Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (4 page)

He acquired what he called a “second identity,” didn't regret the partial loss of Englishness, and loved being asked if he was Belgian (though this is normally a somewhat poisoned compliment from the French to the Francophone). He had either one French wife (if you believe the index to
Paris and Elsewhere)
or two (if you follow the logic of his widely divergent descriptions of what might theoretically be the same woman), and then an English one; children, too, it seems. Before, and perhaps in between, he acquired a connoisseur's knowledge of prostitution: “Most Paris brothels tended to look like public lavatories—English ones, not French ones.” Cobb's life became so French that French things started happening to him: he used to visit Gaby la Landaise, a prostitute from Dax, every payday for a year (I think we are in the late Forties or early Fifties), until the Friday he learned that she had just put a revolver in her mouth and shot herself, “in one of the sparse bedrooms on the fifth floor, No.
78
.” Another small case for Maigret. Meanwhile, the history Cobb was absorbed in became as French as his identity. Not only was it all about France, specifically the Revolution, specifically its later stages, but it was written and published in French: his first book in English didn't appear until he was fifty-two.

Cobb's France is not that of the traditional English Francophile, who tends to prefer the south, the countryside, the sun, the deceptively original village; who likes things as different from England as possible. Cobb preferred cities (indeed, he scarcely seems to notice the pastoral); he loved the north, which included Belgium; when he went south at all, it was to great centres like Lyon or Marseilles. He was addicted to walking, but walking in cities; it's not clear whether he ever drove; certainly he favoured public transport, with its opportunities for eavesdropping and casual observation. He was in no way a snob—a spell in the British army, he claimed, had divested him of class—except in the sense that he tended not to give the middle and upper classes the benefit of the doubt. (History, you could say, had already given them that.) He preferred
les petites gens
both in his life and in his writing: small tradespeople, working folk, servants, laundresses, wigmakers' assistants, cardsharps, water-carriers, prostitutes, idlers, semi-criminals; his closest French friend was both a deserter and a thief.

Though a democrat in his social tastes, he saw enough of the French Communist Party to distrust generalized belief systems; he had no appetite for eating off those comradely plates which, as the food disappeared, slowly disclosed Picasso's benign icon of Stalin. He was, by his own description, “a very lonely person”; he was also, by his own evidence, social and convivial, a welcoming fellow drinker. A paradoxical man, then, a solitary with frequent companions; also a paradoxical historian, since in his life he clearly needed order and ritual to keep chaos and brutality at bay, yet he spent his career with one of the most disorderly and violent periods in France's history.

Cobb's social writing is personal and impressionistic, while his history is archival and fanatically detailed. Yet both depend upon the same principles and focus: a very English taste for the particular and the local, coupled with a disregard for theory, scheme, and overarching structure, for century-hopping generalization, let alone “models.” In the middle of a characteristically enormous sentence about the problem, after five years of Revolutionary upheaval, of establishing anyone's true identity, especially at the lowest levels of society, Cobb refers to “the historian like the police and other repressive authorities before him.” Cobb was fond of this comparison in its benign form: the historian as a detective who takes his time, never rushes to conclusions, learns the geography of the crime, walks the streets, takes a pastis, sniffs the air, asks seemingly irrelevant questions. The trope is also reversible: thus Inspector Maigret, for Cobb, is “a historian of habit, of the
déjà vu …
a historian of the unpredictable … a historian of class”; he may be limitingly unaware of change but is vividly alert to “habit, routine, assumption, banality, everydayness, seasonability, popular conservatism.” This is the historian/detective as virtuous investigator; but Cobb's seemingly throwaway allusion to “other repressive authorities” (the slight looseness of the grammar allows for ambiguity) alerts us also to the down-side of the historian's search for clarity and certitude: the ordering and ordering-about of humanity, the rigid classification, the distant decision-making, the unpersoning, the disappearing, the use of the convenient oubliette.

