You Say You Want a Revolution?: Jennifer Donnelly's ambitious new novel plumbs the depths of the human heart
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Revolution is about two troubled teens, separated by two centuries. Andi, a talented modern-day musician, is deeply depressed because she feels responsible for her younger brother's death. And Alex, an aspiring actress during the French Revolution, is desperate to save Louis XVI's doomed son. I heard you got the idea for the novel from a New York Times article that you read about 10 years ago.
The title of the article was "Geneticist's Latest Probe: The Heart of the Dauphin." It told how a small heart had just been DNA tested and had been found to be the heart of the young son of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. I knew that during the French Revolution the king and queen were imprisoned and ultimately guillotined. But what I didn't know was that two of their children survived them in prison—their older daughter, Marie-Thérèse, who, I believe, was 14 at the time, and their young son, Louis-Charles, who was eight. He was taken away from his mother to be reeducated by the revolutionaries.
What happened to him?
He was treated very, very badly. He was a small child ripped away from his mother, brutalized and basically abused. After his parents were killed, Robespierre and the leaders of the revolution were very worried that someone would try to liberate this boy and rule in his name. So to prevent this, Robespierre eventually had the child walled up alive.
He was put into solitary confinement. He had no toys, no books, and very little food or warmth. Eventually, he got sick and he lost his mind, and he died at the age of 10. I was just horrified, and I wondered, how in the world did the idealism that sparked the French Revolution devolve into such cruelty?
Around the time the article appeared, your daughter, Daisy, was born. Did becoming a parent change your view of the world?
I pretty much lost the protective shell that we all have that enables us to watch something horrific—a news story about an abused child or a child who's caught in political violence—and then continue to go on with our lives. As a new parent, I thought, What kind of world is this? Why is it so brutal, and how do we raise our children in it? How do we ourselves go on living in it? I knew that if I could wrestle with this very hard and harsh story and come to grips with it, I might actually find some answers to those questions.
Things take an unexpected turn when Andi falls down a metaphoric rabbit's hole. Why'd you write such a risky scene?
That all came from the Inferno. The Divine Comedy is one of my favorite things. When Dante starts out, he doesn't know how to go on, and he's thinking of taking his own life. And then, out of nowhere, comes Virgil, the writer he most admires, and Virgil says, "Come on. We're going to go on this journey." That is just such a compelling story for me, and I used it in the book because Andi is in the same situation. She's despairing and suicidal, and her Virgil comes, who happens to be this boy she's falling in love with. And he brings her down into purgatory, quite literally and figuratively. When Dante and Virgil come out at the end, something happens for them and they once again behold the stars, they see the light—and that's the same journey that Andi's going on.
Rick Margolis is SLJ's executive editor. To read a starred review of Revolution (Delacorte), turn to page 150.
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