I wish I knew the answer to that. A lot of people just seem to have some kind of victim-loving complex.
I think in a way, it's because victims are always blameless, or at least can always be absolved of their blame, their responsibility, by their martyrdom. Whatever they have done, they automatically become tragic. I think there's a lot of that in the Liberal fanboying of Camille, if he had survived, everybody would remember (if they remembered him at all) that he joked about stringing aristocrats from lamp-posts as well as for the Vieux Cordelier.
I do remember getting the impression reading it that Mantel never read anything he wrote pre-Vieux Cordelier.
I think Camille's story has possibly been appropriated a little by the Romantics who were all 'Bliss in this dawn it was to be alive' in 1789 and subsequently horrified by anything that happened after 1791. I'm thinking of Claretie's horror at "Ré volutions" here. They're often so busy excusing their own idealisation that they forget he was a Jacobin, they just want a beautiful victim to symbolise their own disenchantment. Mantel's portrayal is rather the apex of these narratives.
Mantel doesn't actually admire Robespierre, at least not as far as his ideas or policies go, but likes his personality type so much she feels the need to make those ideas and policies not his "fault."
Spot on. With Camille she had to make up lots of stuff such as predatory gay lawyers and teenage rapists to shoehorn him into being a victim. With Robespierre, a lovely helpless little creature was already fully formed by history. (It's quite interesting how Thermidorian vilification becomes reasons for adoration through twentieth century liberal romantacism. His near illegitamacy and unstable wastrel Dad, his unworldliness and sexual reticence suddenly make him some poor changeling orphan to be kitchily adored and rescued.)No wonder she claimed to go into the novel loving Camille and to come out loving Robespierre.
I guess that's what passes for admiration in Mantel's largely apolitical world.
I'm not sure she is apolitical. Not just because writing a novel about the leading Jacobins without engaging with their political beliefs is a political act in itself. (I think I might sound a little like Saint Just here.) I think she is a lefty, of sorts. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think I recognise in her views that sort of fatal despair that has permeated the British left since the 1840s. It's the sort of chapel-socialism that cannot imagine radical social change as a positive, life affirming force. It's why she ends up conflating Robespierre with the nihilism of suicide bombers.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-02-16 07:17 pm (UTC)I think in a way, it's because victims are always blameless, or at least can always be absolved of their blame, their responsibility, by their martyrdom. Whatever they have done, they automatically become tragic. I think there's a lot of that in the Liberal fanboying of Camille, if he had survived, everybody would remember (if they remembered him at all) that he joked about stringing aristocrats from lamp-posts as well as for the Vieux Cordelier.
I do remember getting the impression reading it that Mantel never read anything he wrote pre-Vieux Cordelier.
I think Camille's story has possibly been appropriated a little by the Romantics who were all 'Bliss in this dawn it was to be alive' in 1789 and subsequently horrified by anything that happened after 1791. I'm thinking of Claretie's horror at "Ré volutions" here. They're often so busy excusing their own idealisation that they forget he was a Jacobin, they just want a beautiful victim to symbolise their own disenchantment. Mantel's portrayal is rather the apex of these narratives.
Mantel doesn't actually admire Robespierre, at least not as far as his ideas or policies go, but likes his personality type so much she feels the need to make those ideas and policies not his "fault."
Spot on. With Camille she had to make up lots of stuff such as predatory gay lawyers and teenage rapists to shoehorn him into being a victim. With Robespierre, a lovely helpless little creature was already fully formed by history. (It's quite interesting how Thermidorian vilification becomes reasons for adoration through twentieth century liberal romantacism. His near illegitamacy and unstable wastrel Dad, his unworldliness and sexual reticence suddenly make him some poor changeling orphan to be kitchily adored and rescued.)No wonder she claimed to go into the novel loving Camille and to come out loving Robespierre.
I guess that's what passes for admiration in Mantel's largely apolitical world.
I'm not sure she is apolitical. Not just because writing a novel about the leading Jacobins without engaging with their political beliefs is a political act in itself. (I think I might sound a little like Saint Just here.) I think she is a lefty, of sorts. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think I recognise in her views that sort of fatal despair that has permeated the British left since the 1840s. It's the sort of chapel-socialism that cannot imagine radical social change as a positive, life affirming force. It's why she ends up conflating Robespierre with the nihilism of suicide bombers.