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The Palgrave Handbook
of Magical Realism in the
Twenty-First Century
Edited by
Richard Perez · Victoria A. Chevalier
The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism
in the Twenty-First Century
 Richard Perez · Victoria A. Chevalier
Editors

The Palgrave
Handbook of Magical
Realism in the ­Twenty-
First Century
Editors
Richard Perez Victoria A. Chevalier
John Jay College of Criminal Justice Medgar Evers College
City University of New York City University of New York
New York, NY, USA Brooklyn, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-39834-7 ISBN 978-3-030-39835-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39835-4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020
Chapter 2 is a republication of: Siskind, Mariano. “The Global Life of Genres and the Material
Travels of Magical Realism.” In Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature
in Latin America. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014. pp. 25–58. © 2014 by
Northwestern university Press. Published 2014. All rights reserved.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation,
computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in
this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher
nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material
contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains
neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover credit: RooM the Agency/Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For the late Meena Alexander, a poet, scholar, and mentor who taught
me to think and live through a logic of magic.
Richard Perez
For the late Raymond R. Patterson, poet and dearest friend, who
taught me elemental blues and reminded me there are at least
twenty-six ways of looking.
And for my beloved parents, the late Trinidad Grace Conde Chevalier,
and Jesu Chevalier, who are always both magical and real.
Victoria A. Chevalier
 Acknowledgements

A project of this global scope is dependent on the quality of its c­ ontributors.

We extend our first thanks to the brilliant scholars of this anthology who
range from the Americas, Caribbean, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia,
and whose work addresses the impact of magical realism in over three dozen
global authors. The essays showcase the reach of magical realism and its con-
tinued, indeed growing, importance to literature in the twenty-first Century.
We would like to express our gratitude to the intellectual environment
in our respective departments that allows for projects like these to take root
and flourish. Richard wants to thank the English Department Chairs at John
Jay College (former) Allison Pease and (current) Jay Gates, for their support
of his work. Other colleagues, directly and indirectly, have played a role in
the shaping of these ideas, including Belinda Rincon, Jonathan Gray, Baz
Dreisinger, Carmen Kynard, Edward Paulino, Jose Luis Munoz, Luis Barrios,
Suzanne Obler, Lisandro Perez, Jeffrey Heiman, Navideta Majumdar, Helen
Kapstein, Christen Madrazo, Mark McBeth, Adam McKible, Jean Mills,
Paul Narkunas, Elizabeth Yukins, and Toy Fung-Tung. Richard also wants
to thank the many scholars and writers who take part in the Biennial Latinx
Literature Conference he co-chairs with Belinda Rincon who have trans-
formed his thinking in ways he cannot measure. Pedagogy is a substantial part
of Richard’s intellectual life. He has been teaching for over two decades in a
dynamically diverse setting. His students—Chad Infante (now a colleague),
Stephen Bruno, Dominika Szybisty, to name a few—have played an integral
role in sharpening his thinking on twenty-first-century literature by writers of
color.
Victoria would like to thank the English Department Chairs at Medgar
Evers College (former) Brenda M. Greene, and (current) Keming Liu, for
their support of her work, and her colleagues Susan A. Fischer, Carlyle Van
Thompson, and Joanna Sit, for their intellectual engagement and humor.
She would also like to thank her colleagues from Furman University, the

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

late Vincent Hausmann, and Nicholas Radel for their vibrant engagement.
In addition, she is immensely grateful to James de Jongh for his constancy,
honesty, and decades-long recognition, to Joshua Wilner for his faith in
time, to Carla Cappetti, for her unwavering advocacy and love, to Biodun
Jeyifo and Kenneth A. McClane for their guiding presence at the Cornell
University English Department, to Dorothy Mermin, who, also at Cornell
English, insisted upon specific things, and to Nicholas Boggs, for his expan-
sive heart. Helen O’Connell, Ben W. Dickinson, and Steven Bourke, friends
from long ago at The City College/CUNY, taught her about the necessities
of friendship; they, too, are a part of this book’s completion. Of course, some
of the best thinking takes place in the classroom, through the dynamism of
pedagogy. Her students, especially Tamla John, D’Kela Duncan, and Tessa
Paneth-Pollak (now a colleague), have all contributed to her intellectual
growth, and to her thinking about literature and visual arts by writers and art-
ists of color in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Additionally, a project of this size requires institutional support. We
would like to thank the Office for the Advancement of Research at John Jay
College for their Book Publication Funding Program fellowship, funds which
made a significant difference in the production of the book. Specifically,
Dean Anthony Carpi and his staff, who work arduously to support faculty
scholarship. We also want to thank our wonderful editors at Palgrave: Allie
Troyanos, for her guidance and ability to bring clarity to the many moving
parts of this process; Rachel Jacobe, for her detailed reading and organ-
izing of the manuscript, serving as a capable bridge to production; and to
our production project manager, Jidda Zobariya, who worked diligently to
bring this book to fruition. Additionally, a project of this size requires insti-
tutional support. We would like to thank the Office for the Advancement of
Research at John Jay College for their Book Publication Funding Program
fellowship, funds which made a significant difference in the production of the
book. Specifically, Dean Anthony Carpi and his staff, who work arduously to
support faculty scholarship. We also want to thank our wonderful editors at
Palgrave: Allie Troyanos, for her guidance and ability to bring clarity to the
many moving parts of this process; Rachel Jacobe, for her detailed reading
and organizing of the manuscript, serving as a capable bridge to production;
and to our production project manager, Jidda Zobariya, who worked dili-
gently to bring this book to fruition.
Lastly, the Editors want to thank family and friends. Richard wants to
thank his wife Ana, a teacher who lives magically, for her support. His two
stepsons Jose and Kevin who are intellectuals in their own right and have
contributed, incalculably, to this project. And his daughter Laura, for her
brilliance and insistence on living a feminist life. Richard also wants to thank
his late father and his mother, both of whom instilled in him a passion for
ideas and his two brothers, Julio and Eric, who serve as intellectual compan-
ions thinking through their love for Puerto Rican and Caribbean culture.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

