Romance During the French Revolution

“History is a qualitative filter, and events recorded for posterity are a pitiful fraction of the ones that actually take place,” writes Alan Jolis in an explanatory epilogue to this elegant historical novel.

“When the filter of history sifts out significant events along with more trivial ones,” he adds, “it is up to the novelist to go scraping the bottom of the sieve.”

From the imagined remnants of one of the colossal events in human history, the French Revolution, Jolis has constructed a suspense story that is indeed a tale of love and passion. “Love and Terror” takes place in Paris in Vendemiaire of Year II, according to the new calendar that was emblematic of the attempt to build the world anew upon the principles of reason.

That is, the story takes place, according to the Christian calendar, in October 1793, the acme of the terror with which Maximilien Robespierre, head of the Committee of Public Safety, has crowned the Revolution.

The principal characters are Joseph Fouche and Nenette, the baroness de Montdoubleau. Nenette is an imaginary character, a friend (and double) of Queen Marie Antoinette. Fouche is in the history books, a friend of Robespierre’s who became known as the Butcher of Lyon for his pro-revolutionary brutality. Later he was Napoleon’s chief informer and police chief.

As the book opens, the queen is in prison; her trial is tomorrow. Fouche has already rescued Nenette from the guillotine and the two have become lovers. But on the eve of her trial, the queen escapes: Fouche was responsible to Robespierre for her safety. Putting his duty above personal feelings, Fouche slips Nenette, the look-alike, into the queen’s cell. She will be tried and beheaded if the queen cannot be found.

In less deft hands, this tale could be full of phony dramatics and cheap sex. But Jolis is an accomplished novelist (this is his third), and he is skilled both in psychological portraiture and the rendering of the complex relationship between love and lovemaking. He sketches the lonely Austrian princess Marie Antoinette’s appetite for pleasure no less artfully than he does Robespierre’s puritanism.

One of this novel’s charms is its Frenchness. Though written in English, it is imbued with a French point of view, a Gallic sense of irony and wit. Jolis, although raised in France, graduated from Brown University and Georgetown Law School and has written several children’s books in French.

The first requirement for a historical novel is that its characters and plot should be engaging in themselves. “Love and Terror” satisfies this test. The second test, one harder to meet, is that the fictional work should take the reader convincingly to another time and place. This was the majestic achievement of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” which set the standard for modern historical novels. To say that Jolis’ book is no “War and Peace” doesn’t denigrate it, for in its own way, on a smaller scale, it has the ring of authenticity.

The revolutionary George Jacques Danton makes a vivid, brief appearance. So do Joel Barlow, who was later the American ambassador to France, and Tom Paine, the incomparable American pamphleteer of revolution and the rights of man.

Jolis introduces his modern readers to the distinctly unpleasant smells of 18th century Paris and its coarse sights--not the least of which was the daily head-chopping by the guillotine in what is now the Place de la Concorde.

The characters of the ancien regime and the egalitarian revolution are both presented with human sympathy, though Jolis shows without flinching the merciless quality of life that ensues when revolutionaries attempt to remake society on the basis of reason alone.

Jolis quotes Fouche in an epigram as telling the Duke of Wellington much later, in 1813: “Those who imagine that one can govern men with pompous formulas and abstract principles know nothing of the human heart.” The necessity for compassion permeates “Love and Terror”: The novelist’s picturesque details enhance this knowing sketch of the confused and ardent human heart.