Eric Hazan is one of the most remarkable writers of our time.
He is a Parisian who was born in 1936. He has a medical background and he worked for a time as a doctor in Algeria, but he has spent most of his life in his native city. He is both an intellectual and a man of the streets. His wonderful book The Invention Of Paris (2002) is much more than a mere guidebook; it is by far the finest literary and historical companion to any city that I've ever come across. On our last two visits to the city, both my wife (who once lived in Paris) and I found it indispensable.
In The Invention Of Paris, Hazan's understanding of the history of the city - the story of the ordinary people, of the streets - is profound. Yet he always writes as a broad-minded internationalist. He understands and describes with relish the distinct qualities and moods of each arrondissement, but he always places his writing in a careful historical context.
Given the above encomium, I have to write that this new book, his eagerly awaited history of the French Revolution, is a disappointment. His intimate understanding of Paris inevitably informs much of it, and you could argue that it is too Paris-centric. As a radical, imaginative reassessment of one of the great extended episodes of world history, and one that remains deeply divisive and controversial to this day, it doesn't really work. Indeed it falls fairly flat.
Some of it is an almost routine, and excessively concise, rehearsal of what is already very well known. At times the reader yearns for more detail and more exposition. This is all the more unfortunate as he ends, a true man of the Left, on a noble note: he beseeches us to keep the memory of the revolutionaries alive and never to lose the inspiration of a heady time when "the unfortunates" were the "Powers of the Earth", when the true purpose of society was the common happiness. These are moving, high-minded sentiments, but sadly they are hardly justified by what has preceded them.
Hazan is frank: his intention, in this ambitious book, is to revive revolutionary enthusiasm, at a time when "the prevailing tendency is towards relativism and derision". Well, I most certainly don't wish to descend to either derision or relativism, but my considered conclusion must be that his elevated aims are not realised. His book is certainly replete with insights and pointed comments, but some of them verge on the semantic. For example, he rails against the overuse by previous historians of the term "bourgeoisie". Having trailed through contemporary speeches, debates and press reports, he finds that the words bourgeois and bourgeoisie were little used by the revolutionaries themselves.
So he concludes that the bourgeoisie did not actually exist as a class. There were haves and have-nots, but not a bourgeoisie and a proletariat. This seems to me more like a rather recondite admonition for previous historians, and Marxist historians in particular, than a great historical perception. It amounts to no more than a scholarly quarrel among those of the Left. This is not to say that he should have refrained from debating with previous historians. As he notes, he is describing what has been "repeatedly" described before. That is the trouble; perhaps it explains why, when he is dealing with what actually happened, his writing is concise to the point of compression.
I finished the book convinced that Hazan has an essentially romantic, indeed sentimental, view of the Revolution. He does not flinch from mentioning its attendant horrors, but he is so keen to present it as a heroic uprising of the repressed, as an entirely justified struggle for liberty and emancipation, that he can at times seem almost maudlin. This is in a sense ridiculous, for he is a sophisticated and scholarly man, a writer of advanced perception. But the fact that he occasionally seems awestruck by the revolutionaries is, I reckon, almost certain to induce a degree of scepticism in some readers.
To be fair, he is not always starry-eyed. His discussion of the three great journalists of the revolution - Marat, Desmoulins and Hebert - is brief but very trenchant. As he notes, each was the founder and the sole writer of his newspaper; and each detested the other two. As a journalist I read his brief discussion of the trio with fascination, but as so often in this book, I found myself wanting to read much more.
Too often modern historians write too much; their books tend to be excessively long. So it is in a way pleasant to note that this book is, if anything, too short, even if it amounts to more than 400 pages.
But I feel that Hazan in this respect has been too disciplined; he should have allowed himself to be more discursive. His account of the revolution is concise and high-minded; it is also somewhat ingenuous.
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