“The History of France” stands unique, a great work of imagination and research of a kind perhaps never to occur again—the supreme effort in its time of a human being to enter into, to understand, to comprehend, the development of a modern nation. There is no book that makes us feel when we have finished it that we may have lived through and known with such intimacy so many generations of men. And it makes us feel something more: that we ourselves are the last chapter of the story and that the next chapter is for us to create…[1]
I’ve been reading Michelet on the French Revolution (along with swatches from the rest of his History of France) and I’m feeling that imperative. It was amped up by Adam Schiff’s real talk about Trump’s neo-ancien regime stance—I-am-the-State legal rationales, throwback threats to put heads on pikes etc. But I’d already been swept up into Michelet’s anti-aristo drama, which should resonate with anyone alive to the counter-revolutionary tenor of our time. It took Michelet seven volumes to tell the story of the French Revolution, yet he was still a master of compaction who caught the essence of the original Reaction in the last passage of the last volume. His conclusion limns what was at stake then. And, though history doesn’t repeat itself, Michelet’s ender speaks to what’s happening in America now. (“She’s gonna go through some things.” Indeed.) Here’s his reminder audacious hope has a history of going down fast.
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 change because of the death of Robespierre.
Michelet’s lucid dreamlike image of reactionary thrill rides feels all too familiar in this MAGA moment. Ten year olds in America have already witnessed a great change for the worse. And it’s possible they ain’t seen nothing yet. Of course the Democratic Party might come up with the right turn-around artist. And, in the meantime, impeachment managers from the People’s House have made their case before lordly senators. Thanks to Speaker Pelosi’s canny choice to underscore the diversity of her caucus, which looks more like real America than Trump’s white men’s club, her managers have provided an image of multicultural democracy (and competence) that brings home the exclusory nature of the disloyal opposition.
It was easy to switch back and forth from Michelet’s rhetoric to Dems’ discourse since they seemed like his cousins. Michelet cultivated his own version of e pluribus unum. He upheld differences that defined his country—clarifying the shaping role of class, gender and region—yet his history rested on a patriotic sublation of those same differences. The French Revolution, in his telling, gave birth to a nation that was truly national—and infinitely more inclusive than the Three Estates acknowledged by the last doomed Louis.
Michelet wasn’t bloody-minded but he would’ve voted to kill that king when the choice had to be made. (“He was still sure he was king…in spite of all that had happened…That is what they had to kill.”)[2]
Michelet bowed not to royals but to the Enlightenment’s anti-clerical ghost-busters, though his own demythologizing stance to the past was shaped by a near-religious devotion to “the people.” He liked a phrase of Luther’s, “Herr Omens,” Mr. Everyone. His account of the French Revolution is alive to an amazing range of resistors “of every circumstance, of every class” who acted on a shared belief in destroying aristocratic privilege and the kind of absolute monarchy that went with it. He zooms in on those who stepped up for moments even as he sticks with those who stayed in the struggle for years that seemed like centuries. While Michelet took the measure of the Revolution’s most remarkable men and women, he was the One (as Edmund Wilson once pointed out) who did in the great man theory of history. Michelet averred to his radically social approach in his first volume on the Revolution…
What this history will clearly establish and which holds true in every connection, is that the people were usually more important than the leaders. The deeper I have excavated, the more surely I have satisfied myself that the best was underneath, in the obscure depths. And I have realized that it is quite wrong to take those brilliant and powerful talkers, who expressed the thought of the masses, for the sole actors in the drama. They were given the impulse by others much more than they gave it themselves. The principal actor is the people. To find the people again and put it back in its proper role, I have been obliged to reduce to their proportions the ambitious marionettes whose strings it manipulated and in whom hitherto we have looked for and thought to see the secret play of history….-
Michelet credits the “humane and benevolent period of the Revolution” to “everybody.” (And he gives women more than some: “What is most people in the people, I mean most instinctive and inspired, is assuredly the women.”) He equates “the period of violence, …of sanguinary deeds,” with an “extremely small number of men.” Yet he never implies these boys of terror were unconditioned actors. His Robespierre is undeniably awful but he’s also pitiable:
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, without hesitation—that of all men this was the one who suffered most.
