The Scarlet Pimpernel

by Baroness Emmuska Orczy

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in France and England in 1792; published in 1905.

SYNOPSIS

An English aristocrat risks his life to rescue members of the French upper class from being killed during the French Revolution

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

For More Information

Born in Hungary in 1865, Baroness Emmuska Orczy moved to England with her family when she was fifteen. She lived there the rest of her life. In 1905 she published her best-known work, The Scarlet Pimpernel. The novel takes place in 1792 during the French Revolution and has a number of important parallels to European life a century later.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The French Revolution

Peasants in eighteenth-century France endured severe economic and political hardships. Most lived on small farms rented from aristocratic landlords. They worked hard but remained extremely poor, for it was difficult to support a family on the meager income they earned. A peasant spent a large percentage of his annual income paying heavy taxes to the royal government, as well as rent to his noble landlord. The peasant class also owed part of each year’s harvest to the Catholic Church. The average peasant earned barely enough to meet all these obligations.

Peasants suffered personal indignities as well. They often watched helplessly as their fields were trampled by nobleman hunters or wild boars and deer under royal protection. They were powerless to change the situation because they were not represented in the royal French government.

Not every French aristocrat abused his position of power over the lower class. Some, like the Marquis de La Fayette, even believed in the need for widespread social reform. The difficult conditions that the peasants had endured for centuries, however, led to an overall feeling of intense bitterness towards the aristocracy.

On July 14, 1789, a mob of citizens of the Parisien lower classes, who held aristocrats largely responsible for their hardships, attacked the Bastille prison in Paris. The capture of this ancient symbol of aristocratic tyranny triggered the beginning of the French Revolution. In the following months, mobs attacked and burned castles across France, often torturing or murdering their wealthy inhabitants. Severe food shortages prompted an angry mob of peasant women to march to the palace of King Louis XVI at Versailles in October 1789. The women secured a promise from the king to have food supplies sent to Paris. They also forced the king to agree to move back to Paris, where they could remain in close contact with him and make sure that he kept his promise to deliver food.

Conflict between the revolutionaries and the nobility became increasingly violent. In July 1791, royal government troops killed more than fifty people who were protesting against the king. This incident became known as the Champs de Mars Massacre. The following year a mob of working-class revolutionaries initiated a bloody battle at the royal Tuileries Palace in Paris. More than 600 of the king’s guards were killed in the violent clash. Soon after, King Louis XVI was overthrown, arrested, and imprisoned. With the king in prison and many aristocrats in flight from the violence directed against them, the revolutionaries found that they wielded much greater influence in the French government.

The revolutionaries turned their new power against the remaining nobility. Laws were passed in the summer of 1792 that allowed police to search homes without warrants and to arrest anyone suspected of opposing the Revolution. Once accused, alleged traitors were often sentenced to death on very little evidence. Thousands of aristocrats were executed. At the same time, violent mobs continued to take the law into their own hands. In September 1792, throngs of people marched to five different prisons and murdered anyone they suspected of crimes against the Revolutionary cause. By the end of the five-day long “September Massacres,” about 1,400 prisoners had been slain. The majority of the victims were innocent of any anti-Revolutionary activities.

In December the trial of King Louis XVI, who by this time had been deprived of his royal title and called simply Louis Capet, began. Two months later, he was executed in Paris by means of the guillotine. This terrifying time of escalating violence against the aristocracy is chronicled in The Scarlet Pimpernel.

England and Republican France

Many English people initially applauded the efforts of the French revolutionaries to secure more power for themselves. They believed that the French protesters ultimately aimed to establish a system of government similar to that of England. Under such a system, the French king would share more power with the legislature, and a greater proportion of the nation’s people would be represented in the government. As the violence in France grew, however, the tide of English opinion began to turn. Anarchy came to be seen as the dominant characteristic of the French Revolution.

Many of the English found the execution of King Louis XVI in January 1793 particularly disturbing. Politicians and religious leaders across the country spoke out against the French king’s death. The majority of English people began to agree with the opinions of the prominent legislator Edmund Burke. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) warned that the French Revolution was a tremendous threat to traditional English and European civilization. Urging the British to take action, he advocated intervention in the Revolution to stop it from spreading to other countries. Burke feared that the lower classes everywhere might be inspired to seize the wealth and property of the upper classes. The old hierarchy of social classes, which he believed was essential to the well-being of society, seemed in danger of collapsing.

