Jules Michelet: Writing Art and History in Nineteenth-Century France by Michèle Hannoosh (review)

In one of several admiring letters in 1861, Flaubert articulates Michelet's status in the eyes of his contemporaries: 'Il n'est maintenant personne qui puisse se passer de vous, se soustraire à l'influence de votre génie, ne pas vivre sur vos idées' (Flaubert, Correspondance, éd. Jean Bruneau, 5 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1973–2007), III (1991), p. 155). Yet today, save in relation to historiography, this towering figure is almost lost from sight. As Michèle Hannoosh reminds us, however, a young Roland Barthes, working his way through the sixteen volumes of Michelet's Histoire de France while undergoing treatment for tuberculosis in 1942, opened up fertile avenues for modern readers of an enormous corpus. Her own re-evaluation is enhanced not only by penetrating analyses of the published work but also by recourse to Michelet's journal and reflections in his notes for lectures at the Collège de France, the thrust of which are resurrected even in the absence of accessible texts. Whereas Barthes underlined the alternating modes of récit and tableau, Hannoosh argues that the imbrication of narrative and authorial contemplation of works of art is key to an understanding of Michelet's most important and original historical concepts. For the visual arts, providing him with a kind of 'epiphanic illumination' (p. 6) captured in his poetic language, are a 'privileged site—and vehicle—for the interpretation of history' (p. 158). The range of the writer's interests and erudition is overlaid by Hannoosh's own immaculate scholarship and her insights into Michelet's engagement with works as diverse as Reims and Strasbourg cathedrals and the Fontainebleau Dianas, and with artists from Jan van Eyck to Rembrandt. But what she demonstrates is that architecture, statuary, and paintings do not give us fixed points illustrative of successive periods so much as they offer Michelet himself the opportunity to rethink in critical terms the relation between the work of the historian and his attitudes to the past. Inflected by the vicissitudes of his own biography (bereavement, remarriage, the state of his health) and events forcing him to revise prior assumptions about the Revolution's definitive position in the history of France (as both endpoint and template for an enlightened future), Michelet's return to his experience of the works in question is shaded by newly perceived ambiguities, equating the gothic with a sterile scholasticism and questioning the extent to which the positive implications of the Renaissance can be reconciled with Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia. Michelet's writing on Théodore Géricault remains the bestknown of his reflections on the visual arts, notably in the 1840s association of Le Radeau de la Méduse with the shipwreck of the nation. By tracking the correctives to such an interpretation activated by the unfolding of subsequent moments of national trauma (the regressive 1851 coup d'état; the Franco-Prussian War reprising; but, even more catastrophically, the Napoleonic downfall of 1815), Hannoosh highlights not only Michelet's increasing pessimism but also his acute sense of the historian's irreducibly provisional purchase on any apparently structured version of the national story. Hers is an important and original book, intellectually stimulating and beautifully written.