by John Baxter
The euphoria didn’t last. By the time he published that poem in 1809, it bore the rueful title “The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement.” Nobody had foreseen the factional fighting that would end with the mass murder of France’s intellectual elite and large parts of the privileged classes, including the royal family.
Charles Dickens, writing half a century later in A Tale of Two Cities, articulated a general ambivalence about the revolution:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
For good or ill, France exported its revolution to the world. The American Civil War and the Russian Revolution, which hailed Robespierre as a pioneer Bolshevik, both existed in its shadow. Because of its gory conclusion, however, modern France plays it down. The anniversary of the storming of the Bastille remains the national day, the tricolor its flag, and the Marseillaise its anthem. Until it was replaced by the euro, the franc remained its currency; most of the revolution’s advances in science, law, and education survived as well. But like the 1940 surrender to Germany and subsequent occupation, the episode itself is one France prefers to forget.
The Bastille exists today only as an outline embedded in the paving of a busy traffic roundabout and a few stones in the metro station below. There are no individual markers for the thousands of the guillotined buried in such quiet places as the gardens of a convent in Picpus, where they are guarded by the spirit of the Marquis de Lafayette, interred nearby. An exaggeratedly heroic statue of Georges Danton stands at the foot of our street, rue de l’Odéon, marking the former home of the man who was first a friend of Maximilien de Robespierre, then his victim; but it’s the exception. Unless you count a suburban metro station, Robespierre has no monument. “Of all the names of the Terror,” said one historian, “no other has remained so execrable in the public memory.”
In a contemporary caricature, Robespierre drinks blood squeezed from human hearts.
Dien, P. (engraver). Robespierre Squeezes Blood from Human Hearts. Author’s collection.
Another furtive survival of that time lies just a few steps across the boulevard from Danton’s statue, in a cobbled alley called Cour du Commerce Saint–André. A plaque marks the former home of Tobias Schmidt, a manufacturer of harpsichords who found fortune and dubious fame as the designer and manufacturer of the guillotine. Set high on the outside wall of a restaurant, the plaque is virtually unreadable, presumably not by accident.
Even Napoléon Bonaparte, who rebuilt the shattered nation, isn’t as popular as one might expect. No hit musical celebrates his achievements, and the tourists queuing at his grandiloquent tomb behind the Hôtel des Invalides are far outnumbered by the thousands who line up in all weather to descend into the boneyard known as the Catacombs.
Paradoxically, it’s the Bourbon kings whom tourists find most seductive. They see in their vulgarity the Kardashians writ large. By the busload, tourists flood the palace of Versailles and its grounds, even more so since the current president took to using it as a stage for meetings with foreign heads of state. Since Charles de Gaulle, French presidents have carried themselves less like civil servants than like kings. Even now, in some quiet corner of France’s presidential palace, the Élysée, a flunky may be dusting off a throne as the tailor runs up some twenty–first–century imperial robes.
15
The New Era
Paris. May 1770. Austrian princess Marie Antoinette, fourteen years old, arrives in Paris to marry sixteen–year–old Louis XVI, future king of France. As she’s driven through the city, students of the Collège Louis–le–Grand wait in the rain to cheer. One of their brightest, twelve–year–old Maximilien de Robespierre, reads a poem of welcome he’s written. Twenty–three years later, he will sign the warrant that sends her to the guillotine.
GIVEN THE IMPORTANCE TO THE FRENCH OF WEATHER AND THE seasons, it was natural that the revolutionaries of 1789 should set about remaking them in the image of the new France.
As a first step, they reset the date. The year 1792 became Year I. A medal struck for the occasion spelled out the precise instant: “L’ère des Français commencé à l’équinoxe d’automne 22 Sept. 1792, 9 heures 19 min. 50 s. du matin à Paris” (The French era began at the autumnal equinox, September 22, 1792, at 9:19:50 a.m. Paris time).
