Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Too
We are two part-time academics. Ellen teaches in the English department and Jim in the IT program at George Mason University.
Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women's Memory by Marilyn Yalom · 21 February 07
Dear Harriet,
I finished reading Marilyn Yalom’s Blood Sisters a couple of days ago and wrote a brief review, which I put on Eighteenth Century Worlds @ Yahoo. No one said anything; I put it on C18-l, and a debate (quarrel really) erupted between two listowners over whether the "French revolution" was "worth it" or a "good idea." The terms of the discussion were too simplistic (partly because emails don’t allow of nuance unless you write a length and few seem to bother online); nonetheless, the continual back-and-forth prompted others to respond to my review and I can put some of those comments here. I wanted originally simply to recommend the book; now I’m recommending it and able to contextualize it more.
Marilyn Yalom has written a lucid, well-written and informative book about the nearly 100 French women’s memoirs written from the 1970s to the middle of the nineteenth century. All are by women who are bearing witness, telling you their story, what they and those they were attached to experienced during the height of the revolution. They are not just about Paris, or the early hopeful turns of events, or the terror, or counter-war from outside France, but also the counter-revolutions and individual rebellions in local areas of France.
Women covered include the Duchesse de Tourzel (and Madame
Campan as a continual work to compare), Madame Royale (Elisabeth, the daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette who survived), Rosalie Lamorier, Madame Chastenay (translator of Radcliffe’s Udolpho) Madame Roland, Charlotte Robespieer, the Widow Le Bas, Germaine de Stael, Madame Vallon and Alexandrine des Echerolles, the women of the Vendee (Marquise de La Rocheqaquelin, Pauline Gontard des Chevalleries, Renee Bordereau, Julienne Goguet de Boisheraud, Louise Barbier, Comtesse Turpin de Crisse, a superb chapter, really much of the sources for Anthony Trollope’s only historical novel, La Vendee), Madame de la Tour de Pin.
Yalom writes it as a biographer. She offers literal descriptions of the books (and also along invaluable annotated bibliography), but not, let’s say, what is the aesthetic structure. Yalom tells you the tone of the books, but then proceeds to use them as a fund of information for her to retell the woman’s lives. So this is not a book which gives you a sense of the texts or subtler themes.
But she does tell the stories very well and you can use the book as a lead in for your own reading of these women or the particular situations they endured and places they lived in during the revolution as she provides the context the actual editions of these women’s texts often don’t provide. The annotated bibliography some 300 pages long is invaluable: for each Yalom provides the author’s full name, title of her book, where copies are now located or what edition, and a brief precis of the content.
At the end of the book she asks some serious questions. Why does she like these books so? Since I have too have been drawn to these books since I was in my earlier teens (when I first came across one, Alexandrine des Echerolles in a good English translation). For her these are eloquent and moving accounts of survial on the cusp of catastrophe, and she compares what we find there to memoirs about World War Two, and the barbaric way people suddenly treated one another in concentration camps and other places. This leads to her final outlook which is basically
anti-revolution because of the insane killings, and terrible losses
so many did suffer. This would be a natural response reading these books, for not only are just about all of them about how the woman was helplessly caught up in ferocious wars, they are mostly pro-monarchy or bourgeois women. These are the women who could write, got into print, who the establishment would favor or allow.
But I don’t quite buy this somehow. I agree the revolution made many pay a high price (some the ultimate one of life), but I’m not sure the sweeping away of much of the injustices of the ancien regime, and the legal documents which did emerge eventually to create a more democratic enlightened order would have occurred without force. How wrest uncontrolled power and wealth from those determined at any price to hold onto it? Without the civil war the wealthy whites who owned, and all those who made money on enslaving black people would never have given up their "property" or access to wealth and the unpaid labor and services of whatever kind they wanted from others.
