MICHAUD, Joseph (1767-1839), French historian and publicist, was born of an old family on June 19, 1767, at Albens, Savoy, was educated at Bourg-en-Bresse, and afterwards engaged in literary work at Lyons, where the events of 1789 first called into activity the dislike to revolutionary principles which manifested itself throughout the rest of his life. In 1791 he went to Paris, where, not without danger, he took part in editing several royalist journals. In 1794 he started La Quotidienne, for his connexion with which he was arrested after the 13th of Vendémiaire; he succeeded in escaping his captors, but was sentenced to death par contumace 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was again proscribed on the 18th of Fructidor, but at the close of two years returned to Paris when the consulate had superseded the Directory.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 for the time abandoned journalism, and began to write or 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; in 1808 the first volume of his Histoire des Croisades appeared, and in 1811 he originated the Biographie Universelle. In 1814 he resumed the editorship of the Quotidienne, and in the same year was elected Academician. 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. His political services were now rewarded with the cross of an officer in the Legion of Honour and the modest post of king’s reader, of which ...