Early in Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s 2009 Booker Prize-winning novel of Tudor England, a young Thomas Cromwell is made to witness the gleeful burning of an accused heretic. A mother figure in the crowd brings the boy forward for a good view. “You get a pardon for your sins just for watching it, she said. Any that bring faggots for the burning, they get forty days’ release from Purgatory.”
More than two hundred years later, in revolutionary France, little has changed except for the method of killing and the identities of the victims. “Public executions had always been an everyday occurrence in Paris,” Comtesse Alix de Morainville tells us in To Crown with Liberty, Karen Ullo’s epic novel of France and Spanish colonial Louisiana.
Alix, an attendant of Queen Marie Antoinette in the days of the ancien régime, prefers to avoid the Place de Grève because “[t]here, in the name of the law, our fellow Frenchmen had been burned and ripped apart before more modern, enlightened minds called for common folk to be hanged while the nobility were beheaded by axe.” But by 1792, Alix and her noble family can no longer evade the new wave of political and religious violence: “on the day my father was arrested, the Revolution arrived to baptize the flagstones of Place de Grève with a new, more humane death: the guillotine.” Whenever Alix is frightened, she repeats a mantra to herself: do not watch. And yet her very survival makes her a witness.
The story alternates between two timelines, one set in Europe and one in America. We first meet Alix in Louisiana, a few years after her escape from the Reign of Terror. By the spring of 1795, la comtesse is in considerably reduced circumstances: she is now the wife of a gardener from her family’s former estate, and she’ll soon be fashioning her own “swamp hat” for a voyage by flatboat through the bayou.
But Alix is haunted by an almost debilitating grief and guilt. In an extraordinary moment from the opening pages, she and her husband Joseph Carpentier visit the market in New Orleans to sell a piece of damaged Alençon lace, just as a slaver’s galleon discharges its suffering passengers. A blade flashes, and in an inrush of traumatic memory, Alix associates the captives’ trip to the auction block with her own people’s terrifying journey to the guillotine. To compare the plight of condemned European aristocrats to that of African slaves is remarkably bold—and entirely apt. Such empathic moments arise when a writer speaks plainly and in a spirit of charity: as members of Christ’s mystical body, we all partake in one another’s suffering. The institution of slavery in America disturbs Alix intensely. There are no slaves in France, and when a fictionalized Thomas Jefferson brings the young Sally Hemings to Paris, the family pretends to the Jacobins that she is not a slave but a maid.
Alix de Morainville Carpentier’s unique brand of Christian empathy grounds the whole book. She spends her childhood in the Norman countryside in the home of her nurse while her parents minister to the royal family in Versailles. This upbringing, along with her marriage to a commoner, allows her to stand at the intersection of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, the old world and the new. Alix’s journey via the Atchafalaya River to Attakapas becomes a microcosm of fledgling America. When Mario Carlo, the owner of the flatboat, presents as his wife a black woman named Celeste, Alix wonders, aghast, if the children of this unlawful union have even been baptized. An unlettered Irish family and a wealthy French planter with his two daughters round out the party. But while Monsieur Bossier quickly recognizes in Alix a woman of his own class, he discomfits her by insisting she dine by his side while Celeste is made to serve. The trip through the bayou is fraught with adventures and dangers, and every passenger, of high birth or low, must contribute to their survival. And a painful reckoning awaits Alix at their destination: her dear friend Madelaine, whom she has known since her school days in the Ursuline convent, lives here in Louisiana with her husband Louis. Will Madelaine blame Alix for saving herself when all of her family has perished? Will she disdain her for marrying someone outside her own class?
A deep vein of suffering winds through the novel. Alix, though beautiful, is marked by a physical deformity, and while she longs for a child, she experiences years of infertility. Her beloved first husband, Comte de Morainville, is murdered despite his attempts to aid liberty’s cause. Sometimes, Alix feels as though Paris, “that Gorgon city,” has turned her to stone—and in moments of trauma, she struggles with panic attacks. Alix channels her suffering into a ministry of music, having played the harp for the queen in the agony of the young Dauphin’s final illness.
And in the perilous days before her escape from Paris, she is sustained by a group of courageous Sulpician priests who are blackballed for refusing to take the oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The novel is dedicated to the Holy September Martyrs—but more on that in a moment.
