France Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite?

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER PARIS

"The revolution is a complex whole, like life itself, with the inspiring and the unacceptable, with hope and fear, violence and fraternity."

-- Francois Mitterrand

A big azure-and-gilt hot-air balloon, a reproduction of an 18th century model, wafted skyward in a "salute to liberty" as thousands of spectators gathered in the Tuileries Gardens last January for the official launch of the bicentennial of the French Revolution. The Republican Guard played a fanfare. An actor solemnly read the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.

Five days later, in a theater across town, a dozen masked youths with shaved heads invaded a concert of revolution-era songs. Crying "Long live the King!" the royalist punks tossed tear-gas canisters and knocked mezzo-soprano Helene Delavault to the floor. "At first we thought it was part of the spectacle," said Jean-Noel Jeanneney, president of the government's Bicentennial Mission. It wasn't. The singer was hospitalized, and President Mitterrand led the list of notables expressing outrage.

It was an appropriate start -- first uplift, then excess. Just like the original revolution. Reconciliation is the official theme of the 200th anniversary of modern France's cataclysmic birth, but nearly four months into the celebration the French seem as much cleaved as healed by the occasion. For if the revolution sprang from the idealism of the Enlightenment, promising liberty and equality, it soon deteriorated into a bloodbath that led to a dictatorship. Ever since, lurching wildly through two empires, two royal restorations and five republics, democratic France has tried to bridge the contradictions posed by its brutal beginning. Even today, when the left-right dialectic of French politics has softened under a socialist government leaning toward the center, the bicentennial has abraded old sores.

The revolution is fixed in the collective psyche of the nation. Ask any Frenchman to free-associate: he automatically recites, "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite." Then comes a torrent of violent images. Heads on pikes. Hungry mobs storming Versailles. Women knitting and jeering in front of the scaffold. Marat murdered in his bath. The zealous Saint-Just railing, "There is no liberty for the enemies of liberty!" And the battalions of Marseilles singing the nation's new anthem: "May the blood of the impure soak our fields."

For the Mitterrand government, the bicentennial is a political opportunity and a ticklish responsibility. On July 14, the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, the leaders of the seven industrialized nations -- France, the U.S., Canada, Japan, Britain, West Germany and Italy -- will assemble in Paris for a summit. What kind of image will France present? On the surface, at least, that of a united nation celebrating its glorious past with the hoopla of a spectacular Bastille Night parade and sound-and-light show down the Champs Elysees. Already, merchants are hawking underwear decorated with little guillotines. French television is reveling in soap-opera love affairs between 18th century aristocrats and commoners. Villages across France are dressing up their summer festivals in blue, white and red,

But even two centuries later, not all of France cherishes the spirit of 1789. Counterrevolutionary commemorations are proliferating. Right-wing Catholics are organizing a huge "Mass for the Martyrs" of the revolution on Aug. 15 in the Place de la Concorde. Local governments in western France helped raise funds for a $7 million movie called Vent de Galerne, which opened last month, about the republican army's savage repression of peasant rebels in the Vendee. In Lyons a historical society is tracing the descendants of 3,000 executed in anti-Jacobin uprisings. "The bicentennial is more an occasion for mourning than for celebration," says philosopher Jean-Marie Benoist, a former adviser to Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac. Asks Sorbonne historian Pierre Chaunu: "Why should we celebrate a failure?"

The official strategy for evading an answer is to focus resolutely on the high-minded events of 1789, like the Declaration of Rights, with its ideals of liberty, equality, and the sovereignty of the people. As for the blood that flowed thereafter -- the September Massacres of 1792, the Terror of 1793, and the 1793-94 uprising of the Vendee in which 400,000 died -- the less said the better. The play-it-safe politics of the commemoration is aimed at creating at least the illusion of ideological harmony, the same strategy that has sparked Mitterrand's recent political success. "We're not going to celebrate the guillotine," says Jeanneney. "Our mission is to emphasize the positive."

The trouble with this homogenized version of history is that the battles fought during the revolution still resist accommodation 200 years later. Twentieth century French historiography has been dominated by a Marxist school that celebrated the French Revolution and its class struggles as the mother of the Bolshevik Revolution. Regicide was the only way to crush the power of the privileged, and the Terror, like Stalin's purges, was a necessary transition to an eventual dictatorship of the proletariat. Many French have thought of themselves as different from other Europeans because they broke so violently with their past and started fresh.

The unreconstructed left wants an unapologetic bicentennial honoring the nation's radical roots. "France is still a country of class struggle," wrote historian Claude Mazauric in the Communist Party newspaper L'Humanite. "The message of 1789 . . . is to build a society unconstrained by multinational capitalism." SOS-Racisme, a civil rights group, for example, will celebrate with a rally for Toussaint L'Ouverture, a former slave who led an 18th century Haitian rebellion against French colonialism. A group of prominent Parisian socialists is agitating to rename part of the Rue St.-Honore after Robespierre. "All revolutions have excesses," explains former Health Minister Leon Schwarzenberg, "and any revolution without them must be considered suspect." But so far Robespierre's defenders have had no luck, and even moderates are concerned that the government has gone too far in snubbing controversial revolutionary leaders. "They are going to present people with a pasteurized, dissected, plastic-wrapped revolution," complains philosopher and leftist philosopher Andre Glucksmann.

