In the box
Conor Cruise O'Brien
Death in Paris Richard Cobb (Oxford £4.95) In the Archives de la Seine in Paris there is a box bearing the title `Basse-Geole de la ,Seine, proces-verbaux de mort violente [ans These proces-verbaux (that is, evidence officially taken) give the details of 404 people who met violent deaths in the Basse-Geole between October 1795 and September 1801. Of the 404, 274 were suicides (211 men and 63 women), 65 were accidental deaths, mostly by drowning in the Seine, 56 were from natural causes and nine were by murder.
Richard Cobb has used his great gifts as an archival historian to produce a remarkable work of reconstruction. The centre of interest, for Professor Cobb, in the documents in the box, is not so much the dead, but what is revealed about a manner of living, a whole network of social relations, in the evidence identifying the dead, and the circumstances of their death: 'The dead, whatever the manner of their death, stand in as pretexts to talk about the living'.
Professor Cobb is extraordinarily sensitive, lucid and loving in his exploration of this world. Death and suicide uncover a double, even a triple, network : Buttons, being exceedingly durable, and so objects of some considerable value among the small treasures of the poor and the toys of chimney-sweeps and tailors' apprentices, must indeed have survived the official existence of an increasingly anaemic First Republic, and no doubt that of the Empire as well. Cloth buttons, made out of cheap material, and better suited no doubt to the austerity of the Year II, when they were first put into circulation, and to the beggarly conditions of the Year III, would have been far more representative of the short span of life normally granted to a French Republic; but, being inferior, easily frayed, and not much to look at, not even reflecting the rays of the bright summer suns of 1795 and 1796, of 1800 and of 1801, they seem to have been little in demand, save to fill in the many gaps left between the rare odd metal button .
Both what is in the box, and what is not there, tend to support Professor Cobb's verdict: 'the Revolution had nothing at all to offer the habitant de garni; it simply passed him by.'
No likely end could bring them good Nor leave them poorer than before.
Death in Paris is a very short book but its impact is great. It is likely to remain a living
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