Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  In fact, of course, our advantage is illusory, our point of time no more privileged than his, and there will no doubt be future dates from which he will seem to be “right” and we “wrong.” Where he was wrong was not in what he prophesied but in prophesying at all, in believing that the historian knows enough to prophesy. And even that he did not wholly believe; his prophetic activities were in part polemical, like those of so many other prophets, curses rather than predictions.

  Michelet’s polemics—which pervade his historical writings—seem to many modern historians an even greater crime than his prophesies. “Absolutist thinker,” says Professor Pieter Geyl,* “illusionist and self-deceiver,” “repulsive sentimentality,” “impotence of the judgment in the face of emotion and sentiment.” Most historians, outside France, would probably concur in those opinions; some would deny Michelet the title of historian altogether, call The French Revolution an epic pamphlet, a work of art inspired by historical events, anything but history, for accuracy is the essence of history, and accuracy is said to require scientific detachment, not passionate involvement.

  It is going to be my contention in this essay that, while every one of Professor Geyl’s harsh judgments can be sustained on aspects of Michelet’s work, Michelet remains not merely a very great historian but, within certain limits, an exceptionally honest one. His kind of honesty sustains a greatness which his very intelligent and competent modern critics cannot reach because—assuming an equality of talent—their principles would inhibit them. It is fair to add that they do not choose to aim at greatness. They would adapt to their own use the tribute which Vigny paid himself in comparison with Hugo: “What is important is not to be a great poet, but to be a pure poet.” And certainly Michelet is in history what Hugo was in poetry. Each, as well as being poet or historian, was also politician, prophet, philosopher, showman, pamphleteer and even at times something of a buffoon. Modern poets and historians are apt to be purer, and duller.

  The case that needs to be established is not that Michelet is vastly more entertaining than most modern scientific historians—no one who has read Michelet’s French Revolution and, say, Professor Thompson’s account of the same events, would care to dispute that. What will be disputed is the claim hereby made that Michelet is in some ways more honest and therefore more scientific than most modern scientific historians.

  The root of Michelet’s greatness was that he felt passionately about history—specifically about the French Revolution—and the kind of honesty which distinguishes him from many modern historians is that he said clearly and openly what he felt. The tendency of the scientific historian—perhaps less a tendency than a convention imposed by academic public opinion—is towards impassivity. Some Buster Keatons of historiography can attain genuine and total impassivity: they record the facts, and nothing more. Yet what facts, and why record them? How select the facts if you care nothing about them, one way or another? You can, of course, rely on “what seemed important to contemporaries,” but all you know about is what a tiny minority of contemporaries said they thought important. For this reason an intelligent section now tends to fall back on “the history of public opinion.” What was done is doubtful, what was thought unknowable, what was published remains and can be classified, with the minimum intrusion of modern preoccupations. This is a respectable and useful, but limited, activity. There are others who are known to have strong opinions on historical subjects but who separate their opinions—or perhaps rather the expression of their opinions—from their scholarly activity as much as possible. The opinions, hot and strong, go into newspaper articles, radio, television; the serious historical writing is tightly buttoned, ostentatiously unemotional. This convention no doubt has considerable merits. The plain dry style implies the acceptance of rigorous standards, submission to ascertainable facts, the aspiration of historiography towards the status of an exact science. Yet, as in all systems of strict convention, hypocrisy, the nemesis of puritanism, is never far behind. Under this Recording Angel mask, “X” the historian is still “X” the man, often “X” the journalist. His emotions, interests, prejudices are with him as he selects and relates facts, sifts conflicting accounts, attributes degrees of credibility to sources. And he is working in a field, the human past, in which human emotions, interests, prejudices are pervasively relevant; a field moreover in which the arbitration of experiment is impossible—except perhaps in a few peripheral areas, like pachydermatous Alpinism. Class war, religious war, national war all rage in historiography as they have raged in history. With Michelet and Carlyle the war was in the open country. Among modern scientific historians it is siege warfare, unrelenting hostilities masked by long periods of apparent quiet. Then through the ideological slit-window in the massive fortifications of fact comes the crossbow bolt to transfix German, or Jew, or Jesuit. That, or the collapse of a long section of the curtain-wall shows that Tory sappers have succeeded in undermining a Whig position long considered impregnable.

  When, therefore, a modern scientific historian rebukes Michelet for prejudice and emotionalism, what he really objects to is Michelet’s unguarded expression of prejudice and emotion. But the reader should surely be grateful for these unguarded expressions, for they put him on his guard. With Michelet he knows exactly where he stands, as he often does not know with the modern historian. He knows that Michelet has a passionate love of France and a passionate hatred of kings, and that the intense emotional significance which the Revolution had for him was that it meant the liberation of that which he most loved from that which he most hated. A modern reader will see an obvious psychoanalytical explanation for that, which will further increase his understanding of what the French Revolution meant to Michelet, what must be allowed for in reading Michelet’s French Revolution. Of course, if those who wish to purify historiography from the taint of emotionalism were strictly consistent, they would require all honours students in history to undergo psychoanalysis, as a condition of being allowed to proceed to a degree. But then if this were done the results might go far beyond the elimination of the last traces of Micheletism: no history might any longer get written at all.

