This is a novel about the French Revolution—or rather, about what life might have been like for some of the people at the forefront of that revolution. The main characters, all well-known to history, are George-Jacques Danton, a politician; Camille Desmoulins, a pamphleteer and provocateur; and Maximilien Robespierre—let us call him a legislator. All three were also lawyers.
Hilary Mantel does an amazing job of grafting what her imagination conjures up—made-up particulars, conversations, and other details—onto what is known about the actual people and events she depicts. That is, she invents only beyond the limit of what can be gleaned from the historical record. In her Author’s Note at the beginning of the book she writes: "Almost all of the characters in [the book] are real people, and it is closely tied to historical facts—as far as those facts are agreed, which isn’t really very far."
The French Revolution was initially propelled by noble ideas. It gave us the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” which, as per Wikipedia, was “[to be] valid at all times and in every place, pertaining to human nature itself. It became the basis for a nation of free individuals protected equally by the law.” The aristocracy, which had oppressed and abused the great majority of the population for centuries, was almost obliterated. The Catholic Church, which had also preyed upon the population, was largely toppled from its pedestal, with priests becoming civil servants and Notre Dame cathedral rechristened (or rather, renamed) the Temple of Reason. There was talk of abolishing private property and of abolishing slavery in the French colonies. Civilization was to be rebooted: the calendar was reordered to start with year one, and the names of the months were changed: instead of January, February, and March, the newly minted citizens could now put up calendars that showed them Nivôse (snowy month), Pluviôse (rainy month), and Ventôse (windy month). Most of these changes were rolled back under Napoleon and the various nineteenth century “Empires” that followed, but something of the revolution has persisted in the DNA of the nation. For one thing, the French retain a strong anti-clerical bent, which goes some way toward explaining (if not justifying) their objection to burkas and other religious garb. For another, the French remain a very fractious people, very quick to defy their own government, as the frequent strikes and the recent “Yellow Vest” movement attest.
The French rightly celebrate the forward-thinking aspirations of their revolution, and have adopted its unofficial theme song as their national anthem. But as the bloody lyrics of that song remind us, the revolution was characterized as much by ferocity as by noble aspirations. Mantel is not shy about presenting the details:
The Princesse de Lamballe was murdered at La Force prison. Possibly she was raped. When the mob had torn out most of her internal organs and stuck them on pikes, they cut off her head and carried it to a hairdresser. At knife point they forced the nauseated man to curl and dress the Princesse’s pretty fair hair. Then they marched in procession to the Temple, where the Capet family [that is, the now-deposed royal family] were locked up. They put the head on a pike and hoisted it up to sway outside the high windows. “Come and say hallo to your friend,” they exhorted the woman inside.
Heads on pikes were an everyday sight—when the king and queen we led from Versailles to the Louvre (to make it easy for the populace to keep an eye on them and prevent them from making a break for the border, which they did anyway), the heads of various royal retainers were raised on spikes at the head of the procession. The crowds cheered.
As another writer succinctly put it: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The guillotine was an apt symbol of the age: devised as a sanitary and progressive tool that did its job efficiently and without unnecessary cruelty, it became a symbol of horror as soon as it was set up in the Place de la Revolution. Something about separating people from their heads just insists on unsettling the average citizen’s mind, despite the inventor’s best intentions. By the time the revolution wound down in the mid-1790s, as many as 40,000 heads had dropped into the executioner’s basket.
A Place of Greater Safety is a very dense book: Mantel gives us pretty complete biographies of her three major characters, starting with their early lives in the provinces, through their youthful days in the capital, the heady times as the revolution gets under way, the increasingly stressful and conflicted times as responsibilities and alliances pile up and as factions emerge among the revolutionaries, and finally the pull of events and personal conflicts that lead the majority of them to the guillotine. It’s like watching people in a boat as they drift from a still pond through a lazy stream to a raging river and finally over the edge of a Niagara.
Mantel presents her protagonists are good people who are eventually undone by the press of circumstances and by certain quirks of character—flaws. Georges Danton was a natural leader and orator who took easily to power and came to depend on the adulation of the masses. Danton made a strong impression with his scarred face and his massive build. He wasn’t always scrupulous in his dealings, but Mantel never suggests that he put personal gain ahead of his intention to help give France a functioning democracy. In the movie Danton he is played by Gerard Depardieu—it’s hard to imagine a more perfect bit of casting.
Camille Desmoulins was a kind of scapegrace, a mercurial character with a talent for provocation. His pamphlets and speeches taunted his foes and amused his allies. Some allies learned that they had become foes when they read Desmoulins’ latest broadsheet. Desmoulins was high strung and impetuous and fell into affairs with both men and women without seeming to try.
