Footsteps by Richard Holmes
It was a sharp reminder to me of the nature of eighteenth-century Paris. It was still a walled, semi-medieval, fortified city-state. The Revolution took place within a physically contained area—all exits guarded by their barrier towers—which could build up the kind of psychological pressures (rumours, mob scares, as well as the intoxications of a great carnival) impossible to imagine in a modern city, with its immense networks of roads, railways, airports and information services, constantly open to the outside world. The only modern comparison I could think of was West Berlin. The Parisians themselves invented a popular saying about the barrier wall: “Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant.”
Moreover, just as Mary was struggling with a new language (like so many English people, she could translate fluently on the page, but became completely tongue-tied in real life—“how awkwardly I behaved, unable to utter a word and almost stunned by the flying sounds”), she was also struggling with a new language of objects. For in the revolutionary city the significance of everything external—the buildings, the behaviour of the people—depends completely on one’s own degree of sympathy with the cause that they express. What is beautiful can become terrible, what is elegant something mocking and sinister. Like the barrier towers, the meaning of everything can suddenly become ambiguous, or actually be reversed. The friendly crowd becomes a mob; the fine palace a grim prison. The pavement may open up, the front door may shut on a cell, the trusted shopkeeper du coin may become the section secret policeman.
Again, Mary put this perception in her History:
But how quickly vanishes the prospect of delights, of delights such as man ought to taste! … The cavalcade of death moves along, shedding mildew over all the beauties of the scene, and blasting every joy! The elegance of the palaces and buildings is revolting when they are viewed as prisons; and the sprightliness of the people disgusting, when they are hastening to view the operation of the guillotine, or carelessly passing over the earth stained with blood.
These of course were early impressions viewed with the bitterness of hindsight. Yet Mary saw something even in those first days that she recorded at the time, and which clearly shook her deeply. It was the sight of the King being driven in cortège from his prison in the Temple (on the site of the present square du Temple) to his trial at the Convention.
Here arose a small but significant biographical puzzle. Mary says she saw the procession from her window in the rue Meslay. Yet the King’s route on that morning of 26 December lay up the rue du Temple, and then westwards along the boulevard Saint-Martin towards the Tuileries, and I did not understand how she could have witnessed this without leaving the house and walking down to the end of the street and turning up on to the boulevard itself (which runs parallel with the rue Meslay). Yet she clearly says the King passed by her window. Surely she was not romancing? Because if she was it would be quite out of character (as I had begun to understand hers), and besides it would cast doubt on other things she said in her letters.
The solution became clear the moment I walked over the same ground. No 22 rue Meslay stands on a rising piece of land—it is, so to speak, the crown of the street—and the back top windows of the house have an unobstructed view clear across the rooftops to the north, commanding the whole panorama of the boulevard beyond them, from the present place de la République to what was then, and still is, the archway of the porte Saint-Martin. So Mary had, in effect, a view from the grandstand. This also, incidentally, told me that Madame Fillietaz’s servants had bundled the strange Englishwoman to an obscure apartment at the back of the house, rather than give her one of the lavish guest-rooms with balcony at the front. This helps to explain what Mary subsequently says about feeling lost at the far end of a labyrinth of corridors.
Mary’s description of the procession is given in her first letter to Joseph Johnson that same evening. Unlike her note to Evarina, it contains no domestic trivialities—not even a mention of Christmas Day—but goes straight into the historic scene, merely saying that she would have written earlier, but she “wished to wait till I could tell you that this day was not stained with blood” thanks to the prudent precautions taken by the National Convention “to prevent a tumult”. With this slightly ominous preface, she plunges into the following remarkable account of what she saw, and how she felt:
About nine o’clock this morning, the King passed by my window, moving silently along (except now and then a few strokes on the drum, which rendered the stillness more aweful) through empty streets, surrounded by the national guards, who, clustering around the carriage, seemed to deserve their name. The inhabitants flocked to their windows, but the casements were all shut, not a voice was heard, nor did I see any thing like an insulting gesture.—For the first time since I entered France, I bowed to the majesty of the people, and respected the propriety of behaviour so perfectly in unison with my own feelings. I can scarcely tell you why, but an association of ideas made the tears flow from my eyes, when I saw Louis sitting, with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach going to meet his death …
The cinematic immediacy of this thrilled me: one could see the rows of faces behind those closed casements, looking down, like something out of a piece of early silent newsreel. Yet at the same time I was surprised and touched by Mary’s tears, the last thing one might have expected from her, a good republican. She saw the whole order of power and authority stood on its head—the “majesty of the people”. In theory she approved, but in practice she was also shocked. Here at once was that divide between Reason and Imagination; and most of her fellow-revolutionaries from England felt the same. Even Tom Paine, the most vociferous of all king-haters, was soon to go to the bar of the National Convention to plead for “Citizen Capet’s” life—thereby earning Robespierre’s permanent distrust.
