Aristide Ravel is a freelance investigator or “agent” for the Paris police during the last two decades of the 18th century. From the final years of the monarchy to the French Revolution, the Terror, and the decadent Directoire of 1795-99—years in which agents of both the revolutionaries and the royalists were kept endlessly busy—life goes on, order must be maintained, and crimes must be solved.
Susanne Alleyn: Salut et fraternité, citizen!
Aristide Ravel: Pardon me, but before we proceed any further, I ought to remind you that I detest being called a police spy. Spies—paid informers—are loathed by all decent citizens, and I much prefer to be called an investigator, as you very well know.
SA: My mistake. Sorry about that. Please tell everyone a little about your place and time, if you would.
Ravel: I live and work in Paris, capital of the world, in the 1790s. During the past century, everyone wanted to live in Paris, of course: It’s the capital of art, taste, fashion, intellect, and pleasure. At present, during the Revolution, although the opulence has diminished appreciably—it’s not wise to flaunt one’s wealth too openly—it’s still a city of unlimited prospects. Since the fall of the Bastille in ’89, scores of intelligent, ambitious, idealistic folk from all over France have flocked here, brimming with ideas of how to remake our country—perhaps all of Europe—in the best democratic fashion, as we do away with the worn-out remnants of our ancient, often-abused feudal customs. Would I live elsewhere? I doubt it.
SA: Tell me a little about your background, before you came to Paris.
Ravel: I was born in 1758, in Bordeaux, a beautiful, thriving, lively city. My father was a prosperous merchant. I still love Bordeaux, but I can never stay there for long, because of what happened when I was nine years old: I lived a sheltered life like any young son of the well-off bourgeoisie until the day when my father, mad with rage and jealousy, murdered my mother and her lover. He was put to death for the murders—quite horribly, by breaking on the wheel, a foul and cruel form of punishment that, thankfully, the king abolished in 1789.
SA: Such a painful event must have affected you for a long time.
Ravel: You don’t know the half of it, citizeness. The relatives of a felon, no matter how respectable the family, are regarded with contempt and distaste by all, even tradesmen and servants. A convicted criminal’s property, moreover, is confiscated by the state, leaving his surviving dependents with nothing. So suddenly my little sister, Thérèse, and I were left paupers; luckily, my mother’s brother, an attorney, took us in. I was able to go to boarding school and get a good education, though I had to endure endless taunts from the other boys.
SA: Why don’t you tell our readers how you became an investigator?
Ravel: It was purely by accident. You know quite well that, until I went to Paris, I had no intention of working for the police, of all things!
SA: But you do.
Ravel: Because Inspector Brasseur foisted it upon me. He thought I had a natural gift for investigation, and decided to make use of it, whether I wished to cooperate or not.
SA: Yes, your original ambition was—
Ravel: Oh, I was going to be a famous author. After returning to Bordeaux after school, and working for a few years as a clerk in my uncle’s law office, I couldn’t stand any more of the whispers and glances. Since I already had thoughts of trying my luck as a writer, and had little love for the practice of law, I pulled up stakes and headed for Paris in ’85 to live in a garret and scribble illegal, but profitable, political pamphlets. But a short while later Brasseur dragged me into a murder case—you detailed the affair thoroughly in The Cavalier of the Apocalypse. That case soon led to others.
The duc d’Orléans was right when he told me I was a better investigator and clandestine agent than I was a writer; I worked for him for some time (I probably shouldn’t talk too much about what I was up to, but everybody knows that the duke—and his money—had a hand in undermining the monarchy in those years before ’89). Since then, I’ve also worked for Danton, in between investigating criminal matters for the police, usually with Brasseur, who is now a good friend.
By the way, citizeness, while we’re having this chat, why not explain to me why my first murder case—The Cavalier of the Apocalypse—was not the first of my published adventures?
SA: Blame my publisher . . .
Ravel: One should always blame one’s publisher for almost anything, I’ve found.
SA: . . . They asked me for certain stories from a list I’d offered them, without paying any attention to the chronological order in which they had occurred.
Ravel: Evidently publishers haven’t changed much since the 18th century.
SA: So how is law and order maintained in 18th-century Paris?
