March 26, 2020 43
bling among themselves and then gather
up the pieces and rebuild monarchi-
cal authority. During the royal fam-
ily’s flight to the northeastern border in
June 1791, the king repeatedly stepped
out of his carriage because he assumed
that among the people far from Paris he
would find countless loyal supporters.
His dawdling proved fatal to the escape
plan. Finally, in April 1792, he agreed to
declare war on Austria, the land ruled
by his brother-in-law, in the anticipation
that even if the revolutionary armies
prevailed, they would then follow their
aristocratic commanders, march on
Paris, and arrest the radicals.
There are no heroes or villains in
Popkin’s narrative. The revolutionar-
ies articulated enduring principles of
liberty, equality, and democracy, but
found it necessary to undertake dra-
conian measures to defend them. Or-
dinary people could be roused to take
extraordinary risks, such as storming
the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789, but
they could also vent their vengeance in
horrific fashion, as they did in the Sep-
tember 1792 prison massacres in Paris.
More than a thousand people were
slaughtered, many of them hacked to
death after summary judgments deliv-
ered by local militants. In the western
region of France known as the Vendée,
resistance to conscription and the re-
organization of the Catholic Church
ignited a civil war that pitted bands of
peasants, sometimes led by nobles and
aided by British money, against repub-
lican officials and soldiers. The rebels
besieged towns and did not hesitate to
kill, but in the end they had to retreat to
a guerrilla-style conflict as government
armies torched their fields and massa-
cred entire villages in retribution.
Nowhere was “the force of things”
more evident than in the colony of
Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), which in
1789 produced half the world’s supply
of sugar and coffee with the labor of
500,000 slaves (at the time, the United
States had 670,000). When the slaves
revolted in 1791, the French first tried
to repress the revolt, but they could
no longer rely on the free blacks or
mixed-race population, which was
clamoring for rights, or even the white
planters, who threatened to declare
independence and align with France’s
enemies.
The former slave Toussaint Louver-
ture soon emerged as the rebellion’s
military leader and signed up as a gen-
eral for the Spanish when they prom-
ised freedom to those who helped
them against the French. Louverture
disapproved of the execution of Louis
XVI and the attacks on the Catholic
Church, yet he changed sides when
the deputies in France finally agreed
to the abolition of slavery in February
- The abolition had been declared
by the commissioners originally sent
to suppress the uprising when they
saw that they could no longer main-
tain any semblance of French author-
ity otherwise. In agreeing, the deputies
in France were torn between fears that
abolition was part of a British plot to
destroy French commerce and hopes
that abolition might encourage the
slaves in the British colonies to rebel
as well.^1
Popkin’s invocation of the force of
things is meant to circumvent the most
partisan interpretations: that the slave
revolt in Saint-Domingue was directed
by abolitionists in Paris, that democ-
racy in France was inherently totali-
tarian, or that the republic carried out
a deliberate genocide against its own
people in the Vendée. Popkin does not
explicitly confront such polemics; he
does not even hazard an estimate of
the number of those who died in the
Vendée rebellion, a subject of much
heated discussion (the best estimates
are 250,000 insurgents and 200,000 re-
publicans). The artfulness of his narra-
tive strategy militates against this kind
of analysis. With amazing economy
and grace, he interweaves all the vari-
ous strands into one coherent story, in-
cluding the revolt in Saint-Domingue,
France’s war against much of Europe,
political struggles in Paris, and a suc-
cession of uprisings not just in the Ven-
dée but also in multiple places, from
Caen in the north to Lyon and Toulon
in the south. The reader therefore gets
a remarkably clear sense of how events
unfolded and of how unpredictable
outcomes repeatedly changed the op-
tions available for everyone involved,
even, and perhaps particularly, for
Bonaparte.
By its very nature, however, a seam-
less storyline tends to obscure the
joints that hold it together. Popkin ends
up facing the same predicament that
bedevils the people whose stories he
tells; he sees how each major episode
ineluctably shapes those that follow,
but he cannot stand far enough back
to detect the causes that drive the flow
of events. The most glaring example
of this is the weakness of the republic
and its final collapse, which occurred in
1800, when Bonaparte established his
supremacy, and not in 1804, when he
declared himself emperor.