Cobb was a “historian of individuality” in both senses of the phrase. For him, history “has never been an intellectual debate”; it doesn't start from an argument or a theory. With a robust and deliberately offensive pragmatism, he insisted that “I do not know what history is about, nor what social function it serves. I have never given the matter a thought.” He prefers to begin from the opposite end, with a specific person in a specific place at a specific time. Having pounded the streets himself, Cobb was imaginatively alive to the effect of urban geography on the possibilities of historical event: how the river brings news as well as logs; how bridges funnel a population across a city, making identity checks, arrest, and even murder that much more feasible. His exposition of the effect of geography and administrative boundary on the development of Lyon—its buildings taller, its streets darker, its society more perpendicular, its network of passageways more conducive to crime and escape—is Cobb at his most masterly.

It is at street level, too, that Cobb seeks his historical personnel. The proclaimers of Revolution interest him less than the zealous butcher, sceptical baker, and befuddled candlestick-maker low down in the chain of command. In a key statement of intent, Cobb distinguishes his line of approach to revolutionary élites from that of Albert Soboul:

He does name the militants, but he does not give them the benefit of a personality. The result is that we can see how they operated, but we gain virtually no impression of what they were like, whether they were sincere or time-wasters, whether they were out for publicity or for the fruits of office, whether they had sound sense or were crackpots. We just have to accept that they were militants and that something, whether ambition or sincerity, distinguished them from the general mass of their neighbours.

Cobb understood that many individuals—even seeming idealists—join movements for mixed motives, but that the movements themselves like to pretend, as their adherents sup from Stalin plates, that motives are unfailingly pure; he also knew that individuals will retrospectively purify their motives if and when a movement becomes successful. Cobb is against complete motive— an individual with a complete motive is probably a “crackpot” of one sort or another (not that such crackpots do not have their influence on history)—just as he is against complete solutions. Whether a revolution is examined from the ground up, or from theory down, there will always be “mystery and accident” at or close to the heart of it. He is also—as a Maigretian—a believer in “routine, assumption, banality.” To study the moment of revolutionary violence is necessary; but Cobb never forgets that such moments are rare in a human life, as they are rare in human history. The fear, the anticipation, and the memory of violence may be pervasive, but the moment itself is surrounded and given context by a lifetime of work, love, mourning, illness, shopping, play, boredom, and so on.

Cobb's ground-up individualism and tireless archive-truffling helped protect him from the sin of hindsight. Of course, history is by its nature an act of hindsight, of understanding, or understanding better, what was understood less well at the time, or of understanding again what has been temporarily forgotten. But the writing of history is always vulnerable to the contaminated now, to the knowledge of what has occurred between there and here. The Commune knew the Revolution but the Revolution couldn't imagine the Commune. This is obvious, but temptingly forgettable. Further, the Revolution may by its example and declarations have been partly responsible for a subsequent society in which the poor and disadvantaged were treated less badly; but the historian must discover and insist that during the Revolution itself the poor lived as poorly as they ever had, while the repressive Royalist legislation aimed at controlling them was not only not repealed, but vigorously enforced by their new masters. All that the common people got from the Revolution, in Cobb's view, was a brief glimpse of power—power never again experienced, for all the plausible hypocrisies of later forms of government.

Cobb's history is archival, discursive, buttonholing, undog matic, imaginatively sympathetic, incomplete, droll; sometimes chaotic, often manic, always pungently detailed. In
Classical Education
(1985) he describes watching a cinema newsreel about the assassination in Marseilles of King Alexander of Yugoslavia: “there was even a shot of the King, through the open rear door of the car—I think it was a Panhard-Levassor—lying on the floor.” “I think it was a Panhard-Levassor”: it is in such tangy asides— usually between dashes; he puts much, even semi-colons, inside his dashes—that the charm of Cobb's writing lies. His sentences, as miniatures of his overall narrative manner, often just grow and grow; though it is a Byronic rather than a Proustian extension, one of spurts and dashes, furiously alive, furiously observing. The historian as novelist? Up to a point. In
Paris and Elsewhere
Cobb proposes “the framework of a novel that has not been written and that I will not be likely to write.” It is set in Ixelles, one of the independent municipalities of Greater Brussels, between the mid-Forties and mid-Fifties. Cobb evokes with care and vigour the townscape and its socially stratified populace; he describes the inhabitants' various itineraries and jots down decorative street scenes; he remembers the changing quality of the light; he hints at death and murder and transformation. But he's right: he wouldn't ever have written this novel. The historian, especially of the Cobbian kind, is a sort of novelist, but one who instead of inventing plot and character is obliged to discover them; who instead of setting characters in motion against one another with some foreknowledge of their natures and destinies tries to guess at what often incoherent characters were up to amid a distraction of lies and suppressions. This may well be the harder kind of work, especially when the sought plot proves nugatory, fragmented, trampled into indetectability by previous searchers; or, when found, is unpleasing to the reader or even to the historian himself.

