Jules Michelet – författare

"If we wish to know the innermost thought and passion of the French peasant, it is very easy. Walk, any Sunday, into the country and follow him." So begins this extraordinary book by the man often called France's greatest historian. After its publication in 1846, Le peuple sold 1,000 copies in a single day in Paris alone, and was soon considered the classic study of French society in the early nineteenth century. John P. McKay's translation makes the book newly available to English-language readers.  The People is a moving picture of France on the eve of 1848. Michelet saw tensions, divisions, and hatreds tearing France apart, and he sought to provide a new faith that would unite the conflicting groups in the love of country.  This book, Michelet wrote, "is the product of my experience rather than of my studies. I have derived it from my observation and my conversations with friends and neighbors." Because of Michelet's countless discussions with people from all ranks of society and his precise observations, his portrait of France is unsurpassed, and representative of general European problems in a time of rapid social and economic change.

The holy mission of the Maid of Orleans is recreated in this, one of the greatest of the books on Joan. Jules Michelet captures the hardships of battle, the glory of victory, the disillusion of imprisonment. Her betrayal and martyrdom at the stake have an enduring mood of beauty and brutality. Albert Guérard's sensitive translation offers the first complete English rendition of this classic nineteenth-century work.Jules Michelet, 1798-1874, noted French historian, is perhaps best known for his Histoire de la révolution française (1847-53) and his Histoire de France (1833-67).The late Albert Guérard was professor of comparative literature and lecturer in French civilization at Stanford University. His many books include Europe Free and United, Napoleon III, Education of a Humanist, and France: A Modern History.