An argument has long raged over whether history can be considered a science or whether it should be considered literature, and different historians have taken positions for one view or the other or for some combination of the two. A nineteenth century historian stated that history was a science, no less and no more. This statement would be seen as true or false by different historians.
Michelet would see history as literature and not science, for he does not take an objective point of view but instead a very personal one. He makes this clear in his introduction to The People in 1846:
I have made this book of myself, of my life, and of my heart. It is the fruit of my experience, rather than of my research. I have derived it from my observation, and my intercourse with friends and neighbors; I have gleaned it from the highway: fortune loves to favor him who ever follows the self-same thought. . . To know the life of the people, their toils and sufferings, I had but to interrogate my memory.
He speaks in this book directly to the French people, and he speaks as one of them. His is a literary quest for meaning through the writing of history, and he seeks meaning in observation and personal experience.
Thomas Babingrton Macaulay addresses the issue of history as literature directly, and he sees the role of the historian as being an art rather than a science, yet there is a science involved in using only the materials that exist as evidence of what occurred and what that occurrence means. Macaulay uses his literary gifts to make what he learns through research into something that can be comprehended by others:
A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque. Yet he must control is so absolutely as to content himself with the materials he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and ingenious...