Footsteps by Richard Holmes
But to be young was very heaven!
Many of the catchwords and concepts of the Sixties, indeed the very idea of “revolution” itself as a flamboyant act of self-assertion—“the language of personal rights”—found either inspiration or confirmation in the generation of the 1790s. Coleridge and Southey’s plan to found a commune on the banks of the Susquehanna river; Blake’s poetry of visions and defiance (“The Tigers of Wrath are Wiser than the Horses of Instruction”, from The Proverbs of Hell, was one of the most popular graffiti); Shelley’s notions of free love and passive resistance, understood as an early form of Flower Power, “Make Love Not War”; Coleridge’s and later Thomas de Quincey’s interest in drugs and dream-states; Mary Wollstonecraft’s championship of the rights of women—all these spoke directly to the generation of May ′68.
Above all, there was the challenge to the conventions and structures of authority, the whole tone of confrontation, which took place daily, whether in the matter of clothes, art, sexual morality, religious piety or politics. Such confrontation was international: the counter-culture took to the road and passed all frontiers, entered all cities; just as the first Romantics had set out on their wanderings to Wales, France, Germany, Italy, Greece or the Levant—only “the Orient” now meant India rather than Arabia.
What William Hazlitt wrote of the face of the young Southey before he cut his hair and settled down with his extended family in the Lake District, could have been written of many of the young bearded and Christ-like faces on the barricades of ′68. These in turn unconsciously reflected the revolutionary features of the young Cuban, Che Guevara, whose image hung like an icon in a million bedsits, aparts, pads and communal kitchens, in London, New York, Hamburg, Paris and Rome. Hazlitt described this revolutionary and Utopian archetype, as it first made its appearance in the 1790s:
Mr Southey, as we formerly remember to have seen him, had a hectic flush upon his cheek, a roving fire in his eye, a falcon glance, a look at once aspiring and dejected. It was the look that had been impressed upon his face by the events that marked the outset of his life. It was the dawn of Liberty that still tingled his cheek …
While he supposed it possible that a better form of society could be introduced than any other that had hitherto existed, while the light of the French Revolution beamed into his soul—while he had this hope, this faith in man left, he cherished it with a childlike simplicity, he clung to it with the fondness of a lover. He was an enthusiast, a fanatic, a leveller; he stuck at nothing that he thought would banish all pain and misery from the world; in his impatience at the smallest error or injustice, he would have sacrificed himself and the existing generation (a holocaust) to his devotion to the right cause.
Hazlitt was himself one of these young radical enthusiasts, and had visited Paris as an art student during the Peace of Amiens in 1802. In The Spirit of the Age, his portrait of the leading writers and politicians of his generation, written twenty years after, he continued to judge men like Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Godwin by the yardstick of their first revolutionary ideals, and in that dawn light of the French Revolution. It was a light that most of them, he felt, had gone on to deny or betray, and there is a mixed tone of cynicism and elegy—the “hectic flush” and the “falcon glance”—to many of these portraits, which the witnesses and survivors of May ′68 will instantly recognise as part of their own experience. As Hazlitt wrote mockingly of Southey: “He wooed Liberty as a youthful lover, but it was perhaps more as a mistress than a bride; and he has since wedded with an elderly and not very reputable lady, called Legitimacy.”
For the sense of disillusion set in quickly after May ′68. This was also something about which I wanted to write. Contemporary historians now describe it in terms of the Arab oil crisis, the economic depression in Europe, the rise of right-wing governments and the advent of the first mass unemployment since the 1930s. We saw it in more immediate and human terms: communes that went broke, free unions that became bad marriages, university faculties that became hotbeds of rivalry and fruitless dispute, artistic spirits who became addicts and breakdowns, travellers who came home sick and sorry, women who became exhausted, one-parent families, a world of little presses and alternative newspapers that dropped into oblivion, and a Paris where the Bourse remained and Les Halles was destroyed.