We might ask, Why do human beings then have to go beyond what’s necessary and slaugher indiscriminately and in hatred and revenge and fear, for while it’s true some of the killing that resulted was a direct response to the threat from the emigres arming themselves and determined to come back and slaughter all the revolutionaries, punish them horribly and take over again, not all the killings were. People in power began to kill to kill, and they used individuals they knew nothing of to get back at the injuries, losses, and hurts they had endured from others in other places. And then many just obeyed orders because it was the safest easiest thing to do. My own answer is this kind of behavior happens all the time—consider the terrible prison camps of the 20th century, the transportation of people labelled criminals from Great Britain to Australia and the horrific treatment meted out to many of them.
For me too I don’t think eloquence and moving accounts is good enough for an explanation, even survival as a motif, for we find that in many books not about the 1790s from a woman’s standpoint. I think it’s the woman’s perspective and life as a marginalized relatively or completely powerless person who is educated and so she reflects politics in a genuinely new way. Since reality for her is individua-,l and family-based, these books are intimate, and give particulars thought by historians beneath them. The uses of intense subjectivity. I class Fanny Burney with these books, and, if you look at older editions of her letters, hers resemble them.
Contemporary Illustration (originally a black-and-white drawing): Femme Au Panier (Woman with her basket)
I think some of these books are those Jane Austen referred to as Anne Elliot’s preferred reading in Persuasion (though I’m persuaded her reading would also include the mid-18thc century French women’s letters and memoirs), and suggest these underground not-noticed books were read and reprinted throughout the 19th century and shaped or influenced novels about the revolution. I’ve mentioned Trollope’s La Vendee; I’d add Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities and others—though Scott himself was a central source too. For Trollope readers it was these books plus Carlyle that John Grey (his alter ego and a hero in Can You Forgive Her?) so loved to read.
I’ve not been at all adequate on this. There is just so much to say about women’s memoirs as well as what was written, drawn, played, and created music for by contemporaries about the revolution, but I hope I’ve given an idea of the book’s content and the intelligent questions asked if not answered as perceptively as they could be.
Sylvia
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Posted by: Ellen
* * *
Comment
- On C18-l, Jim Chevalier answered as follows:
">>I agree the revolution made many pay a high price. The book fits the outlook Jim C suggested he had. But I’m not sure the sweeping away of much of the injustices of the ancien regime and and the documents which did emerge eventually to create a more democratic enlightened order would have occurred without force. How wrest uncontrolled power and wealth from those determined at any price to hold onto it. Why do human beings then have to go beyond what’s necessary and slaugher indiscriminately and in hatred and revenge and fear.
First of all, thank you to Ellen for acknowledging the purely human reaction which led to my own questions (and for introducing a new source on the subject.) I doubt anyone who has actually read these first-hand accounts (asopposed to "popular representations" or historical reframings) could NOT be touched and horrified.
It seems hopeless at this point to actually get a discussion going on this list about the subsequent statements above, but to reiterate what I’ve said a few times: it is by no means clear that the Revolution DID create a "more democratic enlightened order" – such an order came so far after the Terror, Napoleon and a Restoration that it can as easily be argued that the Revolution’s excesses delayed, rather than furthered, a process which proceeded in England far faster, and with far less wholesale destruction and death.
Do I know this for sure? No. This is why I (rather unsuccessfully) raised the question on a list that presumably includes experts who could provide more knowledgeable and comprehensive examination of the pros and cons of the whole event.
As for why human beings turn to slaughter at the slightest pretext, it may very well be (from what I’ve seen) that that impulse is as rooted in our nature as any of those more positive, and that historians only justify the actions it inspires after the fact. Which is all the more reason to be circumspect about claiming such actions were ever productive or necessary.
Otherwise, anyone unfamiliar with Marilyn Yalom might browse the Net a bit on her subject. The titles alone of her other books are informative:
A History of the Breast
A History of the Wife
Birth of the Chess Queen
Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness
Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers
Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century
As it happens, I was invited to a screening of "When Neitzsche Wept" this Wednesday (based on the novel by her husband Irving, a rather monumental figure in his own right), but it turned out to be over-booked. Too bad – I loved the book.
Jim Chevallier
http://www.chezjim.com/sundries
SUNDRIES 2005 thru 7/06
— Elinor Feb 21, 7:53am # - Bob replied:
"I agree with Jim about Irving Yalom’s novel When Nietzsche Wept, and I’m glad it’s been made into a film. I differ with him about the French Revolution.
