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1925: What Was a Day Like for a Russian Noblewoman in Exile in Paris / Helen Rappaport: After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris From the Belle Epoque Through Revolution and War

 

Following the 1917 Russian Revolutions and the fall of the Romanov dynasty, tens of thousands of Russian aristocrats, intellectuals, and military officers fled to Paris, transforming the French capital into the center of the White émigré community.

Life in Exile

• From Opulence to Survival: Formerly wealthy nobles who had once reveled in Belle Époque Paris as a playground of luxury arrived as refugees. By the mid-1920s, around 43,000 to 50,000 Russian exiles lived in the city.
• Menial Labor: Former princes and military officers famously became known as "princely taxi drivers" or worked in factories like Renault, while noblewomen—renowned for maintaining their poise and appearance—worked as seamstresses, embroiders, and models for fashion houses like Coco Chanel.
• Statelessness & Documents: After the Soviet government stripped exiles of their citizenship in 1921, many relied on the newly introduced Nansen passport issued by the League of Nations to travel and work.

Key Figures

• Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich: One of the Romanovs who escaped the Bolshevik purge, he famously had a romantic relationship with Coco Chanel in the 1921s and helped introduce her to perfumer Ernest Beaux (creator of Chanel No. 5).
• Prince Felix Yusupov and Princess Irina Alexandrovna: The wealthy nobleman (known for participating in the plot to kill Grigori Rasputin) and his wife settled in Paris, where they lived out their exile.
• Cultural and Literary Figures: Writers, poets, and artists such as Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Sergey Diaghilev (with his Ballets Russes) kept Russian artistic and intellectual life alive far from home.

Books/Livres

After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris

Tom Peebles

28 September 2022

https://tocqueville21.com/books/after-romanovs-russian-exiles-paris/

 

A book review of Helen Rappaport’s After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris From the Belle Epoque Through Revolution and War (St. Martin’s Press, 2022).

Paris is “full of Russians at present.” That was how a recently-minted European correspondent for the Toronto Star began his report that appeared on February 25, 1922—by an odd coincidence almost one hundred years prior to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked attack upon neighboring Ukraine on February 24 of this year. The correspondent was an eager young journalist and writer from the American Midwest, Ernest Hemingway, who had only arrived in Paris the previous December. He went on to inform his readers that the Russians were “drifting along in Paris in a childish sort of hopelessness that things will somehow be all right … No one knows just how they live except by selling off jewels and gold ornaments and family heirlooms that they brought with them to France.”

 

Most of the Russians whom Hemingway had encountered were refugees fleeing the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the civil wars that ensued after the Bolshevik takeover in Russia. Many arrived without jewels, ornaments, heirlooms, or much else. Describing “just how they lived” in Paris is precisely the task British freelance-writer Helen Rappaport sets for herself in After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Epoque Through Revolution and War. Rappaport’s work revolves around a series of portraits of the personal lives of several dozen Russians who found themselves in Paris during the first four decades of the twentieth century, with key personalities appearing and reappearing across a loosely chronological narrative.

 

Between October 1917 and mid-1921, Paris became the destination of choice for thousands of refugees from Russia. By 1930, according to one source, the Russian community living in Paris reached about 43,000 members, with another 9,500 living in the suburbs. Yet, as her sub-title suggests, Rappaport starts well before the post-1917 surge in Russian refugees, during Paris “belle époque”—the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century up to the outbreak of World War I. Vibrant manifestations of Russian cultural life flourished during Paris’ belle époque. It was also a time when ostentatious Russians—Romanovs as well as others of aristocratic stock and the just plain wealthy—made the city their personal playground.

 

After early chapters on the Russian impact in belle époque Paris, Rappaport’s middle chapters, the heart of her story, show how the wave of émigrés arriving in Paris in the years following the 1917 Revolution transformed the city and its Russian community. Although “penniless and traumatized but grateful to have escaped the Russian civil war” when they arrived, most Russians fared better during the 1920s than the 1930s. During the latter decade, the worldwide economic downturn not only fragilized the émigrés’ already fragile circumstances but also gave rise to the view that they were stealing jobs from the native French. Rappaport’s story ends with the German occupation of 1940, as the lights in the City of Lights went out—or at least dimmed considerably.

