Gabriel Monod et le travail dans les archives de Michelet

Although Gabriel Monod is chiefly known as one of the leaders of the histoire méthodique and the founder of the Revue historique, he was also the first and foremost biographer of Jules Michelet. After the death of Michelet’s widow in 1899, Monod became the administrator of the personal papers of this romanticist predecessor, whom he considered to be his intellectual father. Until his death in 1912, Monod devoted the best of his time to studying these papers in order to write an extensive biography, which he however did not manage to complete. This article shows how this archival work contributed to Monod’s reconsideration of the epistemology of history. By means of his handling of Michelet’s archives, Monod came to reappraise the status of historical sources and of imagination in historical research and writing, thus pointing at a new possibility for historical synthesis.