Victoria thanks her partner, Elgin, a quiet artist, for his humor, love, and
support. Her parents Trinidad and Jesu for their passion for justice, and pas-
sionate support for the arts, and her siblings, Michael, Elizabeth, and Angela
for their models as astute social critics, and for their myriad examples of
engaging with Puerto Rican, African American, and Caribbean culture; and
especially her late brother, Anthony J. Chevalier, who understood more than
he ever let on about the magical real.
The editors are profoundly grateful to each other for their collaboration
on this project. Their work together has proved to be a rich, transformative
experience and part of an ongoing conversation about magical realism.
 Contents

1 Introduction: “Proliferations of Being: The Persistence

of Magical Realism in Twenty-First Century Literature
and Culture” 1
Richard Perez and Victoria A. Chevalier

Part I Global Migrations of Magical Realism

2 The Global Life of Genres and the Material

Travels of Magical Realism 23
Mariano Siskind

3 Magical Realism, Afrofuturism, and (Afro)Surrealism:

The Entanglement of Categories in African Fiction 67
Lydie Moudileno

4 South Asian Magical Realism 83

Roanne L. Kantor

5 Magical Realism and the Descriptive Turn 101

María del Pilar Blanco

Part II Magic, Aesthetics, and Negativity

6 Harboring Spirits: Deontological Time, Magic,

and Race in Gods Go Begging by Alfredo Vea 121
Richard Perez

xi
xii CONTENTS

7 1978, the Year of Magical Thinking: Magical Realism

and the Paradoxes of White Gay Ontology in Andrew
Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and Edmund White’s
Nocturnes for the King of Naples 145
Nicholas F. Radel

8 Magical Realism and Indigenous Survivance

in Australia: The Fiction of Alexis Wright 173
Maria Takolander

9 Magical Terrestrealism in Edwidge Danticat’s

Claire of the Sea Light 197
Carine M. Mardorossian and Angela Veronica Wong

Part III Magical Conditions

10 The Multiplicity of This World: Troubling Origins

in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing 215
Victoria A. Chevalier

11 The Analogical Legacy of Ground Zero: Magical Realism

in Post-9/11 Literary and Filmic Trauma Narratives 237
Eugene Arva

12 The Uses of Enchantment: Instances of Magical Realism

in Toni Morrison’s Later Writing 263
Claudine Raynaud

13 Reconstructing Personal Identity and Creating

an Alternative National History: Magical Realism
and the Marginalized Female Voice in Gioconda Belli’s
The Inhabited Woman 281
Md Abu Shahid Abdullah

14 Black Magic: Conjure, Syncretism, and Satire

in Ishmael Reed 297
Joshua Lam
 CONTENTS xiii

Part IV Racial and Ethnic Imaginaries

15 The Magical Book-Within-the-Book: I. B. Singer,

Bruno Schulz, and Contemporary Jewish
Post-Holocaust Fiction 333
Caroline Rody

16 Magical Realism in the Novels of Bessie Head 375

Nicole Rizzuto

17 The Magical and Paradigmatic Intimacy of Blackness

and Indianness in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 397
Chad B. Infante

18 Fiction on the Verge: Testing Taboos

in The Republic of Wine 419
Keming Liu

19 Magical Embodiment: Strategic Deontology

in Toni Morrison’s Fiction 435
Johanna X. K. Garvey

Part V (Trans)National Illusions

20 Out of Time: Resisting the Nation in One Hundred

Years of Solitude 465
Lorna L. Pérez

21 “The Deep Root Snapped”: Reproductive Violence

and Family Un/Making in Quan Barry’s She Weeps
Each Time You’re Born 483
Mai-Linh K. Hong

22 Undocumented Magic: Magical Realism as ‘Aesthetic

Turbulence’ in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper 503
Marion Rohrleitner

23 Flying Over the Abyss: Magical Realism in Salim

Barakat’s The Captives of Sinjar 525
Fadia F. Suyoufie
xiv CONTENTS

Part VI Magical Crossings: Pedagogy, Genres, and Fairy Tales

24 Pedagogical Magic: Magical Realism’s Appeal

for the Twenty-First-Century Classroom 557
Kim Anderson Sasser and Rachael Mariboho

25 Outrageous Humor: Satirical Magical Realism 577

Maggie Ann Bowers

26 Winged Words and Gods as Birds: Magical

Realism and Nature in the Homeric Epics 595
Lorna Robinson

27 Streaming from the Past: Magical Realism

as Postmodern Fairy Tale 611
Dana Del George

Index637
 Notes on Contributors

Dr. Md Abu Shahid Abdullah is working as an Assistant Professor in

English at East West University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. He completed his
M.A. in English and American Studies and Ph.D. in English Literature from
­Otto-Friedrich University Bamberg, Germany. His research interests include
but are not limited to trauma, alienation, memory, identity, marginalization,
postcolonialism, ecocriticism, and magical realism. He has published arti-
cles in journals of international standard and presented his research works
in different international conferences. His book Speaking the Unspeakable:
Traumatic Experience and Repressed Memory in Magical Realist Novels will be
published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2020. Currently, he is work-
ing on a research project on the literature of indigenous people in Bangladesh
which is expected to be finished by the end of 2021.
Eugene Arva author of The Traumatic Imagination: Histories of Violence in
Magical Realist Fiction (2011), is an independent scholar living in Germany.
He taught modern and postmodern American and world literature at the
University of Miami. His research focuses on magical realism in literature and
film, trauma theory, Holocaust studies, intermediality, and representation
theory. He has published essays on Caribbean literature and narrative theory,
Holocaust literature, James Joyce, contemporary trauma films, and on the
media spectacle of 9/11. Arva has recently contributed to two collections of
essays on magical realism, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies
(2019) and Magical Realism and Literature (Cambridge University Press,
2020), and was co-editor of Magical Realist Writing as Narrative Strategy in
the Recovery of Historical Traumata (2014).
Maggie Ann Bowers is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at
University of Portsmouth. She previously taught at the University of Antwerp
and the University Kent. She publishes on magical realism, and World
Literature with a particular focus on North America and Indigenous writing.