 

Broadly speaking, the émigrés Rappaport portrays fall into three groups: 1. The Romanov family and aristocrats. 2. Artistic, intellectual, and cultural figures. 3. ‘Everyday’ Russians. Russians in Paris were known for being disputatious, turning “quarreling into an art form,” Rappaport writes. They were too diverse, though, to be labeled “White Russians” in the sense of uniformly monarchists, political reactionaries or counter-revolutionaries who favored the restoration of the Tsar. But one of the few threads linking the heterogenous community was that almost all Russian émigrés were vehement and outspoken anti-Bolsheviks.

 

Numerous Russians were otherwise apolitical. Some were socialists and liberal democrats who had supported the 1905 Revolution in Russia and the Provisional Government that came to power in March 1917, after the abdication of Romanov Tsar Nicolas II. Despite internal differences, moreover, Russian émigrés in Paris remained culturally and emotionally attached to Mother Russia, even though in the eyes of most the Bolshevik regime had rendered their country unrecognizable. Furthermore, almost all émigrés found themselves in difficult financial straits. Rappaport gives special attention to the plight of former aristocrats and nobles forced to eke out a living, a favorite subject of the press at the time.

 

An esteemed Russian general worked as a valet, opening car doors for rich Americans.

 

The book’s individual portraits are the fruit of Rappaport’s dazzling excavation of a wide array of original source material, much of it focused on the Romanovs and others from Russia’s highest social strata. Rappaport also draws on the extensive paper trail created by Russian writers, artists, and cultural figures, leaving a source gap for the everyday Russians who found themselves in Paris—“few voices of ordinary Russians have been recorded,” Rappaport indicates. In what is probably the book’s most original contribution, she valiantly seeks to fill this gap.

 

Rappaport’s narrative sometimes succumbs to the ‘TMI’ syndrome: ‘Too Much Information,’ the often-irresistible tendency of authors to utilize too many of the details they unearth, giving much of the book a gossipy flavor. But her book gained unanticipated resonance earlier this year after Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, which triggered another wave of emigrants out of the Russian neighborhood and into Western Europe, including France—a century after Hemingway reported on the exiles who had arrived in Paris, fleeing the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

 

Russians in Belle Époque Paris

Rappaport’s initial focus on Russians during the Parisian belle époque of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century serves as a valuable contrast to the émigrés who lived more precariously and arrived in the years following the 1917 Revolution. The belle époque was, Rappaport writes, a “golden age of rapprochement” between Russia and France, with Russian literature and culture attracting great interest and attention throughout France. For Russian aristocrats and those with considerable wealth, Paris in 1900 was the “capital of Russia out of Russia,” a “home away from home, a safe haven in winter from the bitter cold of the northern Russian climate and the rising threat of revolution that was increasingly targeting their class.”

 

Romanov grand dukes gained notoriety during the belle époque for taking advantage of all that Paris had to offer, with the gossipy French press eagerly following their salacious adventures and misadventures. Grand Duke Vladimir—Tsar Nicholas II’s most senior uncle—stood out among them, earning the sobriquet “Le Grand Duc Bon Vivant” for indulging in what Rappaport terms “libidinous and sometimes violent behavior” while making little effort to hide his “colossal appetite for food and wines, and his extravagant spending habits,” which included lavish tips. Grand Duke Vladimir was also a generous patron of the arts.

 

In a city considered Europe’s cultural capital, Grand Duke Vladimir’s best-known beneficiary, Sergey Diaghilev, dominated the Parisian cultural scene during the twentieth century’s first two decades. In 1906, Diaghilev pulled together an unprecedented cross section of Russia’s best artwork since the eighteenth century. Until that time, icon painting had been the primary Russian art-form known in France. Diaghilev also set out to familiarize Parisian audiences with innovative new Russian music beyond Tchaikovsky, “the only Russian composer with whom they were familiar.”

