Though he can be a villain from a certain point of view.
You see, yesterday, one of my fellow EvilCo'ers posted a list of villains elsewhere, sourced from 'The Oxford Book of Villains' by John Mortimer*. This reproduced list contained a villain whose inclusion at first I found somewhat surprising - Chauvelin from The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy (1905).
Now, I have recently read this book for various reasons but mainly because I wanted to read something entertaining, and a turn-of-the-century book of a swashbuckling adventure set in Revolutionary France seemed to fit the bill.
Both Chauvelin and the Scarlet Pimpernel can be construed as both heroes and villains.
Chauvelin, as an agent of the French revolutionaries, seeks out French aristocrats for guillotining.
I like the French Revolution as a historic era on its own and as a sort of prequel to the Napoleonic era, and I fully sympathise with the ostensible aims of the revolution - liberté, fraternité, égalité. Without the French Revolution, our world today would've looked much different, perhaps we'd still be living in a more or less feudal age, with a wealthy upper class, the 1%, and the rest of the world being peasants - okay so perhaps the French Revolution in the end didn't change all that much when it comes to wealth inequality, but at least it led to some new political philosophical ideas, plus the veneer of democracy that we all enjoy today.
So to a certain extent Chauvelin can be construed as a hero of the French Revolution.
But the random guillotining of aristocrats doesn't sit right with me - killing people just because they or their parents were born aristocratic is not particularly egalitarian. You can't really change what you were born as. So in that sense he's rather a villain.
This random killing of aristocrats also doesn't sit right with the Scarlet Pimpernel, who happens to be an English aristocrat and who swoops in and out of Paris to save more or less innocent people who have been condemned to the guillotine. So he's a hero, but he appears to oppose the revolution and in that regard is a villain.
As the book was written by the daughter of a Hungarian baron, who fled Hungary in fear of a possible peasant revolution, the author is clearly sympathetic to the Scarlet Pimpernel, painting him as the swashbuckling hero and Chauvelin as the clear-cut villain.
"six foot odd of gorgeousness, as represented by [**]", p. 55, is indeed rather sympathetic to the protagonist - I had to giggle when I first read that because it feels rather Twilight-esque to describe a protagonist as such. Very much the author-narrator's voice bleeding through, there.
But my egalitarian ideals force me to disagree, not with the Scarlet Pimpernel as the hero because in the end he's the one (well, with his friends, of course, especially Sir Andrew Ffoulkes) who ends up saving innocent people from an unfair death, but with Chauvelin as the villain. Sure, he is rather extreme in following up on his revolutionary ideals, and I can't in anyway condone murder - because that's what it is, in the end - but I do agree with the revolutionary ideals, and part of me also warns that there's a distinct possibility that Chauvelin mainly did his perceived duty under societal pressure. That's not entire the reason for his murdering people, of course, he does seem to rather relish it, and he does pose a considerable threat to the Pimpernel (well...). Though I am not really certain whether he's so keen on capturing the Pimpernel because the Pimpernel deprives him of his opportunity to carry out more or less institutionalised murder or because the Pimpernel's actions pose a dangerous loss of face to Chauvelin - I think that there is a considerable threat that if Chauvelin is found wanting, he could end up under the guillotine instead.
Legally speaking, that's called duress - he'd still be guilty of murder, but wouldn't be entirely responsible for it. I'll leave it to a lawyer to interpret whether Chauvelin's situation fully counts as duress, but it does negate his villainy somewhat.
Of course the heroic thing to do would be to say "I'd rather get killed than murder!" or for him to decide to sneakily cooperate with the Pimpernel, but real people often aren't that heroic.
I'll leave it to my dear friend Samantha Schäfer to identify what sort of villain Chauvelin in that regard then is, if he is a villain at all.
Of course the Scarlet Pimpernel remains the hero. He saves people and swashbuckles. I'm sure that's enough to qualify as such.
So, my tiny little artsy project for today is a rendition of the Pimpernel's calling card, which he often leaves for Chauvelin to find out that he has yet again foiled his guillotining (I'm taking the inspiration for this more from the 1956 tv-series than from the novel, mind).
The main thing to conclude from this tiny artsy project, however, is that I need new nibs for my calligraphy pens. I like how the flower worked out, though.
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* I am dying to read this book now. My library doesn't have it. I'm annoyed by that.
** I really don't want to spoil it. Read the book. Watch the series. Read the wikipedia page.
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