Word: restif
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With nearly all the moral fastidiousness of an itinerant siding salesman, Alex Karmel bamboozles the reader into believing that the title page of his book means what it says. There seems no reason to doubt that My Revolution, Promenades in Paris 1789-1794 really is the diary of Restif de la Bretonne, author of The Pornographer, The Perverted Peasant, and Paris Nights. Restif was indeed a writer of the revolutionary period, a fascinating, talented lowlife who wrote some 200 books that mixed pornography and social criticism in roughly equal measure, and died in 1806 after Napoleon, oddly enough, gave...
...historic side of the journal begins with a fine whiff of actuality. Restif chooses July 14th to oversleep and misses the storming of the Bastille. He meets the bloody-minded revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, before Marat has any importance, and finds him horrifying. Later, someone shouts "Power to the people!"almost 200 years ago. What great luck, the reader thinks, that Karmel has unearthed the diary of a man as impressionable as Restif...
Actually, Restif wrote no diary during the terror. My Revolution is an exasperating dodge, deceptively mislabeled by the publishers. It was written entirely in 1969 by Alex Karmel, a novelist and an ex-Fulbright student in Paris. The book is exceptionable because the reader is led to think that Karmel's handmade wormholes are real. It is exasperating because as a historical novel it must be counted brilliant...
...NUITS DE PARIS, by Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne. Restif may be somewhat of a comedown from the great court gossip, Saint-Simon, but he set down the life in Paris just before the Revolution vividly and prophetically, and thus produced, without his aristocratic brain ever knowing it, an indelible picture of an 18th-century slum...
...Restif's own sympathies were nonetheless with the aristocracy, and though he read rage in the eyes of the masses ("Statesmen, beware! A fateful revolution is approaching! The spirit of defiance is spreading!"), he thought it could be checked by the wisdom of Louis XVI-and by cutting laborers' wages to remove the temptation to idleness. But his vignettes of violent street scenes and underworld characters develop into a seething panorama of the revolutionary mob, culminating inevitably in massacres in the streets and prisons, and finally in the Reign of Terror. As for Restif himself, he was several...