Michelet, Jules, a great French historian, was born a printer's son at Paris, 21st August 1798. After a brilliant course of study under Villemain and Leclerc, he became at twenty-three a professor of History in the Collège Rollin. Later he lectured at the Collège Sainte-Barbe and the École Normale, and after the revolution of 1830 was given an important post at the Archives, became assistant to Guizot at the Sorbonne, and tutor to the Princess Clémentine. In 1838 he was elected to the Academy, and at the same time became professor of History at the Collège de France. Already he had made his name known by admirable handbooks on French and on modern history, and commenced the monumental work which was to give him an illustrious place among great historians, his Histoire de France (18 vols. 1833-67; new ed. 19 vols. 1879), the labour of about forty years. Other works were Origines du Droit Français cherchées dans les Symboles et Formules du Droit Universel (1837), Mémoires de Luther (1845), and Procès de Templiers (1841-51). Michelet had a great dislike for priests, but especially for the Jesuits, and he now plunged into controversy with all the impetuosity of his nature and eloquence, bringing to bear upon the enemy at once all his powers of sarcasm and all his unrivalled knowledge of history. Three books were the fruits of his polemic: Des Jésuits, written in conjunction with Edgar Quinet (1843); Le Prêtre, la Femme, et la Famille (1845); and Le Peuple (1846). Next followed his famous Histoire de la Révolution (7 vols. 1847-53; centenary ed. 5 vols. 1889), which is not a good history with all its eloquence and enthusiasm. Before its conclusion Michelet had lost his office by refusing to take the oath of allegiance to Louis Napoleon. Henceforth he lived mostly in Brittany and in the Riviera, buried in his gigantic literary labours. A series of books of a novel kind, full of rhapsodic eloquence and more valuable as literature than as science, were L'Oiseau (1856), L'Insecte (1857), La Mer (1861), and La Montagne (1868). Other books of unusual interest were L'Amour (1858), La Femme (1860), La Sorcière (1862), and La Bible de l'Humanité (1864). The little book, Nos Fils (1869), was a plea for compulsory education. Michelet's great history brings down the story of France to the outbreak of the great Revolution. The second instalment continues it to the close of the Revolution. In the last years of his life he set himself to complete his task, and thus bequeath a great continuous history to France, but he did not live to carry it beyond Waterloo (3 vols. 1872-75). He died at Hyères, 9th February 1874.
Michelet ever treats history from a personal point of view, and his imagination is prone to bring into undue relief striking figures and dramatic scenes and incidents. Thus his work is a series of tableaux, as these were visible to the eyes of a man of genius, full of prejudices for and against his puppets, and destitute of the sense for historical perspective. Yet the whole stands out a masterpiece of genius, instinct with life, and the wide range of historical literature must be ransacked for episodes surpassing his treatment of Joan of Arc or the Templars, or the luminous geographical survey of France with which the work opens. See the books by G. Monod (1875), Noël (1878), Corrêard (1886), and Jules Simon (1889).