But Mary goes much further than describing a there political event. She senses in herself a profound disturbance at what she had witnessed, a threat to the whole notion of personal order and safety, and this too she attempted to describe to her old friend Johnson. It is an almost unique passage in her letters, an admission of vulnerability very rare, yet done with her same matter-of-fact style and the same little gleams of self-mockery that she habitually employed. Yet it is, unmistakably, the same kind of experience that Wordsworth described in his hotel garret room. It has the same quality of confusion between reality and dream, and it even has the same candle burning symbolically on the bedside table. Again I thought of Fuseli’s picture The Nightmare, and wondered if there were some hitherto unexplained connection between the fear of revolutionary violence erupting in the daytime and the fear of psychic violence—a disordering of the personality, as well as the society—erupting from the unconscious mind in the dark. Did the Revolution open one to both kinds of disorder?
Mary begins by explaining to Johnson that she had spent the rest of the day in the house at rue Meslay alone, and as the night came on she found the images of the procession coming back to haunt her—to possess her imagination—with increasing menace. She felt alone and isolated, and—now she says it explicitly—very frightened indeed:
… Though my mind is calm, I cannot dismiss the lively images that have filled my imagination all the day.—Nay, do not smile, but pity me; for, once or twice, lifting my eyes from the paper, I have seen eyes glare through a glass-door opposite my chair, and bloody hands shook at me. Not the distant sound of a footstep can I hear. My apartments are remote from those of the servants, the only persons who sleep with me in an immense hotel, one folding door opening after another—I wish I had even the cat with me!—I want to see something alive; death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy.—I am going to bed—and, for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle.
How much of this was real—the glaring eyes, the bloody hands—and how much of it was Mary’s imaginary identification with the doomed King? She does not say, she does not even seem to care much, so anxious is she to impress Johnson with the power
But Mary did not return; her natural courage and tenacity—and her belief in the Revolution—sustained her. In January 1793 the Fillietaz family returned to Paris, and she dug herself in, working hard at her spoken French, cultivating the circle round Helen Williams, and making contact with the prominent Girondists through Madame Roland. Godwin later said that she became friendly with many of the Girondist leaders in the Convention—Roland himself, Brissot, Pétion (all of whom were to be executed)—and became a popular figure in the “international brigade” of revolutionary sympathisers. He mentions a Swiss couple, Jean-Gaspard and Madeleine Schweizer; a romantically minded Polish aristocrat, Count Gustav von Schlabrendorf, who afterwards claimed he had been in love with her; and the Americans Joel and Ruth Barlow. Ruth, whom she had already met in London, became Mary’s special confidante. There were also several hot-headed young adventurers who attached themselves to Helen Williams, including another American, Gilbert Imlay, and an Englishman, John Hurford Stone (who left his own wife and became Helen’s lover and subsequently her husband).
In the excited and dangerous atmosphere it is clear that romantic unions flourished, as in wartime, and Mary was the object of much gallantry: a provokingly unattached woman, and a famous author as well. She seems to have liked this, but maintained her detachment, remarking somewhat archly in a letter to her other sister, Eliza, that “those who wish to live for themselves without close friendship, or warm affection, ought to live in Paris for they have the pleasantest way of whiling away time.”
Some of the men were tiresome, however; particularly the tall, rangy American Imlay, whom she met at the house of Paine’s friend, John Christie. He was a protégé of the Barlows’, and with his knowledge of Kentucky was working on a somewhat madcap scheme with the Girondist Brissot to foment a pro-French uprising against Spanish colonial rule in the southern territories of Louisiana. He was regarded as an expert on the question, as a result of his book A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of America; but also fancied himself as a romantic novelist, having just published in London a saga of backwoods Kentucky life—told in letters-entitled The Emigrants. The book extolled the simple pioneer life, and had a liberated heroine, whom Imlay seems subsequently to have likened to Mary herself. Mary clearly thought him bumptious, while he found her unaccountably frosty. Besides, the gossip among the international set said that Imlay stayed overnight with Helen Williams. Anyway, Mary was busy with more important matters. Condorcet, who had been appointed to the special Girondist Committee on Public Instruction, had commissioned her to draw up a paper on female education: at last she seemed to be becoming directly involved with the shaping of the Revolution itself.
Yet the progress of public affairs was increasingly alarming. Possibly because of the tightening political censorship, only two letters from Mary reached England between January and June 1793, and during this time the whole aspect of the Revolution altered. On 21 January the King was executed; on 1 February England declared war on France, and a series of laws against “enemy aliens” were promulgated in Paris, beginning with special registration and passport requirements; on 25 February there were food riots in Paris, and three weeks later the first loyalist rising in the Vendée began. Finally, with growing fears of enemies both abroad and at home, on 15 April 1793 the Committee of Public Safety was instituted. From now on Mary was living in a Revolution threatened by both war and civil war.
Once again, the question arose whether Mary would now go back to London. On the declaration of war many English sympathisers followed the example of the English Ambassador and headed rapidly for the Channel ports, showing their freshly stamped passport papers at the barrier towers as they departed. The White’s Hotel group effectively disbanded, and Helen Williams stopped writing special reports for The Times.
