Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  Michelet can hardly be accused of leaving out the warts. His picture of “inside the Revolution” has been substantially taken over by modern historians, with of course numerous and varied modifications, changes of emphasis and a wider field. And French historians—those who are not royalists—have tended to follow him also, as both Aulard and Mathiez did and as Ollivier did in his recent life of Saint-Just, in accepting at least some of those bloodstained heroes as necessary to the greatness of France. Michelet accepts most of the leaders and many others: “these great citizens who died so young and who, whatever they may have done, died in preparing for us this France.” Professor Geyl will have none of this: “sentimentality about the bloody maniacs of 1793–94 … positively repulsive.” No doubt this is a healthy human reaction and yet Professor Geyl is being hardly less sentimental than Michelet. Bloody maniacs? Marat probably was one in literal truth; Michelet at least depicts him so and does not number him among “the great citizens.” He also rejects the Hebertists and those who like Tallien and Fouché were busy butchers in 1793–94 and became respectable indulgents by way of Thermidor. Vergniaud, Brissot, Danton, Desmoulins, all these were “great citizens” for Michelet but none can be classed as a “bloody maniac,” least of all for 1793–94. It comes down then to Robespierre and Saint-Just. They were cruel and vindictive men certainly, like Cromwell, Sherman, Stalin and many national heroes, or like one “great citizen,” still living and respected by all, who killed in a few seconds many more people than were killed in the whole course of the French Revolution. (He did not murder them personally, and neither did Robespierre murder people personally.) But when a professor of history, who is, after all, professionally accustomed both to measuring his words and to the idea of bloodshed, breaks out with “bloody maniacs” about these particular cruel and vindictive men, one may suspect that he has in mind not only the blood but also the great achievement for which Michelet, in spite of everything, admired them: the successful defence of the Revolution. It is precisely because Michelet is torn by conflicting emotions about Robespierre that he can give a more vivid and convincing impression of him than do the productions of the “bloody maniac” school.† Here is his picture of Robespierre at the apparent zenith of his power—and in fact just beginning to slip—at the procession of the Feast of the Supreme Being, Prairial 22 of the Year II (June 10,1794):

  Robespierre, the President of the Convention, naturally walked in front. He appeared radiant. David painted him as he looked that day, I believe, in the Saint-Albin portrait. Nowhere is he more terrible. That smile hurts. Passion seems to have drunk his blood and dried his bones, leaving only the nervous system. He is like a drowned cat resuscitated by a galvanic battery, or like a reptile stiffening and rearing up, with an unspeakable expression of frightening affability.

  But let there be no mistake. The impression is not one of hatred. What you feel is a painful pity mingling with terror. You cry out, without hesitation—that of all men this was the one who suffered most.

  Robespierre was in the habit of walking with a tense, quick step. That was not the pace of the Convention. The first row of the Convention in the procession remained—by malice perhaps, and with a perfidious show of respect—well behind him, leaving him isolated. From time to time he looked round and saw that he was alone.

  The passage is very characteristic of Michelet; the extravagant emotional ejaculation in the second paragraph interrupts, but does not disturb, a brilliant exposition of what has been keenly observed. He is like a spectator at a ball game who cheers immoderately and in a partisan fashion but does not miss a detail of the play. There are other historical writers who, in their own case, mistake for keen and dispassionate observation what is in fact just an incapacity to cheer.

  In an enthusiastic but not very illuminating essay Mr. Edmund Wilson put Michelet (why not Hegel?) at the start of the line that led to the Finland Station and the Bolshevik Revolution. It is however easier to see Michelet’s French Revolution as a station on a French line than as an international junction. Here Professor Geyl is a better guide: “Nothing has contributed more to the survival of the work in France—I believe that its popularity is largely confined to the French reading public—than the fact that the ideas (or should I say the sentiments and aspirations) which it proclaims still evoke a response there.” It is now nearly a hundred years since the envious Sainte-Beuve told the Goncourts about Michelet: “He omits all verbs. But he has become a church —he has his believers.” And he has his believers still, even among those who do not read him, for he has entered the bloodstream of French thought.

