THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (350 pp.)—Georges Pernoud and Sabine Flaissier—Putnam ($5).
"That was a nice way to behave," said the Deputy to the King. "You are a good man and you are liked, but see what a mess you have got into!" Whereupon the Deputy burst into tears.
The tearful Deputy was a man named Corollaire, the good man was King Louis XVI, and the mess was that fantastic and shattering imbroglio—the French Revolution. Louis, dressed in old brown plush and very dirty linen, did not look much of a King at the moment. He had just been frustrated in the most sensible decision of his reign—to flee from his capital with his family. The royal entourage had as much chance of inconspicuous anonymity as a troupe of menagerie freaks.They were recognized 125 miles from Paris at Varennes and—the whole coach train of them—hauled back to finish their roles as tragedians in the century's bloodiest drama.
Georges Pernoud, French journalist, and Sabine Flaissier, historian, have brilliantly executed the astute notion of telling the story of the French Revolution in terms of eyewitness stories culled from 50,000 items in the national archives. The book gives all the blooming, buzzing confusion of a new world being created but not yet comprehended or tidied up by the hindsight or partisanship of a Michelet, Taine or Carlyle.
The Baker's Wife. It is grim stuff for those who have comfortably and vaguely given the French Revolution a retrospective blessing as a Good Thing—Lafayette and all that. The heirs of the French Enlightenment behaved at times like Mau Mau. Parts of butchered bodies were carried on pikes through the streets, and children played in the gutters with severed heads, and in the official Terror the carnage reached a truly modern scale (1,285 deaths at the guillotine in 45 days in Paris alone).
No wonder the King wanted to call it quits. The mob of Paris forced him from his Byzantine cocoon of ceremony at Versailles to rule in Paris. They wanted bread. He promised them bread. As for the mob who butchered his guards and jostled his coach all the way to Paris, they hailed his generosity, "Long live the baker!" and Queen Marie Antoinette was saluted as "the baker's wife." It was time to go. In this whole bewildering montage of scenes, it is on the confused King—and all the confusing attitudes held toward him—that the mind focuses. Things were beyond everyone—most of all beyond Louis—prisoner of a system he could neither administer nor change. He had to go, but the agonized and muddled sincerity of all the witnesses gives pathos to his historic plight. King and all, he was a man.