Robespierre is out of synch with the people when he’s at his peak, and Michelet portrays him looking over his shoulder.
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 around and saw that he was alone.
Michelet walked more than a mile in the shoes of revolutionaries he must have been tempted to anathematize. His History of the Revolution is marked by numberless feats of sympathy. Wilson gets to the core of his achievement:
There is perhaps no more amazing example in literature of the expansion of a limited individual experience into a great work of imagination. When the frail and solitary printer’s son came to turn himself inside out in his books, he gave the world, not, as his romantic contemporaries did, personal exaltations, but the agonizing drama of the emergence of the modern world out of feudalism…
Roland Barthes, OTOH, rolled his eyes a bit at Michelet’s will to make himself into the people’s vessel person. “No one to be left out?” Barthes asked skeptically in his own quirky book on Michelet’s “thematics.”[3] Barthes pointed out the people to Michelet were more like an element (“defined by its double sex; its power of incubation, ultimately its potential of warmth”) than an actual social group. Noting Michelet’s lack of “sociological rigor,” he invoked, by contrast, Marx’s analysis in The Civil War in France: “In 1871…the proletariat and the peasants constitute the people.” Per Barthes, Micheletist history is defined by petty-bourgeois melds and tropes: “nothing in common with the Balzacian novel, in which society appears differentiated to extremes, according to the modes of possession of the classes, where it is Money which determines to the last degree the various ways of speaking, eating, living and loving.” I take Barthes’ points, but, in this instance, better to be wrong with Sartre who called Michelet an “authentic genius” and called out the 20 C. bourgeois for “’leaving Michelet to vegetate in purgatory’ because he had committed the cardinal sin—he’d loved the people.”[4] Historian Lucien Febvre, co-founder of the Annales school, once spoke to how Michelet’s felt populism may be more inspirational in moments of national crisis than classics of class analysis:
…all those who did not accept the powerful watchwords of Digestion, Get Rich, or of Prudence, Save Your Skins—all those who devoured the burning pages Michelet offered them, with a thrill which a hundred years later we Frenchmen of 1938, of 1940, of 1942, of 1944, we the outraged witnesses of Munich, the stunned witnesses of the disaster, the disgusted witnesses of the usurpation…we feel as powerfully as our ancestors, those who read “La peuple” when its ink was fresh.[5]
I haven’t read La peuple—one of Michelet’s one-offs, such as his book-length meditations on natural history, La Mer and L’Oiseau, which he took time out to write during the decades he spent composing his massive History of France. But, according to Wilson, the first half of the treatise which is entitled, “Of Slavery and Hate,” is anything but sentimental about ties between fractious classes in France. Yet Michelet managed to sustain belief in the people. Anyone who’s found him/herself solidarizing not only with prisoners in ICE facilities but with those CIA agents Trump offended when he visited Langley, should be able to keep the faith. I’m thinking just now about Rex Tillerson calling out Trump at the Pentagon after the President trashed the military. If the “fucking moron” (per Tillerson) hadn’t imperiled the very idea of American honor, it’s hard to imagine how else I might’ve ended up feeling so grateful to the ex-head of Exxon given my reflexive anti-corporatism. But forget me. Last year, William Kristol—scion of a power couple on the Right, ex-editor of the conservative journal, The Weekly Standard, and former chief of staff to Dan Quayle—allowed he’d found his “inner Socialist” thanks to Trump et al.’s contempt for human solidarity. Received opinions get flipped during authoritarian waves, creating conditions for unobvious alliances.
In a recent New Yorker piece, “The Last Time Democracy Almost Died,” Jill Lepore recalls how American writers tried to get tight with everyday people in the ’30s and ’40s. She cites a patriotic squib by E.B. White and a more earnest 28 part WPA radio-drama series called “Americans All, Immigrants All,” scripted by Gilbert Seldes. But she laments “there is no twenty-first-century equivalent because …
it is no longer acceptable for a serious artist to write in this vein, and for this audience, and for this purpose. (In some quarters, it was barely acceptable even then.) Love of the ordinary, affection for the common people, concern for the commonweal: these were features of the best writing and art of the nineteen-thirties. They are not so often features lately.
