“The revolution is a complex whole, like life itself, with the inspiring and the unacceptable, with hope and fear, violence and fraternity.” — Francois Mitterrand A big azure-and-gilt hot-air balloon, a reproduction of an 18th century model, wafted skyward in a “salute to liberty” as thousands of spectators gathered in the Tuileries Gardens last January for the official launch of the bicentennial of the French Revolution. The Republican Guard played a fanfare. An actor solemnly read the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Five days later, in a theater across town, a dozen masked youths with shaved heads invaded a concert of revolution-era songs. Crying “Long live the King!” the royalist punks tossed tear-gas canisters and knocked mezzo-soprano Helene Delavault to the floor. “At first we thought it was part of the spectacle,” said Jean-Noel Jeanneney, president of the government’s Bicentennial Mission. It wasn’t. The singer was hospitalized, and President Mitterrand led the list of notables expressing outrage. It was an appropriate start — first uplift, then excess. Just like the original revolution. Reconciliation is the official theme of the 200th anniversary of modern France’s cataclysmic birth, but nearly four months into the celebration the French seem as much cleaved as healed by the occasion. For if the revolution sprang from the idealism of the Enlightenment, promising liberty and equality, it soon deteriorated into a bloodbath that led to a dictatorship. Ever since, lurching wildly through two empires, two royal restorations and five republics, democratic France has tried to bridge the contradictions posed by its brutal beginning. Even today, when the left-right dialectic of French politics has softened under a socialist government leaning toward the center, the bicentennial has abraded old sores. The revolution is fixed in the collective psyche of the nation. Ask any Frenchman to free-associate: he automatically recites, “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.” Then comes a torrent of violent images. Heads on pikes. Hungry mobs storming Versailles. Women knitting and jeering in front of the scaffold. Marat murdered in his bath. The zealous Saint-Just railing, “There is no liberty for the enemies of liberty!” And the battalions of Marseilles singing the nation’s new anthem: “May the blood of the impure soak our fields.” For the Mitterrand government, the bicentennial is a political opportunity and a ticklish responsibility. On July 14, the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, the leaders of the seven industrialized nations — France, the U.S., Canada, Japan, Britain, West Germany and Italy — will assemble in Paris for a summit. What kind of image will France present? On the surface, at least, that of a united nation celebrating its glorious past with the hoopla of a spectacular Bastille Night parade and sound-and-light show down the Champs Elysees. Already, merchants are hawking underwear decorated with little guillotines. French television is reveling in soap-opera love affairs between 18th century aristocrats and commoners. Villages across France are dressing up their summer festivals in blue, white and red,
