Modern Language Review

If ever a man were hurt into poetry it was André Chénier. Or rather, he was hurt into great poetry, the choppy music of the famous ‘Iambes’, smuggled out of the Prison Saint-Lazare as he awaited his turn on the scaffold. The guillotine casts its angled shadow over these pages. It is upon these poems, and upon the last, tragic years of Chénier’s short life that David McCallam trains his spotlight in this brilliantly trenchant book. At its heart are his translations of the last poems, to which I shall return. But it is also the way McCallam frames them, by means of a forensic Introduction, written from a many-sided perspective, and an informative glossary of names and places following on from the poems, which makes this short volume so satisfying. What quickly becomes clear is the scholar’s own passionate devotion to the poet, but also his fascination for the terrible narrowing vortex of his life, caught in the teeth of a particular moment, in the machinery of the historical circumstance. The same sense of impending tragedy, of the individual life put in peril by appalling, apparently arbitrary external pressure, drives the great dissonant chords of Poulenc’s opera of the Revolution, Le Dialogue des Carmélites. To heighten this sense of drama, to flesh out what McCallam calls the ‘profoundly existential crisis for those who lived it day by day’ (p. 2), he interjects fragments from the historical transcript of the interrogation conducted by the Comité’s police stooges on that fateful evening, ‘just after midnight on 8 March 1794’, when they intercepted the poet leaving a house in Passy, where he had been trying to visit a friend who happened to be on their list of suspects.

Chénier’s answers were considered unsatisfactory, and the whole scene prompts McCallam to this perceptive passage:

The Revolution comprised the dizzyingly modern realization that one’s meaning in the world is often little more than the paper-thin credibility it carries in the eyes of others. The Terror is then a mesh of micro-acts, at once thrillingly chosen and horribly contingent. We come at the Revolution from the safety of history and blithely ignore the inscrutable open-endedness of every moment, the raw immediacy of the future facing its protagonists. For them the Revolution was unfolding in many different directions simultaneously.

(p. 2)

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Other insights offered in this prefatory text include the paradox of the lone voice of the poet adopting a ‘choral’ aspect to identify with the mass of victims of the terror, and how hard it is to ‘situate’ Chénier politically with any precision in that he too was riding the sometimes headless beast of the Revolution that writhed and surged forward blindly, responding to and not dictating circumstance. And lest we side too readily or easily with Chénier’s loathing of those ‘creatures of the slime’, of Marat’s ‘foul departing soul’, of ‘Danton, Robespierre, | Chabot, Thuriot, and many of their kind’ (p. 57), McCallam reminds us of the enormous administrative work that laid down rational ground rules for the fledgeling Republic, achieved by the much-maligned Comité du Salut Public; the self-sacrifice of these men for a greater cause was ‘revolutionary virtue in action’ (p. 4). It is a measure of the complexity of the Revolution that this ‘revolutionary virtue’ could clash so murderously with the outraged individual conscience, the ‘Vertu’ called upon in Chénier’s last poem. It is the eternal torque between the present horror and the ‘larger picture’. He beseeches the figure of ‘Vertu’ to weep at his death, the poet having been unable fully to avenge the victims of the Terror, or ‘pursue these fiends | Through hellfire’ (p. 85...