Love: ("L'amour.").

Jules Michelet

Jan 1859 · Rudd & Carleton

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"Amour, L', by the noted French historian Michelet, was published in 1859, when he was sixty-one years old. In the Introduction he writes:--"The title which would fully express the design of this book, its signification, and its import, would be 'Moral Enfranchisement Effected by True Love.'" ... Yet it was merely an attempt to establish reverence for the physical life of woman. Her intellectual life was considered only as a kind of appendage to the physical. Michelet apparently had no other conception of woman and her destiny than as maiden, wife, mother, housekeeper. ... He saw about him not a nation of families, but of individuals. He wished to hold before his countrymen an ideal of family life. ... Its conception of love, though one-sided, was sufficiently in advance of contemporary thought on the subject to render the book remarkable."--C.D. Warner, The library of the world's best literature : an anthology in thirty volumes, 1917.