Victor Hugo’s 1793

Zhou Enlai did not actually reply ‘It’s too early to tell’ when asked about the long-term effects of the French Revolution. The question posed to the Chinese premier during his talks with Henry Kissinger in 1972 concerned the protest movement of May 1968. But why waste such a juicy morsel of apocrypha? That legend has persisted because the aftershocks from great upheavals really do take many decades, even centuries, to subside. Even if time clarifies the course of events, their meaning may remain fogged by doubt, and by dispute.

No epoch-making change illustrates this chronic instability better than the Revolution of 1789 itself, and its blood-drenched aftermath. Near the end of Victor Hugo’s final novel, Ninety-Three, a conscience-stricken aristocrat ponders the misery and carnage that have engulfed much of France. Still, he reflects that ‘Visible labours hide invisible ones… The visible achievements are cruel, but the invisible work is sublime.’ Behind the Revolution’s ‘scaffolding of barbarousness’, a glorious ‘temple of civilisation’ will eventually arise. That hope caps ‘the extraordinary year 1793’, which began with the execution of Louis XVI, continued with the rise of Robespierre and the advent of the Terror, and ended with the wholesale massacre of counter-revolutionaries. Can any future omelette justify this ocean of smashed human eggs? The divided nobleman warns a comrade that ‘If you are rough with utopia, you kill it.’

Since the time of the Terror, enforced from Paris by the Committee of Public Safety, revolutionaries everywhere have quarrelled over how much roughness the quest for utopia can take. As template or trigger for two centuries of further insurgencies, the events that unfolded after 1789 remain unfinished business – in France above all. Ninety-Three (Quatrevingt-Treize) appeared in 1874, deep within a century and a culture steeped in the ideologies and personalities of revolt and reaction. Now, 150 years later, the core of its plot can still arouse passion, even fury. For it dramatises the so-called Vendée rebellion of 1793-95 in western France against the revolutionary state controlled from Paris.

A few historians (notably Reynald Secher) have dubbed the brutal pacification of the region after the defeat of royalist rebels a French ‘genocide’. Others hotly reject the terminology. It is widely accepted that more than 200,000 died (around a quarter of the population) during and after the campaign of the ‘Catholic and Royal Army’ against the revolutionary regime, the majority from the mass slaughter of civilians. The orthodox historians’ line of ‘atrocities on both sides’ holds good for early stages. But from late 1793, the revenge massacres of non-combatants by Parisian forces – the notorious ‘columns from hell’ – do plausibly herald a new kind of state terror. Hence the ‘genocide’ wrangles. In his chronicle of the era, Citizens, Simon Schama considers the Vendée uprising ‘capable of polarising French historians and readers more implacably than almost any other event of the Revolution’. It also, curiously, inspired the creation of one of France’s most popular tourist attractions, the Vendée-based Puy du Fou. The historical theme park now plans a £600m British offshoot in rural Oxfordshire. More of that later.

Hugo wrote Ninety-Three at the age of 72, shortly after he had returned to Paris following two decades of exile in the Channel Islands – where he had produced Les Misérables, and won global fame. It distills the literary titan’s lifetime of engagement with the splendours and horrors of revolutionary idealism into a galloping yarn of provincial insurrection, of progress and pushback, and of torn loyalties. The omniscient narrator, who sees and judges everything with a panoramic perspective, extends his empathy to the royalist rebels. Ultimately, though, he views the post-1789 transformation as an unstoppable force of nature, or ‘Necessity’: ‘To call the Revolution an act of man is to say that waves cause the tide’. Penguin Classics has just issued a dashing new translation by David Bellos. Sadly, it was the final project of this learned, stylish and always-entertaining translator, biographer and scholar of French literature, who died aged 80 last October.

Hugo’s father, Léopold, had as a young officer helped to slay the Revolution’s enemies (‘My father fought in this war’, runs an aside in Ninety-Three, ‘so I know what I am talking about’). From the later revolution of 1830 up to the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, the indefatigable writer had enjoyed not just front-row seats but, sometimes, principal roles in French cycles of rebellion and repression (he became a Senator in 1876). He lived through, and memorialised, an age when ideas wore uniforms and took up arms. Culture wars regularly escalated into shooting (and burning, and guillotining) wars.

‘Books are wellsprings of crime’, fulminates a traditionalist lord in the novel, for ‘literary trivia will end up prompting stupid atrocities.’ Hugo himself, the prophet of liberal progress, stood in the vanguard of a half-century of struggles both on the page and in the street. As novelist, poet and dramatist, however, he could and did wear the colours of his foes. And nowhere does this creative ambivalence – or Keatsian ‘negative capability’ – crackle with more narrative electricity than in the portrayal of the Revolution in Ninety-Three. As Bellos pithily puts it, ‘the author is on both sides at the same time’.

So, most likely, were many of his readers. Sanctified in hindsight by the glories of Napoleon, the virtues of the Revolution solidified over the course of the 19th century into the foundational myth of republican France: a secular catechism that only renegades, traitors or (at best) eccentrics would refuse. By 1978 François Furet, the ex-Marxist who became one of the period’s subtlest interpreters, could state that ‘the French Revolution is in power in society and its institutions, especially in academia’, because ‘no historical debate’ about its events ‘any longer involves real political stakes’.

