City of Darkness, City of Light
By Marge Piercy
Michael Joseph, 1997. 479 pp., $29.95 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
When a brilliant novelist meets a great revolution, the result is a magnificent novel by Marge Piercy that brings alive the colour, the smells, the sounds, the heroes and ideas, of revolutionary turmoil in late 18th century France.
Piercy's new novel has her usual trademarks of matching political with psychological depth, an exquisite skill for using language to convey a complex richness of meaning and a strong feminist light on the lives of women.
The political giants of the five revolutionary years 1789-1794 are portrayed with sympathetic understanding.
Danton is the popular orator with a genuine common touch, full of revolutionary boldness but also the recognisably familiar politician of pragmatism, compromise and self-gain.
Desmoulins, the sparkling journalist who initiated the storming of the Bastille, is everyone's favourite, the "schoolboy at heart, thumbing his nose, writing witty aphorisms".
Robespierre, "the incorruptible", is the "champion of the little people", sternly pursuing revolutionary logic until he falls foul of this very logic when he turns on his plebeian supporters.
Piercy's unique touch is to bring to centre stage the women who played a crucial role in the revolution and initiated the modern women's movement.
Manon Roland is the liberal salon hostess and real intellectual power behind her husband and government minister, Jean.
Pauline Leon, chocolate-maker and organiser of women's bread riots and armed marches to petition or depose the king, joins with Claire Lacombe, an actor who rebels against a life as object of men's lusts and a future as a broken-down, child-burdened, hungry laundress, to form the Revolutionary Republican Women, the "biggest, strongest, most militant women's group".
Sisterhood runs aground on class, however. Manon is contemptuous of common women taking part in public affairs, whilst the "market women" physically attack Claire over price controls on bread which infringe their profits.
The ship of revolution, too, does not survive the shoals of class. Having ended absolute monarchy and restricted the power of the nobility in 1789, the newly liberated capitalist class now thought that the revolution had gone quite far enough, thank you. Their biggest fear was the insurrectionary women and the sans-culottes.
Like the liberal Manon Roland, who was "half-exhilarated, half-terrified" by popular crowds taking power into their own hands, most of the new bourgeois class, including first Danton and Desmoulins, then Robespierre himself, baulked at the plebeian threat to their newly won power.
Robespierre gave the poor price controls on bread with one hand but took away their power with the other, crushing their leadership and organisations. He thus found himself isolated when right-wing forces overthrew him and took both power and bread from the poor.
As the poor people's hero, Marat, says to Robespierre, "You'll lose your head like your friends. You're on one side or the other or you'll get cut in half."
For all the blood and rolling heads of the revolutionary terror, Piercy avoids any cheap moralism. She acknowledges the historical context without celebrating the brutality, recognising that for all their political faults, the bourgeois revolutionaries were human beings, were revolutionary (albeit politically flawed) heroes, their deaths to be regretted.
Politically, Piercy does not let the blood-letting colour her summing up of the revolution. Slavery had been abolished, Jews were given civil rights, peasants had land, and women won divorce and some bourgeois rights such as property and businesses ownership.
In the new Paris of bourgeois prosperity, although a "strange, passive depression" settles on the "crushed, disarmed, policed and kept-down" common people, there are yet stirrings of a new political dissent.
Having tasted power, they were hungrier than ever for it — and they knew a lot more about who their friends were and were not.
As Claire Lacombe concludes, "We did make a new world. Just not exactly the one we intended. It's a bigger job than we realised. It won't be us who finish it."