Proper 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).