  Michelet does not limit himself to telling us in general terms what he felt about the Revolution. He answers at almost every turn the vulgar query which historians usually ignore: “What would you have done, chum?” He tells us exactly where he would have sat in the Convention: between Cambon and Carnot. He would have been, that is to say, a man of the Mountain, but neither a Girondin nor a Jacobin. He would have voted in favour of war, of the assimilation of Belgium, of the death of the King. (“He was still sure he was King, in spite of all that had happened … That is what they had to kill.”) He would have been for the tenth August, but against the second June: that is to say, in favour of the insurrection of the Paris streets to bring down the monarchy, but against the same kind of insurrection to purge republican institutions. He excuses the institutions of the Terror as forced on France by fatality, but does not condone the September massacres, or the mass executions of Prairial and Messidor. Against the triumvirate, but also against the Thermidorian reaction, he leaves his reader in some doubt about where exactly he stands only in one important situation: on Thermidor itself. From his position in the Convention he would have had to vote for the death of Robespierre, Couthon and Saint-Just: la mort sans phrases, in the sagacious proposition of Sieyès. La mort sans phrases but also, for Michelet, la mort dans l’âme, for Thermidor is the end of the Revolution and the end of his book. The last paragraph of his great work runs as follows:

  Not long after Thermidor, a man who is still living and who was then ten years old was brought to the theatre by his parents. As they left the theatre he admired a long line of sumptuous carriages such as he had never seen before. Attendants in short jackets, hat in hand, said to the spectators as they came out: “Need a carriage, master?” The child did not quite understand this new expression and asked what it meant. All they told him was, that there had been a great chang
e because of the death of Robespierre.

  Michelet is certainly honest, in the sense that he declares his interest openly, puts his ideological cards on the table. But to call him “an honest historian” would be only a play on words unless he is also found honest in relation to the facts, unless he consistently relates events which do not suit his thesis. How far is Michelet in that sense an honest historian? Here it is necessary to make a distinction. As historian of the Revolution, of what happened inside the Revolution, he is remarkably honest, because he is anxious to be just to all parties, is acutely concerned and even torn by their disputes, has a keen sense of political tactics and of the working of assemblies, an uncanny intuition into the psychology of power, and the literary ability to say precisely what he means. Few historians have had such equipment and very few have had, in addition, what Michelet pre-eminently had, the stamina to grapple with the enormous basic literature of a long and extremely articulate revolution. He worked harder to find the truth than anyone had done before in this field, and indeed he pays himself an eloquent and deserved tribute. He writes in a footnote to his opening chapter on the September massacres:

  If I may be permitted to say so, I am walking alone in these gloomy regions of September. Alone—no one before me ever set a foot there. Like Aeneas in Hades I walk with my sword unsheathed, driving off vain shadows, defending myself against the lying legions which surround me. I have brought to bear [on these lies] an inflexible critical method, checking them by various tests, by which they fall, especially by a rigorous chronology of days and hours.

  This language, un-British though it may be, is on the whole justified in relation, not only to September, but to the interior of the Revolution as a whole, apart from a few rhetorical exuberances and easily discounted rationalizations. Where he ceases to be a historian and becomes simply a pamphleteer is in his dealing with the enemies, especially the external enemies, of the Revolution. “On no point,” writes Professor Geyl with dangerous and deceptive mildness, “is Michelet’s historical writing technically weaker.” The truth is that Michelet’s concept of international relations is hardly more historical than a Punch-and-Judy show. England is the enemy of France and of the Revolution, and therefore of Civilization and of Justice. About such a country Michelet wished to know no more than an English squire wished to know about Boney or an American Legionnaire about Russia—just enough, in fact, to aim an insult to the satisfaction of his own fellow-countrymen. On England’s reactions to the horrors of revolution, the tu quoque was useful: “Sitting at your ease on the corpse of Ireland … be good enough to tell us: did your revolutions of interests not cost more blood than our revolutions of ideas?” Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy was the main standby: “The Middle Ages knew but one hypocrisy; we are cursed with two: hypocrisy of authority, hypocrisy of freedom; that is to say, the Priest and the Englishman, the two shapes of Tartuffe. The priest influences the women mainly, the Englishman the middle class.” Burke, who was “a pupil of the Jesuits of St. Omer,” (Michelet may here be confusing him with Daniel O’Connell) “delivered a furious diatribe against France, for which he was paid cash down by his adversary Pitt.” Pitt himself was “a rabid clerk,” who encouraged the rising in the Vendée but let it down out of mere gratuitous hypocrisy: “They spent their time asking ‘whether such-and-such a band of partisans had respectable leaders,’ and other English questions.” The general picture of England’s role in the counter-revolution was as follows:

  England “that knight of human liberty,” as Madame de Stael called her, leaning on her fleets and bales of cotton, looked to the Continent for something to fight with, looked for the sword and the dagger. The sword was Germany, poor and warlike, always stretching out her hand for English gold. The dagger was ancient Catholicism, priests and monks, a rusty weapon but good for a stab in the back. The English, to rid themselves of such people, made several revolutions. They hanged them in their own country and encouraged them in ours.

