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.