by John Baxter
The manner in which Michaelmas was observed in Britain and France emphasized even more their national differences. In Britain a pervasive gloom characterized the feast, a contrast to its gaiety in rural France. For British farmworkers who’d failed to win a contract, Michaelmas, as the day on which rents must be paid, could mean a “moonlight flit,” the whole family sneaking away by night, carrying their possessions. In 1836, satirist George Cruikshank made this the subject of one of his caricatures.
A family does a moonlight flit on Michaelmas.
Cruikshank, George. A Family Does a Moonlight Flit on Michaelmas. Author’s collection.
Charles Dickens captured some of the desolation in his description of Michaelmas in his 1853 novel, Bleak House:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier–brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.
The French celebrated the Feast of Saint Martin, Martinmas, on November 11, with even more ceremony than Michaelmas. With the harvest over and the penitential season of Advent looming, it was an opportunity to carouse. Traditionally, Martinmas was also the day on which pigs, fed on kitchen scraps through the summer, were slaughtered and their meat salted down or hung up to air–dry into hams and sausages.
And yet on the new calendar, neither of these important feasts was even mentioned. Were they no longer to be observed? If so, when were pigs to be butchered? A slaughter needed organization: the pig sticker called from the next village; the family rallied to help bleed, skin, and prepare the carcass; others to salt down the joints, cut up smaller pieces of meat for sausage, and drain the blood for boudin noir. Surely they weren’t suggesting that pigs should be fed through the winter? Both the animal and its owners would starve.
Bureaucrats also complained of the new system. The need to transpose dates between the Republican and Gregorian calendars disrupted official documents and complicated international communications. The London Times found Fabre’s calendar “productive of endless inconvenience in mercantile transactions, in comparing dates of letters and bills of exchange, and possessing not one advantage in return, as it was not even astronomically just.”
It survived through the last days of the Directoire and was still in place on Brumaire 18, Year VIII (November 9, 1799), when Napoléon Bonaparte led the coup d’état that formally ended the revolution.
“In revolution there are two types of people,” said Napoléon, “those who make it and those who profit from it.” Determined to be part of the second group, he adopted the best ideas of the revolution, including the legal system, renamed the Code Napoléon, and the metric system. He kept Robespierre’s plan for a network of schools and academies designed to identify the keenest young minds and train them in science, technology, and management. It would lead to the lycée system and a society more effectively educated than most of the world.
The church was restored as an official institution, though no longer as the state religion. As with those other advances of the revolution retained under the First Empire, it was tolerated so long as it was regulated.
The Concordat that authorized this change took effect from Easter Sunday, Germinal 28, Year X (April 18, 1802). The same law reintroduced the Gregorian calendar, and Sunday became again the official and sole day of rest.
Napoléon was crowned—or rather, crowned himself—emperor of the French on Frimaire 11, Year XIII (December 2, 1804), taking the crown from the hands of the pope’s representative and placing it on his own head. It was only when he felt completely in charge of the new state that he abolished the Republican calendar, effective January 1, 1806, returning France to the Gregorian calendar that preceded it. The creation of Fabre d’Églantine had survived a little over twelve years.
32
Watch It Come Down
Santa Monica, California. August 1988. 2 a.m. 36°C. Even by the ocean the air lies motionless, subdued by the heat. The cloying scent of night-blooming jasmine is everywhere. In the faux-Spanish courtyard of a twenties-style villa, the tiles of a dried-out fountain crawl in a pattern of orange and black as ladybugs in their thousands struggle and clamber, drunk on heat and perfume.
THE FRENCH NEVER TOOK SCIENCE FICTION SERIOUSLY, LEAST OF all in one of its most popular forms, the novel of world destruction.
Not so British writers, who for more than a century have relished laying waste to the world, starting with England’s green and pleasant land itself. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells set dinosaurs and Martian war machines roaming, respectively, in The Lost World and The War of the Worlds. In Richard Jefferies’s After London, or Wild England, a cataclysmic blizzard leaves the home counties choked by impenetrable woodland. John Christopher’s The Death of Grass took the opposite tack, disposing of mankind by killing the grains we eat.
