Rethinking the Age of Revolutions: France and the Birth of the Modern World 0190674806, 9780190674809

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Rethinking the Age of Revolutions

Rethinking the Age of Revolutions France and the Birth of the Modern World E D I T E D   B Y D AV I D A . B E L L AN D

YA I R M I N T Z K E R

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bell, David A. (David Avrom), editor. | Mintzker, Yair, editor. Title: Rethinking the Age of Revolutions : France and the Birth of the Modern World / edited by David A. Bell and Yair Mintzker. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2018. Identifiers: LCCN 2018001376 | ISBN 9780190674809 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190674793 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: France—Politics and government—1799–1815. | France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Influence. | France—History—Consulate and First Empire, 1799–1815—Influence. | Europe—Politics and government—1789–1815. | Revolutions—History—18th century. | Revolutions—History—19th century. | History, Modern—18th century. | History, Modern—19th century. Classification: LCC DC155 .R47 2018 | DDC 944.04—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001376 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

To Robert Darnton and Keith Michael Baker

CONTENTS

List of Contributors  ix Introduction  xiii David A. Bell and Yair Mintzker 1. Nature or Nation? Rights Conflicts in the Age of the French Revolution  1 Dan Edelstein

2. Every Island Is Not Haiti: The French Revolution in the Windward Islands  41 Paul Friedland

3. The Politics of Popularity: Celebrity Culture and the French Revolution  80 Antoine Lilti

4. Charismatic Authority in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France  104 David A. Bell

5. The Fate of Nations Is the Work of Genius: The French Revolution and the Great Man Theory of History  134 Darrin M. McMahon

6. “New History”: The Radical Pasts of the French Revolution, 1789–​1794  154 Joseph Zizek

7. The Thermidorians’ Terror: Atrocities, Tragedies, Trauma  193 Howard G. Brown

8. Of Revolutions and the Problem of Choice  236 Sophia Rosenfeld

Index 273

CONTRIBUTORS

David A. Bell (co-​editor and contributor) is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Age of North Atlantic Revolutions at Princeton University. A winner of Guggenheim, ACLS, and NEH fellowships, he is the author of six books, including The Cult of the Nation in France:  Inventing Nationalism, 1680–​1800 (2001); The First Total War:  Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It (2007); and the essay collection Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present (2016). His books have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese. His Charisma and Power in the Age of Revolutions, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Howard G. Brown is Professor of History at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the author of War, Revolution and the Bureaucratic State: Politics and Army Administration in France, 1791–​1799 (1995) and the prize-​winning Ending the French Revolution: Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (2006), as well as the editor, with Judith A.  Miller, of Taking Liberties:  Problems of a New Order from the French Revolution to Napoleon (2002). His latest book is Mass Violence and the Self: From the French Wars of Religion to the Paris Commune (2018). Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bosnall Professor of French and Chair of the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University. He is the author of the prize-​winning The Terror of Natural Right (2009) and of The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (2010), as well as the editor of The

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Super-​Enlightenment (2010) and, with Keith Michael Baker, of Scripting Revolution (2015). His latest book, On the Spirit of Rights, is forthcoming in fall 2018. Paul Friedland is Professor of History at Cornell University. A recipient of NEH, ACLS, Princeton Davis Center and, most recently, Guggenheim fellowships, he is the author of the prize-​winning Political Actors:  Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (2002), and of Seeing Justice Done:  The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France (2012). In addition to his project on the French Revolution in the Caribbean, he is also currently working on a history of animal rights in France. Antoine Lilti is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. A former editor of the journal Annales, he is the author of Le Monde des salons: Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (2005, translated into English as The World of the Salons, 2015), and of Figures publiques:  L’ invention de la célébrité (1750–​1850) (2014, and   translated into English as The Invention of Celebrity, 2017), as well as editor, with Céline Spector, of Commerce, civilization, empire:  Penser l’Europe au XVIIIe siècle (2014). Darrin M. McMahon is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History at Dartmouth College. He is the author or editor of eight books, including Happiness: A History (2006), which has been translated into ten languages and was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and Divine Fury: A History of Genius (2013). A recipient of Alexander von Humboldt and Guggenheim fellowships, he is currently writing a history of ideas of equality and a study of lighting and illumination in the Age of Enlightenment. Yair Mintzker (co-​editor) is Professor of History at Princeton University. A recipient of fellowships from the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Institute for Advanced Study, he is the author of the prize-​winning The Defortification of the German City, 1689–​1866 (2012) and The Many Deaths

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of “Jew Süss”: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-​Century Court Jew (2017). Sophia Rosenfeld is the Walter H.  Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. A  recipient of Guggenheim, ACLS, and Mellon New Directions fellowships, she is the author of A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-​Century France (2001), and the prize-​winning Common Sense:  A Political History (2011). Her current book project is tentatively titled The Choices We Make: The Roots of Modern Freedom. Joseph Zizek is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He is the author of numerous articles including “ ‘Plume de fer’: Louis-​Marie Prudhomme Writes the French Revolution” (French Historical Studies, 2003), and (with Keith Michael Baker) “The American Historiography of the French Revolution” (Imagined Histories, 1998). His current work is on voluntarism in the French Revolution.

INTRODUCTION

D AV I D A . B E L L A N D YA I R M I N T Z K E R   ■

In 2009 Lynn Hunt, one of the preeminent living historians of the French Revolution, declared that the subject had run into an “interpretive cul-​ de-​sac.” Despite the obvious centrality of the Revolution to any understanding of the modern world, its study in the early twenty-​first century seemed to have ground to a halt. Hunt lamented the absence of a new explanatory “paradigm,” and spoke of widespread “dissatisfaction” that while older paradigms had been discredited, nothing had arisen to take their place.1 It was a depressing judgment, but it elicited broad agreement from Hunt’s colleagues. Indeed, what Hunt wrote about the French Revolution might well be applied to the “Age of Democratic Revolutions” as a whole. Historians have recently been devoting much time and energy to surveying the Western revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, placing previously ignored localities such as Haiti at the center of the picture, and tracing out transnational connections. 1. Lynn Hunt, “The Experience of Revolution,” French Historical Studies, vol. 32, no. 4 (2009), pp. 671–​78.

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Still, cogent, large-​scale explanatory paradigms have yet to emerge in their work.2 Where the social sciences once seemed to provide compelling gen­ eral models of revolution, today the field of “comparative revolutions” itself seems largely to have withered on the vine.3 In that respect, the field of American revolutionary history has done no better than that of its French counterpart. The long debates over ideological explanations centered on “republicanism” have largely petered out, and a new overall explanatory framework has failed to replace them.4 To explain how things had come to such a pass in the French case, Hunt looked both to the evolution of scholarship itself and to the political context. In the first case, she paid particular attention to the empirical discrediting of older Marxist theories, to the new attention paid to groups previously marginalized by historians (especially women and black slaves), and to “a general state of ‘paradigmlessness’

2. This work remains inspired by R.R. Palmer’s classic The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–​1800, two vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959–​64); and Jacques Godechot, La grande nation:  L’expansion révolutionnaire de la France dans le monde de 1789 à 1799 (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1983), originally published in 1956. See more recently Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New  York:  New  York University Press, 2009); David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–​1840 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson, eds., The French Revolution in Global Perspective (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2013); Janet Polasky, Revolutions Without Borders:  The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2015). 3.  Classics of the older social scientific tradition include Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy:  Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1966); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions:  A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1979); Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1991). A  more recent approach to the subject, taking a political culture approach, is Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, eds., Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2015). 4. See Alan Gibson, Interpreting the Founding: Guide to the Enduring Debates over the Origins and Foundation of the American Republic (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 2006).

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in the humanities.”5 In the second case, she pointed to the effect of communism’s collapse upon Marxist models, and also to the sobering experience of post–​C old War chaos, which did much to undermine faith in the progressive liberalism associated with the influential “neo-​ Tocquevillian” works of François Furet and his followers.6 In the 1980s and 1990s, it had seemed that a new paradigm linked to Tocqueville and to a linguistic, Cambridge School-​inspired approach to politics (the latter developed most fully by Keith Michael Baker in his analyses of revolutionary “political culture”) was replacing the older marxisant one. The new approach, though enormously influential for a time, nonetheless never achieved the same status as its predecessor, and quickly came in for serious questioning as well.7 Compelling as Hunt’s analysis was, it did not anticipate how changing circumstances—​ both political and scholarly—​ would alter the way historians of the twenty-​first century now look back to the age of democratic revolutions and to the new challenges and possibilities that have opened up as a result. It also implicitly placed a very high value upon “paradigms,” which can sometimes hinder creative historical work as much as they stimulate it. The changing circumstances in which we now see the age of democratic revolutions have come into focus more clearly in the years since her essay appeared, and make it less likely that a single, forceful new paradigm will emerge any time soon to dominate the study of the subject—​even 5. Hunt, “The Experience of Revolution,” p. 672. 6.  Ibid. The key work here was François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). 7. The most important works building on Furet were Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1984); and Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution:  Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1990). For discussion of the “political culture paradigm,” see Suzanne Desan, “What’s After Political Culture?,” French Historical Studies, vol. 23, no. 1 (2000), pp. 163–​96; David A. Bell, “Words and Tumbrels,” in Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 157–​73.

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from the burgeoning scholarly area of global, “connected” histories.8 At the same time, these changing circumstances are opening up new and exciting ways for understanding revolutions—​ways that the essays in this collection exemplify. These circumstances can be summed up in a (deliberately provocative) aphorism: revolutions have come to seem alien to us, because we now live in a post-​revolutionary age. At first glance, this statement might seem absurd. After all, the twenty-​ first century has seen an impressive spate of revolutions, from the “Rose,” “Orange,” and “Tulip” risings in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan in 2003–​5, through the various upheavals of the “Arab Spring,” to the events in Ukraine in 2014. And despite the fading of “comparative revolutions” as a scholarly subject, the study of individual revolutions remains an academic industry. But two things stand out about the revolutions of the twenty-​first century. First, they have had relatively limited aims—​essentially, the overthrow of oppressive rulers and the establishment of liberal democratic regimes. None of them developed programs for far-​reaching, to say nothing of utopian, transformations of society and culture that might take years or decades to bring to fruition. None of their leaders spoke in messianic terms about the events’ transcendent promise. In this sense, they resembled an event like the French Revolution of 1830, which took place over four days and replaced a reactionary monarchy with a moderate monarchy, far more than they did the French Revolution of 1789 or the Russian Revolution of 1917. The last major revolution with ambitions comparable to those of these great earlier revolutions was the Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s, which has spurred no emulation outside of the Islamic world, and little inside it. And secondly, even with their very limited goals, the twenty-​first-​century revolutions are mostly deemed to have failed. The new governments have largely failed to institute the rule of law or to establish stable democratic systems. In the case of the 8.  The phrase is Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s. See his “Connected Histories:  Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 31, no. 3 (1997), pp. 735–​62.

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revolution that spurred perhaps the greatest initial effusion of hope—​that of Egypt—​an illiberal government headed by a general eventually gave way, after considerable revolutionary turmoil, to an even more illiberal government headed by a general.9 In part, the limited scope and even more limited success of these revolutions are linked to the rise of “human rights” as the ultimate criterion of political legitimacy in the world, although this itself has been challenged by the rise of populism in the wake of Brexit and the U.S. presidential elections of 2016. The most ambitious revolutionary movements of earlier centuries, almost without exception, resorted to widespread violence, expropriations, and the exercise (temporary or not) of dictatorial authority, all in the name of accomplishing radical revolutionary change. But today few populations willingly accept such measures, while world opinion (again, at least before 2016) immediately turned condemnatory of any revolution that employed them, leading in short order to a withdrawal of support, sanctions, and even military intervention. At the same time, Western commentators quickly deplored the “failure” of Third World revolutions for human rights violations. Even revolutions of the “1830” type have found it very difficult to respect human rights and to be judged successes. In one sense, these new standards and judgments seem hypocritical. American commentators who revere the Founding Fathers excoriate revolutionaries in the developing world for human rights violations that pale in comparison to what the Loyalists suffered in the American Revolution.10 But in another sense, the new standards testify to the shattering effect that the twentieth century had on the way people around the world think of revolutions. Not only did the most ambitious revolutions of this century take an enormous human toll, but they called into question the very idea that revolutions differ in fundamental ways from revolts and 9.  For further reflections on these themes, see David A.  Bell, “Inglorious Revolutions,” in Shadows of Revolution, pp. 395–​405. 10.  See, on this subject, Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence:  America’s Violent Birth (New York: Crown, 2017).

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civil wars—​that they are more than contingent episodes of violent turmoil; that they can bring new forms of society permanently into being and act as motors of coherent, progressive historical change. From the perspective of the early twenty-​first century, Soviet Communism and Maoism look like brutal and unsustainable experiments—​even like cruel illusions—​rather than the new civilizations their supporters hailed them as.11 It is worth remembering that the former Eastern and Central European dissidents who came to power in 1989 with the collapse of the Communist bloc deliberately refused the label of “revolutionaries” for themselves.12 And it is no coincidence that one of the most prominent historians of the age of democratic revolutions, David Armitage, now maintains that “every great revolution is a civil war.”13 This disillusionment has had very clear consequences for historical scholarship. The very idea of a “paradigm” for understanding an event like the French Revolution presupposes that the event had a unique inner logic and dynamism that governed its action, and that these resembled the inner logic and dynamism of other, similar events—​other revolutions. With historians less confident about the existence in our own time of a single, coherent model for revolutions, driven by such inner logic, they are less likely to approach complex and confusing events in the past with the assumption that they, too, must have had some powerful, dynamic logic behind them. Thus, they are less likely to look beyond Marxist theory, or Tocquevillian “political culture” approaches, for a paradigm of similar explanatory force. As a result, the most interesting recent work on the age of democratic revolutions has not attempted to explain how these revolutions worked as motors of historical change, driven by a coherent inner logic, but instead 11.  See Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion:  The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 12. Ibid., p. 401. 13.  David Armitage, “Every Great Revolution Is a Civil War,” in Baker and Edelstein, Scripting Revolution, pp.  57–​68. See also David Armitage, Civil Wars:  A History in Ideas (New York: Knopf, 2017).

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have tried to fit the revolutions into different, transnational historical frameworks. Not surprisingly, one of the most prominent of these new frameworks is the development of human rights. In the case of the French Revolution, this historiographical shift began to take hold with works on gender and race in the last decades of the twentieth century, which stressed the exclusion of women and people of color from the “rights of man.”14 Organizers of the 1989 bicentennial of the Revolution hailed the Declaration of the Rights of Man as its central achievement.15 More recently, several of the most prominent English-​language works on the Revolution—​notably by Lynn Hunt and Dan Edelstein—​have focused squarely on issues of natural right, natural law, and human rights.16 Many of the most prominent works on gender in the French Revolution have centered on the way feminists “claimed the rights of man.”17 The most important works on revolution in the French Caribbean have highlighted the way former slaves gave new fundamental meanings to languages of rights.18 All these works have had vital importance, insofar as they illuminate the origins of the political world we now inhabit, where human rights regimes, as Samuel Moyn 14.  Key works here include Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Michel-​Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Lynn Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie-​Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution,” in Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 117–​38; Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 15. See Steven L. Kaplan, Adieu 89 (Paris: Fayard, 1993). 16.  Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights:  A History (New  York:  W. W.  Norton, 2007); Dan Edelstein, “Enlightenment Rights Talk,” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 86, no. 3 (2014), pp. 566–​602. 17. See especially Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 1–​56. 18. See Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–​1804 (Williamsburg: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Frédéric Régent, La France et ses esclaves:  De la colonization aux abolitions, 1620–​1848 (Paris: Grasset, 2007).

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has put it, represent “the last utopia.”19 But they no longer treat revolutions themselves as the driving forces of historical change. Even more prominently, many historians have recently tried to place revolutions within the larger story of globalization—​a flurry of new works on the French Revolution has illuminated both the ways that new patterns of trade and communication contributed to the demise of the Old Regime, and also the connections between what took place in France, and events elsewhere in the Atlantic world.20 What Suzanne Desan calls “internationalizing the French Revolution” is as close as the field has come to a new paradigm of the sort discussed by Lynn Hunt.21 But the phenomenon of revolutionary political activity itself is not as crucial to the broad story of global communications, conflict, and exchange as it once was to the story of social change in modern Europe. Every historian of the subject recognizes that the European empire that did the most to drive early globalization—​Britain’s—​was also the one that did not experience a political revolution. In the case of France, revolution has a place in the global story for two reasons. First, the outbreak of the revolution is linked to the French monarchy’s relative failure to deal with the social and economic pressures of early globalization, which contributed to the collapse of the Old Regime.22 And secondly, the revolution is seen as a vehicle for the

19.  Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia:  Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2010). Moyn of course argues for much more recent origins of contemporary human rights politics. See Lynn Hunt’s response to this view point in “The Long and the Short of the History of Human Rights,” Past and Present, no. 233 (2016), pp. 323–​31. 20. For a critical survey of this work, see David A. Bell, “Questioning the Global Turn: The Case of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies, vol. 37, no. 1 (2014), pp. 1–​24. 21.  Suzanne Desan, “Internationalizing the French Revolution,” French Politics, Culture and Society, vol. 29, no. 2 (2011), pp. 137–​60. 22.  See, for instance, Laurent Dubois, “An Atlantic Revolution,” French Historical Studies, vol. 32, no. 4 (2009), pp. 655–​61; Lynn Hunt, “The French Revolution in Global Context,” in Armitage and Subrahmanyam, The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, pp. 20–​36; Lynn Hunt, “The Global Financial Origins of 1789,” in Desan, Hunt, and Nelson, The French Revolution in Global Perspective, pp.  32–​43; Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce:  Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2010); Michael Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)

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transmission of new ideas—​especially those of human rights—​to different societies that would appropriate and modify them in their turn. The new attention to the global dimensions of the French Revolution has had enormously beneficial effects for the field. However, historians of the Revolution should resist the calls for fashioning these approaches into a new overall explanatory paradigm. Especially in our post-​revolutionary world, such a move—​placing the French Revolution within a framework that extends so broadly in space and time—​would limit quite radically those of its aspects that seem most deserving of historical attention. Traditional accounts centered on France highlight such aspects of the Revolution as popular rebellions, the attempts to establish representative democracy, ideological radicalization, utopian social programs, republicanism, ideological terror, dictatorship, and the conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. The recent global or international approaches, by contrast, tend to highlight the subjects of trade, finance, imperial competition, crises of governance within empires, and the appropriation of ideas of rights by non-​Europeans. The author of one ambitious recent attempt to propose a new “paradigm” for the French Revolution based on globalization illustrated the relative narrowness of this approach when he wrote: “today, 1789 is interesting only when considered as an illustration of the revolution of [the] Atlantic world”—​i.e., the only interesting factors are what were shared with other revolutions.23 A similar approach is clearly gaining influence in American revolutionary history, to judge by the success of Justin du Rivage’s recent work, Revolution Against Empire, which argues that the American war for independence arose out of deep disputes over the governance of the British empire.24

23. Pierre Serna, “Every Revolution Is a War of Independence,” in Desan, Hunt, and Nelson, The French Revolution in Global Perspective, p. 166. 24. Justin du Rivage, Revolution Against Empire: Taxes, Politics, and the Origins of American Independence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). The emphasis on imperial competition was also central to an older sociological approach exemplified by Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). See also Bailey Stone, The Genesis of the French Revolution: A Global-​ Historical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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Ironically, such a shift in attention ends up de-​emphasizing precisely those features of the French Revolution that most inspired and most horrified people outside of France for many decades after 1789. Indeed, it de-​emphasizes a great deal of what happened in France itself after 1789, and especially in the extraordinary years 1792–​94, when participants often felt that years’ worth of change could take place in a single day, and Robespierre could boast that the French had moved two thousand years ahead of the human race.25 To the extent that globalizing the French Revolution opens new perspectives and fields of study, it is welcome. To the extent that it imposes a rigid new paradigm, and a rigid new sense of what in the Revolution deserves study, it is not. This point, of course, can be true of any powerful explanatory paradigm. While paradigms can be enabling, they can also be imprisoning. As long as the marxisant “social interpretation” of the French Revolution prevailed, it could be difficult to see anything of interest in the event other than those things that contributed to the supposed key central drama of social conflict. Yet at least this interpretation drew scholars to the different phases of the Revolution, and to its central dramas and conflicts. Future paradigms might not do the same. For this reason, the failure of French Revolutionary history to generate a “new paradigm” may not in fact be a reason for despondency. We should also resist the present malaise in the field, and concern about falling into a paradigmless cul-​de-​sac, for another reason. History never stands still. In the years since the publication of Lynn Hunt’s essay, and especially since the referendum in favor of a withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union and the election of Donald J. Trump as the forty-​fifth president of the United States, a new wave of populism has swept much of the world. It involves both an anger-​filled reaction against social and cultural elites perceived as unjustly privileged and out of touch, and a renewed wave of support for strong, even authoritarian leadership

25. Maximilien Robespierre, Rapport fait au Comité du Salut Public sur les rapports des idées religieuses et morales avec les principes républicains, et sur les fêtes nationales (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1794), p. 4.

