We all know that literature can make history come alive. But there's a downside to this. Sometimes history is retold or reinvented by writers in ways that are useful to powerful interests. And because novels have so much more power over us than bland historical documents, the truth can get lost from view. I'm thinking here of Gone with the Wind. The book remains to this day one of the most popular American books ever published. It may be a great love story and everything else, but it also poses as a work of history. And on that score, it has done an incredible amount of damage, reinventing and retelling the narrative of slavery and Reconstruction in demonstrably false ways. The history it tells could be called the Confederate version of events, but a more accurate term would be the white supremacist version.
It's dangerous to let novelists tell history. In fact, it's dangerous to let anyone tell history who doesn't have to stick as close as possible to the facts. But novelists are especially bad, since they have no commitment to truth, only to story. I can't think of any anti-Confederate or anti-slavery book that has had as large an impact as Gone with the Wind, and because of that, we still get the history of the Civil War dead wrong. But this essay isn't about Mitchell's book; it's about another popular story which claims to tell us something about history: The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy.
I can't think of any book, apart from A Tale of Two Cities, which has had as large an impact on our understanding of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. I'm not sure how well-read or even well-known the book is these days, but it still exercises a tremendous indirect influence. The book's attitude toward the revolution is more or less the attitude of most people today. Its telling of events is the telling we remember and teach.
Dickens' telling was different. He was a social reformer and radical in many ways, and he realized, in a sense, that the aristocrats had it coming. He was horrified by the bloodshed and excesses of the Reign of Terror, but he wasn't pro-aristocrat or pro-royalist in his stance. Dickens' telling, however, published in 1859, has been superseded by The Scarlet Pimpernel, which came out in 1908. And I wouldn't be surprised if the second book, even if it's not read as often, has had a larger impact on the way we think about the French Revolution.
We see this influence all over the place. The whole idea of the Revolution as a wild orgy of blood and guts, of peasants and laborers running through the streets searching for treacherous "aristos," of bloodthirsty revolutionaries decapitating cart-loads of the rich and powerful-all of it stems from Baroness Orczy's book. What's more, the book helped to revive the old Three Musketeers "Romantic Hero" concept. True, the Scarlet Pimpernel is sort of an inverted version of this, who intervenes on the side of the rich and powerful, but his image is tied up in the masked hero myth. To give an example, there was an old Monty Python sketch called "Dennis Moore," which was a parody of the romantic swashbuckler genre. Dennis, of course, steals from the rich and gives to the poor. The only things he steals, however, are lupins ("What do you mean ‘lupins?'"). One of his aristocratic enemies bemoans at one point, "He seeks them here; he seeks them there; he seeks those lupins everywhere," which is a reference to a line from the book.
Defenders of Gone with the Wind claim that you can't judge its history. It's a novel, a romance, and if people look for the facts in its pages that's their own problem. They would probably say the same of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Don't view it as a historical narrative. View it as a pleasant adventure. But unfortunately, these books aren't so innocent or harmless. Whether it's a good idea or not, people do, in fact, get their history from these novels. And the history they tell is inaccurate, and even harmful.
I think it's interesting that the two most famous books on the French Revolution came from English authors. The French haven't been allowed to tell their own story-or at least, we don't listen to them when they do. I haven't read the most famous 19th-century French novel on the Reign of Terror, "Quatrevingt-treize" (or "Ninety-Three") by Victor Hugo, but apparently, it tells a very different story. Of course, the French experienced many revolutions after the first and best-known 1789 revolt. Three, in fact-one in 1830 (the subject of Les Miserables), one in 1848, and one in 1870.
