While "The Arm and the Darkness" by Taylor Caldwell is primarily a long narrative of the physical and spiritual struggles of a young nobleman during the conflicts between the Catholic reaction and the Huguenots in France in the time of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, it is also an adumbration of the emergence of the Common Man into history and his opening battles for liberty, enlightenment and justice. The real villain of this novel is the corrupt hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and the real hero is that urge toward liberation that expressed itself in the Huguenot movement. Of course, the line between good and evil is not drawn quite so definitely as that, for Miss Caldwell makes it plain that there were good Catholics and corrupt Huguenots; but, all the same, the protagonists are reaction and progress and their other names were Rome and Luther. To express all this Miss Caldwell has created Arsène de Richepane, at first a devil-may-care young swashbuckler and then a brooding and disillusioned man. (p. 6)
She has employed every ingredient that Alexander Dumas père ever used but with a difference. Here are the clash of swords, racing horses on night roads, hunted men pursued through dark alleys, conspirators in closed cabinets, rendezvous and passionate meetings, burning chateaux, enraged mobs, battle and siege, haughty noblemen and jackal sycophants, terrifying priests and gentle old abbés, duels, revenge and love and death. Here, too, out of history are Richelieu, Father Joseph, Louis XIII, Anne of Austria, de Bouillon, Rohan, Guiton and Gaston d'Orléans. And not out of history we have the two de Richepane brothers and their father, Cecile and Francois Grandjean, de Vitry and his false Antoinette and a dozen others. It is a vast bubbling mixture but it is stirred by a capable hand. The difference is in the unifying idea. The action is not for the action alone, as in so much of Dumas, but rather to emphasize the spiritual struggle of man, his better self fighting his worse self in an area when all the powers of reaction, repression and mental and physical tyranny seemed invincible. (pp. 6, 12)
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