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by commanding individuals with whom followers feel a powerful bond. These new developments call for the formulation of new research agendas that will investigate the histories of celebrity, power, and politics; charismatic leadership; gender, violence, and populist propaganda; and much more. As will become clear in several essays in this volume, a scholarly reorientation of the field of the French Revolution in this direction is already taking place, although it shifts the discussion away from 1789 itself to the decades preceding it on the one hand, and to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte on the other hand. The essays collected in this volume combine to create a snapshot of some of the most interesting current research in the field. They do not point the way toward a single new “paradigm” for understanding the French Revolution or the age of democratic revolutions, but neither do they at any point display a sense of despair. What they do, instead, is give a sense of the continuing possibilities, as well as some exciting new opportunities, in the study of revolution as a fundamental part of any understanding of the modern world, whether in terms of ideas, political culture, memory, or political theory and practice. Freed from the need to embrace or discredit a single, all-​embracing paradigm, they demonstrate the many ways that the Revolution’s story is still inextricably woven into that of modernity writ large. They devote attention to many different phases of the Revolution, and to subjects that include natural rights, the nature of democratic choice, radicalization, the Terror, the aftermath of the Terror, the politics of personality and authoritarianism—​and, yes, the globalization of the Revolution. It has now been many years since such a collection of essays appeared in English, and we hope that the appearance of this one will provide scholars in many disciplines a sense of where important research in the field is heading, while providing scholars in the field itself directions for new research. This said, we do not claim to be covering all the many different varieties of historical inquiry currently taking place with regard to the French Revolution. The essays collected here are oriented, for the most part, toward cultural and intellectual history, and reflect the influence of the “political culture” approach pioneered in their different ways by François

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Furet and Keith Michael Baker. It is no coincidence that both of the editors, and four of the eight contributors (Edelstein, Friedland, Bell, and Zizek) have had close working relationships with Baker, although none was his formal advisee. We have no desire to slight the important work currently being done in other fields of French Revolutionary history, particularly economic, social, and gender history. But we believe that while the overall interpretations of the Revolution associated with the “political culture” approach no longer have the status of a “paradigm” (if, indeed, they ever did), these methods of analysis remain enormously useful. A close attention to political language, to the changing meanings of key terms, to the representations of key events and personalities, and to the interplay of language and action, are all still capable of providing striking insights into the nature of the events that transpired in France (and beyond) starting in 1789.26 The volume’s first two essays deal with the trajectories of fundamental political ideas before and after the French Revolution, and more specifically with the now-​central issue of rights. As Dan Edelstein shows in his essay, “Nature or Nation? Rights Conflicts in the Age of the French Revolution,” the century that was capped off by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen showed little indication, during its first fifty years, that it would come to care so much about the “natural and imprescriptible rights of man” (art. 2). So how did this particular rights regime come to hold such sway? As Edelstein demonstrates, the Enlightenment did not invent the idea of inalienable rights, which had already been forcefully expressed in the sixteenth century, notably by revolutionary Huguenots. But a century of absolutist politics had silenced this discourse in France, despite its continuing success especially across the Channel. Its rediscovery in the eighteenth century does not appear to have been triggered by cross-​ cultural currents or the rereading of older documents but by the group of intellectuals known as Physiocrats, who deployed it first in the domain of economics, and later in social and political affairs as well. Edelstein also emphasizes that the concept of the collective rights of the nation had 26. For a classic statement of the approach, see Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, pp. 1–​27.

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equally deep roots in the political culture of the Old Regime, in this case in the discourse of the sovereign courts (parlements), which constituted the principal institutional opposition to the monarchy. In the next contribution to the volume, “Every Island Is Not Haiti: The French Revolution in the Windward Islands,” Paul Friedland (Cornell) examines the issue of natural rights from the perspective of the revolutionary events in the Caribbean in the 1790s. Current research on the topic tends to see every revolt by people of color in the Caribbean as either being directly influenced by the great slave rebellion of Saint Domingue in 1791, or as a precursor to the completion of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, and the accompanying race war. By exploring two lesser-​known rebellions—​ the so-​called Fédon Rebellion in Grenada and the Brigands’ War in St. Lucia—​Friedland shows the limitation of the category of race to the rebels’ aims. Not every island in the Caribbean was Haiti, he argues. The rebels in other Caribbean islands constantly and self-​consciously endeavored to remove race as a relevant category, insisting instead on the universality of their revolution. The rebels outside Haiti hardly ever mentioned the revolt in Saint Domingue in their documents. They preferred to invoke the rhetoric and the universalist spirit of the French Revolution instead. The next two essays in the volume turn to the realm of late eighteenth-​ century political culture and the role of exceptional figures in it. In his essay, “The Politics of Popularity:  Celebrity Culture and the French Revolution,” Antoine Lilti (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) explains how celebrity, which appeared in the eighteenth century as a new characteristic of cultural life, became during the Revolution a key mechanism of political life as well. Framing his argument through a discussion of the celebrity status of Napoleon Bonaparte, Lilti’s essay traces the evolution of celebrity in the second half of the eighteenth century. Celebrity, which is based on the curiosity of contemporaries about individuals and on sentimental empathy, emerged in France in contradistinction to traditional forms of renown such as glory and reputation. The result was a transformation in traditional forms of power in which even the French monarchy itself participated (as the emblematic case of Marie-​Antoinette reveals). Later, celebrity influenced the revolutionaries

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and paved the way to the rise of Bonaparte. The latter’s celebrity was much more than a political instrument. It was an expression of a new form of affective and personal attachment, based on a fiction of intimacy, on which most modern forms of political representation continue to depend down to the present day. Following closely on Lilti’s footsteps, David A.  Bell (Princeton) develops similar themes in his contribution, “Charismatic Authority in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.” Bell’s essay examines the emergence, during the eighteenth century, of what he calls the figure of the charismatic revolutionary leader. It considers the characteristics associated with such leaders, tracing their roots in such sources as the Enlightenment cult of genius, the eighteenth-​century worship of “les grands hommes,” new forms of celebrity, and the sentimental novel. It puts particular emphasis on the literary origins, stressing that eighteenth-​century forms of sensibility and sentimentality could contribute to eighteenth-​century versions of cults of personality as easily as they could help bring about new forms of empathy and new concepts of rights. It discusses the applicability of Max Weber’s definition of “charisma” to this figure, and distinguishes it carefully from monarchy. Bell’s chapter places the phenomenon firmly within an Atlantic context, showing how the form of charismatic leadership associated with Napoleon built on the treatment of earlier hero figures, including Peter the Great of Russia, Pasquale Paoli of Corsica, and George Washington. The essay concludes with speculation about the ways that the story of charismatic leadership played out in France during the Revolution, and with thoughts about the relationship of charismatic revolutionary leaders to democratic systems of government. The following two essays turn to the question of the French Revolution in the modern historical imagination. In “The Fate of Nations Is the Work of Genius: The French Revolution and the Great Man Theory of History,” Darrin M. McMahon (Dartmouth) traces the roots of the “great man theory of history” back to Enlightenment theories. The French Revolution is often thought of as a crucible of modern mass politics, an event that led to the emergence of the people as an agent and actor of social change. Less often remarked is the fact that the Revolution also witnessed the

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crystallization of the idea that the single individual of genius and power, “the great man,” is the true motor of history. Although dismissed today as simplistic and naive, the “great man theory of history” enjoyed widespread currency in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, feeding an ideology that depicted the historical process, as Thomas Carlyle famously remarked, as the “biography of great men.” McMahon sketches the history of this theory and its ideological implications from the mid-​eighteenth to the mid-​twentieth centuries, when it contributed to the rise of one self-​proclaimed (evil) great man: Adolf Hitler. In his close attention to Napoleon Bonaparte, McMahon’s work also intersects with Lilti’s essay on celebrity, and Bell’s on charisma. In “‘New History’: The Radical Pasts of the French Revolution, 1789–​ 1794,” Joseph Zizek (University of Auckland, New Zealand) focuses on what he calls the revolutionary obsession with history “from within.” As is well known, many contemporaries believed—​for good or ill—​that the French Revolution marked a rupture in history from which a new history would spring. But what kind of new history? And how could one narrate this transformation? Zizek argues that the Revolution’s sweeping (if short-​lived) democratization of print culture enabled remarkable experiments in historical practice. History writing during the Revolution was neither formally codified as a practice nor provided with any institutional site. It was instead the province of diverse pamphleteers, journalists, novelists, militants, and educators, who embraced what they saw as the emancipatory possibilities of the revolutionary era. Zizek’s essay shows how these very diverse revolutionary practitioners framed history as the essential fulcrum between the tragic past and utopian future. Ultimately, they discovered the practice of history in a revolutionary era to be fraught with difficulties, but even though many of their historical experiments are today forgotten, they left behind surprising and conflicted legacies for the future. The final two essays in the volume treat aspects of political theory and practice. In “The Thermidorians’ Terror:  Atrocities, Tragedies, Trauma,” Howard G. Brown (Binghamton University, State University of New York) analyzes the deployment of the notion of a “reign of terror” in

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Thermidorian political practice. The Thermidorian period did not invent the reign of terror, but it did shape its image into one of an unprecedented collection of atrocities and tragedies. The massive infusion of pathos into politics during the Thermidorian period helped to magnify the psychological impact of the violence of 1793–​94, as well as to stretch that impact well into 1795 and even beyond. Repeatedly exaggerating the repression and violence of the Robespierrist regime, and amalgamating various sorts of “victims” into a barely differentiated mass, helped to give the “reign of terror” the recognizable shape it still enjoys today. More specifically, the organizing strategies, images, and tropes used to represent violence during the Thermidorian period helped to create a wider collective trauma experienced by many more French men and women than actually suffered serious persecution under the Revolutionary Government of 1793–​94. The result was the emergence of a particular national consciousness of suffering, one that helped to turn “peasants into Frenchmen” in ways that Eugen Weber never explored. Concluding the volume is an essay by Sophia Rosenfeld (University of Pennsylvania) entitled “Of Revolutions and the Problem of Choice.” In the cities of Western Europe and its colonies, the so-​called “calico-​craze” of the early eighteenth century helped spawn a new social practice and form of entertainment that came to be known in the Anglophone world as “going shopping.” This activity, in turn, produced a new attachment to preference determination and choice-​making that several prominent historians—​in an effort to reconnect the history of capitalism with that of the American and French Revolutions—​have seen as fundamental to the turn to political choice-​making that they associate with the birth of modern democracy. Rosenfeld’s article looks closely at the very different trajectories and nature of eighteenth-​century consumer and political choice, or shopping and voting, and argues instead for disentangling these developments. The chapter demonstrates that the individuated, privitized, and indeed commercialized form of choice-​making we now typically take as an essential marker of democracy was not a product of the early eighteenth century but of the late nineteenth century and that it furthermore had little relevance to the conception of politics common to the Age of Revolutions.

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At stake in Rosenfeld’s article is ultimately the larger question of the relationship between social change, ideational transformations, and political habits. As such, it is a fitting conclusion and a good summary of the volume’s essays as a whole. This volume grew out of a symposium held at Princeton University in April, 2015, under the aegis of the Eighteenth-​Century Seminar of the Princeton History Department. The editors are grateful to the History Department for its support of the seminar, to Linda Colley, the co-​ organizer of the Seminar, and to Jennifer Loessy. This volume is dedicated, in fondness and gratitude, to our teachers in French Revolutionary history, Robert Darnton and Keith Michael Baker.

Rethinking the Age of Revolutions

1

Nature or Nation? Rights Conflicts in the Age of the French Revolution DAN EDELSTEIN ■

While historians disagree about the moment when our contemporary understanding of human rights crystallized, they share an assumption that rights are first and foremost the property of individuals.1 This defining quality of rights is what has distinguished, since the late medieval period, the “subjective” concept of ius from its “objective” sense, more common in Antiquity.2 Both of these understandings featured prominently in the early-​modern natural law tradition that grew out

1. See notably Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Jenny Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012); Steven Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Stefan-​Ludwig Hoffman, “Human Rights and History,” Past and Present 231, no. 2 (2016): 279–​310. 2.  See Michel Villey, “La genèse du droit subjectif chez Guillaume d’Occam,” Archives de philosophie du droit 9 (1964): 97–​127; Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–​1625 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997); and Annabel Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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of Scholasticism and the recovery of classical sources;3 and it was this tradition that in turn provided the basis for Enlightenment and revolutionary human rights regimes. But natural law theorists did not have a monopoly on rights. Constitutional lawyers also attributed rights to individuals, with English writers celebrating the “rights and privileges” of their countrymen.4 And jurists extended rights to corporate bodies as well, including, in France, to the French nation itself.5 In some cases, constitutional rights were seamlessly incorporated into the natural law tradition: hence, American and English lawyers celebrated the “natural rights” afforded to English citizens, courtesy of the Magna Carta.6 In other instances, however, claims in favor of national rights conflicted with the demand for individual natural rights. It is one such conflict that I  examine here:  I show how the tension between human and national rights during the French Revolution contributed to political repression during the Terror. Some scholars have questioned the extent to which human rights derive from natural rights, noting for instance how the phrase “droits de l’homme” only surfaced in the late eighteenth century (“human rights” was similarly uncommon before the nineteenth).7 But the

3.  See notably Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 2 vols., esp. vol. 2; and Benjamin Straumann, Roman Law in the State of Nature:  The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius’ Natural Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 4.  See J. G.  A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law:  A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (rev. ed.; Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1987). 5. See Dale Van Kley, “The Estates General as Ecumenical Council: The Constitutionalism of Corporate Consensus and the Parlement’s Ruling of September 25, 1788,” Journal of Modern History 61, no. 1 (1989): 1–​52. 6. I analyze this Anglo-​American doctrine of “natural constitutionalism” in a longer version of this paper. Some examples include James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston:  J. Almon, 1764); and Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765–1769), 4 vols. 7. See, e.g., Hunt, Inventing Human Rights.

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conceptual history of human rights should not be reduced to philology. Before “human rights” or “droits de l’homme” became the preferred keywords, a host of related expressions were in use, most of which exhibit a connection to natural law theory. In the first half of this chapter, I offer evidence that the late eighteenth-​century spike in human rights talk was not a novelty, but the recurrence of a political pattern that stretched back across the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries. The question to ask about the French Enlightenment, therefore, is how and why did rights re-​emerge at that time as a critical keyword of philosophical discourse.8 I argue that this return of rights talk in late eighteenth-​century France was largely due to the proselytizing efforts of a small, well-​connected group of economists known as the Physiocrats. But just as their individualistic notion of rights was catching on again in France, expanding from property rights to political liberty, another concept of rights was gaining favor. As the second half of this chapter shows, lawyers affiliated with the Paris Parlement began to promote an older, constitutional theory of national rights (droits de la nation), to counter the judicial reforms of chancellor Maupeou. This theory rested on a concept of the nation as a pre-​political, singular entity (as opposed to a collective body politic, created by a social contract). Parisian lawyers, among others, brought this theory of national rights to the National Assembly; if it did not feature centrally in the crafting of the Declaration of Rights, it re-​emerged with force as deputies began to fear for the safety of the French state. In the name of defending the rights of the nation, however, they facilitated the loss of rights for individuals.

8. Here is where I differ most significantly from Hunt, who views the “relatively sudden eruption of universalizing rights language in the second half of the eighteenth century” as a novel event, whereas I place it in the context of earlier sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century eruptions: see Lynn Hunt, “The Long and the Short of the History of Human Rights,” Past and Present 233 (2016): 323–​31 (328).

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THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF HUMAN RIGHTS: FROM THE WARS OF RELIGION TO THE PHYSIOCRATS

The expression “droits de l’homme” first appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century.9 But this simple observation is misleading, as there was an abundance of expressions circulating in French at this time, and long before, that referred to the same concept. Many authors spoke of “les droits des hommes,” often qualifying these rights as “natural”: hence the Protestant historian Jean Jennet referred to “les droits naturels, & essentiels des hommes” in his 1704 Histoire de la république des Provinces-​ Unies.10 Another common expression was les droits de l’humanité, which can already be found in a 1691 translation of Cicero.11 Other authors invoked “les droits humains.”12 But by far the most common expressions employed before the Revolution were variants on “droits naturels” (e.g., “droits de la nature,” “les droits du coeur et de la nature,” “droits de

9.  Hunt credits Rousseau with the first use, in his Du contrat social (1762), though an earlier instance can be found in Franc̜ois Ilharat de La Chambre’s Abregé de la philosophie, ed. Jean-​Omer Joly de Fleury (Paris: Delaguette, 1754), 2 vols., 1:421 (“jaloux de conserver les droits de l’homme, nous allons démontrer . . .”). For Hunt, see Inventing Human Rights, 23–​24. 10. Jean Jennet, Histoire de la république des Provinces-​Unies des Païs-​Bas (The Hague: Jean van Millinge, 1704), 4 vols., 1:19. Other early uses include Gerard Noodt, Du pouvoir des souverains et de la liberté de conscience, trans. Jean Barbeyrac (1st ed., 1707; Amsterdam: Pierre Humbert, 1724), 238 (“les droits naturels des hommes”); and Thomas Gordon, Discours historiques, critiques et politiques sur Tacite, trans. Pierre Daudé (Amsterdam: F. Changuion, 1751), 3 vols., 1:xvii–​xviii (“les droits des hommes”). 11. “QUICONQUE ôte quelque chose à un autre pour en profiter, blesse les droits de l’humanité, & viole la loy de la nature,” Les Offices de Cicéron, traduits en françois sur l’édition latine de Graevius avec des notes, trans. Philippe Goibaud-​Dubois (Paris: J.-​B. Coignard, 1691), 344; and again 367–​68. See also Andrew Michael Ramsay, Essay de politique (The Hague: H. Scheurleer, 1719), 61 (“les droits naturels de l’humanité”); and Helvétius, De l’esprit (1758), 21, n. C (“tous les droits de l’humanité). 12. See the note by Jean Barbeyrac in his translation of Hugo Grotius, Le droit de la guerre et de la paix (Amsterdam: P. de Coup, 1724), 2 vols.; bk. 2, chap. XIX; 2:548. See also Louis de Boissy, La vie est un songe, comédie-​héroïque (Paris: P. Prault, 1732), 31; and Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Entretiens de Phocion sur le rapport de la morale avec la politique (Amsterdam: D. Aillaud, 1763), 65. See below on the earlier uses of this expression.

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l’état de nature”).13 As noted above, authors often modified whichever expression they chose with “naturel,” a pattern that persisted up until the French Revolution:  the Preamble of the Declaration of Rights invokes “les droits naturels, inaliénables et sacrés de l’Homme.” This discursive pattern underscores a fact that becomes evident once the language of rights is studied more closely, namely that these expressions all derive from philosophical theories of natural law. It may be that “ ‘natural right(s)’ had too many possible meanings” in French, but that is not a reason to artificially separate the history of human rights from the history of natural law.14 Once this paternity of human rights has been recognized, we are forced to grapple with the fact that they are much older than we tend to think. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Etienne de La Boétie was already invoking rights in terms that would not be out of place two hundred years later: “if we lived with the rights that nature gave us [les droits que la nature nous a donnés] and the lessons she imparts, we would naturally obey our parents, follow reason, and be no-​one’s serfs.”15 Here we find the same “preservation” regime of rights that the philosophes would later espouse:  an understanding of rights as pre-​ political entitlements that remain in force in political society. Later in that century, Huguenot revolutionaries would “weaponize” this rights regime to press their case against the French king:  the theologian Théodore de Bèze (or Beza), for instance, would assert, “they say that magistrates, and especially sovereigns, should command; I grant it, but I add that their power is limited by divine and human rights [les droits

13. Droits naturels and droits de la nature are extremely common; the other expressions are from Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, and Discours sur l’économie politique, respectively. 14. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 23. 15.  Etienne de La Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire (Paris:  Bossard, 1922), 62. This text was written ~1549, and first published (posthumously) in 1574. See, e.g., J. H. M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1959); and Nannerl Keohane, “The Radical Humanism of Étienne de La Boétie,” Journal of the History of Ideas 38, no. 1 (1977): 119–​30.

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divins & humains].”16 The expression droits humains occurs multiple times in this work. Human rights talk was indeed already flourishing two hundred years before Rousseau, thanks to the revival of Thomism at the University of Paris in the early 1500s, and its infusion with conciliarism, an ecclesiastical doctrine granting the council of the Church greater authority than the Pope.17 Even this moment did not mark the conceptual birth of natural rights, to which authors had already been appealing since the late Middle Ages.18 But the intellectual movement that began in Paris around John Major and Jacques Almain unleashed a cascade of works on natural rights that flooded through Spain (with the School of Salamanca), France, the Netherlands, England (around the Civil War), the Holy Roman Empire, and eventually the Americas. It was a wave that extended from the Wars of Religion to the Age of Revolution, and ensured that natural rights would never fall completely out of use—​even if there were periods of silence. Curiously, one of the longer silences in this history occurred in France. After the assassination of Henri IV in 1610, natural rights quickly came to be viewed as a regicide doctrine, due to their association with the Jesuit Juan de Mariana’s natural law justification of tyrannicide in 1598.19 Appeals to natural rights suddenly became scarce, and would only resurface in

16. Théodore de Bèze, Du droit des magistrats sur leurs subjets: Traitté tres necessaire en ce temps pour advertir de leur devoir, tant les magistrats que les subjets (1575; Paris: EDHIS, 1977), 100. 17. See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 2 vols., esp. vol. 2; see also Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 18.  See Michel Villey, “La genèse du droit subjectif chez Guillaume d’Occam,” Archives de philosophie du droit 9 (1964): 97–​127; and Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). More recently, some scholars have argued that this concept was already current in Antiquity:  see Fred D. Miller, Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle’s Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 19.  See Harro Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought:  The Society of Jesus and the State, c.1540–​1630 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004), chap.  13; on the purging of the University of Paris at this time, see Lawrence Brockliss, French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1987), 298–​300.

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French works after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685. As a century earlier, it was the Huguenots in particular who brandished the language of natural rights to defend themselves against a “tyrannical” Catholic monarch. But this flurry of rights-​based political criticism largely subsided after Louis XIV’s death, thirty years later. Montesquieu does not mention natural rights in any of his major works; and they are mostly absent from Voltaire’s pre-​1750 writings.20 Of course, the concept was available in foreign works, perhaps most prominently in Hobbes’s De Cive, which was widely read in France after its translation in 1649.21 But it was not a concept that French writers commonly availed themselves of, at least before 1750. After that date, one finds a smattering of references to natural rights in the writings of the philosophes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Helvétius in chief. But it was only in the 1760s and 1770s that the concept truly caught on again in France. This chronology is surprising, as it does not map on, in any obvious way, to the history of natural law publications in the eighteenth century. A  closer look at these two decades, however, reveals the important role played by the Physiocrats in reinserting natural rights into philosophical and political debates. It was the founder of Physiocracy, the doctor François Quesnay, who breathed new life into the idea of natural rights.22 Before turning his

20.  Data from ARTFL-​ FRANTEXT database, the “Tout Voltaire” database, and the Electronic Enlightenment Project. Montesquieu texts include the Lettres persanes (1721), the Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains (1734), and De l’esprit des lois (1748). One interesting exception can be found in Voltaire’s English dedication to Queen Caroline in La Henriade: “YOUR MAJESTY will find in this book . . . the Rights of Kings always asserted, and those of Mankind never set aside,” in La Henriade de Mr. de Voltaire (London: Woodman & Lyon, 1728), n.p. As far as I can tell, Voltaire would not celebrate such rights in French for another twenty years. 21. See, e.g., Yves Glaziou, Hobbes en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: PUF, 1993). Leviathan would not be translated into French until the twentieth century. 22. For biographical details about Quesnay, see Jacqueline Hecht, “La vie de François Quesnay,” in François Quesnay et la physiocratie, 2 vols. (Paris: Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques, 1958), 1:211–​94. In a longer version of this paper, I  discuss Quesnay’s intellectual references, which include, Aristotle, Cicero, Malebranche, and Hobbes (the only natural law philosopher he names, though only to disagree with).