I strongly believe that social change occurs only when those with power are forced to yield some (or all) of their advantage, either by force or by the threat of force. The example of the French Revolution frightened the English ruling class so much that they first tried to repress their opposition at home and then tried incremental change, as in the Reform Act of 1833, giving up only enough to prevent a rebellion.
In the U.S., social reform occurred only after great unrest during the Great Depression threatened the ruling class in the 1930s and after the disturbances of the civil rights movement and the urban riots of the 1960s made business as usual impossible.
People don’t give up their power unless they have to: this is also one way of understanding what occurs to Nietzsche in Yalom’s novel.
Bob Lapides"
— Elinor Feb 21, 7:55am # - David S. Karr replied some time later:
"Much has been written about this matter (more even, than on this listserv), from fears of military invasion from without conjoined with counter-revolution within (and there was much), to Robespierre and the Committee of Safety’s abstraction of "revolutionary justice" in which a perfected society was worth all sacrifices (resurrected by F. Furet).
Simon Schama essentially replayed Burke’s explanation: irrational (lower) orders indulging in blood lust. An easy way out. Mary Wollstonecraft herself regarded the violence as the leaven of ancien-regime oppression, in which subjects were not educated or trained to virtue, and the old regime’s judicial brutality. That corruption of the citizenry then found its outlet in the revolution. Lynn Hunt has suggested, among other things, the whereas the British did have a concept of "the loyal opposition" established in their political culture by the 18C, the French absolutist regime, with its lack of representative institutions, did not establish such a concept. In the 1790s, opposition to gov’t policy—in conditions of revolution, war, and counter-revolution (and a monarch actively seeking to overthrow the gov’t of which he was ead)—could not be perceived as a "loyal opposition" when that concept was not very available within French politics.
For a recent set of essays, see “Violence and the French Revolution,” special issue of Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, ed. D. M. G. Sutherland, 29, 3 (2003).
By the way, the Reform Bill of 1832 expanded the electorate in England/Wales from somewhere around 13% of adult males to somewhere around 18% of them. It’s no longer seen as a marking point of "democratization," (a word that smacks of teleology)—at least to the extent that it was in the old Whig history.
David S. Karr
Dept. of History
Case Western Reserve University"
— Elinor Feb 21, 7:56am # - Sam Cahill complimented me and re-echoed my original emphasis:
"I wish more book reviews were as personal and immediate as this (though some are as intelligent and well read, of course). It’s particularly important to consider women’s "genuinely new way" of looking at politics in a revolutionary era—that women have a unique perspective on national events and that they HAVE, historically, analyzed these events. I think a lot of people don’t sufficiently appreciate academic inquiry because they see it as too depersonalized. The 18th century, and all history, is dramatically human. Weneed to share that more with non-specialists, so I appreciate these comments.
Sam
—Literature is the lie that tells the truth, that shows us human beings in pain and makes us love them, and does so in a spirit of honest revelation.
~ Dorothy Allison."
— Elinor Feb 21, 7:57am # - Andrew Brown weighed in:
"On 20 Feb 2007, at 03:44, Robert Lapides wrote:
Gandhi or MLK would’ve been crushed by the Nazis or the Ancien
Regime in France, long before either built a following.
"Voltaire was the Gandhi of the Ancien Régime." Discuss…
One of the problems with this exchange is that there was no such thing as the French Revolution, just a series of events that, in France and elsewhere, much occupied the period from around 1787 through 1794 or later. There is no useful sense in which those events add up to a coherent entity that can be blamed or praised for anything, whence the toils and travails of scholars who have tried to make sense of the largely meaningless chaos of that period of history.
AB"
— Elinor Feb 21, 7:59am # - I want to thank Jim Chevalier for his first comment on the book where he contexualized it with Yalom’s other works and her husband’s novel. I had noticed she wrote A History of the Breast and showed a real interest in the politics of women’s lives (which gives rise to their art) as well as their art, but not the consistent political outlook nor her husband’s.