xv
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

She is the co-editor of Routledges’ Imaginary Europes (2016), the Wasafiri

special issue Native North American Literature and Literary Activism (2017).
She is the author of the monograph Magic(al) Realism: The New Critical
Idiom (2004), and co-editor of Convergences & Interferences: Newness in
intercultural practices (2001).
Victoria A. Chevalier is an Associate Professor of English at Medgar Evers
College (City University of New York), where she teaches a wide range of
courses in the English Department including US Latinx, African American,
and Caribbean Literature. She is co-editor of the anthology, The Palgrave
Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century (2020). Her book
manuscript under review is entitled Black Things: Trauma, Memory, History
in Twentieth Century American Literatures. Her new monograph, Sick of the
Symbolic, focuses on genealogies of sickness, healing, and affect in contem-
porary US Latinx and African American literatures. Her work has appeared
in, among others, Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism, Twentieth
Century Literary Criticism, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, and
literary fiction anthologies.
Dana Del George holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University
of Southern California. Her book, The Supernatural in Short Fiction of the
Americas: The Other World in the New World (Greenwood, 2001), is an inves-
tigation of interests she developed growing up among several different cultures.
Because of her parents’ work, she spent much of her childhood in a Zapotec
town in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has written several articles about magical real-
ism and a children’s book called The Queen of Fire and the King of Ice, which
uses the fairy tale form to explain divorce and joint custody. She collaborated in
creating an “Introduction to the Fairy Tale” course at Santa Monica College,
where she is a Professor of English.
María del Pilar Blanco is Associate Professor of Spanish American Literature
at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Trinity College. She is the author
of Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the
Hemispheric Imagination (2012) and co-editor of Geopolitics, Culture, and
the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (2020), The Spectralities Reader:
Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Critical Theory (2013), and Popular
Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (2010). She is completing
a second monograph project titled Modernist Laboratories: Science and the
Poetics of Progress in Spanish America, 1870–1930.
Johanna X. K. Garvey is associate professor of English at Fairfield University,
where she was founding Co-Director of both the Women’s Studies Program
and the Program in Black Studies and currently directs the Women, Gender,
and Sexuality Studies Program. Her areas of expertise include Caribbean
women writers, literature of the African Diaspora, and gender and sexuality
studies. She has published articles and book chapters on Ann Petry, Michelle
Cliff, Merle Collins, Paule Marshall, Dionne Brand, Shani Mootoo, Patricia
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

Powell, Maryse Condé, and others, in Callaloo, The Journal of Commonwealth

and Postcolonial Literature, Textual Practice, Anthurium, and elsewhere. She
co-edited (with Caroline Brown) Madness in Black Women’s Diasporic Fictions:
Aesthetics of Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She is the author of The
Sides of the Sea: Caribbean Women Writing Diaspora (UP of Mississippi forth-
coming 2020). She is working on a b ­ook-length manuscript titled “Toni
Morrison’s Geographies of Trauma.”
Mai-Linh K. Hong is an assistant professor of English at Bucknell University
and co-chair of the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies. She writes and
teaches about literature, race, refugees, and justice.
Chad B. Infante is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English
at the University of Maryland College Park. Chad earned his doctorate in
English from Northwestern University in 2018. He is originally from Jamaica
and researches Black and Indigenous US and Caribbean literatures, gender,
sexuality, critical theory, and political philosophy. His book manuscript, enti-
tled “Cool Fratricide: Murder and Metaphysics in Black and Indigenous U.S.
Literature,” studies representations of anticolonial murder, vengeance, and
revenge in Black and Indigenous literature and art as a philosophical response
to colonial violence. He is a comparatist and is currently working on several
articles that read at the intersection of Black and Native Studies, covering a
wide array of topics, from contemporary politics to animated cartoons and
from human–animal relations to cosmography.
Roanne L. Kantor works on the conditions for interdisciplinary research in
the humanities, especially literature’s interface with medicine and the human-
istic social sciences. Her primary field is Global Anglophone literature and its
relationship to other literary traditions of the Global South. Kantor is also a
translator and the winner of the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation. Before
coming to Stanford, Kantor taught at Harvard, Boston University, Brandeis,
and The University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her Masters and Ph.D.
Joshua Lam is an Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State
University. His scholarship focuses on intersections of race, class, and technol-
ogy in US literature and culture. He has published essays on Pauline Hopkins
and Mesmerism; Charles W. Chesnutt and racial objectification; Richard
Wright, whiteness, and political rhetoric; and contemporary experimental
black poetry.
Keming Liu Professor of English at Medgar Evers College, holds a doctoral
degree in linguistics from Columbia University. Her research explores the
impact of language on identity, politics, and cognition. Her book, Voices of
the Fourth Generation (2010), introduces to the West contemporary Chinese
poetry in English translation. Her forthcoming book, Twilight, documents
a changing China in the 21st century through the voices of a farmer poet.
Her other publications include a chapter in Adult ESL: Politics, Pedagogy, and
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Participation in Classroom and Community Programs (Erlbaum, 1998) and

articles in Urban Education and Geolinguistics. She reviews linguistics/liter-
ature titles for Choice Magazine and writes about art and design for a Chinese
fashion and lifestyle magazine. Dr. Liu serves as the Director of the Confucius
Institute at Medgar Evers College.
Carine M. Mardorossian is Professor of English at the University at Buffalo,
SUNY where she specializes in Caribbean and feminist studies as well as
the medical humanities. She is currently completing a manuscript entitled
“Creolized Ecologies.” Her articles have appeared in Small Axe, Ariel, Callaloo,
Signs, MLS, Macomère, The Journal of Caribbean Literature, College Literature
and various anthologies.
Rachael Mariboho is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at The
University of Texas at Arlington, where she teaches first-year writing, British,
American, and World literature, and special topics courses in magical realism
and fairy tales. She received her Ph.D. in English from UT Arlington and
her dissertation, titled Practical Magic: Magical Realism and the Possibilities of
Representation in Twenty-First Century Fiction and Film, examines the func-
tion of magical realism in contemporary popular culture. At present, she is
working on a study of the history of magical realism in film.
Lydie Moudileno is the Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and
Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern
California. Her work examines postcolonial cultures from France and the
Global South, with a focus on critical race theory and issues of representation
and authorship in fiction from Africa and the Caribbean. Recent publications
include: Mythologies postcoloniales: Décoloniser le quotidien (Editions Honoré
Champion, 2018), a co-authored study of racialized representations in con-
temporary French culture inspired by Roland Barthes’s 1957 Mythologies,
and the landmark co-edited volume Postcolonial Realms of Memory. Sites and
Symbols in Modern France, with over thirty contributions by prominent schol-
ars from the United States, France, and the UK examining traces of colonial
history in contemporary France (Liverpool University Press, 2020).
Dr. Lorna L. Pérez is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Buffalo
State, where she specializes in Latina/o Literature and teaches courses in
Latina/o literature, ethnic minority literatures of the United States, and
popular culture/cultural studies. Her research interests include literatures
of the Global South, postcolonialism, and diasporic literatures. Her criti-
cal work has appeared in numerous encyclopedias, Chicana/Latina Studies,
Ethnic Studies Review, Label me Latina/o, The Journal of American Studies of
Turkey, and the CEA Critic. Her creative work has been published in elimae,
The Mississippi Review, Label me Latina, and BlazeVox18. In addition to her
teaching and research work, she has served as the interim chair of the English
Department and has won awards for her work in teaching and diversity.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix

Richard Perez is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of

Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. He is the co-editor of
two critical anthologies published by Palgrave Macmillan, Contemporary U.S.
Latino/a Criticism (2007) and Moments of Magical Realism in U.S. Ethnic
Literatures (2012). His essay “Differential Visions: the Diasporic Stranger,
Subalternity, and the Transing of Experience in U.S. Puerto Rican Literature”
was published in The Cambridge History of Latina/o Literature (2019) edited
by John Moran Gonzalez and Laura Lomas. He is concluding a book project
entitled Towards a Negative Aesthetics: U.S. Latino/a Fiction and the Remaking
of American Literature. His work has also appeared in the Centro Journal
for Puerto Rican Studies, Latino Studies Journal, Women Studies Quarterly,
Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas Journal, and MELUS Journal.
Nicholas F. Radel is professor of English at Furman University, South
Carolina, and has written extensively on race, sexuality, and their intersections
in both early modern English and contemporary gay American literatures.
Radel is a co-editor of The Puritan Origins of American Sex and the author
of Understanding Edmund White. He is currently working on a biography of
White.
Claudine Raynaud Professor of American Studies at Paul-Valéry University
Montpellier 3, Claudine Raynaud has taught in England and the United
States. She is the author of Toni Morrison: L’esthétique de la survie (1996)
and articles on black autobiography (Hurston, Wright, Baldwin, Lorde,
Angelou), Joyce and feminist theory. Her most notable publications include
Cambridge Companions: “Coming of Age in the African American Novel”
(2004), “Beloved or the Shifting Shapes of Memory” (2007), the co-edition
on Gloria Naylor (L’Harmattan, 2012) and a chapter on Hurston’s Tell my
Horse in Afro modernisms (Edinburgh UP, 2013). She co-edited two vol-
umes of Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, “Race” (PULM, 2014, 2016) and
Troubled Legacies: Heritage/Inheritance in Minority American Literatures
(with Michel Feith, CSP, 2015). Her translation with a scholarly introduc-
tion of Sojourner Truth’s Narrative (PURH) came out in 2017. In 2018,
she co-edited an issue of ELA (#44) on Afropolitanism and RFEA (#154) on
African American Modernism.
Nicole Rizzuto is an Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University.
She specializes in global modernism, postcolonial Anglophone literatures,
and critical theory. Her first book, Insurgent Testimonies: Witnessing Colonial
Trauma in Modern and Anglophone Literature (Fordham University Press,
2015) was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Prize for a First
Book. She has published on the topics of realism, modernism, and postcolo-
niality in Comparative Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, and College
Literature. Her current book project, tentatively titled Arresting Ecologies:
Literature at the Frontier, analyzes how stalled travel across land, air, and sea
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

shapes literary and visual works from Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean from
the interwar period through today. Recent essays have appeared in Modernist
Cultures, English Language Notes, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, and
Contemporary Literature.
Lorna Robinson studied Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University.
She became curious about the similarities between 100 Years of Solitude and
Ovid and received a doctorate from University College London on “Magical
Realism in Ovid’s Metamorphoses” in 2005. She created The Iris Project and
Iris magazine to promote Classics in state schools in 2006, and runs Latin
and Greek projects in state schools across the UK. In 2015, she founded the
Rumble Museum, the first museum in a UK state school. She has written a
book Ovid and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. She also written the Latin courses
Telling Tales in Latin and Distant Lands, which introduce Latin through the
stories of Ovid, and Telling Tales in Greek, introducing ancient Greek through
the stories of Homer.
Caroline Rody professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the
author of two books, The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in
Contemporary Asian American Fiction (Oxford, 2009), and The Daughter’s
Return: African-American and Caribbean Women’s Fictions of History
(Oxford, 2001). Among her published articles are an essay on the emergence
of magical realism in contemporary Jewish fiction (Sandin and Perez, ed.,
Moments of Magical Realism in U.S. Ethnic Literatures, 2012), an essay on
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (PMLA, 2018), and essays on Toni
Morrison, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Jean Rhys. Her current monograph, Our
Great Houses, traces the trope of the great house across the national imaginar-
ies of American, English, Irish, Jewish, and other world literatures.
Marion Rohrleitner is Associate Professor of English at The University
of Texas at El Paso, where she researches and teaches twentieth and
­twenty-first-century American Literatures with a special focus on contempo-
rary Chicanx/Latinx and Caribbean diasporic fiction. Rohrleitner is co-ed-
itor of Dialogues Across Diasporas: Women Writers, Scholars, and Activists of
Africana and Latina Descent in Conversation (Lexington, 2013) and co-au-
thor of the forthcoming An Anthology of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions (U
of Virginia Press, 2020). Her work has appeared, among others, in American
Quarterly, Antípodas, Latino Studies, Melus and The European Journal of
American Studies. Her monograph Transnational Latinidades is currently
under review, and she is working on a new project entitled Alternative
Archives: Historical Fiction in the Americas in an Age of Nationalist Amnesia.
Kim Anderson Sasser is an Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College
in the United States and the author of Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism:
Strategizing Belonging, among other articles and chapters on magical realism.
At Wheaton, she teaches courses related to her areas of interest: besides magical
realism, global Anglophone literature and postcolonial literature.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxi

