During the July Monarchy, the historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874) was a professor at the École Normale and the Collège de France, as well as being Director of the Royal Archives. But his anti-Royalist and anti-clericalist opinions cost him all of those government-funded positions during the Second Empire, obliging him to live by his pen. The year before the Pantheon, he had finally completed his six-volume Histoire de la Révolution française (History of the French Revolution).
For Michelet, properly recounted, history had to be a complete “resurrection,” combining historical facts, representations and myths. A precursor of the cultural-history movement, which came to prominence in the latter half of the 20th century, he is considered the first “people’s historian,” in that he gave the anonymous masses a voice and a role in the march of history. Typical of the Romantic era, his ardent and lyrical style sometimes leads his books to be read as fiction.