I want especially to thank Sam Cahill for his kind words as well as his re-emphasizing what was my original emphasis:
" It’s particularly important to consider women’s "genuinely new way" of looking at politics in a revolutionary era—that women have a unique perspective on national events and that they HAVE, historically, analyzed these events. I think a lot of people don’t sufficiently appreciate academic inquiry because they see it as too depersonalized. The 18th century, and all history, is dramatically human."
I appreciated David Karr’s posting too.
I didn’t really intend to ignite the debate. My feeling is often people just are not willing to write with the kind of length and information that’s needed to offer a genuinely nuanced account of just about anything on the Net so they end up in too simplistic a perspective. We really can’t argue whether an event of the magnitude and cultural significance of the French revolution and Napoleonic wars was a good or bad thing. I do think Andrew Browne’s idea that there was no such thing won’t wash: we have to name events and most events don’t exist in isolation when they are important: they occur over a number of years. We could refuse to name anything but then we have no words with which to refer to things in convenient shorthand.
At the risk of myself being too simplistic I will answer Jim C this way by developing one of my hasty paragraphs a little more:
How wrest uncontrolled power and wealth from those determined at any price to hold onto it. Without the civil war the wealthy whites who owned, and all those (so many across the US) who made money on enslaving black people would never have given up their "property" or access to wealth and the unpaid labor and services of whatever kind (including whatever sex was wanted from women or men) they wanted from others.
We might ask, Why do human beings then have to go beyond what’s necessary and slaugher indiscriminately and in hatred and revenge and fear, for while it’s true some of the killing that resulted was a direct response to the threat from the emigres arming themselves and determined to come back and slaughter all the revolutionaries, punish them horribly and take over again, not all the killings were. People in power began to kill to kill, and they used individuals they knew nothing of to get back at the injuries, losses, and hurts they had endured from others in other places. And then many just obeyed orders because it was the safest easiest thing to do. My own answer is this kind of behavior happens all the timeconsider the terrible prison camps of the 20th century, the transportation of people labelled criminals from Great Britain to Australia and the horrific treatment meted out to many of them.
Okay. My point is this kinds of horrific behaviors occur all the time. The "holocaust" was no unique event. The difference between the pogroms of the 20th century and previous eras is the gangs of people in power didn’t have a huge tax base, didn’t have the kind of weaponry and armies they have, and couldn’t reach out to other people with enormous controls over industry, trains, and media. Consider the logistics it took to slaughter so many in WW2.
Jim C will say well why add another? *My response is that we are not adding another. They happen anyway. You are making misconnections*. The blood bath of the US civil war was just terrible: but a group of us listened to this heroizing account of the Gettysburg battle on a bus tour of the place. Sure, the numbers of people you can read about as maimed, beaten, whipped, marked, their lives destroyed in Dickens’s reprinting of the ads seeking slaves who ran way in US newspapers (exposing the fallacy that slaveowners were good to their "property") are in smaller numbers, but this counting is also losing the point.
What you’ve got to keep your eye on is what Orwell said: all do atrocities and all lie about it, and they do it all the time and lie about it all the time. Yes it can get worse: now we have done in the US unashamed systemic torture, thanks to the monster in the White House. But it may be Beccaria is rolling over in his grave, but torture never stopped, never.
My problem with Mark Twain’s comments about buckets and bucket and buckets of centuries of blood is he too looks for a reason to give for the slaughters.
We could make this into a black humor joke of the brilliant sort the Monty Python people did in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when Michael Palin’s character says after Sir Lancelot slaughters a wedding party: “Let’s not bicker and argue over who killed who.”—this needs to be said after viewing Bresson’s depiction of savagery in Lancelot, but it makes me remember Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Faguet where he quoted Faguet’s retort to Rousseau: "’What does he mean?...This mad pronouncement, _man is born
free[, but is everywhere in chains]_…Dire, les moutons sont nés carnivores, et partout ils mangent de l’herbe [To say sheep are born carnivorous but everywhere eat grass], serait aussi juste…"
An equivalent thing would have happened anyway; the events were ignited by human nature and just waiting there. The technologies were in place you see. These sorts of events are happening right now as I type this.
