Chapter XII: The Drama of the Revolution

1898-1902

Planning this "Iliad of the French People" for the people's theater, Rolland designed it as a decalogy, as a time sequence of ten dramas somewhat after the manner of Shakespeare's histories. "I wished," he writes in the 1909 preface to _Le théâtre de la révolution_, "in the totality of this work to exhibit as it were the drama of a convulsion of nature, to depict a social storm from the moment when the first waves began to rise above the surface of the ocean down to the moment when calm spread once more over the face of the waters." No by-play, no anecdotal trifling, was to mitigate the mighty rhythm of the primitive forces. "My leading aim was to purify the course of events, as far as might be, from all romanticist intrigue, which would serve only to encumber and belittle the movement. Above all I desired to throw light upon the great political and social interests on behalf of which mankind has been fighting for a hundred years." It is obvious that the work of Schiller is closely akin to the idealistic style of this people's theater. Comparing Rolland's technique with Schiller's, we may say that Rolland was thinking of a _Don Carlos_ without the Eboli episodes, of a _Wallenstein_ without the Thekla sentimentalities. He wished to show the people the sublimities of history, not to entertain the audience with anecdotes of popular heroes.

Thus conceived as a dramatic cycle, it was simultaneously, from the musician's outlook, to be a symphony, an "Eroica." A prelude was to introduce the whole, a pastoral in the style of the "fêtes galantes." We are at the Trianon, watching the light-hearted unconcern of the ancien régime; we are shown powdered and patched ladies, amorous cavaliers, dallying and chattering. The storm is approaching, but no one heeds it. Once again the age of gallantry smiles; the setting sun of the Grand Monarque seems to shine once more on the fading tints in the garden of Versailles.

_Le 14 Juillet_ is the flourish of trumpets; it marks the opening of the storm. _Danton_ is the critical climax; in the hour of victory comes the beginning of moral defeat, the fratricidal struggle. A _Robespierre_ was to introduce the declining phase. _Le triomphe de la raison_ shows the disintegration of the Revolution in the provinces; _Les loups_ depicts a like decomposition in the army. Between two of the heroic plays, the author proposed to insert a love drama, describing the fate of Louvet, the Girondist. Wishing to visit his beloved in Paris, he leaves his hiding-place in Gascony, and is the only one to escape the death that overtakes his friends, who are all guillotined or torn to pieces by the wolves as they flee. The figures of Marat, Saint-Just, and Adam Lux, which are merely touched on in the extant plays, were to receive detailed treatment in the dramas that remain unwritten. Doubtless, too, the figure of Napoleon would have towered above the dying Revolution.

Opening with a musical and lyrical prelude, this symphonic composition was to end with a postlude. After the great storm, castaways from the shipwreck were to foregather in Switzerland, near Soleure. Royalists and regicides, Girondists and Montagnards, were to exchange reminiscences; a love episode between two of their children was to lend an idyllic touch to the aftermath of the European storm. Fragments only of this great design have been carried to completion, comprising the four dramas, _Le 14 Juillet_, _Danton_, _Les loups_, and _Le triomphe de la raison_. When these plays had been written, Rolland abandoned the scheme, to which the people, like the literary world and the stage, had given no encouragement. For more than a decade these tragedies have been forgotten. To-day, perchance, the awakening impulses of an age becoming aware of its own lineaments in the prophetic image of a world convulsion, may arouse in the author an impulse to complete what was so magnificently begun.