Joseph François Michaud

Who was Joseph François Michaud?

Joseph François Michaud was a French historian and publicist.

He was born at Albens, Savoie, educated at Bourg-en-Bresse, and afterwards engaged in literary work at Lyon, where the French Revolution first aroused the strong dislike of revolutionary principles which manifested itself throughout the rest of his life. In 1791 he went to Paris, where, at great risk to his own safety, he took part in editing several royalist journals. In 1796 he became editor of La Quotidienne, for which he was arrested after the 13th of Vendémiaire; he evaded his captors, but was sentenced to death in absentia by the military council. Having resumed the editorship of his newspaper on the establishment of the Directory, he was again proscribed on the 18th of Fructidor, but after two years returned to Paris, when the Consulate had superseded the Directory.

His Bourbon sympathies led to a brief imprisonment in 1800, and on his release he temporarily abandoned journalism, and began to write and edit books. Along with his brother and two colleagues he published in 1806 a Biographie moderne ou dictionnaire des hommes qui se sont fait un nom en Europe, depuis 1789, the earliest work of its kind; and in 1811 appeared the first volume of his Histoire des croisades and also the first volume of his Biographie universelle. In 1813 he was elected Academician, taking up the vacancy left by the death of Jean-François Cailhava de L'Estandoux. In 1814 he resumed the editorship of La Quotidienne. In 1815 his brochure entitled Histoire des quinze semaines ou le dernier règne de Bonaparte met with extraordinary success, passing through twenty-seven editions within a very short time.