Pierre Michon, _Les Onze_

 A UNIQUE AND for me powerful novel, although it took me a good while to catch on to what was happening. It's a historical novel, I suppose we would say, but on new and surprising lines, like Alvaro Enrique's Sudden Death or Laurent Binet's HHhH, both of which it predates.

It reads like an unusually literary work of art history. Les Onze ("The Eleven") is, we learn, a painting of the Comité de salut public (Committee of Public Safety) during their brief but historically crucial tenure as chief authority of the revolutionary French Republic, a period often known as the Reign of Terror. The painting is the work of François-Élie Corentin, the "Tiepolo of the Terror," and now hangs in a room all by itself in the Louvre. The first part of the book is devoted in large part to Corentin's biography and to accounts of the painting's current placement, surrounded by plaques of background information, as well as some details about the members of the Committee, the best-remembered being Maximilien Robespierre.

As I read, I would occasionally Google Corentin, hoping to get an image of Les Onze or of his other paintings or just some supplementary information about him, and kept getting no results other than the novel Les Onze itself. My frustration had no source but my own dim-wittedness, for it turned out, as I should have seen, that Corentin and his painting are entirely Michon's invention. Michon's imagined biographical details about Corentin, his description of the painting, even his description of the painting's museum setting, were so persuasive that I took them as real.

So, we have a historical novel about the French Revolution, but not at all engineered in the way historical fiction typically is. Nonetheless, short (132 pages) and peculiar though it is, it gives us a more sharply focused idea of what the revolution was about than the much longer, much more populated novels about it do (e.g., those of Dickens, Hugo, Balzac, Trollope, and their many 20th century successors). For Michon, the revolution is about a migration of authority and power from the sacred to the secular. He captures this in describing the scene of the painting's commission, for instance, but also in describing the (mainly frustrated) literary careers of the members of the committee and the way arts and letters, in some respects, moved into the place in the culture that religion had occupied.

Robespierre, I gather, came up in the recent French presidential election, since the leading left-wing candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, sometimes cited Robespierre with approval, especially for his redistributivist principles, which brought outcries from those who associate him mainly with the guillotine. But Michon's novel seems less about political particulars than about a watershed moment, a tectonic shift in our basic social assumptions. 

Anatole France's Les Dieux Ont Soif has long been my very favorite novel about the French Revolution, but now I would say it's Les Onze.