The French Revolution as fiction
Nigel Spivey
A PLACE OF GREATER SAFETY by Hilary Mantel Viking, f15.99, pp. 873 This is a tale of three men: Georges- Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre. Superficially, their early lives in provincial France do not seem packed with radical promise. Danton, following a Champenois usage, was put to suckle on a cow's udder at the age of two, and badly gored by a bull. At subsequent junctures of his youth he was beset again by farmyard beasts, and also by smallpox, leaving him heartily ugly and fairly glad, one imagines, to have made it as far as adulthood. Desmoulins and Robespierre, from Guise and Arras respectively, met at the same college in Paris. Robespierre, a scholarship boy, delivered a Latin pane- gyric to the young Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette when they visited the college in 1775. There, perhaps, a token of his future use of formal oratory — though the senti- ment of the speech is, with hindsight, poignantly ironic.
These three made careers out of the French Revolution. Desmoulins demon- strates best what opportunities the ferment offered to someone desperate to be some- thing : his letters home show a man whose political commitments were motored not so much by solicitude for his fellow men as by the need to make a mark in the world. Robespierre ought, in any well-balanced society, to have found his metier as a slight- ly pompous but competent small-town solicitor. In a well-balanced society, school- boys will happily practise drop-kicks across the dorm with their copies of Cicero. But for Desmoulins and Robespierre, Ciceroni- an postures of Republicanism became, almost overnight, the essential repertoire of centre-stage politics. Long speeches, proscriptions (`the necessary murder'), ple- beian mobs: Paris furnished a Hollywood set for ancient Rome, in which any habitual thug might become a Brutus. It was grotesquely gaudy throughout, and a novel- ist easily capitalises upon the copious mem- oranda trailed by the protagonists.
Professional historians, following Richard Cobb, have largely surrendered to the soap-operatic substance of the French Revolution. Robespierre was not the only one with a copy of Rousseau at his elbow: the confessional literary fashions strutted by Rousseau were aped by others, making a great biographical deposit for both popu- lar history and historical novels (or 'histori- ographic metafiction', as we are now supposed to call them). But I remain impressed by the bravery of Hilary Mantel in this enterprise. Best of times or worst of times, they were saturated with events and personalities: to isolate a trio just about enables a novelist to keep under a thou- sand pages, but nevertheless means that a reader unfamiliar with the Revolution will have trouble keeping up with the rapid changes of scene and personage. There is a lengthy list of characters, but this is not always helpful: it includes, for example, the name of Charlotte Corday, who murdered Marat in his bath - but in the text she is not mentioned by name, and you would have to know the story of Marat's death to make sense of its tangential reportage here.
The author promises to devote more attention to the scrofulous Marat separate- ly, and she admits that the equilibrium of dramatisation and explanation was tricky to maintain. This is a pardonable weakness of the book, and could be surmounted if its readers kept a copy of Simon Schama's Citizens handy as they are frog-marched through the story. That the style is elliptical 'We seem an awfully long way from a fax machine.' is to be expected: it happens to those who write about the French Revolution. Car- lyle's account puffs along with breezy, verb- shorn sentences, exclamations, questions and philosophical platitudes; and in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens suspended Dick- enisan circumlocution: two good prece- dents for the jumpy tenses and bitten-off slices of dialogue which prevail in A Place of Greater Safety. It works especially well for the climax of the story, which is the `trial' of Danton and Desmoulins; less well at the outset, when the rythms of rural France are never allowed to settle.
Dramatic or 'tragic' as the Revolution is often billed, this story offers no genuine catharsis to those who immerse themselves in it. As Danton and Desmoulins are dragged off for a grand exuent in the tum- brils of public execution, there is little to lament. They fell as they had risen. Robes- pierre survives to the end of the book: he is known scarcely any better than when it started. So there is no major revision here of 'The Incorruptible': unsmiling he stays, and repellent or admirable depending whether persons count for more than 'the People'. His own come-uppance at the hands of the Termidorians is appended in a tidying-up note: the prediction, made by Pierre Vergniaud, that the Revolution would, like Saturn, 'devour its own chil- dren', is satisfactorily fulfilled. Danton goes to his death with the same endearing sen- sual wisdom he has shown throughout the story; Desmoulins, a 'veteran' of the Revo- lution, suddenly shows his age (he was only 28) and freaks out. The end might have been sadder if we had gained any sense of soul-sharing amongst our original trio: as it is, their relationships are depicted not so much as friendships as dangerous liaisons. Engaging sympathy for these men was never going to be easy. The paradox coined by Edmund Burke to describe the Revolu- tionary agenda — it was, he said, a system of 'homicidal philanthropy' — dogs the exploration of their motives, and the con- summate stagecraft of their public appear- ances frustrates any attempt to define their private personae. One can see why Dickens eschewed the historical Revolutionaries: it makes the job of constructing a novel about the French Revolution much simpler. Trol- lope, too, had a go: of his now largely for- gotten early novel, La Vendee, one reviewer commented that it had 'the fiction of a romance, but with a little too much of the phlegm of history'. This seems, in retro- spect, an odd line of criticism. Robespierre anticipated Derrida by two hundred years when he said, 'History is fiction': encour- agement enough for Hilary Mantel to have written a novel whose claim to wide reader- ship is that it is never phlegmatic, and yet it does proper justice to the events it recalls. Her story is compact with movement, disjointed, Romantic, florid and perplexing. What else should one expect from the sub- ject?
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