Michelet in Germany

You know the story of the Frenchman being asked: Who is the greatest French poet? and answering: 'Hugo, hdelas. If you were to ask me who is the greatest French historian, I might reply: he'las.In both cases, however, the helas needs to be qualified. It does not deplore a deficiency of poetical or historical talent, but rather an excess of something else: Hugo is too much of arn orator' and Michelet too much of an artist. Indeed, he describes himself as such; he claims tha t the artistic temper is his special gift, although a dangerous one. An artist a romantic artist; and, according to Flaubert, the only true one in France. When all is said, Flaubert declared, all of Lus, great and small, are nothing but abominabl e classics; Hugo himself is but a revolutionary classic. The only French romantic is Michelet: Le scul romantique frangais aura ete le pe're Michelet. If Romanticism is defined in its simplest terms, that is, ats the predominance of feeling and imagination over objective reason, what could be more romantic than the H4istoire de France? WShen we read historians like Tocqueville or Guizot, what we experience is an intellectual pleasure: history is analyzed, explained to uts. What we find in Michelet's Histoire is a sort of rhapsody, a sequence of pictures, of apostrophes, of diatribbes, or lyrLcal outbursts, of songs, of laments. We listen to a voice, by turns angry and caressing, always feverish and passionate, as we would listen to a violin; and indeed we are hearing one of the supreme :instrumnentalists ofFrench prose. Taken as a whole, his works combine the fatal ingredients listed by Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony: la carne, la marte, e il diavolo. They blend the erotic, the funereal, and the demonic. The author of the Histoire de France is also the author of La Femne, L'Amour, and LT Sorcie're. As for the Histoire itself, it originated, iwe are to believe Michelet, from. his early contacts with the dead

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  Open Access•Ludmilla Jordanova, L J Jordanova•The British Journal for the…•1980

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• Michelet et l'utilisation des arts Plastiques comme sources historiques

  Open Access•Francis Haskell•Annales Histoire Sciences Sociales•1993

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