 

But Diaghilev was best known for creating the magnetic dance company Ballets Russe, which stormed the citadel of high Parisian culture by introducing an exotic form of dance frequently described as “crazy” or “mad.” Diaghilev hired his former teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov as a conductor for the Ballets Russe and introduced the Parisian public to Vaslav Nijinsky. Imparting a “new direction and style” to the art of ballet with his “soaring flights,” Nijinsky elevated the male dancer to an equal footing with the ballerina. His 1910 performance for The Firebird Suite drove audiences into “raptures,” Rappaport writes. The next day, Paris talked of nothing but the “soaring angel.”

 

Those who made it to Paris were hopeful that the city would offer something better than the harsh Bolshevik rule and civil wars back home. But survival in the early 1920s was hard. 

 

Russian writers and artists of the belle époque era, forced to flee Tsarist Russia in search of greater freedom of expression, frequented the legendary cafés of Montparnasse more than a decade before Hemingway made Montparnasse his own personal playground. Dubbed “penny universities” which taught “bohemian lifestyle, contempt for the bourgeois, sense of humor and heavy drinking,” Montparnasse cafés were refuge points for impoverished Russian writers whom Rappaport describes as “rebels, misfits and down-and-outs”; and for creative artists “long on talent but short on money and struggling to become established.” According to a popular view at the time, the more “Bohemian” a Montparnasse patron looked, the more likely he was to be Russian.

 

Paris before World War I was also full of rival anti-Tsarist political groups and factions: Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, anarchists, social revolutionaries, and Jewish trade unionists. Vladimir Lenin, unlike the stereotypical disheveled Russian revolutionary, lived conventionally with his wife and mother-in-law in Paris from 1909 to 1912, where he kept a low profile and stayed away from Montparnasse cafés. Focused obsessively on the cause of revolution in Russia, Lenin “despised the sloppy, bohemian lifestyle of some of his fellow political exiles” who in his view had allowed Paris to divert them “too easily” from the cause.

 

After World War I broke out in the summer of 1914, many aristocrats, writers and artists headed back to Russia. Artist Marc Chagall left so quickly that he was unable to lock his studio, leaving a stack of paintings inside which he never saw again. A substantial number of the émigrés who remained behind in Paris sought to enlist in the war. But it was the events of 1917 in Russia, beginning with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March, followed by the Bolshevik Revolution in November and ensuing civil wars, that precipitated the sweeping transformation of the émigré community in Paris at the heart of Rappaport’s story.

 

Fleeing the Bolsheviks for Paris

The wave of refugees arriving in Paris between November 1917 and March 1921 came from a “much wider cross-section of [Russian] society, with loyalties to a wide range of political parties, social classes, and religions,” Rappaport writes. Most had left Russia through Odessa, in Crimea, sailing under abysmal conditions to Constantinople. Those who made it to Paris were hopeful that the city would offer something better than the harsh Bolshevik rule and civil wars back home. But survival in the early 1920s was hard.  The ‘help wanted’ ads in the French press were “full of menial jobs that required none of the skills that the cream of the former intelligentsia had to offer.” A “great deal of valuable Russian talent and expertise failed to find an outlet.”

 

Because of French employment regulations and the requirement of French nationality, only a small portion of Russian doctors, dentists, lawyers, and university lecturers were able to find work in their professions in Paris. Some circumvented the rules by working exclusively for the Russian émigré colony. French-speaking Russians sometimes managed to find jobs in banks and offices as clerks and bookkeepers. Those with English language skills were able to work in hotels and department stores with English-speaking clientele. An esteemed Russian general worked as a valet, opening car doors for rich Americans. One of the more enterprising Romanovs, Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich, suddenly destitute, found a way to exploit his single remaining asset: he was a “handsome, seductive ladies’ man, and women fell for him with predictable regularity.”