And Bob’s argument whether the slaughters were worth it is making the same misconnections.
At the heart of the debate is some teleological thinking. There is no reason here, no necessary connections. Read Hume on things occurring together.
E.M.
— Elinor Feb 21, 8:00am # - "Dear Ellen,
Thanks – very interesting. I think that the point I would have made is that the Revolution was under desperate threat – had the Royalist armies reached Paris then all those involved with the Revolution would have been slaughtered – there would still have been a Terror it would just have been of a different nature( I know that you said this :)). This is not to excuse the Terror; it is just a statement of fact. A similar situation occurred in the English Revolution (albeit on an infinitesimally smaller scale) and of course the Russian Revolution (on a much worse scale).
The thing that really proves the extent to which history is written by the rulers is the fact that while the Terror attracts massive condemnation how often do we hear of the cases of the massacres which followed failed revolutions? The repressions of 1848, the massacre of the Communards in 1870, the brutal murders following the German Revolution of 1918-19, the massacres and torture in Chile following Allende’s overthrow etc. etc.. They smashed Rosa Luxemburg’s head in with a rifle butt before they shot her and flung her body ina lake – I suppose this is why I am slightly cynical about Marie Antoinette (sorry – its not her fault she gets the attention she does :)).
Oh dear – I am getting carried away – I do get angry aboutthis; all those forgotten people, ordinary men and women killed for fighting for a better world.
Nick."
— Elinor Feb 21, 1:28pm # - Nick, I’m glad you added what you did. I made a similar point during the discussion on C18-L, namely that the French rebels are condemned for showing no clemency to the king but no comparable condemnations are made in regard to Elizabeth I’s executing those who challenged her rule.
I also asked Ellen to explain why she thinks I made a misconnection, but she hasn’t answered yet.
— bob Feb 21, 11:15pm # - Bob,
The misconnection is the connection of the violence with revolution or counterrevolution. I wrote that violence exists and human beings do it all the time. I suppose I might be seen as ultimately agreeing with what Bob is trying to say is valid. If there had been no revolution, the people in power would have carried on being violent for whatever interest they wanted in whatever way they wanted; what happened was the violence was taken over by another group of people who happened to pass some legislation which controlled and limited the terrible thing the people who had been in power had done and permitted others they identified with to do.
But this is a description not a ethical inference. I noticed Andrew Brown’s posting did make my point in another way when he referred to the meaninglessness of many of the events. I would say my view is one you find everywhere in Candide.
Bob concentrates on how a group of people who get into power pass some legislation and change the rules of political and social arrangement to favor them as a group and some people as individuals. It’s chance: different groups of people do the killing and kill and do the legislation. Oftentimes what was decent is undone after a while or it’s reversed. This is how I take Jim C’s problem. We have not brought chattel slavery back (though other forms of slavery have replaced it in the 20th century—the slave labor and extermination camps are the substitute I mean here). That is, when the violence dies down, then the groups in power work to make their interests paramount, and the old groups don’t go away, they regroup and wrest what they can back: but they use violence too. (A state is that level of organization which has a legal monopoly on violence.) That’s what’s been happening in the US since the 1970s.
The people doing violence are not doing it to get what they want; they do it to do it.
Violence doesn’t lead to good; it’s just violence. It’s done by some to protect themselves to get back at others; it’s done by others simply because they want to, revel in it.
Nick is understanding me: "the point I would have made is that the Revolution was under desperate threat – had the Royalist armies reached Paris then all those involved with the Revolution would have been slaughtered – there would still have been a Terror it would just have been of a different nature( I know that you said this :)). This is not to excuse the Terror; it is just a statement of fact."
Right. Just a statement of fact.
What’s depressing is to listen to arguments where people favor the rich and powerful and get excited about how this or that supposedly numinous person or people died (e.g., Marie Antoinette—I am not interested in her because I think her special in any way or that she died by the guillotine). So that's why Nick's remark is spot on: "They smashed Rosa Luxemburg’s head in with a rifle butt before they shot her and flung her body in a lake …"
Yes.
