Word: michelet
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Dates: during 1972-1972
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...Wilson's heroes is Jules Michelet, a poor printer's son who discovered Vice's ideas in 1824 and used them to create a new kind of history, written as if from the viewpoint of the past, dedicated to human progress and infected with the notion that the common people are more important than their leaders. "To know how to be poor," Michelet once said, "is to know everything...
...believe that the course of history and steady human progress are inevitably linked. History has not yet made clear whether such a belief is a narcotic, a noble inspiration, a necessary myth or a tragic delusion. But the author shows where any reader's sympathies must lie. Like Michelet's histories, as Edmund Wilson describes them, this book "makes us feel that we ourselves are the last chapter of the story and that the next chapter...