Quand Jules Michelet résistait à la mélancolie en écrivant une histoire de la Saint-Barthélemy à contre-courant des topiques historiographiques

Abstract

When Jules Michelet recalls how he subjectively lived the time of his work on the St-Bartholomew's Day, he evokes a form of melancholic depression that only writing was able to overcome by showing him that the most appalling of massacres did not close off the future but allowed him to become aware that the future must be synonymous with hope. He certainly encountered horror and it seemed to him that he was alone in his research that set him against all previous historiographies operating with no other intention than to falsify the causes, the facts and the consequences of what was for him the greatest massacre of French history. But the massacre, under his pen, reveals that the monarchy is a power as illegitimate as it is unjust, and that religion is a danger when it tries to merge with politics. It also reveals how fear can be destructive of societies.

Keywords

• Reformation
• historiography
• violence
• massacre
• mass murder
• monarchical violence