L'Esprit Créateur

In the notes for his February 12, 1846 Course at the Collège de France, Michelet cites Gericault: "Quand je veux faire une femme, il se trouve que c'est un lion."¹ The painter, Michelet explains, died at a time of intense struggle and heroism, too young to experience hisaccession to grace. Michelet had long associated grace—a feminine motif—with everything that led history astray, that is, away from justice. Unlike Gericault, Michelet lived long enough to recognize the necessity of harmonizing grace and justice. He never stopped discussing 'woman,' persuading himself that he had captured her essence, as he jots in his March 14, 1858 Journal: "Il te faut faire ta femme et te faire toi-même."² If history is a calling, as he claims in his 1849 course, then woman is a religion, whether she be a saint, a simple bourgeoise to be educated or a witch. More than a theme in his corpus, the topic expandedwith the multiplicity and wealth of its variations, becoming rather an interrogation that requireda response. As Ballanche puts it, "la femme est une initiation."³

There was nevertheless a progression in Michelet's depiction of 'woman,' whom he calledhis symbol as early as1845. His focus culminatedin texts specifically devotedto the exploration of the phenomenon: Les Femmes de la Révolution (1854), L'Amour andLa Femme in 1858 and 1859—the two halvesof his nineteenth-century gospelregarding the paternalistic bourgeois family—then La Sorcière in 1862. L'Oiseau (1856), L'Insecte (1857), La Mer (1861), and La Montagne (1868) orchestrate naturalist themes concerning women. Before losing his chair at the Collège de France, Michelet had given his 1849 course the title "L'Amour comme éducation," and that of the following year, "Éducation de la femme et par la femme." In these courses he depicted woman in an exalted style as nature, as the eternal lover. These post-1848 texts reflecteda turning point both in his life and in history. 1848, a year of revolutionary impulse in Europe and in France, was both the date of the proclamation of the Second Republic, andthe beginning of itsdissolution. Buta significant event in Michelet's personal life attenuated his bitter disappointment in the aborted revolution. The fifty year-old historian, madly in love, embarked on an extraordinary adventure with Athénaïs Mialaret, whom he married the following year. He marveled at the convergence between history and his personal life. "Cette terrible année 48 la fit et la mûrit, pour moi, d'une [End Page 45] étonnante manière."⁴ In short his wife, woman, thenentered historical time, joining that center of creation which wasthe historian himself.

From that time forward, Michelet's hymn to woman amplified and grewmore diverse in his writing. At the same time, he undertooka quasi-obsessional study of his wife's body in his private Journal, where he takes pride in being the first to do so in such detail. He also rediscoveredthe strength of love, not only in his life but in history. "L'histoire du monde semble l'histoire de la haine et de l'amour."⁵ Sentiment suffuses everything and illuminates the antagonistic forces that dominate the past. Thus the Middle Ages, he states, seriously erred by ignoring that love is ultimately identical with justice. Moreover, the theme is amplified in his vision of anamorous struggle between the forces that arrest the time of history, like Christianity, and those that promote it and cause it to progress toward a triumph of the people. His vision is not without ambiguity, however, as to the value of the feminine factor in the destiny of humanity.

