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"Never was the land so energetically cultivated as in 1792, when the peasant had taken back from the landlord the soil which he had coveted so long," Michelet tells us speaking of the Great Revolution. Of course, before long, intensive culture would be within the reach of all. Improved machinery, chemical manures, and all such matters would soon be supplied by the Commune.
"Yes, monsieur," said the maire gravely, as he glanced at a proclamation on the wall which he has added to his private collection of antiquities, "that is true. I have often been très fâché to think that I who won the Michelet prize at the Lycée should have put my name to that thing over there."
Mosheim, Cent. 2, chap. v. sec. 4. Dictionary of Sects, p. 13. Lea, Hist. of Sacerdotal Celibacy, 1884, p. 42. Cited by Michelet, Priests, Women, and Families, p. 130. Spiritual Wives, ii. pp. 55-6. Spiritual Wives, pp. 176-7, 181. Ibid., pp. 84-6. The Russian Church and Russian Dissent, p. 201. Lea, Hist. of Sacerdotal Celibacy, p. 40. Visit to the Russian Empire, i. p. 254.
Baudricourt is said by Michelet to have sent off a secret express to the Court to ask what he should do; but of this there seems to be no direct evidence, though likelihood enough. The Court at Chinon contained a strong feminine element, behind the scenes. And it might be found that there were uses for the enthusiast, even if she did not turn out to be inspired.
There is some truth in this panegyric of Michelet's. The passage of the army of Charles VIII. marks a turning-point in modern history, and from this epoch dates the diffusion of a spirit of culture over Europe. But Michelet forgets to notice that the French never rightly understood their vocation with regard to Italy.
That M. Michelet should pretend to have forgotten this vilest of pasquinades, is more shocking to the general sense of justice than any special untruth as to Shakspeare can be to the particular nationality of an Englishman. The story which furnishes a basis to the fine ballad in Percy's Reliques, and to the Canterbury Tale of Chaucer's Lady Abbess.
The metaphysical question of necessity and freewill acquired a new interest: is Progress a fatality, independent of human purposes, determined by general, ineluctable, historical laws? Quinet and Michelet argued vigorously against the optimism of Cousin, who with Hegel held that history is just what it ought to be and could not be improved.
His book was not written for you as this one is: and if, in spite of all my good intentions, I have not always succeeded in being as comprehensible as I meant to be, Michelet, who never thought about little people when he took up his pen, will certainly startle you now and then. But do not be disheartened by a word.
The thing had been done, twenty years earlier again, by a Scotch advocate who had deliberately turned from poetic form, though he retained poetic imagination, and who did not disdain not to make a fool of himself, as Michelet, with all his genius, did again and again.
The amateurs of cosmopolitan literature, I believe, like to find it in Stendhal and Michelet. They praise the former for his delicate and pitiless psychological analysis.
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