How to make sense of all this? And how not to betray the light? As Hazlitt, once more, wrote of William Godwin, the author of Political Justice (1793), the most radical of all the English revolutionary tracts:
Fatal reverse! Is truth then so variable? Is it one thing at twenty and another at forty? Is it at a burning heat in 1793, and below zero in 1814? … Were we fools then, or are we dishonest now? Or was the impulse of the mind less likely to be true and sound when it arose from high thought at warm feeling, than afterwards, when it was warped and debased by the example, the vices, and follies of the world?
I was soon in France again myself. For a moment I saw fragments of the great événements, though already the carnival was in chaos and the millennial hopes in retreat, the visions of those banners against the blue spring sky, those great roaring crowds, those nightly barricades, scattered by violence and confusion and confrontations with intense personal fear.
One night, coming out of the place de la Sorbonne on to the boul’ Mich, my hands full of books and papers, I was caught up in a sudden CRS sweep. It was raining lightly, a sweet-scented summer rain, and the CRS coaches—dark-green, with grilled windows, and rows of doors opening simultaneously, like a train pulling into a rush-hour station—came skidding up on to the pavements, lights flashing and klaxons blaring. A few yards away a girl in blue lycée overalls, painted with Maoist signs, was knocked to the ground and a mass of leaflets spilled out of her canvas shoulder-bag. Hesitatingly, I took a step towards her, and found myself jammed against the iron fence that runs along the site of the old Cluny monastery, where Peter Abelard used to lecture before he met Héloïse. The pressure on my chest was from the barrel of an automatic rifle.
I was looking into the face of a CRS trooper. He was slightly smaller than myself, with a dark complexion—a man from the Midi, or Corsica perhaps. He had an expression of intense boredom, and the drops of rain glittered on his visor. I felt lonely, unheroic and unrevolutionary, and never wanted to see a British policeman so much in my life. It was time for a clear, unequivocal statement of ideological loyalty.
My mouth was dry, and for a moment no sound came out. Then I heard myself saying in a thin voice: “Je suis anglais.” There was a pause, in which nothing much happened in the world, and then I began to add: “J’avais peur que mademoiselle là-bas …”
The visor moved impatiently, the rifle barrel dropped to my stomach, and began to prod—quite gently. “Alors, espèce d’Anglais”—with each word a prod—“occupe-toi de tes affaires”—prod—“rentre chez toi”-prod-and with a final roar“FOUS-MOI LÀ PAIX!”
I crept away, but did not take his advice till much later.
I thought about this incident a good deal, however. It contained a real challenge, and it was this that made me begin to explore “the Revolution” in a different way. If I were English, why indeed didn’t I mind my own business and go home? I was a foreigner, an outsider. The Revolution was a French affair, and perhaps it had always been so. What had happened to the English in 1790? Had they too been told to go home and leave everyone in peace? And if they had stayed on, beyond the September Massacres of 1792, or beyond the execution of the King in 1793, or right on into the Terror of 1794 … what had happened to them? What had they made of their experiences?
I began my investigations with Wordsworth, who had written so well in The Prelude about the intoxicating atmosphere of the times. He was an undergraduate at St John’s College, Cambridge, when he made that first summer visit to France, walking three hundred miles in two weeks through Artois and Burgundy, with his friend Robert Jones. Though they did not visit Paris the excitement of the Revolution was evident in every
On the public boat from Chalon to Lyons they met delegates from Paris eager to talk with them, and Fédéré soldiers with muskets draped with flowers, some flourishing their swords “as if to fight the saucy air”. Stopping off by the banks of the Rhône in the evenings, they were invited to open-air banquets provided free by the Communes. They drank at long wooden tables under the summer stars of the Midi and danced with the peasant-girls, radiant with ribbons fluttering in their hair and tricolour scarves tied tightly round their waists. It was an experience of the early, fraternal days of the Revolution that Wordsworth never forgot, politics and romance perfectly entwined, as they danced hand in hand, “at signal given”, round and round the little dusty squares. “All hearts were open, every tongue was loud with amity and glee; we bore a name honoured in France, the name of Englishmen.”