Mariano Siskind is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities

at Harvard University. He teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin
American Literature with emphasis on its world literary relations, as well as
the production of cosmopolitan discourses and processes of aesthetic glo-
balization. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Desires. Global Modernity and
World Literature in Latin America (Northwestern UP, 2014). He is editor of
World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality: Beyond, Against, Post, Otherwise
(2019) (with Gesine Müller) and Homi Bhabha’s Nuevas minorías, nuevos
derechos. Notas sobre cosmopolitimos vernáculos (2013) and Poéticas de la dis-
tancia: Adentro y afuera de la literatura argentina (Norma, 2006) (together
with Sylvia Molloy).
Fadia F. Suyoufie is a professor of literature at the Department of English/
Yarmouk University in Jordan. Her main area of interest is women’s writings
and writings about women. Her research focuses on alternative modes of
approaching reality in literature, such as dream, myth, fantasy, the Uncanny,
and magical realism. Her recent publications subscribe to postcolonial and
postmodern critical paradigms in the works of Arab women in diaspora and
major Arab figures as Naguib Mahfouz and Mahmoud Darwish. She is cur-
rently engaged in interdisciplinary research on the socio-semiotics of wom-
en’s displacement in war zones in the Middle East.
Maria Takolander is an Associate Professor in Writing and Literature
at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. She is the author of Catching
Butterflies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground (2007) as well as numer-
ous essays and book chapters on magical realist literature, which have been
published in journals such as Ariel, Critique, Postcolonial Text and JASAL.
Co-editor of The Limits of Life Writing (2017), Maria has also published
scholarship theorizing creativity in relation to embodied cognition and the
new materialism. In addition, Maria is an award-winning fiction writer and a
poet, whose work has been published and anthologized nationally and inter-
nationally. Her most recent books are The Double (and Other Stories) (2013)
and The End of the World (2014). Her website is mariatakolander.com.
Angela Veronica Wong received her Ph.D. in English from the University
at Buffalo, SUNY. She is an instructor of literature and composition at
Marymount Manhattan College and has been a writing center consultant at
Baruch College, CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies, and Columbia
University’s School of Social Work.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: “Proliferations of Being:

The Persistence of Magical Realism
in Twenty-First Century Literature
and Culture”

Richard Perez and Victoria A. Chevalier

This anthology tracks the persistence of magical realism in literatures from

around the globe and its implications for twenty-first-century politics, aes-
thetics, identity, and social/national formations. In convening a diverse group
of critics that include scholars from the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle
East, and Australia, the essays employ multiple theoretical approaches. The
essays herein demonstrate that the use of magical realism in literature has
transitioned to a global practice, indicating a new stage in the history and
development of the genre.1 Specifically, the essays in this anthology argue
that magical realism in literature has proliferated globally partly due to con-
tinual travel and migrations, with the shrinking of time and space through
technology, with the growing encroachment of human life on nature, and
the contact between and within cultures, which has exponentially increased,
effectively changing how communities and nations imagine themselves.
Therefore, global literatures offer the reimagining of spaces and shift-
ing populations within continually reconfigured worlds. The concerns of

R. Perez (*)
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York,
New York, NY, USA
V. A. Chevalier
Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY, USA

© The Author(s) 2020 1

R. Perez and V. A. Chevalier (eds.),
The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39835-4_1
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Title: Danton: A study

