I'm sticking with this on the basis that confusion is a feature not a bug. I'm basically immersing myself in it and not attempting to try and understand the big picture.
And, in this section, confusion is what Mantel is dealing with. Meetings behind closed doors and not really knowing who is supporting whom - how unlike 21st Century politics...
The conversation between Robespierre and Mirabeau was interesting for me as it was the first time we see naked ambition coming to the fore - do they want the power to bring about revolution or do they want the revolution to bring them to power? It's hard to tell.
Something that made me smile: "Strategy, he means". Having worked in policy, there are always debates about the difference between strategy, policy and tactics (and lots of other terms). It's good to see it reflected in the 18th Century. I can't help thinking that in the modern day, our 'heroes' would all be SpAds.
Spads with degrees in PPE. That was the stereotype wasn't it?
And confusion is definitely a feature not a bug. I love how well she captures that bewildering atmosphere of a society on the edge of something. We live it as the characters experience it, not knowing where it is going to lead us.
Feature not bug... That's such a revealing way of putting it. Sums up the feeling I've had the whole time that I'm just going blindly forwards, never quite sure how everything is holding together.
Thanks, Simon. Still confused, but also sticking with it 🥰 What caught my eye this week was Mantel’s descriptions, eg “The ladies of the court were stacked on benches like crockery on a shelf …” and “When the Comte took the floor, disapproval rustled like autumn leaves.”
The City of Paris has kindly put together a website and app called „Parcours Revolution“ that is a fantastic resource, especially for those among us who enjoy having a proper geographical sense of where things are. https://parcoursrevolution.paris.fr/ What the characters portraits lack in depth, they make up for in abundance. It seems to me that the French version has more information, but the English version is huge already.
I was delighted to find out that the young revolutionary woman who faints at Versailles in the 1989 film is a real person and was called Louison.
I re-read this chapter yesterday to prepare for this discussion and painstakingly transcribed „The overthrowing of everything“ into my Apple Notes because I loved that phrase and the exchange it appeared in so much. And there you are, choosing it as the title of today‘s post.
When I first read it, the off-handed treatment the Tennis Court Oath received, both disappointed and amused me very much. But there‘s David‘s sketch right there, with the billowing curtains, the upturned umbrella and all the dramatic Roman attitudes, so of course there‘s no need to repeat it. The limited view all our characters have, totally devoid, as humans are, of any benefit of hindsight, is just a brilliant way of telling this story.
Also, Mantel is bone-chillingly good on the death of children. The detail of Louise gathering up the baby‘s belongings was so very touching.
Loose Cannon Camille, rolling helter-skelter across the deck of the ship of state, gleefully smashing things. I don‘t like him at all, but he‘s a hell of a character.
By the way, the Paris trip is on, I just need to sit down with my travelling companions and book the fleet equipage. I realized yesterday that I knew the intersection of the roads where Titonville once stood, because we stayed around the corner a few years ago.
Oh, this reminds me of something I forgot to mention. Mantel I think purposefully ignores the fact that Louis and Marie Antoinette lose a child at this point in the story. It is framed as a bit of a national calamity, a sign of the monarchy in dire straits. But Mantel instead focuses on the death of the Danton child and how it affects G-J and stops him from getting super excited about riots and revolutions.
I love this because it reflects the fact that whilst history is obsessed with royal psychodramas, real people more often have bigger problems much closer to home.
I re-listened to the The Rest is History Episode about that year yesterday, and they point out (with equal justification), that both Louis and Marie-Antoinette were really devoted parents, perhaps quite unusual for royals of that era despite all the Rousseauism wafting about, and must have been completely devastated by their son‘s death and not really prepared for what would eventually turn into the even bigger tragedy of their lives.
The actors who play the king and queen in the 1989 Révolution Française are awfully good, especially the guy playing Louis.
I do feel very sorry for Louis and MA through all of this. Especially Louis, who seemed to want to do the right thing but wasn't cut out for any of it.
Listening to the podcast in conjunction with reading and was not until you mentioned this Simon that I have realised the death of the Danton's child would have been around the same time as the loss of the King and Queen's child. I love the way Mantel draws us into the lives and pains of everyday people with those usually placed In the spotlight on the fringes.
