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 i MET STEVEN KAPLAN, THE GOLDWIN
Smith professor of European history,
when I was a freshman, in the winter of
1973. I had espied his History of the
French Revolution in the spring catalog, but
rather than simply register for the course I
had the dubious notion of soliciting a personal
audience with him first. Even then, he
had a rising forehead and that beakish nose
that seemed ready to jab at anyone so foolish
as to defy him. I must have sauntered into his
office, bedecked in equal parts in denim and
naiveté, and casually inquired whether his
class was any good.
He stared for a moment, no doubt wondering
if some pestilence fatal to sound judgment had overcome
the admissions department. Gathering himself, he replied, "I give
the best lectures in the University."
He defended his case in the very first class, introducing us to
the political and social cross-currents in France that in 1789 were
ominously rising against their established contours--its sulking
nobles, its hungry peasants, its impatient bourgeoisie, and, most
dangerous of all, its intelligentsia besotted with the romantic possibilities
of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution.
The finale to his peroration remains implanted in my memory.
There was, he went on, a disturbance at the Bastille--a Paris
prison whose importance historians have overrated. Some fortyfive
minutes into the lecture, we were given to understand that the
frustrations of the royal subjects, so long suppressed, were such
that even a mild insurrection could prove a tinderbox. Professor
Kaplan lectured then, as always, without notes.His gaze was steady,
but his pace slowed as he related how a courier broke the news to
the King, happily ignorant of any trouble.
"Is it a riot?" asked the uncomprehending Louis.
"No, sire," replied his urgent courier. "It is a revolution."
And at that the professor left the hall. I attended every class.
Memories of my teacher, though they had never left me,
returned with an intensity this past summer, when I toured
Provence and Paris with my wife and discovered that our route
was peopled--in its monuments, its named boulevards, its museums--
from Professor Kaplan's classes. I knew better than to look
for a street named Robespierre--"not one, in all of France," his
voice still echoed--but what about my professor had preserved
the echo with such clarity?
In 1973, when Watergate provided a suitably political backdrop to our
syllabus, Kaplan was only a thirdyear
professor, a trifle precocious, and not so
much older than his students. The campus
still clung to certain illusions of the Sixties,
wherein it was the fashion for some of the
younger faculty to affect a kinship with
undergraduates. However, no such Jacobin
notion tainted Professor Kaplan. In matters
academic, the hierarchical distinction was
clear: he was my superior. In class, he regarded
my contributions with a mocking curiosity, as
if my journalistic brashness had doomed me
in his eyes as a less-than-serious scholar.
After college I read of his exploits in
France, where he adopted part-time residence, teaching and
becoming mildly famous as a connoisseur of traditional baking.
Four years ago, my eldest son enrolled at Cornell and, naturally,
in the History of the French Revolution course. I mused about
dropping in on my old professor, but let the moment pass.
When I think of Professor Kaplan now, in his thirty-seventh
year at Cornell, it is as an exemplar of the history that whetted my
youthful appetite--vivid and sweeping and yet particularized in
its detail. Not only, as he intoned, was France's present inseparable
from its past but, as I came to believe, all history is inseparable
and interconnected. As a writer, even of high finance, I craved
to affix events to a historical narrative whose roots, in their murky
and indirect way, might be no less remote than the Bastille.
It was in Professor Kaplan's seminar on demography that I
was introduced to the notion that history might consist of broad
popular currents--of famines, emigrations, and mortalities as
much as of generals and kings. He has been parodied as proposing
that the French Revolution was merely an agricultural accident--
that it was caused by a shortage of bread--but he did not
lose sight of the fact that every loaf has a baker. His history had
humanity, but it had humans, too. For certain, his Revolution had
a shining star. It was not King Louis nor the spouse who followed
him to the guillotine; it was not Marat nor Robespierre. It was
Professor Kaplan himself.
--Roger Lowenstein '76
ROGER LOWENSTEIN is a regular columnist for SmartMoney
Magazine, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine,
and the author of Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble
and Its Undoing. |