Michelet acknowledged having always been "un cœur brûlant" long before admitting Athénaïs into his life. The first six volumes of his Histoire de France that had been published before he met her abound with female characters, whereas most nineteenth-century historians relegated women to the background. Above all, Michelet highlights the role of powerful women during the Middle Ages. Far from being ancillary characters, they acted, they arguedabout states and thrones, they defendedcities and governedin the name of their sons. "Nous avons déjà remarqué à l'occasion d'Héloïse, d'Eléonore de Guienne et des cours d'amour que, dès le XII^e siècle, la femme prit sur la terre une place proportionnée à l'importance nouvelle qu'elle avait acquise dans la hiérarchie céleste. Au XIII^e siècle, elle se trouve, au moins comme mère et régente, assise sur plusieurs des trônes d'Occident."⁶ Monsters or heroines, virtuous or immodest, their portraits are vividly drawn. Women, Woman? A paradigmatic singular always emerges from each individual figure. The portraits are on occasion ferocious, and as history unfolds they increasingly reveal the negative archetypes that govern Michelet's vision of kings and queens, such as the stagnant and the glacial, the bloated and the ruddy. When bloodis viewed in a positive light, it is allied with the freshness of youth, as in the case of Marie-Louise, the "rose" that was delivered despite her wishes to the "bull" that wasBonaparte. In contrast, the portrait of Catherine of Russia is ruthless; with her red complexion, "la fangeuse Catherine"⁷ is represented as both physically big and a monster of iniquity. Blood, for Michelet, is above all an ambivalent substance that reflects a profoundimaginary dynamic. Roland Barthes analyzed this material imagination at work in [End Page 46] Michelet's obsessive images, calling them "portraits-rebus" built uponthe attractive or repulsive effect the fleshly substance of the character hadon the historian. Thus, in addition to the superabundance of blood whose excess translatesinto moral or spiritual excesses, blood can also representvigor. That is the case inthe much admired Manon Roland, spiritual daughter of Rousseau but without the weaknesses of a Julie or a Sophie. "Elle procédait du peuple; on le voyait aisément à certain éclat de sang et de carnation qu'on a beaucoup moins dans les classes élevées. [...] Madame Roland fut vertueuse, nullement amollie par l'inaction, la rêverie où languissent les femmes."⁸

But what about the woman of the people in the Middle Ages, before she emerged from the anonymity of the rural masses? Michelet gives her two different embodiments. As Joan of Arc she appears individualized and plays an important role in the fifth volume of his 1841 Histoire de France. As the witch, woman is a paradigmatic figure Michelet wouldprivilege when he returnedto writing his Histoire de France twenty years later.

First, the Maiden of Orléans is the dominant feminine figuration in Michelet's late Middle Ages, greater than the chaste Queen Mathilda, the heroic Saint Geneviève, and all the ladies who defended cities. Not merely a historical character, she comes to exemplify for himthe heroic ideal embodied in a being emanating from the people as if by spontaneous generation. Roland Barthes emphasized Michelet's indifference tohistorical causality. "Jeanne n'est pas le résultat d'un certain nombre de données antécédentes. Elle est essentiellement un relais d'identités: elle égale à la fois le peuple et la Révolution, à peu près comme la fleur 'représente' la graine primitive et le fruit futur."⁹ The exemplarity of the hero and of the heroine lies in the incarnation of the Idea, the ability of making it visible. Joan of Arc is France as the nation sees itself. "Au moment où l'injustice est consommée, où l'Anglais se fait roi, alors la France se sent France; elle proteste devant Dieu qu'elle n'a pas mérité de périr. Cette protestation ne peut sortir ni des grands, ni du roi, ni des villes: tous sont souillés; elle sort du peuple, du peuple des campagnes, d'une femme, d'une vierge, de la Pucelle."¹⁰ In Joan of Arc, action and tenderness, common sense and goodness wereunited. She madethe bestial Jacques of peasant uprisings more humane, and through her the people bestowed the chivalricideal to the knights. She gavefright to the English who would wreak their vengeance for being vanquished by the sword of a young woman by condemning her "par sentence de prêtres."¹¹ A synthesis of justice and grace, Joan of Arc wasFrance, already a nation, whose destiny wasat the very heart of history. "En elle apparurent à la fois la vierge […] et déjà la Patrie. […] Le sauveur de la France devait être une femme. La France elle-même était [End Page 47] femme. Elle en avait la mobilité, mais aussi l'aimable douceur, la pitié facile et charmante, l'excellence au moins du premier mouvement."¹²

