“Show my head to the people. It’s worth the trouble.”
Georges-Jacques Danton: the bully-boy. His words, upon his execution, shall forever remain eternal. Trampled on by an ox at an early age, his scarred face fitted in perfectly with the burly frame and overwhelming voice, making him the natural leader of the Parisian revolutionary mob, or Sans-culottes. Maximilien Robespierre: the mastermind. Upon his withered shoulders the weight of historical disapproval falls heavily, but his mind will forever burn freely of the political suspicion and idealism that drove five years of revolution. Camille Desmoulins: the devil. Words flowed through his pen like magic, only to be stumbled over and frustrated in speech. Desmoulins’ aptitude for seduction casts him with a dark shade: long black locks flowing over his sharp features he is a phantom menace, yet one who we love all the same.
A simplistic description at best, but the achievements of Hilary Mantel’s titanic historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, are still fairly well surmised above. Through her perfect cohesion of historical fact with entertainment value, Mantel provides 872 pages of energy, 872 pages of information and 872 pages of passion.
What she achieves, and what all great historical novels achieve, is the romanticising of her subject. She transports us to those Parisian streets, the sweat of the 14th July, the stench of the terror, the fear of the guillotine. In doing so she creates an emotional empathy between the reader and these seemingly far off figures of history. For those reading who have long been scarred by the days of prep-school or even GCSE history - the 10 mark essays, the un-decipherable source questions and the never-ending stream of facts and figures - I understand your pain. However, Mantel shows another side of history, one which the textbooks with their funny red boxes and annoying fonts are unable to provide; history is a story. Why study history- events such as the Holocaust being viewed more as a catastrophe of mankind than as part of its history - if not to be entertained. To be inspired by the glory of the Spartans at Thermopylae, broken-hearted by the death of Richard the Lionheart and inflamed by the treachery of his brother John. Moved by the spirit of Mandela, Gandhi and King, inspired by the voices of Churchill, Cicero and Pitt (younger and elder), overwhelmed by the bravery of WWII or horrified by its brutality.
In this, history is little different from English (so somewhat relating this tangent to the homework that provoked it). History is a story; one we tell not because it will help us understand what a mortgage is, or why the earth spins round, or how to get a job, but because it amuses us to see how men and women - not too dissimilar to ourselves - reached for the stars, and generally fell quite short. It’s a process of human development, perhaps one which will never end, but perhaps at some point we learn from our mistakes through the study of history and, at the very least, we enjoy the ride.
Mantel, and all historical novelists, allows us to do this whilst not disillusioning us with fact. She takes us inside the mind of Robespierre to an extent that a textbook cannot. The textbook will tell anyone that he betrayed Desmoulins and Danton, in a move which makes him look ruthless because he killed his two closest friends. What it can’t show you is the pain it put him in, forced to sacrifice his beloved Camille for his commitment to the Revolution. Mantel’s day-by-day action reifies the factional infighting and constant bickering of the revolution’s politically paranoid state to an extent that a textbook cannot. The constant need to stay on your toes, to be one step ahead of the curve and the speed at which the curve moves, sweeping up good, honourable men beneath it.
This does not render exam-based history obsolete, indeed I found the GCSE syllabus – and what I can remember of my prep-school days - genuinely intriguing, and Mantel’s attention to detail does show that factual knowledge remains an important part of historical understanding. In an age in which the textbook’s ‘potted’ explanation of much more complex and inspiring subjects continues to disaffect young students with the study of history, it must be asked; why study it? Quite simply, to bring back some relevance to the subject of English, the beauty of Mantel’s historical fiction provides the answer: there is no better story than history, one which was written by all of mankind.
Further Historical Fiction Reading:
Bring up the Bodies- Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall- Hilary Mantel
1356 series- Bernard Cornwell
The Saxon Stories- Bernard Cornwell
The Grail Quest series- Bernard Cornwell
Emperor series- Conn Iggulden
For more suggestions, why not have a look at these suggestions: top ten modern medieval tales; top ten counter-factual novels; top ten French Revolution novels; top ten historical novels. Plus, you can find the blog's list of historical fiction here,
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