Mary, who had already stayed in France for more than her planned six weeks, debated with herself about her next move. During this uncertain time she wrote the essay, “On the Present Character of the French Nation”, which she had originally promised Johnson, dating it 15 February. Her general thesis was not optimistic: she argued that the great and universal political ideals of the Revolution, especially as expressed by the National Assembly of 1789–91, were in the process of being betrayed by the weakness of the French as a people. Their natural volatility, their tendency to extremism, their moral shallowness, and above all the years they had spent as a subject nation beneath the authoritarian rule of the French kings completely unfitted them to act responsibly in their new historic role as revolutionary liberators. (I could not help thinking that Mary felt that the English, with their tradition of constitutional monarchy, would have handled the whole thing much better.)
The French, in other words, lacked revolutionary virtue, and this would lead them away from the Paradise on Earth which all the radicals of the 1790s believed in. Mary wrote mournfully:
Before I came to France, I cherished, you know, an opinion that strong virtues might exist with the polished manners produced by the progress of civilisation; and I even anticipated the epoch, when, in the course of improvement, men would labour to become virtuous, without being goaded on by misery. But now, the perspective of the Golden Age, fading before the attentive eye of observation, almost eludes m) sight …
Mary’s stress on revolutionary, or republican “virtue” was in fact a commonplace among radicals of every type at this time: it is found equally in the writings of William Godwin on political justice or the speeches of Robespierre on the loyalty or otherwise of the French army—though Robespierre would soon shift to the far more alarming term, “purity”. What struck me was how alien this demanding concept of moral virtue in public affairs was to the attitudes of 1968. I was moving further and further away into a wholly different world-view of what a revolution required of its participants. Virtue, duty, labour … these were what Mary Wollstonecraft saw as essential to the new world.
Mary’s apparent disillusion with the course the Revolution was now taking, together with the increasing personal restrictions applied to “aliens”, suggest that this was the sensible moment to go home. Besides, in a letter to Ruth Barlow (still at this time in London, though Joel was in Paris) she says she continued to feel tired and ill, the weather was extremely bad, and she “half-ruined” herself in coach-hire. On 14 February someone in the White’s Hotel group offered her a place in his private carriage which was departing for Calais: it was the moment to decide. But once again she decided to stay.
Why was this? In her letter to Ruth she is wonderfully offhand about it. She says in effect that she cannot bear to give up learning French just as she is beginning to master the language, and besides she has not finished her paper for Condorcet:
Yesterday a Gentleman offered me a place in his carriage to return to England and I knew not how to say no, yet I think it would be very foolish to return when I have been at so much trouble to master a difficulty, when I am just turning the corner, and I am, besides, writing a plan of education for the Committee appointed to consider the subject.
Of other reasons she says nothing, though there is just a hint that the company of her fellow-expatriates was increasingly agreeable and even exciting: “I am almost overwhelmed with civility here, and have even met with more than civility …” Reading between the lines I could see Mary being steadily drawn into the heady, dangerous but immensely stimulating atmosphere of the city. The excitement and uncertainty obviously suited her: there was no time to be depressed as in the grey, safe and reactionary world of literary London. The more she complained about the foul Parisian streets, the
Indeed, it must have felt like the centre of the universe. Good and evil forces were inextricably mixed, as she now realised; this was not yet the Golden Age. But what was taking place was an event of historic proportions, and universal significance for later generations, and she intended not only to witness it but to take part in it if she could. As she later wrote, with extraordinary restraint and judgment at the very height of the Terror:
All Europe saw, and all good men saw it with dread, that the French had undertaken to support a Cause, which they had neither sufficient purity of heart nor maturity of judgement, to conduct with moderation and prudence … [But] malevolence has been gratified by the errors they have committed, attributing that imperfection to the Theory they adopted, which was applicable only to the folly of their practice. However, Frenchmen have reason to rejoice, and posterity will be grateful, for what was done by the Assembly.
There was one other reason why Mary stayed: Gilbert Imlay, the man who was so tiresome. As the doubters fled to safety and those who remained drew closer together, meeting more frequently at Helen Williams’s house or Madame Roland’s salon new qualities emerged from behind formal exteriors. The brash backwoodsman turned out to have certain depths and a good deal of charm. Imlay was from New Jersey, and had served with some distinction during the American War of Independence. As the political situation in Paris became more dangerous he became resolutely more sanguine. A friend described him as “very cheerful and high-spirited”. He left off his airs of an author, and began to tease Mary with boyish good-humour. Slowly she responded, her formidable, assertive manner becoming lighter, even girlish. There is an anecdote about her bad French which she told to Ruth Barlow, and which almost certainly refers to one of Imlay’s meaningful jokes: “A Gentleman the other day, to whom I frequently replied,—oui, oui—when my thoughts were far away, told me that I was acquiring in France a bad custom, for that I might chance to say oui, when I did not intend it, par habitude.”