The Legacy of History (II)
Wednesday, 30 January 2008 13:02![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Revolutionary Monsters
In a footnote to his Histoire de la Révolution française, Michelet reported this anecdote: “A young man … one day asked old Merlin of Thionville, how he had brought himself to sentence Robespierre. The old man seemed to experience some remorse. But then, rising suddenly with a violent moment, he exclaimed: ‘Robespierre! Robespierre! … Ah! If you had seen his green eyes, you would have sentenced him just as I did.”[1]
By the time Merlin remembered Robespierre’s eyes for posterity, much had already been written on Robespierre’s fateful physiognomy. In her 1818 Considérations sur la Révolution française, Madame de Staël described Robespierre in the following terms: “I once spoke with Robespierre at my father’s house in 1789. He was then known as a lawyer from
Robespierre, who was then thirty-one years old, is presented like a ghost: the paleness of his face and the green color of his veins betray the contemporary fascination with vampires, and would become an integral part of his legend.[3] These details are reproduced, with variations, in countless works on the Revolution. In fact, they may have been inspired not only by Madame de Staël’s unlikely encounter with Robespierre but also by a Thermidorian engraving, done by Tassart and showing Robespierre “drinking blood.”[4]
In 1821, the Marquis de Ferrières described Robespierre as follows: “He was somber, mournful, suspicious, irascible, vindictive, considering events only in relation to himself. His face had something of the cat and the tiger about it.”[5] The feline characteristics of Robespierre’s face were taking hold of both the popular and aristocratic imagination. They echoed a Thermidorian expression according to which the last months of Robespierre’s political life were a “tigrocratie.”[6] The demonic quality of Robespierre’s gaze was meant to express, better than any political argumentation, both Robespierre’s ascendancy over the Revolution – an hypnotic, mesmerizing effect – and the necessity of destroying him for posterity.
By 1831, when Nodier drew his physical portrait, Robespierre, once observed as measuring over six feet, had become “a fairly small, spindly man.” “His gaze, was an indescribable shaft of light that flashed from a wild eye, between two convulsively retractile eyelids,” Nodier added, “a shaft of light that wounded when it struck…. With his dreadful good faith, his naïve thirst for blood, his pure and cruel soul, Robespierre was the Revolution incarnate.”[7] Robespierre’s “retractile eyelids” clearly suggest a bird of prey, a thought later echoed by Michelet when he wrote of Robespierre: “He swooped down like a hawk on an already paralyzed bird, and bit the tender flesh.”[8]
In his 1847 Histoire des Girondins, Lamartine contributed as well to the construction of Robespierre’s monstrosity:
Robespierre was small of stature; his limbs were puny and angular, his walk jerky, his attitudes affected … his rather sharp voice sought for oratorical effects but found only fatigue and monotony…. His eyes, very much veiled by the eyelids, and very piercing, were deeply embedded in their sockets; they had a bluish look, rather soft but vague, like steel gleaming in a bright light … his mouth was big, his lips thin and disagreeably contracted at the corners, his chin short and pointed, his complexion a deadly yellow, like that of a sick man, or one exhausted by night watches and meditations.[9]
We can see in these lines the simultaneous shrinking of Robespierre’s physique and the progression of his monstrosity.[10] The eyes in particular have kept their animal quality, but a new element has been invoked; they gleam like steel, a direct evocation of the guillotine, one that Michelet will also repeat a few years later: “His anxious eyes … casting a pale gleam of steel” (2: 61). In the popular imagination fired by early accounts of the French Revolution, Robespierre, like Frankenstein’s creature, was death among the living, an unnatural being betrayed by his green veins and his yellow skin, his deep eye sockets and his mechanical gestures. “His automatic gait was that of a man of stone,” Michelet would add, punning on Robespierre’s name (61).[11]
By the end of the nineteenth century, Robespierre’s metamorphosis was complete, and he was unrecognizable. Hippolyte Taine, in his passionate hatred of Robespierre, may have given us the most fantastic vision of the revolutionary thinker. Describing Robespierre’s withdrawal from the political scene during the months of the Great Terror, he wrote:
In vain he detaches himself from the action, and raises his preacher’s eyes to heaven, he cannot help hearing and seeing all around him, beneath his immaculate feet, a cracking of bones and a flowing of blood, the insatiable gaping mouth of the monster he has trained and he bestrides. This mouth grows more ravenous each day, and needs a more ample feast of human flesh, and it is good, not only to let it eat, but even to supply it with food, often with his own hands…. This butchery awakens destructive instincts that civilization had long held in check. His cat’s physiognomy, which was a first that of a worried, but fairly gentle house cat, became the ferocious expression of a tiger-cat.[12]
The now familiar feline qualities of the portrait are meant to suggest an untamable creature, a man-eating tiger with a suggestion of rabid disease, “foaming at the mouth when he speaks.”
