Where will this voyage end?

Neal Ascherson

  • Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two centuries look back on the French Revolution by E.J. Hobsbawm
    Verso, 144 pp, £24.95, May 1990, ISBN 0 86091 282 5

Historians as a tribe are suckers for anniversaries, no less than journalists. And both professions are equally unwilling to leave a nice, juicy coincidence alone, in the spirit of that pre-glasnost Pravda phrase: ‘It is no accident that ...’ These faiblesses ensure that, in our lifetimes and in those of our children, books and journals and Sunday papers will continue to gnaw and growl over the fact that a year of revolutionary upheaval in Eastern and Central Europe took place precisely 200 years after the beginning of the French Revolution. Parallels, some interesting and many frankly idiotic, will go on being drawn.

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