The fragility of the republic was pre-
ordained. The republic of the United
States was feeble in the beginning, too,
but it benefited from many advantages
compared to its French counterpart:
distance from Europe, no resident no-
bility, a ready refuge for dissenters in
Canada, and an absence of alternatives.
The French republic was surrounded
by monarchs who were happy to sit by
as thousands of French noble army of-
ficers crossed the border to organize a
counterrevolution. The Vendée peas-
ants who resisted conscription had no
place to go, so they stayed and fought
back. With centuries of royal rule
etched in everyone’s memory, more-
over, the republic could not erase the
past just by devising a new calendar or
changing names, especially since half
of the population could not read news-
papers or government decrees.In this parlous situation, the army
turned out to be the most effective
school of republicanism in the short
term, and it generated a series of out-
standing officers in an astonishingly
short period of time. But the more time
the armies spent away from France
between 1792 and 1799—in Belgium,
Holland, the German and Italian
states, Egypt and the Middle East,
and colonies in the Indian Ocean and
Caribbean Sea—and the more they
relied on local goods and cash, the
less loyalty they felt to the republic at
home with its repeated rewriting of the
constitution and constant upheavals(^1) See David A. Bell, “The Contagious
Revolution,” The New York Review,
December 19, 2019.
TEMPTATION
János Székely
Translated from the Hungarian
by Mark Baczoni
Paperback • 688 pages • $19.95
On sale April 7th
“A truly great novel that brings
everything together: narrative
force, social history, wit, anger,
grief, love and idealism.”
—Angela Wittmann, Brigitte
A REDISCOVERED MASTERWORK OF
TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION.
Temptation is a Dickensian tale of a young man
coming of age in Budapest between the wars.
Illegitimate and unwanted, Béla is packed off
to the country to be looked after by a peasant
woman the moment he is born. She starves
and bullies him, and keeps him out of school.
He does his best to hold his own, and even-
tually his mother brings him back to live with
her in the city.
In thrall to his feckless father and living in a
crowded tenement, Béla’s mother works her
fingers to the bone while Béla shares a room
with a hardworking prostitute. Finally, he secures
a job in a fancy hotel. Though exhausted by end-
less work, he is fascinated by the upper-crust
world that his new job exposes him to; soon
he is embroiled with a rich, damaged, and dan-
gerous woman.
The atmosphere of Budapest is increasingly
poisoned by the appeal of fascism, while Béla
grows ever more aware of how power and money
keep down the working classes. In the end,
with all the odds still against him, he musters
the resolve to set sail for a new future.
“In this book, we do not smell the sultry perfume
of the golden twenties. Here, the musty odor of
moldy apartments, bad food, cheap alcohol,
and unventilated toilets seeps out of the sides.
But the book is not dull social criticism—the
characters are too vital, the story too exciting.
And Székely, the accomplished screenwriter,
has arranged his scenes far too cleverly.”
—Joachim Kronsbein, Der Spiegel
Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500,
or visit http://www.nyrb.com
A star of French comics imagines America—its movie stars, its history,
its fashion—in these tantalizing graphic short stories
about everything from love to, yes, the actor Robert Mitchum.
Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500, or visit http://www.nyrb.com
MITCHUM
Blutch
^ "
"
^
ALSO BY BLUTCH
PEPLUM
Blutch is one of the most inventive storytellers in comics,
and nothing reveals it like Mitchum.
Serialized and collected in the mid-1990s and never
before available in English, this is Blutch at his most wide-
ranging. From Puritan fever dreams to an encounter with
a shape-shifting Robert Mitchum, Blutch builds stories
out of his dreams, visions of America, and anything else
he can get his hands on.
Drawn in his unmistakable line that veers in a moment
from crude to elegant, blotchy to crisp, horrific to serene,
these comics show Blutch searching for new artistic
frontiers. What he finds is sometimes surprising, occa-
sionally unsettling, and endlessly fascinating.