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attention to economics, Quesnay had written a series of works on surgical and medical topics, including an Essai physique sur l’œconomie animale (1736). In a much revised and enlarged edition of this work, published in 1747, he laid out the fundamental premises of the political theory that would later underpin Physiocratic doctrine. Here we find a clear exposition of how “in the social order, men have legitimate and natural rights.”23 Quesnay would repeat and develop these ideas in Le Droit naturel (1765), where he outlined the basic natural law principles of Physiocracy. Rather than having to “give up” this right when we enter into society (as we do for Hobbes), in Quesnay’s account the passage from a state of “pure nature” to a state of society or “multitude” in fact extends and secures our natural rights:  “when they enter into society and form compacts for reciprocal advantage, they will greatly increase their enjoyment of their natural right [leur jouissance de leur droit naturel].”24 For Quesnay, these rights were essentially, and almost entirely, those of property. He does not appear to have been moved by sympathy or any humanitarian concerns when advocating for natural rights. Nor did he have any political agenda in mind, beyond convincing the government to deregulate the grain trade. The natural rights that he championed did not include a right to self-​government, or a right to freedom of expression. Their overriding objective was to increase the wealth of landowners, and through them, of the nation. These statements would be echoed by all of Quesnay’s collaborators, including Paul Le Mercier de La Rivière, who wrote the Physiocratic text that gained the most notoriety, L’Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques (1767).25 Here as well, natural rights

23.  From the table of contents, in François Quesnay, Essai physique sur l’œconomie animale (Paris: Cavelier, 1747), 3:609. 24. Quesnay, Essai physique sur l’œconomie animale, 15. 25. See Mercier de La Rivière, L’Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques (London: Nourse, 1767), 12; see also Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, De l’origine et des progrès d’une science nouvelle (Paris: Desaint: 1768), 364; and Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, La Science, ou Les droits et les devoirs de l’homme (Lausanne, Switzerland: Grasset, 1774), 6–​7.

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provided the first line of defense for the Physiocratic theory of property and free trade. But it did not take long before others appropriated the concept of natural rights for more politically liberal uses. A year after Mirabeau published La Science, his son, the future revolutionary leader, published an Essai sur le despotisme (1775), in which he echoed many Physiocratic claims, but put them to much different uses: “men retain in a well-​ordered society the full extent of their natural rights [toute l’étendue de leurs droits naturels], and acquire a much greater faculty to use these rights,” the comte de Mirabeau intoned, ventriloquizing Quesnay. But the rights to which this “well-​ ordered society” entitle us were not merely those of property:  we also had natural political rights: “our enthusiasm for our kings, our pride, and especially our long ignorance of the rights of man [l’ignorance si longue des droits de l’homme], have made us leap into our shackles.”26 Mirabeau would rehearse this argument fourteen years later, when he wrote that “ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man [l’ignorance, l’oubli ou le mépris des droits de l’Homme] are the sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments.” These words would make their way into the preamble to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In Mirabeau, we thus find a direct link between the Physiocratic theory of natural rights and the Declaration. As we will see, by 1789 the thesis that natural rights should be retained in political society was not only a Physiocratic position, and had become accepted by others, including most of the philosophes. But the Physiocrats—​and perhaps more importantly, Physiocratic “fellow travelers”—​played an important role in transmitting and transforming natural rights into political entitlements. Another key figure in this process was the marquis de Condorcet.27 While

26.  Honoré-​Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, Essai sur le despotisme (2nd ed.; London, 1776), 36, 152 (emphasis added). 27.  See Keith Baker, Condorcet:  From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Condorcet, Adam Smith, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2001); and David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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not a card-​carrying Physiocrat himself, Condorcet was closely connected to their circle, notably through his mentor, Anne-​Robert-​Jacques Turgot. Condorcet took up his pen to defend Turgot’s controversial policies, and did so in the name of natural rights.28 In his Lettres sur le commerce des grains, he attacked those who would dare strip men of their economic rights.29 But only a few years later, he repurposed natural rights to rail against slavery: “it is impossible that it always benefits a man, and moreover a perpetual class of men, to be deprived of the natural rights of humanity.”30 After 1770, appeals to natural rights became increasingly commonplace in texts by the philosophes, particularly those connected with the salon of baron d’Holbach.31 The coterie is rarely thought of as Physiocratic, but these two social networks overlapped significantly. Quesnay hosted Diderot, d’Alembert, Helvétius, and Marmontel, among others, in his Versailles apartment, and published three articles in the Encyclopédie.32 The marquis de Saint-​Lambert and Charles-​Georges Le Roy were key members of both groups.33 It was in the baron’s salon that the Neapolitan abbé Ferdinando Galiani would try out many of the arguments that appeared in his 1770 anti-​Physiocratic Dialogues sur le commerce des 28.  On Condorcet and natural rights, see Williams, Condorcet and Modernity, chap.  2; and Vicenzo Ferrone, Storia dei diritti dell’uomo (Rome: Laterza, 2014). Neither relate Condorcet’s defense of natural rights to his Physiocratic leanings. 29.  Marquis de Condorcet, Lettres sur le commerce des grains (Paris:  Chez Couturier père, 1774), 21. 30. Marquis de Condorcet, Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres (Neufchâtel: Société typographique, 1781), 14. 31. On this salon, see in particular Alan C. Kors, D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). More generally, see Antoine Lilti, Le Monde des salons: Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005). 32. See Liana Vardi, The Physiocrats and the World of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 41–​42. 33.  See Kors, D’Holbach’s Coterie, 17–​18 (and passim); on Le Roy’s relations with Quesnay, see Christine Théré and Loïc Charles, “The Writing Workshop of François Quesnay and the Making of Physiocracy,” History of Political Economy 40, no. 1 (2008): 1–​42. For Saint-​Lambert, see Hecht, “Vie de François Quesnay,” 272.

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blés;34 and it was there as well that the abbé André Morellet would first hear his arguments, before taking the Physiocrats’ defense, publishing a Réfutation of Galiani’s Dialogues.35 The member of the coterie holbachique whose political views owed the most to the Physiocratic theory was arguably the baron himself.36 Onward from the late 1760s, and under the cover of anonymity, d’Holbach churned out a series of atheistic political works that sought to re-​found government on natural principles. The most famous of these was the Système de la nature (1770), a breathless diatribe against clerical despotism. A chief accusation d’Holbach leveled against priests and tyrants was that they stripped us of our natural and human rights.37 The specific rights that d’Holbach lists were the same as the Physiocrats: liberty, security (sûreté), and property.38 Along with resistance to oppression, these are the same natural rights that the 1789 Declaration of Rights would enshrine (art. 2).39

34. See Koen Stapelbroek, Love, Self-​deceit, and Money: Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 209–​12. 35. André Morellet, Réfutation de l’ouvrage qui a pour titre Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds (London, 1770). Morellet was commissioned by the French government to write this work, but had a genuine commitment to Physiocratic ideas. 36.  Scholars have not devoted much study to d’Holbach’s Physiocratic borrowings, though his sympathy toward the group was noted at the time:  see Vardi, Physiocrats and the World of Enlightenment, 142, n.  126. Older sources recognized the influence of Physiocracy on his ideas:  see, e.g., John Lough, “Helvétius and d’Holbach,” Modern Language Review 33, no. 3 (1938):  360–​84 (379); Everett C. Ladd, Jr., “Helvétius and D’Holbach:  ‘La Moralisation de la Politique,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 23, no. 2 (1962): 221–​38 (235). 37. See Système de la nature (London, 1775), 1:253, 1:336, 2:206, 2:262, 2:302, 2:307, 2:358, 2:362, 2:405, 2:407. 38. Système de la nature, 1:163. See also Système social, pt II, chap. 1; 2:96, 100. Compare with Mercier de la Rivière, Ordre naturel et essentiel, 440; see also 37, 77–​78, 441–​42, 454, and passim; and Dupont de Nemours, De l’origine et des progrès d’une science nouvelle (1768), 346. 39. On this additional right, see Micah Alpaugh, “The Right of Resistance to Oppression: Protest and Authority in the French Revolutionary World,” French Historical Studies 39, no. 3 (2016): 567–​98.

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RESISTING DESPOTISM: NATIONAL RIGHTS AND CONSTITUTIONALISM

Around the time the philosophes began invoking natural rights in earnest, another group of French writers also latched onto this concept. In response to Chancellor Maupeou’s 1770  “coup,” which replaced the parlements with a new set of state-​controlled tribunals, legal professionals launched an all-​out attack on the reforms, bringing natural rights theory into their rhetorical arsenal.40 A lawyer at the Paris parlement, the abbé Claude Mey published a defense of the parlementaire position in 1772, which would be revised and expanded three years later by Gabriel-​ Nicolas Maultrot (also a lawyer) and other Parisian barristers.41 The Maximes du droit public françois, as this work was known, was a two-​ volume collection of arguments for the independence of the judiciary. While historical precedents, backed up by archival sources, comprised the bulk of their evidence, the authors also synthesized works of natural law theory to buttress their cause. They cited lengthy passages of Locke’s Second Treatise and Vattel’s Droit des gens; they referenced Grotius, Hobbes (negatively), Pufendorf, Cumberland, Sidney, Heineccius, Wolff, Montesquieu, Burlamaqui, and other authorities. For the most part, the lawyers protested against laws and political regimes that violated “objective” natural law: “despotic government is contrary to natural right,” announced the title of ­chapter  2.42 But they also extended this critique to the defense of individual, subjective rights: “since the individual only consented to give up his liberty as it was useful to society, his existence, and his happiness . . . it would be harmful, and an unjust process, 40.  See notably Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution:  A Study in the History of Libertarianism, France, 1770–​1774 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). 41. See Dale Van Kley, “The Estates General as Ecumenical Council: The Constitutionalism of Corporate Consensus and the Parlement’s Ruling of September 25, 1788,” Journal of Modern History 61, no. 1 (1989): 1–​52; and David A. Bell, Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 149ff. 42.  See Claude Mey et  al., Maximes du droit public françois (Amsterdam:  M.-​M. Rey, 1775), 2 vols.; 1:32.

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to take away the use of his natural rights.”43 In general, however, Mey, Maultrot, and their collaborators adhered to what I  describe elsewhere as the transfer regime of rights:  they argued that in joining a political body, individuals gave up the personal enjoyment of their natural rights, entrusting them instead to government.44 Despite this loss of individual rights, natural right (le droit naturel), understood as the system of natural laws, still retained its normative force in political society. But where the philosophes appealed to natural law to condemn unjust or arbitrary positive laws, the lawyers went beyond this legal discourse to stake out a stronger political claim.45 Like their counterparts in the American colonies, these patriotes also insisted on the need for popular consent in matters of taxation:  “in every civilized kingdom taxes can only be imposed, even in cases of public necessity, with the consent of the nation” (1:136). They justified this principle, in part, with a long quote from Locke on legislative power (Second Treatise, chap. 10), as well from older, conciliarist arguments;46 but they also appealed to a different set of rights, “les droits nationaux.” These were the historic rights that the French people had retained when they first joined together to form a political community. Again, some of these rights, such as property, belonged to the individual (“every citizen enjoys the right of property over his goods,” 1:42), as opposed to sovereignty (“le pouvoir de jurisdiction”), which the monarch alone possessed. But other “national rights” were ascribed to corporate bodies, first and foremost the Estates General, which had “the right . . . to decide” (1:253–​54) in situations when royal authority was in

43. Mey et al., Maximes du droit public françois, 1:41; the authors here were loosely translating from Christian Wolff ’s Jus naturae et jus gentium (1740–​49). Subsequent references to this work will be provided inline. 44.  Mey et  al., Maximes du droit public françois, 1:40 and 1:233. In the longer version of this paper, I  show how this understanding of rights in political society is more related to a Spinozist-​Lockean conception, as opposed to the Hobbesian argument that natural rights must simply be “renounced” in society. 45.  I  develop the concept of a legal (as opposed to political) discourse in “Enlightenment Rights Talk,” Journal of Modern History 86, no.3 (2014): 530–​65. 46. See Van Kley, “Estates General as Ecumenical Council.”

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question, as well as “the right to prescribe the rules of [French] government” (1:316). This doctrine of national rights was by no means novel.47 Vattel had already theorized les droits de la nation in very similar terms in his influential Le Droit des gens (1758; bk. 1, chap. 3), which the parlementaires quoted at length. For Vattel and his followers, the rights of the nation were simply an expression of the lois fondamentales: if royal government was bound by certain constitutional rules (e.g., Salic law), then those rules afforded correlative rights to the nation. Earlier French constitutional theorists had made the same argument, with the phrase “droits de la nation” appearing repeatedly in seventeenth-​century political theory.48 The authority of such rights would be tested during the controversy over the status of Louis XIV’s “legitimized” sons: in his 1714 edict of Marly, the dying king had placed the duc de Maine and the comte de Toulouse, his sons with Mme de Montespan, in the royal line of succession. Defending this edict, one pamphleteer wrote in favor of the princes, “would it not be more reasonable to conclude that the edict, far from violating the Rights of the Nation, far from hurting its interests, was faithful to its original spirit?”49 But another countered, on behalf of the princes of the blood, that “the edict of 1714 violates the Rights of the Nation,” precisely because “it establishes a new order of succession to the Throne, and this order deprives the Nation of the right it has to elect its Kings.”50 The looming constitutional crisis would be averted, as Louis XIV’s great-​grandson survived to succeed him as Louis XV (after the deaths of his brother,

47. See Bell, Lawyers and Citizens, 118; and David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–​1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 58. 48.  See, for instance, Pierre Jurieu:  “The Officers of the Court and the Crown have enjoyed more or less power, but always in relation to the King: the Rights of the Nation have always remained in their entirety,” “Neuvième mémoire,” Les soupirs de la France esclave qui aspire après la liberté (Amsterdam, 1690), 131. 49. Mémoire instructif sur la requeste présentée au Roy contre les Princes legitimez (Paris: Ganeau, 1716), 40. On this affair more broadly, see Colin Jones, The Great Nation (London: Penguin, 2002), 36–​39. 50. Jean de La Chapelle, Réflexions politiques et historiques sur l’Affaire des Princes (n.p., n.d.), 49.

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father, and grandfather in 1711–​12). But this dispute highlights how “national rights” belonged initially to constitutional theory, not natural law. They would nonetheless be patched together fairly seamlessly by the parlementaires, to produce a French version of the natural constitutionalism so common in Anglo-​American political writing.51 But where constitutional rights were portrayed by English legal theorists (Blackstone in chief) as mere extensions of universal, primeval natural rights, the relation between national and natural rights, in the French case, was not one to one. Instead of being an aggregate of every citizen’s natural (or even constitutional) rights, the rights of the nation were collective rights, rights that “we the people” could not enjoy individually, on our own, but only as a community. Accordingly, these rights tended to be affixed, as we saw, to corporate bodies such as the Estates General or the Parlement, which also presented itself, in 1788, as a defender of the “droits de la nation.”52 This distinction raised the specter of conflict between natural and national rights: if “the nation” could only enjoy its rights through the medium of representative bodies, then the natural rights that each citizen possessed risked being overruled by these greater, corporate interests. This collective quality of national rights is particularly evident in one of the most influential pre-​revolutionary pamphlets, the comte d’Antraigues’ Mémoire sur les Etats Généraux.53 This student of Rousseau’s forcefully argued in favor of a legislative assembly composed of elected representatives: “A free people is governed by laws; laws only deserve this august title when they are a declaration of the public will.”54 As the parlementaires 51. There was also a direct English influence on the French conception of national rights: the expression “droits de la nation” often appears in the context of discussions of English politics. 52. See the “déclaration des droits de la nation” of the Paris Parlement, May 3, 1788, in Stéphane Rials, La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (Paris: Hachette, 1988), 522. 53. See Dale Van Kley, “From the Lessons of French History to Truths for All Times and All People: Origins of an Anti-​Historical Declaration,” in The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed. Dale Van Kley (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1994), 72–​113; Bell, Cult of the Nation, 71; Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies & Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 94ff. 54. Comte d’Antraigues, Mémoire sur les Etats Généraux (1788), 21.

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before him, d’Antraigues relied both on historical precedent and natural law theory to justify this right to self-​government: “others . . . have sought to ground the rights of the nation on a timeless foundation, basing them on the natural rights of all human society. They are the ones who seem to have considered the topic most fully . . .” (16–​17). But here again we see how individual natural rights are transformed to become the property of a collective body. As with Rousseau’s social contract, individuals who join together into political society transfer their natural rights to a sovereign legislative assembly, in exchange for laws—​with the difference that, for d’Antraigues, this assembly is a representative body.55 It is this assembly, however, that comes to enjoy and defend the rights of the nation: “The rights of the estates general are the very right of the nation; it is in this respect that one must determine their breath . . . we should ask what are the rights of the nation, which expresses its will through its representatives” (20). This transfer of rights was not irreversible: if national representatives failed to express their constituents’ genuine interests, they could be repudiated.56 But so long as they faithfully conveyed the will of the people, it was in them that the national rights were to remain vested. Where Anglo-​American natural constitutionalism placed the preservation regime of rights within a legal and political tradition, its French version centered instead on the transfer regime.57 The French droits de la nation were dissimilar from “English rights and liberties” in that the latter continued to be enjoyed by individual English citizens. Parliament, in English constitutionalism, also had rights (as did the king); but these

55. While d’Antraigues occasionally implies that the people retain individual rights, he broadly subscribes to the transfer regime: “Pour ceux qu’il [Dieu] appelloit à se réunir en société, sans doute il exigea & il sanctionna le sacrifice de cette indépendance sans limite [natural liberty], mais il la remplaça par une autre plus difficile peut-​être à conserver, mais tout aussi sacrée. Il soumit l’homme à la loi, & ne le soumit jamais qu’à elle” (8). 56. See, in particular, Friedland, Political Actors, 97–​99. 57.  I  develop this comparison, and the concept of “natural constitutionalism,” in the book-​ length version of this chapter; but a classic example of this merging of natural and constitutional rights can be found in Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.

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rights were not “the” national rights. To be sure, in neither the French nor English cases did the existence of corporate rights preclude that of individual rights; there was no intrinsic incompatibility between the two. But French champions of natural constitutionalism did not place nearly as much emphasis on individual natural rights as their English and American counterparts, who often rested their entire politico-​legal edifices on this foundation. By minimizing the lasting force of natural rights in political society (in accordance with the transfer regime), and by insisting a contrario on corporate rights, the French promoters of this doctrine flirted with disenfranchising individuals of their subjective rights. Why did the French merger of constitutionalism and natural law theory differ so substantially from its Anglo-​American equivalent? Some of the difference had to do with English particularities: English common law was idiosyncratic in its affordance of rights to individuals, particularly where criminal procedure was concerned. Accordingly, when English authors such as William Blackstone combined a traditional constitutional doctrine with arguments and concepts drawn from natural law theory, the logical point of juncture was individual rights. This equation of natural and constitutional rights would be the defining feature of Anglo-​ American natural constitutionalism from the Levellers to the American revolutionaries. While some of the early sixteenth-​century French efforts to assimilate constitutionalism and natural law went in a similar direction, the widespread erasure of natural rights talk under absolutist political culture prevented the join between natural and national rights from imposing itself in the pre-​revolutionary period. But the specificities of French political culture also contributed to this difference. In particular, it is the centrality of the “nation” in this constitutional theory that calls for explanation. As David A. Bell has observed, la nation was a contested term in the eighteenth century, with multiple, often mutually exclusive definitions in circulation.58 One feature that many of these definitions did share, however, was that of an organically constructed community. You were born into a nation (from the Latin natio, “birth”); 58. See Bell, Cult of the Nation, 73.

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you did not contract into it. The Dictionary of the French Academy defined “nation” as “all the inhabitants of the same state, of the same country, who live under the same laws, and speak the same language, etc.”59 The “Collège des Quatre-​Nations,” a school in Paris, admitted students hailing from four recently acquired French territories; students at the University of Paris also divided into “nations” (such as French, Picard, Norman, and German). In Henri de Boulainvilliers’s influential Etat de la France, the French nation refers to the Franks, giving the term a similar meaning to the German Volk.60 As a pre-​political community, the nation did not fit easily in natural law theory (the term is not found, for instance, in Locke’s Second Treatise). It was largely out of place in the social contract narratives that recounted the passage from a state of nature to a civil society, since an organic collectivity of this sort could only be expected after individuals had contracted together. It was in this posterior sense that Rousseau used the expression in The Social Contract (see, e.g., 2.4). There was a French theory of natural law, however, that facilitated the inclusion of the nation, and that was Physiocracy. In Quesnay’s Aristotelian revision of the social contract narrative, there never was a time when we did not live in society, and so nations could precede states. Indeed, according to Quesnay, the formation of nations was a precondition for the development of government: as families grew in size and came into contact, They grow used to seeing each other, they become more trusting, they help each other, they become allied through marriages, and establish personal Nations [des Nations particulieres] of sorts, where all join together for common defense, and each remains in a state of entire liberty and independence with respect to the others.61 59. Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694), s.v. “nation.” 60. See Henri de Boulainvilliers, Etat de la France (London: Palmer, 1727), 3 vols.; more generally, see Harold Ellis, Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 61. Le droit naturel (1756), 27 (see also 26–​28 more generally).

