Footsteps

by Richard Holmes

  He went again to the arcades of the Palais-Royal, tasting its new atmosphere of rumour and political fear: a hawker thrust into his hand a copy of the pamphlet entitled “Denunciations of the Crimes of Maximilien Robespierre”—the text of Louvet’s famous attack on Robespierre in the Convention, which failed to rally support, and ultimately sealed the fate of the Girondists the following summer. Wordsworth began to see with his “proper eyes” how the great questions of Liberty, Life and Death would be settled—not, as he had imagined, by some great common impulse of the people, some invincible natural force like a storm sweeping all before it, “the spirit of the age”; but rather by the personal struggles and “arbitrement” of those who ruled in the capital city. In the crucible of power the conflict of individual men would be decisive. His idealism was chastened; yet his response was the reverse of cynical. He says that he almost prayed that the Revolution would now draw in only the men worthy of Liberty, “matured to live in plainness and in truth”, and that men like this might arrive, with the gift of tongues,

  … From the four quarters of the winds to do

  For France, what without help she could not do,

  A work of honour …

  I remembered our talk of friends flying in to Paris in May from all the capitals of Europe.

  It was clear that Wordsworth realised the Revolution had reached a critical stage. But what did he think of his own situation within it? It was here that I came up against the biographer’s dependence on the survival of personal papers. No letters or journals of Wordsworth are known for this period, and the touching letters of Annette Vallon, discovered over a hundred years later in the municipal archives (they were detained by the French political censor), threw no light on Wordsworth’s time in Paris. I had to make what I could of the 1805 text of The Prelude.

  Up to a point, it is remarkably frank and revealing. He describes the nights he used to lie awake in his little hotel room, reading with “unextinguished taper”, and how—thinking of the violence of the mob, a violence like nothing he had ever remotely experienced in his life before—“the fear gone by pressed on me almost like a fear to come.”

  I thought of those September massacres,

  Divided from me by a little month,

  And felt and touched them, a substantial dread …

  He could not sleep, and his imagination “wrought upon” him until he felt he could hear a voice crying through the whole city, “Sleep no more.” He tried to calm himself with rational thoughts in the long hours before the winter dawn, but he could not recover his sense of “full security”, and gradually a deep and almost nightmarish terror of Paris possessed him:

  … At the best it seemed a place of fear

  Unfit for the repose of night

  Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam.

  Finally, in the third week of December 1792, Wordsworth took the diligence to Calais and “reluctantly” returned to England. In The Prelude he says the decisive reason was “absolute want of funds for my support”—and also, one may suppose, for the support of Annette, whose baby had just been born. Fear for his personal safety was not the conscious motive, for he says in a crucial passage that he had considered sacrificing himself to the revolutionary Girondist cause, though “no better than an alien in the land”. What he says is convincing—there is every evidence that the young Wordsworth was a brave and adventurous man. Moreover, it shows how deeply he had pledged himself to the Revolution as he understood it, even though he saw realistically that his contribution “must be of small worth”. Had he had means, had he been free, he says,

  I doubtless should have made a common cause

  With some who perished; haply perished, too,

  A poor mistaken and bewildered offering-

  Should to the breast of Nature have gone back,

  With all my resolutions, all my hopes,

  A Poet only to myself, to men

  Useless …

  Of course, it is in retrospect—after some ten years—that he regards such a sacrifice as “useless” and “mistaken”. At the time it must have been an agonising decision to take, and there is no doubt that in making the sensible choice to go home he felt he had betrayed some ideal deep within himself—had in fact abandoned most of what both Beaupuy and Annette represented: his youthful hopes of life, his revolutionary spirit. In the long term, and from the literary point of view, he was right, and justified: he was destined to be a great poet, not a political martyr. But the months of depression and uncertainty he suffered after this at Racedown with Dorothy, before being reanimated by his meeting with Coleridge (the “Friend” to whom all this part of The Prelude is addressed), show what the decision cost him.

  In one of the most moving passages of Book X, speaking directly to Coleridge the bare truth “as if to thee alone in private talk”, he says that “through months, through years” he was haunted by what he had left behind in France. His daytime thoughts were melancholic, his dreams miserable. Even long after the atrocities of the Terror were over he scarcely had “one night of quiet sleep”, and he was filled with visions of despair. Most striking of all, he dreamed continually of being back in Paris and being hauled before one of the revolutionary courts, accused of some nameless act of treachery. Hopelessly and desperately he would try to defend himself by

  … Long orations which in dreams I pleaded

  Before unjust tribunals,—with a voice

  Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense

  Of treachery and desertion in the place

  The holiest that I knew of, my own soul.

  Nothing could be more frank, no confession more heartfelt, than this admission of the revolutionary who—for the best of reasons, perhaps—had in 1792 abandoned the cause.

