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virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless.
-maximillien robespierre.
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It begins, they say, in a tennis court in the greatest palace France has ever (had) built, amid the splendor of Versailles, with a shout and an oath immortalized forever after in tinted-yellow oil paints and terribly stirring speeches. It is an irony to trump all ironies that they began their crusade there; the idealists' first defiance, but not their last.
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But perhaps it begins even earlier than that, when he waves off a gallant young marquis drunk on the ideals of dearest liberty off on his ship to fight a war an ocean and half a world away. It is doomed, they are all doomed, but not in the way first expected.
He returns to court that day and finds it suddenly constricting, and he wonders why, out of all the years that people have been talking so nebulously about les droits de l'homme in their countless draperied salons, he has only now realized their weight.
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Lafayette comes back, of course, two years wiser but if possible even more assured in his convictions than he was at nineteen. It is less of a fire than a forge.
"I have been speaking to the Americans' Thomas Jefferson," he tells France when they meet again in the calm before the storm.
"Oh?"
"The principles of liberty remain unchanging, no matter the country in which they are planted," says the marquis. He does not say if they could achieve liberty, why not we ourselves?
They were like schoolchildren with a guilty secret; they pretended they were deaf to the unsaid. When Lafayette begins to gather support, France secretly cheers him on.
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The cost of bread rises, again and again and again.
Legendary aspirations mean little and nothing to the hungry poor.
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The delegates of the Tiers État are men that France has met before (they are his men, after all), and he greets them pleasantly as befits their nation that none of them are completely sure exists in anything nearing physicality. They are burgeoning philosopher-kings and work too far in their minds, and yet they will fight for their country with nothing more than words and the great unending abyssal conviction of their own ideals.
France does not begrudge them their convictions and watches from a discreet corner, and when the arguments begin, he knows that it is only a matter of time.
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The Tennis Court Oath, for all its everlasting remembrance, was only ever the promise of a constitution. France the country does not fault it for what came after, then again has never quite forgiven its later betrayals. They were all such bright-eyed worldchangers, himself included, and in the end, there is too much to forgive and few alive to receive.
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Summer passes in a whirl of disjointed events; the Bastille falls and he feels reborn upon a wave of cheers and shouts and piping revolutionary music. It has gone to all their heads, and the howling in his head is equaled only by the howling of the mob who even then had a voice.
His king has bowed down to the people. The whole world has been set upon its head.
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The National Assembly meets, again and again and again. Lafayette, he hears, is head of the National Guard, and they talk of Amérique and liberté in the spaces between. The conversation turns again to Jefferson, and France looks over the marquis's shoulder as he authors La Déclaration des Droits de L'homme et du Citoyen, a suitably pretentious title that promises further and greater things the more times he reads it over.
The National Assembly receives it the next day and it is duly, uproariously approved.
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Odd, he thinks when there is time (not much) to think, how such words can inspire his people (citizens) to such great lengths. The call of liberty is a siren call, he thinks. It promises great things and leads men to smash themselves against rocks forever until they die.
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He does not see his king very often anymore. France has a motto now, only fitting for a new republic. La république française, he says to himself, savoring the words as they roll over his tongue and the tongues of all his people, tasting of smoke and ink and the first traces of iron blood. He does not particularly want to see his king, in fact, though he wishes his royal family well in a detached sort of way. Republics have no time for kings. There will be no more kings of France.
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When he first converses with Maximillien Robespierre, he does not need an introduction. The lawyer from Arras has earned a reputation for his passionate entreaties for reform in the Assembly, and France finds him pleasant enough. He has met all the leaders of his Revolution; Danton and Desmoulins and Mirabeau and Marat. Robespierre admires the dead philosopher Rousseau, and that is what they talk about over wine, their conversation measured, careful, ardently explosive.
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There is more unrest as the year wears on. The people are tired of promises and the uncertain prevarication of their king. There is a massacre in the Champ de Mars. France goes to bed early that night be is kept awake by the sea-crash sound of the restless Parisian crowds.
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He can feel the paranoia building in him, and when Austria, that smug monarchial bastard, declares war, it is almost a relief. France has always felt better when the enemy is outside and within view, for then there is the chance to strike and hurt someone other than himself. Austria has royalist spies, he knows, and he needs to be dealt with before he sends his subversion into France's dear homeland.
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Prussia joins the war, and Spain, and later England, always England. They jeer at him and he laughs wildly back. He may be fighting a five-way (more than five) war, but by God he will win.
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The war goes on, but he finds himself staying in Paris, for things there are happening far too quickly. The roar of the mob in his head never quietens its demands.