John Wyndham, walking with his wife along a country lane at night, saw blackberry canes whipping in the wind and was inspired to invent a race of ambulant homicidal plants in The Day of the Triffids. Subsequently, in The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos, he unleashed submarine monsters and gangs of malevolent superchildren.
But nobody so comprehensively laid waste to Britain as J. G. Ballard. In The Wind from Nowhere, a gale destroys every sign of human habitation above ground, only to die away inexplicably as the last building crumbles. He followed with The Drowned World, in which global warming returns England (and presumably also France) to the era of the dinosaurs. He imagines London as a swamp, the vegetation and fauna of which are reverting to the Triassic through some unspecified biological process. Mankind has retreated to the Arctic. A few stragglers camp out on the top floor of London’s Ritz Hotel but are kept awake by the bark of giant lizards echoing down Piccadilly.
His other books were even more anarchic. The Drought imagines a layer of pollution covering the oceans, putting an end to evaporation, clouds, rain, and—inevitably—mankind. In The Crystal World, a virus attacks the rain forests, turning them to crystal, then does the same to humans.
Barbarella and the interstellar florist.
Forest, Jean-Claude. Barbarella and the Interstellar Florist. In Le Terrain Vague, 1964.
Neither Ballard nor his predecessors found an answering voice across the channel. French visionaries saw nothing sinister in nature. Climate, nature, the land and its products were to be embraced, celebrated, loved. Jules Verne, the nation’s most famous writer of scientific fantasy, could not have been more benign. No worlds were destroyed in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, or Around the World in Eighty Days. When in the 1960s France did briefly enter the international fantasy scene, the vehicle of its success was equally lightweight—a comic strip that chronicled the mostly sexual adventures of a forty-first-century heroine, Barbarella.
Like Verne’s tales of fantastic voyages, Barbarella has a flavor of the traveler’s tale and bedtime story, nothing that grown-ups need take seriously. In the first of her adventures, Barbarella hitches a ride across the universe on a spaceship filled with flowers. “Is there a place for me among the roses and wild amaranths?” she inquires of the handsome pilot. A true son of Fabre d’Églantine, he responds courteously, “A seat of honor, beautiful orchid.”
Though this national indifference to universal ruin intrigued and puzzled the Francophile James Ballard, the fact that disasters and dystopias should fail to flourish on French soil was no more than the Republican calendar would lead us to expect. A nation that could remake the year in the image of nature—however unsuccessfully—would be the last to enjoy seeing it destroyed. Even Sade, the nihilist’s nihilist, only flirted with the concept. “To attack the sun,” he mused, “to deprive the universe of it, or to use it to set the world ablaze—t
hese would be crimes indeed!”
Once a year, Ballard spent a few weeks on holiday along the Mediterranean. Occasionally he set stories there, fables that hinted at unexpressed urges toward chaos among exiles crowding the Côte d’Azur and Costa Brava. Super-Cannes and Cocaine Nights are sleek fantasies of the near future. Half Helmut Newton, half Bill Gates, they take place in gated holiday compounds or research establishments where frustrated technocrats or bored Eurotrash vent their frustrations on the weak, who become sacrifices to their existential frenzy. (The stories have a hidden agenda: in 1964 on a family holiday near Alicante, Ballard’s wife, Mary, died within a few hours, victim of a runaway infection and inadequate local medical facilities.)
Ballard also set a series of stories in Vermilion Sands, a generic down-at-heel Mediterranean resort of the future. Its craftspeople, bar owners, and part-time writers spend the off-season sculpting the clouds in flimsy lightweight aircraft or operating poetry machines that spew verse on ribbons of tape that tangle around the empty buildings “like some vivid cerise bougainvillea.”
