We were there when –
A phrase to start a story. A history, a reminiscence. A choice, often. A survival, by definition.
You were there when. When there were not enough hours in the day and not enough ink in the entire Convention to rush the grain to Paris; and people were hungry, and people were scared, in the middle of a war, two fronts, three fronts, you were there when – and what did you do?
I fed the people, you could say. I was there to feed the people.
You were there in that mad, exhausted spring when hope itself seemed to have faded beyond the horizon, when accusations were falling like apple blossoms and treacheries sprouting like leaves, when you were asked to sign a decree,
I am here to feed the people, and not to kill revolutionaries, you said.
(You will not sign another decree either, in Thermidor; you will choose silence again; after all, the people were still one missed grain delivery away from starvation. We will never know if that was the explanation you gave yourself; we will never know if you wished you’d have chosen differently, condemned yourself, spared yourself from surviving.)
We will wonder if you smiled when you heard the slogan, years later, hungry, empty, broken years later; bread and the Constitution, if you thought it as something that had been yours, as something you’d been trying to give the people for years. You were there when –
and once again, you survived, a veteran of that forgotten army that had been wielding pens, not swords, watching the dawn rise outside their windows, over the endless stacks of orders and accounts, laws and reforms, trying to keep your republic together until a republic was no more.
You did not live to see the next one, and that perhaps was the greatest tragedy of all. But such is the cost of civil service; forging what future we may, one line and one sleepless night and one inevitable defeat at a time; there is little honor and remembrance in it; but the people can only hope to build a better republic if they are alive, if they had been fed, if they have someone else’s legacy to follow, and we are here now, because you were there then.
Happy birthday, Lindet.
