What would have happened if Napoleon had been assassinated in 1804 and the ideals of the French Revolution had triumphed? This is the starting point of the novel 'Les causes invisibles', by Jaume Valor

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History has gone as it has, but it could perfectly always have gone in a different way. Saint Paul might not have fallen off his horse, the Medici might have had bad artistic taste, Luther might have been hit by a cart while preparing the 95 theses , Rousseau might have devoted himself to raising his children... And Napoleon might have dead, along with the Pope of Rome, in a mysterious attack on Notre Dame de Paris on the day of his coronation as emperor (1804). None of this ever happened, and Napoleon ravaged the European continent with his ambition and his armies until the Russian cold and the British crown stopped him.


What would have happened, however, if Napoleon had indeed been assassinated in 1804 and the political vision and ideals of the Revolution of 1789 had ended up triumphing in France, under the baton of the Machiavellian and turbulent Fouché, and had spread to other European countries? What if all these geopolitical movements had caused Catalonia to be emancipated from Castile and become a kind of protectorate of France? These are the questions that the architect and university professor Jaume Valor (Barcelona, ​​1965) formulates and tries to answer in Les causes invisibles , a uchronic novel that has the indispensable virtue of transcending its curious and exciting approach and of manage to build a novel world that works in its own right.


Adventures and postmodernity


Set in Barcelona, ​​Paris and London in the 1820s, Valor's novel is made with the same materials – and the same spirit! – as the great adventure novels of the 19th century, for example those of Alexandre Dumas (father and son). All of this, however, here we find it recharged and centrifuged by the self-awareness and playful neo-baroque of postmodernity. I mean, in addition to political intrigue, palace conspiracies, cowardly villains who become brave men, passionate and difficult love stories, unsanitary prisons and towering ships, poisonings and quests desperate - all of them, more or less, classically Dumasian elements -, here we also find terrorist groups fighting in favor of the workers' cause (blood and rage), capitalists with a criminal greed, a bit of political philosophy,


The hardest part of writing a chronology novel is finding the balance between explaining and describing the alternate history you invent and building and developing the novel's plot and characters. The invisible causesfinds this balance in the fiction itself, but in addition the author and the publisher have wanted to play it safe and, at the end of the book, have added an explanatory chronology and a glossary of the characters, both fictional and historical (Fouché, Fourier , King George III, the Duke of Wellington...). Apart from that, which is key, if the novel is read with pleasure, despite some clichés and over-explanations, it is also because the structure holds up well to the multiple plots and scenarios, because the pace is fast-paced without being frenetic, because the argument uses without abusing the shocks and surprising turns, and because Valor's prose is fresh, direct, colorful and effective.