Ravel: Paris has had a large, centralized, extraordinarily efficient police force (aided by thousands of those spies whom everyone hates so much) for over a century. Unlike London, which has only a few constables and night watchmen who are always overwhelmed by the inevitable lawlessness born of a large city’s squalor, Paris is very well regulated. The responsibilities of our police are spread much, much wider than those of police in your century: They practically run the city, being in charge of such things as sanitation, public health, orphanages, licensing, and so on, together with what you think of as police duties— maintaining public order, and preventing crime and sedition.
That’s why I never wanted an official position in the Paris police; I would have had to become a bureaucrat as well as an investigator. As it is, I’m quite content as a free-lance, as long I have enough money in my pocket to pay for my rent and my dinner . . . my needs are few, I’ve found.
SA: What’s going on in the world around you?
Ravel: Mon dieu, need you ask? The French Revolution, of course. The greatest event in the history of the world, according to some. The most dreadful, according to others. It all depends on your perspective, I suppose.
SA: And what’s your perspective?
Ravel: Back in ’85, when I was scrawling my vitriolic political pamphlets, insulting Fat Louis and his empty-headed queen to earn a few livres, I was all in favor of anything that would do away with our seemingly frozen absolute monarchy, customs, and system of law. (Perhaps I should say, not “frozen,” but “rusted into rigidity and uselessness.”) During the first years of the Revolution, I, like almost everyone else except for the most narrow-minded of the nobility and clergy, firmly believed we had at last achieved our goals.
By 1791 we had many reforms and, in a constitutional monarchy, something approaching a more democratic and impartial government. But, owing to dissension from various sides—and the vanity, blindness, and obstinacy of a few key figures—and the irrational pressures that religion exerts on many folk—and the catastrophic, costly war we blundered into that never seems to end—eventually it all went wrong. So from starting out as quite a firebrand before the Revolution, I’ve become merely a disappointed liberal with no taste whatsoever for politics. I expect many of my fellow citizens feel the same.
SA: Well, getting back to your career as a sleuth, what was your most fascinating, confounding, or horrifying case?
Ravel: I’m sure there are many more investigations in store for me, but I must say that the most horrifying, if only for the number of murders involved, has to be the affair of the headsman (related in Palace of Justice) whom I pursued in the autumn of ’93, at the start of the Terror. A madman, or so we thought, was leaving headless corpses strewn around Paris, as if to mock the guillotine; it didn’t help that I was currently preoccupied with much more personal matters. My friend Mathieu Alexandre, merely because of his moderate politics, was then in prison under suspicion of counterrevolutionary activities (nonsense, of course—Mathieu was a sincere patriot) and was eventually tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal, not known for its leniency. Brasseur and I finally caught the headsman, to be sure—but the affair turned out to be extraordinarily bitter and painful and I’d rather not speak of it.
SA: What aspects of your world do you think would seem most alien to those of us who live in the 21st century?
Ravel: Well, despite the endless, wildly exaggerated portrayals, in your popular fiction, of our revolution as an anarchic welter of gore and severed heads, I honestly think that you in the 21st century would find France before the Revolution considerably more alien than you would find conditions during the Revolution itself. Many of the freedoms that you take for granted—freedom of the press; equal rights and justice under the law for all; freedom of thought and a government divorced from the Church—were only pipe dreams in France until 1789, though they were granted, or began to be granted, during the Revolution.
Before the Revolution, you could have been severely punished, even condemned to death, for acts of sacrilege or blasphemy—for owning books that criticized or ridiculed the Church, for defacing a church or shrine, or for making offensive jokes about religion. And if you were condemned to death for whatever reason, the manner of your execution depended not upon the heinousness of the crime, but upon how blue your blood was. If you were a nobleman, you were beheaded with a sword in what was considered an honorable and gentlemanly fashion; if you were a commoner, you were hanged, or broken on the wheel. (The guillotine is, in my opinion, a great improvement for everyone—for sometimes not even a “gentlemanly” execution went as smoothly as it should have.)
SA: Speaking of executions, does the thought of assisting the authorities to send a guilty person to execution affect your personal feelings about investigating a crime? Or do you believe that murderers deserve what they get?
