MICHELET Jules Tableau chronologique de l’histoire moderne.

First edition.

Jules Michelet is the historian whose work is one of the most significant literary achievements of the nineteenth century.

His first work, Tableau chronologique de l’histoire moderne de 1453 à 1789, spans three and a half centuries, from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the French Revolution, and concludes with a series of 116 questions, divided into 3 series, on modern history for the concours général.  

Michelet’s fame quickly spread to the court, where he was put in charge of the education of the daughter of the Duchess of Berry and then, after 1830, of Princess Clémentine, daughter of Louis-Philippe. He achieved an enviable position and, in 1838, was admitted to the Collège de France and the Institut. However, like his father, Michelet remained a liberal and anticlerical. In 1848, he drew up a plan for democratic education, but after the coup d’état, he refused to swear allegiance to Napoleon III, thereby losing his chair at the Collège de France and the directorship of the historical section of the Archives, which had been entrusted to him in 1830. An ‘old fighter’, Michelet, who appears to be a son of the Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, was above all a man of letters who believed that history should first and foremost be a course of philosophical instruction.  

Minor brown spots, otherwise a fine copy.