Yet this consensus took two centuries to form. The light of Revolution had often dimmed. In 1815, with Bonaparte’s downfall and the monarchy’s restoration; in 1851, when his nephew Napoleon III seized power in a coup d’état; in 1871, and surrender to Prussia; in the débâcle of German invasion in 1940 and the Pétain regime: Hugo’s invincible republican ‘future’ repeatedly came to juddering halts. Arguably, only when Charles de Gaulle stabilised the French Republic in the late 1950s with the ballast of a quasi-monarchical presidency did Hugo’s ‘Necessity’ begin to look like a permanently done deal.

Hugo the know-all liberal narrator deems the rebellion a futile and foredoomed war of ‘peasants against patriots’: ‘ignorance holding out with pride and idiocy against truth, justice, law, reason and deliverance’. Hugo the novelist has other ideas. Picturesque sub-plots aside, he condenses the conflict into a tense, three-way dialogue of life and death between the royalist Breton aristocrat Lantenac, leader of the insurgency, his soft-hearted revolutionary great-nephew Gauvain, despatched from Paris to quell the rebellion, and the Jacobin commissar Cimourdain. ‘A pure soul, but a dark one’, Cimourdain is the hard-line champion of Terror as purification, but also a former priest who taught and nurtured the wavering Gauvain, and still loves him as a son. Civil war becomes a family quarrel, as it was for Hugo, whose Breton mother had royalist sympathies.

For Cimourdain, the healing knives of the revolutionaries will restore health to the diseased body of the nation: ‘Surgeons look like butchers’, and ‘The Revolution is an amputation’. Just as prophet-Hugo has managed to align himself with this doctrine of cruel necessity, however, novelist-Hugo steps in to give the diehard feudalist Lantenac a spectacular last-ditch deed of selfless bravery. The old reactionary’s sacrificial acts confirm that ‘Above the revolutionary absolute stands the human absolute.’ Lantenac’s nobility pushes Gauvain from the path of progressive duty, and provokes a final crisis.

In its blend of horror, heroism and romance, the revolt of the Vendée (which spread out into parts of Brittany, Anjou, Maine and Normandy) retains its power to enthral. In Victorian Britain, both Anthony Trollope and GA Henty – master of the imperial adventure-story – wrote novels about it. Abortive British coastal raids to support the rebels lend a plot-strand to the BBC’s Poldark series (and the Winston Graham novels they adapted). In France, meanwhile, the growing success of the Puy du Fou theme park has reignited dormant controversies and diffused them far beyond the academy. With 2.8 million annual visitors, the ride-free estate south-east of Nantes offers outdoor and indoor historical shows, from Roman to modern times, four recreated villages – from a Viking settlement to a provincial high street c.1900 – and a suite of hotels designed in period style. Only Disneyland Paris and the (frankly fictional) Parc Astérix attract more customers in France.

Created by the conservative politician and entrepreneur Philippe de Villiers (once Jacques Chirac’s culture secretary), and now led by his son Nicolas, Puy du Fou appeals to the vast bulk of the families who throng it as an all-purpose day out, with no mission beyond thrilling hi-tech entertainment. However, it did begin with a Vendean focus – and a restored château as the heart of the site. The park’s attention to local history means that the 1793 rebellion and its memory loom far larger in its programme than in orthodox tours of the French past. Le Dernier Panache, for instance, is one of the most popular daily shows, garlanded with several awards for its live-action drama. It recounts the romanticised career of François de Charette de la Contrie: an aristocratic officer who returned from the American War of Independence, where he fought a monarchy, to lead Vendean peasant forces, which defended one. In 2023, this show spawned Vaincre ou Mourir, a movie about Charette’s insurrection produced by the Puy du Fou organisation. It generated an outraged pile-on by mainstream critics. Heresy still comes at a cost.

Almost since its inception (1977), Puy du Fou has incurred the wrath of orthodox historians and intellectuals of the left. For them, the De Villiers’ brainchild serves as a Hollywood-style Trojan Horse, smuggling counter-revolutionary propaganda into the picnic-boxes of the French family outing. Catholic, royalist, nationalist tropes (its critics claim) wrap far-right ideas in fancy costumed spectacles. For journalist Isla Galloni, the park ‘spurs violence against those it excludes from French birth-culture’. The historian Guillaume Lancereau edited a hostile book entitled Le Puy du Faux: ‘Peak of Fake’.

Behind the hyperbole, the critics acknowledge that scepticism about the Revolution – and sympathy for its armed opponents – may still serve to weaken the ideological fabric of the national state. For sure, Philippe de Villiers has lately aligned himself with far-right positions and personalities, such as the maverick presidential candidate Éric Zemmour. But the shrewder Puy du Fou objectors have broader views, and longer memories. They grasp that a much-loved attraction that sympathetically foregrounds Catholic and local loyalties – as opposed to the Jacobin ‘patriotism’ imposed from Paris after the Revolution – may still, however indirectly, unpick the stitching in the Republican tricolore.

With his grand plan to convert 158 hectares of farmland north of Bicester into an equivalent showground for British history, Nicolas de Villiers and his colleagues may find that resistance to the scheme does not stop with arguments over traffic congestion, rubbish clearance and habitat loss. Cherwell district council have yet (as of late July) to deliver its verdict on the planning application but promises a decision very soon. Back in the Vendée, Puy du Fou inflects the monolithic, unitary idea of France with a bow to history’s valiant losers. By doing so, it still flouts a Republican taboo. In the words of Ninety-Three, ‘The bronze mask of civil war has two profiles, one turned towards the past, the other towards the future, and each is as tragic as the other.’ In Oxfordshire, which masks will the history of Britain wear?