Author: Hilaire Belloc

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Language: English

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1899

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 Danton
A STUDY

BY
HILAIRE BELLOC, B.A.
LATE BRACKENBURY SCHOLAR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE,
OXFORD

New York
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1899
TO
ANTHONY HENLEY
 PREFACE
An historian of just pre-eminence in his university and college, in a
little work which should be more widely known, has summed up the
two principal characters of the Revolution in the following phrases:
“the cold and ferocious Robespierre, the blatant Danton.”[1] The
judgment is precipitate and is tinged with a certain bias.
An authority of still greater position prefaces his notebook on the
Revolution by telling us that he is going to describe the beast.[2] The
learned sectarian does not conceal from his readers the fact that a
profound analysis had led to a very pronounced conviction. So
certain is he of his ground, that he treats with equal consideration the
evidence of printed documents, of autograph letters, and of a chance
stranger speaking in a country inn of a thing that had happened forty
years before.
The greatest of French novelists and a principal poet has given us
in “Quatre-vingt-treize” a picture moving and living. Yet even in that
work much is admitted, for the sake of contrast and colour, which no
contemporary saw. The dialogue between Danton and Marat, with its
picturesque untruths, is an example.[3]
If facts so conflicting be stated as true by men of such various
calibre, it would seem a very difficult task to write history at all. Yet
there is a method which neither excludes personal conviction, nor
necessitates the art of deceit, nor presupposes a primitive ignorance.
It is to ascertain what is positively known and can be proved, and
with the facts so gathered—only with these—to paint a picture as
vivid as may be; on a series of truths—with research it grows to
respectable proportions—to base a conviction, general, wide, and
capable of constant application, as to the character of a period or of
a man.
 Such was the method of Fustel de Coulanges, and on his model
there has arisen from the minute, the sometimes pedantic accuracy
of French scholars, a school which is the strongest in Europe.
The method I have been describing has also this advantage, that
the least learned may enter upon such a path without confusion and
may progress, and that a book of no pretensions can yet, by
following these rules, at least avoid untruth. With inferior tools, and
on an over-rough plan, I shall yet attempt in this life of Danton to
follow the example.
The motto which is printed at the head of this book, and which is
borrowed from the most just of biographers, must give a note to the
whole of my description. What was the movement which founded our
modern society? what were its motives, its causes of action, its
material surroundings? And what was the man who, above all
others, represented that spirit at its most critical moment?
To find a right answer to such questions it is necessary to do two
things.
First, we must make the sequence of cause and effect reasonable.
In giving an explanation or in supposing a motive, we must present
that which rational men, unbiassed, will admit. To put in the same
character irreconcilable extremes is to leave no picture. To state a
number of facts so that no thread connects them, so that they
surprise by contrast but leave only confusion in the mind, is a kind of
falsehood. It is the method most adopted by partisans; they frame a
theory upon the lines of which such and such facts will lie, but they
omit, or only mention as anomalies, facts which are equally true, but
which would vitiate their conclusions. We must (to use a
mathematical metaphor) integrate the differentials of history; make a
complete and harmonious whole of a hundred aspects; strike a curve
which shall unite in a regular fashion what has appeared as a
number of scattered points. Till we can say, “This man—seeing all
his character and innumerable known acts—could not have acted as
such and such a report would have us believe;” or again, till we can
say, “This epoch, with its convictions, its environment, its literature,
could not have felt the emotions which such and such an historian
lends it,”—till we can say this, we do not understand a personality or
a period.
In the second place, we must recognise in all repeated and
common expressions of conviction, and in all the motives of a time of
action, some really existing ideal. There was a conviction common to
many thousands of Parliamentarians in the earlier stages of the
English Civil War. There was a genuine creed in the breasts of the
well-paid Ironsides of its later period. There was a real loyalty and an
explicable theory of kingship in the camp of Charles the First.
So in the period of which we deal there was a clear doctrine of
political right, held by probably the strongest intellects, and defended
by certainly the most sustained and enthusiastic courage that ever
adorned a European nation. We must recognise the soul of a time.
For were there not a real necessity for sympathy with a period which
we study, were it possible for us to see entirely from without, with no
attempt to apprehend from within, then of many stupendous
passages in history we should have to assert that all those who led
were scoundrels, that all their lives were (every moment of them) a
continuous piece of consummate acting; that our enemies, in fine,
were something greater and more wicked than men. We should have
to premise that all the vigour belonged to the bad, and all the
ineptitude to the good, and separate humanity into two groups, one
of righteous imbeciles, and the other of genius sold to hell. No one
would wish, or would be sincerely able to place himself in either
category.
We must postulate, then, of the Revolution that which Taine
ridiculed, that for which Michelet lived, and that which Carlyle never
grasped—the Revolutionary idea. And we must read into the lives of
all the actors in that drama, and especially of the subject of this
book, some general motive which is connected with the creed of the
time. We must make his actions show as a consonant whole—as a
man’s—and then, if possible, determine his place in what was not an
anarchic explosion, but a regular, though a vigorous and exceedingly
rapid development.
 A hundred difficulties are at once apparent in undertaking a work
of this nature. It is not possible to give a detailed history of the
Revolution, and yet many facts of secondary importance must be
alluded to. It is necessary to tell the story of a man whose action and
