Revolution is a staircase. In February 1848, the poet Lamartine found himself in charge of a Paris revolution, from an upper floor in the Hôtel de Ville. He identified on the staircase something as specific as a tornado: a roaring double helix formed of those fighting their way upwards and those pressing downwards. It appears whenever a society mutinies and decides to make a new world. I first saw it in the Sorbonne in May 1968, clinging to a landing-wall to avoid being sucked into the deafening vortex, the up-torrent waving despatches from the front line and the barricades, the downrush battling towards the street with rolls of posters and strung bundles of fresh leaflets. Since then, even in the little history I have seen, there has been the staircase of Solidarity's first Warsaw strike headquarters in 1980, or of the White House parliament during the 1991 Moscow putsch.

LRB 6 January 2005 | PDF Download