Part 1, Chapters 3-4 Summary and Analysis

Michelet was well educated and read works in Latin, Greek, English, Italian and German. He traveled throughout Europe visiting many of the libraries and talking to many of the people. His work on the French Revolution began with a study of feudalism and continued to a year after the fall of the Bastille. He wrote of the paradoxes in history that characterized the age of social change that he studied. These contradictions that he wrote of would reappear later in other writers concerned with social-economic phenomena, notably Karl Marx.

Michelet continued his writings, becoming so revolutionary that he was suspended from his teaching post in 1848 and then reinstated. When Napoleon became Emperor in 1851, Michelet lost both his teaching position and his job at the Archives. He continued his writing on the history of France. In writing on...