Eventually, English people of all social classes registered shock at the events taking place across the English Channel, a reaction that was captured in The Scarlet Pimpernel. Many in the lower classes feared the social chaos that the Revolution seemed to be generating in France, while members of the upper classes felt threatened by the execution of so many of their fellow aristocrats in France. In November 1792, English nobles created the first Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. (A “Leveller” referred to anyone who advocated attacking the wealthy in order to make society more equal, or level.) The group resolved to support law and order, suppress rebellious publications, and prevent the spread of revolution. By 1793 there were about 2,000 such associations in existence.

As disturbing as the events in France seemed to many people, some powerful English political leaders did not want to intervene. Prime Minister William Pitt, for example, believed that taking action against Revolutionary France would be overly expensive. He argued that England itself did not seem to be in immediate danger and had important problems of its own to handle. Given his views, the official government policy under Prime Minister Pitt toward the French Republican government remained one of neutrality. This ceased, however, on February 1, 1793, when France declared war on England as well as several other nations, in anger against these countries’ support of the French aristocracy.

THE GUILLOTINE

The guillotine is a constant source of anxiety to the central characters of The Scarlet Pimpernel. In 1792, when the story takes place, this beheading machine—which consisted of a heavy blade dropped between two grooved poles—had only recently been invented by Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin. This respected French doctor originally regarded his invention as a humane and merciful alternative to other, more torturous means of execution common at the time, such as being burned alive or drawn and quartered. His method of swift mechanical decapitation was introduced in France in 1789 and adopted as France’s main means of execution in early 1792. A thief and forger named Nicholas Pelletier became its first victim on April 25, 1792. During the course of the French Revolution, thousands more people were killed by the guillotine’s blade. Although Dr. Guillotin’s invention rose to the height of its infamy during the French Revolution, it remained the means of execution in France until 1977.

King George III, whose views contrasted with Pitt’s, was pleased with this turn of events. He expected a war to “rouse such a spirit in this country that I trust will curb the insolence of those despots [the revolutionaries], and be a means of restoring some degree of order to that unprincipled country, whose aim at present is to destroy the foundations of every civilized state” (Weiner, p. 71). England viewed France’s declaration as an opportunity to put a stop to the Revolution that had appalled and threatened so many of them.

French émigrés

About 120,000 people fled France during the Revolution, more than half of them French aristocrats seeking to escape the revolutionary violence directed against them. Within two months of the peasants’ attack on the Bastille in 1789, thousands applied for a French passport. The roads became clogged with the carriages of people fleeing the country. Gradually it became difficult for anyone, particularly aristocrats, to get out of France.

The cost of obtaining a French passport rose enormously during this period. Even if a person could afford the tremendous price, applying for a passport to leave the country could be construed as the action of someone who was unhappy with France and a sign that the person might be a traitor. All passport applicants risked attracting the attention of the authorities, who arrested aristocrats on the slightest evidence.

Although a man known as “the Scarlet Pimpernel” did not actually exist, others like him did help many people escape the dangers of revolutionary France. Numerous Swiss citizens, for example, made multiple trips to France to marry French women. The women could then have themselves listed on their passports as Swiss citizens and be safely escorted across the border. This strategy was effective, although one Swiss man was finally arrested as he tried to take his eighteenth bride to Sweden. People also wore disguises to escape. A French aristocrat named Madame de Falaiseau, for example, disguised herself in a peasant’s striped skirt, a muslin kerchief, an old cap, and heavy black shoes with coarse stockings. She was then led over the border by a friendly peasant.

Many émigrés fled to England, where they were generally welcomed and treated kindly, as in The Scarlet Pimpernel. Still, most found it emotionally difficult to settle in a foreign country. The French émigré Madame de Falaiseau described her feelings upon arriving in England on January 1, 1793, in the following passage: “Separated perhaps for ever from my family, proscribed, a wanderer outlawed from my country, no longer possessing anything, far from all I knew and loved in my childhood, from my days of happiness, I saw around me nothing but distress and no hope for the future at all” (Weiner, p. 45). Many such émigrés were also worried about the safety of those they had been forced to leave behind. It seems likely that a majority of French émigrés shared the feelings of the Comtesse de Tournay in The Scarlet Pimpernel, who is described as deeply affected by “fatigue, sorrow and emotion” after her arrival in England (Orczy, Scarlet Pimpernel, p.30).