But we should also be aware that, for Michelet, the strong presence of women in history ultimately remains accidental. Joan of Arc wasmiraculous. There wasanother exceptional moment, the beginning of the Revolution, when women, collectively, were superior to men by the life they brought to ideas inherited from the eighteenth century. "Les femmes règnent alors par le sentiment, par la passion, par la supériorité aussi, il faut le dire, de leur initiative. Jamais, ni avant, ni après, elle n'eurent tant d'influence. […] En 91 le sentiment domine, et, par conséquent, la femme."¹³ But Michelet's explanation of this phenomenon ultimately relegates women to their nature. On the one hand, they are more instinctive, "moins gâtées que nous par les habitudes sophistiques et scolastiques." On the other hand, they suffer more than men in periods of extreme poverty, either as mothers or as "filles seules, tristes créatures sans famille, sans soutien."¹⁴ Throwing in an attractive portrait of Théroigne de Méricourt, Michelet describes the lower class women responsible for the eventsof October 5, 1789 which returned the king to Paris from Versailles by calling for bread for themselves and their children. It is about them that he writes the dreadful sentence, "la femme, l'être relatif qui ne peut vivre qu'à deux."¹⁵ When the women of history are strong, then, it is despite their femininity, or by sublimating it. If they confront extreme situations, they are ultimately crushed by them. They reveal in this way that they are not supernatural beings, but rather remain attached to their mortal frame and are bound to suffer, as he indicates in the case of Joan of Arc.

Women then are dual. They initially carried the revolutionary impulse forward, but they also generally caused revolutions to abort. The sum total of their contributions to history is quite dismal. Women remain, whatever they do, subservient to their sexual nature. Moreover, they should not be held accountable for their actions. A society that punishes women condemns itself for neglecting to educate them. They may be responsible but they cannot be punished: "il faut tenir compte de la part de fatalité qu'y mêle la maladie."¹⁶ Women are considered sacred over and above their individuality since they represent a real or potential maternity, linked to their female 'wound.' "Ce n'est pas notre faute si la nature les a faites, non pas faibles, comme on dit, mais infirmes, périodiquement malades, nature autant que personnes."¹⁷ By their blood, women are tied to the rhythm of nature; they thus are placed above history which remains linear.

Michelet is seized with violent emotion when he evokes women's physical vulnerability, a vulnerability paralleled by a moral sensibility perceptible [End Page 48] beneath the strength of character of the most heroic. The historian portrays himself as both eulogist and champion of woman. He cherishes her weakness, for it allows man to cure her. His interest embraces every aspect of femininity, including its forms, dress, hairstyle, complexion, diet, digestive and reproductive functions, education and, of course, morality, and he establishes an essential relation between all these elements. He proceeds with the same passion for totality with regards to woman as he does with regards to history, a passion that sometimes madehim ill. This totalization couldnevertheless only be realized on a profound level of material imagination. It is on that level that all women participate in the archetypes of material femininity. Prefiguring the studies of Gaston Bachelard, who often cites Michelet, the historian discovered the joy of abandoning himself to the dynamic of the imagination, "avant les pensées." In La Montagne, Michelet relates the experience of the mud baths he consented to try at Acqui, in Italy, and his discovery of their therapeutic spiritual value. His experience is described in almost mystical terms as he attains a progressively greater understanding of both his "mal" and the remedy for it.

Je n'accusai que moi […], l'excès de cet effort pour revivre à moi seul la vie du genre humain. […] Dans le second quart d'heure, la puissance [de la Nature] augmentait. L'idée disparaissait dans mon absorption profonde. La seule idée qui me restait, c'était Terra mater. Je la sentais très bien, caressante et compatissante, réchauffant son enfant blessé. Du dehors? Au dedans aussi. Car elle me pénétrait de ses esprits vivifiants, m'entrait et se mêlait à moi, m'insinuant son âme.¹⁸

Just as his experience of mother earth expands his spirit as it soothes him, Micheletwill experience the enveloping and fecund femininity of the sea, the seething of its desire. What renders the feminine element contrary to history is ultimately what prompts hisdesire to fuse with it. What separates man from woman hurts him.

The first lines of La Femme express his profound suffering at the failure of relationships between men and women: "par un concours singulier de circonstances, sociales, religieuses, économiques, l'homme vit séparé de la femme. […] Le foyer est froid, la table muette et le lit glacé."¹⁹ In his Précis de l'Histoire de France, he attributes women's turning away from men to the ascendancy of alcohol and tobacco, which is associatedwith the fateful date of 1610. He commits himself increasingly to rehabilitating and defending women, oppressed from time immemorial, oppressed by the feudal lord, by their employers, by their loutish husbands, and above all, disdained and manipulated by the Catholic Church. These wereMichelet's main feminist principles. But his good intentions were bathed in the paternalistic climate of [End Page 49] his time. He belongedindeedto thenineteenth century, an era when elevating women to poetic divinity was a mere alibi for excluding them from public life, andhe convergedwith the Romantic ideology that idealizedwomen while infantilizing them.

