Edited by Lionel Gossman, this volume contains three programmatic essays by Michelet. The first two are available here for the first time in English translation. The third, the Preface to the 1869 edition of the Histoire de France, originally published in its first English translation by Edward K. Kaplan in his Michelet’s Poetic Vision (1977), has been revised by the translator for this volume. Curated by leading scholars and translators this volume provides essential reading for anybody interested in modern French and European history. One of the greatest Romantic historians and immensely popular during his lifetime, Jules Michelet (1798-1874) fell into disfavour among the positivist historians who came after him and who regarded his work with disdain as "literature." In the 1920s and 30s, however, he began to be rediscovered and rehabilitated by the members of the influential Annales school. The objects of Michelet’s interest—living conditions, popular mentalities, laws and the arts, the historian’s relation to the objects of his study, no less than political history—have since come to occupy a central place in modern historical research. A free online-only supplement contains an essay on Michelet by John Stuart Mill from the Edinburgh Review (January 1844) and several studies of Michelet by Lionel Gossman. The University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences of Princeton University has generously contributed to the publication of this volume.
The translation of Introduction to World History and of the Opening Address at the Faculty of Letters presented in this volume are based upon the following French edition:
The first edition of the book, published in April 1831 with the same publisher.
The translation of the 1869 Preface to the History of France is based on the edition of Charles Morazé (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962), and checked against Michelet’s Oeuvres complètes, volume IV, ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion, 1974).
A 1880 edition of the book (Paris: A. Lacroix & Co.) is available at http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Histoire_de_France_%28Jules_Michelet%29, while another edition by Gabriel Monod can be read on-line at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38243.
Please find below the online supplements available for this volume:
by kind permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.
From Ed. George Stade. Scribner Writers Online - European Writers Collection. © 2010, by kind permission of Cengage Learning, Inc.
Adapted from the article ‘Jules Michelet: histoire nationale, biographie, autobiographie’, Littérature, May, 1996, 102: 29-54.
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 3 September 2001, 145: 283-333. © 2001, by kind permission of the American Philosophical Society.
Acknowledgments
1. Foreword by Lionel Gossman
2. Chronology of Jules Michelet
3. Michelet, Introduction to World History (1831)
Translated by Flora Kimmich
Notes and Clarifications
4. Michelet, Opening Address at the Faculty of Letters, 9 January 1834
Translated by Lionel Gossman
5. Michelet, Preface to History of France (1869), with Introduction by Edward K. Kaplan
Translated by Edward K. Kaplan
6. Select Bibliography of Critical Writing on Michelet