The Novel in Focus

The plot

The novel opens in September 1792, the third year of the increasingly violent French Revolution. Masses of people gather daily in Paris to watch the grisly spectacle of nobles being beheaded by the guillotine. A number of aristocrats, though, have been able to escape the threat of execution. This has happened largely through the efforts of a mysterious man known only by his signature symbol—a small, red, star-shaped flower called the Scarlet Pimpernel. The French government, angry and embarrassed at its inability to stop the Scarlet Pimpernel, has ordered all guards to be particularly cautious about letting people go through the city gates of Paris. Even so, the Scarlet Pimpernel manages to safely escort the Comtesse de Tournay and her children out of Paris. After sailing across the English Channel to Dover, England, the de Tournay family is brought to the Fisherman’s Rest Inn by a loyal associate of the Pimpernel, Sir Andrew Ffoulkes.

The Englishman Sir Percy Blakeney and his French wife Marguerite arrive at the inn soon after this. Sir Percy appears to be an amiable, though somewhat foolish, man. Marguerite, in contrast, is known as one of the most clever women in Europe. The couple is active in fashionable upper-class English social circles, and in public they appear to be very happy together. In reality, however, the marriage is troubled. Sir Percy learned early in their marriage that Marguerite had made accusations against a noble French family in Paris in front of the revolutionaries. Since that time he has become emotionally distant. Marguerite, out of pride, had never explained to him her side of the story. She had naively been deceived into the betrayal and had not realized that her actions would lead to the death of the aristocratic family. Hurt by her husband’s coldness, she tends to treat him with sarcasm and scorn.

Marguerite leaves the inn to say goodbye to her brother, Armand. She knows he is a fervent republican, and believes he is returning to France to continue working for the revolutionary cause. He does not tell his sister, however, that he is actually going back to help the Scarlet Pimpernel rescue a count, the Comte de Tournay, from France. After Armand’s departure, Marguerite meets Chauvelin, a French agent who has been sent to England to catch the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel. He asks for her help in his mission, but she refuses. Warning her that she will yet agree to his offer, he leaves for London.

That night, Chauvelin’s associates assault and steal secret papers from two of the Pimpernel’s loyal followers. This provides Chauvelin with evidence that Marguerite’s brother, Armand, is a colleague of the Scarlet Pimpernel and therefore a traitor to Republican France. Chauvelin catches up with Marguerite at a London opera and threatens to have Armand killed for his activities if Marguerite refuses to help him catch the Scarlet Pimpernel. Frightened for her brother, she reluctantly agrees. At a ball that evening, she manages to intercept a note that indicates that the Pimpernel himself will appear in an empty dining room late that night and soon after depart for France. Marguerite passes on the information to Chauvelin. At the scheduled hour, though, he finds only the foolish Sir Percy soundly asleep on a sofa.

Early the next morning, Sir Percy informs his wife that he must leave for a while on business. After his departure, she walks into his private study. She discovers several scholarly books that are not in keeping with his frivolous public personality, a few maps of France, and a gold ring embossed with a pimpernel flower. She realizes her husband is actually the famous Scarlet Pimpernel who has been bravely rescuing French aristocrats. She enlists the aid of Sir Andrew Ffoulkes and learns of her husband’s plan to rescue the Comte de Tournay and her brother Armand, whom Chauvelin was pursuing. Armed with knowledge about her husband’s intended route, she and Sir Andrew sail across the English Channel to Calais, France, to search for him.

Chauvelin and his men, who have discovered the Pimpernel’s true identity as well, are on his trail. Sir Percy and his plan seem doomed, but Marguerite courageously continues to follow him in the hopes of finding a way to save his life. Just as he is about to be captured, a daring plan is devised. He uses a clever disguise to slip through Chauvelin’s trap and fulfill his mission. At the end of the novel, Sir Percy looks upon his brave and loyal wife with new respect and admiration. Having finally settled their differences, the couple begin to rebuild a happy relationship.

