Royals, radicals and rebels

DAVID ANDRESS assesses a detailed portrait of the political and personal interactions that fuelled the French Revolution – but is only partly convinced by the book's approach

- By DAVID ANDRESS

Over a long career, John Hardman has specialised to great effect in teasing out, from speeches, decrees, minutes, memoranda, letters, diaries and unsent drafts, the varied moods of French political decision-makers before and after 1789. Translating the many tones of such documentation, from the augustly solemn to the petulantly self-pitying, he has shown readers the complex characters of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, alongside the unfolding riddles of the revolutionaries Barnave and Robespierre. In this new book, Hardman weaves this expertise into a portrait of the French Revolution as a whole, seen emphatically, and rarely in the current century, from the top down.

One of the intriguing points that emerges from this perspective is the highly personal nature of political interactions, right across this period. Hardman shows how natural it was in pre-revolutionary elite circles to expect a harvest of preferment for friends and relations to come from any shift of policy or ministerial position. As he demonstrates, those who came to prominence from 1789 also took such spoils for granted, whether seen as the reward for venal loyalty, or the rightful deserts of merit and virtue. The results looked very much the same. The misfortune of the revolutionaries was to combine such actions with a language of overbearing national unity, which could turn any suggestion of a following into a faction, barely short of overt treason.