Meanwhile, Bishop Talleyrand, who helped orchestrate the state takeover of Church property, says Mass in the Champs du Mars on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. As he elevates the host, Alex reflects that “there, on the altar erected in a field named for a pagan god, held in the hands of a bishop who had betrayed Him as surely as Judas, broken for us just as He had been on the cross, the Lamb of God reigned: above the dueling thrones of King and Assembly, above the gaudy pageantry of government, above my impotence and barrenness, above my husband’s brave futility, above the violence and the sins of all the wretched millions of the earth: He was there.”
And while Alix is deprived of the Mass on her journey through the bayou, Christ is there, too. In Attakapas, she meets a native doctor who had once hoped to join the Society of Jesus. The priests who succeeded the Jesuits in the region have scorned his vocation, but he has a crucifix on the wall that the Jesuits made with a crown of thorns composed of eagle feathers. What appears at first to be a pagan symbol proves an image of the universal Church. Alix later reflects on her unlikely journey from France to this new republic, an ocean away. “Just as the reign of blood in France had touched the shores of Louisiana,” she says, “so too could our little drop of hope send its ripples beyond our two souls.”
Like Hilary Mantel—or like Maggie O’Farrell, whose 2020 novel Hamnet peers into the family tragedy behind Shakespeare’s greatest play—Ullo beautifully immerses the reader in a period of great political and spiritual upheaval. While Mantel adopts Thomas Cromwell’s jaundiced political eye, Ullo gives us a woman’s perspective unclouded by resentment at her state in life, which is always in flux. But Ullo avoids deifying the feminine genius—unlike O’Farrell, in whose undoubtedly excellent book Shakespeare’s wife becomes almost fey, plying her herbs and attempting to conjure her dead.
Too often, the heroines of popular historical fiction turn out to be moderns who are transplanted into the past only to advertise their right thinking and shame their supposed contemporaries. But in To Crown with Liberty, we have a more natural order among men and women created by God. Whether Alix is speaking with Thomas Jefferson or visiting the gardener’s cottage in Normandy, she brings considerable wit, intelligence, and empathy to bear—even as she admits her frequent temptations and sins. In Alix, Ullo gives us a clear-thinking mind paired with a luminous faith.
At the moment of crisis, Alix stands terrified in the cloister of St. Joseph des Carmes as the September martyrs of St. Sulpice are called one by one to swear allegiance to the state or die by the sword. But when she begs her old friend Father Pontus not to leave her, he says, “‘[i]t is the gate of paradise, madame. I shall not turn away. When you come, I will be waiting.’”
This moved me to tears. Perhaps the literary antecedent I’m thinking of here is not Hamnet or even Wolf Hall, but A Tale of Two Cities.
To Crown with Liberty
by Karen Ullo
Chrism Press, 2024
Paperback, 322 pages
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Crown of Liberty speaks to the price paid, the crown of thorns when the remnants of Christendom was abandoned. France’s revolution was the model for others, except for the American which was really a war of independence. The Christian based structure of American life was preserved, whereas France, Russia were true revolutions that changed the social order.
Karen Ullo as depicted by Ms Bauer captures [putatively by inference] the distinct difference in the French revolution from the Russian. Religion. Christianity in particular. Abolished by Marxist ideology Russia, tolerated with harsh conditions during the French [Robespierre admirer of Rousseau’s absolute individualistic freedom sans natural law turned to deadly response when faced with opposition]. Nevertheless what both revolutions have in common is the refusal of faith in Christ to wither and die. Whereas when both anti Christian governments collapsed Christianity returned, not to total recovery, rather to a more tolerated condition.
The thorns of suffering and loss, now felt especially in secularist America and France, to a lesser degree during a resurgence of the former, though limited prominence in Putin’s vision of an imperial Russia – the outcome of abandoning Christendom. When regents were assumed appointees of the divinity and defenders of the faith. When pope had a unique suzerainty in the government of nations. Thomas Aquinas considered monarchy the best form of government, likely due to the definiteness of royal command and the revealed moral order. What we experience today is a Church within a secularized culture and government itself drawn into secularism. Virtually identical to the experience of Ms Ullo’s poignant mention of a secularist, revolutionary Bishop Talleyrand raising the host, to the secularized Roman pontiff raising the host. Although the present pope for whatever reasons no longer seems to bother.
When speaking of the Crown of Liberty being one of thorns in a contemporary context please consider the life, teachings, murder and martyrdom of Blessed Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko. If Lech Walesa was the war cry of Solidarity, Blessed Father Jerzy was its heart.
If you liked this one, I highly recommend you read “Attercop Hall” by Heather Hibl. It likewise features a young female protagonist but avoids the pretentious “feminine genius” while telling a really gripping historical period story about the Bayeaux Tapestry.