The following year Wordsworth abandoned his studies in Hebrew and Oriental languages (intended to qualify him for a post as a clergyman) and went directly to Paris. He arrived in December 1791, armed with a letter of introduction to Helen Maria Williams, poetess and francophile, to whom his first published poem had been dedicated in rapturous terms. He attended the debates in the National Assembly at the Louvre Palace, and in the noisy Jacobin Club nearby: “In both her clamorous Halls, the National Synod and Jacobins, I saw the Revolutionary power toss like a ship at anchor, rocked by storms.”
He quartered the city from one end to the other in a series of long hiking expeditions, as if he were still in his native Cumberland. From west to east, from the Champ-de-Mars to the boulevard Saint-Antoine (where Dickens later placed Madame Defarge’s wine-shop); and from north to south, descending the slopes of Montmartre, still covered with vines, crossing over the Seine and the Île de la Cité, to climb again up the long rue Saint-Jacques to the “dome of Geneviève” on the hill where the Pantheon now stands. He patrolled the arcades of the Palais-Royal (then the Palais d’Orléans) fascinated by the mercurial crowds: soldiers, hawkers, ballad-mongers, prostitutes, soapbox “haranguers”—including a feminist club—and local demagogues, “a hubbub wild!” He noted the mixture of respectable bookshops, taverns, brothels and gaming houses (Balzac describes them, still there a generation later, in La Peau de Chagrin), and was struck by the way that political talk had become common currency in the streets, so that everywhere he was surrounded by “hissing Factionists with ardent eyes, in knots, or pairs, or single ant-like swarms of builders and subverters, every face that hope or apprehension could put on …”
He went to the ruined site of the Bastille prison, at the northeast corner of the city wall. Until the coming of the Terror, this remained the joyful symbol of the Revolution, the ancien régime torn apart brick by brick; then it was replaced by the symbol of the guillotine, set up on the place de la Révolution (now Concorde). Bastille keys were carried across Europe as the insignia of liberation; Chateaubriand even took one to the Governor of Newfoundland, while another reached Jefferson’s house in Virginia. Tourists and sympathisers like Wordsworth eagerly picked up pieces of stone from the prison rubble to bequeath to their children. Wordsworth described emotionally how he watched the west wind, the zephyr (later to be Shelley’s “destroyer and preserver”), whipping through the debris and “sporting with the dust” of the ruins. He sat “in the open sun and pocketed a relic, in the guise of an enthusiast”.
But this phrase brought me up short. Why only “in the guise” of an enthusiast? Was this a kind of political retraction—he was writing ten years after the events he describes? Or was it that same odd sense of alienation, the feeling that it was somehow “not his business” either, that revolution was something for the French alone?
His responses were complicated: he was looking for “something I could not find”; for an uplifting wave of revolutionary joy which did not quite touch him; in “honest truth” he was “affecting more emotion” than he felt. His reflections on this “strange indifférence”, in The Prelude, brought him suddenly close to me, and made me want to enter more deeply into the personal reactions of those few and scattered English witnesses. I wanted to know more about their hesitations and their innermost thoughts. What I needed, once again, was their biography. I pressed more closely on Wordsworth’s poem, but without realising it I was beginning to ask questions that such a literary and public text could not answer.