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It was only after “the constitution of these Nations” that positive laws and sovereign government could be established, once it became clear that such mutual defense leagues were insufficient for the safeguard of property (28). For the Physiocrats, this precedence of the nation over the state did not affect individual rights, as they paid little heed to constitutional doctrine, and embraced a philosophy of social naturalism.62 But their insertion of the nation into a natural law origin story of government made it much easier, conversely, to insert natural law theory into constitutional histories of the French nation. For the parlementaires and d’Antraigues, natural law provided a “liberal” counterbalance to the focus, among constitutional scholars, on corporate rights. But at the hands of other theorists, natural law could in fact serve the opposite purpose, propping up collective rights at the expense of individual ones. We find precisely such an example in the most celebrated pre-​revolutionary pamphlet, the abbé Sieyès’ Qu’est-​ce que le tiers état? To the title question of his treatise, Sieyès notoriously answered with a single word: “Everything.”63 He subsequently developed this answer by arguing that the Third Estate constituted the real French nation:  “The third estate is a complete nation” (28). The aristocracy, following this logic, was its own, separate nation, which Sieyès sarcastically invited to decamp to the forests of Franconia. His pamphlet thus neatly reversed Boulainvilliers’ constitutional history of France, which had retraced the origins of the nobility to the conquering Franks. While it is this bold assertion that garnered the most attention at the time, it is Sieyès’ definition of the nation that is perhaps most arresting. As he wrote in a famous passage, “the nation exists before everything, it is the origin of everything. Its will is always legal, it is law itself. Before 62.  I  adopt this concept from Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 102. 63. Emmanuel Sieyès, Qu’est-​ce que le tiers état?, ed. E. Champion (Paris: Société de l’Histoire de la Révolution Française, 1888), 27 [ARTFL]. See notably William H. Sewell, Jr., A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution:  The Abbé Sieyes and What is the Third Estate? (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1994); Friedland, Political Actors, 114–​22.

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and above it there is only natural right” (67, emphasis in original). This passage is often read as a Rousseauist statement about the absolute sovereignty of the collectivity.64 But there is an important and telling chronological difference:  for Sieyès, the nation precedes the social contract that, in Rousseau’s account, is what creates political society in the first place.65 All it takes to create a nation, according to Sieyès, is “a more or less sizable number of isolated individuals who want to unite. By this act alone, they already form a nation” (65). No social contract is required; only at a later time (“the second epoch”) does this collectivity get around to creating a body politic that can express the common will. For Rousseau, by contrast, mere cohabitation is a woefully insufficient factor for transforming isolated individuals into a body politic. As he insisted in The Social Contract, When scattered man, regardless of their number, are successively enslaved to a single man, I see in this nothing but a master and slave, I do not see in it a people and its chief; it is, if you will, and aggregation, but not an association; there is here neither public good, nor body politic.66 Where Rousseau’s own version of how political bodies are created stresses the “instantaneous” transformation of individuals brought together by the social contract (“At once [À l’instant], in place of the private person of each contracting party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body,” I.6), Sieyès proposes a narrative of emergence, which is drawn out over time (“but let us pass over [franchissons]

64.  See, e.g., Sewell, Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution, 46; Van Kley, “Origins of an Anti-​ Historical Declaration,” 95. 65.  See Keith M. Baker, “Sovereignty,” A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1989), 851. 66. Jean Jacques Rousseau, “Social Contract,” in The Social Contract and Other Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, MA Cambridge University Press, 1997), I.5, 48.

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the intervals of time . . .” 66). This gradual evolution into political society owes more to Physiocratic natural law theory, which similarly dispensed with a social contract.67 Even as a pre-​political body without formal political organization, however, the nation was still the fons et origo of rights: “they already form a nation; they have all its rights; it is only a question of exercising them” (65). Here, Sieyès parted ways with the Physiocrats, who saw the progressive development of political structures as a means of strengthening individual rights, not of creating national ones. To be clear, Sieyès never denies rights to individuals:  quite the contrary. But not once are their rights defined as natural in his pamphlet. The only reference to pre-​ political rights is fairly dismissive: “One should not judge its demands [of the Third Estate] based on the isolated observations of the few authors more or less knowledgeable about the rights of man [quelques auteurs plus ou moins instruits des droits de l’homme]” (36). Individuals seemingly enjoyed rights at the pleasure of the nation, which could revoke them if it served the greater good: “The law, by protecting the common rights of every citizen, protects each citizen in full [dans tout ce qu’il peut être], up until what he seeks to become starts to harm the common interest” (89, emphasis in original).68 Only the nation is described as having any inalienable rights (66). Since the Third Estate was the genuine French nation, these rights were its particular prerogative: “The third estate has its political rights, as well as civil ones; it must exercise both on its own”

67. See also Sieyès’s first draft for a declaration of rights: “l’ordre social est comme une suite, comme un complément de l’ordre naturel,” though here he does make room for a “contrat réciproque:” in Rials, Déclaration des droits de l’homme, 594. On his relations with Physiocracy, see Catherine Larrère, “Sieyès, lecteur des physiocrates:  Droit naturel ou économie?,” in Figures de Sieyès, ed. Pierre-​Yves Quiviger, Vincent Denis, and Jean Salem (Paris: Sorbonne, 2008), 195–​211. 68. This idea would resurface in Sieyès’ drafts for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, where he does refer to “natural rights,” but defines “l’objet d’une association politique” as “le plus grand bien de tous” (art. 2): in Stéphane Rials, La Déclaration des droits de l’homme (Paris: Hachette, 1988), 602. In other respects, however, the drafts present a somewhat different account of rights than that found in Qu’est-​ce que le Tiers Etat?, probably reflecting the greater attention given to individual rights after spring 1789: see below.

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(39); elsewhere Sieyès refers to “the rights of the full body of citizens” (31), and “[les] droits du tiers état” (52). Much has been made about Sieyès’ elevation of the nation into the source of all legality and legitimacy. Hannah Arendt called attention to how his distinction between a pouvoir constituant (the nation) and a pouvoir constitué (government) gave unlimited power to the people, and ushered in the tyranny of the majority.69 But her attempt to distinguish the French pouvoir constituant from the American constituent people is unsatisfactory: as Jason Frank has countered, the American revolutionaries were equally committed to the principle of popular sovereignty.70 How could this same principle be understood so differently on either side of the Atlantic? Why was la nation so different from “we the people”? Sieyès himself suggested that the two were identical.71 But the American people were never understood as a pre-​political, organic community. Individuals possessed rights by virtue of being humans, not by virtue of living together. Most American theorists agreed with Locke that the power of the state originated in the specific rights that individuals enjoyed in the state of nature (such as the executive power), but that “it can be no more than those persons had in a state of nature before they entered into society, and gave up to the community: for nobody can transfer to another more power than he has in himself.”72 All political power might originally have derived from the people qua individuals, but the people qua sovereign collectivity was not all-​powerful. By replacing this passage from the many (individuals) to the one (people) with a narrative that emphasized

69. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 154–​55. For a helpful discussion of her claims, albeit in a different context, see Joshua Braver, “Hannah Arendt in Venezuela: The Supreme Court battles Hugo Chávez over the creation of the 1999 Constitution,” I•CON (2016): 1–​29. 70.  Jason Frank, Constituent Moments:  Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,), 46–​50. 71. See his draft declaration: “Tous les pouvoirs publics, sans distinction, sont une émanation de la volonté générale; tous viennent du peuple, c’est-​à-​dire de la nation. Ces deux termes doivent être synonymes” (Rials, Déclaration des droits de l’homme, 601). 72. John Locke, Second Treatise, §135.

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the continuity between a pre-​political community and a political one (in both cases, the nation), Sieyès granted a far greater power to this collectivity, removing the checks that previous natural law theorists had placed around it to defend the rights of individuals.

DECLARING THE RIGHTS OF MAN (AND OF THE NATION?)

On the eve of the French Revolution, then, there were two main rights regimes available to engaged citizens. In the writings of the Physiocrats and the philosophes, French readers could find strong statements favoring the preservation regime. From the parlementaires and other more constitutionally minded authors, they could pick up a natural constitutional definition of rights that attached them to the nation. While this theory of national rights could be compatible with, and was often found alongside, a belief in the inalienability of natural, individual rights, it typically implied a hierarchy between (superior) collective and (inferior) individual rights. During moments of political crisis, as we will see, this hierarchy facilitated the suppression of individual rights in the name of the national security, or salut public. The tension between national and natural rights is difficult to observe if we focus solely on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. With one interesting exception (art. 3), this document largely reflects, at least in its final form, the Enlightenment commitment to individual rights (albeit with a greater faith in the power of good laws than found, say, in the American states). There are various reasons why the constitutional doctrine of national rights is mostly invisible in the Declaration. The American Revolution had just offered models of how to declare rights to French readers:  the declarations of six American states had been translated and published in 1783 by Benjamin Franklin and the duc de La Rochefoucauld-​d’Enville.73 Leading constitutional scholars of the day, such as the Neapolitan Gaetano Filangieri, had also 73. Constitutions des Treize Etats-​Unis de l’Amérique (Paris, 1783).

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insisted on enshrining natural rights in constitutional documents.74 And in France, a number of key Physiocrats and fellow travelers were instrumental in stirring up the demand for a declaration of rights, in the Cahiers de doléances that communities throughout France prepared for the Estates General (see below). Despite all of these strong affirmations of the preservation regime of rights, however, the Cahiers reveal that the constitutional emphasis on national rights was equally pronounced, as we will see. There has been an attempt of late to credit the idea of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the “radical principles” of a shadowy network of “philosophe-​révolutionnaires.”75 Leaving aside the aforementioned American examples that had already widely publicized this idea (and would be repeatedly referenced during the debates at the Assembly), there is plentiful evidence in the Cahiers that French citizens across the country and from different social classes were pressing for such a Declaration, with some even drawing up their own drafts.76 At least twenty-​four cahiers explicitly demanded a “Déclaration des droits”; some called explicitly for a “Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen.”77 Most of these demands came from the Third Estate (seventeen cahiers), though the nobility also pressed the case (five cahiers).78

74.  Neapolitan Gaetano Filangieri’s Scienza della legislazione (1783–​86) was translated as La science de la législation, trans. J.-​A. Gallois (Paris: Cuchet, 1786–​1791), 6 vols. See more broadly Vincenzo Ferrone, The Politics of Enlightenment:  Constitutionalism, Republicanism, and the Rights of Man in Gaetano Filangieri, trans. Sophus Reinert (London: Anthem Press, 2014). 75.  See Jonathan Israel, Revolutionary Ideas:  An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 57–​58. Israel does not address the demands for a Declaration of Rights in the Cahiers. 76. The American example was particularly prominent during the early debate over whether or not to include a Declaration of Rights at the beginning of the Constitution:  see Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, ed. M. J. Mavidal et al. (Paris: P. Dupont, 1862–​), Aug. 1, 1789, 8:319; henceforth abbreviated as AP.. 77.  These cahiers were identified by a proximity word search for “déclaration droits” on the ARTFL version of the Archives parlementaires: http://​artfl-​project.uchicago.edu/​node/​144. 78. One additional cahier was compiled jointly by the nobility and third estate, and one more by all three estates.

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Not all of this interest was spontaneous: some of the drafts included in the Cahiers contained near identical language, often modeled on the Instruction donnée par S.A.S. Monseigneur le duc d’Orléans. This influential pamphlet, published in January 1789, and likely written by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, contained a set of seventeen articles, the first of which began, “Individual liberty will be guaranteed to all the French”; it also included a provision against the lettres de cachet (“no-​one can be arrested, or made a prisoner, without a warrant [un décret], issued by regular judges”).79 It was followed by a series of Délibérations à prendre pour les assemblées de bailliages, written by Sieyès, which encouraged the Estates General to “present to the people the list of their essential rights, under the heading of Declaration of Rights.”80 If there was an influential group of revolutionaries who were pushing and plotting for a Declaration of Rights, it was not a shadowy network of “philosophe-​révolutionnaires,” but the very public members of the Société des Trente, who gathered at the home of the parliamentarian Adrien Duport starting in November 1788.81 This group included the marquis de Lafayette, who shared a first draft for a Declaration of Rights with Thomas Jefferson in January 1789, and would present one of the first proposals of a Declaration (his third draft) to the National Assembly on July 11, 1789;82 Dupont de Nemours, who penned part of the cahier for the Third Estate of Nemours (his home town), asking the Estates General to “declare . . . the rights of men and of citizens”;83 79. See Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Instruction donnée par S.A.S. Monseigneur le duc d’Orléans (Paris, 1789), 4–​5. On this work, see Rials, Déclaration, 95, n. 59. 80.  Sieyès, Délibérations à prendre pour les assemblées de bailliages, in de Laclos, Instruction donnée, 36. 81. See Rials, Déclaration des droits de l’homme, 31. 82. All three of his drafts can be found in Rials, Déclaration des droits de l’homme, 528, 567, and 590. On Jefferson and Lafayette’s collaboration, see notably Dumas Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man, vol. 2. of Jefferson in his Time (1951; Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 223–​25. 83. AP, 4:214. This cahier also lamented “l’oubli des droits de l’homme” (4:191), a phrase that would recur in the Preamble of the Declaration (“l’oubli ou le mépris des droits de l’Homme sont les seules causes des malheurs publics et de la corruption des Gouvernements”).

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Condorcet, who published a draft declaration in February 1789, and composed most of the cahier for the nobility of Mantes, which similarly demanded that “a declaration of rights be immediately issued”;84 Alexandre de Lameth, whose speech to the assembly of the three estates in Péronne called for “a constitution grounded in natural rights”;85 the comte de Mirabeau, who would take a leading role in the drafting of the final Declaration; the duc de La Rochefoucauld-​d’Enville, who had translated the American state declarations with Franklin; as well as Sieyès, Lepeletier de Saint-​Fargeau, Dominique Garat, Destutt de Tracy, Volney, and others. The Société des Trente lay at the intersection of multiple influential networks. Most members hailed from the liberal nobility, and many would go on to have illustrious careers in the Revolution. At least three members had close ties to American revolutionaries:  Lafayette, La Rochefoucauld-​d’Enville, and Dupont de Nemours, who was also friends with Jefferson.86 A  number were intimately connected to the philosophes:  Dupont de Nemours, Condorcet, and La Rochefoucauld-​ d’Enville all corresponded with Voltaire; Garat (future minister of justice), with d’Alembert; Volney, Garat, Condorcet, and Mirabeau attended the cercle d’Auteil, Mme Helvétius’ salon, which d’Alembert, Diderot, and d’Holbach also frequented.87 They included Freemasons:  Dupont de Nemours, Destutt de Tracy, Garat, Sieyès, and Volney all belonged to the prestigious lodge of the Neuf Sœurs.88 But with respect to their

84. See Keith Baker, Condorcet, 265; AP, 3:661. 85.  “Discours de M.  le chevalier Alexandre de Lameth, prononcé à l’assemblée générale du bailliage de Péronne, et imprimé sur la demande des trois ordres,” in AP, 5:366. 86. See Robert F. Haggard, “The Politics of Friendship: Du Pont, Jefferson, Madison, and the Physiocratic Dream for the New World,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 153, no. 4 (2009): 419–​40. 87.  See Olivier Blanc, “Cercles politiques et ‘salons’ du début de la Révolution (1789–​1793),” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 344 (2006): 63–​92. 88.  Nicholas Hans, “UNESCO of the Eighteenth Century:  La Loge des Neuf Sœurs and its Venerable Master, Benjamin Franklin,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 97, no. 5 (1953): 513–​24. Duport may also have been a member (522).

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role in promoting a Declaration of Rights, perhaps the most relevant connection that many members shared was a direct or close engagement with Physiocracy. Dupont de Nemours was a key Physiocratic impresario; Condorcet had been one of the first to adapt the Physiocratic defense of free trade to the defense of political rights and the abolition of slavery; Mirabeau’s father was Quesnay’s closest collaborator, and would publicly honor their contribution to the Declaration;89 and Sieyès, as we saw, was well versed in Physiocratic beliefs. Given the earlier role played by the Physiocrats in disseminating the preservation regime of rights (discussed in part 1), it seems reasonable to grant them a special place in the genealogy of the Declaration. But it would be a gross overstatement of their influence to suggest that the Declaration was the sole result of Physiocratic ideas (or any other “radical” ideas, for that matter). If only a fraction of the cahiers explicitly requested that the Estates General produce a Declaration of Rights, the vast majority sought to enshrine basic political rights. As Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff demonstrated in their quantitative study of the Cahiers, the demand that the lettres de cachet be abolished was found in 71% of Third estate cahiers, and 67% of those from the nobility; the plea that personal liberties be protected was equally widespread (contained in 66% of Third Estate, and 75% of the noble, cahiers).90 These requests, moreover, were often expressed in the language of natural rights:  the assemblies asked the Estates General to “conserve,” “consecrate,” “recognize,” “assure,” “guarantee,” and “re-​establish” their rights, all terms that upheld the preservation regime.91 The particular expressions employed were still in

89. See session of Aug. 18, 1789; AP, 8:453. 90. See Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the ‘Cahiers de Doléances’ of 1789 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), table 14–​8, 277. 91. See, for example, the Cahiers de la ville et pays-​état d’Arles (AP, 2:57); Cahier des remontrances de l’ordre de la noblesse du bailliage d’Aval (AP, 2:139); Cahier des plaintes, doléances et remontrances du clergé du bailliage de Beauvais (AP, 2:287); Instruction que l’assemblée de l’ordre du clergé du bailliage de Clermont en Beauvoisis remet à son député aux Etats généraux (AP, 2:746); Cahier du tiers-​état de la sénéchaussée de Marsan (AP, 4:34); Cahier des vœux, doléances et supplications du tiers-​état de la sénéchaussée de Montpellier (AP, 4:49).

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flux: “droits naturels,” “droits des hommes,” “droits de l’homme,” were all used interchangeably.92 All three estates adopted this language, with the third estate employing it most commonly.93 But the first estate could be just as strident. The clergy’s embrace of natural rights talk was already evident during the Assembly of the Clergy, held in the summer of 1788. At the closing ceremony, the archbishop of Narbonne, Arthur Richard Dillon, celebrated the king for having granted civil and legal rights to Protestants, with the Edict of Versailles (1787): “we will bless Your Majesty with having put an end to the shocking contradiction that fortified laws against the rights of nature,” he asserted.94 This edict continued to be celebrated as a milestone in the cahiers of the clergy:  “we are far from ignoring the imprescriptible rights of nature that our errant brothers possess,” wrote the first estate of Beauvais.95 The clergy also invoked natural rights in support of other reforms. Their cahier from Caen lambasted the excessive taxes that “violate all the rights of men at once,” and the clergy of Clermont-​en-​ Beauvoisis denounced lettres de cachet as violating “the most sacred of natural rights.”96 Underpinning some of these assertions was the old doctrine of conciliarism: “The clergy also wish to see the return of synods, provincial councils, and a national council,” wrote the first estate of Caen, a demand that many other clerical cahiers would echo.97 But the clergy’s backing of natural rights, in the cahiers, reminds us that, until Pius VI attacked the Declaration of the Rights of Man in his 1791 encyclical Adeo 92.  In a fairly typical example, the third estate of Gardanne, near Aix, expressed its desire that “Les droits naturels et imprescriptibles de l’homme et du citoyen quel qu’il soit, seront inviolablement reconnus et assurés aux Etats généraux” (AP, 6:280). The same formulation can be found in the Cahier des doléances de la communauté de Carri et le Rouet [today, Carry-​le-​Rouet], a neighboring town (AP, 6:293). 93. Rials, Déclaration des droits de l’homme, 277, n. 7. 94.  Discours au roi, prononcé à Versailles, par M.  l’archevêque de Narbonne, à la clôture de l’assemblée du clergé, le dimanche 27 juillet 1788; in AP, 1:387. 95. AP, 2:287. 96. See AP, 2:488 and 2:746, respectively. 97. AP, 2:486.

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nota, the French Church remained committed to a doctrine that had long been, after all, the purview of theology.98 From the perspective of the Cahiers, it thus appears overdetermined that the National Assembly would take up the question of a Declaration of Rights. But whose rights were being defended, exactly? A deep ambiguity ran through the demands in the Cahiers. Precisely half of the twenty-​ four explicit pleas (identified above) for a Declaration of Rights framed this request in terms of individual rights, while the other half wanted the Estates General to affirm national rights. “Do not let the Estates general disband without having written, in the clearest and most exact manner, the declaration of the rights of the nation and the laws of its constitution,” affirmed the nobility of Etain, in a typical statement.99 This directive often coexisted with assertions in favor of individual rights, as well: the nobility of Château-​Thierry asked the Estates to “obtain from the King a declaration of the rights of the nation and of the individual rights of the French.”100 But the declaration that many cahiers sought was often limited to the assertion of national rights: “the bill decreeing the declaration of the rights of the nation will be solemnly passed according to form by the assembly of the Estates”; “a declaration of national rights shall be written.”101 The difference between calling for a declaration of the rights of man and a declaration of the rights of the nation may, in some cases, have been merely terminological, though as Stéphane Rials has observed, “we should note that most often the expression ‘declaration of the rights of the nation’ does not refer to the fundamental rights of individuals, but to the requisite political balances.”102 What’s most interesting about this terminological 98. See Thomas D. Williams, Who Is My Neighbor? Personalism and the Foundations of Human Rights (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 33; more generally, see Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), and my “Christian Human Rights in the French Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 79, no. 3 (2018): 411–26. 99. AP, 2:219. This phrasing reappears in several cahiers: see 5:29, 5:220, 5:531, 5:641, 6:15. 100. AP, 2:659. 101. Third Estate, Châtellerault, AP, 2:691; all three orders, Bayone, 3:100. 102. Rials, Déclaration des droits de l’homme, 275, n. 5.