Bob will insist those leading the violence have some good cause they are justifying their violence by. But they cannot do the violence alone; the overwhelming preponderance of those doing the violence are doing it to do it for the reasons I stated, and after a while the people in power change and we get criminal-types at the helm ... Look about you :).
Lincoln freed the slaves, but he did it, not the millions who fought and killed and were killed. He might not have, and his reasons for doing this murky (partly to win the war).
Do I think there's been progress since anatomically human men and women emerged in Africa? Yes, but not because of the violence or from it. Recently it's been partly a result of the very technology (you can produce such a plethora of goods for so little money) that they may use to destroy them.
Ellen who trusts she again makes herself obscure
— Elinor Feb 22, 8:50am # - Ever since I read Martha Washington had a black half-sister, whom Martha never made the least attempt to free and used as a slave-maid, who had children by white men in the house (this is the situation at the core of Valerie Martin’s Property), and that Martha Washington was against freeing the slaves, I’ve never been able to have sympathetic feelings for her. My father once showed me a letter he came across by Washington where Washington was inviting some men to the house, and as an extra added inducement described an available slave girl. I remember my father saying "so much for the father of this country."
Over on C18-l and my blog I’ve been debating with others the inferences to be taken from Marilyn Yalom’s Blood Sisters, a book about French women memoirists, most of whom were strongly royalist, and whose memoirs was published and read throughout the nineteenth century; well, here’s another "sisters" book, this one about slave women in the 19th century:
http://blacknetart.com/sweat/2007/01/what-are-we-worth.html
For those who can’t reach the blog commentary:
What Are We Worth?
Doing research for a new project Keith and I are working on. Reading a lot of interesting books on slavery. I’ll say more about that when the time comes, but in the meantime, I’m sitting with what I’m finding out as I’m making my work. In the stacks, I stumbled upon a book I wasn’t looking for; it’s called We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century and it was edited by Dorothy Sterling. I opened to a random page and what I read hit me hard. A mother and daughter who had been separated due to slavery for twenty years had reconnected and started writing to one another. The daughter was free and was hoping to buy freedom for her mother and brother. The mother, Elizabeth Ramsey, writes to her daughter:
I said in my letter to you that Col. Horton would let you have me for 1000 dol. or a woman that could fill my place. I think you could get one cheaper where you are than to pay him the money. . . . I think that 1000 dollars is too much for me. You must writ very kind to Col Horton and try to Get me for less money. I think you can change his Price by writing Kindly to him.
...
For the record, the daughter was able to buy her mother for $900.
E.M.
— Elinor Feb 23, 9:49am # - Susan Maslan on C18-l, expressing frustration with the terms of the discussion:
"Since I have written a book about the French Revolution I have tried to stay out of this discussion. It is very frustrating to hear the repetition of the pro and con positions. I don’t usually hear people arguing about whether World War II was a good or bad thing, or whether the Reformation was. Instead we try to figure out what happened and why and what its meaning and significance were to contemporaries as well as to a larger historical picture. Of course we have our own politics and our own beliefs that propel our studies and that no doubt create and spur our interest in our historical object.
All that said. I find very difficult indeed the repeated assertion that reform is always superior to revolution, the faith that, given time, reform will no doubt take place (a faith for which, in the French case there is no supporting historical evidence), and a leap to a supposed "outcome" rather than a focus on the unfolding of events themselves. Maybe, if people want to discuss the French Revolution we could raise issues like paticipation, citizenship, sovereignty, food, war, the family, enfranchisement etc. and see what happened.
I apologize for my no doubt frustrated tone. It is hard to go to dinner parties all the time and have to listen to people reflexively condemn one’s object of study. Probably a little like being a Shakespearean and having to listen to lots of people insist that Shakepeare didn’t write the plays. I think it is great to get the discussion going and wonderful to feel its energy; I just wish it could shift out of its current pro-con model.
best, Susan"
— Elinor Feb 24, 10:07am #
commenting closed for this article