interest, nay, whose whole life, so far as we know it, lies in less than
five years.
Danton’s earlier life is but a fragmentary record, collected by
several historians with extreme care, and only collected that it may
supplement our knowledge of his mature career. The most laborious
efforts of his biographers have found but a meagre handful of the
facts for which they searched; nor does any personal inquiry at his
birthplace, from what is left of his family or in his papers, augment
the materials: the research has been thoroughly and finally made
before this date, and its results, such as they are, I have put together
in the second chapter of this book.
He does not even, as do Robespierre, Mirabeau, and others,
occupy the stage of the Revolution from the first.
Till the nation is attacked, his rôle is of secondary importance. We
have glimpses more numerous indeed, and more important, of his
action after than before 1789. But it is only in the saving of France,
when the men of action were needed, that he leaps to the front.
Then, suddenly, the whole nation and its story becomes filled with
his name. For thirteen months, from that 10th of August 1792, which
he made, to the early autumn of the following year, Danton, his spirit,
his energy, his practical grasp of things as they were, formed the
strength of France. While the theorists, from whom he so profoundly
differed, were wasting themselves in a kind of political introspection,
he raised the armies. When the orators could only find great phrases
to lead the rage against Dumouriez’ treason, he formed the
Committee to be a dictator for a falling nation. All that was useful in
the Terror was his work; and if we trace to their very roots the actions
that swept the field and left it ready for rapid organisation and
defence, then at the roots we nearly always find his masterful and
sure guidance.
 There are in the Revolution two features, one of which is almost
peculiar to itself, the other of which is in common with all other great
crises in history.
The first of these is that it used new men and young men, and
comparatively unknown men, to do its best work. If ever a nation
called out men as they were, apart from family, from tradition, from
wealth, and from known environment, it was France in the
Revolution. The national need appears at that time like a captain in
front of his men in a conscript army. He knows them each by their
powers, character, and conduct. But they are in uniform; he cares
nothing for their family or their youth; he makes them do that for
which each is best fitted. This feature makes the period unique, and
it is due to this feature that so many of the Revolutionary men have
no history for us before the Revolution. It is this feature which makes
their biographies a vividly concentrated account of action in months
rather than in years. They come out of obscurity, they pass through
the intense zone of a search-light; they are suddenly eclipsed upon
its further side.
The second of these features is common to all moments of crisis.
Months in the Revolution count as years, and this furnishes our
excuse for giving as a biography so short a space in a man’s life. But
it is just so to do. In every history a group of years at the most,
sometimes a year alone, is the time to be studied day by day. In
comparison with the intense purpose of a moment whole centuries
are sometimes colourless.
Thus in the political history of the English thirteenth century, the
little space from the Provisions of Oxford to the battle of Evesham is
everything; in the study of England’s breach with the Continental
tradition, the period between the Ridolphi plot and the Armada; in the
formation of the English oligarchy, the crisis of April to December
1688.
This second feature, the necessity for concentration, would excuse
a special insistence on the two years of Danton’s prominence, even
if his youth were better known. The two conditions combined make
imperative such a treatment as I have attempted to follow.
 As to authorities, three men claim my especial gratitude, for the
work in this book is merely a rearrangement of the materials they
have collected. They are Dr. Bougeart, who is dead (and his clear
Republicanism brought upon him exile and persecution); M. Aulard,
the greatest of our living writers on the Revolutionary period; and Dr.
Robinet, to whose personal kindness, interest, and fruitful suggestion
I largely owe this book. The keeper of the Carnavalet has been
throughout his long and laborious life the patient biographer of
Danton, and little can now be added to the research which has been
the constant occupation of a just and eminent career.
We must hope, in spite of his great age, to have from his hands
some further work; for he is one of those many men who have given
to the modern historical school of France, amid all our modern
verbiage and compromise, the strength of a voice that speaks the
simple truth.
DANTON
A STUDY
This Portrait is presumably a David, both from its style and from the fact that it is
the companion picture to that of Madame Danton which is certainly by that master.
Its date is either the Autumn of 1792 or possibly early 1793. It is mentioned by
Madame Chapin, Danton’s sister-in-law, in a letter which she writes during the
Empire to the two boys, Danton’s sons: she says “I am sending you the portrait of
your Father ... it has been retouched ... the coat especially has been made dark-
blue, as that is the colour he ordinarily wore. Madame Dupin,” (Danton’s second
wife) “has just seen it and calls it a striking likeness.” Both this letter and the
picture are in the possession of Dʳ Robinet, to whom they were given by Danton’s
grand-daughter & by whose permission this portrait is reproduced.
 CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
PREFACE vii
I. THE REVOLUTION 1
II. THE YOUTH OF DANTON 40
III. DANTON AT THE CORDELIERS 57
IV. THE FALL OF THE MONARCHY 114
V. THE REPUBLIC 171
VI. THE TERROR 211
VII. THE DEATH OF DANTON 249
VIII. ROBESPIERRE 282
APPENDICES—
I. NOTE ON THE CORDELIERS 321
II. NOTE ON CERTAIN SITES MENTIONED IN THIS
BOOK 327
III. NOTE ON THE SUPPOSED VENALITY OF DANTON 331
IV. NOTE ON DANTON’S RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE
MASSACRES OF SEPTEMBER 340
V. SHORT MEMOIR BY A. R. C. DE ST. ALBIN 347
VI. EXTRACTS SHOWING REIMBURSEMENT OF
DANTON’S OFFICE 365
VII. EXTRACTS CONCERNING DANTON’S
HOUSEHOLD 373
VIII. CATALOGUE OF DANTON’S LIBRARY 380
IX. EXTRACTS FROM THE MEMOIR WRITTEN IN 1846
BY THE SONS OF DANTON 384
X. NOTES OF TOPINO-LEBRUN, JUROR OF THE
REVOLUTIONARY TRIBUNAL 395
XI. REPORT OF THE FIRST COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC
SAFETY 403
INDEX 430
 THE
LIFE OF DANTON
 CHAPTER I
THE REVOLUTION

