| Recent studies on mid- to late-nineteenth-century French historiography have suggested potential overlaps between the discursive, aesthetic, and philosophical concerns of Victor Hugo and Jules Michelet. And yet there exists no such study to substantiate these claims. My project responds to this critical void. Drawing upon historical and post-colonial theory, my dissertation analyzes the presence of colonial ambitions in Hugo's and Michelet's late historiographies (1861-1874). To examine this subject, I study Hugo's Les Miserables, Quatrevingt-treize, Paris, and Michelet's La Sorciere and La Mer. Drawing upon the post-colonial figure of the two-faced Janus, I show how Hugo and Michelet use history to project a vision of a superior unified France onto the past. In the forward-facing aspect of Hugo's and Michelet's Janus-faced project, I examine how these two writers envision the totalization of French civilization at home and abroad. In light of their explicit advocacy for neutralizing domestic disunity and for extending the "light" of French language, morality, and science to savage and barbaric foreign populations, I conclude that Hugo and Michelet anticipate the ideological momentum building toward the Third Republic's programs of domestic acculturation and "civilizing" missions abroad. |
