From a Paris print shop to the national archives
Michelet was born in Paris in 1798, the son of a printer. He grew up around books as objects made by hand and became a teacher before working at the French national archives. There he had access to records on which he could build a history of France across many centuries. He also wrote a separate history of the Revolution, returning repeatedly to what collective action felt like to the people living through it.
He took the chair of history and moral philosophy at the Collège de France in 1838. His teaching drew audiences into disputes about the church, the nation and the inheritance of the Revolution. His academic career ended under Louis-Napoléon after the 1851 coup; his writing continued outside the lecture hall.
The sorceress as a historical character
La Sorcière appeared in 1862. Michelet reconstructs a figure who gives the poor access to remedies and forms of consolation excluded by more powerful authorities. His sympathy and his anticlerical politics govern the portrait; the sorceress does not speak from a deposition of her own. The English text in this reader is A. R. Allinson’s translation, printed as The Sorceress: A Study in Middle Age Superstition.