I’m not unmoved by Lepore’s lament, though I’ve heard versions of it ever since my old college teacher Christopher Lasch denounced class-bound elites’ culture of narcissism. It’s never worthless to focus on what distances “progressives” from everyday life. Yet I doubt we should look back in longing to ’30s popular fronting since that cultural tendency was tied up with the party line of American Communists. (“Communism is 20th Century Americanism.”) Expressions of amity for the American people were often linked with lies about what was being done to the people(s) of the Soviet Union. Michelet’s love letters to France, OTOH, seem more defensible since the legacy of Twentieth C. communism isn’t lurking in his 19th C. populism. Not that Edmund Wilson was wrong to start his study of the movement of mind that led to the Russian Revolution, To the Finland Station, with Michelet. Though it turns out that first mover was more alive to lessons of Terror than his interpreter. (See Wilson’s apology for gentling Lenin in the introduction to the 1971 reprint of Finland Station.) While Michelet never reduced the French Revolution’s hard men to haters or power-mongers, he wasn’t out to absolve them either. In his mind, Robespierre was a sort of…monarchist. Late in his life, after he’d lived through the Paris Commune where revolutionary workers slaughtered hostages (before being outdone by their bourgeois enemies who massacred thousands of communards), Michelet mused about what he’d witnessed:
I was born in the midst of the great territorial revolution and I shall have lived to see the dawning of the great industrial revolution. Born under the terror of Babeuf, I have lived to see the terror of the International.
And he wasn’t glad all over. Doubt he’d’ve been a sucker for Leninists or Stalinists. But it’s not only Michelet’s inbred resistance to radical terror that distances his histories of struggle from the “cultural front” of the 30s. Unlike many writers and readers on the left who’ve aimed to be people persons (then and now), Mr. Everyone wasn’t Mr. Beamish. He knew he had to be hard-nosed to sniff out the history of human misery. This introverted scholar fought against his avoidant side to keep his writing pungent. A passage from his Journal, cited by Georges Bataille, hints at what it took for him to take in the suffering of the people.
…he says that in the course of his labors it would happen that inspiration failed him: he then would go downstairs and out of his house, and enter a public urinal whose odor was suffocating. He breathed deeply, and having thus “approached as close as he could to the object of his horrors,” he returned to his work. I cannot help recalling the author’s countenance, noble emaciated, the nostrils quivering.[7]
Bataille was introducing a French edition of Michelet’s study of sorcery in the Middle Ages. For a long time, that was the only volume by Michelet I could find in an English translation. (It was published by a press specializing in books on the Occult!) [8] While his book on sorcery is another one of his one-offs rather than a Michelet for beginners, it’s not an outlier removed from his characteristic themes. He begins with the parlous state of French peasantry—evoking dailiness of hard manual labor under the thumb of vicious and capricious lords. He charges “optimistic” historians with overestimating the degree of stability in fiefdoms of Deep France. Michelet pictures the peasant as a man “constantly expecting bad news.”
This instability of condition and tenure, this horrid, shelving declivity, down which a man slips from free man to vassal,—from vassal to servant, —from servant to serf, is the great terror of the Middle Ages, the basis of its despair.
He treats sorcery as a sign of a bent search for surcease in a doomy Age. He protests on behalf of all those anxious innocents persecuted by pious witch hunters down through the centuries. But he also imagines how the powerless might have been tempted to go to the Devil after enduring feudal rites such as the one that gave lord and retinue rights over a peasant’s new wife on her wedding night:
One can still see the shameful scene—the young husband bringing his bride to the castle. One can imagine the guffaws of the knights and squires, the ribald tricks of the pages…They begin by bargaining with [the poor trembling fellow eager to redeem his wife], laughing at the agonies of the “hard-fisted peasant,”…The unfortunate man offers all he possesses, even the dowry itself…No use! it is not enough. Angered at the injustice, he urges, “But my neighbor, he paid nothing.”…Ho! ho! argufying now, the insolent scoundrel! Then the whole pack crowds round him, shouting; sticks and brooms belabor him with a hail of blows. Finally he is hustled and kicked out of doors, and they scream after him: “Jealous brute, with your ugly, Lenten looks, who’s stealing your wife? You shall have her back tonight, and to cap the favor, with child…Say thank you; why! You’re nobles now. Your firstborn will be a baron…”
Our silly national Fabliaux and ridiculous Contes without exception assume that under this mutual injury and all subsequent ones she will have to bear, the wife is on the side of her outragers and against her husband; they would have us believe that the poor girl, bullied and shamefully used, made a mother in spite of herself, is delighted and overjoyed at it all. Can anything be more improbable? No doubt rank, politeness, elegance were likely enough to seduce her; but no one took the trouble to use these means. They would have much fine fun indeed of anyone who for a serf’s wife should have played the high-bred lover. All the rout, chaplain, cellarer, down to the very serving-men, thought they were honouring her by outrage. The humblest page fancied himself a great Lord, if only he seasoned his love-making with insults and blows.