  Here my own investigations were also brought up short again. Wordsworth had left Paris in December 1792, along with so many others who saw the radical direction in which Robespierre was steering the Revolution. Were any writers bold enough to remain? The history of the so-called White’s Hotel group of expatriates had never been written, though the individual stories—of largely political figures like Tom Paine, who was elected Deputy for the Pas de Calais, fell foul of Robespierre in 1793 and missed the guillotine only by the mistaken marking of his cell door—were comparatively well known. There were also minor celebrities like Helen Maria Williams, who survived the Revolution, and several weeks of imprisonment with her mother and sister in the Luxembourg, to write such highly coloured accounts as her Memories of the Reign of Robespierre (1795). The description of her midnight arrest, by the head of her local Paris section, a mixture of curious gallantry and ruthless revolutionary police work, is one of the few memorable and convincing passages; though there is also a fine black-comic episode in which she explains the enormous value of her English tea-kettle in keeping up the morale of those in the condemned cells.

  But none of these memoirs provided the day-to-day authenticity, the biographical intensity, the quality of first-hand witness to a decisive experience which I wanted to supply some mirror to the events of 1968. Moreover, I had already glimpsed, through Wordsworth, the shadow of a philosophical problem—though was it philosophical or psychological?—which seemed to lie behind the English experience of revolution. It was not so much the alienation of the English witness from the events he observed, though this was obviously important; more the enormous gap that was revealed between his rational expectations of the Revolution, the whole atmosphere of progressive eighteenth-century Enlightenment—and its imaginative impact upon him as an individual, a wild mixture of hope and terror and desperation, the sense of life being radically altered in a way that broke every form and convention that had been previously held. It was also the sense of personal demands made, of a sudden need for sacrifice and risk—Wordsworth’s choice to go or stay—which might never be encountered in ordinary life in such an absolute form. I wanted to discover someone who had met all this head-on; and I wanted to know in detail how they had, quite s
imply, made out.

  2

  The gap between rational expectation and imaginative impact or, to put it in its classical form, between Reason and Imagination, was something that became progressively more significant as the heady excitements of 1968 drained away into the anxious and cynical 1970s. “Imagination” had been one of the watchwords of the Paris students, conjuring up a whole new world of brilliant, creative, unauthoritarian (another key notion) solutions to society’s problems. But what did it mean? It was of course taken from nineteenth-century Romantic vocabulary—it assumed the rebellious idealism and individualism of Blake and Baudelaire, Shelley and Bakunin, Trotsky and Lautréamont. But still, what did it actually mean?

  In the famous poster stuck to the bolted door of the Sorbonne on the night of 13 May 1968—like Luther’s declaration on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral—it was used in a curious way. Posters are not intended to be philosophical statements, but this one indicated a particular way of thinking. It read: “The revolution which is beginning will call into question not only capitalist society but industrial society. The consumer society must perish of a violent death. The society of alienation must disappear from history. We are inventing a new and original world—Imagination au Pouvoir!”

  “Imagination” is an instrument both of creation and of destruction. It is a way of wiping the slate clean, of achieving a gleaming tabula rasa. The attempt to oppose it to existing society in all its corrupt forms—capitalist, industrial, consumer, and alienated—evokes not so much Marx as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “Imagination” is a way of purifying society from all corruption or organisation; a way of starting again from the individual goodness of man, unfettered by prejudice or convention. Indeed, it slowly dawned on me, “Imagination” is here used in the opposite sense to what one might expect: it means precisely the “Pure Reason”—the “Godlike Reason”—the “Progressive Reason”—of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Like the early idealist revolutionaries of the 1790s, the students had been intoxicated by supremely rational expectations. They had wanted to change a whole world—or re-invent it—without having the faintest notion of the impact this would have. They had been led on, not as they thought by their warm hearts (and they were warm), but by the wonderful ice-palaces in their heads. They hadn’t imagined anything in the constructive sense at all. They were Utopian speculators whose Brave New World lay in their minds alone, a bundle of slogans, images, dream-words and seed-ideas.

  That, at any rate, seemed one way of looking at it; and of accounting for the lack of political consequences to 1968, which began to make my comparison with the earlier Revolution seem superficial. One of the most influential. French commentators, Edgar Morin, writing in Le Monde at the end of May of that year, already drew the distinction along similar lines: between a political and a cultural revolution, in which “Imagination” had played a role more educative than socially revolutionary. He wrote:

  Marx once said that the French Revolution was a classic revolution because it developed the characteristics upon which all succeeding bourgeois revolutions were modelled. Perhaps, in a similar way, the Paris Student Commune will become the classic model for all future transformations in Western societies. The destruction of the University Bastille drew together all types of young people in much the same way as the destruction of that other Bastille united the Three Orders in 1789. The transformation of the Sorbonne into a forum-cum-festival-cum-laboratory of ideas created the image of an open society and an open university where imagination reigns in the place of a dismal bureaucracy; where education is available to all; and where economic exploitation and domination have been eradicated … Precisely because it has been Utopian rather than constructive it has been able to envisage a future that embraces the whole of society.

