Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France: Revolution and Remembrance, 1789–1799 (review)

The French Revolution had no shortage of dead to mourn—those who fell in the storming of the Bastille or during the journée of 10 August, the victims of the September massacres, the thousands who died on the scaffold during the Terror and the near half-million casualties of the Revolutionary wars. Joseph Clarke draws on a wide range of sources to bring into sharp focus the different ways in which these manifold deaths are marked amid the changing cultural politics of commemoration. A broadly chronological approach allows him to demonstrate how the course of the Revolution itself is reflected in changes in attitude among the political élite towards the remembrance of the dead: the early notion of one nation united in its desire to create a new age is steadily eroded, as remembrance becomes selective and made to serve crude propagandist ends, and as ceremonies, pamphlets and monuments are devised less to honour the dead than to defend a particular idea of the Revolution. The ‘heroes’ of the fall of the Bastille are soon forgotten and le menu peuple ignored. Clarke is sensitive to the private as well as the public face of mourning, and he emphasizes the personal suffering of the bereaved as a constant counterpoint to official attitudes. He demonstrates effectively how for the majority of ordinary citizens, despite the increasing secularisation of civil society, death and remembrance remain inextricably bound up in the rituals and rhetoric of religious belief. This attachment to traditional ways of thinking and behaving marks an ultimately unbridgeable gulf between popular customs and the politicized processes imposed by the authorities. Those authorities, at whatever period of the Revolution, do not come well out of this survey. This is nowhere better demonstrated than in the chequered history of the Panthéon, to which Clarke gives considerable attention. He evokes with a good eye for the telling detail not only the ceremonies to mark the deposition of the remains of Mirabeau, Voltaire, Rousseau (eventually) and Marat (briefly), but also the continuing controversies surrounding the Panthéon’s transformation from church to monument, the increasing emphasis on the representation of abstract virtue within its walls, to the exclusion of all spiritual warmth, and its ultimate decline into an irrelevance. This study contains many fruitful insights, and throughout Clarke presents complex material with confidence and skill. His judgements are clear, balanced and often bleak: he is particularly severe on Robespierre and the Montagnards, who use the dead to suit their own purposes and seek to make their memory an endorsement of their rule, and also on the Directory, which he reviles for its failure to honour its own fine words and for its dismal record of procrastination and penny-pinching. This richly detailed and rewarding study provides ample evidence for Clarke’s conclusion that as the century nears its end the Revolution has gone on for too long, has made too many demands on the people and taken too many lives, while delivering too little in return.