The Legacy of History (V)
Sexual Politics
Although twentieth-century historiography slowly abandoned the practice of historical narratives organized around dominating figures, Danton and, above all, Robespierre continued to haunt the historical imagination.[1] More revealing still are the popularized images of the revolutionary drama that were staged again a few years before the Bicentennial. For our purpose, the most interesting, perhaps inevitable, post-Freudian reappraisal of Robespierre’s and Danton’s characters took place in Andrzej Wajda’s 1987 film Danton.[2]
Adapted from a play by Stanislawa Przybyszewska, The Danton Case, the film capitalizes on the familiar and contrasting figures of Danton and Robespierre. In contrast to Danton’s exuberant, larger-than-life physique (Danton is played by a robust Depardieu), Robespierre (brilliantly played by Wojciech Pszoniak) is true to his legend: a thin man with cold, inexpressive features, except for a frown of permanent resentment. In our first encounter with him, we see him sick, rising painfully from bed to meet his hairdresser. His head is carefully hidden behind a mask and a wig that serve as exteriorization of a complex, inscrutable personality. Robespierre lives in a curious household, under the adoring eyes of the “maid Duplay,” whose shy advances he systematically rejects with undisguised revulsion. In another correlated scene, striking in its detached cruelty, Duplay coldly beats a naked child (who would appear to the uninformed spectator to be her son) for his inability to memorize his revolutionary catechism. (Ironically, at the time the scene is supposed to take place, the Commune had just passed a decree forbidding masters, fathers, and mothers to inflict corporal punishment on children.)[3] Duplay is made to appear as a revolutionary, unnatural, harsh mother; only in the end is the spectator told that the abused child is in face Duplay’s little brother.
By contrast, Danton is presented as a force of nature. Of vigorous disposition, he is shown to prefer a night with a woman to an urgent meeting with his friends and political allies. He invites Robespierre to a sumptuous dinner, only to throw away fine dishes, glasses, and carefully prepared food when Robespierre declines to eat. Danton represents life, waste, and excess. He lives luxuriously while the people beg for bread; he is rich and wasteful, but redeemed by a devastating sincerity. In Wajda’s tale, Danton is fully exonerated.
Consequently, the reasons for Danton’s fall are no longer attributed to political corruption but to the capriciousness of irrational politics and, more specifically, to Robespierre’s unpredictable character. Two momentous scenes seal Danton’s and Camille Desmoulins’s fate. The first takes place when Danton, having invited Robespierre to eat with him, loses his temper and screams at the Incorruptible: “What do you know of the people? Nothing! Look at yourself! You don’t drink wine! You faint at the sight of a naked sword! And they say you’ve never screwed a woman! So? … You want the happiness of men and you are not even a man.” This explosion of anger makes explicit what the movie has already gone to some pain to emphasize. First, that Robespierre lives in an isolated world, entirely detached from the people, or, we should say, what the word “people” is supposed to mean. Second, Danton’s judgment emphasizes what remains, in Wajda’s eyes, Robespierre’s most deplorable sin: his effeminacy. Already connoted by powder, make-up, and wig, Robespierre’s femininity takes a more decisive and, for Wajda, more deplorable turn. It becomes a physical cowardice crudely associated with Robespierre’s personal sexual failures. In what may have been an unintentional comment on this scene, the national secretary of the French Socialist party, Marcel Debarge, declared during the Bicentennial: “I like Danton because I have always had a weakness for people who live, who screw…. The visionary side of Robespierre sends shivers down my spine.”[4] In Wajda’s account of the French Revolution, sexuality and politics are inseparable, or rather, sexuality serves to emphasize the fact that Robespierre cannot serve the people adequately. Wajda’s feminization of Robespierre amounts to an indictment. As Danton makes clear, Robespierre in unfit to lead the nation.
In a second scene, both more cruel and pathetic, Robespierre, who has come to plead with Camille Desmoulins (Patrice Chéreau) to abandon Danton, is rejected by Desmoulins and his friends, in the midst of laughter and derision. Robespierre, alone in the corridor, hears the mockery and leaves, humiliated, resentful, more than ever determined to see them all executed. Wajda’s argument, that Robespierre was in love with Camille Desmoulins - made more explicit in a previous scene where Robespierre tenderly puts his arms around Desmoulins’s shoulders but does not succeed in moving the journalist - also serves to show two irreconcilable visions of the Revolution: Danton and his friends offer images of conspicuous consumption, delighting both in domestic bliss and decadent feasts. Most of all, they are undisguised. Unlike Robespierre, who is first seen being made up, Danton keeps throwing away his disheveled wig.
By contrast, in Wajda’s eyes, Robespierre’s repressed sexuality symbolizes how far the Revolution had strayed from its course. Everything that comes in contact with him is anomalous, from the strange domestic arrangement at the Duplay house to the repeated visits of a caricatural Saint-Just, sporting a single earring, heavy makeup, flowers, and speaking with obscene violence. In the concluding scene, after Danton and Desmoulins have been executed, Robespierre lies around, still sick and in bed, covering his face, in shame or despair, with a white shroud-like sheet.
