1. Barthes – the Early Years
5. Michelet (1954) – An Anachrony
Barthes’s Michelet was published in 1954 following the success of Writing Degree Zero
the year before. Barthes’s study of Michelet’s work dated back to his sanatorium days, and had
occupied him for several years during and after his illness. In that sense, there was something
anachronistic about its publication as a book in 1954 and, for many years to come, it would stand
as unique among Barthes’s publications. Except for Barthes’s acute awareness of the importance
of History, Michelet did not have the theoretical focus of Writing Degree Zero [which will be
discussed in my next posting] and, on the surface, had little in common with the articles Barthes
was writing at the time about literature, the theatre and contemporary cultural myths.
Jules Michelet, portrait by Thomas Couture

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In a 1971 interview,i Barthes explains that he first read Michelet at the suggestion of
Joseph Baruzi, a musicologist and scholar interested in the philosophy of history, whom he had
met as a student before the war. Baruzi was a highly cultured man who was well-read outside the
mainstream and who had the ability to sense the ‘enigmatic’ within the ‘outmoded’. ii Jules
Michelet (1798–1874) was a major figure of the French Romantic movement, who had been at
the forefront of intellectual life in the nineteenth century. His political ideas were particularly
influential among the radical and socialist leaders who took part in the upheavals of 1848;
notably the Paris popular uprising of June 1848, which was brutally repressed by the elite
bourgeoisie that had been wielding power since the 1789 French Revolution. In addition to his
life’s work – a History of France in 23 volumes (1833–1867) – Michelet’s publications included
an impassioned History of the French Revolution in seven volumes (1847–53) and a visionary
Introduction to Universal History (1831), as well as smaller books on more personal themes –
nature, love, womanhood. His approach to historiography was highly subjective and his beliefs –
a mixture of sentimentalism, socialism, anticlericalism and Republican idealism verging on the
mystical – were imparted with rich eloquence. With the introduction of scientific methods into
the study of history towards the end of the nineteenth century, Michelet’s work was bound not to
fare well. Indeed the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which by 1974 had altogether
dropped his entry, iii was already introducing Michelet as the ‘most stimulating, but most
untrustworthy (not in facts, which he never consciously falsifies, but in suggestion) of all
historians.’ By the time Barthes started reading Michelet and took to him, Michelet’s highly
subjective interpretation of history, sympathetic approach to his subject and dithyrambic style
were long outmoded. Yet it was precisely those aspects that fascinated Barthes.
Barthes was not interested in Michelet’s political ideas, which he described as unoriginal,
adding that Michelet’s defence of republican and democratic institutions was largely shared by
the liberal petty bourgeoisie of mid-nineteenth century France. iv Barthes was essentially
interested in Michelet the man of letters, whose writings he admired for their ‘baroque strength’.v
Barthes was fascinated by Michelet’s total dedication to both history and writing, manifest in his
intense, personal involvement in his narratives. Barthes was also particularly sensitive to those
aspects that would eventually lead to a positive re-evaluation of Michelet’s work: his desire to re-
create the past in all its material, existential, experiential reality; to exhume the dead and the
nameless in order give them a voice; and thus conjure up the totality of human experience. For

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Barthes, it was the imaginative dimension of Michelet’s work which had led to its dismissal in
the name of scientific rigour, that made him relevant: however inaccurate or biased, his writings
showed that knowledge, and in this case enquiries into the past, fulfilled a deep-seated
psychological need, the need to project oneself into the past and dream of a past life.vi
The Michelet project had begun, as mentioned earlier, as a collection of approximately
1,000 index cards carrying observations and quotations. When Barthes was commissioned by
Éditions du Seuil to write a book on Michelet for their ‘Écrivains de toujours’ series, all he
needed to do was to decide on an appropriate order for these notes and elaborate on them.
‘Écrivains de toujours’ was an illustrated, pocket-size series aimed at a wide readership, which
had proved extremely successful since its launch in 1951. The originality of the series rested on
the fact that it consisted of a biographical essay and a thematic overview of the work of the writer
under scrutiny, illustrated by extensive extracts from their work, hence the subtitle ‘par lui-
même’ (‘by himself’). Barthes obediently adhered to the overall format of the series, but his
approach to his subject was somewhat novel. The foreword warns the reader that, contrary to
expectations, the book is not offering an overview of Michelet’s thought and life, and ‘still less
an explanation of the former by the latter’. Instead it focused on those themes – words and
images – that are repeated throughout Michelet’s prolific and diverse œuvre in order to try and
recover, through a kind of psycho-sexual approach, ‘the structure’ of Michelet’s existence, or
‘better still an organised network of obsessions’.vii Barthes readily acknowledged that Michelet’s
œuvre was the product of a particular period in history, but ‘first of all’, he added, ‘we must
restore to this man his coherence. […] I have sought to describe a unity, not to explore its roots in
history or in biography.’viii Michelet’s ideas and opinions might have changed during his lifetime
and been widely shared by the nineteenth century liberal middle-classes, but the way he related
personally to history was both idiosyncratic and constant. What Barthes deemed characteristic
about Michelet’s recurrent themes was that they implied a physical, bodily response to his subject
matter, epitomized in Barthes’s choice of title for the first chapter of Michelet, ‘Michelet, Eater of
History’: ‘he burrows into the heart of historical substance, feeds on it, grows in it.’ ix Even
Michelet’s migraines are ‘historical’: ‘Fits of nausea, dizziness, oppression do not come only
from the seasons, from the weather; it is the very horror of narrated history which provokes
them.’ x Michelet’s portrayal of historical characters and events, as analyzed by Barthes, is
particularly revelatory in this respect: Louis XVI (born 1754–guillotined 1793) is described as

