A passerby hesitated, stared. “Excuse me–” he said. “Good citizen–are you Robespierre?
Robespierre didn’t look at the man. “Do you understand what I say about heroes? There is no place for them. Resistance to tyrants means oblivion. I will embrace that oblivion. My name will vanish from the page.”
“Good citizen, forgive me,” the patriot said doggedly.
Eyes rested on him briefly. “Yes, I’m Robespierre,” he said. He put his hand on Citizen Desmoulin’s arm, “Camille, history is fiction.”
–Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

Like her Booker-Prize-winning books Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, A Place of Greater Safety is a historical novel in which lawyers best known for beheading tragic heroines (Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette) are among the protagonists. In its form, its topic, and even its quality, A Place of Greater Safety also bears comparison to War and Peace, although Mantel does not advocate an elaborate conceptual scheme comparable to Tolstoy’s. In the afterword, she writes, “I am not trying to persuade my reader to view events in a particular way, or to draw any particular lessons from them. I have tried to write a novel that gives the reader scope to change opinions: a book that one can think and live inside.” Until I finished the novel on Saturday, I was so deeply inside it that now I mourn the characters, even Robespierre.

As the quotation cited above suggests, Mantel is interested in the relationship between history and fiction. The most obvious difference is that history is true and fiction is false. But even if one insists on facts (as I do), the distinction is more complicated than that. Robespierre really walked down the streets of Paris. The passage above is fiction because Mantel has imagined the scene. (However, Mantel frequently has the characters state real quotations from their works, on the theory that “what goes onto the record is often tried out earlier, off the record.”) Within the fiction of the book, it really is Robespierre whom the patriot recognizes: that is a fact, not a mistake.

But what does it mean to say “Robespierre”? Does one mean The Incorruptible, the great civic republican moralist and statesman? Does one mean the villainous author of the Terror? Historians still debate who Robespierre was, even given the vast evidence that survives. And, according to Mantel, Robespierre wasn’t sure himself. Not only is the truth perspectival in the sense that each of us observes from a distant and limited vantage-point, but we are not even sure how to view ourselves. The meaning of the word “Robespierre” changes for Robespierre from minute to minute. His name did not vanish from the page, as he predicts above, but the fullness of his experience did.

It’s worth comparing the actual French Revolution to the contents of this novel. One difference is scale. Twenty-eight million people were alive in France in 1792. Each lived a continuous stream of consciousness and formed passionate, complex, incomplete, and often invalid views of scores of other people, for a total of billions of relationships. The scale of a novel is necessarily much smaller. I count roughly 136 named characters in A Place of Greater Safety, not counting crowds and generic figures like “the patriot” (above).

In real life, the action was continuous and simultaneous, all those millions acting and thinking at once. In contrast, Mantel writes almost entirely in set-pieces. Each scene takes place at a geographical location and involves between one and a dozen named people. Each scene is set after the previous one in chronological order, but usually after a gap of hours, days, or even months. So, whereas history flowed smoothly and simultaneously, the novel jumps from set-piece to set-piece.

Reality has no narrator. Mantel narrates in a supple, subtle, deliberate style. For instance, consider this sentence: “He put his hand on Citizen Desmoulin’s arm, ‘Camille, history is fiction.’” Since Robespierre was a boyhood friend of Demoulin’s, he never addresses him as “Citizen Desmoulin.” The title “Citizen” enters the narration here because “the patriot” has been addressing strangers that way, and Robespierre sees his friend from the patriot’s perspective at that moment. But he begins is sentence with the name “Camille …,” and within three words, we are back to a more intimate view. The title “Citizen” evokes layers of irony as we read Mantel’s narration of Robespierre’s thoughts in reaction to a nameless patriot who is using terminology invented by men like Robespierre.

As Mantel writes in the afterword, “I am very conscious that a novel is a cooperative effort, a joint venture between writer and reader. I purvey my own version of events, but facts change according to your viewpoint. Of course, my characters did not have the blessing of hindsight; they lived from day to day, as best they could.” To imagine their experience sympathetically (when the characters in question include Danton, Demoulins, and Robespierre) is a great achievement of sympathy. But the book is not devoid of judgment, on the false theory that “tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.” Like Cromwell at the end of Bring up the Bodies, Robespierre in the last chapter of A Place of Greater Safety is a chilling figure, all the more frightening because Mantel has made him so human until then.

The post history and fiction in Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety appeared first on Peter Levine.