Revising a calendar authorized by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE and last updated by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 was a bigger job than France’s new masters imagined. Centuries of use had cemented it deep in the daily life of Christian Europe. To undermine its foundations threatened the entire edifice.
But not to change it would compromise everything for which the revolution was fought. In the words of the man whose name became synonymous with the new calendar, “The regeneration of the French people and the establishment of the Republic entailed the reform of all that came before. It was as if we had not lived at all during those years spent under the oppression of kings. The prejudices of the throne and the church poisoned every page of the ancient calendar.”
As a first step, a nine–man commission was convened to explore options. It included the astronomers and mathematicians Joseph–Louis Lagrange, Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande, Gaspard Monge, and Alexandre Guy Pingré. Chemist Louis–Bernard Guyton de Morveau, another member, was not an obvious choice, although he had helped create the first systematic catalog of minerals, so he might at least know where to begin.
Almost as important as the scientific expertise of these men was their political reliability. Nobody should be too identifiable with the ancien régime. They didn’t come more solid than Lagrange. Italian by birth, he believed that “one of the first principles of every wise man is to conform strictly to the laws of the country in which he is living, even when they are unreasonable.” Nor was one likely to hear a discouraging word from Charles–Gilbert Romme, the commission’s chairman. Described as “a small, awkward and clumsy man with an ill complexion, and a dull orator,” he could be relied on to deliver the conclusions desired by whoever was in power at the time.
Hindsight shows that these gentlemen, however distinguished in their own fields, weren’t particularly qualified for their task. But who would be? It was one nobody had seriously undertaken for centuries. Revising the calendar required someone with a fresh viewpoint, uncluttered by scholarship or reverence for history.
As is often the case, the moment produced the man. The person who would do most of the work in creating the new calendar and bear the burden of responsibility was the youngest, least educated, and most obscure of the commission’s members: Philippe–François–Nazaire Fabre, better known as Fabre d’Églantine, or Fabre of the Wild Rose.
If the term “loose cannon” had existed in the 1780s, it would have been applied to Fabre. Poet, actor, singer, and playwright, he was, at forty, younger than his colleagues on the commission by at least a decade and, in their eyes, insultingly unqualified.
A single but crucial distinction fitted him for the post: he had friends in high places. Specifically, he was a protégé of Georges Danton, the spellbinding orator who, along with the ascetic Maximilien de Robespierre, dominated the new state.
Brutish in looks and build, Danton compensated for his pockmarked face, further scarred by a childhood encounter with a bull, by exercising his flair for the dramatic and his mesmerizing baritone voice. In his distinctive red surcoat, he was the undisputed king of the Mountain, as members of the Convention—the elected body in charge of the country, its congress—called the high–banked seating of the Chambre des Députés.
Georges Danton.
Anonymous. Georges Danton Making a Speech. Author’s collection.
I
n Fabre, Danton recognized someone with his own hunger for the limelight. He was a dangerous patron, with many enemies, but neither man was a stranger to taking chances. As Danton urged in one of his most famous speeches, “Boldness, more boldness, always boldness!”
Under a monarchy, no person as lowborn as Fabre or Danton could have achieved high office or taken part in national politics. But during the revolution, an ability to rouse the mob and win its support meant more than position or fortune. Oratory launched reputations. “Public diction,” says historian Simon Schama in his book Citizens, “was public power.”
As politicians visited the theater to pick up points of technique, performers became celebrities overnight. It took Fabre, a newcomer from the south, only two years to become one of the city’s most popular playwrights. A tragedy, Augusta, failed, but he had a hit in 1790 with Le Philinte de Molière, ou La suite du Misanthrope (Molière’s Philinte, or the sequel to The Misanthrope), a parody of Molière’s famous play. Audiences intimidated by the original enjoyed his easily digested parody.
His colorful name inevitably attracted attention. He explained that he’d added the “Églantine” himself in honor of the golden rose presented to him by none other than Clémence Isaure herself, doyenne of Toulouse’s Acadèmia dels Jòcs Florals, or Academy of the Floral Games, for the public recitation of an original poetic work, in his case a sonnet dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
Fabre d’Églantine with his fictional golden rose.