David Gilmour sees Cobb's career in terms of a curve, beginning with a long obscurity, as the provincial academic explored and relished his second identity. He attained general recognition only in the mid-Seventies, following his appointment as Professor of Modern History at Oxford. During this period France gave him the
Légion d'honneur;
literary editors sought his prose, and the radio his voice; one year he was a “controversial” chairman of the Booker Prize. (He was controversial mainly for remarking in his judicial speech that he'd never read Proust, an admission some thought a joke, and others deliberately pseudo-philistine. In fact, Proust wasn't his period, and Proust's personnel were hardly
petites gens.
It is the typical, conventional, popular novelist, the scourer of the streets and celebrator of the ordinary, who is of most use to such a historian. Cobb's taste was thus for Simenon, Pagnol, Cendrars, Queneau, René Fallet, Sue, MacOrlan, and Restif de la Bretonne.) Then, from the mid-Eighties, the curve descended, in a return to comparative obscurity, but now accompanied by illness and unhappiness. By the time of Cobb's death in 1996 the only historical work of his available in English was
The People's Armies
— ironically a translation by another hand.

This is sad, but not entirely a surprise. Cobb never wrote a big, popular book, not least because he never lowered his sights or tour-guided his terrain. He sought to convey his fascination, but never tried to ingratiate himself with the casual reader:

First of all, then, we have to deal with the
sans-culotte
as such— that is to say, with a person not as he was, let us say, in 1792, or as he would have become in 1795 or in 1796, but as he was for a brief period from 1793 to 1794. For the life and death of the
sans-culotte
can be circumscribed within a period running more or less from April 1793 to April 1794, allowing for a possible overlap up to Thermidor year II or even to Brumaire year III. It would be stretching the species too far to describe, as a Norwegian historian has done … [etc.]

Cobb knew that the truth lay in the detail, and the detail meant complication, elaboration, doubt. He would never have made a TV don. As a reviewer he was famous in literary editors' offices for the unanswered telephone and the unguessable delivery date: his copy,typewritten to the very edge of innumerable small index cards, would arrive when it chose to arrive—always brilliant, always vastly over length, always uncuttable. The wise editor would sit tight, knowing that when the elusive text did finally turn up it would surely make a lead review. In a way, these semi-public years of Cobb's were the untypical ones. He was the sort of historian who inspired other historians, who taught by example, who was a quiet cult. Becoming a foppish opinion-monger, goosing the tabloid readers of Middle England, hoovering up the three-book advance: this was never his world. He would rather have another three a.m. calvados and watch the Rouen fishmongresses gut the night's catch by kerosene lamp.

There
is
a line of disenchantment and melancholy running through Cobb's life and work. But it is not about himself; it is about France. It may be that other countries, like politicians, are there to disappoint us; and that those who take a second identity are more vulnerable to such disappointment. Your
alter
country is all that your first was not; commitment to it involves idealism, love, sentimentality, and a certain selective vision. Over the years, however, you may discover that the alluring differences only half-conceal grinding similarities (the snootiness of élites, the complacency of the bourgeoisie, the conservatism of the proletariat); you may also start noticing aspects of that otherness which you dislike, or which seem aimed at destroying what initially drew you to the country. Where now are the idling Rouen trolleybus with its pole unhooked, the jolly shop-window mime artists, the companionable sadsacks in all-night bars? Items of old France are still there, in places; the four-table family restaurant can yet be found, though with greater difficulty. But your love has become vulnerable, nostalgia threatens to become corrosive, and a moment of terminal fracture beckons. All of this happened to Cobb.