But before this happens, we get to see more of revolutionary France. The Baroness' portrayal of it is frankly ridiculous. First of all, she assumes that everyone must be miserable and downcast. They all look at one another with suspicious, angry glares. And of course, the biggest scandal of all is that the people don't show the proper deference to the visiting English gentry now that they are equal citizens. No bowing and scraping greets Sir Andrew and Lady Blakeney when they arrive in Calais. The impudent rogues! Orczy also takes it for granted that the common folk of France live in filth and stink to high heaven. She writes of how the people think they can be rude to the gentry now that they are free citizens. This strikes her as very funny, so she repeats it again. And again. Just as she repeats everything.
The Baroness is entirely pro-aristocrat, although she also sympathizes with the wealthy bourgeoisie. If I had to describe her politics, they would probably be bourgeois liberal in the nineteenth-century sense. She is mildly opposed to feudalism, and she is ostensibly opposed to anti-Semitism, although there is a bit of it in her own writing. But she fears democracy and hates the working classes. The only time she criticizes the aristocracy, even vaguely, is when she accuses them of behaving snobbishly toward the bourgeoisie. She doesn't include even a single cursory word about the starving peasants or the poor people of Paris struggling to pay for bread. She is totally uninterested in the awful plight of the French people under the monarchy and the aristocracy, and she portrays the working classes as violent, evil scoundrels. This is the image of the revolution and the Reign of Terror we have inherited-an angry, vicious mob gone wild, guillotining their social "betters."
But none of it's true! First of all, England was not "free and honest" at the time.
The British working class still didn't have the vote at the time of the French Revolution, and the government was busy cracking down hard on any criticism of its policies. As for French history, the Baroness doesn't even seem to know what the Reign of Terror actually was, although she loves to use the phrase. She puts it in the year 1792, even though the actual Reign of Terror didn't start until 1793. She claims that it "culminated in the bloody September Massacres," at one point. What? The September Massacres were a horrible series of mob attacks on prisoners, but they had little to do with the later Reign of Terror or with the revolutionary government. Orczy is just fond of them, no doubt, because they help along her theory of the working classes as dangerous rascals. What's more, the Reign of Terror had little to do with the aristocracy. Rather, it was a power struggle within the revolutionary government itself. The chief victims were the Girondists-a rival sect opposed to the Jacobins. The other chief victims were the people, by the way, not the landed gentry.
For instance, the worst violence of the period came as the result of a peasant revolt against the revolutionary government. The Jacobins responded on one occasion by murdering four hundred peasants in a mass drowning. The revolutionary government also used broad dictatorial powers, which were a direct betrayal of the republic and the people.
That's the lesson to take from the Reign of Terror: that it was a betrayal of the Revolution. The working classes were not responsible for the violence: they were hurt by it. But Orczy's interpretation of it is still the one that gets passed along. It's an inversion of where our sympathies ought to lie. It makes us sympathize with the oppressors, with the monarchs and the aristocracy, with the enemies of the people. What's more, it suggests that whenever working class people make the decisions, all of society descends into chaos. A lot of people still entertain that view, even in democratic countries. Orczy tells us a false version of events. And why? Because the French Revolution unleashed the anger of the people. The same anger, no doubt, that drove her from Hungary as a young girl.
