YES I WOULD LIKE TO HEAR ABOUT CAMILLE WHO'S LAST NAME I HAVE PROMRLY FORGOTTEN HOW TO SPELL :D
[so I tried to answer and then it became this whole personal essay instead O__O I suppose one can always be fanciful and blame Camille for momentary possession]
Camille Desmoulins (and yes, he is Camille, for some reason, even though Robespierre is not Maximilien, nor Saint-Just is Antoine, and there are entirely too many Jean Pauls to find the right Marat among them; but Camille is Camille forever) is – was – a lawyer and a journalist and one of the key figures of the French Revolution, famous for his impassioned speech that led to the storming of the Bastille in 1789, written about in quite a few lovely posts by people much more seriously interested in and knowledgeable about this historical period than myself, and my beloved because of – well, because of his incendiary, scathing, often overblown, and sometimes downright brilliant pamphlets – because of staying true to freedom as he saw it (including clemency, including freedom of speech, including a very fair share of populism and naïveté, but hell it is worth learning French if only to memorize some of his words) – because my grandmother was a history teacher during a dictatorship.
Being a history teacher meant: lectures in a city left in ruins by the frontline having passed back and forth too many times to count; stealing carrot peels from the table after her better-off roommate decided to make a salad for herself, and eating them before she returned; family caught in the guerrilla war and narrowly escaping a deportation to Siberia; her brother imprisoned by the KGB for the crime of owning a radio; being told that there was no money to get a degree in anything but a certificate to teach elementary school; but she wanted to study history, and she wanted to learn French, and, smiling in the pictures with her perfectly coiffed hair, half-starved, defiant against her entire family, she did.
Being a history teacher meant: a strictly state-approved curriculum, but fortunately, there was nothing wrong with the French Revolution on the surface of it, and if she dedicated rather a lot of time to it, well, she was one of the best history teachers in her city; and if her husband, my grandfather, had decided to learn French too, while in hiding, for a year, during the war (and what were the reasons for hiding? some things you only learn many years later, from whispers), and couldn’t get a position in a university due to insufficient ideological purity, well, they met rather late in life, but lived together for more than fifty years. Being a history teacher meant Robespierre, and Danton, and Marat, and the ideals of a Revolution and the fear of Terror, and above all, the freedom of opinion that leads to immortality. (Do I agree with it all? But my grandparents’ house was perhaps the only place in my childhood where my agreement wasn’t required, even then). Being a history teacher meant sticking ideas in the gaps between words, so that her students would notice, and living for fifty years until she, too, got to see a dictatorship fall.
But now, being a grandma meant that July 14th was an important holiday to a degree that I didn’t understand how nobody else seemed to have heard of it in my elementary school, and being taught the first two stanzas of La Marseillaise in French and in translation, and being given Ninety-Three at much too young an age and informed that I was going to cry at the end, and Incorruptible as the epithet for Robespierre and the ideal to be attained, and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People and David’s Death of Marat somehow a part of a backdrop of what probably was a very unusual childhood, though it seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, and Camille Desmoulins as that favorite of grandma's that she doesn’t even want to mention too often, nor too casually, as if not to stain the words.
It meant stories upon stories, during the times when history and story blended together, and a weird, awkward, bookish grandkid, of the type who decades afterwards falls headlong into the French Revolution in the middle of very real, very immediate hard times for liberty and harder choices that all of a sudden have to be made, and starts reading about Camille, exasperating, uncompromising, flawed, scared, courageous, firebrand Camille, and – well, reading Camille, one can sometimes believe that words can reach beyond the grave.
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