A Place of Greater Safety
By Hilary MantelPenguin, 1993. 873 pp. $13.50 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
"But if you had not the King, or Lafayette, or Mirabeau, or the Ministers — and I have heard you speak against them all — who would there be left to rule the nation?". An exasperated Claude Duplessis, senior public servant in the Treasury under the monarchy that ruled France before the Revolution, asks this question of his two daughters in Hilary Mantel's new novel.
"Our friends", is their confident reply. Their friends were George-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Maximilien Robespierre, three famed leaders of the French Revolution who did go on to rule the nation in the five revolutionary years from 1789 to 1794.
Mantel's epic novel recounts the history of the French Revolution through the eyes of these three leaders — the huge, earthy Danton with his inspiring oratory which steeled the popular hatred for the nobility but who was actually more moderate than he looked; Desmoulins, the brilliant journalist who was immensely popular for his mastery of the "fine art of mockery, vituperation and abuse"; and the stern Robespierre, who doggedly pursued extreme measures to preserve the infant republic against aristocratic counter-revolution.
Lawyers all, these three were men from the middle class professions who, like the rising class of capitalist entrepreneurs in the absolute monarchy of France, found that the domination of political life by the nobility had closed all doors to their personal and economic advancement. Some realised that they needed to break these doors down, and that they needed the social weight of the labouring poor, the "sans-culottes" (craftsmen, shopkeepers, labourers) to do it.
Mantel follows the Revolution through its successive stages in which this alliance of the bourgeoisie and the poor, under the threat of counter-revolution and war, advanced the Revolution, shedding those conservatives who were frightened of the popular movement and who sought social stability for a new "aristocracy of the rich".
Early figures like General LaFayette, the French hero of the North American Revolution, and Mirabeau, the flamboyant ex-noble, were found wanting as revolutionary France was attacked from within and without, a situation demanding sacrifice of the capitalists' liberty and profits for the war and the republic.
The Jacobins under Robespierre did just this when in power, introducing a controlled economy aimed at winning the war. Danton and Desmoulins, who had travelled further to the left with each new popular upsurge, came to oppose the Terror, resentful of the price their class was paying, and, in the crisis atmosphere of 1794, went to the guillotine.
The Jacobin republic has come to be symbolised by the "dictatorial" Robespierre and the Terror of the guillotine. Mantel reflects this view to some extent. The Terror, however, was truly popular. As Fouquier-Tinville, the head of the Committee of Public Safety, puts it in the novel, "it is only the Committee that is holding things together — the revenue, the armies, the food supplies". Mantel's Fouquier is not an attractive person, but the power of the Jacobins was that of the people. The Terror was theirs.
For Mantel, the real heroes are Danton and Desmoulins — her novel ends with their executions, not Robespierre's when his usefulness had been outlived and the revolutionary alliance with the poor dissolved.
Danton is presented as the talented and brave bourgeois revolutionary he was (that rallying cry of later Marxists — "audacity, audacity, yet more audacity" — is Danton's). Mantel has Desmoulins accurately summarise Danton as "a complicated person with simple wants — power, money, land" ("women", adds his wife). In the final analysis, however, Danton's sympathy for capitalist "freedom" alienated him from the poor and doomed him under the more disciplined and self-sacrificing policy of Robespierre.
It is impossible not to like the Desmoulins of Mantel's novel for his childlike irascibility, his irreverence, his irrepressible humour. Reluctantly attending confession, Desmoulins is confronted by the priest for his contributions to "envy, anger, pride ...". "Ah", he responds, "the seven Deadly Sins. Put me down for the whole seven." Desmoulins does not bow to convention and is a stranger to hypocrisy, but ultimately he, too, lacked the political hardness of a Robespierre which the republic needed for its survival.
Mantel's Robespierre is less attractive than his two colleagues but nevertheless receives a more nuanced treatment than the usual conservative portrait of him as a fanatical, paranoid, emotionally cold, blood-crazed dictator, the very incarnation of how revolution leads to the guillotine and gulag.
Mantel avoids this simplistic psychological and political caricature. Her Robespierre had to struggle hard to eliminate his "conciliatory streak" and never overcame his lifelong abhorrence of killing. Robespierre was not corrupt and was genuinely popular with "the little people who'd fallen foul of vested interests". He went a considerable way to bring the popular movement to the rescue of the Revolution, though always with the intention of controlling it.
Whilst Mantel's technique of seeing events through the eyes of her main characters allows a more honest appraisal of their idealism and their moral doubts, the drawback is that their views of their opponents to their left allow no right of appeal. The more radical popular leaders — Jaques Roux (the Red Priest), Hebert, and Marat — are all seen as personally and politically contemptible. Revolutionaries (especially capitalist ones) don't have to have likeable personalities, but the "left" leaders deserve a better hearing.
Mantel's emphasis on leaders tends towards the "history-from-above" approach with Great Men making history (although she recognises, through Robespierre, that this is "nonsensical"; the "real heroes are those who have resisted tyrants"). There is a little too much of the coffee-house conspiracy compared to the interventions of the popular movement.
The love affairs are extravagant. The novel stops well short of the full soap opera, but does get a little sudsy around the edges. Mantel's revolutionary women, however, are not confined to the love affairs but are an active political force, discovering a new sense of worth and power in the Revolution.
At 870 pages this is a lot of book, fluently written and terribly addictive — good to read on your holidays or in a quiet moment on your nearest barricades.