fe of
the dead centuries was possible. All or nothing was his word. It was
a bold venture, but it was a venture, or rather an act, of faith.
Thierry had been tyrannised by the idea of the race: the race is much,
but the people does not march in the air; it has a geographical basis;
it draws its nutriment from a particular soil. Michelet, at the moment
of his narrative when France began to have a life distinct from Germany,
enters upon a survey of its geography, in which the physiognomy and
the genius of each region are studied as if each were a separate living
creature, and the character of France itself is discovered in the
cohesion or the unity of its various parts. Reaching the tenth and
eleventh centuries, he feels the sadness of their torpor and their
violence; yet humanity was living, and soon in the enthusiasm of
Gothic art and the enthusiasm of the Crusades the sacred aspirations
of the soul had their manifestation. At the close of the mediaeval
period everything seems to droop and decay: no! it was then, during
the Hundred Years' War, that the national consciousness was born,
and patriotism was incarnated in an armed shepherdess, child of the
people.

By the thirteenth year of his labours--1843--Michelet had traversed
the mediaeval epoch, and reached the close of the reign of Louis XI.
There he paused. Seeing one day high on the tower of Reims Cathedral,
below which the kings of France received their consecration, a group
or garland of tortured and mutilated figures carved in stone, the
thought possessed him that the soul and faith of the people should
be confirmed within his own soul before he could trust himself to
treat of the age of the great monarchy. He leaped at once the
intervening centuries, and was at work during eight years--from 1845
to 1853--on the French Revolution. He found a hero for his
revolutionary epic in the people.

The temper of 1848 was hardly the temper in which the earlier
Revolution could be judiciously investigated. Michelet and Quinet
had added to their democratic zeal the passions connected with an
anticlerical campaign. The violence of liberalism was displayed in
_Des Jesuites_, and _Du Pretre, de la Femme et de la Famille_. When
the historian returned to the sixteenth century his spirit had
undergone a change: he adored the Middle Ages; but was it not the
period of the domination of the Church, and how could it be other
than evil? He could no longer be a mere historian; he mus