Then there’s Maximilien Robespierre. History has not been kind to him, but Mantel shows us how this scrupulous, high-minded idealist eventually succumbed to the machinations of trusted associates, ultimately signing the death warrants of Danton and Desmoulins. Volumes have been written about Robespierre, but he remains an enigma. In an essay for the London Review of Books, Mantel has written:
To write about Robespierre you have to find the courage to allow yourself to be mistaken. Otherwise every sentence will be freighted with conditionals and qualifiers, and every quotation prefaced by 'alleged to have said'. You will contradict yourself, because he contradicts himself. If you want to know why he excites such extremes of adoration and loathing, you have to study not just the biographies but the life stories of the people who wrote them. His 19th-century biographer Ernest Hamel worshipped him, the socialist historians Mathiez and Lefebvre championed him, George Sand called him 'the greatest man not only of the Revolution but of all known history'. Lord Acton described him as 'the most hateful character in the forefront of human history since Machiavelli reduced to a code the wickedness of public men'. In 1941 the historian Marc Bloch tried to call time: 'Robespierrists, anti-Robespierrists, we've had enough. We say, for pity's sake, simply tell us what Robespierre was really like.'
No one can tell us what Robespierre—or Danton, or Desmoulins, for that matter—was really like. The extraordinary thing that Mantel does is situate them all among their families and their scores of associates. This does up the ante for the reader: there are enough people in this book that the cast of characters at the beginning—a list that is six pages long—becomes a frequent necessity. We learn as much about the personal lives of the story’s main characters—their parents, lovers, wives, children, and friends—as we do about their public careers. Much of the detail, of course, comes from Mantel’s imagination, yet I was surprised to find out how much history knows about, to cite one example, Camille Desmoulin’s wife, Lucile. We first meet her at 15, as she interrupts her mother in an embrace with Camille. He then proposes to Lucile in a letter, partly as a tactic to prevent her from disclosing what she has seen, and partly just because the idea appealed to him, I suppose. Mantel has a good feel for Lucile's adolescent mind:
Now she had outgrown Sunday treats; the river looked always the same, and if it rained, and you stayed indoors, that was no great disaster. After her childhood (after she said to herself “my childhood is over”) events in her imagination became more interesting than anything that happened in [her family’s] household. When her imagination failed her, she wandered the rooms, listless and miserable, destructive thoughts going around in her head. She was glad when it was time for bed and reluctant to get up in the mornings. Life was like that. She would put aside her diaries, consumed with horror at her shapeless days, at the waste of time that stretched before her.
Lucile decides to accept Camille’s proposal, and their marriage, strangely enough, is a success. They become a much-talked-about couple: both are good looking, talented, and well-connected. Camille has a promiscuous past but seems to put that behind him after he marries. Lucile has no such past, but has a few ardent admirers, including Danton: he makes half-serious passes at her which she deflects gracefully. Unfortunately for Camille and Lucile, they live in a time when personal attacks, slander, and innuendo are very potent. (Camille, in fact, is not always scrupulous himself in employing these weapons.) The pamphlet press in France in the 1780s and 90s played much the same role as social media does in our time.
Friends and enemies alike believe that the Desmoulins are depraved libertines—just as the nation had believed (or, in some cases, pretended to believe) that Marie Antoinette did all sorts of depraved things—incest, beastiality, nothing was off limits. Such rumors could not only sully a person’s reputation: they could be entered as evidence at your trial.
Besides Lucile, we also get to know Danton’s two wives (sequential, not simultaneous), as well as the strange family that provides shelter to Citizen Robespierre. And then there are all the associates of the principal characters, such as Fabre d’ Églantine, an actor and playwright who tutors Danton in the art of public speaking. Toward the end we meet some of the extremists (Antoine Saint-Just most prominently) who turned the Committee for Public Safety into little more than a means of liquidating political opposition. These men come to understand that Robepierre’s integrity as the central figure on this committee is the only thing preventing them from doing away with Danton, Desmoulins, and other holdovers from the glorious early days of ‘89 who now want to apply the brakes to a revolution that, in the words of one politician living safely beyond the border, “like Saturn, devours its children.”
Mantel even gives us brief glimpses of the royal family, of the Marquis de Sade, and of Charles-Henri Sanson, the fourth in a six-generation family of executioners and a man who knew the stress of overwork.
It’s hard to know how Mantel makes this whole world seem so real, how she is able to individualize and develop so many characters and so much action. I have a theory, which is that for each significant character in the story she has combined what she has been able to learn from the historical record with a friend, acquaintance, or public person from her own 20th century world, superimposing the one upon the other. But I guess that’s just to say that the characters seem too real to be made-up, which is in turn just another way of saying that she’s a remarkably good writer.
Of course, I am not much of an authority on the French Revolution, and I’m sure an actual expert could point to events that Mantel has made up that are nowhere in the historical record, as well as to biases and omissions that serve her story at the cost of scrupulous fidelity to that record. There is an episode near the end of the book where one of the women in the household where Robespierre is staying claims that Danton has raped her. Mantel leaves us in no doubt that the accusation is false, but this is what pushes Robespierre to finally accede to Danton’s death, though the presumed rape is not made public nor is it used against Danton at his trial. There are other such “behind closed doors” episodes in the book—an earlier one establishes the dishonesty of the young woman making the accusation against Danton.
If you really wanted to get as close as possible to knowing what life during the French Revolution was like, you could read A Place of Greater Safety in tandem with a conventional history—Simon Shama’s Citizens, for example. I’ve been reading accounts of the various persons and events that led to the deaths of Danton and Desmoulins (on Wikipedia, of course) and I’m shocked to discover that these accounts differ from Mantel’s here and there—mostly in ways that make the characters seem less noble and tragic. But facts be damned—Mantel’s reality is the one that I’ll remember.