“If you’re a star, they let you do anything. Grab em by the pussy.” Sorry for that flash-forward! But Michelet’s history brings you near the kind of patriarchal routs that are being called out now. My interjection seems licensed by Michelet’s own instinct to protest against what’s been done to the people (of both sexes) since time immemorial. History for him was about doing justice, which may make him seem out of time now. “He was most the prejudiced historian that ever lived” according to one superior member of the guild. Back in the 50s, Conor Cruise O’Brien defended Michelet against “Buster Keatons of historiography” who preferred a neutral (not to say neutered) tones. What irritated them, he noted, was Michelet’s “unguarded expression of prejudice and emotion:” “But the reader should surely feel grateful for such unguarded expressions because they put him on guard. With Michelet he knows exactly where he stands.”[9]
Michelet was making up his vocation as he went along. And he thought it required him to be a man of feeling as well as a master of archives. (“I’m a complete man, having both sexes of the mind.”) For Michelet, historical mass wasn’t so much a “puzzle to reconstitute” as a “body to embrace.” (Pace Barthes.) He had little use for master thinkers whose theses seemed less than fully human. Citing an anecdote about Kant’s intense response to the French Revolution, he used it to mock this “extraordinary, powerful creature, a man, or rather a system…”
His name was Emmanuel Kant; but he called himself Critic. For sixty years, this perfectly abstract being, devoid of all human connection had gone out precisely at the same hour, and, without speaking to anyone, had taken precisely the same walk for a stated number of minutes, just as we see in the old town-clocks, a man of iron come forth, strike the hour and then withdraw. Wonderful to relate, the inhabitants of Koeningsberg, (who considered this as an omen of the most extraordinary events) saw this planet swerve and depart from its long habitual course…They followed him and saw him hastening towards the west, to the road by which they expected the courier from France!
O humanity! To behold Kant moved and anxious, going forth on the road, like a woman, to inquire the news…
That’s another example of the solitary printer’s boy turning himself inside out on the page. Michelet’s temper wasn’t that of a German philosopher but he longed to break from habits of disengagement. History of the French Revolution opens with a wonderful evocation of Professor Michelet leaving behind another academic year in order to return to a richer source of life:
Summer comes on; the town is less peopled, the streets are less noisy, the pavement grows more sonorous around my Pantheon. Its large black and white slabs resound beneath my feet.
I commune with my own mind. I interrogate myself as to my teaching, my history, and its all-powerful interpreter—the spirit of the Revolution.
It possesses a knowledge of which other are ignorant. It contains the secret of all bygone times. In it alone France became conscious of herself. When, in a moment of weakness, we may appear forgetful of our own worth, it is to this point that we should recur in order to seek and recover ourselves again. Here, the inextinguishable spark, the profound mystery of life, is ever growing with us.
Michelet was biased toward vitalisms but he wasn’t anti-intellectual. He wrote rhapsodies about heroes of the Enlightenment, forgiving them for their human flaws. In an early chapter of The History of the French Revolution titled “How Free Thinkers Escaped,” he compares their plight to that of the slave thrown into the Coliseum after a “great carnage” with an egg in his hand. “Half dead with fear, stooping, shrinking, cringing,” the slave was saved only if he made it through the lions and managed to place the egg on the altar. The slave’s “extraordinary contortions” that left spectators “convulsed” with laughter set up Michelet’s musing on Mind in France:
I’m obliged to say, in spite of every consideration, that this spectacle was revived towards the close of the middle ages, when the old principle, furious at the thought of dying imagined it would still have time to annihilate human thought. Once more, as in the Coliseum, miserable slaves were seen carrying among wild beasts, uncloyed, unglutted, furious, atrocious and ravenous, the poor little deposit of proscribed truth—the fragile egg which might save the world, if it reached the altar… Those slaves whom I see passing yonder across the bloody arena, are the sovereigns of the mind, the benefactors of the human race. O my fathers, O my brethren, Voltaire, Moliere, Rabelais, beloved of my thoughts, it is you whom I behold trembling, suffering and ridiculous, under that sad disguise.
