Great historical writing paints vivid pictures, but also draws meaningful conclusions from those images. The dullest historical writing sinks into a heavy mass of abstraction: representative individuals are molded by the forces of their times, like so many pieces of cheap pottery made from the same thin mixture poured into a mold. Jules Michelet’s style shocks a modern reader by insisting both on the meaning of historical interpretation and the uniqueness of the individual:
“Wonderful virtue of death, which alone reveals life! The living man is viewed by each from one side only, according as he benefits or injures each. Does he die? We then see him in a thousand new lights, and distinguish the numerous ties by which he held to the world.”
Death, the historian’s key, permission to begin the work! Michelet is writing here about the 1407 assassination of Louis I, Duke of Orléans, but he’s pointing out several things to the reader. First, history takes advantage of the opportunity death offers. We are at last able to discover what life blinded us to, we can begin to judge without the constraint of a particular set of interests. Next, once freed of a personal calculation, we can start to see more clearly, and recognize the individual as part of the larger web of life.
“So when you tear the ivy from the oak which supported it, you perceive that it leaves behind innumerable vivacious filaments, which you cannot tear from the bark on which they have lived: they will remain broken, but still they will remain.”
In a footnote, Michelet says “I remarked this the other day, in the forest of Saint-Germain, September 12, 1839”, which seems a rather excessive precision, until one imagines the author himself strolling through the woods, glancing up at the twining ivy and suddenly remembering the reckless gallant of the Bal des Ardents hacked to death with axes and pikes. The historian gazes at the little threads that attach the vine to the tree and thinks about what has been left behind when life is over. Of course, that’s why we read history, or it’s one reason. What remains of all that was? And see how personal Michelet is, but without narrowing his scope! HIs walk in the woods is a model for his method.
Louis I, Michelet goes on to say, was a charmer, cheated on his wife and left her a bastard son, but his death provoked real mourning among those shocked by this gallant young man struck down so gruesomely. And in private, the handsome rake had been truly pious. Many historians can’t resist insisting, over and over, on the prevailing practices of the age under study. They perhaps hope to make a particular story more meaningful by showing that it was typical. Michelet writes with a sense of the universal, but manages at the same time to regard each tombstone as marking a real human life, one no historian can recover.
“Each man is a humanity, a history at large. . . And yet this being, with whom was intertwined an infinite generality was at the same time a single type, a special individuality, a unique and irreperable being, who cannot be replaced. Nothing like him has preceeded, nothing like him will follow; God will not begin his work anew.
Others will come, no doubt; the world, which is untiring, will bring to life other persons, better perhaps, but like–never, never.”
[Chaque homme est une humanité, une histoire universelle . . . Et pourtant, cet être en qui tenait une généralité infinie, c’était en même temps un individu spécial, une personne, un être unique, irréparable, que rien ne remplacera. Rien de tel avant, rien après; Dieu ne recommencera point. Il en viendra d’autres, sans doute, le monde, qui ne se lasse pas, amènera à la vie d’autres personnes, meilleures, peut-être, mais semblables, jamais, jamais . . .]
Michelet reminds me that history can show the vast distance between ourselves and the past, and the closeness in humanity at the very same time.
Note: I’ve been meaning to write about excellent style in history, so thanks to the 2022 Nonfiction Reader Challenge and @bookdout for inspiring me to get going!
* I remarked this the other day, in the forest of Saint-Germain, September 12, 1839
Jules Michelet. Histoire de France. Vol. III, Book VIII