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and conceptual confusion is that it points to how, in the run-​up to the meeting of the Estates General in May 1789, French political actors were beginning to combine the two rival rights discourses then circulating in France. A revealing instance of this combination can be found in Sieyès’ Délibérations that were appended to the duc d’Orléans’ Instruction donnée. Many of the passages here paraphrase the arguments that Sieyès had made earlier in Qu’est-​ce que le Tiers Etat? We read, for instance, that “to the Nation belongs all powers, all rights, since the Nation is identical to an individual in the state of nature, who has no trouble looking after himself.” But now this argument was made to support the proclamation of a declaration of rights: “present to the people the list of their essential rights, under the heading of Declaration of Rights.” Even though these rights are clearly identified as individual and pre-​political (“the universal rights of Man and of the Citizen”), the Nation’s ability to grant—​and by implication, to deny—​rights meant that they did not have the inalienable quality that the preservation regime of rights guaranteed.103 Most of this ambiguity would disappear in the final wording of the Declaration. As Keith Baker has underscored, however, we must not forget how confused and contingent the process of drafting this document turned out to be.104 It is true that some statements, such as “The Law is the expression of the general will” (art. 6), seemed almost destined to be included, so commonly did they (or variants thereon) feature in draft proposals.105 But the wording for other articles only appeared at the end of torturous debates, and could differ considerably from anything found in prior drafts. If no mention of national rights made it into the final version, then, it was not because of any overt decision to exclude them.106 In fact, during the parliamentary debate, deputies occasionally 103.  Sieyès, Délibérations à prendre pour les assemblées de bailliages, in Laclos, Instruction donnée, 32–​36. 104. Baker, “The Idea of a Declaration of Rights,” in Van Kley, ed., French Idea of Freedom, 190. 105. It is found in at least 26 of the 47 draft proposals collected in Rials, Déclaration des droits de l’homme. 106. At least four of the draft declarations collected in Rials mention les droits de la nation.

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referred to the object of their efforts under this other name. Presenting a report of the constitutional committee, Jean-​Joseph Mounier announced, “we must begin by declaring the rights of the French nation.”107 Another deputy proposed that the declaration begin with “an inquiry into the rights of the nation, which precede all others, and from which all others derive . . .”108 Even after the Declaration was passed, it was referred to in such terms.109 If the Declaration appeared primarily to endorse the preservation regime of rights (particularly in art. 2), it did contain at least one article that evoked the national, constitutional doctrine of rights: “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation,” declared article 3.110 These two sentences first appear, with very minor differences, in the third and final draft that Lafayette presented to the Assembly on July 11.111 Mounier had adopted this article for his own proposal, and it also featured in the draft he presented in the name of the constitutional committee on July 27.112 And it was Mounier who, at the end of a long, circuitous debate, put forward the winning proposal for the first three articles of the Declaration on August 20.113 107. July 9; AP, 8:216. 108. Antoine-​François Delandine, Aug. 1; AP, 8:325. 109. See, e.g., the marquis de Sillery: “Une sage Constitution établie, dans laquelle les droits de la nation et ceux du monarque seront irrévocablement fixés, ne sera-​t-​elle pas le rempart assuré du bonheur des peuples?” (Sept. 7; 8:600). 110.  On art. 3, see Kent Wright, “National Sovereignty and the General Will:  The Political Program of the Declaration of Rights,” in Van Kley, ed., French Idea of Freedom, 199–​233. 111. “Le principe de toute Souveraineté réside dans la Nation. Nul corps, nul individu ne peut avoir une autorité qui n’en émane expressément” (Rials, Déclaration des droits de l’homme, 591; slightly different phrase in his second draft, “Le principe de toute souveraineté réside imprescriptiblement dans la nation,” 567). 112. See Rials, Déclaration des droits de l’homme, 606 and 613. The same expression is found in Boislandry’s draft (art. 46), 730. 113.  Antoine de Baecque, Wolfgang Schmale, and Michel Vovelle, eds., L’An 1 des droits de l’homme (Paris: CNRS, 1988), 153–​54.

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Read solely within the context of the Declaration, article 3 does not appear very threatening. All of the American state declarations had included similar statements:  section 2 of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, for instance, affirms that “all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people; that magistrates are their trustees and servants and at all times amenable to them.” As an assertion of popular sovereignty, then, article 3 was simply a set piece of revolutionary doctrine. Exactly what the nation’s sovereignty consisted in was less clear.

THE NATION STRIKES BACK: NATURAL CONSTITUTIONALISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is generally viewed as antithetical to the political violence that reached a climax in France in 1793–​94.114 And yet, at the very height of this repression, its agents repeatedly and enthusiastically proclaimed their adherence to this Declaration and to human rights. Représentants en mission traveling through Charente-​Maritime replaced religious icons with copies of the Declaration and the Constitution in a local church.115 A popular opera composed in November 1793 opened with this song: How lovely is the age in which we live! This age, when I have seen The empire of liberty established On the rights of humanity!116 114. See, e.g., Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 18, 178. 115. François-​Alphonse Aulard, ed., Recueil des actes du Comité de salut public (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1894), 7:493 (Oct. 18, 1793). 116.  “Ah! qu’il est beau, ce siècle où je respire!.../​Ce siècle, où de la liberté,/​Sur les droits de l’humanité,/​Mes yeux ont vu fonder l’empire!” Gabriel Bouquier and Pierre-​Louis Moline, La Réunion du dix août, ou L’inauguration de la république française (Paris: chez R. Vatar, an II [1793?]), 3–​4.

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One way to justify the repression of counterrevolutionaries was to argue that they were denatured and had forfeited their rights. “The Declaration of the Rights of Man will never be understood by the enemies of the fatherland,” the conventionnel Antoine Claire Thibaudeau warned ominously on May 7, 1794, “but men who have not been debauched by false pleasures, or stultified by prejudice, who, remaining close to nature, have always retained in their heart the seeds of liberty and equality, will easily understand it without any commentary.”117 This argument, as I’ve shown elsewhere, could be supported with natural law theory, which was particularly harsh toward “enemies of the human race,” who violated the laws of nature and must be destroyed.118 In this respect, celebrating the rights of man was not opposed to denying them to some. Robespierre insisted that the Vendéen rebels be exterminated precisely because they “will eternally conspire against the rights of man and the happiness of all peoples.”119 But this privatory logic—​that certain individuals could be deprived of rights—​was reinforced and complemented by the assertive logic of national rights. If the nation had rights, it could press to have them recognized and upheld. During the first year of the Revolution, this argument was mainly levied against government bodies that overstepped their authority. Hence, in November 1789, Antoine Barnave accused the Metz parlement of issuing a ruling that was “offensive to the rights of the nation, by the accusations it contains; seditious in its call to arms; insulting to the King and the National Assembly . . .”120 Even the Assembly’s own decrees could be criticized in this manner:  a month later, Mirabeau warned that the Assembly did not have the right to exclude one of its own deputies, since to do so would be to “propose a humiliating bill for the Assembly, offensive 117. 18 floréal an II; Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, 20:416. 118. Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, & The French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), chap. 3. 119. May 8, 1793; in Rob., 9:487–​88. 120. Nov. 17, 1789; AP, 10:84. For similar uses, see Gaultier de Biauzat’s speech on Nov. 19, 1789 (10:123), and the “Adresse des jeunes citoyens de la ville de Bordeaux,” Mar. 4, 1790 (12:20).

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to its liberty and contrary to the rights of the nation, which alone can judge, in the final instance, the conduct of its representatives.”121 By the spring of 1790, however, it was more common to find deputies asserting the Assembly’s power to exercise the rights of the nation on its behalf.122 During a debate over how to fund parish priests, following the abolition of the dîme, Jacques Guillaume Thouret asked, “are the rights of the nation on [Church] goods . . . to defray the costs of religious service acknowledged?” before responding in the affirmative, “Yes, these rights are acknowledged . . .”123 A few months later, Isaac-​René-​Guy Le Chapelier raised a troubling prospect:  “What would become of  the rights of the nation, if it were possible, in moments of turmoil and disorder, when each of us [representatives to the National Assembly] is subject to hatred, revenge, and factions, to drag us away from our duties, and force us to stand before a judge?”124 To exercise the rights of the nation, members of the National Assembly should be inviolate. And in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the National Assembly, a certain Arnauld, leading a delegation of representatives from Saint-​Domingue, denounced his island’s colonial assembly for assuming “the rights and powers of the National Assembly:  as if the attributes of sovereign power could belong to any others that those who fully exercise the rights of the nation.”125 This claim that the National Assembly, and only it, could “fully exercise the rights of the nation” found its most vocal supporter in Maximilien Robespierre. When discussing the establishment of a high court to try “crimes of lèse-​nation,” which he defined as “attacks committed directly 121. AP, 10:35. See also Nicholas Bergasse’s letter refusing the serment civique: “le serment qu’on ose me commander attente aux droits des législatures, attente aux droits de la nation” (Feb. 6, 1790; 11:459). 122.  Interestingly, it was the more conservative deputies who continued to invoke national rights against the Assembly: see the abbé Maury, Apr. 19, 1790 (AP, 13:108); and the comte de Sérent, May 16, 1790 (15:527). 123. Apr. 12, 1790; AP, 12:700. He is referring here to the decree nationalizing Church property, passed on Nov. 2, 1789. 124. Aug. 7, 1790; AP, 17:655. 125. Sept. 30, 1790; AP, 19:325.

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against the rights of the nation,” Robespierre argued that “a court defending the rights of the nation” could only be placed in Paris, under the surveillance of the Assembly.126 Among the powers of government, he reasoned, only the “legislative body” could enforce national rights.127 Indeed, this was its very purpose: “We have been sent to defend the rights of the nation,” the Incorruptible pronounced on the eve of the Assembly’s dissolution.128 At times, he even appropriated this role for himself in particular: “I call on [je réclame] the rights of the nation against a system that I find opposed to them [qui m’y paraît contraire].”129 It was during the first months of the National Convention that the punitive and repressive potential of these appeals to national rights became evident. As the Convention tried Louis, numerous deputies intoned against the king for having “violated,” “erased,” “impaled,” “undermined,” and “invaded” the rights of the people.130 Robespierre again made the most effective use of this argument, claiming that even the defenders of Louis’ constitutional inviolability acknowledged that “those who, on August 10, 126. Oct. 20, 1790; AP, 20:25–​27. The creation of this court had been mandated by the National Assembly on July 23, 1789 (AP, 8:267). Until the Constitution established the structure and location of this court, the Assembly decided, on Oct. 14, 1789, that crimes of lèse-​nation would be heard by the Châtelet court (AP, 9:445). See Charles Walton, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution:  The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009), esp.  173–​79; and Anne Simonin, Le Déshonneur dans la République (Paris: Grasset, 2008), 233–​37; see also G. A. Kelly, “From Lèse-​Majesté to Lèse-​Nation: Treason in Eighteenth-​Century France,” Journal of the History of Ideas 42, no. 2 (1981):  269–​86; and Barry Shapiro, Revolutionary Justice in Paris, 1789–​90 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1993). 127. “C’est un principe incontestable que les droits politiques des citoyens, et par conséquent les droits de la nation, ne peuvent point être soumis ni au pouvoir exécutif, ni au pouvoir administratif . . . Le Corps législatif au contraire doit juger des qualités politiques et individuelles, parce que ce sont là les véritables intérêts du peuple” (Mar. 5, 1791; AP, 23:674). See also Mar. 9, 1791, 23:746; and Aug. 10, 1791, 29:326–​27. 128. Sept. 1, 1791; AP, 30:139. 129.  Aug. 23, 1791; AP, 29:656. At the moment the Constituent Assembly was disbanding, Robespierre charged the revolutionary clubs and societies with defending the rights of the nation (Sept. 29, 1791; 31:619). Once he was again in government, however, he again assumed the personal burden of defending these rights: “C’est moi dont le nom fut lié avec les noms de tous ceux qui defendirent avec courage les droits du peuple” (Sept. 25, 1792; 52:132–​33). 130. AP, 53:396, 645; 54:150,179, 266; 57:431.

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might have destroyed Louis XVI would have committed a virtuous action.” And yet, he deftly observed, “the only basis for this opinion could be Louis XVI’s crimes and the rights of the people.” So he concluded: “has an interval of three months changed either his crimes, or the rights of the people?”131 In this speech, as in those by other deputies, the rights of the nation were nearly synonymous with natural rights. The natural constitutionalism theorized by Sieyès had become, in the eyes of many deputies, a political reality:  with the dissolution of the monarchy, the nation had returned under the jurisdiction of natural law.132 Tellingly, deputies increasingly referred to the rights of the people (droits du peuple) rather than those of the nation.133 This terminological shift mirrored the abrupt rise of a new criminal category, the enemy of the people. Rarely used during the first three years of the Revolution (though in fact an older expression than droits de la nation), it rose to prominence in 1792, before becoming a cornerstone of the Terror legislation in 1793–​94.134 Whoever violated the rights of the people became their 131. Dec. 3, 1792; AP, 54:76. 132. See, e.g., Robespierre: “Quelles sont les lois qui la remplacent [la constitution monarchique]? celles de la nature; celle qui est la base de la société même, le salut du peuple, le droit de punir le tyran et celui de le détrôner, c’est la même chose,” 54:75. I discuss the place of natural law arguments during the king’s trial in Edelstein, Terror of Natural Right, chap. 3. 133.  During the trial, deputies invoked the rights of the people on at least 23 occasions, compared to 3 references to rights of the nation. Data are taken from volume 54 of the Archives parlementaires, which contains most of the speeches delivered on this occasion. By 1793, droits de la nation had largely faded from use, reflecting the predominance of droits du peuple, which features roughly 16 times more often in the Archives parlementaires for that year (214 vs. 13 hits, on uncorrected OCR). It would even make it into the Declaration of Rights of 1793: “Quand le gouvernement viole les droits du peuple, l’insurrection est, pour le peuple et pour chaque portion du peuple, le plus sacré des droits et le plus indispensable des devoirs” (art. 35). The people also replaced the nation as source of sovereignty: “La souveraineté réside dans le peuple” (art. 25). 134.  Droits du peuple features less than 20 times per year in the Archives parlementaires between 1789–​1791; there are 76 instances in 1792, and 129 in 1793. The expression “ennemi* du peuple” appears in 8 laws passed between Jan. 1, 1793, and 9 Thermidor year II (in the Baudouin collection), including the infamous law of 22 prairial. In the sixteenth century, however, Huguenot revolutionaries were using the term: see, e.g., Nicolas Barnaud, “il n’y a point de prescription contre les droits du peuple & des estats . . . la prescription contre les droits du peuple est invalide,” Le Reveille-​Matin des François, et de leurs voisins (Edinburgh, 1574), 2:88–​89.

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enemy; and it was to prosecute such offenses against the collectivity that the individual rights of the accused would be peeled away. To be sure, this process was not inevitable, and in some circumstances, the rights of the nation could cohabitate with individual rights. Early in the Revolution, when the National Assembly charged the Châtelet court with trying crimes of lèse-​nation, it had insisted that it respect the new procedural rights that the Assembly had just established, in accordance with “the rights of man.”135 But as political turmoil increased, the rights of man and those of the nation clashed with increasing prevalence. When Couthon introduced the law of 22 prairial, which stripped the ennemis du peuple of most procedural rights, one of his justifications was that “the rights of the republic have been far less respected in the prosecution of crimes against liberty.”136

CONCLUSION

The observation that French revolutionaries, during the Terror, suppressed individual liberties in the name of collectivity is hardly new: revisionist historians, following the lead of François Furet and Keith Baker, made similar claims. But the argument I  am presenting here differs in key respects. First, from a methodological perspective, I  am not suggesting that the logic of national rights invariably led to the suppression of individual rights, but rather, and more weakly, that it could push in that direction. Other political practices, theories, and institutions pushed in other ways, and the outcome of these conflicts cannot be determined by looking at political ideas alone. As justifications for, and incitements to, action, however, ideas can gain broad support at critical junctures, and significantly influence events. Secondly, at a conceptual level, there are important differences between appeals to the nation or people, and to the general will. As we 135. See Oct. 9 and 24, in AP, 9:394–​96 and 517. 136. Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, 20:695.

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saw with Sieyès, the concept of the nation could adopt certain qualities of the Rousseauist body politic, but it retained its own defining features. In addition to being pre-​political and not contractually constituted, the nation or people had rights that could be defended without the people themselves voicing their demands. In other words, the rights of the nation or people were not the product of will; they owed their existence to constitutional precedent and (especially after August 1792) the laws of nature. This distinction explains why the Jacobins, in 1793, could explicitly reject voluntaristic conceptions of the body politic, while continuing to pose as defenders of the people’s rights.137 Revisionist historians also pursued the Tocquevillian thesis of a continuity between the political projects of the old and new regimes. Drawing on Claude Lefort, Furet argued that the French revolutionaries rushed to fill in the gap filled by absolute sovereignty, replacing the royal bon plaisir with popular will.138 Marcel Gauchet and Lucien Jaume also faulted the National Assembly for perpetuating an absolutist political culture that laid excessive emphasis on laws, rather than rights.139 But the account I offer above suggests that at least one critical legacy of the old regime did not originate in Versailles, but rather in the Paris Parlement. It was the parlementaires who first portrayed themselves as the staunch defenders of national rights; even the term lèse-​nation can be traced back to the patriote literature attacking the “despotic” Maupeou ministry.140 In his anonymously published Mémoires de l’abbé Terrai (1776), one of the “forbidden best-​sellers” of the old regime, the lawyer Jean-​Baptiste-​Louis Coquereau thundered: “[the public] could not be satisfied with such light punishments for a monster guilty of the worst crime, the crime of Leze-​Nation, a crime as

137. See Edelstein, Terror of Natural Right, chap. 4. 138. See “The Revolution is Over,” in François Furet, ed., and Elborg Forster, trans., Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1–​79. 139. Marcel Gauchet, La Révolution des droits de l’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1989); and Lucien Jaume, Les Déclarations des droits de l’homme (Paris: Flammarion, 1989). 140.  Dale Van Kley similarly originates this term in parliamentary discourse, though only identifies actual uses in the late 1780s: see The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 325–​26.

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superior to that of Leze-​Majesty, as the nation is to its sovereign.”141 A similar warning would resurface in the cahier of the third estate of Paris: “Any person convicted of acting in a way that sought to prevent the holding of the Estates General will be declared a traitor to the fatherland, guilty of the crime of lèse-​nation . . .”142 The first two signatories of this cahier were the president of the assembly, Guy-​Baptiste Target; and its vice president, Armand-​Gaston Camus, two of the most famous lawyers in Paris at the time, both close to the parlementaires.143 While obviously modeled, in name at least, on the monarchic crime of lèse-​majesté, this new offense of high treason, which the revolutionaries sought to prosecute as early as July 1789, was still a product of the parlementaire pursuit of national, collective rights. If the revisionist continuity thesis was essentially formal, resting as it did on a parallel between the understanding and exercise of sovereignty before and after 1789, the lasting commitment to national rights, by contrast, constitutes a direct and concrete instance of political continuity. One might ask, in closing, how central the French Revolution is to this history of rights. The thesis that all humans derive rights from nature, which they should continue to enjoy in political society, had been around since the sixteenth century, and revived during the Enlightenment; the doctrine of national rights similarly predated 1789. Did the Revolution significantly affect these ideas? At a theoretical level, this question is debatable:  revolutionaries may have introduced new rights (most notably the social rights of the 1793 Declaration), but they largely perpetuated earlier rights regimes. At a more practical level, however, the Revolution marked a turning point in French history, as the moment when rights became the foundation of politics. The Declaration of Rights, which 141.  Mémoires de l’abbé Terrai .  . . ([Paris?:] A la Chancellerie, 1776), 315. On this text, see Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (rev. ed.; New  York:  Anthem, 2015), 650. In Robert Darnton’s ranking (based on sales of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel), Coquereau’s book ranks 9th:  see The Forbidden Best-​sellers of Pre-​revolutionary France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 63. 142. AP, 4:282. 143. See Bell, Lawyers and Citizens, 187. As Bell also notes, “Eight of the 36 electors chosen to draft the formal grievances of the city of Paris were barristers.”

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in August 1789 had only been passed as a temporary measure, to be revisited when the Assembly came closer to completing its work on the Constitution, rapidly transformed the language of politics, and had immediate ramifications for the justice system and religious toleration.144 Rights went from constituting a political theory to becoming a political practice. But the rights of the nation had, in fact, already featured in old regime political culture. Transferred from the Parlement to the National Assembly, these rights now entered the same political arena as the droits de l’homme. Just as the parlementaires had invoked the rights of the nation to defend against royal “despotism,” so too the deputies called upon these rights to fend off the king, and later anyone they identified with royalism. In practicing a politics of rights, the Revolution thus became a stage where conflicts between these rival conceptions of rights could play out. In the process, both doctrines were pressed to their logical conclusions: the enlightened theory of individual rights revealed itself to be less than universal, its protections vanishing for those deemed “unnatural”; while the constitutionalist theory of national rights became, in the troubled years of 1792–​94, a judicial and political instrument of repression. The declaration of rights may have been heralded as a new set of divine commandments, but it would turn out to be a god that failed.

144.  See Rials, Déclaration des droits de l’homme, 256; and Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 133–​44.

