Forgetting Varennes

Today we commemorate the 220th anniversary of the one-week anniversary of Louis XVI’s ignoble return to Paris following his escape attempt on June 20-21, 1791. “Why on earth does this matter?” you may wonder. I chose this date, rather than June 20, when the royal family departed from the Tuileries, or June 21, when they were caught and brought back from Varennes, to underline the arbitrary nature of historical memory. The reputation of Louis XVI in our day is necessarily associated with Varennes. His ignominious return to Paris from Varennes on June 21 under armed guard is tied to the descent from favor that led to the fall of the monarchy, to the rise of the republic, and more or less directly to his execution just 19 months later, which ushered in the Terror and all the atrocities that we know.

But things did not have to be that way.

Varennes could have faded from memory long ago. After all, it is a rather insignificant little town and the arrest was a fluke. If Louis had been dressed in regal attire, or had exerted a bit more pressure on the guards, or incited his men to use armed force, or simply demanded more insistently that his family be escorted to their destination, they might have found their way safely to Montmédy. It is not very far, only 50 km (about 58 miles).

Moreover, by September 1791 His Majesty made it official that the matter was not worth remembering. He demanded that the city of Paris forget the events of June 1791, and that the National Assembly annul all legal procedures relative to his flight.* If this command had been executed, no one would remember Varennes. Perhaps France would still be a monarchy.

This commemoration of a failed command is not as trivial as it may appear. Our entire concept of historical causality, of why the Revolution took the course it did, hinges on such seemingly insignificant events. As Tolstoy reminds us, “Our false conception that an event is caused by a command which precedes it is due to the fact that when the event has taken place, and out of thousands of others those few commands which were consistent with that event have been executed, we forget about the others that were not executed.”**

This glaring, obvious and yet often forgotten truism about historical memory is important to keep in mind. Not only as we attempt to understand the past, but also, as we try to make sense of our own history-in-the-making.

Happy June 29th. Vive Varennes.

* Archives de la Préfecture de Police (Paris).
** Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Maude & Maude(Oxford World Classics, 2010), 1288.

Christmas gift for the revolutionary on your list

“Guillotine” is a card game set during the French Revolution. Slogan: “Le jeu de cartes révolutionnaire qui vous fera perdre la tête.” Your goal? Collect as many noble heads as possible to score enough to win. The game consists of three rounds, with each round consisting of twelve “hours” (collecting a head takes one hour). You will execute the noble first in line. But luckily, there are certain cards that allow you to change the line-up of the condemned, and so enable you to get a better head, or make your opponents get a worse one. Of course, there are certain heads that aren’t very good to “collect”. “Collecting” the martyr isn’t very smart, for example.

The game is rather quick, and very easy to learn. There are not many rules, and the few rules that exist are consistent and very basic.

Strength: Simple, quick, and fun.
Weakness: Can be hard to find a place to buy it. Card iconography bears little to no resemblance to historical figures, but rather a Disney-esque rendition wherein everyone is young and beautiful. Also deforms revolutionary history, of course, but that is a different matter.
My kids and I found it relatively amusing. And they do remember that 1793 is an important date…
Would probably be more fun in a classroom situation, as a reward to students after learning about the Revolution (and prompt them to point out its deformation of history).
Happy Holidays!

La Marquise, An II (Roche Bobois): Irony or amnesia?

What were they thinking? A lovely armchair it is, but why incur the wrath of fate by calling it a “Marquise, l’An II.” Did Roche Bobois Furniture forget that it was not such a good thing to be an aristocrat in 1794? Or is this an ironic reference to the survivors? (And why are the book titles in the background all so fuzzy!? We want to know what that marquise was reading.)

Happy birthday, Mr. Robespierre

Today is the birthday of Maximilien Robespierre.
In a work-in-progress, we have been poring over the many biographies dedicated to the man behind the Terror and a surprising fact has emerged. The best ones exhibit a marked tendency to borrow literary tropes from one of the genres that would exploit Robespierre's fall to greatest effect in the first decades of the nineteenth century, that is, the gothic family saga. This is unsurprising when one recalls that a fascination with psychology, especially the psychology of the mind in trauma, is central to both biography and gothic fiction. The acceptance of psychology among historians may be somewhat more controversial, but this subject matter (the scant documents about the man’s private life, and tainted nature of most testimonies) does much to justify the recourse to the mind.
The pathology of paternal abandonment forms the basis of Max Gallo’s psycho-biography, L’homme Robespierre: Histoire d’une solitude (1968). Exposed at the age of six to the results of his father’s multiple failings—bankruptcy and paternal irresponsibility chief among them—Robespierre felt forced to assume control of his three younger siblings and to give them the father-figure they so desperately needed, according to Gallo. From this early trauma emerged the man who would push for his agenda with unflinching determination. “Maximilien must have felt this wound, this original and crushing shame, and bore within him the guilt for a father whose very memory he wanted to rub out, and whom he had to renounce in adopting a radically opposed attitude” (29). The father would return in absentia to haunt him more than once, as when at age 23 the young man was pulled into familial bickering caused by the financial morass of Robespierre senior. Gallo notes apropos that these petty and commonplace quarrels weighed on Maximilian: they made him rigid and intent on seeking success as the only means to erase the past at the same time as they forced him time and again to confront “this annoying shadow of a father” (“cette ombre gênante d’un père,” 40).
Just 13 years later, Robespierre would give up the fight entirely in his ultimate public act. The astounding speech to the Convention on 8 thermidor An II (July 26, 1794)—in which he implied knowledge of multiple criminals in their midst but refused to name any names–is interpreted by Gallo as an act of defeat by one who had grown too tired to fight the shadows any longer, and who accepted the martyrdom he had long seen coming (309). One cannot deny the gothic tone of this analysis, replete with spectral fathers, awful secrets, and a human stain spreading across the generations.
More recently, Ruth Scurr has followed Gallo’s methods in Fatal Purity (2006). She does not adopt his Marxist Vulgate or the painful penchant for the Incorruptible that marks the 1968 work, but rather adopts a less partisan approach and, more importantly, a less reliable sympathy for the subject. Admitting with some bemusement that Robespierre “still makes new friends and enemies among the living,” Scurr subtly weaves her tribute with a threat: “friends, as he always suspected, can be treacherous; they have opportunities for betrayal that enemies only dream of” (9).
What better tribute to the man than those strangely menacing words.
Rest in peace, Mr. Robespierre.