Is Pierre Michon’s The Eleven a political novel?

Pierre Michon's <i>The Eleven</i> ( <i>Les Onze</i>, 2009) is narrated by a cicerone who entertains visitors to the Musée du Louvre and describes the painting of eleven members of the <i>Comité de salut public</i> during the French Revolution, which revisits the history of politics at the decisive moment of <i>la Terreur</i>. The novel purports to be a commentary on the painting, the people it depicts, the circumstances of its creation and its author. However, the painting is imaginary, as is the quotation from Jules Michelet's <i>Histoire de la Révolution française</i> that legitimises it. The complex interplay of literary traditions and techniques used in the novel defies the banality of a running commentary on political figures and circumstances told in a realist mode to evoke instead the spectacle of telling/making the history/story of politics as a surge of terror, thus revealing the abyss implicit in the performative situation of the protagonist and his audience doubling/mimicking the text and the reader: originary fiction of politics as imaginative re-enactment of the politics of fiction that redeems the Revolution.