Views of aristocracy and peasantry

People throughout the world have had differing interpretations of the French Revolution. Many people who have studied the events of the Revolution over the last two centuries have viewed the French aristocrats as selfish, wealthy, and oppressive villains who largely deserved their violent fate. Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, however, reflects a different vision of the Revolution and the social classes involved.

Orczy’s novel presents a highly sympathetic view of nobility. The main characters, including the Scarlet Pimpernel himself, are all aristocrats. The tremendous hardships faced by French nobles such as the de Tournay family are highlighted, along with their innocence of any specific crimes. Deep sympathy is expressed for the injustices done to them: “The daily execution of scores of royalists of good family, whose only sin was their aristocratic name, seemed to cry for vengeance to the whole of civilised Europe” (Scarlet Pimpernel, p. 20). This viewpoint, which holds that innocent French nobles are being forced to pay for their ancestors’ oppression of the people, is repeated throughout the book.

Not all French aristocrats are portrayed as ideal people in the novel, however. The narrator describes the Comtesse de Tournay as a woman possessed of the typical haughty, rigid bearing of her class. After coldly voicing her desire to never meet Marguerite because of her past denunciation of a noble family in France, the countess is described as being “encased in the plate-armour of her aristocratic prejudices… rigid and unbending...” (Scarlet Pimpernel, p. 35).

While some members of the nobility are portrayed in an unfavorable light, much sympathy is still shown for them in the story. The lower classes, on the other hand, are frequently described in extremely unflattering terms. The first sentence of the novel, for example, refers to the common people of Paris as “a surging, seething, murmuring crowd, of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate” (Scarlet Pimpernel, p. 1). The violent excesses of the lower classes are characterized as horrible and disturbing throughout the story, further evidence that Orczy’s novel is a presentation of the French Revolution from the perspective of the nobles of France.

Sources

A number of prominent historical figures in the English government are referred to in the book. Among them are Prime Minister William Pitt and Edmund Burke, who differed sharply in their views on the appropriate English response to the French Revolution.

There are also a number of parallels in The Scarlet Pimpernel to the author’s life. She was born in 1865 in Hungary to the Baron Felix Orczy and his wife, Emma. At the time, Hungary had a hierarchy of aristocrats and peasant workers that was much like the one in pre-revolutionary France. Her family moved to London in 1880, but Orczy’s childhood experiences were as a member of a noble family in a world of frustrated peasants and lower-class workers.

There was a tremendous amount of tension between the upper and lower classes in Hungary, and peasant uprisings against living and working conditions in that country actually contributed to her family’s decision to move to London. Like the characters Marguerite and the Comtesse de Tournay in her novel, then, Baroness Orczy was not a native of England.

Other similarities between Orczy’s life and the lives portrayed in The Scarlet Pimpernel are evident as well. She married Montagu Barstow in 1894, and the couple became very active in aristocratic London social circles. The central characters in Orczy’s novel—Sir Percy and his wife Marguerite—enjoy similar status in upper-class London society. Such parallels make it clear that Baroness Orczy drew on some of her own personal experiences to write her story about aristocrats and their adventures during the French Revolution.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

The rise of the working class

Throughout the nineteenth century, manufacturing industries were boosted by the Industrial Revolution. Manufacturing gradually displaced agriculture as the basis of European economies. New means of mechanical production were invented that allowed goods to be made more quickly and cheaply than ever before. Industrial business owners were thus able to make a great deal of money. For the growing number of workers in their factories, however, hours were long, factory conditions were squalid, and wages were often barely enough for survival. As was the case with the peasants in eighteenth-century France, many people lived in extreme poverty.