  Pondering on these various interpretations, I continued to search among the scant records of the White’s Hotel group. I located the actual site of the hotel, strategically placed in the passage des Petits-Pères, between the King’s prison in the Temple and the arcades of the Palais-Royal. It is a tiny side-street, next to the old church of Notre Dame des Victoires which was pillaged in 1794 and which became the official Bourse des Valeurs between 1796 and 1809. The present hotel building is largely occupied by the local Commissariat de Police, who knew nothing of its historic associations; which was perhaps just as well.

  The existence of the White’s Hotel group became best known in England in 1792, when the Annual Register carried a report of the notorious banquet held there by the Friends of the Rights of Man, on 18 November—just after Wordsworth had gone back to Paris. The banquet was attended by some fifty ardent francophiles—English, Irish and American—among whom were Tom Paine, who was currently being burnt in effigy in England; and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who was to be killed in Dublin before the rising of the United Irishmen in 1798.

  Forty “treasonous toasts”, as the Register reported, were drunk—to the National Convention, to the French armies, and to the “speedy abolition of all hereditary titles and feudal distinctions”—and a revolutionary verse by Helen Maria Williams was recited. A wealthy banker, Sir Robert Smythe, formally renounced his title, to prolonged applause. An American poet, Joel Barlow, presented a “Letter to the National Convention in France” which earned him, along with Thomas Christie and John Home Tooke, the title of “Citoyen”. Barlow’s works had been printed in London by Joseph Johnson, a radical publisher of St Paul’s Churchyard, who was also to print the early work of Wordsworth and Blake. Yet within three months this whole ebullient group was to be scattered, and my researches led mournfully to a history of arrests, trials, recantations or executions: either at the hands of Pitt’s Government in England for treason (especially during the great Treason Trials of 1794), or at the hands of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety for being aliens and spies.

  For the White’s Hotel group were caught between the two fires of revolution and reaction. Among their most tragic stories was that of the Rev William Jackson, who was arrested on a mission between Paris and Dublin, and tried for High Treason in November 1794. While waiting for the capital sentence to be passed, his wife brought him a strong brew of tea in the cells below the dock. On his own instructions it had been heavily laced with whisky—and “metallic poisoning”—and in a few minutes he was convulsed in agony. The court, outraged at this gesture of revolutionary suicide, demanded that Jackson be dragged back up to the dock to hear his sentence. But one of the jury, an apothecary, mercifully intervened: “I think him verging to eternity; he has every symptom of death upon him … I do not think he can hear his judgement.” So the enthusiast of Liberty died in the cells in his wife’s arms, leaving no record of his life but a bare court transcript.

  From White’s Hotel in Paris I myself moved back to Joseph Johnson’s publishing house in London, determined to pursue my enquiries from the other direction, among the circle of radical writers in London who sympathised with events in France. I searched among the names of those who had dined at Johnson’s table—Blake, William Godwin, Joel and Ruth Barlow—and then, many months later, I came across a letter written to one of Johnson’s little-known friends, William Roscoe, a liberal attorney, in Liverpool. This letter is still kept in the Central Library at Liverpool, among a mass of minor papers. But to me it was one of the most exciting documents I had ever read. It was dated London, 12 November 1792—exactly six days before the banquet at White’s—and contained the following paragraph:

  I have determined to set out for Paris in the course of a fortnight or three weeks; and I shall not now halt at Dover, I promise you; for I go alone—neck or nothing is the word. During my stay I shall not forget my friends; but I will tell you so when I am really there. Meantime let me beg you not to mix with the shallow herd who throw an odium on immutable principles, because some of the mere instruments of the Revolution were too sharp.—Children of any growth will do mischief when they meddle with edged tools.

  The voice broke in on me like a new sound, a new
dimension: brisk, cheerful, daring, strangely modern. Paris, alone, neck or nothing! It was like that moment in a Shakespearian play when, after the muffled scene-setting dialogue of the minor characters, the hero abruptly enters from an unexpected angle in the wings, speaking with the sudden clarity and assurance that a major actor brings to his part. The whole theatre instinctively stiffens to attention. Yet in this case it was not a hero but a heroine. For the author of the letter to Roscoe was Mary Wollstonecraft. It was she who was setting out for Paris, quite alone, and airily referring to the September Massacres as “meddling with edged tools”. I had found my exemplar, and my guide.

  3

  In November 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft was thirty-three years old, unmarried, and that rarest of things in eighteenth-century England, a woman freelance reviewer and writer, living entirely by her own pen. She had published, as well as a mass of occasional journalism, four books: a critique of teaching methods, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786); a semi-autobiographical novel, Mary (1788); a collection of tales for children, Original Stories (1788); and a classic first statement of British feminism, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792). This last work, attacking male attitudes to education, marriage and the Rousseauistic “romanticising” of women’s subservient role in conventional society, was dedicated to the French statesman Talleyrand. The dedication closed with a characteristically cool but insistent demand that the revolutionaries should turn their legislative attention to the claims of women everywhere: “I wish, sir, to set some investigations of this kind afloat in France; and should they lead to a confirmation of my principles when your Constitution is revised, the Rights of Women may be respected, if it be fully proved that reason calls for this respect, and loudly demands JUSTICE for one-half of the human race.”