Michelet by Roland Barthes; translated by Richard Howard (Hill & Wang: $14.95; 226 pp.)

For those of us who read Roland Barthes’ “Michelet par lui-meme” shortly after its publication in France in 1954, reading the recent translation by Richard Howard feels like a pilgrimage--a proper phrase in view of the Barthes cult that developed and dominated the literary world for the last 25 years.

Barthes, who died in 1980, remains best known to the general reader as the brilliant structuralist and semiologist of “The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies,” “The Fashion System” and “The Empire of Signs.” In the mid-60s, literature professors saw in him a modern Saint George undaunted by repeated assaults from the old-fashioned French Sorbonne establishment. Around 1970, Barthes’ writing evolved into a more radical phase. He abandoned the unconscious collective meanings he traced, for example, in Racine’s tragedies for an approach in which there would be no final “signified” (meaning) lying behind the various “signifiers” that constitute a literary text. “S/Z,” Barthes’ reading--in actuality his reconstruction--of Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine,” signals a series of more and more personal, loosely assembled, and hedonistic works, such as “The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes” (by himself) and “A Lover’s Discourse.”

Albeit less systematic, these later volumes are not much easier to read than those of Barthes’ militant phase. But “Michelet” takes us back, somewhat mercifully, to an earlier period when Barthes was both more accessible and more politically committed.

In “Roland Barthes,” Barthes writes that Michelet attracted him by founding “an ethnology of France,” that is, by his skill in questioning historically the most natural objects, such as faces, food, clothes, complexion. In other words, by prefiguring Barthes’ own “mythologies.” One can imagine many other reasons for the Michelet/Barthes conjunction, some serious (a common ideology of the left, their love of provincial life styles, perhaps a secret pleasure taken in the vulnerability of women), some trivial (their similar position at the College de France, their frequent migraines). But the most substantial reason is that for someone like Barthes, who challenges the authorial role and who privileges literary form over literary content, Michelet’s writings compensate a relative paucity of ideas by a vision of historical objects so personal and visceral it turns history into fiction or poetry.

What Barthes exposes in the 19th-Century historian is the “organized network of personal obsessions” originating in the writer’s responses to the basic elements of our physical world. These responses, he believes, structured Michelet’s experience, therefore his view of history. Barthes denied the influence of the philosopher Gaston Bachelard whose method comes to mind immediately and acknowledged instead a debt to Sartre’s concept that our attitudes toward such physical qualities of matter as viscosity or solidity are revealing of how we come to grips with the basic phenomenon of existence. At any rate, “Michelet” clearly belongs to an era of French criticism which chose “ahistoricity,” focusing on the text-as-system and proposing unseen factors as the keys to that system.

Apart from an initial “memorandum” in which Barthes does away with Michelet’s ideas in a few lines, a short conclusion, and an appendix, the book is divided into seven sections carved along the grain of Michelet’s major themes as Barthes sees them. The first is on Michelet as devourer (also swimmer, walker, victim and eventually inseminator) of history. The second is on Michelet’s elaboration of a sort of physics and chemistry of history. The third is on various historical antinomies, such as the sexualized opposition of female Grace (the World-as-Woman, a passive principle) and of Justice (the Just man, the Hero, an active fecundating principle). It is in that section that Barthes introduces one of Michelet’s most endearing characters, the Witch, in whom male and female power join.

The next section presents Michelet as a sort of paraschites , an embalmer of the dead, who believes his mission to be the recovery of “the tissues, the humors, not the skeleton of history.” Barthes then surveys a series of historical portraits and shows how Michelet constructs the character around some essential physical substance (the “dry” Louis XV, “waxy” Napoleon, the “watery” Pompadour or the Frenchman as “flint”) or a morphological type (Marat as toad, Catherine the Great as Minotaur).

The fifth section consists of a taxonomy of blood. “For Michelet,” Barthes writes, “blood is the cardinal substance of history,” “a cosmic element, a unique and homogenous substance which traverses all bodies without losing . . . anything of its universality.” According to Barthes, Michelet distinguishes between various kinds of “bad blood”--for instance the “sealed blood” of prolonged aristocratic crossbreeding. At the other end of the spectrum is “good blood” present in the blush of motherly middle-age matrons (Madame Roland, for instance).

The sixth section, the most iconoclastic as regards Michelet, made Barthes’ book an instant success. From the blood of flower-women, Michelet moves on to the essence of womanhood. In excerpts from Michelet’s journal, Barthes found confirmation that Michelet was obsessed specifically with menstrual blood. He saw female menstruation as a “sacred crisis” during which the woman is in communication with cosmic time, thereby countering the jerky linear time of history. That awesome moment was to be approached religiously by the husband who, under the guise of assistance and sympathy, turns himself into a priest participating in a mystery. The theory may well have been a way of justifying Michelet’s own eroticism--that of a voyeur, if we believe Barthes--an interpretation confirmed with the publication of Michelet’s complete journals in 1959. The last section of the book “The Ultra-Sex” retells Michelet’s desire (typical of a 19th-Century thinker) to reconcile all sexual polarities into the androgyne par excellence, the people.

As can be seen from this resume, rather than analyzing Michelet’s prose in a conventional way, Barthes creates a parallel text of his own, often governed by little more than his own free associating on Michelet’s text. Although each section is followed by relevant excerpts from Michelet, it is not so much his voice the reader hears as it is Barthes. But since Barthes claimed somewhere that “literary discourse has no responsibility whatsoever toward reality,” we should, in the words of Montaigne, blame only his project, not his procedure.

What of Michelet? He comes off as very much of his century, enamored of continuity, unity, simplicity and monism, which may be perceived as naive, alien or refreshing depending on how committed one is to the antipodal values of our times. The excerpts provided by Barthes are thematically assembled and do not, therefore, give an idea of the sustained inspiration or movement of Michelet’s individual works. If you want a real taste of Michelet, read “The People.”

The translation, by Richard Howard, a veteran translator of French literature and critical theory to whom we owe nine previous Barthes volumes, is excellent.