Ravel: I do believe that most murderers—not all—deserve death, if there is absolutely conclusive proof that the culprit is guilty. But I also suspect that sometimes innocents, like Joseph Lesurques in the famous case of the robbery of the Lyons mail-coach in ’96 (you included a little about it in Game of Patience), are punished for crimes they didn’t commit, and that is a terrifying thought. It was of no consequence to the authorities before the Revolution, however, because the theory behind prerevolutionary justice was one of dissuasion: the example of punishment, always in public and the crueler the better, was supposed to warn potential malefactors away from committing crimes . . . so even the unjust punishment of an innocent person was supposed to be of benefit to the community (though that was small consolation to the unfortunate victim, I imagine). We have done away with that appalling concept in our reformed penal code, I’m glad to say.
Knowing that a successful investigation will probably lead to an execution hasn’t yet kept me from solving a crime. I must confess, though, that I now feel far less uneasy about dispatching a culprit to the guillotine, a quick and painless death, than I would have felt, before the Revolution, in sending him to be hanged or, worse, broken.
SA: What would you say to 21st-century people who declare that things are so bad right now that surely “this is the worst time ever to be alive”?
Ravel: Try living through the Terror. I would tell such spoiled children to grow up, or to read a history of the past thousand years. You have mechanical marvels that are commonplace to you but would seem like magic to us in the 18th century; and in many parts of your world, absolute monarchies and all their abuses have been abolished and the democratic ideals that we fought for during the Revolution have been put into practice. No time or place in history has ever been a bed of roses; your century, despite its many ills, has much to commend it.
SA: And what about the age of the French Revolution do you think is most relevant to those of us who live in the early 21st century?
Ravel: Didn’t you just write an essay about that yourself, citizeness?
SA: Yes, for a blog—
Ravel: In my day, I expect it would have been published as an inflammatory pamphlet and sold illegally under the counter, to avoid the censors.
SA: That’s true. I’ve heard that some historians are comparing the explosion of opinion writing—influential opinion writing, I should say—in today’s blogs to the explosion of opinion writing in the late 18th century that helped bring about the French Revolution—
Ravel: —Which was brought about by certain advances in printing technology, as yours was by the rise of your “Internet.” Imagine, if we had only had your “computers” and “Internet” and “blogs” in 1789 . . . eh bien, I find it highly amusing that you call your “blog” a “Blague” at your own “site web”—for, of course, blague is French for “joke.”
SA: But what about the Revolution do you think is most relevant to us?
Ravel: While investigating crimes, one learns a great deal about basic human nature. That hasn’t changed over the centuries. The rich and privileged rarely want to give up their riches and their privileges and will fight tooth and nail to protect them. I think that is as true of the first decade of the 21st century in a republic, as it is of the last decade of the 18th century in a monarchy. No matter the century or the situation, the powerful are always guided first by self-interest, and when tensions between the angry many and the powerful few come to a boil, you may not be able to contain the resulting explosion. That is what led us eventually to the Terror, during which a great many people who richly deserved it lost their heads—and a great many more who did not deserve it did also.
SA: And with that cheerful thought, we’ll have to close. Au revoir, citoyen!
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Susanne Alleyn is the author of the Aristide Ravel French Revolution Mysteries (The Cavalier of the Apocalypse, Palace of Justice, Game of Patience, and A Treasury of Regrets) and of A Far Better Rest, the reimagining of A Tale of Two Cities, all available in paper and eBook.
eBooks for Kindle or Nook of Game of Patience and A Treasury of Regrets: currently 99 cents each for a limited time!
Historical Sleuth Interviews will appear around the middle and end of each month. Authors, if you’d like your historical sleuth to be interviewed here, please send Susanne a note with a little information about your books.
Dorothy Parker: It’s the Roaring 20s in New York City. Why do I live here, you ask? Where else would I live? Dubuque? I’m a New Yorker through and through. And not just New York, but Manhattan. I get a nosebleed if I travel above 80th Street.
The founding members of the Algonquin Round Table: Art Samuels, Charlie MacArthur, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott
Dorothy: Right now, I’m trying to find out why a friend—well, no, not a friend, let’s call him a royal pain in the neck—decided to commit suicide. This guy was not some hand-wringing nervous wreck. Far from it. Ernie MacGuffin is—was—about the most self-assured, self-deluded second-rate artist in New York (and that’s saying something). Why would he take a nosedive off the Brooklyn Bridge? And then why would his “spirit” (notice the quotation marks) appear at a séance a week later?
