The French Revolution & Hilary Mantel & Dickens

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

published 1992

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

published 1859

Thunder of Valmy by Geoffrey Trease

published 1960

I recently went to see the opera Andrea Chenier, by Giordano, at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. It was a gala night, because it was the final performance by conductor Antonio Pappano, the much-loved music director at ROH for many years, and there was wonderful singing from Jonas Kauffman and Sondra Radvanovsky and an extraordinary atmosphere in the theatre – it was a delight to be there.

The plot concerns the French Revolution, and is loosely based on the story of the real-life Andre Chenier, a poet who (#spoileralert) did not survive the revolution.

This led me to think a lot about that period of French history, and to see that it might be time to read the only one of Hilary Mantel’s books that I have never read: A Place of Greater Safety, 1992.

I am a huge fan of Mantel – and the tribute I wrote for the i newspaper when she died, here, is probably the piece of work I am most proud of from the past few years. There are posts about her other books all over the blog.

But this book – mmm. It is 750 pages long, and very detailed, and very well-researched. She wrote it some time before it was published – she was terribly surprised that no-one thought it would be a bestseller, and that she couldn’t get anyone to take it.

She says: 'I had never been to Paris when I began to write. This did not matter. In my dreams of Europe, I had found the keys to the gate of an unknown city. For the constant and passionate imagination, no documents or passes are needed. It did not seem to me that I was writing of dead people or events that were distant and frozen. I was working at a transformative moment in the history of Europe… I was at one with the work I did.'

Of the reviews at the time, Vogue is helpful:

‘Concentrating on the tortuously interwoven relationship between its three most important protagonists, Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins, Hilary Mantel has pulled off the apparently impossible … an ambitious, gripping epic … The host of minor characters and the swirling mob who form the necessary background to the story are never lost from sight, but are expertly marshalled on and off the bloodstained stage … a tour de force of the historical imagination’

 

Apparently another review said she should concentrate more on a novel and less on history – I can see the point of this rather aphoristic remark, and perhaps that is what she did in her masterwork, the Wolf Hall trilogy.

I set myself targets to read so many pages a day, and some of it was hard going. There is a huge number of characters, and because fact-based many of them have the same forename: Louis? Which one would that be? I read an e-book, and although there is a list of characters in the beginning that is not very helpful when you are on a Kindle. (and not that helpful anyway).

She did a remarkable job of showing us the lives of Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins. I was unfamiliar with the story of Camille Desmoulins, while knowing something of the other two – he was a wonderful character:

‘Camille, you’re taking your solicitor to confession with you?’

‘A wise precaution. No serious sinner should neglect it.’

And: ‘I never know why Hope is accounted a virtue,’ Camille said. ‘It seems so self-serving.’

It is always helpful to remember that Gerard Depardieu played Danton in a 1980s film, as he seems natural casting and it is an easy way to picture him.

Robespierre is ‘the sea-green incorruptible’ and when I was at school I wondered what that meant. Aha, I thought today, it will be easy to find out now in the age of Google, but I couldn’t find any convincing explanation of what the phrase means. (I do know what incorruptible means – it’s the sea-green I’d like to know about).

I realized how much it helps when reading Tudor history that I already know a lot about it (lady-in-waiting called Jane? Well we know who she is) – much much less about French history. But boy do I know a lot about it now. I will say that by the final section I was truly enthralled – I knew what was going to happen, but it was still unbearably sad, gripping, tense, heart-breaking. I far exceeded my target for pages read - I couldn’t put it down as it moved towards its terrible ending (very Cromwell).

It made me think about the nature of revolution, of politics, of the cost to people, about leaders who squabble and then turn on each other.

OF COURSE (this is Hilary Mantel) she had some incredible turns of phrase and descriptions: 

- [Danton to Desmoulins:] ‘The filthy business was necessary, but at least I had the grace of soul to pretend it was nothing to do with me. You, you’d have fluttered up to take the credit for the Massacre of the Innocents. So don’t look down on me from whatever ledge of higher morality you’re perched on today. You knew. You knew it all, from the beginning.’

- Outside the door Fabre took out a silk handkerchief and dabbed his face. It had been the most unpleasant morning of his life – if you excepted the morning in 1777 when he’d been sentenced to hang.

- [the toddler] talked a lot now – mostly in a meaningless language, as if he knew he were a politician’s child.

I could see and imagine many of the characters very clearly. I was astonished to realize how young the main players in the revolution were, and how intricate the connections among them.

When I wondered how much Mantel had made up I remembered these words from her introduction to the novel: 'The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.'

The revolutionary newspaper run by Jean-Paul Marat was called The People’s Friend, which was hard to take seriously as this was also the name of a particularly sweet magazine, full of nice stories, that you used to find in the dentist’s waiting room back in the day – and is still going strong, the longest-running women’s magazine in the world. (Marat’s journal lasted three years.)

One of these items is stained with the actual blood of Marat

 

When I’d finished the book, I COULD have read a serious factual book about the French Revolution, for interest, but instead I turned to Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. This was a sad disappointment – I loved this book when I was a teenager, with its heroic self-sacrifice, famous lines and touching romance. I am a big fan of Dickens, but this was not the book to reinforce that – it seemed sentimental and at times ridiculous, although you had to respect his wish to show the causes and results of the revolution, while ploughing on through a strange plot, an odd time structure, and some very stupid behaviour by the characters. But there were odd moments when I remembered why I had loved it all those years ago – the phrase ‘recalled to life’, and the sinister secret note reading

‘Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from jacques’

Came back to me in a flash and still gave me the genuine frisson. And Sydney Carton is at least an unusual and intriguing character.

I also read, for old time’s sake, Thunder of Valmy by Geoffrey Trease (1960). He wrote great books for children ( and has featured on the blog for his what-would-now-be-called-YA series of Bannerdale books) – and I do remember that when we did the revolution in history lessons at school, my nonchalant knowledge of the era, gained from this book, quite impressed the teacher – the oubliettes, the lettres de cachet, the three-tier system, the Tennis Court. (All of course feature in the Dickens too). And Thunder is still a great read – exciting and adventurous and giving a young person or an old person a great deal of useful background.