Last Letters, by Olivier Blanc
McGurn, William
tt ranee is nothing but a great scaf1 ' fold in which the strong kill off the weak in the name of the law." So wrote a health officer named Dufresne in June 1793 to friends in Santo Domingo. It was...
...Others were philosophic: "The events in which I find myself caught up will probably spare me the inconveniences of old age," wrote Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, a famous French chemist and member of the Academy of Sciences...
...one suspects that the Terror saw a good many personal scores settled in the name of revolutionary justice...
...Not surprisingly Fouquier-Tinville was himself to feel the guillotine blade when events turned on him...
...think of his age and how easy it is to make a child say whatever one wishes, and even things that he does not understand...
...Olivier Blanc, a French historian, discovered these 153 notes and letters—some dashed off but moments before their authors were carted off to the guillotine—in the Archives Nationales, stuck into the files of the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal with no apparent rhyme or reason...
...Never does he speak directly, though his shadow hovers over every word...
...In short, Blanc would have been well served by a bit of Anglo-Saxon packaging...
...LAST LETTERS: PRISONS AND PRISONERS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Olivier Blanc/Farrar, Straus and Giroux/$22.50 William McGurn Many letters, too, include snippets of advice and a list of debts still outstanding...
...While noting that the male and female prisoners in the Conciergerie were separated by an iron fence, he pointed out that the bars "were not so close together that a Frenchman should ever have reason to despair...
...I shall die for serving my country with too much zeal, too much application, and for carrying out all the government's wishes, my hands and heart free of all blame," he wrote...
...I have to say one thing that is very painful to my heart...
...I hope that He will forgive me...
...Some believed they would be vindicated by history: "The future will justify me in the opinion of just men and true Republicans," wrote Frederic de Dietrich, mayor of Strasbourg...
...In his rise and fall is the rough paradigm of the totalitarian monster who has come to torment our own century: the faceless bureaucrat who decides life or death not on the basis of what people have done but simply for who they are...
...but towards God, my friend, I was not so innocent...
...The confusion here suggests a rushed translation into English, not necessarily a bad one but one that is not always clear because it also fails to explain those details which might be common knowledge to a French readership but need to be fleshed out for a foreign one...
...I loved Him, but served Him ill...
...Still others were genuine revolutionaries who'd somehow fallen out with their confreres...
...your virtues call you there...
...T ike any good drama Last Letters is L not without a villain, the public prosecutor, Antoine-Quentin FouquierTinville...
...Often eloquent, frequently moving, the bulk of these impassioned farewells have never been published before...
...As this book makes amply clear, the "crimes" that saw these unfortunates sent to the scaffold ranged from writing to "persons abroad" to trying to hold onto their possessions to just being in the wrong place at the wrong time...
...Indeed, one of the more remarkable aspects of these letters is the large percentage that do express forgiveness for those who have cost the authors their lives...
...The reactions of each of these people are similarly varied, although a certain fearlessness, or at least resignation, is common enough to merit notice...
...Almost two centuries after they set these emotions to paper, they finally have an audience that appreciates them...
...He is less successful in the introduction to each case, where he tries to provide some background on the accused...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 43...
...so let my friends not weep over my happiness, we shall all be together ere long . . . Among the most graceful is the letter sent by Marie-Antoinette to her sister-in-law, where the former queen displays a nobility of spirit more alien to her captors than her high birth...
...Fouquier-Tinville's downfall, for example, is flat without it...
...A good number found solace in religion, like the Comtesse de Trojoliff: Farewell, my poor friend, do not regret me, I die with trust and almost with joy...
...At the outset Olivier Blanc declares that it was his intention "to let the documents and facts speak for themselves," and by and large he is successful in that...
...At what a fine banquet I shall be at this evening, my friend, I shall await you there...
...All I can say is that it is the letters I wrote to you that have brought me to the scaffold...
...As with those others, too, this last gesture of remembrance would never reach its intended destination...
...It is to his sense of justice the in42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 nocent appeal for clemency and understanding...
...Throughout it all his finger points unflinchingly to the guillotine, unmoved by any sense of pity...
...His particular achievement here is thus to have rescued the human from the historic, to demonstrate that even while drawing their last breaths on earth men and women will continue to be men and women, with all the contradictions that implies, full of humor, pathos, and charity, as well as an undeniable reserve of fortitude that probably surprised even them...
...forgive him, my dear sister...
...Nor, as the author sadly relates, were most ever read by their intended recipients...
...to him prisoners offer damning evidence about their fellows in hopes of escaping their sentence...
...I know how much that child must have caused you pain...
...in his files the last letters of the condemned come to rest after being intercepted by the court, undelivered, perhaps even unread...
...Almost two centuries later his last thoughts and those of others like him have been collected and published as Last Letters: Prisons and Prisoners of the French Revolution...
...These appear with such frequency that it is refreshing finally to come across a man who was bitter and did not hesitate to say so, again the unfortunate Monsieur Dufresne, writing to the man who'd denounced him: I take my eternal farewell of you, villain...
...the day will come, I hope, when he will feel all the more the value of your care and your kindness to us both...
...Others, such as our friend Dufresne, were people who didn't know how to keep their mouths shut...
...Yet the book's corresponding virtue is the author's recognition that the letters are themselves so full of life that it is best to keep them ever in the foreground...
...In this regard putting the events of these individuals within the larger chronology of the French Revolution itself would have greatly enhanced the work...
...I don't know whether you did it on purpose...
...In Fouquier-Tinville's own last letter, addressed to his wife, he explains his role with an irony that doubtless escaped him...
...Though I knew you for a scoundrel, I cannot bring myself to believe that you are also a wicked villain...
...If it was not wickedness, your turn will come soon enough...
...In this particular section she also touched on the charges of incest with her eight-yearold son, which the boy repeated at the trial without understanding what he was saying: May my son never forget his father's last words, which I repeat to him now: let him never seek to avenge our death...
...Like so many that he sent to the scaffold, he enclosed a locket of his hair...
...condemned or the nature of their crimes...
...There is even one charming testimonial to la difference, written by the Comte Beugnot...
...Many of the crimes, for example, were financial: people trying to get around the financial decrees of the Revolutionary government by taking advantage of obscure loopholes...
...Some were undoubtedly bona fide partisans of the ancien regime...
...Nor do the prisoners themselves fall into definitive categories...
...I have nothing with which to reproach myself in my conduct towards mankind, I have never had any but feelings of humanity, I sincerely wish the happiness of those who have brought me to the grave...
...It was an imprudent correspondence during the Terror, one that would ultimately cost him his head, condemned for spreading "counter-revolutionary propaganda...
...The letters do not lend themselves to easy generalization about either the William McGurn is deputy editorial page editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal...
Vol. 21 • February 1988 • No. 2