  It would be idle to enquire whether the French are like that because Michelet wrote in the way he did—a view to which Professor Geyl seems to incline—or whether Michelet wrote in the way he did because he was so French. One could perhaps say that the essence of certain French qualities, distilled by him, went to make later generations more intoxicatingly and dangerously French; like the effect of Calvados in draught cider. What is certain is that his chief qualities and limitations are French characteristics pushed to extremes. The undisguised passion which informs his historical writings and is a source of his greatness, seems rather shocking in an English translation, apparently also in Dutch, and probably in other languages. But in French it comes easily and is acceptable. It has always been recognized that the French are more indulgent to displays of emotion in their social life than are their neighbours; the same is to some extent true of their intellectual life also. This is not exclusively to the disadvantage of French intellectual life, as is sometimes supposed.

  “Emotionalism,” sniffs the Nordic critic. “Et alors?” a Frenchman might reply. “Is an intellectual not human? Does he not have emotions? And if he does, what is to be gained by his concealing them and pretending to be a machine? A historian for example cannot be objective. He is himself part of the historical process; the passions and the interests of the people he is writing about are his too, to the extent that he can find out what they are. An archaeologist does not need to be altogether human—there are some quite good English archaeologists—and a mediaeval historian may be God knows what. But a modern historian, dealing with wars and revolutions which are still vibrating around us, cannot possibly be impartial. We French admit that. Our modern historians conduct themselves accordingly, after the glorious example of Michelet. As for the modern historian who sets out to be impartial, he may be honest and have opinions, in which case he will be prevented, by his commitment to impartiality, from writing anything at all; or he may be honest and have no opinions, in which case he is an idiot, both in the classical sense and in the ordinary sense, and his writings will correspond to his condition; he may be dishonest and have no opinions, in which case more lucrative careers than historiography are open to him, and he has no moral or intellectual reason to refuse them; or finally he may be dishonest and have opinions, in which case he is certain to put across his opinions under the disguise of ‘impartial history’ with all the prestige which the fog-bound populations accord to such idols. People who believe in fabulous creatures, such as ‘impartial historians,’ readily become the prey of confidence tricksters.”

  The normal Anglo-Saxon reply would, I think, be that these are sophistries, turning on the false unstated premise that opinions are immutable, whereas in fact the honest historian is one who has opinions which he is prepared to modify in accordance with the evidence. That is certainly the ideal of the historian-as-scientist. But in practice the man who believes himself to be prepared to modify his opinions in accordance with the evidence cannot help interpreting the evidence in accordance with his opinions. If he is scrupulous this dilemma will paralyse him. Acton’s knowledge was certainly not inferior to Michelet’s but his production was vastly inferior. From an insular point of view it is the classical contrast between an honest Englishman, tongue-tied by his inhibitions, and a voluble, unscrupulous Frenchman.

  Let us assume that the conventions of the objective manner are not n
ecessarily identical with historiographic virtue. The opposing convention, that of Michelet—“the most prejudiced historian that ever lived” according to Lewis Galantière—can claim, in France, the honour due to an art, as opposed to a pseudo-science. Michelet was a great artist, with the respect for his material that that implies. “Michelet’s imagination did not work in a void”—it is Professor Geyl himself who is speaking—“he had a sense of the fact, his imagination throve on the truth and genuineness of archive documents.” It is one of the misfortunes of Anglo-French communication that the Michelet style, and the idea of history-as-an-art, became discredited in England through the intermediary of Belloc, who wrote good prose—the only good prose some of his academic critics probably ever read—but unlike Michelet could not be bothered with (or afford) the drudgery of prolonged and detailed research. From this derived the famous equation: Good prose equals bad history; with its obvious and gratifying corollary: Bad prose equals good history.

