Le Symbolisme de Nature chez Michelet: Introduction littéraire à son spiritualisme

Jules Michelet's career as historian and teacher was devoted to the celebration of the liberation of humanity, the victory of will over physical constraints. His books on nature, L'Oiseau, L'Insecte, La Mer, and La Montagne, are didactic poems that express the religious faith underlying his philosophy of history. The ambivalence of Michelet's symbolism permits him to express the spiritual dimension of nature in literal terms, and to allegorize practical, social lessons. His imaginative responses to the physical grandeur of air, mountains, and the sea explain how aesthetic feelings of sublimity are translated into specific insights. Air provokes dreams of angelic freedom, earth challenges him to penetrate the secrets of organic transformation, and the sea displays the process of primal creation and evolution. Analysis of Michelet's symbolic imagination describes how the bird reveals God's transcendence, and how therapeutic mud baths confirm his belief in a divine power within nature. His vision of nature as metaphor of God proves that he is not a pantheist: substance (the vehicle) is not identical with spirit (the tenor). His unsatisfied aspiration toward a transcendent God gives his poetic passages their special tonality. Michelet's spiritualistic philosophy of free will and creativity is buoyed with the conviction that readers would make of his poetic vision a social reality. (EKK)