Of course, Wajda’s film was meant first of all as a political fable on contemporary Poland, a nation struggling with Communism (embodied by Robespierre’s rigid austerity), seduced by the lure of Capitalist decadence (whose excesses and appeal are represented by Danton) under the watchful camera-eye of a Catholic Church worried about family values.[5] As Raymond Lefebvre comments:
It has been said that Robespierre’s impassive face was reminiscent Jaruzelski’s mask, and that Danton had expressions similar to those of Walesa. It is true that [in the film] parable takes presence over historical analysis. As Wajda himself put it: “If one is under the impression that my sympathies lie with Danton, it’s because it is difficult not to side with the victim of a political trial.”[6]
In economic terms - and we should remember that these legends were first forged in the early days of liberal capitalism - Danton is redeemed as an emblem of productive economic activity. He could just as well have emerged from a Balzac novel. He takes bribes, gambles, borrows, spends, squanders, wastes, invests, and gets rich, immensely rich, before dying. The Minotaur rides a bull market; he is a figure of greed, high investment, and profit. In contrast, Robespierre is further castigated as a figure of sterility, withdrawal, austerity, shrift, and fruitless hoarding.[7]
But Wajda’s film is exemplary in another important way. Like all movies and popular novels about the French Revolution, its underlying concern is not the personal rivalry between Danton and Robespierre, but their relationship to this ultimate and deadly signifier, the guillotine, and what the guillotine stands for, the Terror. The culmination of the film is what we have known and expected from the first scene: Danton’s death, filmed with documentary precision. Lefebvre notes “the removal of the black sheet, the straw where the blood will gush forth,” and calls it a “horribly effective” conclusion (p. 144). Ultimately, as we shall see, the creation of Danton and Robespierre’s legends also served to account for the Terror.
[1] The physical descriptions linking the revolutionaries’ monstrous features to their monstrous deeds were transmitted, largely unchallenged, to the twentieth century. In a 1937 essay entitled Robespierre: The First Modern Dictator (London: Macmillan, 1937), Ralph Korngold reproduced in great detail the legendary features and habits of dress attributed to Robespierre, from “his green-gray eyes” with a “steely” gleam, to his clothing “immaculate, almost to the point of elegance” (pp. 20-21). A cursory survey of books dedicated to the Revolution show the fanciful portraits of Danton and Robespierre faithful reproduced.
[2] Andrzej Wajda, Danton, a 1987 Gaumont production, based on the play, L’Affaire Danton, by Stanislawa Przybyszewska.
[3] This decree did not receive unanimous support from the public, however. Alger quotes reports attributing children’s mischievousness to Chaumette’s abolition of corporeal punishment. Paris in 1789-1794, pp. 212, 218.
[4] Quoted by Steven Laurence Kaplan, Farewell Revolution: Disputed Legacies, France 1789/1989 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 449.
[5] Initially, Przybyszewska’s play had been meant to reflect Soviet Russia. Robespierre emerged as a solitary, tragic hero. See Craig Ziner’s fascinating essay on a recent production of the play, “Staging Stanislawa Przybyszewska’s The Danton Case,” in Fictions of the French Revolution, ed. Bernadette Fort (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991), pp. 163-79.
[6] Raymond Lefebvre, Cinéma et révolution (Paris: Edilig, 1988), p. 144.
[7] Lest we believe that modern historiography itself has successfully discarded the monstrous legend created after the Revolution, in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989]), Mona Ozouf in turn acknowledges the powerful couple formed by Danton and Robespierre. Far from dismissing the fable so coarsely crafted by decades of popular, conservative, and liberal thinking alike, she reinforces it: “Robespierre has been compared to Danton as virtue to vice, incorruptibility to venality, industriousness to indolence, faith to cynicism…. But, one might equally well contrast the two men as sickly to strong, suspicious to generous, feminine to masculine (or more accurately female to male), abstract to concrete, written to oral, deadly systematizer to lively improviser - such is the Dantonist version” (pp. 213-14).
This series of characterizations, “sickly, suspicious, feminine, abstract, written,” and the punch line “deadly systematizer,” undermine the positive qualities previous listed. “Virtue and incorruptibility,” “industriousness and faith,” point to the debilitating sterility of a man who had no known mistresses, a surprising indictment of his capacity to lead the nation. If we add up the characteristics of Danton, “strong, generous, masculine, concrete, oral, lively improviser,” we find no less than a forceful rehabilitation of the monstrous Minotaur, saved by his coarse but appealing sensuality, his natural appetites guaranteeing that, had he been given a chance, this bull would have yielded much profit to the beleaguered Revolution.
...Okay, so the criticism is mostly just implicit, but still. One rather wonders why no one got around to writing an article on the subject earlier, as the real message of Danton is pretty obvious. Its characterizations make Maxime cry, too. D:
Note: Read the last footnote especially, it's most enlightening. >__>