TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/050189/05018900.022

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 13KB | 234 lines

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.