TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050189/05018900.022

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                                                                                WORLD, Page 48

FRANCE

Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite?


200 years later, the French are still quarreling about the
revolution

By Margot Hornblower/PARIS


    The revolution is a complex whole, like life itself, with
the inspiring and the unacceptable, with hope and fear, violence
and fraternity."

    Francois Mitterrand A big azure-and-gilt hot-air balloon,
a reproduction of an 18th century model, wafted skyward in a
"salute to liberty'' as thousands of spectators gathered in the
Tuileries Gardens last January for the official launch of the
bicentennial of the French Revolution. The Republican Guard
played a fanfare. An actor solemnly read the 1789 Declaration
of the Rights of Man and Citizen.

    Five days later, in a theater across town, a dozen masked
youths with shaved heads invaded a concert of revolution-era
songs. Crying "Long live the King!" the royalist punks tossed
tear-gas canisters and knocked mezzo-soprano Helene Delavault
to the floor. "At first we thought it was part of the
spectacle," said Jean-Noel Jeanneney, president of the
government's Bicentennial Mission. It wasn't. The singer was
hospitalized, and President Mitterrand led the list of notables
expressing outrage.

    It was an appropriate start -- first uplift, then excess.
Just like the original revolution. Reconciliation is the
official theme of the 200th anniversary of modern France's
cataclysmic birth, but nearly four months into the celebration
the French seem as much cleaved as healed by the occasion. For
if the revolution sprang from the idealism of the Enlightenment,
promising liberty and equality, it soon deteriorated into a
bloodbath that led to a dictatorship. Ever since, lurching
wildly through two empires, two royal restorations and five
republics, democratic France has tried to bridge the
contradictions posed by its brutal beginning. Even today, when
the left-right dialectic of French politics has softened under
a socialist government leaning toward the center, the
bicentennial has abraded old sores.

    The revolution is fixed in the collective psyche of the
nation. Ask any Frenchman to free-associate: he automatically
recites, "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite." Then comes a torrent
of violent images. Heads on pikes. Hungry mobs storming
Versailles. Women knitting and jeering in front of the scaffold.
Marat murdered in his bath. The zealous Saint-Just railing,
"There is no liberty for the enemies of liberty!" And the
battalions of Marseilles singing the nation's new anthem: "May
the blood of the impure soak our fields."

    For the Mitterrand government, the bicentennial is a
political opportunity and a ticklish responsibility. On July 14,
the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, the leaders of the
seven industrialized nations -- France, the U.S., Canada, Japan,
Britain, West Germany and Italy -- will assemble in Paris for
a summit. What kind of image will France present? On the
surface, at least, that of a united nation celebrating its
glorious past with the hoopla of a spectacular Bastille Night
parade and sound-and-light show down the Champs Elysees.
Already, merchants are hawking underwear decorated with little
guillotines. French television is reveling in soap-opera love
affairs between 18th century aristocrats and commoners. Villages
across France are dressing up their summer festivals in blue,
white and red.

    But even two centuries later, not all of France cherishes
the spirit of 1789. Counterrevolutionary commemorations are
proliferating. Right-wing Catholics are organizing a huge "Mass
for the Martyrs" of the revolution on Aug. 15 in the Place de
la Concorde. Local governments in western France helped raise
funds for a $7 million movie called Vent de Galerne, which
opened last month, about the republican army's savage repression
of peasant rebels in the Vendee. In Lyons a historical society
is tracing the descendants of 3,000 executed in anti-Jacobin
uprisings. "The bicentennial is more an occasion for mourning
than for celebration," says philosopher Jean-Marie Benoist, a
former adviser to Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac. Asks Sorbonne
historian Pierre Chaunu: "Why should we celebrate a failure?"

    The official strategy for evading an answer is to focus
resolutely on the high-minded events of 1789, like the
Declaration of Rights, with its ideals of liberty, equality, and
the sovereignty of the people. As for the blood that flowed
thereafter -- the September Massacres of 1792, the Terror of
1793, and the 1793-94 uprising of the Vendee in which 400,000
died -- the less said the better. The play-it-safe politics of
the commemoration is aimed at creating at least the illusion of
ideological harmony, the same strategy that has sparked
Mitterrand's recent political success. "We're not going to
celebrate the guillotine," says Jeanneney. "Our mission is to
emphasize the positive."

    The trouble with this homogenized version of history is
that the battles fought during the revolution still resist
accommodation 200 years later. Twentieth century French
historiography has been dominated by a Marxist school that
celebrated the French Revolution and its class struggles as the
mother of the Bolshevik Revolution. Regicide was the only way
to crush the power of the privileged, and the Terror, like
Stalin's purges, was a necessary transition to an eventual
dictatorship of the proletariat. Many French have thought of
themselves as different from other Europeans because they broke
so violently with their past and started fresh.

    The unreconstructed left wants an unapologetic bicentennial
honoring the nation's radical roots. "France is still a country
of class struggle," wrote historian Claude Mazauric in the
Communist Party newspaper L'Humanite. "The message of 1789 . .
. is to build a society unconstrained by multinational
capitalism." SOS-Racisme, a civil rights group, for example,
will celebrate with a rally for Toussaint L'Ouverture, a former
slave who led an 18th century Haitian rebellion against French
colonialism. A group of prominent Parisian socialists is
agitating to rename part of the Rue St.-Honore after
Robespierre. "All revolutions have excesses," explains former
Health Minister Leon Schwarzenberg, "and any revolution without
them must be considered suspect." But so far Robespierre's
defenders have had no luck, and even moderates are concerned
that the government has gone too far in snubbing controversial
revolutionary leaders. "They are going to present people with
a pasteurized, dissected, plastic-wrapped revolution," complains
philosopher and leftist philosopher Andre Glucksmann.