Michelet, sui generis genius whose true intellectual father was the Italian Vico (originator of the “New Science” of history), put his own prosaic spin on French Intellect. France, he wrote, “is the country of prose”—a form of writing he praised “as the freest, the most common to all men, the most human.”
Prose is the last form of thought, what is furthest from the vague and inactive reverie, what is closest to action. The passage from mute symbolism to poetry, from poetry to prose, is a progress toward the equality of minds; it is an intellectual leveling.[10]
More conservative minds might resist such leveling but Michelet was down. His democratic instinct placed him in the tradition of writers who have taken the people seriously and dared to represent them in the fullness of time. That tradition was affirmed for the Ages by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis. I’m surprised Michelet didn’t get his own chapter in that testament to how Western literature got real.
Michelet was ahead of Auerbach in some respects, asking questions that might seem especially pertinent in our time when book culture has been marginalized: “How do books come to be of the people? Who will write them?” Michelet allowed he hadn’t solved the problem. While he was “born of the people” and had them in his heart, their language remained “inaccessible” to him: “I have not been able to make the people speak.” He wasn’t just copping to a flawed ear—a failure to dig local argot or the French language with its shirt tails out. His self-lacerating lines on “the impotence of men of letters, of subtle minded men” go beyond matters of style. There’s probably a lesson in professional development for writers of “literary fiction” implicit in what follows here, but there’s also something much more profound:
Three things are required which are very rarely found together. Genius and charm (do not imagine that the people can be made to swallow anything insipid, anything weak). A very sure tact. And finally (what a contradiction?) there must be a divine innocence, the childlike sublimity which one occasionally glimpses in certain young beings but only for a brief moment, like a flash of heaven.[11]
Isn’t this is a pretty good prescription for Democratic presidential candidates? (Young Obama may have been the last one to blend earnestness with subtlety.) Moreover, Michelet’s clarity about uses of innocence seems punctual in the wake of Col. Vindman’s testimony, though the apparent failure of his truth attack to sway Trump fans is evidence of rot in our body politic. Still, it was proof of Adam Schiff’s tact, if not genius, that he capped his case against Trump in the Senate with Vindman’s straight talk: “This is America, right matters.” (Schiff thus became one of those “brilliant and powerful” democratic voices who were, per Michelet, “given the impulse by others much more than they gave it themselves.”)
Vindman’s innocent surety flows out of his experience as a first generation immigrant (a phrase that may refer to parents and their children). It’s striking how important immigrant voices have been during the impeachment process. Col. Vindman and Ambassador Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill made patriotism seem like the last refuge of refugees.
Their presence instantiated America as a nation of nations at a time when Trumpism is out to trash the meaning of our Statue of Liberty. It’s not by chance, of course, France gave us Lady Lib. Revolutionary France was America’s internationalist twin. Clunky yet graceful Col. Vindman meet Anacharsis Clootz. One of Michelet’s favorites, Clootz first turns up in the History of the French Revolution on the day the Assembly decreed abolition of nobility. He was head of a deputation:
…a score of men from every nation in their national costumes,—Europeans and Asiatics. He demanded, in their name, to be allowed to take a part in the federation of the Field of Mars: “in the name of every people, that is to say, of the legitimate sovereigns, everywhere oppressed by kings.”
