INTRODUCTION

Jules Michelet was born in Paris, in 1798. He was the son of a printer and saw many hardships in hîs eariy youth. He won brilliant success as a student and became a professer at the École Normale and at the Collège de France. The latter position he resigned in 1852. His enthusiasm and véhémence involved him in much polemical writing. His chief works were the History of France, down to the Renaissance, 1833- 1844; from the Renaissance to the Révolution, 1855- 1867; and the History of the Révolution, 1847-1853. He wrote many other books with political or controversial tendencies, including Des Jésuites, 1843, ^^^ le Peuple, 1846, besides some strange combinations of crude science and lyric imagination: V Oiseau, 1856; l'Insecte, 1857; l'Amour, 1859; '^ Femme, 1860, etc. He died in 1874.

Michelet is correctly classed among the great writers of France, although the term " historian " seems often a misnomer. He might, in fact, sometimes more fittingly be called an historical novelist or the composer of an historical prose epic. His enormous History of France, a life's work in itself, is, judged from the point of view of scientific scholarship, grossly inadéquate, though he was one of the first in France to make use