 

One of those women was Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, who was then dominating the Paris fashion world. The gossipy French press followed the affair closely while dismissing Chanel as a “little shop girl.” Chanel No. 5, Coco’s most famous brand, took off while she and Dimitri were linked romantically, making a fortune for Coco. Dimitri’s lack of money probably doomed the relationship. He was just like other dispossessed Russian grand dukes, Coco concluded, “diminished, almost emasculated by their poverty in exile … tall and handsome and splendid, but behind it all—nothing; just vodka and the void.”

 

Ivan Bunin’s stories of “aging, solitary people in emigration” distilled the grim realities of everyday life in Paris

 

Most male refugees were forced to take “fairly low-grade and drab jobs,” such as washing dishes, waiting tables, cleaning windows, working in factories or, especially, driving a taxi. In an environment where just about everyone needed to find new means to survive, Russian taxi drivers were the “aristocrats of the émigré work force”; many were actual aristocrats. For women—sewing, millinery, and knitting proved to be the “quickest, easiest and most immediate route of out of poverty.” The economic plight of the émigrés arriving in Paris in the early 1920s was reduced to an aphorism: “The men drive taxis and women sew for a living.”

 

Taxi driving was “greatly to be preferred for the autonomy and independence it allowed.” The French public, Rappaport indicates, perceived Russian taxi drivers as more dependable than their French counterparts. The French automotive assembly line became a mainstay for those Russian men not lucky enough to land taxi-driving opportunities, especially at the Renault factory at Billancourt. Paid only about two dollars a day in the late 1920s, at a time when Ford workers in the United States were earning a stunning five dollars per day, many Russian auto workers saw the assembly line as “only a stopgap on the way to something better—in most cases, taxi driving.”

 

Women gravitated to all levels of the fashion trade. One of the most enterprising was Grand Duke Dimitri’s sister, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna. Although destitute, Maria was skilled at needle working and started fashioning clothes. After her brother introduced her to Coco Chanel, she opened a shop with its own brand name, and for a while sold exclusively to Chanel. Younger Russian women, especially those from an aristocratic background, became fashion models. But scores of Russian women earned a “pittance doing piecework at home.” In his 1933 work Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell described one such woman living in the hotel where he resided who “worked sixteen hours a day, darning socks at twenty-five centimes a sock, while [her] son, decently dressed, loafed in the Montparnasse cafés.”

 

In 1924, France officially recognized the Bolshevik Regime, by then known as the Soviet Union, much to the dismay of the Russian émigré community. Russian writers and intellectuals were further dismayed that their French counterparts, whose support and patronage they needed in their “fight against the communist suppression of freedom of expression,” were all-too-often “fascinated by the new, and politically fashionable, socialist experiment in Russia and keen to champion what they saw as its progressive policies.” By the late 1920s, Russian writers, in a “constant battle between a longing for the inspiration of Russia and the need to be free,” encountered a “tide of indifference” in which their work was viewed as “rooted in the past and reactionary.”

 

The most prominent Russian writer in Paris was Ivan Bunin, a master of the short story in the tradition of Anton Chekhov, whose stories of “aging, solitary people in emigration” distilled the grim realities of everyday life in Paris. In 1933, Bunin won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Russian to do so. It was undoubtedly the “single most important event in the cultural and literary life of the Russian emigration,” Rappaport writes, but an event that infuriated Soviet authorities back in Moscow. Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, a popular female satirist who wrote short stories under the name Teffi, tuned into the “sense of abandonment and despair shared by so many newly arrived Russians.” Teffi wrote about “her dismay at how the emigration had divided rather than united people, how hardship and uncertainty about their status had eaten away at them like a malady and eroded the grandeur of spirt once admired in them.”