2

Every Island Is Not Haiti The French Revolution in the Windward Islands PA U L F R I E D L A N D   ■

In the mid-​1790s, something remarkable happened in the Windward Islands of the eastern Caribbean. On island after island, populations rose up against British rule, and in many cases even succeeded in forcing the British out, at least for a time. Who were these rebels? What did they want? If you were to read most present-​day accounts of the Fédon Rebellion of Grenada (1795–​96), the Brigands’ War of Saint Lucia (1794–​97), and the Second Carib War of Saint Vincent (1795–​96), you would be given the impression that they were slave rebellions largely inspired by the slave revolt in Saint Domingue in 1791, a massive uprising that is often regarded as the beginning of the Haitian Revolution.1 What

I am grateful to the editors of this volume and to the other participants in this collection for their comments when this paper was first presented at the colloquium at Princeton. I would also like to thank the participants in the Stanford French Culture Workshop, where I presented a version of this paper, and especially Dan Edelstein, for his invitation and thoughtful criticism. I am particularly indebted to David Bell, Robert Travers, and Allen Wells, all of whom took the time to read an early draft of this article and gave me invaluable comments and suggestions. 1. In much of the historiography, the slave uprising of 1791 in St. Domingue is seen as inexorably linked to Haitian Independence in 1802–​4, and the two events are often collectively referred to

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happened in the Windward Islands between 1794 and 1797, in other words, can be seen as reverberations of events in St. Domingue, so many echoes of the Haitian Revolution. This is certainly the account that one finds in general histories and various academic compendia that are forced to synthesize a great deal of information into one text. Just to cite one example among many, here is the summary of these events contained in the Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (2012): The Haitian Revolution had a tremendous impact upon the broader Caribbean, inspiring slave insurrections and revolts across the region:  uprisings in Jamaica by maroons, and Saint Vincent by the Caribs in 1795–​96, slave and maroon revolts in Surinam in 1798, rebellion in Grenada in 1795–​97, [and] the “Brigand’s War” in St Lucia 1796–​97.  .  .  .  By providing the example of a new State arising from a slave revolt, Haiti shook the international community. . . .2

as “The Haitian Revolution.” Jeremy Popkin, in his recent book You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010), has offered a very interesting challenge to the prevailing historiography. 2. The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, edited by Bardo Fassbender et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 601. For other examples, see: Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty:  A History of the Early Republic, 1789–​1815 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011), 534: “News of the rebellion in Saint-​Domingue was everywhere, and the island could not help becoming a symbol of black liberation. Throughout the 1790s major slave conspiracies were uncovered in the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Louisiana, and slave rebellions actually broke out in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Curacao, and Grenada”; From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution, edited by Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2009): “[S]‌lave revolts and conspiracies advanced steadily from the 1730s onward. . . . With the Haitian Revolution standing at the apex, another round of revolts began in the 1790s, including uprisings in Saint Lucia (1795–​97), Grenada and Saint Vincent (1795–​96), and Guadeloupe (1802). . . . [p.82]”; Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico, edited by Friedrich Katz (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2014), includes the following in its list of slave and maroon rebellions in the eighteenth century: “Fédon’s war” in Grenada (Slave and Maroon rebellion); “Brigand’s war” in Saint Lucia (Maroon rebellion); and “Second Carib war” in Saint Vincent (Maroon rebellion)

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Most local and popular histories of the Caribbean also characterize these uprisings in the Windward Islands as primarily slave rebellions, and in contemporary historical memory on the islands themselves, each of these uprisings is remembered as a separate rebellion with little connection to rebellions on neighboring islands that occurred at the same time. The Brigands War of Saint Lucia, the Fédon Rebellion of Grenada, and the Second Carib War of Saint Vincent are celebrated today as instances in which people of color, both black and mixed race, were able to stand up to white oppression, seeking an end to slavery as well as revenge for the injustices that had been perpetrated against them. These stories took on particular resonance in the second half of the twentieth century, as the racial battle lines of the 1790s seemed to prefigure the anti-​imperial struggles that culminated in the political independence of Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent in the 1970s. The people of Saint Lucia, for example, celebrated the bicentennial of the biggest battle of the Brigands’ War in 1995 by issuing a series of stamps in which the gens des bois, the famous rebel army of the woods, are depicted as half-​clad black men engaged in battle against red-​coated British soldiers, all white (see Figure 2.1). The problem with these accounts is that there is little substantiating evidence to support them and, on the contrary, there is a massive amount

[p.44]; the entry under “Grenada” in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, edited by Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which, although it acknowledges the participation of people of all races in the Grenada rebellion, nevertheless maintains that, “Fédon and his supporters were inspired by recent slave rebellions in Latin America and the Caribbean, including the Haitian Revolution, and by Carib revolts on the island of Saint Vincent”; Jennifer Mori, Britain in the Age of the French Revolution:  1785–​1820 (London:  Routledge, 2014), 176:  “The slaves of St Domingue, led by Toussaint l’Ouverture, had risen in 1791 to claim the liberty and equality of their white French brethren, and the appeal of black Republicanism, which blended the rhetoric of revolutionary freedom with African traditions of magic and tribal custom, proved irresistible to the slave populations of Martinique and Guadeloupe, not to mention the British islands of Grenada and St Vincent”; and James Walvin, The Atlas of Slavery (London: Routledge, 2014), 116, which includes the Fédon rebellion of Grenada in a list of slave revolts that helped set the stage for a time when “the blood letting between black and white reached a crescendo in the British islands.”

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Figure 2.1:  Saint Lucian stamp from 1995 commemorating the bicentennial of the Battle of Rabot.

of evidence supporting a very different narrative of what took place on these islands. So dearly held is the narrative of a war of liberation fought by blacks against whites, however, that when the facts have contradicted or muddied the narrative, then it is the facts rather than the narrative that have had to bend. In Grenada, for example, although people of mixed race, most of whom held slaves, have tended, by their very existence, to complicate the neat story of a war between blacks and whites, retrospective Grenadian celebrations have solved this problem by taking a Manichean approach, literally blackening representations of mixed-​race rebels so as to create a clearer contrast.3

3. According to Shalini Puri, the commemorative portrait of Fédon created during the Grenada Revolution of the 1980s was “less a likeness than an ideological resignification. It was a heavily Africanized image of the mulatto leader of the 1795 rebellion.  .  .  .  The [1980s] Revolution’s version of Fédon’s Rebellion told it as a story of black rebellion and claimed it as the prehistory of the Revolution.” [Shalini Puri, The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 62.]

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While historians are used to being discontented with general and popular histories of the periods and regions that they study, the surprising thing about this narrative of Haitian-​inspired slave rebellions is that it is also the predominant narrative at the moment among works by professional historians of the Atlantic World, where we might expect to see more rigorous attention to questions of evidence and argumentation.4 In large measure, a celebratory narrative of Caribbean freedom fighters developed as a direct response to more than a century of European narratives in which liberty had been presented as a gift magnanimously bestowed by white Europeans on a grateful but naive black populace. In the case of France, in particular, this self-​congratulatory narrative seemed especially ripe for criticism, as the French themselves and subsequent French historians have often presented France as the cradle of modern human rights and the very first country to have the moral courage to abolish slavery, in 1794. According to this view, the Rights of Man was a kind of unstoppable intellectual and cultural force that would inevitably overcome any obstacle in its path, not stopping until universal human rights had been achieved. From the perspective of such a narrative, 1794 and 1848 (when France abolished slavery for the second time) are glorious moments in the march toward universal liberty. One feels almost peevish pointing out that the very fact that there are two dates associated with abolition would seem to suggest a more complex narrative than an unstoppable force.5 4.  There are certainly exceptions to this general trend. David Barry Gaspar and Léo Elizabeth, for example, have both written excellent articles that offer a balanced account of the politics of this period in the Windward Islands. See David Barry Gaspar, “La Guerre des Bois: Revolution, War and Slavery in Saint Lucia, 1793–​1838,” in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, edited by David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1997), 102–​30; and Léo Elizabeth, “La République dans les Isles du Vent (déc. 1792–​avril 1794), in Annales historiques de la Révolution française, n.°293–​94, 1993. Révolutions aux colonies, 373–​408. 5. For a relatively recent example of the argument that France invented human rights, setting in motion an almost unstoppable force, see Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 160: “The bulldozer force of the revolutionary logic of rights can be seen even more clearly in the French decisions about free blacks and slaves. . . . France granted equal political rights to free blacks (1792) and emancipated the slaves (1794) long before any other slaveholding nation.”

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For many historians of the Atlantic World who reject this narrative in which Europeans magnanimously bestowed freedom on enslaved peoples of African descent, however, the lure of teleological triumph has been difficult to resist. For them, the idea of the self-​liberation of the Caribbean people allows an attractive alternative that, although it rejects the narrative of emancipation as a gift, nevertheless retains the story of ineluctable progress. Some historians of the Atlantic World have endeavored to restore agency to the Caribbean peoples by de-​emphasizing the importance of Europe and European ideas in the Caribbean context and drawing attention instead to primarily African cultural, religious, and military influences on Caribbean rebellions.6 Related to this, but somewhat different, is the argument made by Laurent Dubois and others that European ideas were somehow incomplete or not fully realized within Europe itself, and that only in the Caribbean context were the ideals of the French Revolution able to achieve their full potential: [T]‌he Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundations for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendants of the Haitian Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors.7 For Dubois and many other historians, the Haitian Revolution has become not only the most important event in the history of the Caribbean, but one

6.  See, for example, Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti:  The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); John K. Thornton, “‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4, no. 2 (1993):  181–​214; and David Geggus, “Marronage, Vodou, and the Slave Revolt of 1791,” in Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2002). See also Lauren Dubois, Avengers of the New World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), 108–​10. 7. Dubois, Avengers, 7. I am grateful to Nate Boling for his help in thinking through the theoretical basis of Dubois’s argument.

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of the most important events in the age of revolutions as a whole.8 We are clearly in a different historiographical moment from when R. R. Palmer published his multivolume exploration of the Age of Revolutions, but saw fit to devote only a few lines to the Haitian Revolution. And we have even come very far from the prevailing historiographical sentiment of 1995, when Michel-​Rolph Truillot published his seminal book Silencing the Past, detailing how the original “trauma” of the Haitian Revolution had led to its complete obliteration from historical narratives and modern memory outside of Haiti, with C. L. R. James’s remarkable Black Jacobins standing as one of the lone exceptions. Today, the study of the Haitian Revolution has become not only common but very nearly obligatory, to the point that it threatens to overwhelm our understanding not only of the Caribbean but of the Atlantic World more generally. What has taken the place of academic “silence,” however, is a surprisingly monotone historiographical narrative in which every uprising involving slaves or people of color in the Atlantic World is seen through the prism of the great slave uprising of 1791 in Saint Domingue and the fight for Haitian independence in 1802–​1804, when generals on both sides of the conflict contemplated wholesale racial extermination.9 But every island in the Caribbean is not Haiti. And every uprising is not a slave rebellion or a race war. One need only look at a map to see that the Windward Islands are separated from Haiti by more than eight hundred miles of open sea (see Figure 2.2). The surviving primary sources attest to the fact that the inhabitants of these islands were much more attuned to what was happening on neighboring islands or in the metropole, from which ships arrived and departed on a regular basis, than they were to events in Saint Domingue, which they mentioned only infrequently. As a historian of the Windward Islands, I confess to feeling a certain affinity 8.  For contrasting reflections on the meaning of the Haitian Revolution for the history of revolutions, see David A. Bell, “Questioning the Global Turn:  The Case of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 37, no. 1 (2014); and Pierre Serna, “Every Revolution Is a War of Independence,” in The French Revolution in Global Perspective, eds. Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 9. See footnote 1 on the conflation of these two events in much of the historiography.

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Figure 2.2:  Map of the Caribbean in 1795. (Note the roughly eight-​hundred-​mile distance between Saint Domingue and the Windward Islands).

with the frustration of the French official in Guadeloupe who wrote in exasperation to the Committee of Public Safety in 1794, after receiving a box of documents intended for Saint Domingue and Guyana: The Committee should be aware that the Windward Islands have absolutely no contact [ne communiquent nullement] with Guyana and Saint Domingue, it being impossible to have any communications [with these islands] given the winds which reign in this part of the world. This fact merits the full attention of the Committee.10 And one does not even need a calendar to question the likelihood that the great slave uprisings in Saint Domingue in 1791, through some sort of delayed reaction, gave rise to a series of simultaneous revolts some four or five years later, not to mention the even less likely scenario that the Haitian 10.  Victor Hugues, commissaire of the National Convention to the Windward Islands to the Committee of Public Safety (20 frimaire year 3), Archives nationales d’outre mer C/​7A/​47.

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struggle for independence (1802–​1804) somehow inspired rebellions a decade before it actually occurred. The revolution that resulted in an independent Haiti in 1804 may indeed have proved inspirational to nineteenth-​ century revolutions in Latin America,11 but the conventional laws of time and space would suggest that we look at the uprisings in the Windward Islands of the 1790s on their own terms, rather than considering them as aftershocks of Saint Domingue in 1791 or precursors of Haitian independ­ ence in 1804. In the pages that follow, I  hope to show that the surviving textual evidence points toward only one conclusion:  that the rebels of the Windward Islands did not see themselves as fighting in separate, local rebellions in which one race took up arms against another, but rather they imagined themselves to be participating in the French Revolution, which they understood as a worldwide revolution to establish a universal Republic in support of rights for all people, regardless of race or nationality. I  will not only be connecting the dots—​literally, from island to island—​of events that have more or less been understood as separate, intra-​island rebellions, but I will also endeavor to show that, rather than being struggles between blacks and whites, the battles that were waged on these islands involved individuals of every color on both sides. Very far from fanning the flames of racial tension, the rebels studiously avoided all references to race. Proclamations were addressed to “Citizens, whatever color they may be” and first-​person narratives took pains to avoid identifying the race of any individual mentioned, including the author. If there was one salient feature common to all of these rebellions, it was not race; it was allegiance to the ideals of the French Revolution. While the abolition of slavery was indeed one of the goals of rebel forces on all of the islands, so were many of the other

11. See Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–​1848 (London: Verso, 1989). For a range of reflections on the degree to which the Haitian Revolution influenced rebellion and revolution elsewhere, see The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, edited by David P. Geggus (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001).

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tenets of the radical French Revolution, including an implacable hatred for the British, whose imperial monarchy was regarded as the virtual antithesis of the universal Republic. I realize that some readers may object to a narrative that might seem to imply that inhabitants of the Caribbean were “influenced” by events and ideas in the metropole, as if they were somehow incapable of coming up with their own ideas. Such a narrative, in other words, could be construed as perpetuating a kind of intellectual imperialism, robbing Caribbean rebels of agency and making them unwitting pawns of Europeans. But the story I want to tell is very different. Far from being unable to think for themselves or naively parroting ideas exported to them from the metropole, the rebels of the Caribbean—​black, white, and mixed race—​ saw themselves as part of the Revolution, fighting for a cause that they embraced as their own: the ideal of a universal Republic in which people of all races and all nations would be free and equal. So completely did these Caribbean revolutionaries embrace the principles of the French Revolution in its most universalistic incarnation, that they would ultimately defend it against the French themselves. When Napoleon attempted to restore slavery to Guadeloupe in 1802, creating a “special” zone in which the previously universal principles of the Revolution would no longer apply, thousands of citizens from Guadeloupe would take up arms in the name of the Republic against the Republic, essentially defending the Revolution against itself. They may not have been solely responsible for inventing the political language that they spoke, but they defended its message long after the apostates of the metropole had embraced Bonapartism beneath a veneer of Republicanism. Very far from contributing to the chorus of narratives championing the triumphal march of human rights, the story I  am about to tell reveals a certain fragility inherent in universal, abstract principles. For all their rhetorical appeal and their ability to inspire people to take up arms in their defense, the very abstraction of these principles seems to make them particularly susceptible to subtle redefinition; “liberty” and “equality” may be wonderful things but, in the Windward Islands at least, they were decreed in 1794 just as easily as they were un-​decreed in 1802.

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But, I will come back to this point at the end. For now, I simply want to present, as clearly and straightforwardly as possible, the narrative of the French Revolution in the Windward Islands. For if this narrative is even remotely plausible, then we may want to reconsider some of the things that we have been telling ourselves about the Atlantic World for the past twenty years. *** The Revolution in France was dizzying for those who witnessed it firsthand, but for colonists who learned of events in the metropole months after those events had taken place, it must have been even more disorienting and confusing. If the transmission of news from the metropole to the colonies was slow, communications back and forth was, of course, twice as slow. A letter written in France might take two months to be received in the Caribbean colonies, and a reply might take another two months to make its way back to France. In a revolutionary atmosphere in which the political culture could change in the space of a few days, if not hours, four months was an eternity. A colonial official writing back to Paris in the late summer of 1792 would still have included “the King” along with “the Nation” and “the Law” in the letterhead of official correspondence, but by the time the letter was received in Paris, the king had been arrested; and by the time a reply was received back in the Caribbean, the king had already been tried, condemned, and guillotined. Because of the time lag, one has to imagine that colonial officials were somewhat apprehensive as they drafted their correspondence, never sure of the political climate in which their letters would be received. Apprehension worked in both directions, however. French officials constantly worried about the extent of colonists’ loyalty to the mother country. From the earliest days of the Revolution, there had been secessionist rumblings among colonists who worried about their future and the security of their property in the new régime, and especially the enormous financial stake that many colonists had invested in human prop­ erty. Soon after the Revolution of 10 August 1792, therefore, the new Executive Council, which replaced the government of Louis XVI, decided that it would be prudent to dispatch a messenger across the Atlantic to reassure colonists that the new Republican régime had no intention of

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disturbing the status quo in the colonies. Within weeks of coming into existence, the Republic chose Jean-​Baptiste Lacrosse for this “very important mission,” put him in command of the frigate Félicité, and charged him with transporting copies of the various decrees that had been passed by the new National Convention. Lacrosse set sail from the port of Brest on 24 October 1792, and arrived off the coast of Martinique early on the morning of 1 December, only to discover the white flag of counterrevolution fluttering above the harbor. News of the Revolution of August 10 had preceded him, and many slaveholding citizens, white as well as non-​white, had rallied to the royalist cause, afraid that the new Republic might dispossess them of their human property. Not only on Martinique, but on Guadeloupe as well, the tricolor had been replaced by the white flag of the Bourbon monarchy, and patriots loyal to the Republic on both islands had fled.12 Lacrosse had been specifically charged by the National Convention with the task of bringing “citizens of different colors” into the Republican fold.13 In one of his first letters to be disseminated throughout the Windward Islands, he therefore urged citizens “of all colors” to think of themselves as being part of “one and the same family.” At the same time, he reassured slaveholders, white as well as non-​white, that the new racial equality would not in any way infringe upon their right to own slaves: “Your property is, like ours, under the protection of the nation. Never has it entered into the plan of the government to destroy it by attacking your human property [propriétés pensantes]; those who have told you this are misleading you and lying to you.”14 There was nothing (at least yet) about French Republicanism that was inconsistent with slavery, and many loyal patriots of the French Republic saw no more conflict between their insistence on liberty for themselves and their enslavement of others than did many patriots of the slightly 12. “Compte rendu de Lacrosse,” in Archives parlementaires, 76:508. 13.  For Lacrosse’s instructions from the National Convention, see Archives parlementaires, 60: 185. 14. Ibid., 182–​83.

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older American republic to the north.15 Nevertheless, and in contrast to what was taking place in the American context, Lacrosse was simultaneously mixing the language of racial equality with a defense of slavery. While this may seem strange to us two centuries later, this was the official policy of the French government between 4 April 1792, the date when “men of color and free negroes” were accorded equal political rights with white colonists, and 4 February 1794, when slavery was officially abolished throughout France and the colonies.16 During this period of time, the Republic both defended slavery as an inviolable right of property and racial equality as a core principle of the Revolution. With both Martinique and Guadeloupe in open rebellion against the Republic, Lacrosse had no choice but to set sail for Saint Lucia, the only colony in the Windward Islands (apart from tiny Marie Galante off the coast of Guadeloupe) that had remained loyal to the Republic. Arriving in Saint Lucia, Lacrosse devoted himself to fostering a political culture of revolutionary Republicanism and paid special attention to citizens of color, or “new citizens” to use the preferred euphemism of the day. As he wrote in his report to the National Convention, “I did not squander any chance to instruct and enlighten the new citizens.” He reinvigorated political clubs on the island; he saw to the planting of liberty trees (now called “Republican trees”). In short, he “made use of all means to electrify souls,” and he proudly noted that “the Marseillaise was sung everywhere.”17 As word spread throughout the region of the exemplary Republicanism of Saint Lucia, refugees from counterrevolutionary islands made their way to this Revolutionary stronghold. The colonial assembly of Saint 15. It should be noted that abolitionism had become a strong political movement by this point in France, and that a willingness to tolerate slavery was by no means an uncontroversial position. 16. The National Assembly had proclaimed, as early as May of 1791, that free blacks and people of color born of two free parents were to be regarded as equal citizens. Because this proclamation met with resistance by whites in the colonies, it was overturned several months later. In early 1792, however, the National Assembly voted to accord civil rights to all free blacks and people of color, regardless of parentage. 17.  Archives parlementaires, 76:510. On political clubs, see Anne Pérotin-​ Dumon, “Les Jacobins des Antilles ou l’esprit de liberté dans les Iles-​du-​Vent,”in Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 35, no. 2 (1988): 278. See also Mémoire pour Pélage, 1:18.

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Lucia, although it continued to support a system of slavery based upon race, nevertheless emphasized the universalistic nature of the island’s Republicanism with respect to non-​slaves, boasting that it had “welcomed into its bosom, with delight, all citizens, without regard to status, fortune, color, sex or age, who had abandoned their rebellious domiciles in order to come in search of patriotic asylum among us.”18 So exemplary was Saint Lucia in its faithfulness to the Republic that the island was officially renamed Sainte-​Lucie-​la-​fidelle, and the principal city on the island, Castries, was renamed Félicité in honor of Lacrosse’s ship and crew. From his base on Revolutionary Saint Lucia, Lacrosse wrote letters to the inhabitants of the rebellious islands. In particular, he addressed the “new citizens” of Martinique and Guadeloupe, presenting Saint Lucia as a kind of post-​racial Republican utopia—​at least for its non-​enslaved inhabitants—​where people of all colors enjoyed all civil, political, and social rights (including the right to enslave others): Already, the reign [of the Republic] has begun on loyal Saint Lucia:  Come see your brothers who have become our brothers, united as one family, sitting at the same table, partaking of all the social pleasures, as well as of our labors and our dangers in war. Would you prefer the ancien régime where a humiliating line of demarcation separated you from whites? Imitate the example of the new [i.e. non-​white] citizens of Saint Lucia who have remained loyal. . . .19 Eventually, it would seem that Lacrosse’s promises and enticements had their intended effect. Reassured that the new Republic had no intention of challenging their right to human property, citizens of all colors on the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique rose up against the local, royalist governments. By mid-​January, Lacrosse was able to report back to France that the Windward Islands had returned to the Republican fold 18.  Lettre ou instructions de l’assemblée générale coloniale de l’île Saint-​Lucie-​la-​Fidèle à J.-​B. Thounens, son député (1793): 10. 19. Archives parlementaires, 76:522.