And without dropping spoilers, I've read ahead and next week gives one single page to another huge set piece of the revolution. Mantel is trolling France and trolling the rest of us.
Heartbroken by the death of the child, in those days it was certainly a lottery if you survive from an illness or infection, because so many doctors appeared to be completely useless and lost at the time, if not harmful! 💔
Those poor doctors were more or less all working from faulty assumptions; without having even an inkling of germ theory (8 years to go until smallpox vaccination!) they didn’t really stand a chance. I wondered about the doctor who treated Camille‘s father and had very sound opinions about kidneys.
“The literal truth doesn’t matter any more. All that matters is what they think on the streets.” True in 1789. Extremely true today. I wonder if there were particular events happening in the 1970s (a turbulent decade!) when HM was writing this that inspired that particular thought. It got me thinking about how the pamphlets are acting as an 18th century social media. Presenting opinion as fact. Driving people further apart and towards greater extremes of opinion. Sooner or later it all goes pop.
I am enjoying this: the confusion, the misunderstandings, the nervousness, and the approaching horror. Not enjoying the horror, that is to say, but enjoying how she sets the scene for it. No-one has a clue what is going on, and neither, in a way, do we. In fact of course we know that The French Revolution is about to start, but we need also to know and to *feel* that *they* don’t know that. I love that portrait of Mirabeau—John Goodman should play him in the film!
Ha, he would. I always find with Mantel is that it is a strange balancing act between foreshadowing and future-blindness. We know and we don't know. She builds in this dramatic irony, where we know the future and the characters don't... and then conspires to make us feel as the characters do, and imagine the future might work out different this time.
Good writers can do one of these well. Mantel does both excellently.
The other bit that confused me was where it went into play script mode. I wasn't sure of the reasons- although I wasn't bothered by it.
I assume it follows on from "'So whatever I say next, write it down.'" But why? I love the detail where Max is changed from de Robespierre to plain Robespierre at the end. That's excellent minute-taking, that is. Although he is also referred to as Robispére, which is not so good.
This bit is great. As we know from Wolf Hall, Mantel is very interested in stage and performance as metaphor and practice in politics. Both these men see themselves as the main actor in their own play (a bit like that Cromwell vs More scene at the end of Wolf Hall), and the script presentation draws our attention to this performative battle of wills.
This novel is endlessly creative and playful. We switch between past and present tense, we adopt the Mantelian "we" perspective that we see her use again in Wolf Hall. Later on, Danton breaks down the fourth wall to confide one-on-one with the reader.
It did make me think that we're quite comfortable with epistolary novels, so we should adapt easily to the play script version - even if it is not intended for performance. It works as it is.
I just listened to George Saunder's Lincoln in the Bardo, which I believe started out as an idea for a stage play, and is mostly written as one. I haven't seen a hard copy, so I can't say for sure. At the time, some complained that it didn't qualify as a novel. I'm infinitely relaxed about how we define the novel. A story (or not) between two covers. That'll do me for a definition!
I felt that writing this section with Mirabeau as a play script was a callback to the moment where Camille (after grounding himself by connecting with Maximilien) "saw the Comte in quite a different light: a tawdry grandee, in some noisy melodrama". Later when Mirabeau declares their refusal to disperse, his speech is also introduced with a dialogue tag; in that case he's also clearly acting ("scrupulously attentive to his own legend") & contradicts himself in his aside.
I’ve been reading French literature for more than 40 years and perhaps this will be the year when I finally understand what Jacobins are. If anyone would like to explain, I would be pathetically grateful.
We will get to them very soon. They first met in a Dominican monastery, and the Dominican monks in Paris were known as the Jacobins because their first house was on the Rue Saint-Jacques. They are a rather disparate bunch that falls on the more radical end of the revolutionary spectrum. It was mostly used as a term of abuse.
To a large extent, this whole book is about infighting between different factions of "Jacobins" over the nature of the revolution. So if we're confused about what it means to be a Jacobin, it is because no one can agree on what the revolution is supposed to look like.
