12-Week Reading Goals Updates (2023)

It's basically just the French Revolution.

Another six weeks of 2023 are gone, the crocuses are blooming, and it’s time to check in on my reading goals for this year.

2023 Reading Goals: Progress!

1. Finish Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: DONE!

2. Read Tartuffe by Molière (a play): DONE!

3. Candide by Voltaire (a satirical novella): DONE!

4. The French Revolution by Hilaire Belloc: DONE!

5. Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini: DONE!

6. Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts

7. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

8. Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: DONE!

9. An anthology of French poetry: DONE!

10. Pensées by Blaise Pascal (philosophical musings of a great mathematician)

11. Julie; or, The New Heloise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (thank you, Katie, for suggesting this title!)

12. Lafayette by Harlow Giles Unger: 75% completed

13. From Mother and Daughter: an anthology of the writings of Madeleine and Catherine des Roches

Other (Non-French) Things I Read:

The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Lady Susan by Jane Austen (the 2016 adaptation Love & Friendship is based on this epistolary novella)

A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken

The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins

Bible: 1 and 2 Chronicles, Job, Romans, a few minor epistles, and a handful of Psalms and Proverbs

Journal-Style Reflections

This could be called the month of the French Revolution. I’ve now read about the French Revolution in three forms: a novel that focuses on 1789 to 1791 (Scaramouche), a short history providing an overview of the Revolution’s philosophy and actors and its political, military, and religious consequences (Belloc), and a biography of one of its incongruous characters (Lafayette).

I’ve grown more sympathetic to the Revolution, even though it remains one of history’s best examples of what happens when liberty is pursued without law. Even pre-Reign of Terror, there were some horrifying crimes - a Paris mob cheered while Jourdan Coupe-Tete butchered a financier alive and proudly paraded his heart and his head in the city hall.

Though I object to nearly every detail of how the French Revolution was carried out, one can’t emphasize enough the deplorable system in France that was designed to benefit a fraction of the population, even manufacturing a famine to keep grain prices up.

Scaramouche:

It had been a while since I’d read a good, action-adventure book of historical fiction. The style and characters remind me a bit of the Poldark series by Winston Graham.

“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”

Isn’t that a great opening line?

Scaramouche, set in the late 1780s, follows a young, illegitimate child of the French aristocracy named André-Louis Moreau. Though he has little love for the aristocracy that raised him but treats him as an outsider, he is just as cynical about any attempts to reform it. He would gladly remain on the fringes until his dear friend is murdered, sending him impetuously into the heart of the burgeoning French Revolution.

Forced into hiding, André-Louis joins a troupe of improvisational actors in the Commedia dell' Arte tradition, which has some very famous character types you’ve probably heard of like Harlequin, Pantaloon, Columbine, and of course, Scaramouche (which probably sounds familiar to most of us, let’s be honest, because of the Bohemian Rhapsody). André-Louis takes the part of Scaramouche, the scheming rogue.

Eventually, André-Louis is drawn back into the events of the Revolution itself and is forced to choose between exacting his revenge and pursuing justice.

The novel is not very sympathetic to the French Revolution, especially as it spirals into chaos at the arrest of the royal family, but it avoids the other ditch of fawning over the aristocracy, like the novel The Scarlet Pimpernel. It's sympathetic to the nobility as human beings, not as a social class. Overall, this was a fun, witty novel.

Hilaire Belloc’s The French Revolution:

Hilaire Belloc. What can I say? Known equally well for his humorous children’s poetry as for his very decided and sometimes polemical economic and political views, he will never bore you.

Belloc is a great man for precisely defining an issue. For example, he calls King Louis XVI inept rather than weak, for Louis possessed both conviction and courage, as witnessed most strongly in his behavior before his death. Yet he was not at all suited to being king, especially in such a time.

An even more informative definition comes in the word dogma, which he defines as “a transcendent doctrine.”

The danger for the French Revolution arose when they confused their dogmas.

A dogma is not negotiable. You either believe it or not. It is more often a foundational presupposition than a logical conclusion, and Belloc is skeptical how well one can persuade someone to accept a dogma they don’t already believe.

One such dogma is belief about the existence of God - though many arguments exist defending the positions of the theist (God exists), the atheist (God does not exist), and the agnostic (there is no satisfactory evidence proving or disproving the existence of God), these are more often treated as the foundational tenet of a person’s life, not something open to repeated inquiry. It’s a dogma, a transcendent doctrine, and it’s appropriate to be “dogmatic” about a central, governing principle or idea.

The danger lies in treating as dogmas doctrines which are actually non-essential, what Belloc calls the “machinery” of the principle, which “have in reality nothing to do with the…theory itself,” and which “would not, were they abstracted, affect its essence.”

In his example, the doctrine of the equality of man is the essential, non-negotiable doctrine of the Revolution, but the system devised - representation - was not as essential. The Revolutionaries were too dogmatic about representative government being the only way to preserver man’s equality. The problem was that representative government was largely untried and difficult to institute anew amidst all of France’s upheaval. Ironically, the dictator Napoleon better represented the will of the people than their earlier attempts at democracy had. (I don’t think Belloc is pro-dictator, but I’m not entirely sure. The man was certainly not afraid to be unconventional in his opinions.)

There were many other things I learned that I hadn’t known - that many Revolutionaries, at least at first, did not mean to depose the king, merely to limit his power greatly. His death might not have been inevitable, and Belloc posits that if Louis had retreated to a country castle and summoned the military early on, he might have escaped with his life.

I also learned that the reason for the Reign of Terror was a military one. With half of Europe attacking France, they needed to crack down on all dissenters and summon every able-bodied man to the army. You need a mighty big stick to do something like that, and the guillotine did its part.

Also, Belloc strongly dislikes the Marquis de Lafayette, whom he views as incompetent, ambitious, and frankly, a little too American. (C’est la vie, n' est-ce pas?)

This made me want to learn more about America’s favorite fighting Frenchman, so I put off reading my biography of Napoleon and picked up Harlow Giles Unger’s book. I’m not done with that yet, so I’ll save my opinions for the next goals update.

Next Steps

I still have six chapters left in Lafayette. After that’s done, I’ll take a month off of my larger biography and novel goals, focusing on poetry and philosophy throughout April.

Other, Non-Literary Favorites

I listened to a lot of Edith Piaf and Debussy last month, and I’ve been listening to the music of Fauré this month. He might be one of my favorites now.

My cousin gave me an amazing blend of tea in an even more amazing tin. Murder on the Orient Express by Harney & Sons. In addition to being a perfect smoky oolong blend with jasmine and bergamot, it has drawn me back into an early afternoon tea time. Every day, sometime between 12 and 2, I brew a nice, big mug and tell myself that I am not to get up until I have sipped the entire thing. Now, I have two small children, so I’m actually getting up a lot between sips, but the mug serves as a reminder to sit back down. For twelve minutes or so, nothing else has to get done.