Nova Scotia and the United States. On his return to France in 1797 he was shipwrecked and lost most of his collections. In 1800 he went to Madagascar to investigate the flora of that island, and died there on the 16th of November 1802. His work as a botanist was chiefly done in the field, and he added largely to what was previously known of the botany of the East and of America.
He wrote two valuable works on North American plants—the Histoire des chênes de l’Amérique septentrionale (1801), with 36 plates, and the Flora Boreali-Americana (2 vols., 1803), with 51 plates. His son François published a Histoire des arbres forestiers de l’Amérique septentrionale (3 vols., 1810–1813), with 156 plates, of which an English translation appeared in 1817–1819 as The North American Sylva.
MICHEL, CLAUDE, known as Clodion (1738–1814), French sculptor, was born on the 20th of December 1738 in Nancy. Here and probably in Lille he spent the earlier years of his life. In 1755 he came to Paris and entered the workshop of Lambert Sigisbert Adam, his maternal uncle, a clever sculptor. He remained four years in this workshop, and on the death of his
uncle became a pupil of J. B. Pigalle. In 1759 he obtained
the grand prize for sculpture at the Académie Royale; in 1761
he obtained the first silver medal for studies from models; and
in 1762 he went to Rome. Here his activity was considerable
between 1767 and 1771. Catherine II. was eager to secure
his presence in St Petersburg, but he returned to Paris.
Among his patrons, which were very numerous, were the chapter
of Rouen, the states of Languedoc, and the Direction générale.
His works were frequently exhibited at the Salon. In 1782
he married Catherine Flore, a daughter of the sculptor Augustin
Pajou, who subsequently obtained a divorce from him. The
agitation caused by the Revolution drove Clodion in 1792 to
Nancy, where he remained until 1798, his energies being spent
in the decoration of houses. Among Clodion’s works are a
statue of Montesquieu, a “Dying Cleopatra,” and a chimney-piece
at present in the South Kensington Museum, One of
his last groups represented Homer as a beggar being driven
away by fishermen (1810). On the 29th of March 1814 Clodion
died in Paris, on the eve of the invasion of Paris by the allies.
Thirion’s Les Adam et Clodion (Paris, 1885) contains a list of the sculptor’s works sold between 1767 and 1884. See also A. Jacquot, Les Adam et les Michel et Clodion (Paris, 1898).
MICHEL, CLÉMENCE LOUISE (1850–1905), French anarchist, called la Vierge rouge de Montmartre, was born at the château of Vroncourt (Haute-Marne) on the 29th of May 1830, the daughter of a serving-maid, Marianne Michel, and the son of the house, Etienne Charles Demahis. She was brought up by her father’s parents, and received a liberal education. After her grandfather’s death in 1850 she was trained to teach, but her refusal to acknowledge Napoleon III. prevented her from serving in a state school. She found her way in 1866 to a school in the Montmartre quarter of Paris, where she threw herself ardently into works of charity and revolutionary politics. She became violently anti-Bonapartist, and is said to have meditated the assassination of Napoleon. During the siege of Paris she joined the ambulance service, and untiringly preached resistance to the Prussians. On the establishment of the Commune she joined the National Guard. She offered to shoot Thiers, and suggested the destruction of Paris by way of vengeance .for its surrender., She was with the Communards who made their last stand in the cemetery of Montmartre, and was closely allied with Theodore Ferré, who was executed in November 1871. This ardent attachment was perhaps one of the sources of the exaltation which marked her career, and gave many handles to her enemies. When she was brought before the 6th council of war in December 1871 she defied her judges and defended the Commune. She was sent as a convict to New Caledonia, among her companions being Henri Rochefort, who remained her friend till the day of her death. The amnesty of 1880 found her revolutionary ardour unchanged. She travelled throughout France, preaching revolution, and in 1883 she led a Paris mob which pillaged a baker’s shop. For this she was condemned to six years’ imprisonment, but was released in 1886, at the same time as Prince Kropotkin and other prominent anarchists. After a short period of freedom she was again arrested for making inflammatory speeches. She was Soon liberated, but, hearing that her enemies hoped to intern her in a lunatic asylum, she fled to England. She returned to France in 1895, and in 1902 was back in London. She was touring France and lecturing on behalf of anarchist propaganda when she died at Marseilles on the 10th of January 1905.