In one story of the series, “Prima Belladonna,” a botanist raises “choro-flora” plants that sing. They include “soprano mimosas, azalea trios, mixed coloratura herbaceous from the Santiago Garden Choir,” and a giant “Khan-Arachnid orchid” that is half diva, half Venus flytrap. The story is subtly subversive, since Jim Ballard disliked music and owned neither radio nor record player.
Vermilion Sands captures that Mediterranean sense of world destruction which the French shun. When the world ends for France, it will, Ballard suggests, expire in the same manner as his imaginary resort, gently but inexorably declining from an excess of those archetypal Gallic afflictions, cafard and ennui: as T. S. Eliot suggested, “not with a bang but a whimper.”
The anarchic impulse articulated by Sade was inherited by André Breton and the surrealists, who revered the marquis and wistfully envied his recklessness. “The purest surrealist act,” announced Breton, “is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly.” Not that anyone in the group ever did anything so ill-mannered. Breton’s father, after all, had been a policeman. Their outrages were limited to disrupting theatrical events staged by their rivals or abusing priests or nuns in the street.
To Ballard, France was inseparable from surrealism. In common with many Britons, he saw it as an exotic Continental courtesan with whom he could indulge fantasies that no British partner would countenance. Above his desk he pinned a Max Ernst collage of a nude woman, her head replaced with that of a predatory bird.
Once Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of Empire of the Sun made him rich, Ballard commissioned an artist to repaint two canvases by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux that were believed to have been destroyed during World War II. His favorite, The Mirror, showed a woman clothed in a formal gown, seated before a mirror that reflects her naked. Ballard never hung the painting. For a time he kept it leaning on the wall next to his desk, ready for that moment when, he once confided, he anticipated it opening like a portal, inviting him to step in.
He talked often about moving to France. “I go to the Côte d’Azur every summer,” he said, “and, if I could afford it, would happily live there for the rest of my life.” Since his personal fortune at that time exceeded £4 million, it was not money that prevented him. Did he fear that France would free his imagination, and with it his hunger for destruction? Could he see himself as part of an expat mob roaming the streets of Cannes, hunting victims to murder? These were questions only the woman in The Mirror could answer.
33
Who Was That Masked Man?
Downtown Los Angeles. March 1992. 10 p.m. 14°C. Reaching the filming location means threading through trailers housing makeup and costume staff. Fat black cables snake from humming generators toward a blaze of light. A gantry looks down on a narrow, mirrored club. “What’s this movie about, anyway?” A grip nods toward a stocky figure in leather jacket and dark glasses waiting impassively in the shadows. “Him.”
IF NO SCHOLAR HAS DONE SO ALREADY, ONE WILL EVENTUALLY write a thesis about the French Revolution that claims responsibility on its behalf for the existence of Batman—not to mention Superman, Wonder Woman, the Lone Ranger, and the Incredible Hulk. Would there have been Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne without Sir Percy Blakeney and the Scarlet Pimpernel? Probably not.
Of the numerous novels, plays, and musical works inspired by the revolution, most sided with its victims. Authors who before 1789 showed French aristocracy as oppressors of the virtuous poor now took the opposite point of view, celebrating them as sensitive and kindly souls martyred by a bloodthirsty mob.
In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens writes his aristos villainous, none more so than the Marquis St. Evrémonde, who represents the worst excesses of the ancien régime. Having run down a pedestrian, the marquis tosses some money out the window and orders the coachman to drive on. But Dickens is just as critical of the revolution. In Madame Defarge, a tricoteuse who sits knitting under the guillotine as her victims die, he created one of the most memorable of all fictional revolutionaries.
The book’s moral hero is a disreputable English barrister, Sydney Carton. Drawn into the revolution by chance, he redeems a wasted life by going to the guillotine to console a terrified girl. Dickens’s final words for Carton are among his most memorable: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
The more prolific Baroness Orczy, writing half a century later than Dickens, was not much for shades of character. An aristocrat herself, she fled Hungary as a child to escape a peasant uprising, an experience that made her understandably hostile to rebels. The manner in which she describes the Paris mob at the opening of her first novel about the revolution, The Scarlet Pimpernel, leaves no doubt about her sympathies: “A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate.”