  Apart from such polemics, more or less brilliant and more or less suggestive, there is hardly anything on international relations. “The vultures of Germany and the white bear of Russia” come in for a mention, and Poland, like Ireland, receives the tribute of a not wholly disinterested tear. There were conveniently enough two Belgiums, a true and a false one: the “true Belgium” called on France for help, the “false Belgium,” which was unfortunately larger, rejected her. The intransigent internal enemies of the Revolution—royalists and refractory priests—fare a little better, both because, being French, they have the honour to exist, and because their bravery at least belongs to the French heritage. But even so, the lack of sympathy is so marked as to be at times ludicrous: “The attitude of the royalists was extraordinarily provocative. One could not pass by the walls of the prisons without hearing them singing.”

  Certainly this burlesque treatment of the forces opposed to the Revolution is a grave defect, and one which Michelet’s critics have not spared. They have in fact insisted on it rather too much. Hardly anyone—certainly no one outside France—is likely to take Michelet’s account of international reactions and motives very seriously. Few, except anti-clericals of strict observance, will follow uncritically his analysis of the religious resistance (Le Prêtre et la femme). He does not, after all, conceal his point of view, like the perfidious English Gibbon. Michelet’s achievement should surely be considered mainly in terms of what he really worked on, what takes up the bulk of his three thousand pages: the Revolution itself, seen from Paris. Like the revolutionaries with whom he identified himself, he did not have much time for studying the psychology, or even considering the point of view, of the enemies of the Revolution. He was too busy considering the conflicting points of view, and the complex psychology, of the revolutionaries themselves. It would be hard to deny that he does this with great skill and concern for justice. He avoids—as subsequent French historians have not done—identifying himself with any single leader or tendency. He sees all the leading revolutionaries, the whole Convention, as engaged not just in an elemental struggle for power—the anti-revolutionary picture—and not just in a series of clashes between patriots and agents of Pitt—the official version—but in a confused, slippery, wily, panic-stricken struggle for individual and collective survival. They all, or almost all, believed in the Revolution, at least in its minimum sense of the destruction of aristocratic privilege and the kind of monarchy associated with it, the so-called absolutism. Some of them, like Carnot and Cambon and Prieur de la Marne, managed to do an astonishing amount of constructive work. Much of the great legal and educational structure which is often vaguely attributed to Napoleon was in fact the work of the Convention—great work accomplished amid fantastic difficulties and dangers. Most of the revolutionaries—including Marat as well as Danton and Robespierre—feared the Scylla of social revolution as much as the Charybdis of counter-revolution. But the importance of the two threats fluctuated bewilderingly, and fatally for many. As it fluctuated the revolutionary vocabulary went through wide changes of meaning, and the political leaders through corresponding arcs of attitude. The term indulgents covered originally those who feared counter-revolution—at the moment—less than social revolution; the term exagérés covered those with the contrary valuation. The distinction was not unlike that between revisionist and dogmatist in current communist terminology, but the labels switched faster and more dangerously. You could be an exagéré one year and an indulgent the next; both Marat and Danton were. Or, like the more politic Robespierre, you could follow an exagéré speech immediately with an indulgent one or dress an indulgent (anti–social-revolution) policy in the language and methods of exagération. Indeed the methods of exagération—including conspicuous human sacrifice, mass offerings to the guillotine—could be the tactics of those who most feared social revolution, the so-called indulgents. The Girondins were arrested (June 2, 1793) as indulgents, covering royalist elements who did in fact at that time support them. When they were executed (October 1793) it was for
a quite different reason: in order to deceive and hold in check the social-revolutionary movement in Lyons. They themselves had ceased to be of any political significance—“They were exhumed in order to be killed,” says Michelet—but to kill them was a useful gesture for people who were themselves beginning to be accused of indulgence. At the time of the executions immediately before Thermidor, in the summer of 1794, a time when fifty-four people went to the guillotine in one batch, clad in the red shirt of the parricide, for alleged complicity in an attempt against Robespierre’s life, Robespierre was still suspect of indulgence, of a desire to go “through clemency to a dictatorship.” And the leading group among those who brought him down in Thermidor were not indulgents but exagérés, terrorists who feared above all the retreat into indulgence which they thought Robespierre was likely to make at their expense. It was because they suspected him of being a potential Thermidorian that the Thermidorians guillotined Robespierre.