#lemur muses

[lemurious]

Here’s to the ones who deliberately step outside the ranks and ignore categorization. Here’s to the revolutionary who contradicts Newton based on experimental evidence on the diffraction of light; to the journalist who describes eye diseases; to the doctor who advocates for prison reforms; to the lifelong skeptic of lofty pretensions who is turned into a symbol before his blood has clotted.

Here’s to refusing to turn away from the fear and the violence and the treachery and the war; to claiming the guard-post, though armed with words alone. Perhaps, just enough to protect the shared ideals. Perhaps, too much. Perhaps, insufficient; history may have the answer, but how could one know that, when one is in the process of making the history happen?

Here’s to hard decisions made unflinchingly; to cutting through the rush of a new republic like a soldier escaping a siege, decisively and with full understanding of the inevitable defeat; and to words that continue to ring true as we offer complacency to the twin hydras of poverty and injustice in hope that it will be enough to escape them, just this time.

"...que la société humaine y prenne garde, on ne tuera Marat qu’en tuant la misère ; Charlotte Corday n’a rien fait ; tant qu’il y aura des misérables, il y aura sur l’horizon un nuage qui peut devenir un fantôme, et un fantôme qui peut devenir Marat." - Victor Hugo

Happy birthday, Marat.

(*engraving is from the British Museum collection)

[lemurious]

We were there when –

A phrase to start a story. A history, a reminiscence. A choice, often. A survival, by definition.

You were there when. When there were not enough hours in the day and not enough ink in the entire Convention to rush the grain to Paris; and people were hungry, and people were scared, in the middle of a war, two fronts, three fronts, you were there when – and what did you do?

I fed the people, you could say. I was there to feed the people.

You were there in that mad, exhausted spring when hope itself seemed to have faded beyond the horizon, when accusations were falling like apple blossoms and treacheries sprouting like leaves, when you were asked to sign a decree,

I am here to feed the people, and not to kill revolutionaries, you said.

(You will not sign another decree either, in Thermidor; you will choose silence again; after all, the people were still one missed grain delivery away from starvation. We will never know if that was the explanation you gave yourself; we will never know if you wished you’d have chosen differently, condemned yourself, spared yourself from surviving.)

We will wonder if you smiled when you heard the slogan, years later, hungry, empty, broken years later; bread and the Constitution, if you thought it as something that had been yours, as something you’d been trying to give the people for years. You were there when –

and once again, you survived, a veteran of that forgotten army that had been wielding pens, not swords, watching the dawn rise outside their windows, over the endless stacks of orders and accounts, laws and reforms, trying to keep your republic together until a republic was no more.

You did not live to see the next one, and that perhaps was the greatest tragedy of all. But such is the cost of civil service; forging what future we may, one line and one sleepless night and one inevitable defeat at a time; there is little honor and remembrance in it; but the people can only hope to build a better republic if they are alive, if they had been fed, if they have someone else’s legacy to follow, and we are here now, because you were there then.

Happy birthday, Lindet.

[lemurious]

I have a picture of Camille at my desk, and often look at it when writing yet another paper, another note, another story; because whether work or fiction, they all turn into a story at the end; and over the last year my own life has felt like something out of a history book, or a novel - hard choices and long hours and the fear of losing a democracy, fragile and imperfect as it has been, and gaining more and more responsibility with time; battlefield promotions, one might say; and so many words, diplomatic perhaps more than uncompromising; and there is still much to learn.

I am celebrating my own birthday close to Camille's, so here's to him and here's to me, and I am older than he ever got to be, which is a heartbreak for the lost possibilities and a reminder to live with passion and without fear. And here's to the Revolution, and to history, and to gratitude to the community (including here! the creativity and thoughtfulness has often felt like a safety net), and to learning (French, now! I will be reading Camille before the year is over) and to finding time for writing and for love, in any form.

And here's a proper, though belated, birthday greeting to this exasperating, uncompromising, complicated firebrand of my gateway revolutionary. Happy belated birthday, Camille. May you remind me to live with a cause and without reservations.

[lemurious]

Only so many names can become titles of history books, earn chapters of their own, spur heated discussions; when hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands write the history of days and (if fortunate, only if fortunate) years, together, without a blueprint and with little hope for success - only sheer determination and conviction; to serve.

To follow, and what some might call a slight becomes a matter of pride; to serve the republic and those who have been building it, up until the moment when no alternative seems honorable - when no alternative seems possible; and somehow, it still feels like death should have only been an interlude, when there was so much more left to live.

What if is particularly poignant in this case; when should you decide to fight another day, another year; would your skills, your abilities, be used to serve, and not to waste what you have built? How many others have faced this choice, after this Revolution and others to follow?

We may not know the count, but that does not protect us from having to face the same choice; even now, even these days, some of us already have. The stakes may not be life and death, but the questions remain: what will you serve? what lines will you cross? what compromises will be made? and will they be worth it? May we have the integrity and the clarity to find our own answers.

Happy birthday, Philippe Le Bas.

[lemurious]

"But we cannot know with certainty the answer to the most troubling question: was he directly implicated in the bloodbath that Paris suffered, or was it unleashed to discredit him? The most likely answer is that, in his absence, his enemies were jumping at shadows, and he was the perfect scapegoat for their panic to kill as many suspects as possible."

