AG: The events covered by Blake’s “French Revolution” may be summarized briefly from history, according to Erdman. The three estates – that is the king, the priests, and the commons – convened on May 4th, 1789, in Versailles, and met separately for five weeks while the deputies of the commons (which was the people) tried to induce the other orders (that is the aristocrats and the clergy) to sit with them. Emboldened by increasing popular agitation and having been joined by some of the liberal clergy and nobles, the commons declared themselves a national assembly on June 17th. On the 19th, two days later, King Louis XVI assembled his ministers who tried to take the initiative but the commons finally made a decision that they would not separate before they’d given France a constitution.
So here’s the struggle – There’s a people’s group, there are three estates there. So we get this notion of estates – three estates. There’s the people’s group, there’s the nobles and the clergy, and they’re all meeting around each other at Versailles, though Blake places his poem right in Paris at the Louvre, the King’s palace in Paris. The actual historical event was in Versailles. Okay.
The common’s group got more and more wild and more and more independent, defying the King. Finally the King on June 27th capitulated and ordered his nobles and clergy to join the commons and make one big assembly. However, at the same time he surrounded Paris and Versailles with Hessian mercenaries.
Peter Orlovsky: What were his Hessian mercenaries?
AG: German mercenary soldiers.
Peter Orlovsky: Oh.
AG: Mercenaries. So, in other words, he was saying, okay, we’ll join, but he was surrounding everybody with a gun. And that’s in the book. You’ll see the armies of the king mentioned in the book Yes?
Student: Why the mention of King Henry IV then?
AG: Henry IV comes in later …
Student: Yeah.
AG: … because earlier, according to Erdman — where I’m taking my information and (S. Foster) Damon, and a few others – Henry IV, otherwise referred to (in the poem) as Aumont), an earlier king, had, during the revolt while he had Paris under siege, supplied Paris with food, and Louis XVI did not do that. But also (Henry IV) had proposed a unity of Europe to end war. So Blake is calling on the ghost of King Henry IV of France as a sort of sympathetic royal presence who showed the way for the royalty and the nobles to act, if they were going to act peaceably to reconcile the nation and bring Eden back to earth. Bring a successful revolution without violence. Henry would have been the (model).
So Henry IV comes in and out of the poem, comes in and out of the Louvre, as a pale presence, who is then mocked and rejected by these modern nobles, and then he leaves. Around the time that Abbé Sieyès representing the populists, comes in. But we’ll go through this one-by-one. We’ll actually go through it act by act. We may not finish it today but we can start.
to be continued