[1] Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, ed. Gérard Walter (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 2: 61, emphasis in original. This extraordinary reply was widely circulated in the nineteenth century and is reported, with minor variations, by different writers.
[2] Germaine de Staël, Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (Paris: Delaunay, Bossange et Masson, 1818), 2: 140-41.
[3] Ann Rigney discusses the pallor of Robespierre’s face in Louis Blanc’s account of the Revolution, and shows how it is interpreted as a sign of his willingness to sacrifice himself. For Michelet, she suggests, it supports his view of Robespierre as a man of “colorless talent” (“Icon and Symbol,” p. 113).
[4] Engraving by Tassart, collection De Vinck, Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes.
[5] Charles-Elie de Ferrières, Mémoires, 3. vols. (Paris, Baudoin: 1821-1822), I: 343-44. Quoted in E. L. Higgins, The French Revolution as Told by Contemporaries (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1938), p. 135.
[6] See the engraving in the Collection De Vinck: “Miroir du passé pour sauvegarder l’avenir / Tableau parlant du Gouvernement cadavero-faminocratique de 93, sous la Tigrocratie de Robespierre et Compagnie.” Paris, Germinal, Year V. Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes.
[7] Charles Nodier, Portraits de la Révolution et de l’Empire ed. Jean-Luc Steinmetz (Paris: Tallandier, 1988), vol. I, p. 191.
[8] Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, 2: p. 667.
[9] Alphonse de Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins (Paris: Hachette, 1870) I; pp. 41-42. I quote the translation published by Henri Béraud, Twelve Portraits of the French Revolution, trans. Madeleine Boyd (Boston: Little, Brown, 1928), p. 66.
[10] Moreover, if Lamartine’s description sounds vaguely familiar, it may also be because, in its style, it echoes the description of Frankenstein’s monster, published a few years before: “His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun white sockets in which they were set.” Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, ed. James Rieger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 52.
[11] Thomas Carlyle himself would be influenced by the now-familiar monstrous legend. Commenting on the terrible days that preceded Thermidor, he describes “a seagreen Robespierre converted into vinegar and gall.” The French Revolution: A History (
[12] Hippolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine: La Révolution (Paris: Hachette, 1885), 3: pp. 209-10.
(no subject)
Date: Wednesday, 30 January 2008 22:32 (UTC)KITTYTIGER!ROBESPIERRE, BUT THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY WILL HAVE DOMINATRIX!ROBESPIERRE. MWAHAHAHAHAHA. >D...this is so going on an icon and/or banner and/or anything once I find the image that fits it. >___>
Maxime, I'm so sorry. ;.;
Also:
his veins a shade of green
I didn't know green blood existed. Red, I've seen. Blue, I've heard. But green?... OH, WAIT! MARTIANS!!1!~ Of course.
Taine's description is... a trip. I think the attraction of the last two centuries for fantastic, macabre, horror, etc. has been far too powerful. O.o
Oh, and while we're there. There's one quote I've been searching for MONTHS. I know someone, one of the Thermidorians, but can't remember which, said that Robespierre's grave would never be big enough to be filled by all of their hatred/anger/rage, or something like that. Except I don't remember the exact words well enough, and I don't know who said it, or where I read it (I must have read it in the first months of my Fr Rev "fangirling" and didn't pay attention). I wondered if you knew...
(no subject)
Date: Wednesday, 30 January 2008 22:45 (UTC)I think Maxime might be permanently scarred.