- Peter McPhee, Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life

Highly recommended. A nuanced take with some delightful anecdotes, and others just as heartbreaking. A much more measured representation of my beloved Camille compared to the few dismissive sentences in Twelve Who Ruled (which is excellent on the whole - but was written in the middle of WWII, which probably influenced its position).

A book that makes Robespierre human without delving into faux-psychological examinations, and protects the reader from the tendency to ascribe every achievement and every horror to a single person; when others on the Committee, and in the Convention, and at the Jacobins (not to mention on the mission) were just as busy, and just as determined, and often, much more ruthless; the others who had the power, and took the laws, such as they were, such as they had been made, into their hands, again and again.

A history that doesn't shy away from the fear of the conspirators at every corner, and explains the reality of the city in what must've felt like a perpetual desperate last stand.

--

(And you know what hurts the most? That in the end, impossibly, they had won.

They had won themselves a republic, with grand ideals and very real attempts to achieve them, with equality of law and administration, with proposed rights to education and social support that were more than a century ahead of their time, a republic which somehow managed to stand against the combined might of the European armies and internal insurrections and hold its ground, and still not run out of bread even if it had gotten close.

And then, the ones who came after Thermidor took their fragile, bloodied, victorious republic and wasted it. Not even broke it, which would be easier to forgive - wasted it, to corruption and greed and petty vengeances and lack of belief that it could aspire to be better.)

--

but not all is lost. the words have remained.

[lemurious]

A cathedral, it needs marble and bricks and careful calculations so that the towers would not fall. And it also needs the idea of heaven; a reason that lasts beyond a single lifetime.

A victory, it needs an army and cannons and cathedral bells melted into copper to forge cannonballs. And it needs something to fight for; a reason greater than death. 

A republic, it is a tower of paper and an army on the march. 

It needs an army that defends a nation and not a ruler; an army of hundreds of thousands drafted in a year; it needs signature after signature, night after night; the brutal necessity of survival; and in the end it brings the kind of victory that is organized, measured in its trajectory and engineered to completion. 

It may take a long time to understand that it needs the ideals too; perhaps one cannot be condemned for focusing on the tower and leaving the (centuries and) skies for others. 

An engineer; a general; an organizer; a survivor. Perhaps a tragedy, unspoken, and a complexity of life that merits both memory and story. 

Happy birthday, Lazare Carnot.

[lemurious]

"When Bastille fell, Danton was thirty, Robespierre was thirty-one, Desmoulins twenty-nine, Saint-Just twenty-two - five years later they all were dead, destroyed by the same mechanism of revolution that they had helped to set in motion. In such perilous times minds and bodies were consumed at a frightful rate. To keep up with the tempo of change was impossible - to fall behind was to be lost. The makers of the revolution had no time to accomplish their goal of beginning the world over again..."

"Büchner wrote Danton's Death at twenty-one and was dead at twenty-three; Przybyszewska wrote Thermidor at twenty-four and The Danton Case at twenty-seven and was dead of malnutrition and tuberculoses at thirty-four."

(Introduction to Przybyszewska's The Danton Case & Thermidor, by Daniel Gerould)

--

They were all so young. Young enough to consider their mortality irrelevant, perhaps; young enough to pledge themselves to a cause before bringing it to existence by sheer force of will; and yet not too young to know the price they were paying, and choose to pay it anyway, to weigh their conscience against success or victory. It was only fitting that their first chroniclers for the stage were just as young, and courageous in their own way; and meticulous and dedicated to their craft just the same; and gone entirely too soon.

(There is the heartbreak of so much that was lost, so much that they could've achieved had their lives not been cut short; and also a kind of envy, for the certainty of purpose - which perhaps had never existed anyway (not the purpose, the certainty), and was instead the hard, brutal, daily fight with obstacles on all sides and little more than conscience to rely on.)

[lemurious]

Reading George Lefebvre's The Coming of the French Revolution, translated by R R Palmer, and it is clear and insightful and will merit proper post(s), but - a note on the author.

There is that constant reminder of how young everyone was during the Revolution and how infuriating and tragic it is that their lives were lost to history, to their new Republic that was about to crumble in their absence. For me, it has been intermixed with the pervasiveness of the feeling and I am *mumble* years old and what have I done in the world? yes, but is it enough? is there enough time to achieve anything still? etc.

A note. Lefebvre's doctoral work was "severely interrupted" by WWI, so he finally defended his (highly influential) thesis at the age of 50, became a professor at the age of 60, and a major authority on the Revolution, and continued his research and writing, with notable success, until his death at the age of 86 (and through another world war and personal tragedies). I admit that this gives me an entirely different sort of hope; one reminding me that there is time.

Also: "as long as one thinks it to have been wise, feasible or legitimate to try to introduce a kind of political democracy in France in the eighteenth century, one must regard as necessary, in the judgment of the present translator, virtually all the steps taken by the revolutionaries down to the dictatorship of 1793-1794. To consider these steps unnecessary, deploring them as excesses, requires one to say that the objective of political democracy in France at the time was a false or impossible one...". I love you R R Palmer