    In the past decade Marxist history has lost its sway as
many French intellectuals grew disillusioned with East bloc
totalitarianism. A revisionist school, influenced by
nonpartisan British and American scholars, presents a more
complex picture of the revolution: nobles seeking to weaken
royal power played a driving role in the rebellion, for example;
few peasants suffered under a feudal yoke. In the U.S. a much
heralded new work by Harvard University's Simon Schama, called
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, depicts the
ancien regime in a positive light -- not too differently from
France's current best seller La Revolution, by historian
Francois Furet. "The French have come to realize that the
revolution was a magnificent event that turned out badly," says
Furet, a professor at Paris' Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the
University of Chicago.

    Furet views contemporary France as a "republic of the
center" in which a consensus has emerged in favor of market
economics combined with broad social services. "Left-right
rhetoric today does not correspond to reality," he says. "France
has buried its civil war." Three key changes explain why: the
Fifth Republic finally established a strong, stabilizing
presidency; the appeal of the Communist Party has withered; and
the old antagonism between the Roman Catholic church and state
has eased. "The left is in power precisely because it renounced
its revolutionary culture," he says.

    Frenchmen appear ambivalent about their revolutionary
forebears. Polls show that the most revered figure of the era
is now the Marquis de Lafayette, who ultimately broke with the
Jacobins and fled the country. After a televised re-enactment
of Louis XVI's trial, only 27% of French viewers favored
beheading the hapless King. One French poll even found that 17%
of the country wants the return of the monarchy. Seeking new
heroes, Mitterrand said last week that he will place in the
Pantheon, France's national mausoleum, the remains of the
Marquis de Condorcet, an influential leader of the National
Assembly who called for universal public education, and of the
Abbe Gregoire, a revolutionary priest who advocated civil rights
for Protestants and Jews.

    But the church is still not entirely reconciled. Many
Catholics consider Gregoire a turncoat priest for swearing
allegiance to the revolutionary state, which repudiated the
power of the Pope. Last June, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, head
of the French church, officially endorsed a campaign to sanctify
181 priests and three bishops who were murdered by a Paris mob
in the Carmes prison in 1792. "France is like a family that has
had an internal dispute," Lustiger said. "If we don't talk about
the bad things that happened, we won't have a real
reconciliation." Right-wing Catholics will converge on Paris for
an August anti-bicentennial rally. Says Francois Triomphe,
founder of Anti-89, an umbrella for several dozen groups
protesting the government's celebrations: "We seek reparations
for the evils done to the church."

    In western France, where counterrevolutionary rebellions in
the Vendee, Brittany and Normandy were brutally put down,
antipathy toward the revolution is widespread. Historian Chaunu
calls the retribution "genocide." In 1793 General Francois
Westermann had reported proudly to his government, "I have
trampled the children under my horses' hooves. I have massacred
the women so they will give birth to no more rebels." The new
movie about the Vendee uprising, Vent de Galerne, has
understandably garnered intense local support and money. Says
Jean-Michel Mousset, a trucking-company owner from Ste.-Florence
who put up $5,000: "In 1793 liberty, equality and fraternity was
on our side, not on the side of the republicans."

    The dissenting voices on both the right and the left have
had little effect on the majority of 1789 commemorations.
Celebrations large and small, local and national, will attract
record numbers of tourists to France. If these do not mark a
true festival of reconciliation, the French can still take pride
in the passion they have for their history. In Lyons, Jacques
Tournier, the descendant of a water carrier who was guillotined
in 1793, recalls that his grandmother refused to walk past the
place in the market where the execution machine stood. "Now I
too avoid that spot out of respect for my ancestors," Tournier
says. Jacques Delmas, a lawyer from Reims, has fonder feelings
for the revolution. "One of my ancestors stormed the Bastille,"
he says, "and I feel both thrilled and proud to be French
whenever I walk past the place where it once stood."

    However it is celebrated, France's birthday party promises
to be anything but boring. The main business of such a
celebration is, after all, a kind of national introspection.
More than a century ago, historian Alexis de Tocqueville, the
first cool head to examine the various sides of the revolution,
wrote, "Happy are those who can tie together in their thoughts
the past, the present and the future. No Frenchman of our time
has had this happiness." In this bicentennial year, the task
seems daunting as ever. But the stimulation of ideas and the
resulting reflection make the jubilee remembrance well worth all
the fuss.

    MISCONCEPTIONS

    MYTH   The storming of the Bastille freed hundreds.

    FACT   The fortress held only seven prisoners.

    MYTH   Death by guillotine was quick and painless.

    FACT   Execution often took several chops.

    MYTH   Most guillotine victims were aristocrats.

    FACT   Only 10% of those beheaded were nobles.

    MYTH   The guillotine was the main form of execution.

    FACT   Most of the 400,000 put to death during the
revolution            were shot, burned or drowned.

    MYTH   When the poor rioted over the price of bread, Marie
          Antoinette cried, "Let them eat cake!"

    FACT   Attributed to an unnamed "princess," the remark
appears            in Rousseau's Confessions at least two years
before            Marie Antoinette arrived in France in 1770.