I’m thinking that close near-term analogues are political parties. And when Jacobin politicians eventually rose to the most powerful positions in French government it became a shadow government more powerful even than the state itself, sort of like National Socialism in Germany or the Communist Party in Russia.
Now, some may bridle at this comparison. After all, we have a respected contemporary journal called “Jacobin,” but I submit my analogy is apt in this regard: all three movements consolidated power in the name of ideological purity and revolutionary necessity, sidelining or destroying alternative power centers and effectively becoming the state.
One caveat: the Jacobins operated in a much more unstable and improvised context, without the long-term institutionalization seen in Nazi Germany or the USSR. Their dominance was relatively brief and chaotic—but for a time, they exercised immense power, especially through Robespierre and the Revolutionary Tribunals.
One thing that struck me in this week’s additional reading was the persona of Camille that comes across in the letter to his father - he sounds a little awed by the pomp and splendour of the procession, and almost sweetly deferential. Maybe he is shit stirring when he earnestly says, “Would you like me to subscribe for you?” but it felt like a glimpse of a different character to the one Mantel paints. So far we’ve seen Camille as chaotic, destructive, full of death drive, but to me the letter has quite a different feel.
Editing to add an afterthought, which is that I suppose even revolutionaries long for fatherly approval!
Ahh, very true! When I re-read the letter imagining a more sarcastic, provocative tone, his recount of this “blessed” event seems quite different! He does make that comment to Mirabeau, too, about being relieved to escape his childhood home when he was sent away to school, so perhaps the thought of fatherly approval doesn’t hold much sway after all!
I'm just at the beginning of this chapter, but the descriptions of the cold weather reminded of the programme Simon Reeves in Scandavia. He stated that an Icelandic eruption in the 1700s may have led to erratic weather patterns and triggered the French revolution. Link is from a Guardian article saying the same thing.
We have just watched this and it got me thinking about the interconnectivity between everything. Including in this case the fact this came up in the programme as I am doing this slow read.
When I read the name Dr. Guillotin I did have a 👀 moment haha. Thanks for the research! I find all the context so fascinating, and knowing precise moments that sparked Mantel’s writing of scenes and events is super fun to read!
The enormous cast of revolutionaries indeed- notebook exploding with names, and places that play roles. A few notes: p. 148 Laclos sounds like a therapist. Camille is an “extraordinary little agitator”. Camille sees Mirabeau as “ monstrously vain & conceited” but gives him a run for his money in dialogue. Not to mention Ropespierre not letting Mirabeau jerk him around and rushed to the rostrum to begin with “Let them sell their carriages and give their money to the poor…”
Wow I love some of these additional sources, thank you. The paintings- especially the Tennis Court Oath- clearly capture the sense of ceremony and attempts to impose order as events unfold so dramatically- those outfits! The gestures in the shafts of light! The milling about all looking in different directions! I ll definitely go away and look that painting up. AND I had no idea that Camille’s writings still existed- nicely written up in these examples, too- what a thrill!
I have now caught up with my reading and I am easing into the weekly routine of being absorbed into Mantel's world then coming to Footnotes and Tangents to catch-up with everyone 's thoughts and feelings. The extra layers Footnotes and Tangents gave to Wolf Hall was one of my favourite parts and I am finding, once again, the extra information you give us Simon means I am getting more out of the book than I did on first reading it a few years ago.
I'm sticking with this on the basis that confusion is a feature not a bug. I'm basically immersing myself in it and not attempting to try and understand the big picture.
And, in this section, confusion is what Mantel is dealing with. Meetings behind closed doors and not really knowing who is supporting whom - how unlike 21st Century politics...
The conversation between Robespierre and Mirabeau was interesting for me as it was the first time we see naked ambition coming to the fore - do they want the power to bring about revolution or do they want the revolution to bring them to power? It's hard to tell.
Something that made me smile: "Strategy, he means". Having worked in policy, there are always debates about the difference between strategy, policy and tactics (and lots of other terms). It's good to see it reflected in the 18th Century. I can't help thinking that in the modern day, our 'heroes' would all be SpAds.
Spads with degrees in PPE. That was the stereotype wasn't it?
