I'm still struggling a bit - and I'd be lost without the list of characters at the beginning. The names are as confusing as Tolstoy: the Comte? What else is he called? And the Duc! Which one is he? I'm just trying to learn to live with the confusion - but as somebody who takes being called 'a control freak' as a compliment, it's hard.
This chapter, though, definitely ups the ante. And it really captures what I've always thought: riots rarely run to plan, and nobody can really control them. Even describing a riot as a single entity may be misleading as we may be lumping together a number of individual events.
The letter at the beginning made me smile, even though I knew it was the precursor to something terrible. And the description of the killing of the governor is horrific - maybe foreshadowing the terror that is to come.
None of our leading characters - 'heroes' doesn't seem to be the right word - being there for the action is perfect. They set things off but then lose control. This will happen again, and they will lose their lives. And, of course, it's only in hindsight that we decide what is significant. (I do find it interesting that some people still talk about the storming of the Bastille as if it involved the release of lots of political prisoners - O Level history taught me differently.)
There are some great little moments sprinkled throughout the chapter. I particularly liked the description of the judge having a fine duelling pistol in one hand and a cleaver in the other. And, definitely, 'Despite the fact you were here, you were there' is spot on about how we remember what we expected to see rather than what actually happened.
I love this chapter for how it evokes the chaos of riot and revolution. And it is the way Mantel captures the twin feelings of exhilaration and terror that move through the story. The double helix of the Revolution. There's so much joy and fear, mixed together, alive on the page.
Now that the action is thoroughly underway, I'm struggling to stop myself storming ahead to the end! I'm determined to stick to the schedule but now that we've got some momentum it is TOUGH. And the way the action is delivered here - Camille in a surging, vivid, violent present tense, and on the other hand, the dramatic reveal of the plan by Lucile to her gobsmacked father... Masterful!
It's also very sobering to read these scenes and in the next tab of my browser, over here in Sydney, to see images coming in from the protests in LA. Sending thoughts of safe passage through this time to all those brave people speaking up and putting their bodies on the line for their communities.
Yes, now the challenge is to stay slow and savour!
I first read APOGS in and around the events of the Arab Spring and the counter-revolution in Egypt. The book felt so resonant then and I think it will always feel relevant, as I think Mantel does this masterful job at captures the highs and lows of street power and revolution.
It feels important to me that we are still at the point where events are taking place, with no sense of a distinct whole, as it were. When does the Revolution gain its capital R, as it were? The Storming of the Bastille became the catalyst afterwards, declared so much later by the victors. Events now are still so febrile, but they do seem to be coalescing, like elements relentlessly drawn to a focal point by centripetal force. Neither Camille, nor Max, nor Georges-Jacques are at the centre - yet - and there's no sense that any one individual is guiding events - much as Mirabeau wishes he were. The world feels like it's teetering on the edge of something, but equally that there's no inevitability about how or where it will fall. It's like watching a crash in very slow motion: horrifying, but simultaneously enthralling.
A slow-motion crash indeed; enthralling and horrifying in equal measure. Mantel really makes you feel like you are caught up in something and no one really knows what it is. And no one, not even Mirabeau, can control it. As Camille thinks: "No one will chain this dog, no one will lead it home." Terrifying.
As others mentioned, this week’s reading comes at a time when a would be king is sending troops to LA to defend the regime against protests of his own making. Mantel’s writing captures the mob dynamic in a way that television can’t. Her description of the mob as a creature that pulses, preys and engulfs the moment is so effective. It becomes larger than the sum of its parts and can’t be controlled. Not by those who encourage it nor by those who seek to kill it. I hope our citizens will find places of refuge and safety this week for we know how the story ends.
We remember Camille as inciting the storming of the Bastille. But so much of history becomes folklore. The storming of the Bastille coalesced from many wellsprings across the city. In part Camille owes a debt to Thomas Carlyle for his fame in this regard.
Carlyle immortalizes Camille’s speech in language that blazes with romantic energy: “He springs to a table: the Police satellites are eyeing him; alive they shall not take him, not they alive him alive. . . ‘To arms! Let universal Paris, universal France, as with the throat of the whirlwind, sound only: . . . To arms!’”