As the century continued, workers throughout Europe took sometimes extreme action to improve their situations. In France a movement called the Paris Commune took over Paris for two months in 1871. This rebellion was similar in some ways to the eighteenth-century French Revolution. Among the rebels were working-class people who felt that the French government was unresponsive to their needs. They demanded better wages and working conditions, and expressed a desire to create a system that was truly representative of their interests. The revolt did not turn out to be a peaceful one. Troops were sent in by the legitimate government, which had moved to Versailles. The soldiers severely beat any captured Communards, or supporters of the rebellious Paris Commune. In return, the Communards burned public buildings and assassinated the Archbishop of Paris. By the time the legitimate government had again regained control of the city, more than 20,000 people had been massacred over the course of a few days. One English reporter wrote, “Paris the beautiful is Paris the ghastly, Paris the battered, Paris the burning, Paris the blood-spattered, now” (Burchell, p. 120). The reporter could have made the same comment about Paris 100 years earlier during the French Revolution. While the Paris Commune ended after only two months, the French staged peaceful protests for better working and living conditions throughout the rest of the century.

Another violent revolution of the lower classes took place in Russia in 1905, the same year The Scarlet Pimpernel was published. That year, on January 22, about 1,000 people were killed when Czar Nicholas II’s Imperial Guard opened fire on a crowd of protesters. The uprising spread across Russia; over half a million workers went on strike, wild riots erupted, and the homes of wealthy landowners were looted and burned. This revolt subsided within a year, after the Czar agreed to extend greater political and civil liberties to everyone. By the early 1900s, working-class people across Europe possessed at least somewhat greater influence and power than they had enjoyed during previous centuries.

Nationalist movements

During the French Revolution, many revolutionaries were seized by a fierce patriotism that drove them to destroy people who were suspected of being disloyal to Republican France. In the late nineteenth century, this kind of nationalist feeling was a significant force throughout Europe. People of similar ethnic backgrounds came to feel a growing sense of solidarity, while many wars were caused by the desire to increase national power by extending territory. Germany, for example, fought against both Austria, in the Seven Weeks War, and France, in the Franco-Prussian War. Ernest Hasse, who in 1894 founded a nationalist group called the Pan-Germanic League, said, “we want territory even if it be inhabited by foreign peoples, so that we may shape their future in accordance with our needs” (Burchell, p. 106). Such statements illustrate the negative side of the nationalist movement. Just as aristocrats had been victims of the patriotic fervor of the French Revolution, there were also victims of this late nineteenth-century nationalist movement. As feelings of ethnic unity became the focus of fierce pride, many people became intolerant of those who were of different ethnic groups.

THE DREYFUS AFFAIR

One of the major events of late nineteenth-century France was the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894 a Jewish military captain named Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of espionage against France and sentenced to prison. The small amount of evidence against him consisted mainly of a document containing secret military information that he had allegedly intended to send to a German contact. A few years later, evidence turned up that seemed to prove his innocence, but the army refused to reopen the case. The case escalated into a tremendous debate that divided France. While the debate touched on many issues, the depth of French anti-Semitism revealed by the case was particularly striking. There was even an anti-Semitic journal, La Libre Parole, that established a fund for the widow of a man who had helped create the case against Dreyfus. Many of the contributors accompanied their donations with letters suggesting that Jewish people be used as test targets for new guns, or that Jews be attacked, blinded, or thrown into the sewers.

Jewish citizens were frequent victims of this kind of thinking; they were commonly seen as outsiders and blamed for taking away jobs and money from “real” citizens. While Jews had faced deep prejudice for centuries, it intensified during this time of growing nationalism. In Poland and Russia, increasingly severe persecution took place in the form of pogroms, organized massacres of Jewish people. Throughout Europe, less violent expressions of prejudice against Jews were also common during this time. In The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy drew on the longstanding anti-Semitism in Europe to devise one of the Pimpernel’s most successful disguises, that of an old Jewish man. The disguise is successful in the novel because of the hatred that many French people had for Jewish people. Chauvelin’s anti-Semitic revulsion overrides any desire he might have had to examine the disguised Percy more closely. Such extreme anti-Semitism was very powerful in the early twentieth century, the period in which Orczy wrote the book.

Reviews

Though she wrote over thirty books, Baroness Orczy is most famous for The Scarlet Pimpernel. It was generally praised for its exciting plot; a typical review, which appeared in the New York Times on October 14, 1905, describes it as “thrilling.” Orczy wrote many sequels to The Scarlet Pimpernel in recognition of its popularity. These include The Elusive Pimpernel (1908), The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1922), and The Way of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1933). All of these books take place during the French Revolution and feature many of the main characters from the original novel.