While we have avoided an unprecedented federal default for the time being, the debt ceiling matter hasn’t been resolved. We could be right at the brink again in just a matter of months. Pundits and politicians from both parties lean on recent polls to demonstrate why their perspective is the one that the American public supports. But have a majority of Americans actually made up their minds about the debt ceiling? This is an issue where a single survey finding taken at face value or in isolation can be misleading.

What polling really reveals is that members of the public are still wrestling with the debt ceiling dilemma. Public opinion on this issue is still "mushy" – a term used by Public Agenda’s founder Daniel Yankelovich to describe poll findings that aren’t stable because people are still absorbing new information and ideas, grappling with trade-offs and unsure what they really think. When opinions are still mushy, survey results can fluctuate dramatically. Once people become more realistic and settled in their views, public opinion tends to be remarkably steady over time.

Here are some chief indicators of mushiness in polling results:

• People’s responses are starkly inconsistent, seeming to reflect fundamentally different priorities and values from one question to another.
• Responses shift dramatically depending on how questions are worded or even the order of questions in a survey.
• Many respondents admit they’re not sure or don’t know – although some polls make uncertainty hard for respondents to admit, thereby masking the mushiness factor.

For example, few Americans are buying the "default doesn’t matter" line of thinking, according to an AP/Gfk poll in October. Six in 10 Americans said it is "extremely" or "very" likely that the U.S. would face a major economic crisis if the debt ceiling isn’t raised; just 8 percent said a major economic crisis was "not too likely" or "not at all likely." Yet just a question later, only 3 in 10 said they strongly or even somewhat supported raising the debt ceiling. A surprising 46 percent said they neither supported nor opposed raising it. That’s hardly what you’d expect people to say if so many of them were really envisioning a major economic meltdown. As the AP itself put it, "people seem conflicted or confused."

We see similar uncertainty in an October poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal. Overall, their results suggest that Americans have been pretty evenly split on which causes them more concern: "That Congress will not raise the debt ceiling and the federal government will not pay its bills, such as defaulting on its loans and not making payments to Social Security recipients and government workers" (37 percent), or "That Congress will raise the debt ceiling and that federal spending will increase and the government will go further into debt as a result" (41 percent). At the same time, almost 1 in 5 Americans (19 percent) said they "do not know enough about this to have an opinion at this time." Percentages of people willing to admit that they don’t know the answer to a poll question are usually in the single digits. The high percentage of "don’t knows" in this poll is even more striking given that there has been plenty of news coverage on the pros and cons of raising or not raising the debt ceiling.

But there is one area where the public seems much more certain and resolved: they are ready for compromise. In a CBS poll, a full 77 percent of Americans say that they would prefer having leaders reach an agreement that they themselves didn’t fully support versus 17 percent who would prefer "not reaching an agreement on the debt ceiling and having the US go into default on its debts."

Or put another way, 77 percent of people endorse coming to an agreement even if they personally might see the terms of the deal as less-than-optimal. That’s an impressive majority in support of compromise. Why do we say that this is a more solid, less mushy result than the other results we discuss? For one thing, the "don’t know" responses are only 9 percent. For another, the question isn’t focused on technical economic matters that average citizens might not fully understand, but rather addresses making decisions and forging progress – fundamental principles that everyone can understand.

This result is also consistent with other recent public opinion polling on the same topic even though the wording was slightly different. Support for compromise has actually increased since a January 2013 CBS News poll, which found that 73 percent of Americans would prefer a debt ceiling agreement that they didn’t fully support rather than seeing the US stop paying its bills. Only 17 percent who would prefer the government to stop paying its debt obligations.

The call for compromise also echoes what we heard in last year’s National Issues Forums, where citizens gathered to consider different options for tackling the debt. Most said they didn’t expect the country to adopt solutions that matched their own preferences and opinions in every respect. Most seemed to assume that they would have to live with some compromises they personally didn’t like. As one woman put it "everyone must see that every group is making a sacrifice ... Everyone must be seen to be giving up something."

In our work, we’ve seen Americans call for compromise time and time again to make headway on tough issues, especially the tough issues surrounding the debt. For most, the question isn’t whether they and their neighbors are willing to compromise and make concessions for the good of the country and the next generation. It’s whether their elected leaders in Washington are willing to do the same.

Interested in getting a deeper perspective on the polls and what Americans are really thinking about the important issues of the day? Public Agenda is joining with the National Issues Forums and the Kettering Foundation to provide monthly insight through our new Beyond the Polls blog. We’re launching in November. Look for it on On the Agenda and on our partners’ web sites, and sign up to receive updates when we post a new column.