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and were now in a “state of tranquility and peace.”20 Patriotic refugees who had sought safe haven on Saint Lucia returned home to Martinique and Guadeloupe, and for the next several weeks these formerly rebellious islands vied with each other for the honor of Lacrosse’s visit.21 He decided to accept the position of interim governor of Guadeloupe, leaving Saint Lucia so he could take up his post on that island. For a few brief weeks, in January of 1793, all seemed well in the Windward Islands. Royalists had been defeated on Martinique and Guadeloupe. Saint Lucia and tiny Marie Galante could bask in the honor of having never betrayed the Republic, and Lacrosse now found himself in ostensible command of all of these islands in the name of the French Republic. He therefore found it advisable to name a second in command on the island of Guadeloupe, so that he might better administer that island in the event that he was called away to Martinique or Saint Lucia. For this position, he named Captain Kermené (formerly Baron Kermené), who was currently commanding the forces on neighboring Marie Galante. Writing of Kermené in his account delivered to the National Convention a few years later, Lacrosse would note that the Republic was obligated to him for having “supported Saint-​Lucia against the machinations of the aristocracy.”22 And indeed, Kermené was one of the most active and well-​ known patriots in the Windward Islands, and would play an important role in the coming months on Saint Lucia. The happy accord that had settled over the islands in a common embrace of Republicanism would very soon be disrupted by the arrival of two generals, Rochambeau23 and Ricard, who had been appointed immediately

20. Ibid., 60:179–​80. 21. Ibid., 60:181. 22. Ibid., 76:511. 23.  Donatien-​Marie-​Joseph de Vimeur, vicomte de Rochambeau, was the son and aide-​de-​ camp of the famous general who fought in the American Revolution. He would later be in charge of the extraordinarily brutal and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to maintain French control over Saint Domingue, and would surrender to Dessalines in November of 1803, paving the way for the declaration of Haitian independence on 1 January 1804.

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before the Revolution of 10 August as the governors of Martinique and Saint Lucia respectively, but who were only now coming to claim their posts, which had been re-​confirmed by the new Republican government.24 But the political climate on these islands in Janunary of 1793 was significantly more radical than when these generals had been appointed, and Lacrosse was faced with the difficult, and no doubt self-​effacing, task of convincing the newly victorious, decidedly radical, assemblies to accept them as governors. He went first to Martinique, where he helped to install Rochambeau as governor, and then to Saint Lucia where he did the same for the septuagenarian General Ricard. Lacrosse was about to return to Guadeloupe to resume his role as governor, when he learned that a third general, Collot, appointed at the same time as the others, had landed in Guadeloupe in order to assume the governorship. After a brief time in which conservatives on the island backed Collot, and radicals insisted that Lacrosse remain as governor, Rochambeau managed to convince Lacrosse to step down and allow Collot to assume the governorship for the good of the colony.25 Over the next year, something remarkable took place. Although the particular details differed from island to island, as a whole, events on Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint Lucia almost exactly mirrored and at times even anticipated events in the metropole. On all three islands, a Girondin administration battled counterrevolutionaries as well as the threat of British invasion while at the same time attempting to stave off the threat of an alliance between radical politicians and local self-​proclaimed “sans-​ culottes.” Recollecting this period of turmoil some years later, Ricard, the former governor of Saint Lucia, would marvel at the parallels between the colonies and the metropole: One will be surprised by the resemblance that existed between the events that I am describing [in Saint Lucia] and the preponderance 24.  The generals had attempted to land at Martinique in September of 1792, but had been repulsed by the counter-​revolutionaries then in control of the island and had continued on to Saint Domingue. In late January, having heard that the tricolor was once again flying over all the French Windward Islands, they returned to claim their posts. 25. Archives parlementaires, 76: 511–​12.

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of [events] which so frequently threatened the Republic. [The surprising thing] is that the colonies imitated or anticipated the tragic dramas of France. The same coils were powering the same springs, and in every theater, big and small, the passions were everywhere the same.26 As Ricard would describe it, the radicals on Saint Lucia, in league with radicals on neighboring islands, endeavored to disband the colonial assembly and replace it with their own radical assembly. But no sooner had Ricard put out this political fire than he faced a rebellion in the island’s armed forces. Three battalion officers and an engineer in chief deserted their posts and joined deserters from the rank and file to form their own radical military force. The colonial assembly sided with Ricard, but radical members of the municipal government declared their allegiance to the rebel soldiers. Ricard assembled “a company of grenadiers and two detachments of colonists, the majority of whom were citizens of color” and gave chase to the rebel forces who had disappeared into Saint Lucia’s forests. In the end, Ricard’s forces were victorious; some of the rebel leaders were captured, others were killed, and still others managed to escape into the woods. According to Ricard’s report, he then decreed a general amnesty, after which “the plantations returned to work.”27 Who were these rebels? Ricard gave scant details in his published Précis du compte rendu intended for public consumption, but he alleged that radicals on Saint Lucia had been in league with counterparts from Martinique, implying an inter-​island radical conspiracy. He mentioned, as we saw, that the majority of those who joined him in chasing down the rebels were gens de couleurs, and his statement that the plantations returned to work soon after the rebels had been defeated suggests that

26. Précis du compte rendu à la Convention Nationale par le Général N. X. Ricard de sa conduite depuis son départ de France (Philadelphia, 1795), 11. 27. Ibid., 8–​11.

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either the slaves had stopped work during this moment of civil unrest or that perhaps some slaves had joined the rebels. But if the published account named no names, Ricard’s handwritten compte rendu reveals the names of the leaders of the rebel conspiracy: Captain (former Baron) Kermené, Lacrosse’s former second in Command in Guadeloupe, whom Lacrosse had credited with keeping Saint Lucia loyal to the Republic a year earlier; Sabathier Saint-​André, a former teacher of mathematics from Bordeaux, who had been the chief engineer of the armed forces on Saint Lucia, and who had recently been elected to the National Convention by the voters of Guadeloupe; and La Cassaigne and Genest, both of whom were also from metropolitan France. The only créole among the leaders had been the municipal official Genty, a person of color originally from Martinique, who had allied himself with the rebels of Saint Lucia.28 To Ricard, writing after Thermidor, these island Jacobins could be compared to their metropolitan counterparts:  “The Americas had their Robespierres, their Couthons, their Saint Justs; they had their Sabathiers, their Gentys, their Kermenés,  .  .  .  [P]‌erhaps [the latter] were less horrible but more vile than the former, since they had all the same aims but without their fatal energy.”29 What Ricard neglected to say in his report is that they lacked the “fatal energy” of Robespierre et  al. because they had ended up dead before they could take power. Kermené supposedly slit his wrists after being taken prisoner by Ricard, although many would murmur that Ricard had him assassinated. Ricard had put a price on the heads of the remaining rebels, and someone, apparently a slave, took him at his word and had decapitated Sabathier Saint-​André, preventing him from ever taking his seat in the National Convention.30 Much as Ricard might have liked to present the story of 28. “Compte rendu à la convention nationale par le général Ricard de son administration et de sa deffense [sic] de Ste Lucie” [CAOM C/​10/​C7]. On Genty, see Léo Elizabeth, “La République dans les Iles du Vent (déc. 1792–​avril 1794),” 378. 29. “Compte rendu par Ricard.” 30. Elizabeth, “La République dans les Isles du Vent,” 404. A recent article by Matthieu Carlot suggests that few details of Sabathier’s fate can be found. [See Matthieu Carlot, “Des chemins périlleux. Le voyage des conventionnels des colonies vers Paris (1793–​1794),” in Annales

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Saint Lucia as one in which the forces of law and order triumphed against “anarchists,” it seems clear that what took place was not unlike the battle between Girondins and Montagnards five thousand miles away, except that in this instance the Girondins got the upper hand, and the radical leadership was either killed or escaped into the woods, where they gathered what remained of their numbers and regrouped. Was this, then, the origin of the famous gens des bois—​the rag-​tag soldiers in the woods who would battle the British the following year, helping to return Saint Lucia to the Republic? I  suspect it was. And although this multiracial renegade army in the woods does not seem to mesh with subsequent characterizations of them as an army of maroon slaves, I suspect this is for the simple reason that they were not—​or at least not at this point in time—​an army of maroon slaves, but rather an army made up of people of all colors who had united behind the cause of the radical Republic. We will return to the gens des bois in a moment, but it is worth asking whether we can conclude anything at all about the race of people involved on all sides of the political turmoil in Saint Lucia? And I think the answer is: No. As on all the islands, there were white royalists, white moderates, and white radicals, just as there were people of color in all three camps. And as for the slave population, at least on Saint Lucia, it would appear that, for the moment, they had largely decided to wait on the sidelines, unsure of who might prevail. On the other side of the Atlantic, although officials in Paris were certainly worried about the fate of the colonies, their attention was, at least for the moment, very much elsewhere. Particularly after the declaration of war against Britain on 1 February 1793, soon followed by war with much of the rest of Europe, not to mention the internal uprising in the Vendée, they were concerned with problems much closer to home. In the colonies, however, the declaration of war with Britain felt like a much more immediate threat, and the colonists of the Windward Islands—​or at least

historiques de la Révolution française 380, no. 2 (2015): 21.] Although Elizabeth seems very clear on what became of Sabathier, I have yet to find a confirmation of Elizabeth’s account, and he provides no citation.

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pro-​Revolutionary colonists—​suddenly felt alone, abandoned, and very vulnerable. The colonial assembly of Saint Lucia urged its representative in Paris to warn the authorities that the colonies were in danger of falling victim “to the furor of our enemies and then the republic will lose forever, and by its own fault, these precious islands.”31 Preoccupied with events in its own hemisphere, however, the French Republic would not get around to sending troops to aid in the defense of the Windward Islands until the spring of 1794, more than a year after war had been declared. And even then, they could muster only a relatively modest force. On 23 April 1794, a small flotilla of ships set sail from the port of Rochefort bound for the Windward Islands. The ships carried some 1200 troops, and two commissaires, specially appointed by the National Convention, and invested with extraordinary powers.32 This paltry force might seem too little too late, were it not for the fact that the commissaires carried with them a weapon that, if not exactly secret, was not yet public knowledge in the Caribbean: the emancipation decree of 4 February 1794, proclaiming the immediate abolition of slavery in all islands under French control and, by implication, all islands that might soon come under French control. In a region in which slaves outnumbered free peoples by a margin of as much as ten to one, the emancipation decree not only promised freedom to hundreds of thousands of slaves, it also had the potential to alter completely the balance of power in the Western hemisphere. The commissaires entrusted with the task of shoring up the French colonies in the Windward Islands were loyal Jacobin stalwarts. One, who was destined to enjoy a notorious future in the Caribbean, was Victor Hugues, a native of Marseilles, who had spent nearly two decades of his youth in Saint Domingue, before returning to France in 1792 and informing the government of his availability to serve in any capacity in which he could be useful; his letter had been read out loud before the National Convention and Hugues was named commissaire to the Windward Islands in 1793. 31. Lettre ou instructions de l’assemblée générale coloniale de l’ile Sainte-​Lucie-​la-​Fidèle à J.-​B. Thounens, 19. 32. Colonel H. de Poyen, Les guerres des antilles de 1793 à 1815 (Paris, 1896), 73.

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The other was Pierre Chrétien, who had been appointed in 1792, but who had apparently been waiting a year for ships, troops, and materiel in order to undertake his mission. As soon as Hugues had been appointed to accompany Chrétien, the two made their way to Rochefort to oversee the assembly of a fleet. As they waited in that city for their mission to begin, they found themselves pressed into service for the Revolutionary Tribunal of Rochefort, where they both took part in judicial proceedings that resulted in the condemnation of more than forty counterrevolutionaries to the guillotine, including several naval officers accused of plotting to turn French ports over to the British. The curious thing about the roster of officials taking part in the judicial Terror of Rochefort is that it is a veritable who’s who of the most important military and administrative leadership of the coming Revolution in the Windward Islands:  Hugues, who served as public prosecutor of the Rochefort tribunal, was about to become the most important official—​ many would say dictator—​of the island of Guadeloupe; Chrétien, Hugues’ fellow commissaire, who would accompany Hugues to Guadeloupe, served as an expert witness; Gaspard Goyrand, who would soon lead the Revolution in Saint Lucia, served as one of the tribunal’s judges; and Lebas, who would help Hugues administer the island of Guadeloupe, served as substitute solicitor.33 Hugues and Chrétien set sail from Rochefort in April of 1794 and after forty days at sea, they arrived off the coast of Guadeloupe on the morning of 4 June 1794, only to see the Union Jack flying above the island. They would soon discover that all of the French colonies in the Windward Islands had fallen to the British:  Martinique had fallen on 6 February 1794, only two days after France had declared the abolition of slavery; Saint Lucia had been attacked on 31 March, with émigré French royalists serving as guides to the British, and the island had fallen within a matter of days; Guadeloupe had been the last to fall, in mid-​April. On many of the islands, Republicans of all colors had been shipped off to Britain, 33. Charles Berriat Saint-​Prix, La justice révolutionnaire à Paris et dans les départements (Paris, 1863), 11; on Chrétien’s role, see Kemmerer, Histoire de l’Ile de Ré (La Rochelle, 1868), 2:279.

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where they would be held as prisoners of war until they could be traded back to the French. On Saint Lucia, several Republicans who had refused to surrender fled to the woods, joining forces with the radicals who had taken refuge there in the wake of Ricard’s Girondist purge several months earlier.34 The rapidity with which the Girondin generals on all three islands had surrendered to the British would later be called into question, and all three would have to account for their conduct and their patriotism before the National Convention. Undeterred by the British presence on Guadeloupe, Hugues and Chrétien resolved to take back the island in the name of the Republic. They immediately disseminated a proclamation to the citizens of Guadeloupe, declaring the newly abolitionist, universalistic principles of the radical Republic: “Citizens a Republican government can support neither chains nor slavery. .  . . Citizens, you have become free only in order to enjoy happiness and to share it with others. He who oppresses his fellow citizen is a monster who must be immediately banished from the earth.”35 While the news of abolition may well have come as a surprise to slaveholders on the island, it would appear that patriotism (or hatred of the British) took precedence over economic interests. The vast majority of free inhabitants on the island, both people of color and white, sided with the Republic, although some—​again, of all races—​would support the British.36 The balance was tipped by the overwhelming support of (former) slaves who rallied en masse to the side of the Republic. Over several days, troops from the metropole joined local inhabitants in attacking the British, engaging them in intense battles. Chrétien was killed by enemy fire two weeks after his arrival, leaving Hugues as the sole commissaire. In the end, however, the Republic was victorious. The Union Jack was lowered, the tricolor flag was raised, and many royalists 34. Mémoire de Jean-​Joseph Lambert délégué à Sainte-​Lucie par les Commissaires de la Convention Nationale aux Isles du Vent, et présentement Capitaine à la 4e. demi-​Brigade d’Infanterie de Ligne au Directoire Exécutif [CAOM, C/​10C/​7]. 35. Extrait du procès verbal de la Convention nationale [CAOM, C/​7A/​ 47]. 36. M. A. Lacour, Histoire de la Guadeloupe (Basse Terre, 1857), 2:336–​37.

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who had not managed to flee with the British were publicly guillotined. Hugues proceeded throughout the summer and autumn of 1794 to set up the institutions of the Terror on the island of Guadeloupe, including surveillance committees and revolutionary tribunals, unaware that the Terror had ended in the metropole. Finding himself in sole command, he also sent off a request to the Committee of Public Safety, informing them of his successes, and requesting that Goyrand and Lebas, his former colleagues on the Rochefort tribunal, join him and help with the re-​conquest of the remaining Windward Islands, still under British control. No less imperial-​ minded than their predecessors, the now-​Thermidorian Committee of Public Safety immediately authorized the voyage of Goyrand and Lebas to join Hugues in Guadeloupe.37 Lebas and Goyrand set sail from the port of Brest on 16 November 1794, as part of a flotilla of nineteen ships, containing two thousand soldiers, among whom were several who had been taken prisoner by the British six months earlier, during the latter’s conquest of the French islands, and who, after being traded back, were now being repatriated. (Among these soldiers were Louis Delgrès and Magloire Pélage, both of whom were of mixed race, and both of whom would play important roles in the coming re-​conquest.) The ships arrived in Guadeloupe on 6 January 1795, and Hugues, now joined by his former colleagues Lebas and Goyrand, lost no time in charting a strategy to retake neighboring islands from the British. He introduced Goyrand and Lebas to Jean-​Joseph Lambert, a former member of the National Guard of Saint Lucia as well as a member of the representative assembly of that island, who had fought the British under General Ricard, but who had taken to the woods rather than surrender. He had eventually escaped to newly reconquered Guadeloupe, where Hugues had made him a judge in one of the new revolutionary tribunals on that island. But now, Hugues had more important plans for him. Goyrand and Hugues arranged to send Lambert back to Saint Lucia where, under cover of darkness, he was to make contact with the inhabitants of that island and prepare the way for the coming invasion to 37. Poyen, Les guerres des antilles de 1793 à 1815, 88

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be led by Goyrand. On 26 January, Lambert landed on a deserted cove of Saint Lucia, and immediately set off to gather information from his friends and acquaintances. Asking about the gens des bois, he was told that, “The gens des bois [were] a number of citizens of all different colors who had been obliged to seek refuge in the mountains and in the woods in order to avoid being pursued by the English and the [royalist] émigrés, [but the gens des bois] never stopped fighting whenever they had the chance to do so.” Taking leave of his friends, and promising to return soon, Lambert told them to be ready for a signal from the “legitimate agents of the French Government.”38 Upon his return to Guadeloupe, Lambert apprised Hugues and Goyrand of the situation on Saint Lucia, and indicated that the inhabitants of that island were ready and willing to rise up against the British. When Hugues informed Lambert that he would shortly be sent back to Saint Lucia for the purposes of making direct contact with the gens des bois, Lambert suggested to Hugues that, “it would be necessary to take a white man with me in order to gain the confidence of both whites and blacks.” In a mémoire twenty pages long, this is Lambert’s one and only (oblique) reference to his race:  the fact that he was not white. And this studious avoidance of race would be typical of many of the documents produced during this period. While race was clearly an important consideration to Lambert—​as well as to those on the island of Saint Lucia whom he hoped to rally to the cause of the Republic—​so too was the Republican ideal of racelessnesses and a marked preference to avoid, whenever possible, distinguishing citizens by race. Lambert’s subtle request for parity was a way of addressing the realities of race, while at the same time gesturing toward this raceless ideal. Lambert proposed a white officer named Massade, whose patriotism he vouched for, and the two of them were officially made delegates of the commissaires before returning to Saint Lucia to reconnoiter with the gens des bois. Landing, once again, on Saint Lucia under cover of darkness, they were assured by those they met that “the majority of the inhabitants of the 38. The details of Lambert’s actions on Saint Lucia are contained in his Mémoire, op. cit.

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island were waiting for French forces to arrive so that they could join them in exterminating the English who never stopped tyrannizing them to the extreme.” Learning of the whereabouts of the gens des bois, Lambert and Massade headed into the woods to find them, and here is how Lambert describes their first encounter: These unfortunates uttered cries of joy upon seeing me; I  assured them of my gratitude and embraced them, bolstering them with promises of a brighter future, and I informed them of my mission and of the powers that had been invested in me. I asked them if they were resolved to die with me in order to ensure the triumph of the Republic; they swore that they were. Learning that the gens des bois had named Marinier as their commanding officer, Lambert reports that, “I immediately gave Citizen Marinier a certificate making him a Lieutenant-​Colonel in the army of the Republic (which the commissaires of Guadeloupe had given me as a blank) and I  announced that he was henceforth the Commander in Chief of the Republican Army [of Saint Lucia].” Upon hearing this, all the gens de bois shouted “Vive la République!” For the next several days, Lambert spent his time surreptitiously posting proclamations signed by the commissaires of Guadeloupe, informing the people of Saint Lucia of the impending invasion, urging “citizens of all colors” to fall under the standard of the Republic at the first opportunity, and warning those who did not that they would be treated “as enemies of the public good.” On 16 April 1795, commissaire Goyrand landed on the island of Saint Lucia with six hundred troops, announcing his arrival by a proclamation to “all citizens, whatever color they may be” and declaring that, in accordance with the decree of 4 February, slavery was henceforth abolished. For the next two months, Goyrand coordinated with Marinier, the newly appointed Commander in Chief of Republican forces, battling the British for control of the island. He immediately set about forming the island’s administration along the lines of the radical Republic he had left behind in the metropole. Goyrand divided the island into six municipal units, headed

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by “whites, Africans, and men of color who could write,” noting that by including men of all colors in the administration he was “giving proof that everyone would enjoy civil liberty and political equality in accord with the French constitution.” He also formed a Surveillance Committee composed of five individuals, but he would later insist that he never prosecuted anyone without tangible proof of their guilt, and that investigations were conducted only against those who had embraced the cause of counterrevolution during the British occupation. In short, Goyrand assures us, only a few “profoundly perverse” individuals were punished.39 Indeed, virtually all surviving sources, French as well as British, testify to Goyrand’s moderation and humanity in his dealings with both friends and enemies.40 Even as he battled the British for control of the island, he made it a point to travel among the “citizen cultivators”—​a term he used along with “African citizens” to avoid referring to the race of the newly emancipated slaves—​doing his best to convince them that their work was essential to the Republican cause. Every décadi, the day of rest in the Republican calendar, Goyrand reports that he “assembled the African citizens and explained to them in speeches which they could understand, all about civil liberty, political equality,” but he also made sure to speak to them about “respect for property and persons.” While he insisted on the principle of equality, Goyrand was nevertheless a man of his times and his account often strikes a paternalistic tone. Speaking of the newly freed slaves, he wrote: “These men, too long oppressed, have a natural sense of justice and injustice; I had gained their trust to such an extent they looked upon me as a father; they knew that I punished malefactors only with regret and that I would never betray them.” But Goyrand was also a man of deep conviction. Immediately upon hearing reports that non-​white soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the British were being sold as 39. Details concerning Goyrand’s administration of Saint Lucia are contained in his Compte rendu au citoyen Bourdon, Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies, par le citoyen Goyrand, ex-​agent aux Isles-​du-​Vent [CAOM C/​8B/​24]. 40. See, for example, The Diary of Sir John Moore, edited by J. F. Maurice (London: E. Arnold, 1904), 1:219. Moore describes Goyrand, his adversary, as “a man of humanity, [who] did good, and is much liked by the Colony.”