As a result, Camille has become to us, the first revolutionary journalist, the man who ignited the Bastille’s fall, the passionate liberal destroyed by his own revolution which spawned a new kind of illiberalism.
But Camille didn’t cause the storming of the Bastille, he was one agitator among many.
Camille may be my favorite Mantel character. As I said in the last thread, sometimes Mantel’s depictions of ambition are a little too cynical for my taste. There has to be room and weight for the momentous, pivotal, awesome, even if the agent is dark and selfish. As with Tolstoy’s Napoleon at Austerlitz.
But with Camille at the Palais-Royal, Mantel does give you that spark—the voltage of the singular, fateful act. It’s messy, it’s tragic, it’s tinged with self-regard—but it is momentous: “He didn’t feel brave, just sure. History was gathering itself at his back.”
Toward the beginning of the chapter, this made me laugh so hard: Laclos has only known him a matter of a week or tow; already he is launched on "the trouble with you ..."
Love how Camille really bothers some people while others just go with the flow around him.
‘And the whole section lurches like a fever’ - for me this sums up the feeling I had while reading it! Thanks for your guidance, Simon, I would’ve been lost without it 🥰
I never read it that way - my sense of it is that it is just a humorous way of saying “home-grown.” While aristos wouldn’t have eaten pot-au-feu , everyone else did. The fact that the archetypal pot for pot-au-feu has a lid doesn’t mean it was for intended for transporting, it was just for controlling temperature and evaporation in a dish cooked very slowly for a long time. This wasn’t the type of meal that would be carried around; it would spoil within a few hours once taken away from the fire.
Thinking about this a bit more... home-grown doesn't quite make sense to me, because it has a positive connotations and Camille and Marat are using it pejoratively. Unless, of course, they hold Washington in contempt? Which is surely also a possibility...
I wouldn't say "over-influenced", just influenced. You get to bring your intimacy with the French language to this story, influencing your unique reading. As with anything, it can be read and explored in different ways.
Writing from Los Angeles, this week's reading is even more the fever dream, as others have mentioned. The weekly posts are making this come alive... maybe a little too alive in the context but much appreciated. Angelenos will be out in the streets this weekend too... hoping for more peaceful outcomes for all.
Well this week’s read was short and to the brutal point! I am ever more amazed at Mantel’s achievement: she wrote this in her early twenties!—how did she know how to do it? She had done her research, of course she had: she knows who everyone is and where they are, and what they were thinking of and hoping for, insofar as they had any grasp of their situation and any ideas which could comprehend what is emerging around them; she’s been to these places—you just know that she has the Palais Royale in her mind’s eye as she describes the scene, she knows them like she knows the town where she grew up. But there’s more to her magic: it’s the emotional intelligence that she brings to it and the intellectual imagination. She’s there at the scene, and she brings us with her, and it’s pretty bloody terrifying.
Thank you for all the links, Simon. I couldn’t bear to look at the picture of Damiens, butI loved the very clean and orderly scene at the Palais Royale in the French film (I couldn’t see anything on the app, and then I remembered your saying last year that F&T is best read in one’s browser, so I’ve written a memo to self about that). Looking forward to next week, as ever….
Less confusing this week. I felt like I was following the action and becoming more immersed in events. The scene with Camille doing a speech standing on a chair on top of the table seemed a big moment for the character and very memorable for the reader. And he just gets handed pistols! Fantastic.
This slow read was the first time I really appreciated that Camille was tottering on a chair on a table, and not just on a chair. It gave me a sense of vertigo!
Just a quick suggestion for anyone (like me) unfamiliar with this history and getting a bit bogged down with the estates general… I stumbled on The Rest is History podcast on Spotify and it’s really helping me. Quite lighthearted but lots of clear explanations. They have a run of episodes on the French Revolution and the third in the series (no. 477 overall) picks up with the estates general, Mirabeau, Necker et al. Thought I’d mention. Sorry of this has been recommended elsewhere and I missed it.