 

From Hard Times to Worse in 1930s Paris

By 1930, the “charm and seductive romance of ‘Russianness’ had begun to wear thin.” The economic downturn following the 1929 stock market crash not only reduced the need for foreign labor in Paris but also precipitated a “xenophobic backlash” against émigrés, with right-wing, nationalist French politicians assailing Russians as a “drain on resources at a time of economic hardship.” A volatile period of strikes and demonstrations in 1930s Paris, followed by food shortages, brought “painful reminders” of 1917 to the fearful emigrants, who “prepared for another Armageddon.” Rappaport documents a wave of suicides which overtook some of the community’s most vulnerable members in the latter portion of the 1930s, the “only answer to dealing with the wounds of separation and cultural disinheritance that stubbornly refused to heal.”

 

Upended Anew

The German occupation of Paris, which began in June 1940, was a grim time for the Russian emigrant community, marked by “extreme poverty and hunger for most.” By August 1940, “all the old émigré life of Russian Paris had been closed down with the enforced disbanding of cultural, educational and charitable bodies.” Some Russians remained but more sought to flee again, with Spain and the United States being the preferred destinations. A few even went to Berlin to fight against Stalin’s Soviet Union.

 

Rappaport’s account belies Hemingway’s notion of a “childish sense of hopelessness” prevailing among the Russians who found themselves in Paris in the period between the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the German invasion of France. Rappaport uses the term “stoic endurance” to describe how everyday Russians survived during their Paris years. “Stoic endurance” also aptly describes both the resourceful adaptations of many Romanovs and the painful reflections of the writers, poets and artists depicted in this fascinating account.

Cover image: St. Martin’s Press, 2022 (Fair Use)

Clothes and the Horse: A Guide to Correct Dress for All Riding Occasions by Sydney D. Barney, 1953.

 Clothes and the Horse: A Guide to Correct Dress for All Riding Occasions
Author: Barney, Sydney
Publisher: London 1953
(…) (T)his is a reference book for the men, women, and children who want to know what well-dressed riders wore in the 1950's. It includes both tailored and ready-to-wear clothes, and stresses economy for the beginner. Frontispiece is a black and white photo of Queen Elizabeth presenting Lieutenant-Colonel Harry Llewllyn with a bronze statuette of Foxhunter at Badminton 1952. There are several other B/W photos and drawings to illustrate the book.
In http://www.tomfolio.com/bookdetailssu.asp?b=4019&m=737

 “This is a book that often gets advertised in period issues of The Tailor & Cutter. It was published in London, 1953 and presents a classical English view on correct riding attire. It is essential reading for any tailor who is called upon to cut equestrian cloths. Riders have very specific requirements in their sport and the cutter must be mindful of these. A bespoke riding garment has the potential to give the competitor an edge both in their presentation, personal confidence as well as it a greater range of movement permitted by the corrected fitted garment. A good many items in the gentleman's wardrobe such as the dress coat, morning coat and hacking jacket also have their origins in riding attire.”
In, with Photographs: http://www.cutterandtailor.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=956
By Sator

Old Boy

 

What to Wear Pheasant Shooting | Complete UK Shooting Outfit Guide

An Artisan's London, Episode Three: Efe Laborde

 

1983 Danton Official Trailer 1 Gaumont, TF1 Films Production / WAJDA'S 'DANTON,' INSIDE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

WAJDA'S 'DANTON,' INSIDE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

Danton

NYT Critic’s Pick

Directed by Andrzej Wajda

Biography, Drama, History

PG

2h 16m

By Vincent Canby

Sept. 28, 1983

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/28/movies/wajda-s-danton-inside-the-french-revolution.html

 

COMPARED to the massive scale of the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1789-95 seems almost to have been a chamber piece. Though armies supporting Louis XVI crossed France's border seeking to save the Bourbon monarchy, and though all of France eventually become involved in the bloodshed, the most decisive battles of the Revolution were fought in Paris, in the political clubs and on the streets.

