Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the sin of hindsight. Of course, history is by its nature an act of hindsight, of understanding, or understanding better, what was understood less well at the time, or of understanding again what has been temporarily forgotten. But the writing of history is always vulnerable to the contaminated now, to the knowledge of what has occurred between there and here. The Commune knew the Revolution but the Revolution couldn't imagine the Commune. This is obvious, but temptingly forgettable. Further, the Revolution may by its example and declarations have been partly responsible for a subsequent society in which the poor and disadvantaged were treated less badly; but the historian must discover and insist that during the Revolution itself the poor lived as poorly as they ever had, while the repressive Royalist legislation aimed at controlling them was not only not repealed, but vigorously enforced by their new masters. All that the common people got from the Revolution, in Cobb's view, was a brief glimpse of power—power never again experienced, for all the plausible hypocrisies of later forms of government.
    Cobb's history is archival, discursive, buttonholing, undog matic, imaginatively sympathetic, incomplete, droll; sometimes chaotic, often manic, always pungently detailed. In Classical Education (1985) he describes watching a cinema newsreel about the assassination in Marseilles of King Alexander of Yugoslavia: “there was even a shot of the King, through the open rear door of the car—I think it was a Panhard-Levassor—lying on the floor.” “I think it was a Panhard-Levassor”: it is in such tangy asides— usually between dashes; he puts much, even semi-colons, inside his dashes—that the charm of Cobb's writing lies. His sentences, as miniatures of his overall narrative manner, often just grow and grow; though it is a Byronic rather than a Proustian extension, one of spurts and dashes, furiously alive, furiously observing. The historian as novelist? Up to a point. In Paris and Elsewhere Cobb proposes “the framework of a novel that has not been written and that I will not be likely to write.” It is set in Ixelles, one of the independent municipalities of Greater Brussels, between the mid-Forties and mid-Fifties. Cobb evokes with care and vigour the townscape and its socially stratified populace; he describes the inhabitants' various itineraries and jots down decorative street scenes; he remembers the changing quality of the light; he hints at death and murder and transformation. But he's right: he wouldn't ever have written this novel. The historian, especially of the Cobbian kind, is a sort of novelist, but one who instead of inventing plot and character is obliged to discover them; who instead of setting characters in motion against one another with some foreknowledge of their natures and destinies tries to guess at what often incoherent characters were up to amid a distraction of lies and suppressions. This may well be the harder kind of work, especially when the sought plot proves nugatory, fragmented, trampled into indetectability by previous searchers; or, when found, is unpleasing to the reader or even to the historian himself.
    David Gilmour sees Cobb's career in terms of a curve, beginning with a long obscurity, as the provincial academic explored and relished his second identity. He attained general recognition only in the mid-Seventies, following his appointment as Professor of Modern History at Oxford. During this period France gave him the Légion d'honneur; literary editors sought his prose, and the radio his voice; one year he was a “controversial” chairman of the Booker Prize. (He was controversial mainly for remarking in his judicial speech that he'd never read Proust, an admission some thought a joke, and others deliberately pseudo-philistine. In fact, Proust wasn't his period, and Proust's personnel were hardly petites gens. It is the typical, conventional, popular novelist, the scourer