Enemy of the peuple

A new 'stand up history of the French Revolution' is enough to make Mark Simpson take to the streets. As a counter-comedy reactionary.

VIVE LA REVOLUTION: A Stand Up History of the French Revolution’, Mark Steel (Scribner)

‘If real life can be funny, history should be doubly so’. So reads the slogan pinned proudly to the back of Mark Steel’s book about the French Revolution in big bold, bloody red letters.

And what a stirring, uplifting, inspiring slogan it is. Whatever it means.

‘In this revolutionary new book,’ the blurb goes on to promise, perhaps punningly, perhaps pathetically, ‘Steel banishes stuffiness from history…’ Ah yes, stuffiness. Now there’s the real enemy of the people all right! We can all take to the barricades – or at least our local bookshop – against that can’t we? Down with the ancien regime of history books!

And who better than a stand-up comedian to bring us a history which is free of fond feudal fustiness? Mark Steel, the Robespierre of Radio Four, is here to throw open a few windows on the French Revolution, and chuck out history’s chintz into history’s dustbin.

According to Steel we’ve been sold a pup by the ‘powers that be’: ‘it seems to me that we’re not supposed to like the French Revolution very much,’ he muses in his introduction. And what is the starting point for Steel’s heroically ‘revisionist’ history of the French Revolution? What is the oppressive, hegemonic, mind-controlling force of tradition that he is resisting? Why, a Blue Peter item on Marie Antoinette introduced by that ruthless reactionary Peter Purves, c. 1978.

Apparently Steel has never forgotten nor forgiven that children’s programme he watched on an ‘unemployed afternoon’ all those years ago. It still rankles that he was told ‘she loved beautiful clothes and was admired for her exquisite taste in jewellery’ and that as a result a ‘she was loved by the people of France’. Somehow however ‘the mood changed’, and ‘“outside agitators” spread untrue stories about the Queen’s greedy habits.’ This led to the revolution depicted by ‘five or six actors shouting “Down with ze Queen”’.

Steel continues: ‘I can’t recall what followed, [odd, since he seems to have remembered every other banal detail] though presumably someone showed you how to make your own guillotine using a shoebox, an elastic band and a Stanley knife.’

Personally, I can entirely understand how an item on Blue Peter watched by some layabout lefty looking for something else to whinge about in the late Seventies could justify a whole book more than thirty years later. What I find less easy to justify, however, is why Steel’s agonising idea of humour needs to be inflicted on us. Mr Steel’s gags are more predictable than the action of Dr Guillotin’s infamous brainchild, but rather blunter and infinitely less humane. If you were to delete them from this book it would be half the length but take only a quarter as long to read.

The main problem with Steel and lefty ‘humour’ in general is not that it is a very poorly disguised form of whingeing – so is much of human cultural activity – but that it is the rankest kind of hypocrisy. The lefty stand-up occupies a populist pulpit from which he pours scorn on those who… occupy pulpits. Lefty humour is crap moralism – the stuffiest thing you could ever have the misfortune to be stuck in a tumbrel with. Crap moralism that thinks it’s funny. Lefty humour is the trendy vicar that wants you to buy him a pint. It’s as smug, self-satisfied and utterly closed-minded as it pretends to be freethinking. With its forced, proley man-in-pub delivery, made famous and, in fact, compulsory by the lefty stand-up hypocrite Ben Elton, it is mind-numbingly pedantic, unimaginative, and philistine. In fact, the leftiness of the lefty comic is so insensate that it has survived, nay triumphed over the demise of leftiness.

Oh, and it’s jaw-achingly unfunny. This is because the whole point of lefty humour is to be crushingly predictable. It is a drippy appeal to the very thing which should be the bugbear of any revolutionary or radical: common sense. Limp, demotic punchlines are deployed on behalf of dullard ordinariness against the unbearable privilege of cleverness, against the injustice of intellect, against, finally, the outrage of history itself – which becomes just a series of ‘lessons’, in which everything is reassuringly familiar, reinforcing your superior, snarky contemporary prejudices about who the are the bad guys and the good guys, who is lefty and groovy and who is not. Hence most of Steel’s gags begin ‘presumably’ or ‘no doubt’ (an ominous habit which, to be fair, at least gives the reader the chance to avert their eyes).

Writing about the corvee, in which peasants were forced to spend one day a week building and maintaining local roads, Steel quips: ‘No doubt anyone who objected was told, “We can’t go back to the days of state handouts if we expect a modern efficient transport system, so there is no alternative to a public/peasant partnership”.’ Hur hur.

Sometimes you have to avert your eyes longer. Talking about the salt tax, known as the ‘gabelle’, which put the price of salt beyond the reach of the poor, leading inevitably to a black market in the stuff, Steel’s punchline, which you could see coming a kilometre off, goes on for six lines: ‘So the scene, presumably, was one familiar to the modern world, furtive customers looking both ways outside the house of a dealer before tapping a pre-arranged knock on the door, then arriving home triumphantly before complaining that the stuff these days is cut with chemicals and it will never be as good as the gear you could get back in the 1750s.’

Talking about Louis being arrested trying to flee the country and taken back to Paris under escort of the National Guard while wearing a ‘fresh cap of liberty’, Steel’s razor wit offers the observation: ‘Which must have been like making Peter Mandelson walk from Hartlepool to London selling copies of Socialist Worker.’ Hee hee. But hang on, Mandelson isn’t king, or even queen, and the SWP, Steel’s old nutty Trotskyite party, have never been particularly associated with liberty, popularity, fashion, or, many would argue, politics. But that’s just me being stuffy, I guess.

Perhaps Mark Steel works better when he’s actually standing up with a microphone, instead of sitting down with a word processor. I can’t say as I’ve never seen him. He could hardly be worse though: the nearest thing I found to real humour here was Steel’s prose style and his bathetic inability to get to grips with the scale of his subject. Defending Robespierre, architect of The Terror he comes up with the unanswerable line, ‘None the less, Robespierre was aiming to liberate humanity, a task riddled with difficulties at the best of times.’ Too right, mate.

Often though Steel’s attempts to be serious and get to grips with large themes (i.e. history) almost has you almost wishing he crack another of his room-emptying gags instead. Almost. Apparently, for all its occasional faults and short-lived unpleasantness, which was anyway mostly the fault of the counter-revolutionaries, the French Revolution was right-on and groovy because, ‘the imagination could rule, and the full potential of human creativity was unleashed…. The French Revolution was the polar opposite of a society ruled by those who have forgotten how to dream’.

After reading this book I’d argue that the greatest indictment of the French Revolution is that all that imagination running riot and ‘unleashed full human potential’ didn’t prevent some of its contemporary followers from writing in ghastly clichés – and penning gags which are crimes against humanity. Roll on, I say, the Restoration of stuffiness.


© Mark Simpson 2003

www.marksimpson.com