Footsteps. Richard Holmes
lived at the end of the eighteenth century, but I had a strange feeling that I was writing about someone in the same house.
It was a restless time. The window of my attic room overlooked the shunting yards of Paddington station, and my dreams were shaken by the whistle and roar of departing trains. The sense of movement and change was everywhere. News of disturbances in Paris had been reported piecemeal in the English papers for weeks, but largely in terms of isolated disruptions by students at Nanterre, or syndicalistes at Renault. Then I began to get letters from friends already in the city, speaking in confused, rapturous terms of the long “sit-ins”, the great marches and demonstrations, people coming from all over Europe—Berlin, Rome, Amsterdam—to celebrate the new spirit of Liberté, and take part in some huge, undefined événement. It was a carnival, they wrote, and a revolution too. The world would never be the same again, the authorities were cracking, the old order was in retreat.
A letter from Françoise, a girl I’d met after the Cévennes journey, now a student in Paris, reached me; it was carried over by a lorry-driver as the French post had gone on strike:
Across the boulevard a dark-blue Peugeot was lying on its side burning. Its wheels in the air meant the whole city had turned upside down. The pavements glittered with broken glass, and the flames shone on our posters flyleaved up the trees. The night stank of riot gas, and my eyes ran with tears—of happiness! At the bottom of the rue des Ecoles the wall below the barred windows of the Medical Faculty was painted with enormous graffiti in red—Imagination au Pouvoir … The CRS surged by in their black boiler suits and visored helmets, swinging their long batons like madmen who didn’t understand our sanity. I saw a little old lady with a Samaritaine carrier-bag walk straight through them untouched … Everyone in the cafe was cheering and embracing each other, bringing in the latest news. It is like a dream come true!
I read this with mixed feelings, half-excited and half-sceptical. Then, one evening at my window, staring out into the quiet English night and hearing the distant clankings, I tuned my radio to Luxembourg and heard with astonishment that they were trying to burn down the Bourse. It was a live report—French state radio had been forbidden live coverage—and the noises seemed to fill my room. I could hear the huge crowds shouting, the crack of CRS gas-canisters, the brittle, thrilling sound of breaking glass, the sudden ragged bursts of cheering. And suddenly the idea of “the Revolution” came to life in my head, and I knew that it was something I had to write about. It was not the destruction that excited me but the sense of something utterly new coming into being, some fresh, immense possibility of political life, a new community of hope, and above all the strangely inspired note—like a new language—that sounded in the voices of those who were witnessing it. It was a glimpse of “the dream come true”, the golden age, the promised land.
Moreover, I identified it—immediately, naïvely—with that first French Revolution as seen by the English Romantics some hundred and eighty years before. The gap in time, the great and complex historical differences, for a moment meant nothing to me. For what I was feeling, what my friends were feeling, seemed to be expressed perfectly by the Romantics, and by no one else.
’Twas a time when Europe was rejoiced,
France standing at the top of golden hours And human nature seeming born again.
So William Wordsworth had written, when in July 1790 he set off to walk through France on the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille.
There were moments when the student barricades round the Sorbonne and in parts of the Latin Quarter really did seem to be re-enacting the events of 1789-94 (though no Robespierre arrived and no Terror began). The huge open debates in the courtyard of the Sorbonne and in Paris theatres like the Odéon seemed to be emulating, if not the great ideological discussions of the first Assemblée Nationale—in many ways the climax of the entire eighteenth-century Enlightenment—at least the more fervid and impassioned meetings of the Cordeliers and the Club des Jacobins. If there was no Robespierre there were many who looked and sounded like the young, handsome, long-haired and insolent Saint-Just.
When on 27 May de Gaulle took mysterious flight from Paris to an unknown destination (actually he went by helicopter to consult with General Massu at an army base in Germany), many people drew the parallel with Louis XVI’s fatal flight to Varennes of autumn 1792. If history was not exactly repeating itself then at the least it was in a strange state of theatrical correspondence. It was a replay, a rerun, a harmonic echo across nearly two centuries.
The whole ethos of the Sixties—that youthful explosion of idealism, colour, music, sex, hallucinogenic states, hyperbolic language and easy money (“the counter-culture”, as the sociologists called it)—was based on a profoundly romantic rejection of conventional society, the old order, the establishment, the classical, the square (and also, in fact, austerity).
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
Many of the catchwords and concepts of the Sixties, indeed the very idea of “revolution” itself as a flamboyant act of self-assertion—“the language of personal rights”—found either inspiration or confirmation in the generation of the 1790s. Coleridge and Southey’s plan to found a commune on the banks of the Susquehanna river; Blake’s poetry of visions and defiance (“The Tigers of Wrath are Wiser than the Horses of Instruction”, from The Proverbs of Hell, was one of the most popular graffiti); Shelley’s notions of free love and passive resistance, understood as an early form of Flower Power, “Make Love Not War”; Coleridge’s and later Thomas de Quincey’s interest in drugs and dream-states; Mary Wollstonecraft’s championship of the rights of women—all these spoke directly to the generation of May ′68.
Above all, there was the challenge to the conventions and structures of authority, the whole tone of confrontation, which took place daily, whether in the matter of clothes, art, sexual morality, religious piety or politics. Such confrontation was international: the counter-culture took to the road and passed all frontiers, entered all cities; just as the first Romantics had set out on their wanderings to Wales, France, Germany, Italy, Greece or the Levant—only “the Orient” now meant India rather than Arabia.
What William Hazlitt wrote of the face of the young Southey before he cut his hair and settled down with his extended family in the Lake District, could have been written of many of the young bearded and Christ-like faces on the barricades of ′68. These in turn unconsciously reflected the revolutionary features of the young Cuban, Che Guevara, whose image hung like an icon in a million bedsits, aparts, pads and communal kitchens, in London, New York, Hamburg, Paris and Rome. Hazlitt described this revolutionary and Utopian archetype, as it first made its appearance in the 1790s:
Mr Southey, as we formerly remember to have seen him, had a hectic flush upon his cheek, a roving fire in his eye, a falcon glance, a look at once aspiring and dejected. It was the look that had been impressed upon his face by the events that marked the outset of his life. It was the dawn of Liberty that still tingled his cheek …
While he supposed it possible that a better form of society could be introduced than any other that had hitherto existed, while the light of the French Revolution beamed into his soul—while he had this hope, this faith in man left, he cherished it with a childlike simplicity, he clung to it with the fondness of a lover. He was an enthusiast, a fanatic, a leveller; he stuck at nothing that he thought would banish all pain and misery from the world; in his impatience at the smallest error or injustice, he would have sacrificed himself and the existing generation (a holocaust) to his devotion to the right cause.
Hazlitt was himself one of these young radical enthusiasts, and had visited Paris as an art student during the Peace of Amiens in 1802. In The Spirit of the Age, his portrait of the leading writers and politicians of his generation, written twenty years after, he continued to judge men like Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Godwin by the yardstick of their first revolutionary ideals, and in that dawn light of the French Revolution. It was a light that most of them, he felt, had gone on to deny or betray, and there is a mixed tone of cynicism and elegy—the “hectic flush” and the “falcon glance”—to many of these portraits,