And confusion is definitely a feature not a bug. I love how well she captures that bewildering atmosphere of a society on the edge of something. We live it as the characters experience it, not knowing where it is going to lead us.
Feature not bug... That's such a revealing way of putting it. Sums up the feeling I've had the whole time that I'm just going blindly forwards, never quite sure how everything is holding together.
I feel the same and trusting that it supposed to confuse us.
That reminded me of Benedetti’s poem, Tactics and Strategy: https://hyemusings.ca/poetry-corner-mario-benedetti-tactics-and-strategy-tactica-y-estrategia/
This immediately brought Michel De Certeau’s strategy and tactics to mind for me
Citizeness Roland is definitely her husband’s Spad!
Thanks, Simon. Still confused, but also sticking with it 🥰 What caught my eye this week was Mantel’s descriptions, eg “The ladies of the court were stacked on benches like crockery on a shelf …” and “When the Comte took the floor, disapproval rustled like autumn leaves.”
Lovely quotes.
Beautiful!
The City of Paris has kindly put together a website and app called „Parcours Revolution“ that is a fantastic resource, especially for those among us who enjoy having a proper geographical sense of where things are. https://parcoursrevolution.paris.fr/ What the characters portraits lack in depth, they make up for in abundance. It seems to me that the French version has more information, but the English version is huge already.
I was delighted to find out that the young revolutionary woman who faints at Versailles in the 1989 film is a real person and was called Louison.
That's a great resource!
Definitely going to have a look at this. Thank you for sharing this information 😊
Thanks for this!
I re-read this chapter yesterday to prepare for this discussion and painstakingly transcribed „The overthrowing of everything“ into my Apple Notes because I loved that phrase and the exchange it appeared in so much. And there you are, choosing it as the title of today‘s post.
When I first read it, the off-handed treatment the Tennis Court Oath received, both disappointed and amused me very much. But there‘s David‘s sketch right there, with the billowing curtains, the upturned umbrella and all the dramatic Roman attitudes, so of course there‘s no need to repeat it. The limited view all our characters have, totally devoid, as humans are, of any benefit of hindsight, is just a brilliant way of telling this story.
Also, Mantel is bone-chillingly good on the death of children. The detail of Louise gathering up the baby‘s belongings was so very touching.
Loose Cannon Camille, rolling helter-skelter across the deck of the ship of state, gleefully smashing things. I don‘t like him at all, but he‘s a hell of a character.
By the way, the Paris trip is on, I just need to sit down with my travelling companions and book the fleet equipage. I realized yesterday that I knew the intersection of the roads where Titonville once stood, because we stayed around the corner a few years ago.
Oh, this reminds me of something I forgot to mention. Mantel I think purposefully ignores the fact that Louis and Marie Antoinette lose a child at this point in the story. It is framed as a bit of a national calamity, a sign of the monarchy in dire straits. But Mantel instead focuses on the death of the Danton child and how it affects G-J and stops him from getting super excited about riots and revolutions.
I love this because it reflects the fact that whilst history is obsessed with royal psychodramas, real people more often have bigger problems much closer to home.
I re-listened to the The Rest is History Episode about that year yesterday, and they point out (with equal justification), that both Louis and Marie-Antoinette were really devoted parents, perhaps quite unusual for royals of that era despite all the Rousseauism wafting about, and must have been completely devastated by their son‘s death and not really prepared for what would eventually turn into the even bigger tragedy of their lives.
The actors who play the king and queen in the 1989 Révolution Française are awfully good, especially the guy playing Louis.
I do feel very sorry for Louis and MA through all of this. Especially Louis, who seemed to want to do the right thing but wasn't cut out for any of it.
Listening to the podcast in conjunction with reading and was not until you mentioned this Simon that I have realised the death of the Danton's child would have been around the same time as the loss of the King and Queen's child. I love the way Mantel draws us into the lives and pains of everyday people with those usually placed In the spotlight on the fringes.
And without dropping spoilers, I've read ahead and next week gives one single page to another huge set piece of the revolution. Mantel is trolling France and trolling the rest of us.
