MICHELET

First UK edition, first printing. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dustwrapper designed by the Miller, Craig & Cocking Design Partnership. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Light marginal toning to the pages owing to the poor quality paper stock. Light rubbing and a touch of softening to spine tips. In the near fine dustwrapper, showing a few light surface marks and a touch of curling to the upper edges of front and rear flaps. An attractive copy of this uncommon volume.

Barthes would later refer to 'Michelet', an early work, as the favourite among his own books. Divided into its author's characteristic short, headed sections, generously illustrated in black and white throughout, it is ostensibly an examination of the life and works of the great nineteenth-century French historian, but as always with Barthes, both it's manner and method are personal and idiosyncratic. As Ann Demaitre notes in her review of the book ('History of European Ideas', [10.4], 1989), "[t]here are striking similarities between [...] Barthes, the critic, and Jules Michelet, the historian. Both acquired a dominant stature on the intellectual scene of their respective eras [,] both were intellectual gadflies whose original ideas, occasionally designed to 'Épater les bourgeois' [,] triggered endless controversies; [,] both were obsessed by sexuality which pervades the often brilliant and sometime scabrous metaphors [...] used in articulating their iconoclastic views. Finally, both Barthes and Michelet were fascinated by words which Barthes undertook to 'decode' while Michelet used them to create a style unsurpassed in its richness, plasticity and suggestive force." The book (the author's second) was originally published in 1954 as 'Michelet par lui-même'. It is translated here by Richard Howard.