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pale and swollen, and Napoleon (1769–1821), yellow and waxy, all attributes that discredit both
the French monarchy and the Empire; conversely, Joan of Arc (1412–1431) – like the People and
the Revolution – is presented as a seed for the future.xi Thus, the historical figures conjured by
Michelet ‘have virtually no psychology’, writes Barthes, ‘and if they are condemned, it is not on
account of their motives or their actions, but by virtue of the attraction or revulsion attached to
their flesh.’xii For Michelet, the present and the past are constituted of either harmful or beneficial
substances, and the reactions these provoke provide the basis for his system of values: ‘Good is
determined by virtue of its seamless, fluid, rhythmic nature, and Evil as a consequence of its
dryness and its discontinuity.’xiii
Louis XVI, portrait by A.-F.Callet Napoleon, portrait by David
It was this emphasis on physicality in Michelet’s work that led early commentators to link
Barthes’s approach to a recent wave of criticism inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s enquiries into
the literary mind, which related poetic symbols to the traditional four elements – fire, water, earth
and air – and studied them from a psychoanalytical perspective.xiv Barthes would explain later
that this was a misconception: xv his was a personal approach born out of his playing with
quotations and notes on index cards, and essentially the product of years of relative isolation. Yet,
as we can see, Barthes’s concerns were not altogether removed from those of his contemporaries,
even when he was at his most personal. There was also something almost premonitory in

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Barthes’s interest in Michelet. As the idea that historical research should encompass all aspects of
human experience, including the daily concerns of ordinary people, – instead of focusing merely
on political figures and international relations – gained ground in the 1950s, Michelet’s notion of
‘total history’ acquired new relevance.
For many years, however, Barthes’s readers did not quite know what to make of his
obvious fascination for Michelet – the only writer whose work he claimed to have read in its
entirety. Michelet’s florid style was indeed, as we shall see later, a far cry from the ‘neutral’ form
of writing and the minimalist dramaturgy that Barthes championed in the 1950s. For the
following twenty years, this book, which was after all a biography of sorts, seemed so much at
odds with Barthes’s concerns that it was considered as quite apart from the main thrust of his
thinking. This ceased, however, to be the case after 1975, when Barthes published his own
Roland Barthes in the same series as his book on Michelet. From then on Michelet par lui-même
came to be considered as a key to the late Barthes, and perhaps one of his most important books.
As always in such circumstances, the case may have been somewhat overstated, but there is no
doubt that Barthes’s Michelet exhibited some of the characteristic features of Barthes’s later
writings: on the formal side, a rejection of the linear approach afforded by chronology in favour
of the fragment; and from the thematic point of view, an emphasis on the link between writing
and the body, between literary imagination and corporeal experience.
NOTES
i
Roland Barthes , ‘Réponses’ (1971), Œuvres complètes, Paris, Seuil, 1994, vol. 2, p. 1312.
ii
Ibid.
iii
It is worth noting that Michelet’s entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica has now been fully
reinstated, and that he fares better in the current edition online than Barthes himself.
iv
Roland Barthes, Michelet (1954), translated as Michelet by Richard Howard, Oxford, Basil
Blackwell, 1987, p. 11.
v
Ibid. OC 2, p. 1312.]
vi
‘Une “histoire de la civilisation française”: Une mentalité historique’ (1960) [book review of
Histoire de la civilisation française (1958) by G. Duby and R. Mandro], in Roland Barthes,
Œuvres complètes, op. cit., vol.1 (1993), p. 887.

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vii
Michelet, op. cit., p. 3.
viii
Ibid., p. 3.
ix
Ibid., p. p. 18.
x
Ibid., p. 19.
xi
Ibid., p. 36.
xii
Ibid., p. 92.
xiii
Ibid., p. 203.
xiv
Gaston Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938), Water and dreams: An Essay on the
Imagination of Matter (1942), Earth and reveries of will (1948).]
xv
‘Réponses’ (1971), op. cit., p. 1312.