😂
I absolutely agree, that was a touching moment and as always Mantel manages to say a lot and capture the raw feeling within such a small paragraph.
Heartbroken by the death of the child, in those days it was certainly a lottery if you survive from an illness or infection, because so many doctors appeared to be completely useless and lost at the time, if not harmful! 💔
Those poor doctors were more or less all working from faulty assumptions; without having even an inkling of germ theory (8 years to go until smallpox vaccination!) they didn’t really stand a chance. I wondered about the doctor who treated Camille‘s father and had very sound opinions about kidneys.
I’ve liked Louise from the get go- wise beyond her years. I just felt something good about her, and…here you see something good.
“The literal truth doesn’t matter any more. All that matters is what they think on the streets.” True in 1789. Extremely true today. I wonder if there were particular events happening in the 1970s (a turbulent decade!) when HM was writing this that inspired that particular thought. It got me thinking about how the pamphlets are acting as an 18th century social media. Presenting opinion as fact. Driving people further apart and towards greater extremes of opinion. Sooner or later it all goes pop.
I am enjoying this: the confusion, the misunderstandings, the nervousness, and the approaching horror. Not enjoying the horror, that is to say, but enjoying how she sets the scene for it. No-one has a clue what is going on, and neither, in a way, do we. In fact of course we know that The French Revolution is about to start, but we need also to know and to *feel* that *they* don’t know that. I love that portrait of Mirabeau—John Goodman should play him in the film!
Ha, he would. I always find with Mantel is that it is a strange balancing act between foreshadowing and future-blindness. We know and we don't know. She builds in this dramatic irony, where we know the future and the characters don't... and then conspires to make us feel as the characters do, and imagine the future might work out different this time.
Good writers can do one of these well. Mantel does both excellently.
The other bit that confused me was where it went into play script mode. I wasn't sure of the reasons- although I wasn't bothered by it.
I assume it follows on from "'So whatever I say next, write it down.'" But why? I love the detail where Max is changed from de Robespierre to plain Robespierre at the end. That's excellent minute-taking, that is. Although he is also referred to as Robispére, which is not so good.
This bit is great. As we know from Wolf Hall, Mantel is very interested in stage and performance as metaphor and practice in politics. Both these men see themselves as the main actor in their own play (a bit like that Cromwell vs More scene at the end of Wolf Hall), and the script presentation draws our attention to this performative battle of wills.
This novel is endlessly creative and playful. We switch between past and present tense, we adopt the Mantelian "we" perspective that we see her use again in Wolf Hall. Later on, Danton breaks down the fourth wall to confide one-on-one with the reader.
It did make me think that we're quite comfortable with epistolary novels, so we should adapt easily to the play script version - even if it is not intended for performance. It works as it is.
I just listened to George Saunder's Lincoln in the Bardo, which I believe started out as an idea for a stage play, and is mostly written as one. I haven't seen a hard copy, so I can't say for sure. At the time, some complained that it didn't qualify as a novel. I'm infinitely relaxed about how we define the novel. A story (or not) between two covers. That'll do me for a definition!
I felt that writing this section with Mirabeau as a play script was a callback to the moment where Camille (after grounding himself by connecting with Maximilien) "saw the Comte in quite a different light: a tawdry grandee, in some noisy melodrama". Later when Mirabeau declares their refusal to disperse, his speech is also introduced with a dialogue tag; in that case he's also clearly acting ("scrupulously attentive to his own legend") & contradicts himself in his aside.
I’ve been reading French literature for more than 40 years and perhaps this will be the year when I finally understand what Jacobins are. If anyone would like to explain, I would be pathetically grateful.
We will get to them very soon. They first met in a Dominican monastery, and the Dominican monks in Paris were known as the Jacobins because their first house was on the Rue Saint-Jacques. They are a rather disparate bunch that falls on the more radical end of the revolutionary spectrum. It was mostly used as a term of abuse.
To a large extent, this whole book is about infighting between different factions of "Jacobins" over the nature of the revolution. So if we're confused about what it means to be a Jacobin, it is because no one can agree on what the revolution is supposed to look like.