And the sad thing is, all the 19th century historians seem to have adopted the greenness... It would be pretty bizarre to have green blood though. The point of course, is that it's monstrous and they wanted to turn him into a monster.
I think Taine had read too many Gothic romances. Really, one would think you'd know that if you can write something like that it's time to put the novels down. >__>
I know the quote you're talking about, but I can't remember off the top of my head who said it. I'll have to go look through the different places it could be cited...
(no subject)
Date: Wednesday, 30 January 2008 22:51 (UTC)Yes. But I think he already is. Or has been. For long. >___>
Well, Martians can have green blood. It's such a proof
of humanity's nonsense and absurdity, you know. :DAs in: it's time to stop trying to write history and to write novels instead? XD
Ooooooooooh!!! You're putting an end to a very long mental trauma trying to find where the hell I had read that. :D :D :D :D :D
(no subject)
Date: Thursday, 31 January 2008 01:36 (UTC)Indeed. Poor thing. D:
Oh, yes. If they're from outer space, I suppose they can have green blood.
O Reason, save us!Or stop reading novels, since they're clearly messing with his ability to write history.
I'm sure I've read it in more than one place, so it ought to show up eventually...
(no subject)
Date: Thursday, 31 January 2008 15:46 (UTC)I thought it may have been in Hamel, or on the web that I had found that quote, but I can't remember clearly...
(no subject)
Date: Thursday, 31 January 2008 18:20 (UTC)It sounds like something Hamel might have cited. I'll have to check.
(no subject)
Date: Wednesday, 30 January 2008 23:27 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: Wednesday, 30 January 2008 23:29 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: Wednesday, 30 January 2008 22:37 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: Wednesday, 30 January 2008 22:51 (UTC)Apparently the feet the "German visitor" was using were closer to 11 inches than 12, so that would make the claim more reasonable...
(no subject)
Date: Wednesday, 30 January 2008 23:22 (UTC)...Except that apparently it works. ;.; Why can't people see how ridiculous this is?
(no subject)
Date: Thursday, 31 January 2008 01:46 (UTC)And the sad thing is, even if we've moved beyond judging people's characters by their appearance on an intellectual level as a society, we certainly haven't on that subconscious level, which is why these myths can perpetuate in less obvious forms.(no subject)
Date: Thursday, 31 January 2008 21:48 (UTC)I'm amused by the mental images of rabid!Maxime, though.
Also, aren't most people's veins a bluish green color? D: Why is that bad?
(no subject)
Date: Thursday, 31 January 2008 22:37 (UTC)Poor Maxime. Foaming at the mouth can't be all it's cracked up to be.
I guess they meant that they were just more green then usual? I don't really know. D:
(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 00:29 (UTC)Poor Marie Antoinette. ;___; I think she's the only one. Or the only one with noticeable deformities because of it.
I decided that this required artistic representation.
Oh. ;_____;
(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 00:52 (UTC)Well, Capet was probably pretty inbred too... Not to mention all the aristos.
XD! Poor Maxime. Clearly he's been bitten.
By what though? O.o;The tricolor exclamation points are a nice touch.I'm sure it's perfectly normal to have greenish veins.
Provided they don't glow in the dark. In which case you might have been exposed to radiation or something like that.(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 00:55 (UTC)Aww. Probably. I haven't studied them much, so I wouldn't know for sure. ;__;
A kitten.Thank you. :D They amused me........Eeeep.(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 01:03 (UTC)Well, there's only a given number of people the aristos--and especially the royalty--would be allowed to marry and it's rather small so... You do the math.
It would explain the whole tiger/cat thing. O.OThat probably sums up a lot of Maxime's thoughts, actually. Except when they're tricolor ellipses.In the 18th century that couldn't happen though.(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 01:08 (UTC)>___>
Yes. I thought ahead. Also, rabid kittens amuse me.Awww, probably.But...but radioactive jacobins from space. ;____; It would be so funny.(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 01:46 (UTC)It's a disturbing thought, I admit.
