The Other Side of the Coin-- or the Channel

Yesterday, there was a post on All About Romance about the pro-English bias in historical fiction, a world in which the English are always good, the French are always bad, and, yes, the demmed Pimpernel is that elusive.

There’s an interesting post to be written on the sources of this bias. Just off the top of my head, I can come up with half a dozen completely unsupported theories, ranging from linguistic bias to literary tradition to lopping off heads being generally considered both unsporting and messy to that nasty French waiter who corrected your grammar when you were on a class trip to Paris in ninth grade. Fill in your own explanation here.

AAR made an important point. For those of us who write in the early nineteenth century, while it’s fun to play with the burlesqued image of the nasty Revolutionary Frenchman (see Blackadder, e.g. Nob & Nobility), like any historical event, the Revolution consisted of multiple stages, giving way to the Directory, the Consulate, and finally the Empire. There were, as there are anywhere, idealists and opportunists, visionaries and scoundrels—sometimes rolled up in the same person.

This has been much on my mind recently, because, after several volumes of “English Good, French Bad, Please Pass the Port and Mind the Sheep!”, my next book, The Orchid Affair, features a hero who’s not only French, but a genuine, card-carrying Girondin, second in command at the Prefecture of Paris, and right hand man to Bonaparte’s Minister of Police.

My hero, Andre Jaouen, isn’t an Englishman in disguise or Sir Percy Blakeney cunningly masquerading as a Frenchman. He’s not an Andrew pretending to be an Andre, or the lost half-brother of the Dauphin. Andre isn’t an aristocrat at all, or anything close; he’s an avocat from Nantes, a provincial lawyer who got involved in the revolution from the ground up, serving as a delegate from Nantes to the Estates General and later to the National Assembly. A child of the Enlightenment, he read Rousseau and believed it, believed that man’s chains could be broken and the injustices of an unnatural order be set right.

With hindsight, we know exactly how the Revolution went astray, leading to rivers of blood in the Place de la Revolution and the rise of a pudgy Corsican dictator. But we have the advantage of two hundred years and heavy history textbooks. How would someone have felt at the time, not knowing, at the start of it all, how it would all turn out? I wanted to explore the workings of someone who genuinely believed in the ideals of the Revolution—and who is forced to come to terms with the way it all played out.

But we can still pass the port.

What do you think of the English bias in historical fiction?