Thanks, Simon! I’m glad to know it’s not just me, then
I’m thinking that close near-term analogues are political parties. And when Jacobin politicians eventually rose to the most powerful positions in French government it became a shadow government more powerful even than the state itself, sort of like National Socialism in Germany or the Communist Party in Russia.
Now, some may bridle at this comparison. After all, we have a respected contemporary journal called “Jacobin,” but I submit my analogy is apt in this regard: all three movements consolidated power in the name of ideological purity and revolutionary necessity, sidelining or destroying alternative power centers and effectively becoming the state.
One caveat: the Jacobins operated in a much more unstable and improvised context, without the long-term institutionalization seen in Nazi Germany or the USSR. Their dominance was relatively brief and chaotic—but for a time, they exercised immense power, especially through Robespierre and the Revolutionary Tribunals.
Truth be told…the footnotes and tangents, all so skillfully managed by Simon, are the delicious frosting on this cake of sooooo many ingredients.
One thing that struck me in this week’s additional reading was the persona of Camille that comes across in the letter to his father - he sounds a little awed by the pomp and splendour of the procession, and almost sweetly deferential. Maybe he is shit stirring when he earnestly says, “Would you like me to subscribe for you?” but it felt like a glimpse of a different character to the one Mantel paints. So far we’ve seen Camille as chaotic, destructive, full of death drive, but to me the letter has quite a different feel.
Editing to add an afterthought, which is that I suppose even revolutionaries long for fatherly approval!
I suspect he is shit stirring! He did say earlier that he wanted to start a bloody revolution to horrify his father...
Ahh, very true! When I re-read the letter imagining a more sarcastic, provocative tone, his recount of this “blessed” event seems quite different! He does make that comment to Mirabeau, too, about being relieved to escape his childhood home when he was sent away to school, so perhaps the thought of fatherly approval doesn’t hold much sway after all!
I'm just at the beginning of this chapter, but the descriptions of the cold weather reminded of the programme Simon Reeves in Scandavia. He stated that an Icelandic eruption in the 1700s may have led to erratic weather patterns and triggered the French revolution. Link is from a Guardian article saying the same thing.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/15/iceland-volcano-weather-french-revolution#:~:text=The%20Laki%20volcanic%20fissure%20in,died%20through%20the%20ensuing%20famine.
Yes, I talked about this last week: https://footnotesandtangents.substack.com/i/163470178/climate-chaos-and-revolution - thanks for the extra link, Marcus.
We have just watched this and it got me thinking about the interconnectivity between everything. Including in this case the fact this came up in the programme as I am doing this slow read.
When I read the name Dr. Guillotin I did have a 👀 moment haha. Thanks for the research! I find all the context so fascinating, and knowing precise moments that sparked Mantel’s writing of scenes and events is super fun to read!
Now you know!
The enormous cast of revolutionaries indeed- notebook exploding with names, and places that play roles. A few notes: p. 148 Laclos sounds like a therapist. Camille is an “extraordinary little agitator”. Camille sees Mirabeau as “ monstrously vain & conceited” but gives him a run for his money in dialogue. Not to mention Ropespierre not letting Mirabeau jerk him around and rushed to the rostrum to begin with “Let them sell their carriages and give their money to the poor…”
Wow I love some of these additional sources, thank you. The paintings- especially the Tennis Court Oath- clearly capture the sense of ceremony and attempts to impose order as events unfold so dramatically- those outfits! The gestures in the shafts of light! The milling about all looking in different directions! I ll definitely go away and look that painting up. AND I had no idea that Camille’s writings still existed- nicely written up in these examples, too- what a thrill!
I have now caught up with my reading and I am easing into the weekly routine of being absorbed into Mantel's world then coming to Footnotes and Tangents to catch-up with everyone 's thoughts and feelings. The extra layers Footnotes and Tangents gave to Wolf Hall was one of my favourite parts and I am finding, once again, the extra information you give us Simon means I am getting more out of the book than I did on first reading it a few years ago.
Also, fell down a rabbit hole on the role of coffee houses throughout history and revolutions. The French Rev part comes at the end of the article
https://www.history.com/articles/coffee-houses-revolutions