Picaresque
Donald Macrae
Paris and its Provinces, 1792-1802. Richard Cobb (Oxford University Press £5.25) Most books are written with the simple ambition that they will be bought and read. There has, of course, always been an industry engaged in the production of books to be bought but not to be read, books whose possession confers prestige on their owners and gives a kind of chic to their homes. Historians of merit and learning, and the Professor of Modern History in Oxford is certainly such a one, are not in this business. At times great scholars — and I suspect Richard Cobb of being a great scholar on the strength of his 'earlier writings and, indeed, of this volume — write books which laymen cannot read because they are not technically equipped to understand the difficulties and delights of, say, the sermons of St Bonaventura on the life of St Francis. But that is not the case with this volume which is perfectly accessible to anyone who knows both French and English. Nevertheless it can hardly be read.
Let us start again: why should a historian not also be a picaro? The picaresque hero is robustly male and at least slightly salacious. He is not a crook, but he is certainly a card. He is a practical hedonist in hard times and low society. He flourishes in disturbed and broken societies — the long decline of imperial Spain, the Germany of the Thirty Years War or, in our age, in the debacle of Hapsburg Europe, as did Schweik, the good soldier. He is not given to the virtues of classical form and his narrative tends to be one damn thing after another. Very often he gives us an anecdote without its punchline. Even when an eighteenth century Frenchman like Lesage took him over all he could do was sentimentalise him a little, but not tame him. Professor Cobb is something like Lesage's hero, the historian as Gil Bias.
He begins by establishing his credentials as a fortunate traveller, meeting Soldati in a train, struck by the beauty of a poor girl in another train, drunk and befriended on leave by a "sailor's wife" in Marseille. He ends by denouncing the new order of our time, of a -Paris reaching ever further towards the sea or towards Brussels in "a uniform drabness, a common, all-enveloping ugliness." Clearly he feels, in defiance of the criminal statistics, that this new world arising in France is no place for a picaro. He may be right or he may, like other men, have merely aged twenty-five years in a quarter century. In between is the meat of the book, and an odd dish it is.
• This is the life of the margins — as in all picaresque literature. The margins are of two kinds. One is that of the suburbs, roads, regions feeding on and fed off Paris in the years of the republic and consulate. One feels crowded by the danger, bustle, solitude, poverty, dark 'woods, deserted roads, broken men from broken armies, officials armed with the puritan rectitude of the revolution and the incompetence of all bureaucracy. Places one knows well ' become in the perspective of this history alien and dangerous, engaged in mysterious life of which one glimpses but imaginatively can understand but little. • The second margin is not geographical but human. Banditry, bigamy, even seduction are not the dominant activities of mankind. To stress their prevalence, continuity and variety has been the theme of much of Professor Cobb's history before now. Here we encounter little else. But even in these hard winters, these alarming years, somehow order maintained itself and was maintained, somehow markets — and not just black markets — operated, armies were uniformed and provisioned even if by rigour and chicane, crops grew and were harvested, houses built, goads manufactured. Indeed, if that had been otherwise the picar oons and bandits would not have flourished— if that is the right word — and the underworld of Professor Cobb's researches would have been less intriguing.
But how interesting is it anyhow? The world of Luzarillo de Tormes or Gil Bias is tolerable from security and comfort, but experienced in reality it was a boring hell, punctuated by excitement, brutality and fear. It is little wonder that under judicial examination Professor Cobb's ruffians become almost intimate, almost warm, in their relations with those who will send them to the guillotine. Such prolonged and, yes, secure dealings with other persons must have been both novel and consoling. Picaroons and criminals are, in reality, very disappointing to the romantic imagination. In these pages one finds a metamorphosis taking place. The justice of the revolution with its neo-classical bleakness is something new. New, too, is the possibility that the picaro may become truly heroic in the romantic vein, truly the ally of Cain and Satan. Over these pages is the shadow of Vautrin. But it is Simenon — whose canon Professor Cobb assumes all readers have at their fingertips — to whom we are referred. I would have preferred Balzac, for here the Balzacian milieu is in the making. (But to be fair, I liked one of the references to a café used by Maigret and, long ago, by me.) Simenon, I suppose, helps the topography: Balzac would have helped towards a sociology, but Professor Cobb probably hates such a thought nearly as much as he dislikes the Bretons who, churlish Celtic peasants, do not see Paris and the centralised nation as the summum bonum. (How, by the way, does the author square his dislikes? The drab modernity of the environs of Paris is in part the price of that centralised state. . .)
And so, exasperated, to conclude. There is here the material for books, original, fresh, deeply learned. There is here the material for Sue, Balzac, and Hugo, in the affairs of the bande Juive and its captain Kotzo-Picard, or of the less lurid, less pervasive — if the testimony was true — bande a Scdambier. All this material is nearly unfindable unless the reader is patient, Maigret-like enough to refer back and forth to the text here, the notes there, the foot-notes below. It is not that Professor Cobb does not write well: his sentences are excellent. It is that he has organised badly, assumed .that his readers know his other works, are ready to switch constantly between languages, and care as much as he does for his subject matter. No doubt there are such readers, sweet-tempered and painstaking. There could be, with a little labour, many more. A temperament is an excellent thing, but it is not the sole vocation of the historian.
Donald Macrae is Professor of Sociology in the University of London.
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