Michelet’s version of the French Revolution upholds its internationalism. It’s all there in an introductory chapter [read it here] on the back story of the Bastille and the heroine, Madame LeGros, whose fight to free a desperate prisoner, Latude, helped prep the people for Revolution. “The world,” writes Michelet, “is covered with prisons, from Spielberg to Siberia, from Spandau to Mont-St.-Michel. The world is a prison!” He means to give voice to the “captive mind” and he assumes that’s in his DNA because he’s French. “Where does that mind speak, if not on France, in spite of chains? It is ever here that the mute genius of the world, finds a voice,—an organ. The world thinks, France speaks.” More on what’s iffy about Michelet’s pride in place anon, but first, let’s jump to another moment of high internationalism that has an undeniable currency. At the end of another gripping chapter on the taking of the Bastille, he notes the prison was hated all over the world. Since Bastille and tyranny were in every language, synonymous terms, “every nation, at the news of its destruction, believed it had recovered its liberty”:
In Russia, that empire of mystery and silence—that monstrous Bastille between Europe and Asia, scarcely had the news arrived when you might have seen men of every nation shouting and weeping for joy in the open streets; they rushed into each other’s arms to tell the news: “Who can help weeping for joy? The Bastille is taken.”
Given the (police) state of Russia today, Michelet’s chronicle is enough to make you weep all over again. And of course that state remains the enemy of the people.
But Michelet’s faith France was the primary locus of justice won’t do. His “ruling vice,” as O’Brien once wrote, is a national chauvinism.[12] The weakest sections of Michelet’s account of the French Revolution are those that address its foreign enemies. Don’t go to Michelet for a fair hearing of Edmund Burke’s outraged orations on the Revolution. It’s not that Michelet was incapable of grasping behavior and motives of those who opposed his side; he just didn’t care. Per O’Brien:
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 complex psychology of the revolutionaries themselves.
O’Brien answers historians who kvetch about Michelet’s inside angle on the Revolution—“Hardly anyone—certainly nobody outside France—is likely to take Michelet’s account of international reactions and motives very seriously.” Yet he doesn’t give Michelet’s France First attitude an Irish pass. He guessed Michelet would’ve probably supported the repression of the rebellion in Algeria (even as he would’ve favored “genuinely equal status for Moslem Frenchmen”). O’Brien doesn’t apologize for wondering what Michelet “would think if he were alive.” He wants to suss how someone like Michelet (and by extension others whose minds had been shaped by the History of France) might be led to dump the default position of imperial Frenchmen. Michelet’s work raises a related but broader issue that resonates beyond France’s borders (as Edmund Wilson once noted): “how far it is possible to reconcile the nationalist idea with a concern for the life of mankind?” That question will seem urgent to anyone over here convinced Trump’s authoritarianism, racialism, and self-dealing are un-American. Maybe it’s wrong, though, to look for a humane, usable past in this country’s history. Everyone knows there are plenty of precedents for Trumpism in our nation’s long nights of know-nothing chauvinism. Still (as ever) I think it’s best to resist anti-American persuaders. I’ll never twig to plug-ugly “U.S.A.” chants but I’ve got a crush on Never Trump Republicans who chose country over party in 2016. Many of them have become indispensable voices. Those on the left who disdain them as “neo-cons” are polluters—purists who piss in a right-as-rain reservoir of resistance. Leftists who don’t want to hear from Never Trumpers aren’t likely to get much of a lift from Michelet’s mix of nationalist fervor and expansive humanism. Their loss. But it will be the people’s too if the left’s refusal of the patriotic option shrinks resistance to Trump’s counterrevolution.
xxx
Let me end by returning to what may be Michelet’s most enduring affirmation of patriotism–his remembrance of Fetes of the Revolution that took place all over France a year after the taking of the Bastille. The year preceding those Fetes had been full of struggles against aristocrats and bishops. It had led to a reorganization of France:
Interior custom duties, innumerable tolls on roads and rivers (twenty-one tolls on the Loire!), an infinite diversity of laws and regulations, weights, measures, and money, and rivalry carefully encouraged and maintained between cities, countries and corporations,–all these obstacles, these old ramparts, crumble and fall in a day.
