The Wolves of the Revolution

I finished The Werewolf of Paris yesterday. It was pretty good although, despite what I said in my review of the first half of the book, the influences seemed less to be Jekyll and Hyde and Crime and Punishment. Author Guy Endore was clearly an admirer of Victor Hugo as the second half of Werewolf of Paris feels very much like The Hunchback of Notre Dame with a hefty dose of Les Miserables.

Guy Endore was born Samuel Goldstein and I wonder if he took the name Endore in order to sound more French. His novel covers the tumultuous period following the reign in Napoleon in France, Bertrand, the werewolf, a child of a priest's rape of a thirteen year old servant, grows to manhood in a France increasingly dominated by political radicalism, leading to the brief rule of the Commune in 1871. Endore isn't shy about pointing out for the reader the thematic connexion he sees between the left-wing radicals and werewolves:

Bertrand, it now seemed to Aymar, was but a mild case. What was a werewolf who had killed a couple of prostitutes, who had dug up a few corpses, compared with these bands of tigers slashing at each other with daily increasing ferocity! "And there'll be worse," he said, and again he had that marvelous rising of the heart. Instead of thousands, future ages will kill millions. It will go on, the figures will rise and the process will accelerate! Hurrah for the race of werewolves!

He spends a lot of time describing the Communards' desecration of churches and monasteries as well as the ridiculous, and hideous, show trials and courts martial. But after all that, he takes a moment to mention that the Capitalists killed even more people when they retook the city.

Bertrand, meanwhile, manages to control his lycanthropy with a sadomasochistic sexual relationship with a wealthy Jewish woman named Sophie. She allows him to bite and cut her and this helps him control his wolf side. I'm not sure how this is supposed to fit into Endore's political allegory, which makes me like it.

The final portion of the book suggests Bertrand may never have transformed at all, that the belief that he did may have been a shared madness of he and his uncle, Aymer. This becomes a conflict between faith and empiricism as Aymer finally decides to join the priesthood in the wake of his disillusionment with the Commune. Endore provides an interesting argument between Aymer and a doctor over whether Bertrand really is a werewolf and you really start to wonder if Aymer had been an unreliable narrator all this time.

I finally remembered why I had this book on my kindle--I put it there after watching Hammer's 1961 adaptation of the book starring Oliver Reed (here's my review from 2014). It's not a bad movie. Oliver Reed is perfectly cast.