In Paris, the Revolution's leaders, with the backing of the angry mobs, set policies that the rest of the country, left to their own devices, would probably have disowned, at least initially. The course of the Revolution was shaped by a small group of extraordinary men, all young, who started out as idealists, then became comrades and close friends, godfathers to one another's children. Within four years, they had split into factions as mortal enemies. Men did not hesitate to send to the guillotine former boon companions, now branded as traitors to the fatherland.

This peculiar, dreadful intimacy of a handful of remarkable personalities is vividly dramatized in ''Danton,'' Andrzej Wajda's fine, comparatively ascetic historical film that will be shown at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center today at 9:30 P.M. and tomorrow at 6:15 P.M.

Chief among these personalities are Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. Danton is the passionate, vulgar, not entirely honest man of the people, a hugely popular leader of the Revolutionary left who becomes increasingly moderate as the Revolution adopts policies of extermination. Robespierre, called ''the incorruptible,'' is the small, fastidiously dressed, rigorously moral lawyer from Arras who, being convinced that Danton's moderation is a betrayal of the Revolution, engineers his trial and execution. ''Robespierre, you will follow me within three months!'' the furious Danton screams as he is hauled off to the guillotine and, as things turned out, he was absolutely right.

''Danton,'' a Franco-Polish co-production, was directed in France by Mr. Wajda from a screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere, based on a stage play by Stanislawa Przybyszewska. Gerard Depardieu, who is, of course, a French actor, stars as the sympathetic Danton. Wojciech Pszoniak, a Polish actor, shares star billing as the thin-lipped voice of reason, Robespierre. That the Robespierrists, all of whom are seen as fanatics, some slightly less opportunistic than others, should be played by Polish actors, while the earthy, hearty, mostly honest Dantonists are played by French actors, is just one of the possible reasons why the Polish Government has not yet seen fit to release the film at home.

Without stretching things too much, I suppose, Mr. Wajda presents us with a Danton who is the articulate conscience of the Revolution, someone, perhaps, not entirely unlike Lech Walesa, the popular spokesman of Poland's Solidarity movement. On the other hand, Robespierre is seen as being completely removed from the practical needs and real feelings of the people, a stern father-figure of a dictator, a man who doesn't hesitate to approve the murder of thousands of people for the fatherland's ultimate good.

In an interview in Le Monde, Mr. Wajda denies all associations between 18th-century France and 20th-century Poland, though he does say that Danton represents the West and Robespierre the East.

Whether or not these associations hold true are beside the point of the film. ''Danton'' brilliantly illuminates one of the most fascinating periods of the French Revolution - those early months in 1794 when Danton, having been in self-imposed retirement in the country, returned to Paris to attempt to stop the Terror. Louis had been beheaded in January 1793. By October 1793, the Terror was picking up momentum, with the execution of Marie Antoinette, the liberal-thinking Duc D'Orleans, the chatty, letter- writing Madame Roland, and the leaders of the Girondists, the Revolution's moderates. In returning to Paris instead of fleeing the country, as his friends advised him to do, Danton knew he was leaving his head exposed to the guillotine.

In keeping with the chamber-piece nature of this Revolution, ''Danton'' is played out in a series of mostly small, intimate, beautifully defined confrontations between the robust, commonsensical Danton and the steely Robespierre. It's to Mr. Carriere's credit, as the screenwriter, that these scenes should be so truly dramatic and understandable, even, I suspect, to someone who has no special knoweldge of or interest in the course of the Revolution.

 

It's to Mr. Wajda's credit that though his sympathies are clearly with Danton, played with all stops out by Mr. Depardieu, it is Robespierre, played with silky neuroticism by Mr. Pszoniak, who emerges as the film's most arresting, possibly tragic figure.

Not so effective are those scenes that attempt to place the personal- political drama in the context of a city and a nation in rebellion. There is something as perfunctory as there is obligatory about the crowd scenes. They remind me, in fact, of those Hollywood mobs, led by Blanche Yurka as Madame Defarge, that were out to get Charles Darnay in the 1935 ''A Tale of Two Cities.'' It also doesn't help that the French dialogue of the Polish actors, including Mr. Pszoniak, has not been especially well post-synchronized with the movements of the actors' lips.