After I fell behind right from the start, I have finally caught up and read everything. Just in time. Desmoulins would surely have been offended if I had missed his big moment. The time begins when one is better advised to be on good terms with our trio (but that will eventually pass too, one must be quite flexible in revolutionary times).
HM captures the sense of inevitability and sheer unpredictability of the events so well. They will become even more unpredictable and uncontrollable as they develop. I’m not across the detailed writings of the three protagonists: do you think they all thought of themselves up to this point as destined to play a key role in the future of France? The murder of Delaunay is a real shocker (more graphic in Schama, if I remember rightly).
I suspect they did at times, even if only unconscious. Mantel's Danton clearly sees his goal in life is to be at the top of whichever ladder he climbs. Camille would like to shock his father. Perhaps Max has the least blatant ambition, but expects to be a man of virtue in a republic of the virtuous.
Absolutely fascinating how she handles the Bastille. I don't know my history well enough to have known ahead of time that none of our main characters were there. So this section was much different than I was expecting. I love how she captures the whole kickoff to everything. And Simon, like you say in your email, to them, at the time, it was probably just another remarkable event in a series of remarkable days. I also will admit, again not knowing the history, I had pictured a lot more than seven prisoners!
I'm still struggling a bit - and I'd be lost without the list of characters at the beginning. The names are as confusing as Tolstoy: the Comte? What else is he called? And the Duc! Which one is he? I'm just trying to learn to live with the confusion - but as somebody who takes being called 'a control freak' as a compliment, it's hard.
This chapter, though, definitely ups the ante. And it really captures what I've always thought: riots rarely run to plan, and nobody can really control them. Even describing a riot as a single entity may be misleading as we may be lumping together a number of individual events.
The letter at the beginning made me smile, even though I knew it was the precursor to something terrible. And the description of the killing of the governor is horrific - maybe foreshadowing the terror that is to come.
None of our leading characters - 'heroes' doesn't seem to be the right word - being there for the action is perfect. They set things off but then lose control. This will happen again, and they will lose their lives. And, of course, it's only in hindsight that we decide what is significant. (I do find it interesting that some people still talk about the storming of the Bastille as if it involved the release of lots of political prisoners - O Level history taught me differently.)
There are some great little moments sprinkled throughout the chapter. I particularly liked the description of the judge having a fine duelling pistol in one hand and a cleaver in the other. And, definitely, 'Despite the fact you were here, you were there' is spot on about how we remember what we expected to see rather than what actually happened.
I love this chapter for how it evokes the chaos of riot and revolution. And it is the way Mantel captures the twin feelings of exhilaration and terror that move through the story. The double helix of the Revolution. There's so much joy and fear, mixed together, alive on the page.
And to make things worse, the Duke won't be a duke for much longer but will join the Jacobins and re-name himself Philippe Égalité.
I mean, that just bloody typical! It's taking a liberté!
Ok, now I’m in.
Before this chapter I probably would have DNF’ed on my own, but trusted in the “F&T Process.”
It is also feeling a little too familiar now, unfortunately, given the state of the world.
The slow burn. And then this chapter: fireworks!
Now that the action is thoroughly underway, I'm struggling to stop myself storming ahead to the end! I'm determined to stick to the schedule but now that we've got some momentum it is TOUGH. And the way the action is delivered here - Camille in a surging, vivid, violent present tense, and on the other hand, the dramatic reveal of the plan by Lucile to her gobsmacked father... Masterful!
It's also very sobering to read these scenes and in the next tab of my browser, over here in Sydney, to see images coming in from the protests in LA. Sending thoughts of safe passage through this time to all those brave people speaking up and putting their bodies on the line for their communities.
Yes, now the challenge is to stay slow and savour!
I first read APOGS in and around the events of the Arab Spring and the counter-revolution in Egypt. The book felt so resonant then and I think it will always feel relevant, as I think Mantel does this masterful job at captures the highs and lows of street power and revolution.
Oh yes that would’ve been spookily resonant. I shouldn’t be surprised but it is a good reminder that history continues to happen!
