4 - The configuration of actors II
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
Summary
… it is only possible to play a great role in history if one is, what I have no hesitation in calling, a representative man… When nowadays opinion appears to be divided on the matter of proper names, what really divides it is the ideas, the aspirations, the tendencies, which those names represent.
Louis Blanc, Le Temps, 22 February 1866Proper names and their symbolic function
Michelet may have proclaimed in the 1847 preface to his French Revolution that ‘The principal actor was the peuple’ (I:7), and described his own work as the first truly republican history, all previous histories having been essentially monarchic ones with either Louis XVI or Robespierre as king (II:991). But, like every other historian of the Revolution, he was dealing with a pre-configured fabula which included certain outstanding individuals: ‘the great men’. These individuals occupied positions of political power and played a significant, if intermittent, role in the course of events – a role which becomes more and more prominent in the later episodes of the fabula as an ever-diminishing personnel engages in the power struggle leading to the final play-off of Thermidor.
‘There was nothing about his features striking enough to arrest the gaze of someone scanning a large gathering; there was nothing written in physical letters about his completely interior power,’ writes Lamartine of Robespierre as he appeared at Versailles in the early days of the National Assembly in 1789 (I:56).
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- The Rhetoric of Historical RepresentationThree Narrative Histories of the French Revolution, pp. 137 - 170Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991