Does Gamelin’s career resemble that of a lesser Robespierre?
I’m sure this is what Anatole France intends in the novel. Robespierre is Gamelin’s hero; they fall on the same day. Both are quiet idealists who suddenly find themselves important, then mutate with frightening speed into powerful and pitiless men. At the start of the play Gamelin thinks Revolutionary France a kind of Eden. Robespierre as a young lawyer was opposed to the death penalty – a remarkable position for the time. The paintings of David and his contemporaries were often deeply political or became politicized. Is it significant that Gamelin starts out in life as an artist? The artist David was political in the most despicable sense, as of course he survived everything by ducking and weaving and wound up sanctifying Napoleon in oils just as he had the Jacobins. Perhaps Anatole France had this in mind when he chose Gamelin’s career. How chilling to think that in 1912, while he was writing the novel, there was another inadequate painter about to scrawl his name in history. Your wo
