Whenever Mr. Gray thinks about the history of the French Revolution, he immediately thinks of Andrei Vajda’s film Danton. He is now leafing through a voluminous volume just published by Polis: Annie Jourdan’s New History of the French Revolution (translated by Kostas Gaganakis, ed. by Irini Oikonomou).

I remember, in the summer of 1989, two hundred years after the fall of the Bastille (July 14, 1789), the cover of Time magazine: it showed a throat cutter, an invention of the revolutionary Dr. Guillotin (who was not exactly an invention, but an evolution of the older Halifax mechanism Gibbet, who answered England).

The cover of Time must have been a graphic depiction of the beheading of Louis XVI and was accompanied by only one sentence on the cover: “What exactly are they celebrating?”. Alignment, I thought.

In 1983, Danton symbolized Lech Walesa and Robespierre represented Wojciech Jaruzelski.

At the end of the 20th century, the French Revolution meant the Terror of 1794. Other levelings followed later: the idealization of Robespierre and Saint-Guist (see Zizek).

Jourdan, however, seems to approach the French Revolution as a civil war, and, as in all civil wars, the warring parties compete to see who sheds the most blood. Violence is becoming the norm. The Englishman Edmund Burke, a contemporary of the French revolutionaries, said that in order to preserve the regime, he must make concessions from time to time. What the French rulers did not do.

Mr. Gray thinks about this every time he is in Paris and walks around the Place de la Concorde: it is assumed that where the obelisk stands today, a guillotine once stood (it changed places several times). He thinks of Wajda’s film, which, when it came out in 1983, had strong symbolism: Danton was Lech Walesa and Robespierre Wojciech Jaruzelski. But the film is primarily about 1794 and the Terror. “More than Gerard Depardieu as Dante, I think of the brilliant Polish actor Wojciech Pszoniak as Robespierre. “Incorruptible”, who does not bite in the mouth, drinks not a drop of wine, never laughs, does not smell of perfume, but does not wash and constantly sweats from illness. I think of the music, with its chilling strings of Jean Prodromides, and what the film implies with its final scene: the bitter end of Robespierre on the guillotine, his jaw torn by a bullet. I think of the slider as a symbol of any civil war.”