“Documentary Evidence”: Archival Agency in Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety

Abstract

We first encounter Georges Danton – one of the three main characters in Hilary Mantel’s 1992 novel A Place of Greater Safety – as a young boy, shortly after he has been gored by a bull. On the one hand this can be read as a straightforward act of characterization: Danton’s injurious childhood becomes formative for his revolutionary future. Yet, the description of Danton’s childhood injury is also crucial in relating the fictional character in Mantel’s novel to the historical character upon which he is based, not least because the only extant portrait of Danton shows a man with a heavily scarred face (Charpentier). The rooting of a fictional narrative within historical detail is a central concern for Mantel. Her fifth novel, like many of her other works, is a historical novel, this one set during the French Revolution. It traces the lives of three revolutionary protagonists – Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre – from childhood to the execution of Danton and Desmoulins in 1794. A Place of Greater Safety is written in explicit relation to archival traces. As Mantel herself explains in a short author’s note that precedes the text, much of her historical research found its way into the finished novel in its entirety: “Where I can,” she writes, “I have used [the characters’] real words – from recorded speeches or preserved writings – and woven them into my own dialogue” (xi). Yet archives do not simply figure in the novel as the source-material for Mantel’s fiction. Indeed, midway through the novel, while attending the salon of Madame Roland, the scar by which Danton was first introduced starts to speak to the host: “Yes, take a good look, his face said; you have never in your safe little life seen a man like me” (425). Here, Danton’s scar not only carries a record of the historical past, but actively structures Madame Roland’s experience of the present. It is the manner in which the archive not only records but actively produces history that I will explore in this essay.