Norman Hampson

When she regretfully consigned the old world to the dustbin of history in North and South, Mrs Gaskell had no illusions about the nastiness of the new, but still saw it as conferring an unprecedented independence on the working man. Dickens put the emphasis on the dehumanised pursuit and efficient accumulation of material wealth, as an end in itself: the replacement of Squire Allworthy by Mr Bounderby. In this interesting and original book, Michael Miller suggests that they may have ordered these things better in France.

It is generally assumed that social revolutions must be good for the poor. To suggest the contrary is to appear wilfully paradoxical. After all, revolutionaries assert, and most of them probably believe, that their new order will be especially favourable to those who are least able to look after themselves. Their intentions may be benevolent enough, but the effects of their policies on the lives of ordinary people are another matter. Even if the change is for the better in the long run, a transition period of confusion, loss of business confidence or unskilful planning, can be catastrophic for those who have the fewest reserves. When Burke wrote of the impossibility of supplying the poor with ‘those necessaries which it has pleased the Divine Providence for a while to withhold from them’, he must have known that those from whom ‘necessaries’ are withheld may not be there when they become available again. Revolutionary leaders, even if they do not share Burke’s views on Providence, are sometimes to be found on the same tack, urging their followers to forget about what Robespierre called chétives marchandises and to sacrifice the present for a glorious future, at least for the survivors. Alan Forrest’s study of how the French Revolution actually affected the poor allows us to study one case in some detail.

In what her publishers claim to be the first monograph in English on David, Dr Brookner explains that she sees her book as a ‘preparation’ for more specialised studies at present under way in France and America. It is intended ‘for the general reader whose eye has been arrested by David’s images and whose mind has been haunted or irritated by their supernal energy and conviction’. This would seem to focus the centre of interest of the book on David’s ‘revolutionary’ period, from the ‘Oath of the Horatii’, completed in 1785, to the ‘Intervention of the Sabine Women’ and the portrait head of Bonaparte in 1798. Whatever the merits of the portraits that David painted throughout most of his career, it is not by these that the non-specialist is likely to remember him, and fine though some of them are, they are scarcely noteworthy for their ‘supernal’ energy. ‘Leonidas at Thermopylae’, executed between 1800 and 1814, should perhaps be added to the canon, but with this exception, the best-known works of David fall within the revolutionary period.