  As in so many other fields the French tendency made towards individual excellence, the English towards collective success. History-as-science, if taken really seriously,‡ is a sedative, leading to the resignations of agnosticism, one of the artificial paradises. History-as-art on the contrary is a stimulant, enriching and embittering contemporary conflicts. History-as-science could work for UNESCO (Revision of National History Textbooks Project), under the slogan: Fragmentation is the Mother of Amnesia. History-as-art on the other hand—which is history acting on history—is a rough business like history itself—like the Eumenides in Barrault’s production of the Oresteia, snuffers and diggers-up of bones. In the case of France undoubtedly the history-as-art tradition is part of the long blood-feud, which runs from the Great Revolution and 1848 through the Commune to the collaborations and liberations of the last struggle. A passage in Edgar Morin’s recent book, l’Autocritique, shows how deeply this tradition—essentially l’histoire engagée—has penetrated into the French mind:

  The lectures which excited me most were those of Georges Lefebvre on 1789. From the start, Lefebvre showed us how the significance of the French Revolution had been continually altered as a result of subsequent historical developments. Lamartine, Aulard, Jaurès, Mathiez—the historians themselves were historicized. It was a fine lesson in relativity which taught me, much better than dialectics did, that there are no pure observers, but there is a constant complex relation between present history and past history, the observer and what he observes.

  Michelet’s cult of the Revolution, negligible though its influence on world communism may be, has probably helped to form the intellectual background of French communism. Some objective historians have blamed him for this, with one of those lapses into “judgments from the standpoint of today” to which even they are liable. This seems to be a misunderstanding. We may be reasonably sure that the French Communist party would be a force even if Michelet had never existed; the Italian Communist party after all manages to get along without him. Granted he supplies French Communists with much of their intellectual background, is it necessarily the worst part? Would they be better people or less dangerous to France if they derived their intellectual background wholly from German precept and Russian practice? If they really read Michelet, as distinct from hearing about him, they are learning some disconcerting things about how revolutions work, and they are in contact with what is, within definite limits, a very humane and generous mind.

  Within definite limits … The really harmful capacity of Micheletism—the effect of which is not confined to the Communists—derives, not from what he admires, but from what he lacks. His ruling vice is chauvinism, rooted in an arrogant lack of interest in anything outside the boundaries—the natural boundaries, of course—of France. It is not a malevolent lack of interest, in principle. Far from it: France, which is civilization, is open and accessible to foreigners. They can come and learn; they can even become French. For those who do—like Clootz and Tom Paine—he has a special, paternal affection. But those who opposed Revolutionary France, like the famous “false Belgians,” were opposing both civilization and liberty; they are literally “voting themselves out of the human race” as far as Michelet is concerned. The same indeed is true of French provincials who oppose Paris, for “The Commune is everything. Paris is the world.”

  Many Frenchmen are by nature only too ready to accept this kind of doctrine. It is, after all, more generous than other national myths, because it is proselytizing rather than exclusive. But, perhaps for that reason, it is also more resentful. If you offer to receive an unfortunate fellow human being into your society, the most gifted and polite society in the world, and he declines that honour, you will begin to regard him as a very low and perverse fellow indeed, with whom you will be justified in dealing severely.

  Michelet if alive today would certainly have supported the repression of the rebellion in Algeria. Is it not the same as La Vendée or the Chouans? “They wanted to fight France! Poor fellows, they were French and they did not know it.” The Algerian rebels would have been for Michelet, as for many Frenchmen today, no more than primitive fanatics fighting not for liberty—since France is offering them true liberty, the liberty to be French—but for the forces of the dark past, religious intolerance, economic stagnation, backward social customs. The policy of integration would have been Michelet’s policy on Algeria, although it must be added that, for him, unlike some of the present advocates of that policy, integration would have involved genuinely equal status for Moslem Frenchmen. As for foreign protests about France’s methods of repressing the rebellion, Michelet would have reacted—as he did to those who protested against the atrocities of the French Revolution: “Ce grand concert de pleureurs qui pleurent tous contre la France.”

