“What is history? Specification.¹⁵⁰ The more that history specifies, clarifies, characterizes, the more it is history, the more it is itself.” His Histoire de la Révolution française accompanied Michelet day and night for nearly ten years. He wrote the last two volumes in total solitude, near Nantes: “For my voluntary exile, I chose the capital of our civil wars; I wanted to end my book between Brittany and the Vendée.”¹⁵¹ The crucial step was that of locking up his library in Paris, taking away “only the sources strictly necessary.” And so Michelet withdrew to a place that was immune from the chronic contagion of other books, those “silent witnesses” that, due to their mere presence, remain in a state of complicity with diverging worlds and obstruct the exact hallucination. One Sunday in May, toward ten in the morning, before his departure, Michelet wanted to visit the principal museum of the Terror.

“By this I don’t mean Clamart, where Mirabeau is, with Madame Roland—I don’t mean the Madeleine, where, along with the king, were the Girondins, Charlotte Corday; I don’t mean Picpus, where André Chénier sleeps, along with the French nobility; nor Bourg-la-Reine, where Condorcet lies. I’m referring to Mousseaux.

“It is the cemetery of Danton and Robespierre, of Camille Desmoulins, of Saint-Just, of Anacharsis Clootz, of Lavoisier.

“The weather, in contrast to these lugubrious recollections, was sunny, mild, already bringing blossom, it was the weather of a warm spring day caressed by breezes.

“Nature is forgetful! But France is all the more so! This place of death where the earth drank the blood of the nation, the very life of the Republic, what has become of it? ‘A hostelry outside the gate, a drinking house?’ No, a meeting place of disrepute, where there is dancing! France dances cheerfully on its dead!

“This ground, planted with young trees, is a remote corner of the old orchard that once formed part of the Mousseaux estate. A park, once owned by the Duc d’Orléans, laid out in English style at the end of the eighteenth century, shabbily decorated with rococo architecture, with fake ruins that have now become real, is charming but extremely sad. It was where Marie Antoinette last strolled (on June 20), and Robespierre, in his darkest days in Prairial and Messidor, often carried his frenzied agitation about with him. Later it was a place of celebration. In June 1848, Mousseaux was the center of the national ateliers: their sudden dissolution would drown Paris in blood.

“The corner of the orchard described here, purchased in 1784 by the Ferme générale as land needed for the new city walls of Paris, then acquired by the municipality in February 1793, was an ordinary cemetery for some time, divided into four sections.

“Suppressed as such, and cleared, it was sold, conveyed to the Marquis d’Aligre, one of the richest men in France, who, most probably unaware of all of this, rented out half of it so that they could build this meeting place; the remainder, closer to the city wall, is divided into small stony gardens where the Parisians fancy themselves cultivating flowers.”¹⁵²