Book Review - "Dancing to the Precipice"

"Dancing to the Precipice: The Life of Lucie de la Tour du Pin, Eyewitness to an Era" by Caroline Moorehead

My education had a big hole in it....well, many holes. One was that I had no idea what the French Revolution was all about and what happened.  I found “Dancing to the Precipice” recommended on a book list and decided to read it. 

From Publishers Weekly:  “Educated to wait on Marie Antoinette, the marquise Lucie de la Tour du Pin (1770-1853) instead precariously survived a devastating revolution, an emperor, two restorations and a republic. Drawing on Lucie's memoirs and those of her contemporaries, Moorehead (Gellhorn) uses Lucie's descriptions of both personal events and the ever-changing French political atmosphere to portray the nobility's awkward shifts with each new event and the impact they have on Lucie and her diplomat husband, Fréédric. A woman with both court-honed aristocratic manners and rough farm skills (earned in the Revolution's wake during her rural New York exile), Lucie benefited from passing platonic relationships with Napoleon and Wellington, Talleyrand, and countless salon personalities. Lucie's terror during the anarchy of the Revolution remains palpable in her memoirs centuries later. Moorehead obviously admires Lucie, but she gives a convincing and entertaining portrait of an intelligent, shrewd, unpretentious woman and the turbulent times she lived through and testified to in her memoirs.”

Having known nothing about the French Revolution, I have to say, I was shocked by the brutality and the senselessness of much of it. The contrast between the American Revolution and French Revolution is quite striking. Reading the book also gave me some insight into the French people themselves.  The fashion...during the French revolution many of their fashions where political statements.  It was also interesting to see how most of them threw off all religion and embraced the new philosophies of the time.

I found the book fascinating overall.  It was often difficult to keep the names straight and remember who was who.  I felt the author painted Lucie as a woman without fault which  I found annoying at times.  But Lucie was an extraordinary woman who lived through some extremely difficult times.

Now I think I should try to tackle "Reflections on the Revolution in France" by Edmund Burke. Hmmm?  We'll see.

A few quotes from the book:
"'Amid all these pleasures,' [Lucie] wrote, 'we were laughing and dancing our way to the precipice.'"


"For the philosophers of the Enlightenment and their friends, the salons were the one place where ideas of this kind could be aired in safety, where no questions were deemed too sensitive to debate, no thoughts too perilous to think.  Many severed their links with their religious upbringings."


"Even now, with the revolution turning upside down all ideas about society, the nuances of 18th-century fidelity hung on.  To show such evident love for one's husband was unusual, even a little absurd; but among her contemporaries Lucie was unusual, sometimes disconcertingly so."


"Over the next two years, the securalisation of the Church would go further than anyone had imagined, with churches demolished or turned into warehouses, church bells and plate melted down, religious orders made destitute, and priests turned into public servants.:


"As [Alexander] Hamilton observed, it was hard to go on supporting a revolution that had plainly substituted 'to the mild and beneficent religion of the Gospel a gloomy, persecuting and desolating atheism'."


"The revolution, argued the emigre journalists, had turned out to be synonymous not with liberty but with destruction."