Wordsworth said that in going to witness the Revolution he had passed too abruptly “into a theatre, of which the stage was busy with an action far advanced”. Though he had prepared himself by reading “the master pamphlets of the day” and endless discussions with his friends, his understanding was too intellectual, too rational perhaps. Real events lacked a “living form and body” in his mind; they had not fully entered his imagination. “All things were to me loose and disjointed, and the affections left without a vital interest.” His heart was “all given to the people, and my love was theirs”; yet it was precisely from these ordinary people—les citoyens—that he was most cut off. He had no friends in Paris, and he could not experience directly how the Revolution had shaken and transformed their lives. He was the outsider, the observer. He describes this in a passage that uses no revolutionary symbols at all, but reverts instead to the familiar imagery of his childhood in the Lakes—to the images of plants and weather, presenting the French Revolution in terms, of all things, of an English greenhouse:
… I scarcely felt
The shock of these concussions, unconcerned,
Tranquil almost, and careless as a flower
Glassed in a green house, or a parlour shrub
When every bush and tree, the country through,
Is shaking to the roots …
It was almost as if the great revolutionary wind, the shaking of the foundations, had still not touched anything deep or permanent within him.
What changed Wordsworth happened not in Paris that winter, but in Orléans and Blois, where he went to study French throughout the spring and summer of 1792. It was here that his affair with Annette Vallon, his teacher, took place, which resulted in a child born in December 1792; and here that his great friendship with Capitaine Michel Beaupuy, a cavalry officer and passionate sympathiser with the revolutionary cause, was formed.
Wordsworth tells the story, partially in disguised form, in Books IX and X of The Prelude; and later added that Beaupuy had more influence on his thinking than any other man except Coleridge. He describes how in his conversations with Beaupuy a “hatred of absolute rule” daily laid a stronger and stronger hold upon his feelings, “mixed with pity too, and love” for the poor and abject people of France.
One day, as he was walking with Beaupuy in the country lanes near the Loire, there occurred one of those quintessentially Wordsworthian incidents—a meeting with one of the lonely outcasts of society, like the Cumberland beggar of later years—which seemed to crystallise everything that he had believed intellectually, and give it decisive human shape and conviction. It was for Wordsworth a form of conversion-experience, in which revolutionary theory was suddenly flooded by a personal truth.
The meeting was simplicity itself. A poor farm-girl, thin, weary and “hunger-bitten”, was leading a heifer along the lane by a cord. The heifer nibbled hungrily at the wild berries in the hedgerows, and the girl, too exhausted and depressed to lead it on, “crept” by its side distractedly knitting, “in a heartless mood of solitude”. Neither man spoke, but when they
… Should see the people having a strong hand
In making their own laws; whence better days
To all mankind.
At the end of October, “inflamed with hope”, Wordsworth was back in Paris to see this spirit at work. But what he found appalled and shook him: the King was imprisoned, the September Massacres had taken place, the guillotine had been set up in the place de la Révolution, and Robespierre was in the process of seizing dictatorial power in the National Convention. It was one of the great spiritual crises of Wordsworth’s life: where did his true loyalties now lie? Should he stay in France, ally himself to the Girondist cause, throw in his lot with the other English and Americans in Paris—Tom Paine, Helen Maria Williams, the Barlows, the Christies? Above all, should he remain with Annette to give her what protection he could, and to make their love-child legitimate? Or should he flee back to England and safety, because in the end none of all this was “his business”; because he was an English poet who had had an adventure, who had gathered his “copy”, and who owed it to his family—and his poetry—to scramble back home and begin to write about what he had seen and experienced? I was gripped by his dilemma. I entered into it, suspending history, seeing obscurely so many of the problems of my own generation expressed in a new and vivid way; seeing the vague excitements and cloudy enthusiasms focused down to an intense burning point of a single life: seeing, in fact, the biographical process become an instrument of moral precision and analysis—a way of making sense of my own world. And, of course, I passionately wanted Wordsworth to stay.
Well, he did stay: for approximately five weeks, in the tiny fifth-floor garret room—une chambre de bonne—of an unknown hotel on the Left Bank, ranging “more eagerly” through the city than he had done before, walking beneath the high walls of the Temple prison where the King and his family were incarcerated and crossing the pont du Carrousel to stand in the grim, deserted square in front of the Louvre—“a black and empty area then”—where the Swiss Guards had opened fire on the mob as it stormed the Louvre Palace. The scarred trees and the stained gravel bore witness to the struggle, and his mind dwelt on the heaps of dead and dying.