posted on 02 Apr 2019

Vive La Revolution by Mark Steel

If you’ve ever tried to read some of the more academic studies of the French Revolution of 1789 you won’t need me to tell you that the analysis of how why and what happened is devilishly complex. There is always the danger of looking back on key historical moments and thinking of them as happening in an oddly orderly way – yesterday the world looked like this, then this happened and now it looks like this. I remember as a youngster being struck by the realisation that the ‘fall of the Roman Empire’ didn’t happen over a couple of days back in 400CE but was a process that began two hundred years earlier. Telling someone living in the Empire back in 250CE that they were living through the decline and fall of the Roman civilisation would have been meaningless to them.

That taught me an important lesson about the way events in history are always the result of a process that happens over time. That in itself means that historical events are always about complexity, contradictions and uncertainty and that any subsequent analysis of events is always going to be influenced by the analyst’s own assumptions and ideologies. In short, when it comes to human behaviour and politics there can never be a single story or an absolute truth, just interpretation. That is not to say however that there’s never a version of the ‘truth’ that emerges as the favourite or dominant narrative – in the battle for contemporary ideological or political dominance history is often reinterpreted to suit the prevailing orthodoxy or establishment.

Never has this been more true than the way in which different, subsequent generations have been told the story of the French Revolution. Mark Steel’s starting point for this book is that the French Revolution is now fundamentally misunderstood, that the main movers in the revolution have become caricatures and that a fundamentally hostile political interpretation has been cast over the events and motives behind a revolution that has fundamentally reshaped the way Europe thinks about government and politics.

Whilst he doesn’t hide from complexity of the historical details – he’s certainly done his research – he also sets out to write in a style that is accessible, non-academic and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny. If you’re familiar with Mark Steel’s stand-up comic routines you’ll know exactly what to expect and you also won’t be surprised that he has a sophisticated and intelligent analysis of his own to bring to the party. Steel’s own politics on the Left are not hidden away in some ill-directed attempt to appear ‘neutral’ but become the lens through which he analyses the mass of reading he’s done on the topic. He has a comic eye for the absurd and a stand-up’s highly tuned bullshit detector mentality which allows him to get beneath the surface gloss and reinterpret for a lay audience what was going on.

Steel is very much aware that the revolution wasn’t one moment but a rolling series of events and critical points – look at our current nightmare over Brexit as an example of that – and he helps us through all of this by writing in quite brief sub-headed sections that are never allowed to become too dense.

In the end there’s a storyline here that he follows from the conditions that created the revolutionary environment, through the key early events and the excitement of creating a new order, to the almost inevitable betrayals, factionalising and resetting of the state. It’s a story that starts with the dispossessed and ends with Napoleon.

In many ways it’s a book that knows it’s audience perfectly. If you want to know more about the French Revolution, you don’t want to be patronised but you also don’t want to be tied to a great academic brick of a book, then this is the one for you.

Having said that, it’s not a book without its own problems. There is sometimes a feeling that this in the way it’s been conceived more a script than a book and it’s easy to see how this would translate with very little effort onto the radio. There are times when the Steel persona and the knowing comic intercessions become a bit wearisome and formulaic and this all adds to the feeling that the book is maybe 50-80 pages too long.

But that might just be me and my taste so why not check it out for yourselves. Paperback copies are cheap and easy to find and I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll be amused and entertained for your money.

 

Terry Potter

March 2019