It feels important to me that we are still at the point where events are taking place, with no sense of a distinct whole, as it were. When does the Revolution gain its capital R, as it were? The Storming of the Bastille became the catalyst afterwards, declared so much later by the victors. Events now are still so febrile, but they do seem to be coalescing, like elements relentlessly drawn to a focal point by centripetal force. Neither Camille, nor Max, nor Georges-Jacques are at the centre - yet - and there's no sense that any one individual is guiding events - much as Mirabeau wishes he were. The world feels like it's teetering on the edge of something, but equally that there's no inevitability about how or where it will fall. It's like watching a crash in very slow motion: horrifying, but simultaneously enthralling.
A slow-motion crash indeed; enthralling and horrifying in equal measure. Mantel really makes you feel like you are caught up in something and no one really knows what it is. And no one, not even Mirabeau, can control it. As Camille thinks: "No one will chain this dog, no one will lead it home." Terrifying.
As others mentioned, this week’s reading comes at a time when a would be king is sending troops to LA to defend the regime against protests of his own making. Mantel’s writing captures the mob dynamic in a way that television can’t. Her description of the mob as a creature that pulses, preys and engulfs the moment is so effective. It becomes larger than the sum of its parts and can’t be controlled. Not by those who encourage it nor by those who seek to kill it. I hope our citizens will find places of refuge and safety this week for we know how the story ends.
We remember Camille as inciting the storming of the Bastille. But so much of history becomes folklore. The storming of the Bastille coalesced from many wellsprings across the city. In part Camille owes a debt to Thomas Carlyle for his fame in this regard.
Carlyle immortalizes Camille’s speech in language that blazes with romantic energy: “He springs to a table: the Police satellites are eyeing him; alive they shall not take him, not they alive him alive. . . ‘To arms! Let universal Paris, universal France, as with the throat of the whirlwind, sound only: . . . To arms!’”
As a result, Camille has become to us, the first revolutionary journalist, the man who ignited the Bastille’s fall, the passionate liberal destroyed by his own revolution which spawned a new kind of illiberalism.
But Camille didn’t cause the storming of the Bastille, he was one agitator among many.
Camille may be my favorite Mantel character. As I said in the last thread, sometimes Mantel’s depictions of ambition are a little too cynical for my taste. There has to be room and weight for the momentous, pivotal, awesome, even if the agent is dark and selfish. As with Tolstoy’s Napoleon at Austerlitz.
But with Camille at the Palais-Royal, Mantel does give you that spark—the voltage of the singular, fateful act. It’s messy, it’s tragic, it’s tinged with self-regard—but it is momentous: “He didn’t feel brave, just sure. History was gathering itself at his back.”
Sublime.
Toward the beginning of the chapter, this made me laugh so hard: Laclos has only known him a matter of a week or tow; already he is launched on "the trouble with you ..."
Love how Camille really bothers some people while others just go with the flow around him.
‘And the whole section lurches like a fever’ - for me this sums up the feeling I had while reading it! Thanks for your guidance, Simon, I would’ve been lost without it 🥰
I was wondering if “Washington pot-au-feu” was just a Francophile “tin can revolutionary” or like a cheap Washington.
I never read it that way - my sense of it is that it is just a humorous way of saying “home-grown.” While aristos wouldn’t have eaten pot-au-feu , everyone else did. The fact that the archetypal pot for pot-au-feu has a lid doesn’t mean it was for intended for transporting, it was just for controlling temperature and evaporation in a dish cooked very slowly for a long time. This wasn’t the type of meal that would be carried around; it would spoil within a few hours once taken away from the fire.
Thinking about this a bit more... home-grown doesn't quite make sense to me, because it has a positive connotations and Camille and Marat are using it pejoratively. Unless, of course, they hold Washington in contempt? Which is surely also a possibility...
I’m possibly over-influenced by the French usage of pot-au-feu as an adjectival phrase.
I wouldn't say "over-influenced", just influenced. You get to bring your intimacy with the French language to this story, influencing your unique reading. As with anything, it can be read and explored in different ways.
