Barthes on the Historian

A writer or author of a history, especially one who produces a work of history in the higher sense, as distinguished from the simple annalist or chronicler or events, or from the mere compiler of a historical narrative (OED).

“Michelet afflicts himself with the most terrible historical diseases, he takes them on himself, he dies of History the way one dies—or rather the way one does not die—of love. ‘I have drunk too deep of the black blood of the dead’—this means that, with each migraine, Michelet renews in himself the death of the People-as-god, of History-as-god. But at the same time this death survived and repeated acts as a nutriment, for it is this death which constitutes Michelet as a historian, makes him into a pontiff who absorbs, sacrifices, bears witness, fulfills, glorifies.”

Roland Barthes, Michelet (1954).

[Translated by Richard Howard]