Her Mémoires (Paris, 1886) contain accounts of her trials. See also La Bonne Louise (Paris, 1906), by E. Girault.
MICHEL, FRANCISQUE XAVIER (1809–1887), French antiquary, was born at Lyons on the 18th of January 1809. He became known for his editions of French works of the middle ages, and the French Government, recognizing their value, sent him to England (1833) and Scotland (1837) to continue his researches there. In 1839 he was appointed professor of foreign literature in the Faculté des lettres at Bordeaux. Between 1834 and 1842 he published editions of a large number of works written between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries in French, English and Saxon, including the Roman de la rose and the Chanson de Roland. Subsequently he published French translations of Goldsmith, Sterne, Shakespeare and Tennyson. He died in Paris on the 18th of May 1887.
His original works include Histoire des races maudites de la France et de l’Espagne (1847); Recherches sur le commerce pendant le moyen âge (1852–1854); Les Ecossais en France et les français en Écosse (1862); Études, de philologie comparée sur l’argot (1856); Le Pays basque (1857); Histoire du commerce et de la navigation a Bordeaux (1867–1871); and, in conjunction with Edouard Fournier, Histoire des hôtelleries, cabarets, hôtels garnis (1851–1854).
MICHELANGELO (Michaelangniolo Buonarroti) (1475–1564), the most famous of the great Florentine artists of the Renaissance; was the son of Ludovico Buonarroti, a poor gentleman of that city, and of his wife Francesca dei Neri. The Buonarroti Simoni were an old and pure Florentine stock of the Guelf faction: in the days of Michelangelo’s fame a connexion of the family with the counts of Canossa was imagined and admitted on both sides, but has no foundation in fact. Ludovico was barely able to live on the income of his estate, but made it his boast that he had never stooped to add to it by mercantile or mechanical pursuits. The favour of the Medici procured him temporary employment in minor offices of state, among them that of podesta or resident magistrate for six months, from the autumn of 1474, at Castello di Chiusi and Caprese in the Casentino. At Caprese, on the 6th of March 1475, his second son Michelagniolo or Michelangelo was born. Immediately afterwards the family returned to Florence, and the child was put to nurse with a marble-worker’s wife of Settignano. His mother’s health had already, it would seem, begun to fail; at all events in a few years from this time, after she had borne her husband three more sons, she died. While still a young boy Michelangelo determined, in spite of his father’s opposition, to be an artist. He had sucked in the passion, as he himself used to say, with his foster-mother’s milk. After a sharp struggle his stubborn will overcome his father’s pride of gentility, and at thirteen he got himself articled as a paid assistant in the workshop of the brothers Ghirlandaio Domenico Ghirlandaio, bred a jeweller, had become by this time the foremost painter of Florence. In his service the young Michelangelo laid the foundations of that skill in fresco with which twenty years afterwards he confounded his detractors at Rome. He studied also, like all the Florentine artists of that age, in the Brancacci chapel, where the frescoes of Masaccio, painted some sixty years before, still victoriously held their own; and here, in reply, to a taunt he had flung at a fellow-student, Torrigiano, he received the blow on the nose which disfigured him to his dying day.
Though Michelangelo’s earliest studies were directed towards painting, he was by nature and predilection much more inclined to sculpture. In that art he presently received encouragement and training under the eye of an illustrious patron, Lorenzo dei Medici. On the recommendation, it is said, of Ghirlandaio, he was transferred, before the term of his apprenticeship as
