By Paul Carrier
A Place of Greater Safety may not be the most famous English-language novel about the French Revolution; that honor goes to A Tale of Two Cities. But Hilary Mantel’s masterpiece certainly is one of the best works of fiction about that blood-soaked milestone.
Long before Mantel focused her talents on Tudor England with Wolf Hall and the newly published Bring Up the Bodies, she explored the tumult that consumed France in the late 18th century. She did so through a detailed look at the lives of three men who figured prominently in the upheaval: Maximilien de Robespierre (1758-1794), George Jacques Danton (1759-1794), and Camille Desmoulins (1760-1794).
The spine of this riveting novel consists of fictionalized biographies of the trio of lawyers over the span of their short lives, although other characters - some famous, some not - wander these pages as well. Over 100 people make an appearance, including the Marquis de Lafayette, Jean-Paul Marat, the Marquis de Sade, Anne-Josèphe Théroigne, Marie-Jeanne Roland, and, of course, King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
Periodically, Mantel steps back from her focus on the major players to provide context, by examining the overall
progression of events before and during the revolution.
Danton emerges as a force of nature - a large, decidedly ugly, but charismatic and impassioned revolutionary who marries the daughter of cafe owners but lusts after Desmoulins' wife.
The witty, manic and idiosyncratic Desmoulins, a bisexual lawyer turned journalist who is plagued by a stammer, finds himself in love with a married woman while engaged to her daughter, whom he eventually marries.
Robespierre, in hindsight perhaps the most prominent of the three, is coolly analytical, well-mannered and nattily dressed, an idealistic and conscientious provincial lawyer who rises to the pinnacle of power as heads roll during the Reign of Terror.
The witty, manic and idiosyncratic Desmoulins, a bisexual lawyer turned journalist who is plagued by a stammer, finds himself in love with a married woman while engaged to her daughter, whom he eventually marries.
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| Robespierre |
Mantel’s highly individualistic style takes some getting used to. She shifts narrators, and sometimes refers to people as “he” or “she” without identifying them by name. But her unorthodox approach is at the heart of her justly admired historical fiction. Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize in 2009, so it isn’t surprising that Mantel's skills were on display years earlier in A Place of Greater Safety, which was published in 1992.
Thanks to the novel’s you-are-there feel and its length (748 pages in paperback), the travails that preceded the revolution and the excesses of the revolution itself play out slowly and fitfully, amid conflicting ideologies and an initial drive for peaceful reform that becomes increasingly violent over time.
“Nothing changes,” Mantel writes early on, before the fall of the Bastille. “Nothing new. The same old dreary crisis atmosphere. The feeling that it can’t get much worse without something giving way. But nothing does. Ruin, collapse, the sinking ship of state: the point of no return, the shifting balance, the crumbling edifice and the sands of time. Only the cliché flourishes.”
Part of the appeal of A Place of Greater Safety is that Mantel carefully explores the political complexity of the period and the spasmodic nature of the revolution, with its egomania, paranoia and surrealism, as well as the newfound sense of freedom that exhilarated the masses. It’s not at all clear, as events begin to unfold, that the progressives’ high-minded calls for a new order will degenerate into the Reign of Terror.
In fact, our image of the French Revolution as an orgy of blood lust is grossly simplistic. The king and queen were not beheaded until 1793 - four years after the storming of the Bastille signaled the start of the revolution. So too, the Reign of Terror did not begin until 1793, and it ended the following year.
By the time the terror is in full swing, though, madness is the new monarch of France. Trials become absurd formalities, and the executioner grumbles about his workload. "At first they thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there are problems of scale," Mantel writes. "Do the powers-that-be understand just how much blood comes out of even one decapitated person?"
As Lucy Caldwell wrote in Britain’s The Independent last year: “The book is an incredible feat. More than just telling the story, it captures the spirit of the Revolution – it makes you feel you are living through it.”
