La France devant l'Europe

by Jules Michelet, Yann Potin (Scientific Editor)

Voici un livre oubli, car gar dans le pli des vnements, entre guerre trangre et guerre civile. Publi Florence en janvier 1871, moins de trois mois avant le tragique pisode de la Commune de Paris, La France devant l'Europe est une oeuvre crpusculaire, nourrie par le dsespoir d'un homme qui n'a pourtant cess, au cours de son travail d'historien, d'annoncer la "Rvlation" d'une humanit enfante par l'clair de la Rvolution franaise. Ce petit texte aussi nerveux que prcipit, fut crit dans la fuite et l'exil, face la dfaite et l'invasion du territoire national par les armes de Bismarck. C'est donc un livre de l'effondrement, qui tente de penser le dsastre avant mme son issue. Il ressort de cette prise de parole et d'criture prmature une sorte de prophtisme maladroit et sublime, suspendu dans le temps et qui semble tre autant crit pour soi que pour les autres.

144 pages, Pocket Book

First published July 1, 2010

About the author

His father was a master printer, not very prosperous, and Jules assisted him in the actual work of the press. A place was offered him in the imperial printing office, but his father was able to send him to the famous Collège or Lycée Charlemagne, where he distinguished himself. He passed the university examination in 1821, and was soon appointed to a professorship of history in the Collège Rollin.

Soon after this, in 1824, he married. This was one of the most favourable periods ever for scholars and men of letters in France, and Michelet had powerful patrons in Abel-François Villemain and Victor Cousin, among others. Although he was an ardent politician (having from his childhood embraced republicanism and a peculiar variety of romantic free-thought), he was above all a man of letters and an inquirer into the history of the past. His earliest works were school textbooks. Between 1825 and 1827 he produced diverse sketches, chronological tables, etc, of modern history. His précis of the subject, published in 1827, is a sound and careful book, far better than anything that had appeared before it, and written in a sober yet interesting style. In the same year he was appointed maître de conferences at the École normale supérieure. Four years later, in 1831, the Introduction à l'histoire universelle showed a very different style, exhibiting the idiosyncrasy and literary power of the writer to greater advantage, but also displaying, in the words of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, "the peculiar visionary qualities which made Michelet the most stimulating, but the most untrustworthy (not in facts, which he never consciously falsifies, but in suggestion) of all historians."