Her hero, no less broadly drawn, is a titled Englishman, Sir Percy Blakeney. Between 1905 and 1940, she published more than a dozen novels and short story collections about his exploits. Blakeney is one of popular fiction’s first clandestine heroes. Alexandre Dumas may have beaten Orczy to first place with his 1844 novel about Edmond Dantès, an escaped convict, wrongly convicted, who pursues his revenge in disguise as the fictitious count of Monte Cristo, but only Orczy explored such a character as extensively, furnishing many of the details that we still associate with the hero in hiding.
Before Orczy, few fictional characters hid their expertise. Sherlock Holmes enjoyed demonstrating his skill at deduction and Svengali his ability to hypnotize. But Sir Percy allows everyone, even his wife, to regard him as a wimp and a fop. Only a few confederates know of his efforts to smuggle aristos out of France while evading the malevolent Chauvelin, officer of the Committee of Public Safety. Calling himself the Scarlet Pimpernel, Sir Percy leaves behind a calling card—another trope of the hidden-hero persona—with the image of that tiny star-shaped red flower, Anagallis arvensis. He also gleefully circulates the rhyme that became one of the most memorable aspects of the series:
We seek him here, we seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven?—Is he in hell?
That damned, elusive Pimpernel.
No later masked hero would be complete without some similar announcement—a costume, slogan, or catchphrase: “It’s a bird . . . it’s a plane . . .” for Superman, the Lone Ranger’s “Hi ho, Silver!,” the Shadow’s “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” As for the Scarlet Pimpernel’s nom de guerre, the name of a flower, might the Baroness have been influenced by Fabre and his botanical almanac? On this topic the lady, seldom lost for words, was uncharacteristically silent.
Parisians, having proved in 1789 the value of taking to the streets, did so again
in July 1830 and June 1832. The latter uprising lasted only two days, but we know it well because it inspired Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables and the films and musicals that followed. Then there was the brief anarchist rebellion of 1871 known as the Commune: in the power vacuum following the siege of Paris by the armies of Prussia, the citizens of Montmartre—the most militantly socialist of all Paris districts—declared the city free of all government except that of its people.
As the French army sat in barracks and the administration dithered in Bordeaux, on the other side of the country, the Communards confiscated all church property and ended religious teaching in schools. Rents were suspended, and pawnshops forced to return household goods and tools pledged by starving families. Workers were encouraged to take over businesses whose owners had fled the city. The families of National Guard members killed fighting the Prussians were promised pensions, a provision that, had it ever been introduced, would have extended to both unmarried companions and illegitimate children.
Though Fabre d’Églantine had taken little interest in the ideals of the revolution, he shared in its immortality at least by proxy, particularly during this episode, since the Commune also decided to restore the Republican calendar. But before it could do so, it collapsed. Guided by traitors who led them through the old gypsum mines that honeycomb Montmartre, soldiers from outside Paris with no allegiance to the rebels brutally suppressed the uprising. Thousands died or were exiled to New Caledonia.
The readiness of the Communards to revive the Republican calendar suggests that Fabre and his collaborators were on the right track in attempting to shake loose the naming and counting of days from church control.
In 1849, Auguste Comte, French philosopher and proponent of positivism, had proposed a solar calendar with thirteen months of twenty-eight days each. An additional festival day, commemorating the dead, made up the total of 365. Following Fabre’s lead, Comte renumbered the years, beginning with the “great crisis” of 1789. Months and days were named for great figures in science, religion, philosophy, industry, and literature, ranging from Gutenberg and Shakespeare to Buddha and Socrates. In total his calendar honored 558 individuals, including a few villains (among them Napoléon), whose name days would be devoted to their “perpetual execration.”