I like your home-grown interpretation as well, Claire!
That occurred to me, too. It would make sense.
The picture has a lid and handle on the pot making me wonder if it was a meal that could be cooked and then transported - since he’s overseas 🤔
A flatpack revolutionary... if you will.
Perfect for an on-the-hoof revolution!
Writing from Los Angeles, this week's reading is even more the fever dream, as others have mentioned. The weekly posts are making this come alive... maybe a little too alive in the context but much appreciated. Angelenos will be out in the streets this weekend too... hoping for more peaceful outcomes for all.
Well this week’s read was short and to the brutal point! I am ever more amazed at Mantel’s achievement: she wrote this in her early twenties!—how did she know how to do it? She had done her research, of course she had: she knows who everyone is and where they are, and what they were thinking of and hoping for, insofar as they had any grasp of their situation and any ideas which could comprehend what is emerging around them; she’s been to these places—you just know that she has the Palais Royale in her mind’s eye as she describes the scene, she knows them like she knows the town where she grew up. But there’s more to her magic: it’s the emotional intelligence that she brings to it and the intellectual imagination. She’s there at the scene, and she brings us with her, and it’s pretty bloody terrifying.
Thank you for all the links, Simon. I couldn’t bear to look at the picture of Damiens, butI loved the very clean and orderly scene at the Palais Royale in the French film (I couldn’t see anything on the app, and then I remembered your saying last year that F&T is best read in one’s browser, so I’ve written a memo to self about that). Looking forward to next week, as ever….
That clip looks so civilised compared to Mantel's version!
Less confusing this week. I felt like I was following the action and becoming more immersed in events. The scene with Camille doing a speech standing on a chair on top of the table seemed a big moment for the character and very memorable for the reader. And he just gets handed pistols! Fantastic.
This slow read was the first time I really appreciated that Camille was tottering on a chair on a table, and not just on a chair. It gave me a sense of vertigo!
Just a quick suggestion for anyone (like me) unfamiliar with this history and getting a bit bogged down with the estates general… I stumbled on The Rest is History podcast on Spotify and it’s really helping me. Quite lighthearted but lots of clear explanations. They have a run of episodes on the French Revolution and the third in the series (no. 477 overall) picks up with the estates general, Mirabeau, Necker et al. Thought I’d mention. Sorry of this has been recommended elsewhere and I missed it.
Thanks Sharon, yes it's great - I've linked to it a couple of times and it is a great help. Here's the link if anyone is interested: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX6W9e1zgsgaG
I thought you probably had mentioned it - sorry for missing that. Over a year later and I’m STILL learning to drive Substack. 🤪
Naah it's ok. It's just buried away in my footnotes, so easy to miss.
After I fell behind right from the start, I have finally caught up and read everything. Just in time. Desmoulins would surely have been offended if I had missed his big moment. The time begins when one is better advised to be on good terms with our trio (but that will eventually pass too, one must be quite flexible in revolutionary times).
Hello, good too see you again here! I keep falling behind too but am hanging in there...
HM captures the sense of inevitability and sheer unpredictability of the events so well. They will become even more unpredictable and uncontrollable as they develop. I’m not across the detailed writings of the three protagonists: do you think they all thought of themselves up to this point as destined to play a key role in the future of France? The murder of Delaunay is a real shocker (more graphic in Schama, if I remember rightly).
I suspect they did at times, even if only unconscious. Mantel's Danton clearly sees his goal in life is to be at the top of whichever ladder he climbs. Camille would like to shock his father. Perhaps Max has the least blatant ambition, but expects to be a man of virtue in a republic of the virtuous.
Absolutely fascinating how she handles the Bastille. I don't know my history well enough to have known ahead of time that none of our main characters were there. So this section was much different than I was expecting. I love how she captures the whole kickoff to everything. And Simon, like you say in your email, to them, at the time, it was probably just another remarkable event in a series of remarkable days. I also will admit, again not knowing the history, I had pictured a lot more than seven prisoners!
And this was all foreshadowed by Danton earlier in the book, who expected the Bastille to be much bigger when he arrived in Paris.