Nor is Michelet the only one to note the bifurcation of the destinies of men and women as a historical fact. (Vigny and Musset made it a corollary of the mal du siècle.) Michelet sought to give a new tone to his study by adopting the language of recent sciences, biology and sociology. That is also what distinguishes him from other noteworthy reformers such as Proudhon and Comte, more fiercely antifeminist than he. Before outliningthe positive aspect of his catechism in La Femme—addressed to the twenty-eight year-old man, the ideal marriageable age for men—Michelet paints a bleak picture of the century, ravaged by the decline of moral purpose in the midst of surprising material and intellectual progress. He laments that people no longer marry. From the very beginning of L'Amour, he places woman at the heart of the "maladie du siècle." She is defined by her menstrual cycle, "la crise sacrée," which renders her pathological, a perpetual wound. "Ce siècle sera nommé celui des maladies de la matrice,—autrement dit de la misère et de l'abandon de la femme, de son désespoir."²⁰

In La Femme, he describes with compassion and a very modern sense of sociological analysis the poverty and despair of the working woman, exploited in large industrial cities, and too often reduced to prostitution. Woman is thus both a victimand the instrument of evil. Because she is too weak to work continuously without rest, her only salvation is marriage, described as a true acculturation of the young spouse by her husband.

Michelet's description of conjugal life is characterized by amawkish sentimentality that has often been attributed to Athénaïs's influence. Whatever concerns woman is depicted as small, charming, touching; all of it is represented as taking place in the isolation of what he calls "la maison du berger." Michelet never participated in the debate regarding the rights of women which nevertheless roiled around him, unlike other reformers more militantly antifeminist than he. For example, Comte tookon John Stuart Mill, and Proudhon acceptedthe epistolary challenge offered by the feminist Jenny d'Héricourt. Nothing similar with Michelet. In 1848 he seemed oblivious towomen's political agitation andtheir demand for rights. He pursuedhis work on women and woman between his office in the historical archives and the various localesof his research (hospitals, working-class neighborhoods), his study, and the conjugal alcove. L'Amour unleashed passions, cries of horror ('How can he speak of torn viscera!'), cruel parodies, protests that sometimes [End Page 50] surprised the historian. Some referred to him as 'la Bible de l'amour,' while others, republicans andconservatives, decried his crude language, his abuse of physiology, "cette sauce piquante de toutes les erreurs du temps" according to Barbey d'Aurevilly, who even spoke of "marivaudage halluciné."²¹ Liberals agreedon the whole with the message, although the socialist Pelletan objectedto defining woman as a naturally wounded being, while praising the magic of the historian's style. Michelet mentions that "article hostile de Pelletan: pour la femme libre des socialistes" in a November 28, 1858 entry in his journal.²² There is no doubt that 'la femme libre' horrifies him. Yet he seeks to define the nature of woman in terms of difference, not inferiority as does Proudhon. He traces thisdifference to fertility, the ultimate source of woman's dependence. "Elle ne fait rien comme nous. Elle pense, parle, agit autrement. […] Son sang n'a pas le cours du nôtre. […] Elle ne respire pas comme nous."²³

Women's reaction to Michelet's two books wasvaried. Some wroteto the author to thank him for taking them seriously, for attributing to them the dignity of personhood, for putting them at the center of a program for the moral regeneration of humanity. Feminists, on the other hand, challengedthe conflation of woman as illness (Angélique Arnaud in 1858). In La Femme affranchie (1860), Jenny d'Héricourt praises her adversaries, the counter-emancipators, for restoring the reality of womenby not backing away from anatomical details.²⁴ Regarding women's rights, she finds it more difficult to criticize the seemingly well-intentioned Michelet than the brutal Proudhon. She does however address the contradictions of the historian who claims to free her while thinking for her. Here, she points toa fundamental criticism, one that Michelet seems to have anticipatedin affirming that woman herself is "ce miracle de divine contradiction."²⁵ Woman remains for Michelet a miraculous subject who allows him to explore the limits of his thought, intuitions, obsessions. He can pass from the affirmation of his principles of fraternity to the expression of the most retrograde social remedies as to the place of women in society. Woman allows all the inconsistencies of the thinker who depicts her as both fickle and faithful, who wishes her to be his equal and yet obedient. She is of all social classes and all time. As a woman of the people, she must be educated, but only to fulfill the ideal Michelet defines for her.

