate History of the French Revolution that François Furet hailed as a literary monument. Michelet loathed the Middle Ages yet painted them more vividly than almost anyone. History, as he saw it, was an endless war pitting man against nature, spirit against matter and liberty against fatality. He died on 9 February 1874.
Source: Jules Michelet