Thomire, Pierre Augustin. Portrait of Fabre d’Églantine. Museé des beaux–arts de Carcassonne.
At forty, Fabre was older than the leading figures of the revolution. But “Fabre d’Églantine” was a role like any other, with a costume to go with it, and he was above all an actor. Abandoning powdered wigs and brocaded surcoats for open–necked shirts, he let his hair grow and wore it swept back from his high forehead, with a prominent widow’s peak. Instead of satin breeches that ended at the knee, he adopted the simple cotton trousers of the common people that earned them the name les sans–culottes—those without pants.
His glib self–promotion didn’t fool everyone, least of all his patron. “Danton liked his wit,” says Simon Schama, “and pretended to like his plays, but he was under no illusions about Fabre’s virtue.” Robespierre, nicknamed “the Incorruptible,” dismissed him as a man “of principles but no virtue; talents but no soul; skillful in the art of depicting men, much more skillful in deceiving them.”
Backed by Danton, Fabre became president of the Cordeliers Club, named for the group that had met in the chapel of the Franciscan monks to plot revolution. It was from its pulpit that Danton first made his reputation as a public speaker. Fabre was elected to the Convention in 1792 and served as a deputy for two years, voting with Danton in most things, including for the execution of Louis XVI. When Danton became minister of justice, Fabre, along with Danton’s old friend Camille Desmoulins, was appointed his private secretary, responsible for writing some of his speeches.
And once a commission was convened to debate the new calendar, who better to keep an eye on its deliberations than the ambitious Fabre?
16
On the Beach
Lady Jane Beach, Sydney, Australia. November 1986. 2 p.m. 18°C. Steps hewn from the sandstone zigzag down to a crescent of yellow sand. Nude men, oiled, tanned, and lithe, sun themselves on the stair–side terraces, as flagrantly on offer as meat on a butcher’s slab. At the water’s edge, ankle deep in waves that barely rise above a languid ripple, a young couple wades naked, hand in hand, she heavy–breasted and wide–hipped, he spectacularly well–hung.
“MOTHER’S JUST HAD A THALASSOTHÉRAPIE,” MARIE–DOMINIQUE said. “It did her a lot of good. Maybe I should have one.” She turned sideways and looked at herself critically in the mirror. “What do you think?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “A thalawhat?”
“Thalassothérapie. Doesn’t that exist in Australia?”
“Search me. What is it?”
“A sort of health treatment using products of the sea. You know, thalassa—Greek for ‘sea’? Imagine a health farm or a spa, but with seawater.”
“Then it’s not for me. Remember—I can’t swim.”
“Doesn’t matter. There’s no swimming involved.”
“How can there be . . . ?”
But I knew it was pointless to ask. This was all about maman. If her mother was looking good, Marie–Dominique wouldn’t be satisfied until she’d had the same treatment.
By March and April, long gone are the holidays but not the flab, nor those accumulated toxins that cause one to regard a slice of foie gras with less appetite than revulsion. And one can already see the summer looming, and the months of July and August, when one’s body is exposed to the often unkind attention of neighbors and friends.
In the Middle Ages, these were the months when people set out on pilgrimages to the holy places of Christendom. Today they still travel, though the regeneration they seek is less spiritual than physical. Modern pilgrims don’t head for Chartres or Santiago de Compostela but to Dinard or Île de Ré, more intent on purging their bodies than cleansing their souls.
Two weeks later, we stood on the deck of a ferry and watched the low outline of Île de Ré emerge from the sea mist. A new road bridge linked this offshore island to the mainland, transforming a sleepy backwater into one of the most fashionable hideaways along the Atlantic coast. Until the bridge, it had harbored a few beachcombers and locals involved in the oyster trade. Now they were outnumbered by city people in search of better health through thalassotherapy.