Mr. Wajda and Mr. Carriere haven't exactly cleaned up Danton's reputation, but the bad things remain offscreen. There are references to the taking of bribes, to his love of women and property, and he himself asks forgiveness for having formed the notorious Committee of Public Safety, the body through which Robespierre came to control the country. Not emphasized at all is Danton's part in the September 1793 massacre in which mobs were encouraged to ransack Paris prisons and, without discrimination, murder everyone they could lay hands on as agents of the feared monarchist counterrevolution. Danton was not as clean as a hound's tooth.

What the film does most effectively is dramatize his later conviction that the Revolution's fury was itself a betrayal of the Revolution, as he says so eloquently in the trial that is the film's climax.

In addition to Mr. Depardieu and Mr. Pszoniak, the excellent cast includes Patrice Chereau as Danton's journalist-friend, Camille Desmoulins; Angela Winkler as Lucille Desmoulins, Camille's wife who followed him to the scaffold; Boguslaw Linda, as Saint Just, and Roger Planchon, who is partciuarly good as Fourquier Tinville, who prosecuted Danton and his associates in a rigged trial.

''Danton'' is a major work from this major film maker. Ah, Those French! DANTON, directed by Andrzej Wajda; screenplay (French with English subtitles) by Jean- Claude Carriere, based on ''L'Affaire Danton'' by Stanislawa Przybyszewska with the collaboration of Mr. Wajda, Agnieszka Holland, Boleslaw Michalek and Jacek Gasiorowski; photography by Igor Luther; edited by Halina Prugar- Ketling; music by Jean Prodromides; produced by Margaret Menegoz/Les Films du Losange in collaboration with Production Group X of Warsaw Barbara Pec-Slesicka; a Triumph Films Release. In Alice Tully Hall, as part of the 21st New York Film Festival; presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in cooperation with the Motion Picture Association of America. Running time: 136 minutes. This film has no rating. Danton, Gerard Depardieu Robespierre, Wojciech Pszoniak Eleonore Duplay, Anne Alvaro Lacroix, Roland Blanche Camille Desmoulins, Patrice Chereau Louison Danton, Emmanuelle Debever Amar, Krzysztof Globisz Herman, Ronald Guttman Tallien, Gerard Hardy Couthon, Tadeusz Huk Panis, Stephane Jobert Lindet, Marian Kociniak Barere de Vieuzac, Marek Kondrat Saint Just, Boguslaw Linda Heron, Alain Mace Legendre, Bernard Maitre Fabre d'Eglantine, Lucine Melki Philippeaux, Serge Merlin Collot d'Herbois, Erwin Nowiaszack Carnot, Leonard Pietraszak Fouquier Tinville, Roger Planchon Frere d'Eleonore, Angel Sedgwick Bourdon, Andrzej Seweryn David, Franciszek Starowieyski Billaud-Varenne, Jerzy Trela Chanteuse boulangerie, Anne-Marie Vennel Westermann, Jacques Villeret Lucile Desmoulins, Angela Winkler Herault de Sechelles, Jean-Loup Wolff Vadier, Czeslaw Wollejko Chef des gardes, Wladimir Yordanoff Servante des Duplay, Matgorzata Zajaczkowska Lebas, Szymon Zaleski

Corrected on 

Oct. 13, 1983

: 

Thursday, Late City Final Edition

We acknowledge mistakes in our reporting with corrections. If you spot an error, please let us know at corrections@nytimes.com.Learn more.

Danton

NYT Critic’s Pick

Director

Andrzej Wajda

Stars

Gérard Depardieu, Wojciech Pszoniak, Anne Alvaro, Roland Blanche, Patrice Chéreau

Rating

PG

Running Time

2h 16m

Genres

Biography, Drama,