Aux armes, citoyens!

[pallas_athena]

"And what's the point of a revolution without general copulation?"
--Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade

Lately I've been reading A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel, who just won the Booker Prize for Wolf Hall. I'm more than halfway through, and I have to admit it: I love this book. After wading through wheelbarrowloads of poorly-written "popular history" and poorly-researched historical fiction, it's an amazing feeling to find someone, at last, doing it right.

I have one other confession to make: I was a teenage French Revolution geek. Michelet and Twelve Who Ruled had pride of place on my shelves, along with a plethora of other books in English and French. I sang the Carmagnole and Ça Ira in the school hallways, and dated my papers by the Revolutionary calendar. So when I say that Mantel's novel has the French Revolution Geek Seal Of Approval, you'll know those aren't idle words.

A Place of Greater Safety requires commitment: it's a doorstop-sized book and a slow read. In this, and in its sprawling scope, it reminds me a bit of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (though Mantel isn't quite that insane.) If you do make the commitment, though, you get rewarded with sentences like:

Annette had decided to employ that aspect of herself her friends called a Splendid Woman. It involved sweeping about the room and smiling archly.

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[Danton to Desmoulins:] "May I continue? You've never achieved anything because you're always bloody horizontal. I mean, you're supposed to be at some place, right, and you're not, and people say, God, he's so absent-minded - but I know the truth - you started the day with very good intentions, you might even have been on the way to where you're supposed to be going, and then you just run into somebody, and what's the next thing? You're in bed with them."
"And that's the day gone," Camille said. "Yes, you're right, you're right."

The book centres around Georges-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre, following them from childhood through optimistic youth into their history-making years as "public men." Mantel does well by all three. She clearly found them interesting and wanted to know more about them, and she makes her reader feel the same curiosity.

They don't have the narrative all to themselves, however; a good double handful of characters take a turn telling the story. We hear from the long-suffering Gabrielle Danton, the keen-witted Lucile Desmoulins and her mother Annette; the pubescent Louise Gély, who grows up with the Revolution; from Fabre d'Églantine, unemployed genius; from Manon Roland, salon hostess and implacable enemy of our three protagonists; from Philippe, Duke of Orléans.

I admit to being especially impressed by her treatment of Robespierre. We all know the cardboard-cutout Robespierre, the villain of countless stories: bloodless, sexless, icy, devoid of human feeling, caring only for the ideals of Revolution and Republic. Mantel's Robespierre is very different. The adjective she uses most for him is "gentle." She creates an extremely believable human character for him; she gives us his hopes and fears, his likes and dislikes, his wit, his weaknesses. Her Robespierre isn't sexless, and she even takes us into his bed to prove it -- with results that are sort of morbidly hilarious.

In fact, a sense of the ridiculous is one of this book's great strengths:

'Sansculottes', the working men call themselves, because they wear trousers not breeches. [...]On the sansculotte head, the red bonnet, the 'cap of liberty'. Why liberty is thought to require headgear is a mystery.

For the rich and powerful, the aim is to be accepted as sansculotte in spirit, without assuming the ridiculous uniform. But only Robespierre and a handful of others keep hope alive for the unemployed hairdressers of France.

Genius, I tell you. Go read.