  With these opinions, Michelet would have been in accord with the great majority of contemporary Frenchmen. That is not to say, however, that he would be at home in contemporary France. He would—again like many Frenchmen—have wished the war, without being able fully to accept its consequences. The Fifth Republic is not a republic in Michelet’s sense: it is, as Mauriac has said, a consulate. The charisma attaching to the head of the state, and the privileged status of the army, would have seemed to him not republican but quasi-monarchical, Bonapartist, and therefore detestable. His dislike of Napoleon was so great that he even went so far as to sympathize with those whose countries were invaded, although these were foreigners fighting against—no, not against France; against the Empire. This line of thought, or pattern of feeling, could lead him, in contemporary terms, to reverse his position about Algeria.

  Questions about what Michelet would think if he were alive today are not, I believe, idle or sentimental. Because both of his greatness as an artist, and of the Français moyen character of many of his feelings, his picture of the Revolution—and to a great extent, of France itself—is present in the contemporary French consciousness. In that sense Michelet is alive today. With his narrow and intense lucidity and his unguarded felicity of language he can tell us a great deal about the state of mind of the people whom he loved and taught and to whose glories he belongs.

  * In Debates with Historians. Professor Geyl’s essay on Michelet is, like his other essays, extremely shrewd, although I think it suffers from a lack of sympathy with the subject.

  † In any case, why maniacs? If anything, Robespierre and Saint-Just were bloody depressives.

  ‡ This excludes Russian Marxism, a healthy open-air game, in which all are invited to join.

  THE PEOPLE’S VICTOR

  How came it that this prudent, economical man was also generous? That this chaste adolescent, this model father, grew to be, in his last years, an ageing faun? That this legitimist changed, first into a Bonapartist, only, later still, to be hailed as the grandfather of the Republic? That this pacifist could sing, better than anybody, of the glories of the flags of Wagram? That this bourgeois in the eyes of other bourgeois came to assume the stature of a rebel? These are the questions that every biographe
r of Victor Hugo must answer.

  —ANDRÉ MAUROIS

  Monsieur Maurois, luckily, does not seriously attempt to answer any of them; his book* is very much better than this little collection of paradoxes à l‘Américaine would suggest. This is a lucid, well-constructed biography, solidly based on wide and deep research, and making discriminating and efficient use of vast materials. M. Maurois’s narrative, although fairly long—about five hundred pages—is compact and extremely readable: it has the momentum and the sweep necessary for a subject which demands greater-than-life-size treatment. The work is, the author tells us, “the largest in scale and the most difficult that I have undertaken.” Much as it surpasses his earlier biographies—particularly his rather skimpy exercises on English subjects—it could only have been written by a man with long experience of the possibilities and problems of biography—by, in short, a master craftsman. A craftsman, too, not burdened by excessive subtlety or overmuch fastidiousness, or irony—and therefore at home with his subject. Hugo was the concentrated essence of a century of Français moyens and it is fitting that he has found a Français moyen to write his biography.

  “We have so rich a native field of romantic poetry,” says the dust jacket, “that Hugo’s somewhat rhetorical verse leaves us cold.” No doubt you have; perhaps it does. It could also be that you know less French than you think you do, and that you have a taste for misleading comparisons, flattering to yourselves. There is nothing at all like Hugo in the English field of romantic poetry. Nor was Hugo’s verse just “somewhat rhetorical,” with the implication of poor taste and unwarranted excitement that that conveys. It was a majestic roll of rhetoric sustained for fifty years, with a marvellous variety of expression and an always deepening resonance. Hugo was a public man. He felt the events of his own life—the birth of a child, a bereavement—as public events, archetypes of human destiny. He felt the great historical events of his day as events in his personal emotional life. And always words, millions of words, gushed out of him, scalding hot and at high pressure, like steam out of his boiling century. He said so much that in the end he had said something for everybody. A section of his public followed his body from the Étoile to the Panthéon. There were two million of them.