#michelet

[soulbornincoldandrain]

this too, is yoohankisms

- michelet by rolant barthes, about Michelet as a historian, an author reader and victim to narrative

[les-portes-du-sud]

Mais la fleur épanouie fleurit en toute plénitude dans les enfoncements profonds, par exemple des golfes indiens. La mer fut là un grand artiste. Elle donna à la terre les formes adorées, bénies, où se plaît à créer l’amour. De ses caresses assidues, arrondissant le rivage, elle lui donna les contours maternels et j’allais dire la tendresse visible du sein de la femme, ce que l’enfant trouve si doux, abri, tiédeur et repos...

Michelet

[echoesofthefall]

And not ourselves only, but all nature, alas! becomes demoniac. If there is a devil in the flower, how much more in the gloomy forest! The light we think so pure teems with children of the night. The heavens themselves — O blasphemy! — are full of hell. That divine morning star, whose glorious beams not seldom lightened a Socrates, an Archimedes, a Plato, what is it now become? A devil, the archfiend Lucifer. In the eventime again it is the devil Venus who draws me into temptation by her light so soft and mild. 

— Jules Michelet, La Sorcière (1862)

[frederick-the-great]

Michelet lamented Saint-Just’s untimely end: ‘France will never console herself for the loss of such a hope.’ For Michelet, Saint-Just was the one man who might have stood up to Napoleon and made ‘the sword bow to the law’

Marisa Linton, The French Revolution’s Angel of Death

[r-ludovic-r]

Michelet 

[publicatiosui]

Must not something or someone die if we are to have a memory of it or him or her? Is not the otherness of the past fundamentally to be seen in death? And is not repetition itself a kind of resurrection of the dead, as any reader of Michelet will recognize?

Ricoeur

[ourladyofperpetualnaptime]

In June 1794, to purge the last vestige of idolatry and above all the newest idolatry of Reason itself, Robespierre assigned Jacques-Louis David the task of choreographing the Festival of the Supreme Being. Following the revolutionary tradition of ritual destruction, the celebration featured the spectacular burning of a colossal plaster statue of Atheism, from which a charred statue of Wisdom eventually emerged. According to Michelet, the ritual included the burning of an effigy of Nothing—yet another positivity painstakingly constructed so as to be annihilated.

rebecca comay, from mourning sickness: hegel and the french revolution, 2010

[1homme2terre]

Le plus tentant pour l'homme, c'est l'inutile et l'impossible.

Jules Michelet