Col. Kurtz’s dying words “the horror, the horror” resonated with me time after time while reading this mesmerizing and (at times) emotionally overpowering work on the French Revolution (which most history books date from 1789-1799). The period that captured my imagination as a child and has always held the most fascination for me was the interlude known as the Reign of Terror (Sept 5 1793-July 27, 1794) when the French government lost its collective mind and went on a killing spree that continues to shock the world for its sheer sang froid, never to be equalled (though superceded only in body count by the Great Terror of Stalinist Russia some 130 years later). In my impressionable state I instinctively, impulsively identified with the Cordeliers as embodied by Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins against the ruthless Jacobins, personified by the ascetic lawyer Maximilien Robespierre. I was certainly swayed in my youth by the human drama projected in the impassioned speeches of its leaders, as well as the superhuman struggle to create a just society, only to be consumed by the blandly evil Committee for Public Safety that began with such high hopes and fatefully ended as a brutally efficient killing machine run by bureaucrats. That and the selfless sacrifice of the fictional Sydney Carton (portrayed by actor Ronald Colman in the first of many remakes of Charles Dickens’s Tale Of Two Cities) in his poignant soliloquy at the scaffold (“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done….”).
One aspect of the revolution that author Graeme Fife makes masterful and dramatic use of is the huge amount of archival material the perpetrators and victims (high and low) left behind and preserved for future historians. Fife’s account of this grand experiment in government gone horribly awry, is almost like a well-crafted detective novel that captures eyewitness accounts, fatal actions and even conversations, with an attention to detail that astonishes a 21st century reader who takes for granted the total surveillance of the modern state. It seems everyone involved was constantly firing off letters, filling diaries, publishing broadsheets and pamphlets, to say nothing of the committees’ public hearings faithfully recorded word for word by stenographers. It’s almost as if the French knew they were living through a watershed moment in human history and took pains to document as much of it as possible.
Many episodes made me blanche and almost weep at the senseless human toll taken by the sansculottes armies and their officers, all under the direction of the ironically named Committee for Public Safety ensconced in faraway Paris:
- entire regions (the Vendee’ chief among them) condemned as strongholds of “rebels, brigands, royalists”, invaded and the inhabitants summarily slaughtered, all the way down to “babies still at the breast”. In the town of Cholet, in the words of one agent, “the eyes could not but see everywhere bloody images; everywhere fields covered with victims whose throats had been cut…Fathers, mothers, children of all ages and both sexes, swimming in their own blood, naked and in postures which the most heartless soul could not gaze on without shuddering.”
- as revolutions tend to do, the worst examples of humanity are suddenly elevated to positions of arbitrary power which they proceed to abuse with impunity. Jean Pinard, a “26-year-old illiterate drunkard farmworker”, on a rampage of the French countryside with a troop of gendarmes at his command, “captured seven young females, ‘beautiful as goddesses’, whom he handed over to 600 men. ‘In one day, each of the girls received 100 men. Afterwards they could no longer walk, turned imbecile, and, a few days later, they were shot.'”
- in one of the greatest travesties in the history of civilization, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the “father of modern chemistry”, went to the guillotine as part of a mindless sweep of civil servants suspected of mishandling funds generated by tax farms (agricultural centers set up with public money to generate produce for the populace). Lavoisier it was who “discovered the secret of fire and named its essential ingredient, oxigene” (=oxygen). Without his pioneering work, later industrial advances such as the internal-combustion engine might have been delayed for generations. In one of the last letters sent to his wife from prison, Lavoisier evokes the senseless fate suffered by many under the Reign of Terror:
My work is finished. But you have a right to hope for a long life. Do not give that up. When you came yesterday, you seemed very miserable. Why? I am resigned to my fate. They cannot take away from me anything of what I have achieved. Besides, it’s not absolutely certain we won’t be reunited. I may be released. Meanwhile, my greatest happiness is when you visit me.
My lifelong interest in the revolution was fired anew when I discovered Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s visceral masterpiece Danton back in the Eighties, which I’ve watched on a yearly basis (at least) since. Discovering Fife’s brilliant account has rekindled that passion even moreso.
In one of the bitterest ironies of that dark episode in French history, the final tally reveals that the brunt of the carnage fell ~ not on the feckless royalty that had motivated the revolutionaries to start with ~ but on the ordinary citizen. Quoting the author:
Of the 16,594 people who, condemned by courts, went to the guillotine, only 878 were of noble birth, a mere 6.25 per cent of the total…By far the majority of victims were drawn from those so-called beneficiaries of the Revolution, the small people and the hated bourgeoisie and professions, that class from whose milieu came the men who directed the Terror.