Yes. So cute and yet so crazy and dangerous. XDOr at least cutelittledrawing!Maxime.ROTFL. It would, now that you mention it.(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 01:53 (UTC)If only they were green. O_OI'm sure he can think in emoticons too. :DIt would be so Meaningful and Symbolic.(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 01:58 (UTC)What, you mean kittens aren't green? O.O!Especially tricolor ones. XDAnd entertaining too. *nods*(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 02:01 (UTC)No. D: They have blue ones, though. Aww. Poor thing. There are so many colors he can't use. ;__;
:D(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 02:25 (UTC)That's too bad... :(Dye?Oh, he can use them if he wants to. Especially green. XD(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 02:28 (UTC)As long as it wouldn't hurt it.Oh, good. I would hate to think he was being deprived of his rights. ;-;(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 02:32 (UTC)No, I don't think that would be such a good idea, actually. >__>Thought he wouldn't use purple and gold anyway. For obvious reasons.(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 02:35 (UTC)If it was nontoxic, and the kitty didn't mind...>__> Although I think it would be kind of pointless.Of course. :D Virtuous Maxime is Virtuous.(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 02:39 (UTC)Just a bit. I don't think my kitties would like it much. D:Is there any other kind of Maxime except Virtuous Maxime?(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 02:41 (UTC)I don't think Grantaire!kitty would mind. But he's orange, so the color wouldn't turn out well....um. Scary!OOC!Dominatrix!Maxime. :D;;;(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 02:53 (UTC)One of my cats is white, so the color would take, but she would protest.Oh. I forgot about him. *hides*(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 03:01 (UTC)Alas. D: We will have to give up on the possibility of green kitties, then.But he loves you. ;____; He just expresses it differently.(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 05:12 (UTC)*sighs* 'Twas a nice dream.I suppose that would make sense; since I love all Maximes (even though the non-OOC ones don't go around demanding people's loyalty and threatening them if they don't comply), I suppose it makes sense that even Scary!OOC!Dominatrix!Maxime would like me. XD...Didn't they make cats that glow green though?
(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 05:16 (UTC)Oooh. I don't know. That would be cool, though slightly needless.Awww, logic. I'm sure Scary!OOC!Dominatrix!Maxime appreciates your understanding.(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 05:31 (UTC)I think they somehow spliced their genes with a kind of glow-in-the-dark jellyfish, if I remember correctly...Well, it's not his fault he is the embodiment of everything that historical!Maxime wasn't. D:(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 05:34 (UTC):D Awesome. I wonder if they sell them.I know. ;__; He didn't ask for terrible characterization. And it isn't as though it stops him from being a perfectly respectable fictional character.(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 06:10 (UTC)It would probably be very expensive to get one of they did. I just wish people would stop confounding him with the real thing. It makes me sad. D:(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 06:21 (UTC)I know. :D I just wondered. I don't particularly want another cat.</strike I know what you mean. D:(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 19:51 (UTC)Of course, I'm not even sure they're selling them in any case. It would probably be better if OOC!Maxime didn't exist, despite the fact that I like all Maximes...(no subject)
Date: Friday, 1 February 2008 22:12 (UTC)Probably not. >.> Alas. I don't really need to bankrupt myself buying a new cat anyway.I know. :( Or if he only existed in fanfic written like that on purpose.(no subject)
Date: Saturday, 2 February 2008 04:29 (UTC)And then there's always the issue of how ethical it is to make new genetically engineered cats when there are so many unwanted ones in shelters... Well, that would be ideal, wouldn't it? *sighs* Pity reality doesn't seem to measure up, at present.(no subject)
Date: Saturday, 2 February 2008 06:27 (UTC)That's true. But there are always unwanted cats. :(Alas. ;___; We can hope.(no subject)
Date: Saturday, 2 February 2008 19:36 (UTC)Which is why one should adopt them. :D Whatever happens it will assuredly take a long time.(no subject)
Date: Sunday, 3 February 2008 01:39 (UTC)Alas. ;___; I don't think I can adopt any more at the moment.Probably. ;_____;(no subject)
Date: Sunday, 3 February 2008 02:30 (UTC)XD I didn't mean constantly; this obviously only applies to people looking to acquire more cats. It's most unfortunate. D:(no subject)
Date: Sunday, 3 February 2008 03:17 (UTC);-; It probably won't get worse?(no subject)
Date: Sunday, 3 February 2008 08:09 (UTC)Well, I really hope not. O__O