Abstract

Jules Michelet, whose texts are distinguished by a pronounced authorialism, determined many key milestones in the scientific biography of Roland Barthes, who declared “the death of the author” as a scholarly concept. The analysis of Barthes’s texts gives grounds to find traces of the author’s presence, though in a completely different way than in Michelet’s works. These similarities and diff erences between the French semiotician and the French historian become more evident if we imagine that Barthes made the full circle in his perception of the stylistics of Michelet’s historical works. At the beginning of his career, Barthes enthusiastically welcomed Michelet’s clearly expressed and even deliberately demonstrative authorial position. He saw Michelet not as an academic scholar, but as an author of a passionate and psychologically intense narrative. In Barthes’s thought, this was the manner best suited to the description of the past. The high degree of emotionality and extreme subjectivity of evaluations formed a rich set of interpretations. Barthes regarded this methodology as the most fundamental approach to the historical material. The next step in his perception of Michelet was done after the emergence of the concept of “the death of the author”. He saw Michelet’s views and style as archaic, outmoded and inadequate to the modern discourse. However, this unexpectedly harsh attitude to his former idol is not as straightforward and unequivocal for Barthes as it might seem at first glance. By stating Michelet’s irrelevance, Barthes simultaneously rediscovers him for the era of new humanities knowledge, which is proclaimed within the framework of the structuralist approach in the West. Barthes regards Michelet’s authorialism as one of the possible signifiers interpreting history as a signified. In this case, the richness of historical facts creates virtually limitless space for unlimited semiosis, which was in line with Barthes’s semiology.