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One day the Jacobins invite him to a meeting, and he finds himself entranced by their visions of a new France, a bastion of democracy, where virtue rules all with a gentle hand. It is nothing more than he has hoped for himself all along, and he is overjoyed that his people feel the same, even after all that has happened.
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Lafayette warns him about the Jacobins, but France knows that the former's disagreements with the latter are somewhat personal; Lafayette, he who wrote the Declaration, has nevertheless ever been a moderate, and he insists on sticking with his king even when the monarchy themselves grow daily more reviled.
France calls him a royalist and a traitor, tells him that a constitutional monarchy cannot possibly be realized when the monarchy-his former monarchy-are so corrupt. His shouts drown out the marquis, but when he leaves it is France himself who feels betrayed.
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Not long after, Lafayette flees and is sent to prison in Prussia by royalists, of all people. France is no longer sure what to think. He sees more of the Jacobins but they are all of them too burdened with affairs of the state to speak easily.
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The state is kingless, but it is all safely in the name of liberty. France protests loudly but soon sees his own folly; there must be sacrifices made, after all, and it is a time of war. The belligerents are coming from all sides, and one cannot be squeamish.
The act is immortalized in cold, acid-etched copper and tinted a full range of impossibly bright colors. Here the head, here the guillotine, here the madly cheering crowd. For liberty, for liberty.
Liberty.
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He has no regrets.
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He is both country and man, at least in theory, but these days it is difficult to separate France with its mob-howling Paris at its heart with the philosophizing Francis Bonnefoy, because they are both a part of him, the violence and the hope for a better place, the terror and the virtue.
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The Terror comes as a succession of names, new ones for his Revolutionary months with their flavor of mad enlightenment and dead ones too, a long and neverending string of condemned and soon-to-die, traitors and spies and enemies. There are always more of the latter. Germinal and Brumaire and Fructidor, year I and year II, all the benefits of the metric system and a ten-month year-small comfort against the mob-slain.
Their names blur in the mind and even then the crowds do not stop.
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We are mad men for mad times, France thinks giddily. Robespierre talks of virtue and sends his own friends to the guillotine-for liberty, always for liberty. There are such a lot of dead. His head is choked with them.
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He has no regrets, for a country has none, but he wonders at the strength of principles. He wonders at their truth. Terror and virtue, he thinks, and Robespierre had said that they were inseparable. The sun shines on Paris still and all his leaders are dead.
Mad men, indeed, but he was one of them, and still he does not know the truth. All his high hopes have come tumbling, in more ways than one, but he cannot find it in himself to be disappointed.
It seems that there will again be emperor-kings of France.
(There will be again be kings, but not for long.)
notes:
* the title of the song comes from "A la volonte du peuple," the French version of the song "Do You Hear the People Sing," from the musical adaptation of Les Misérables. Contrary to what many people seem to think, Les Mis is NOTabout the French Revolution, but instead a later revolution of 1830. I just thought the song was rather fitting.
* the French Revolution itself, as I'm sure all you France fans know, started 1789 and, after quite a bit of chaos (most notably the Reign of Terror of 1793-94, in which Robespierre played a large role; the epigram is from one of his speeches defending the Terror), eventually ended in the takeover by Napooleon in 1799.
* this fic could be said to end with Napoleon's coup (the guy later declared himself emperor and quite a few more kings followed), though I moved a few events (Lafayette's jailing, the Champ de Mars massacre, the wars) around slightly. The wars that France fought against what was basically most of Europe at the time started in more or less 1792, which was when crazy shit started happening. After the Terror, the Directory ruled France from 1795 until Napoleon took over. Nobody really liked them.
* the Marquis de Lafayette was a nobleman who came to America at 19 and fought in the American Revolution before coming back home to France and eventually writing the Declaration of the Rights of Man (yup, that was him), but then the radicals decided that he was too moderate and he was sent to jail. The Americans still loved him, though. He's my favorite revolutionary out of all of them. I mean, the Hero of Two Worldsis a pretty bamfy moniker, even if he wasn't as successful as he could have wished. At least he died peacefully at the age of 76, instead of being guillotined. That's a plus.
* I've always felt-and this could be just me not reading enough revolutionary!France fic that the whole dichotomy between the high ideals and then the later bloody violence was never explored enough, so I tried to get that idea across in the fic (the two songs I mentioned above, although they have the same tune, are rather different in their message, which is another interesting thing). I've never thought of rev!France as being insane per se, just caught up in events and genuinely believing, like all the other idealists, that there was a virtuous purpose behind it all.