Themes in The Scarlet Pimpernel
It is remarkable that a book with a plot as simple as Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel contains so many different themes. The work, a piece of historical fiction, takes place during the French Revolution and tells of the title character's efforts to smuggle French nobles out of their homeland to save them from certain death at the guillotine and the events that result from this character's doing so. It is due to this being set during a time known in France as “the reign of terror” that these themes are able to play out as they do within the overarching sequence of events that are transpiring. Two examples of such themes that are apparent throughout the book are secret identities and justice.
The first theme mentioned above, secret identities, is a driving force of the novel. From the outset of the story, it seems like everyone is trying to figure out who the larger than life Scarlet Pimpernel really is. This desire to uncover the hero’s identity is clearly referenced in the following lines, “all the most strenuous efforts on the part of my spies have failed to discover who he
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It is through a perverted sense of justice that the French nobility and their families are being persecuted by the French people in the first place, as the corruption, hypocrisy, and misdeeds of a few are being blamed on an entire class. Similarly, Lady Blakeney, unintentionally but again under the guise of justice, leads the noble Marquis de St. Cyr and his family to be executed by speaking out against him because of the violence he ordered to be committed against her brother in his youth when he was pursuing St. Cyr’s daughter. Most notable, however, is the sense of justice the drives the League of The Scarlet Pimpernel to “spend [their] money and risk their lives...when you set foot in France- and all for [the] French men and women, who are nothing to [them]” (Orczy,