A minibus carried us across to the ocean side, where a score of six–story Edwardian mansions lined the beach, a fragment of Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement transported to the Charente coast. Once the summer retreats of Paris’s wealthy, they now served as guesthouses for clients of the nearby clinics.
Six thousand kilometers to the west, on the same latitude, almost identical houses—disingenuously called “cottages” by their millionaire owners—lined the shores of Rhode Island and Martha’s Vineyard. Yet as far as I’d been able to discover, no American resorts offered thalassotherapy. Only the British shared the French belief that seawater, both inside and outside the body, was conducive to good health.
Even more puzzling, the therapy only worked with the cooler waters of the Atlantic. Clinics fringed the western coast and the French side of the English Channel, but none existed on the Mediterranean. If there was any therapeutic value in their climate, it resided in the sun alone.
The low, modern building on Île de Ré to which the bus delivered us made no concessions to comfort or style. Behind its picture windows, figures in white shuffled lethargically or sprawled on daybeds, staring out to sea. I looked for a sign over the door warning “Abandon Foie Gras, Côte de Boeuf, and Châteauneuf–du–Pape, All Ye Who Enter Here.”
Unceremoniously registered, we were sent to separate changing rooms. I was relieved of everything but swimming trunks and issued with a robe and flip–flops. Nobody explained the treatment I was to receive. French doctors, I’d learned from experience, didn’t recognize the term “bedside manner.” Putting patients at their ease rated somewhere below choosing new curtains for the waiting room.
When I came out, Marie–Dominique was nowhere in sight.
“Where’s madame?” I asked.
“Treatments for men and women are separate,” said a receptionist. “Madame will meet you at the main pool afterward.” She pointed down a long corridor. “Room seventeen.”
Feeling ambushed, I followed her directions, the flip–flops dictating that somnambulistic shamble I’d noticed in other clients. Each unmarked door I passed brought to mind the shenanigans described by Michel Houellebecq in his novels The Elementary Particles and Platform.
A cynic beside whom even Jean–Paul Sartre appeared sunny, Houellebecq saw only corruption and decadence in France’s health resorts, spas, nudist beaches, and t
halassa clinics. Most, he suggested, were nothing but pickup spots where the young and hard–bodied, in return for favors or money, made themselves available to the old, flabby, and rich.
In his novel Platform, the main character and his girlfriend, exhausted by a trawl through the fleshpots of Asia, sign up for a recuperative thalassotherapy in a resort along the channel coast, but find no escape from the tyranny of the daily, if not hourly, orgasm.
Some readers, hoping he wrote from experience, had been disappointed to find that actual thalassotherapy was much less fun. “Before I started reading [Platform],” wrote British novelist Julian Barnes, “a friend gave me an unexpected warning: ‘There’s a scene where the narrator and his girlfriend and another woman have a threesome in the hammam [steam room] at the thalassotherapy center in Dinard.’ His tone hardening, he went on, ‘Well, I’ve been there, and it’s just not possible.’”
Was good health the only thing on offer? I kept my eyes and ears open as a helper led me to my first appointment. But if moans of ecstasy were being generated, not a whisper of them escaped through these featureless doors.
Room seventeen was plain, white, narrow, about the width of a railway carriage but half the length. Just inside, a woman in a white coat with arms like hams stood behind a counter. My mind flashed back alarmingly to a sauna I’d visited in Finland. Similar ladies, wearing floor–length plastic aprons, had grabbed me as I emerged, reeling with heat, thrown me facedown on a table, and scraped me almost raw with the sort of brushes normally used to scrub floors.
This lady motioned for me to remove my robe and walk to the far end of the room.
“Attention!” she ordered. (Watch out!)
As I turned to face her, a stream of water slammed me against the wall with fire–hose force. What I’d taken for a counter actually enclosed a kind of hydrant, with a heavy–duty canvas hose and a brass nozzle attached. Mouth and nose filled with seawater, I tried to fend off the stream. No hope. For three minutes, every inch of my body was battered by the torrent. If you could drown standing up, this was the way to do it.