In the past decade Marxist history has lost its sway as many French intellectuals grew disillusioned with East bloc totalitarianism. A revisionist school, influenced by nonpartisan British and American scholars, presents a more complex picture of the revolution: nobles seeking to weaken royal power played a driving role in the rebellion, for example; few peasants suffered under a feudal yoke. In the U.S. a much heralded new work by Harvard University's Simon Schama, called Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, depicts the ancien regime in a positive light -- not too differently from France's current best seller La Revolution, by historian Francois Furet. "The French have come to realize that the revolution was a magnificent event that turned out badly," says Furet, a professor at Paris' Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the University of Chicago.

Furet views contemporary France as a "republic of the center" in which a consensus has emerged in favor of market economics combined with broad social services. "Left-right rhetoric today does not correspond to reality," he says. "France has buried its civil war." Three key changes explain why: the Fifth Republic finally established a strong, stabilizing presidency; the appeal of the Communist Party has withered; and the old antagonism between the Roman Catholic church and state has eased. "The left is in power precisely because it renounced its revolutionary culture," he says.

Frenchmen appear ambivalent about their revolutionary forebears. Polls show that the most revered figure of the era is now the Marquis de Lafayette, who ultimately broke with the Jacobins and fled the country. After a televised re- enactment of Louis XVI's trial, only 27% of French viewers favored beheading the hapless King. One French poll even found that 17% of the country wants the return of the monarchy. Seeking new heroes, Mitterrand said last week that he will place in the Pantheon, France's national mausoleum, the remains of the Marquis de Condorcet, an influential leader of the National Assembly who called for universal public education, and of the Abbe Gregoire, a revolutionary priest who advocated civil rights for Protestants and Jews.

But the church is still not entirely reconciled. Many Catholics consider Gregoire a turncoat priest for swearing allegiance to the revolutionary state, which repudiated the power of the Pope. Last June, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, head of the French church, officially endorsed a campaign to sanctify 181 priests and three bishops who were murdered by a Paris mob in the Carmes prison in 1792. "France is like a family that has had an internal dispute," Lustiger said. "If we don't talk about the bad things that happened, we won't have a real reconciliation." Right-wing Catholics will converge on Paris for an August anti-bicentennial rally. Says Francois Triomphe, founder of Anti-89, an umbrella for several dozen groups protesting the government's celebrations: "We seek reparations for the evils done to the church."

In western France, where counterrevolutionary rebellions in the Vendee, Brittany and Normandy were brutally put down, antipathy toward the revolution is widespread. Historian Chaunu calls the retribution "genocide." In 1793 General Francois Westermann had reported proudly to his government, "I have trampled the children under my horses' hooves. I have massacred the women so they will give birth to no more rebels." The new movie about the Vendee uprising, Vent de Galerne, has understandably garnered intense local support and money. Says Jean-Michel Mousset, a trucking-company owner from Ste.- Florence who put up $5,000: "In 1793 liberty, equality and fraternity was on our side, not on the side of the republicans."

The dissenting voices on both the right and the left have had little effect on the majority of 1789 commemorations. Celebrations large and small, local and national, will attract record numbers of tourists to France. If these do not mark a true festival of reconciliation, the French can still take pride in the passion they have for their history. In Lyons, Jacques Tournier, the descendant of a water carrier who was guillotined in 1793, recalls that his grandmother refused to walk past the place in the market where the execution machine stood. "Now I too avoid that spot out of respect for my ancestors," Tournier says. Jacques Delmas, a lawyer from Reims, has fonder feelings for the revolution. "One of my ancestors stormed the Bastille," he says, "and I feel both thrilled and proud to be French whenever I walk past the place where it once stood."

However it is celebrated, France's birthday party promises to be anything but boring. The main business of such a celebration is, after all, a kind of % national introspection. More than a century ago, historian Alexis de Tocqueville, the first cool head to examine the various sides of the revolution, wrote, "Happy are those who can tie together in their thoughts the past, the present and the future. No Frenchman of our time has had this happiness." In this bicentennial year, the task seems daunting as ever. But the stimulation of ideas and the resulting reflection make the jubilee remembrance well worth all the fuss.

MISCONCEPTIONS

MYTH The storming of the Bastille freed hundreds.

FACT The fortress held only seven prisoners.

MYTH Death by guillotine was quick and painless.

FACT Execution often took several chops.

MYTH Most guillotine victims were aristocrats.

FACT Only 10% of those beheaded were nobles.

MYTH The guillotine was the main form of execution.

FACT Most of the 400,000 put to death during the revolution were shot, burned or drowned.

MYTH When the poor rioted over the price of bread, Marie Antoinette cried, "Let them eat cake!"

FACT Attributed to an unnamed "princess," the remark appears in Rousseau's Confessions at least two years before Marie Antoinette arrived in France in 1770.

With reporting by Alexandra Tuttle/Paris