Michelet’s account of that year of destruction and creation tends to put the reader back in the river of time, swimming doggedly with him. (“…the revolution was finished on the 14th of July; finished on the 6th of October, and finished on the 4th of February, and yet I begin to fear in March that it is not quite ended…”) Michelet has the knack for making us live backward and forward (as Edmund Wilson realized): “So we grope with people of the past themselves, share their heroic faiths, are dismayed by their unexpected catastrophes, feel, for all our knowledge of after-the-event, that we do not know precisely what is coming…” But Michelet wasn’t afraid to zoom out for moments. Historical tableaux are frequent in his history. These overviews, per Barthes, place Michelet virtually in God’s position, “for God’s chief power is precisely to hold in simultaneous perception moments, events, men and causes, which are humanly dispersed.” Barthes notes Michelet’s divine tableaux “furnish a euphoria.”
That’s definitely the take-away from his tableau of the French nation’s first post-Revolution Fetes. Michelet goes from celebration to celebration and his account underscores how “the whole possesses an extraordinary charm: the greatest diversity (provincial, local, urban, rural, &c.) in the most perfect unity.” Near the end of his jubilant chapter he quotes a sentence written by members of a village Federation: “Thus ended the happiest day of our lives.” But Michelet can’t stop, won’t stop. He rolls on into a final final chapter about Paris’s Fete. And that brings even more joy. It rained that day—”the weather was aristocratic,” but the people were undaunted. They’d spent the previous week preparing the Champ de Mars for a party worthy of 1789, soundtracked by the song of the summer: “Ca Ira,” which translates to “It’ll be fine.”
The city of Paris had sent thither a few thousand idle workman who would have required years to execute so great a task. The people saw through this ill-will, and the whole population set to work. It was an extraordinary spectacle, to behold, both day and night, men of every class, and every age, even children, but all citizens,—soldiers, abbes, monks, actors, sisters of charity, noble ladies, market-women, all handling the pickaxe, rolling barrows, or driving carts. Children walked in front bearing torches; perambulating musicians played to enliven the workmen; and they themselves, while leveling the earth, continued still to chant their levelling: “Ah ca ira! Ca ira! Ca ira! He that exalteth himself shall be abased!”
Hey, they’re singing our song! “Ca Ira” captures the sunny side of resistance. It’ll be fine when we take Trump down!
Michelet, though, acknowledges San-cullotes would harsh “Ca Ira’s” mellow, adding verses when the revolution went darker in coming years:
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
les aristocrates on les pendra!
Et quand on les aura tous pendus
On leur fichera la pelle au cul
Ah! It’ll be fine, It’ll be fine, It’ll be fine
the aristocrats, we’ll hang them!
And when we’ll have hung them all
We’ll stick a shovel up their arse
That version of “Ca Ira” may still be your tune. God knows there are reasons to be rageful in the Trump era. But I think it’s important to hold on to memories of happier times. When I read Michelet on the Fete at the Field of Mars, I thought of the crowd at Obama’s first inauguration. Sean Spicer may have always been headed for the hook, but there was something more than Trump’s ego at stake when that clown tried to diminish Obama’s patriotic fete. The people at Obama’s party were not only marking the day America became America (“that it had never been before”), they were making a promise they and the rest of us must keep now.
Notes
1 To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940) by Edmund Wilson.
2 A thought that must’ve been in Bertolucci’s head when he directed the final anti-climactic confrontation between Padrone and Peasant in 1900.
3 Michelet (1954) by Roland Barthes.
4 Quoted by Gordon Wright in his introduction to History of the French Revolution. (1967) University of Chicago Press.
5 Quoted in Michelet by Roland Barthes.
6 Michelet was trying to be worthy of those who’d been dehumanized in the past, but he was getting a whiff of the future too. Per an emblematic image from 20 C. concentration camps that stuck in another writer’s mind: “One survivor recalled that at night in his lower bunk he’d grown used to the pee of the man above him leaking onto him.” Promises to Keep (2004) by Richard Hoggart.
7 Quoted in Michelet by Roland Barthes
8 I recently found a University of Chicago edition of Michelet’s The French Revolution, which translates the first three volumes into English. (Pace Paul Berman.)
9 Quoted in Michelet by Roland Barthes
10 Quoted in Michelet by Roland Barthes
11 “Michelet Today”; essay in Writers and Politics (1965) by Conor Cruise O’Brien. It was O’Brien (and Fredric Smoler) who steered me to the last passage in The French Revolution, which O’Brien quotes in “Michelet Today.”
12 “Michelet Today”