Fortunately, Michelet still hadanother book to write about woman. When he turnedaway from his republican-bourgeois prophecies, he becamean ethnologist as much as a historian in La Sorcière, and a mythologist more than a psychologist, since he addresseda discomfort situated elsewhere than in consciousness. In 1861 he rereadwhat he hadwritten on the Middle Ages and [End Page 51] perceived over several centuries the outline of a female figure born "des temps du désespoir profond que fit le monde de l'Eglise. […] La sorcière est son crime."²⁶ He decidedto give voice to that forgotten figure, to that anonymous being who often ended up on the pyre, like Joan of Arc. If the lady of the manor, "que les romans veulent faire croire si delicate, […] commandait aux hommes dans l'absence du mari, […] jugeait, […] châtiait, […] ordonnait des supplices," the peasant's wife who was neither protected, nor powerful, had to find arms in her very weakness.²⁷ Michelet's gift for panoptical vision, his talent for mythologizing his characters and dramatizing his narrative, provide a synthesis of history and fiction at the center of which lies woman, endowed with three hundred years of symbolic life.

Michelet assertsthat Nature made her a witch, but it is the house that creates woman. In the first phase, the young wife of the serf is alone in her hovel, amongsparse and meager objects, and while spinning she dreams of the ancient gods, not quite abandoned. When times become more difficult, between the humiliation of servitude (often sexual for woman) and the power of gold, she increasingly listens to the voice of the tempter. She listens to Satan, the damned bastard who, unlike the saints "qui se remuent peu" and "attendent en attendant," cries "en avant."²⁸ Satan in Michelet's view is not evil, but first and foremost "le prince de la nature," who laughs and subverts, and moves things along. Woman ventures outside then onto the heath, into the forest.²⁹ She hears the voices of nature, she learns the qualities of the various plants. This is the second stage, that of the witch, powerful in her ability to administer philters and potions close to poisons, and she takes enormous risks. She was, Michelet explains, the only doctor available to the common people for a thousand years. She does more, however, for she consoles and even brings the dead back to life. In nature, she experiences and reveals the immensity of desire. The villagers follow her to the witches' Sabbath, dionysiacal celebrations that culminate in incestuous revels. Then the authorities construct the sorceress as a threat to be denounced and burnt at the stake. The last figure of the witch, that of the sixteenth century, is much less fascinating to Michelet. As the confidante of the great lady, complicit in the secrets of the alcove, her power dissolves into intrigue.

In his book, Michelet fashions himself as a shaman, a believer or scoffer, since he does not question the efficacyof the witch's practices. The opposition between man and woman is the point of departure for a series of active dualities that do not overlap: inside and outside, pure and impure, official medicine and its converse, God and Satan. The witch is not the hoary magician of olden times; she announces the new scientific spirit. The witch is a [End Page 52] myth of origins, according to Michel Serres who shows what is premonitory in Michelet's reasoning, an archeology of science on three levels: "quasi freudien, quasi marxiste, quasi nietzschéen."³⁰

La Sorcière is a perfect culmination of the hymn to woman the historian intones. It illuminates his preceding texts in a new way. The witch reminds us that feminine difference may be a lively function of creation that subverts repetitive models before assuming the guise of the pale domestic goddess that is at the center of his life and of his republican utopia. But if Michelet seems at times to imagine a sisterly society where woman would be less a genetrix and more of a confidant and an assistant, man remains 'divine.' "Mon symbole, la femme" may thus be understood in diverse ways : favorite symbol, symbol of myself? Always symbolon, nevertheless, half of a total message to be reconstituted, created. Michelet's ultimate dream oscillates between that of spiritual androgyny—his own, which incorporates both male and female dimensions in his own—and the parasitic role that Barthes identifies, "que l'homme soit parasite de la femme."³¹