Before writing a life of Danton in English it is necessary to do three

things. First, to take a definite point of view with regard to the whole
revolutionary movement; secondly, to explain, so far as is possible,
the form which it took in France; thirdly, to show where Danton stood
in the scheme of events, the nature of his personality, the effects of
his brief action. This triple task is necessary to a book which, but for
it, would be only a string of events, always confused, often without
meaning.
What was the Revolution? It was essentially a reversion to the
normal—a sudden and violent return to those conditions which are
the necessary bases of health in any political community, which are
clearly apparent in every primitive society, and from which Europe
had been estranged by an increasing complexity and a spirit of
routine.
It has never been denied that the process of gradual remoulding is
a part of living, and all admit that the State (which lives like any other
thing) must suffer such a process as a condition of health. There is in
every branch of social effort a necessity for constant reform and
check: it is apparent to the administrator of every kind: it is the
business of a politician continually to direct and apply such
correction:—the whole body of the law of England is a collection of
the past results of this guiding force.
But what are the laws that govern it? What is the nature of the
condition that makes reform imperative? What distinguishes the
good from the bad in the matter of voluntary change, and separates
the conservative from the destructive effort?
It is in the examination of this problem that we may discover how
great a debt the last century owed to nature—a debt which
demanded an immediate liquidation, and was often only paid at the
expense of violence.
It would seem that the necessity of reform arises from this, that our
ideas, which are eternal, find themselves expressed in phrases and
resulting in actions which belong to material environment—an
environment, therefore, that perpetually changes in form. It is not to
be admitted that the innermost standards of the soul can change; if
they could, the word “reform” would lose all moral meaning, and a
thing not being good would cease to be desired. But the meaning of
words, the effect on the senses of certain acts, the causes of
pleasure and pain in a society, the definition of nationality—all these
things of their nature change without ceasing, and must as
ceaselessly be brought into accordance with the unchanging mind.
What test can be applied by which we may know whether a reform
is working towards this rectification or not? None, except the general
conviction of a whole generation that this or that survival obstructs
the way of right living, the mere instinct of justice expressed in
concrete terms on a particular point. It is by this that the just man of
any period feels himself bound. This is not a formula: it seems a
direction of the loosest and of the most useless kind; and yet to
observe it is to keep the State sane, to neglect it is to bring about
revolution. This much is sure, that where there exists in a State a
body of men who are determined to be guided by this vague sense
of justice, and who are in sufficient power to let it frame their reforms,
then these men save a State and keep it whole. When, on the
contrary, those who make or administer the laws are determined to
abide by a phrase or a form, then the necessities accumulate, the
burden and the strain become intolerable, and the gravitation
towards the normal standard of living, which should act as a slight
but permanent force, acts suddenly at a high potential and with
destructive violence.
As an example of the time when the former and the better
conditions prevailed, I would cite the period between the eleventh
and the fourteenth centuries, when a change of the most
fundamental kind passed over the society of Europe, indeed a
change from barbarism to civilisation, and yet the whole went well.
Reform, being continual, was easy. New institutions, the
Parliaments, the Universities, the personal tax, rose as they were
demanded, and the great transition was crowned with the security
and content that surrounded St. Louis. Simplicity, that main condition
of happiness, was the governing virtue of the time. The king ruled,
the knight fought, the peasant dug in his own ground, and the priest
believed.
It is the lack of simplicity that makes of the three centuries
following the fifteenth (with vices due perhaps to the wickedness of
the fifteenth) an opposite example. Every kind of phrase, emblem, or
cloak is kept; every kind of living thing is sacrificed. Conditions cease
to be flexible, and the body of Europe, which after all still breathes, is
shut in with the bonds of the lawyers, and all but stifled.
In the sixteenth century one would say that the political quarrels of
the princes were a mere insult to nature, but the people, though they
are declining, show that they still exist; the passions of their religions
enliven the dead game of the Tudors and the Valois. In the
seventeenth the pedants give their orders, the upper classes fight
the princes, the people are all but silent. Where were they in the
Fronde, or in that less heroic struggle the Parliamentary Wars? As
the eighteenth century falls further and further into decay all is gone;
those who move in comfort above the souls which they have
beneath them for a pavement, the rich and the privileged, have even
ceased to enjoy their political and theological amusements; they are
concerned only with maintaining their ease, and to do this they
conjure with the name of the people’s memories.
They build ramparts of sacred tombs, and defend themselves with
the bones of the Middle Ages, with the relics of the saint and the
knight.
It is this which necessitates and moulds the Revolution. The
privileged men, the lawyers especially, held to the phrase. They
excused themselves in a time most artificial by quoting the formulæ
of a time when life was most natural and when the soul was nearest
the surface. They used the name of the Middle Ages precisely
because they thought the Middle Ages were dead, when suddenly
the spirit of the Middle Ages, the spirit of enthusiasm and of faith, the
Crusade, came out of the tomb and routed them.
I say, then, that the great disease of the time preceding the
Revolution came from the fact that it had kept the letter and forgotten
the spirit. It continued to do the same things as Europe at its best—it
had entirely neglected to nourish similar motives. Let me give an
extreme example. There are conditions under which to burn a man
to death seems admissible and just. When offences often occur
which society finds heinous beyond words, then no punishment
seems sufficient for the satisfaction of the emotion which the crime
arouses. Thus during the Middle Ages (especially in the latter part of
their decay), and sometimes in the United States to-day, a man is
burned at the stake. But there are other conditions under which a
society shrinks with the greatest horror from such a punishment.
Security is so well established, conviction in this or that so much less
firm, the danger from the criminal so much less menacing, that the
idea of such an extreme agony revolts all men. Then to burn is
wrong, because it is unnecessary and undesired. But let us suppose
the lawyers to be bent on a formula, tenacious from habit and
become angrily tenacious from opposition, saying that what has
been shall be; and what happens? The Parliament of Strasbourg
condemns a man to be burnt while the States General are actually in
session in 1789!
Again, take the example of the land. There was a time when the
relations of lord and serf satisfied the heart. The village was a co-
operative community: it needed a protector and a head. Even when
such a need was not felt, the presence of a political personage, at
the cost of a regular and slight tax, the natural affection which long
habit had towards a family and a name—these made the relation not
tolerable, but good. But when change had conquered even the
permanent manorial unit, and the serf owned severally, tilling his
private field; when the political position of the lord had disappeared,
and when the personal tie had been completely forgotten—then the
tax was folly. It was no longer the symbol of tenure drawn in a
convenient fashion, taken right out of the cornfield from a primitive
group of families; it had become an arbitrary levy, drawn at the most
inconvenient time, upsetting the market and the harvest, and falling
on a small farmer who worked painfully at his own plot of ground.
It is difficult to explain to English readers how far this deadening
conservatism had been pushed on the Continent. The constitution of
England and the habits of her lawyers and politicians were still, for all
their vices, the most flexible in Europe. Even Pitt could tinker at the
representative system, and an abominable penal code could be
softened without upsetting the whole scheme of English criminal law.
To this day we notice in England the most fundamental changes
introduced, so to speak, into an unresisting medium: witness those
miniature revolutions, the Income Tax and Employers’ Liability, which
are so silent, and which yet produce results so immeasurable.
It has always been a difficulty in writing of the Revolution for
English readers, that in England the tendency to reform, though
strong, was not irresistible. It was a desire, but it was not a necessity,
and that on account of the quality which has just been mentioned,
the lack of form and definition in the English constitution and legal
habit.
But if we go a little deeper we shall see a further cause. Nothing
will so deaden the common sense of justice in a legislator or a
lawyer, nothing will separate him so much from the general feeling of
his time, as distinction of class from class. When a man cannot
frequently meet and sympathise with every kind of man about him,
then the State lacks homogeneity; the general sentiment is
unexpressed, because it has no common organ of expression, and
you obtain in laws and legal decisions not the living movement of the
citizens, but the dead traditions of a few.
Now by a peculiar bent of history, the stratification of society which
is so natural a result of an old civilisation, was less marked in
England than elsewhere in Europe. The society of the Continent is
not more homogeneous to-day, as contrasted with that of modern
England, than was the society of England a hundred years ago, as
contrasted with that of the Continent then; and any English traveller
who is wise enough to note in our time the universal type of citizen in
France, will experience something of the envy that Frenchmen felt
when they noted the solid England of the eighteenth century. There
great lawyers were occasionally drawn from the people; there a
whole mass of small proprietors in land or capital—half the people
perhaps—kept the balance of the State, and there a fluctuating
political system could, for all its corruption, find a place for the young
bourgeois Wolfe to defeat the great gentleman Montcalm.
But while in England reform was possible (though perhaps it has
been fatally inadequate), in the rest of Europe it was past all hope.
Everywhere there must be organs of government, and these on the
Continent could no longer be changed, whether for better or worse:
they had become stiff with age, and had to be supplanted. Now to
supplant the fundamental organs of government, to make absolutely
new laws and to provide an absolutely new machinery—all this is to
produce a violent revolution.
You could not reform such a body as the Châtelet, nor replace by
a series of statutes or of decisions such a mass as the local
coûtumes. Not even a radical change in the system of taxation would
have made the noblesse tolerable; no amount of personal energy
nor any excellence of advisers could save a king enveloped with the
mass of etiquette at Versailles. These numerous symptoms of the
lethargy that had overtaken European society, even the disease
itself, might have been swept away by a sharp series of vigorous
reforms. Indeed, some of these reforms were talked of, and a few
actually begun in the garrulous courts of Berlin and of St.
Petersburg. Such reforms would have merited, and would have
obtained, the name of Revolution, but they might have passed
without that character of accompanying excess which has delayed
upon every side the liberties of Europe. We should be talking of the
old regime and of the Revolution as we do now, but the words would
have called up a struggle between old Parliaments and young
legists, between worn-out customs and new codes, between the
kings of etiquette and the kings of originality, between sleep and the
new science; the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries would
have been united by some curious bridge—not separated by an
abyss.