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slaves on other islands, Goyrand fired off a note to the British commander, threatening “to put chains on British soldiers and officers and attach them to the plantations until such time as the unfortunate Africans who have been sold in English territory are returned. This [is a] manifest violation of human rights [droit des gens].”41 For the ten months in which Goyrand presided over Saint Lucia, the island was administered according to the ideals of the Republic. The extent to which these ideals were understood to be universal, in their embrace of all humanity throughout the world, rather than strictly French, is evidenced by the fact that several British soldiers defected to the Republican side, one of whom drafted a letter begging his British “brothers” to abandon a cause that “daily reviles the dignity of Man.”42 The British eventually did abandon Saint Lucia in mid-​June of 1795, allowing Goyrand the opportunity not only to consolidate Republican rule over the island, but to devote significant efforts to exporting the ideals of the Revolution to neighboring islands. Goyrand and Hugues succeeded in making contact with sympathetic individuals on the nearby islands of Grenada and Saint Vincent, both of which were former French colonies that had been ceded to Britain in 1783, but which still contained majority French-​speaking and French-​identified populations. On Grenada, forces loyal to the Republic took control of several major towns in March of 1795, and that same month, on Saint Vincent, the so-​called black Caribs, of mixed indigenous and African ancestry, joined French-​speaking colonists in a revolt against the British. To help spread the Revolution to neighboring islands, Goyrand sent off 41. While eighteenth-​century invocations of the term droit des gens are often translated as the “law of nations,” I would argue that during the radical phase of the Revolution the term took on a meaning more akin to the modern understanding of the term “human rights.” See, for example, the Abbé Grégoire’s proposal to the National Convention for a Déclaration des droits des gens (first proposed in 1793 and again in 1795), which was meant as a kind of international supplement to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and which contained references to “universal morality” and the greater “human family.” See Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur: depuis la réunion des États . . ., 24: 296. 42. Letter from John Mury, Private in 61st Regiment, Souffriere, to his “brothers.” Royal Irish Academy, The Caldwell Collection, 12 R 43/​17, quoted at https://​www.ria.ie/​sites/​default/​files/​ caldwell-​collection-​catalogue-​sp-​list-​a040.pdf.

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two small battalions in the fall of 1795, one to Grenada and the other to Saint Vincent. The five-​hundred-​man battalion sent to Saint Vincent was under the command of Marinier, the former leader of the gens des bois of Saint Lucia, who had accepted a commission as Lieutenant-​Colonel in the French army. Seconding Marinier, was Louis Delgrès; both were men of color. Delgrès had been a veteran of the defense of Martinique, had been taken prisoner by the British, repatriated to France, and then had accompanied Goyrand and Lebas back to the Caribbean in order to fight for the cause of the Republic. (We will encounter him again in 1802, in Guadeloupe, still fighting for the cause of the universal Republic against its enemies who, this last time, would be French.) In April of 1796, a massive British flotilla under the command of General Abercrombie arrived off the shore of Saint Lucia, heralding the end of the brief reign of the universal Republic on that island. The British sent an emissary ashore, calling on Goyrand to surrender. He replied: “The scale of your formidable forces causes me no fear. Republicans of our caliber know how to defend themselves  .  .  .  against the oppressors of the human race.” Although massively outnumbered, the Republicans of Saint Lucia—​people of all colors—​managed to hold out for nearly a month. On the side of the Republic, although the troops were primarily made up of black soldiers, a number of men of color as well as whites fought alongside them. Joining these French-​speaking Republicans were several British soldiers as well as sixty, mostly German, soldiers from the Lowenstein legion who had been fighting for the British, all of whom had defected to the cause of the universal Republic. On the British side, there were also troops of all colors, including white soldiers from Britain and Europe, white émigré French colonists, as well as black and mixed-​race soldiers loyal to the British cause. In short, people of all races fought on both sides.43 After weeks of bloody fighting, Republican forces on Saint Lucia found themselves surrounded in the fortress of Morne Fortuné, and Goyrand reluctantly agreed to surrender. In the articles of capitulation, Goyrand made the noble, if futile, gesture of requesting that the victorious British respect 43. On the racial makeup of those who fought, see The Diary of Sir John Moore, 205–​20.

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the rights of all inhabitants on the island, without exception: “All property, people of every age, of every sex, of every color, will be placed under the protection of the law.” Here, interestingly, Goyrand lumps color together with age and sex, as if to have mentioned it by itself would have been akin to acknowledging the special nature of racial difference. The British bluntly rejected Goyrand’s universalism: “All property, all inhabitants shall be under the dependence and protection of English laws.”44 Race-​based slavery would be restored. Goyrand did manage, however, to get the British to agree that all soldiers, regardless of color, would be treated as prisoners of war, and therefore presumably immune from re-​enslavement.45 After Goyrand’s surrender, Abercrombie’s forces went on to crush the rebellions on nearby Saint Vincent and Grenada, but Abercrombie would later confess to Goyrand that the hard-​fought battles with Republican forces on all of these islands had prevented the British from pursuing their original aim of invading Saint Domingue and Guadeloupe, thereby allowing these two islands to remain in the Republican fold. *** According to the narrative that I have just presented, it would seem clear that the uprisings in the Windward Islands in the years 1794–​96, rather than being separate slave rebellions inspired by the slave rebellion in Saint Domingue of 1791, were in fact part of a larger Revolution in which countless individuals of all colors and backgrounds fought for the cause of a universal Republic against Britain. While Hugues and Goyrand, as commissaires delegated by the National Convention to the Windward Islands, were undoubtedly instrumental in implementing Republican institutions and in spreading those institutions throughout the Windward Islands, they could never have achieved what they did without the support of thousands of people who fervently embraced the cause of the universal Republic. Some of these people may well have been motivated by a personal desire for freedom, calculating that they were more likely to achieve this goal by cooperating with the French than with the British; others were 44.  Article II of the “Capitulation de la Colonie Ste.-​Lucie” in Goyrand, Compte rendu au citoyen Bourdon, 48. Emphasis added. 45. The Diary of Sir John Moore, 219.

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no doubt motivated by a sense of French patriotism and an abiding hatred of the British; still others were undoubtedly inspired by the abstract ideals of universal Republicanism and the promise of a better world. To what extent is the narrative that I  have presented believable? The careful reader will no doubt have noticed that nearly all of the sources referenced so far are either French government documents or correspondence with the French government. One might very plausibly argue that to rely exclusively on such documents creates the possibility of a distorted picture of events. Individuals with a mandate from the French government as well as those seeking their support would no doubt emphasize the extent to which they were motivated by French Republican ideals. We should consider, therefore, the very real possibility that the political ideas expressed in this body of sources do not transparently reflect the actual political views of the individuals taking part in these uprisings. Most difficult of all is the problem of gauging the views of the recently enslaved population of the Windward Islands, as they left no direct textual record of their thoughts and motivations. Even if we believe Goyrand’s and others’ accounts of the emancipated slaves’ devotion to the Republican cause, we cannot discount the possibility that these recently freed people may have told French officials what they wanted to hear. I am aware of one relatively recent attempt to probe the oral history of the people of Saint Lucia, but the results are inconclusive. A  104-​year-​old man interviewed at the end of the twentieth century, gave the following account of the so-​ called Brigands’ War of Saint Lucia: “the French and the British had a fight when the French had all of the land but the British had more men. The British took the land from the French, at which point the French established themselves in the interior.” Although this might seem to be a plausible description of the gens des bois, this account was dismissed by the author of the article for its “erasure of any role by the slaves” in the uprising, giving us more insight into the historiographical preconceptions of the interviewer than the historical memory of the interviewee.46 46.  Claire Robertson, “Claiming Freedom:  Abolition and Identity in St Lucia History,” The Journal of Caribbean History 34, no. 1 (2000): 108.

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It is certainly possible that rumors spread among slave communities from island to island, and while this rumor network may well have spread the news of the slave uprisings of Saint Domingue, it may also have spread the news of the French Republic’s abolition of slavery.47 Without any definitive sources detailing the content of information being spread among the enslaved people of the Caribbean during this period, however, it is extraordinarily difficult for us to know what the slaves of the Windward Islands were thinking either before or after their emancipation. But even though they may have been very familiar with the slave rebellion in Saint Domingue that had taken place five years earlier, one wonders to what extent this would have been uppermost in their minds when confronted with the realities of a war taking place right in front of them between French Republicans of all colors, who spoke of universal equality and loudly denounced slavery as a crime against human rights [droits des gens], and the British, who were trying to preserve the status quo. It is not difficult to imagine that enslaved people may have, at one and the same time, chosen to emancipate themselves and to fight for the cause of the Republic; to do so would have been both a means of achieving freedom for themselves and their loved ones as well as a way of embracing a cause larger than themselves. As difficult as it may be to access directly the mindset of the formerly enslaved population on these islands, we do not have to rely exclusively on French sources for information regarding the extent to which the rebels saw themselves as fighting for Republican principles. In the diaries of Brigadier-​General John Moore, who took part in the British re-​conquest of Saint Lucia in 1796, and who was in command of the island after Goyrand’s surrender, we find detailed reports on the gens des bois, as they continued to battle the British even after the Republic

47. For differing interpretations of the circulation of rumors among communities of enslaved people in the Caribbean, see Julius S. Scott III, “The Common Wind:  Currents of Afro-​ American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1986); and Michael Craton, “Slave Culture, Resistance and the Achievement of Emancipation in the British West Indies, 1783–​1838,” in Slavery and British Society, 1776–​1838, edited by James Walvin (London: Macmillan, 1982).

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had officially surrendered. Moore refers to the rebels—​or the “Brigands” as he preferred to call them—​as “negroes” and on several occasions he noted that rebel camps contained not only men in arms but large number of women as well. This, combined with the fact that he describes the plantations as “universally deserted” (208, 232)  would seem to suggest that the gens des bois were, at least by this point in time, primarily former slaves who were resisting re-​enslavement. But before we jump to the conclusion that they were purely and simply fighting for their own personal freedom, we should take note of Moore’s remark that “The negroes in the island are to a man attached to the French cause; neither hanging, threats, or money would obtain for me any intelligence from them. Those upon the estates are in league with and connected with those in the woods.” And referring specifically to the rebel fighters, Moore insisted that “Their attachment and fidelity to the cause is great; they go to death with indifference. One man the other day denied, and persevered in doing so, that he had ever been with them [the brigands] or knew anything of them. The instant before he was shot he called out ‘Vive la république’ ” (231, 234). Although Moore’s diaries would seem to corroborate the various French accounts that insisted on Saint Lucians’ allegiance to the Republican cause, the biggest trove of non-​French sources that we have relates not to the Brigands’ War of Saint Lucia, but rather to the so-​called Fédon rebellion on nearby Grenada. This island had been traded back and forth between the British and French for much of the eighteenth century, and although it had been under British rule since 1783, the majority of the population—​ white, mixed race, and black, free and enslaved—​was French-​speaking, French-​identified, and Catholic, in contrast to the sizeable British minority on the island which—​also white, mixed race, and black, free and enslaved—​ were English-​ speaking, British-​ identified, and Protestant. These two populations had coexisted relatively peacefully for a number of years, but relations had become increasingly strained under the leadership of a new governor who had imposed a number of anti-​Catholic measures that had greatly disturbed the French-​identified population on the island who were nevertheless, at least for the moment, British subjects.

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No doubt fully aware of the growing frustration of the French majority on the island as well as the appeal of emancipation to the enslaved people of Grenada, commissaires Hugues and Goyrand made contact in January of 1795 with Julien Fédon, a mixed-​race Grenadian plantation owner. Fédon, Goyrand, and Hugues planned for several weeks, arranging for the covert transportation of arms, as well as Phrygian caps, national cockades, and tricolor flags emblazoned with the words “Liberté, Egalité, ou la Mort” in advance of the rebellion.48 Finally, on the night of 2 March 1795, the insurrection began with coordinated takeovers in most major towns on the island. The British inhabitants were taken completely by surprise by a rebelling force made up of people of all colors: whites (including several Catholic priests), people of mixed race (including many plantation owners), as well as former and current African slaves. A  British magistrate, awakened at midnight by the sound of knocking, opened his door to find a crowd of armed men of all colors standing outside. In response to his question, “What is the matter?,” one of the men responded: “The matter is: war is begun. The French army is here. And you are our prisoner.”49 A British doctor, awakened at the same time in a different town, asking the same question, received the following response: “The troops of the Republican Army have taken over the island.” The doctor would later remark: “I was confirmed in the report from observing French cockades in all their hats.”50 The multiracial army of French rebels took about fifty white British prisoners and marched them up to Belvedere, Fédon’s estate high in the mountains, where they were held for several weeks. Accounts by surviving British prisoners would later describe Fédon’s estate as a kind of Republican village, which would eventually hold as many as 7000 people, including blacks, people of color, and white French colonists loyal to the 48. Turnbull, A Narrative of the Revolt and Insurrection (Edinburgh, 1795), 16. 49. Francis McMahon, A Narrative of the Insurrection in the Island of Grenada, in the year 1795 (Grenada, 1823), 9. 50. John Hay, A Narrative of the Insurrection in the Island of Grenada, Which Took Place in 1795 (London, 1823), 24.

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Republic. For the most part, the leadership was in the hands of gens de couleur and blacks, with others following their orders. According to one British prisoner, “almost all the white French inhabitants of the three adjoining Parishes” were at the camp, but they “appeared to have very little to say or to do.”51 All of the British prisoners’ memoirs refer to the fact that the soldiers in the rebel camp kept insisting on showing the prisoners their official certificates of commission in the French Republican army, as if somehow they were afraid that they would not be seen as legitimate Revolutionary soldiers (which, of course, is exactly what has come to pass in historical memory). The tricolor flag flew over the camp, and most people wore the national cockade in their hats. There were regular Republican festivals held in the camp, as well as the singing of French national hymns. And there were political speeches. One of the British prisoners would later recall “a mulatto” forecasting the eventual triumph of the universal Republic:  “Liberty can never be confined solely to the dominions of France; but must gradually extend to every corner of the globe, when it will become the interest of mankind to unite and totally exterminate that perfidious race [the English].”52 On 4 March, Fédon sent two soldiers of color dressed in French Republican uniforms with golden epaulettes and helmets marked with the words “La Mort ou la Liberté” to the British council of Grenada under a flag of truce, where they delivered the following proclamation: “Julien Fédon, General of the French Republican Forces [orders you] . . . to surrender to the Republican forces under our command.”53 At the bottom was Fédon’s signature, and the line:  “Done at our Camp, the fourth of March, the third year of the French Republic, one and indivisible.” Two days later, under another flag of truce, Fédon sent two white officers in French uniforms with another proclamation, threatening that if an attack 51. McMahon, A Narrative of the Insurrection in the Island of Grenada, in the Year 1795, 24. 52. Hay, A Narrative of the Insurrection in the Island of Grenada, Which Took Place in 1795, 74. 53. Turnbull, A Narrative of the Revolt and Insurrection, 36.

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was made on his camp, all the British prisoners would be summarily executed. Like Lambert who had requested one citizen of each color for his expedition to Saint Lucia, Fédon also seemed to be using racial parity as way to insist on equality between the races without explicitly mentioning the existence of race. At the end of March, Fédon’s camp got a resupply of weapons from Guadeloupe, as well as a note from Hugues, who, like everyone else, referred to the English as the implacable enemies not simply of the French, but of universal Republicanism itself: “Strike hard. Exterminate the English. They are the common enemies of liberty and the Rights of Man.”54 On 8 April, the British launched an attack against camp Belvedere, and as Fédon had threatened he would do if attacked, he ordered the summary execution of forty-​eight British prisoners who were shot one by one over a period of forty minutes. Three were spared and transported to Guadeloupe, where they were kept in prison ships and later under house arrest by Hugues. All three of them went on to write books about their experiences, and it is from their accounts that we have detailed descriptions of life in Fédon’s Republican camp at Belvedere. The rebellion on Grenada would last approximately fifteen months, and at one point the rebels had succeeded in taking over the near totality of the island with the exception of Saint George’s, the capital city. There were atrocities and murders on both sides. The French apparently set up a guillotine and executed various traitors, spies, and people generally behaving in an un-​Republican manner (including several former slaves who were convicted of eating mules). The British, for their part, hanged anybody they could get their hands on who had formerly been a British subject but had defected to the French. While it is difficult to gauge the politics of current and former slaves on the island, many appear to have embraced the cause of the Republic, not simply because it offered them freedom, but also because they identified both culturally and politically with France and the Revolution. I cannot help finding the following account by a British 54. McMahon, A Narrative of the Insurrection in the Island of Grenada, in the year 1795, 34.

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officer telling: “We halted at the house of Madame Renaud (whose son had joined the rebels) in expectation of [finding some rebels there]. . . . [We] were soon after convinced that [our] suspicions were well founded, for the first salutation upon leaving the house, was, Courage Citoyen . . . from a blind Negro man [who mistook us for rebels].”55 And yet, not all slaves on the island rushed to embrace the Revolution. When a large flotilla arrived from Britain in June of 1796 with thousands of troops intent on retaking the island from the rebels, the British were able to raise an army of “trusted negro slaves” to fight alongside them. By all accounts, culture and language were usually more important than race or economic self-​interest in determining whether one supported the Republic or the British, something that is borne out by the long list of individuals with French names—​black, white, and mixed race—​who were executed by the British for treason once they had regained control of the island.56 But even language and culture were not hard and fast rules. A French abbé with close ties to the British was denounced as “an aristocrat” by Republican forces for his support of the British, and shot.57 And one of the British prisoners’ memoirs listed the names not only of the white Frenchmen who had joined the revolt, but also of the “four execrable traitors, who . . . were born of British parents, yet joined in the unnatural insurrection.”58 Like the British and German soldiers who defected to the cause of the universal Republic on Saint Lucia, there were those who apparently joined the Republican cause out of moral conviction. By the time the French Revolution in the Windward Islands had run its course, in addition to the islands of Guadeloupe, Saint Lucia, Grenada, and Saint Vincent, several other islands in the Caribbean 55. Henry Thornhill, A Narrative of the Insurrection and Rebellion in the Island of Grenada, from the Commencement to the Conclusion (Barbados [Bridgetown], 1798), 34. 56. Court of Oyer and Terminer for Trial of Attained Traitors record book [1796]. 57. Wise, A Review of the Events (Grenada, 1795), 44. Turnbull, A Narrative of the Revolt and Insurrection, 22. 58. Turnbull, Narrative of the Revolt, 160–​61.

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experienced either a Republican uprising or at least a failed attempt to spark one during the period between February 1795 and the autumn of 1796: Martinique, Saint Martin, Saint Eustatius, Dominica, and Curacao. All of these revolts were successfully put down by the British, however, and Guadeloupe would remain the lone outpost of Republicanism in the Windward islands until 1802 when it too was invaded, not by the British this time, but by the French. In that year, Napoleon, leader of a still nominal Republic, assembled an armada of ships with the secret intention of restoring slavery throughout the Caribbean. When the soldiers of the French Republic came ashore on Guadeloupe on 6 May 1802, they were welcomed by Republican soldiers on that island and by a populace that included tens of thousands of former slaves who had lived as free citizens of the Republic for the past eight years. The newly arrived soldiers from the metropole immediately began forcing non-​white soldiers from Guadeloupe to remove their uniforms, and several of them were taken back to the ships as prisoners. As word spread of what was happening, many of the soldiers from Guadeloupe headed into the hills to regroup, eventually massing at the town of Basse Terre. Some of the white troops went over to the side of the recently arrived forces, but other white soldiers remained loyal to the Republican troops of Guadeloupe. In the end, the forces from the metropole prevailed. After several weeks of fighting, the commander of the resisting forces made a last stand at a fort in Basse Terre. And when defeat appeared imminent, he and his followers—​men, women, and children—​headed to the heights of Matouba, shouted “Live Free or Die,” and blew themselves up.59 That commander was Louis Delgrès: the Martinican native, who had fought the British in the defense of that island in 1794, had been shipped back to Britain as a prisoner of war, had been traded to France from where he accompanied Goyrand on his journey to Guadeloupe, had fought in Saint Lucia under Goyrand and Marinier, had fought in Saint Vincent in

59.  For a moving description of these events, see ­chapter  15 of Lauren Dubois, A Colony of Citizens:  Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean 1787–​1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

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the short-​lived rebellion on that island, and had fought his last battle on Guadeloupe on behalf of the Republic against the Republic. Perhaps more than anyone else, this man of many islands and many races epitomizes the story of the brief glory and eventual tragedy of the French Revolution in the Windward Islands. *** I hope, in this whirlwind tour of political and military events in the Windward Islands from 1792 to 1802, that I  have at least raised some questions about how this region and this period have been subsequently characterized. What precisely is at stake when we reinscribe race into a situation in which the participants themselves seemed so intent on embracing racelessness, in seeing themselves as human beings rather than specimens of their color? A quarter century ago, Barbara Jeanne Fields complained in a widely cited article of the “absurd assumption inseparable from race in its characteristic American form [that] takes for granted that virtually everything people of African descent do, think, or say is racial in nature.” Related to this, she argued, was the assumption that “any situation involving people of European descent and people of African descent automatically falls under the heading of ‘race relations.’ ”60 It would be naive to suggest that race had nothing to do with the French Revolution in the Caribbean, but it is equally naive to assume that those who took part in the French Revolution in the Windward Islands made decisions purely on the basis of their race. As we have seen, various factors played into those calculations, and race was but one among many, and not always the dominant one. When we resist the idea, despite overwhelming evidence, that the people of the Windward Islands saw themselves as taking part in a universal political and cultural Revolution because that idea smacks of European influence, we might think we are restoring agency to them, but I doubt they would agree with us. When we ignore their Revolutionary slogans, and what appears to be their full and passionate embrace of the principles of the French Revolution in its most universalistic incarnation; and when we 60. Barbara Jean Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” in New Left Review I, no. 181 (May–​June 1990): 98. I am grateful to Andrew Edwards for this reference.

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insist that their agenda was restricted to their own personal liberty, are we not, in fact, robbing them of political agency? As I suggested in the introduction, my intention was not to add one more narrative to the long list of those celebrating the inevitable triumph of human rights. If anything, the story of the French Revolution in the Windward Islands reminds us that rights are slippery, subject to widely differing interpretations, and evanescent. The ease with which they can be bestowed mirrors the ease with which they can be taken away. The French Republic granted them and retracted them with a few simple lines. In February of 1794, the National Convention had declared that, “the slavery of Negroes, in all the Colonies, is abolished; consequently [the Convention] decrees that all men, without regard to color, living in the colonies, are French citizens, and will enjoy all the rights assured by the constitution.” Only five years later, Article 91 of the Napoleonic constitution of 1799 declared that “The government of the French colonies shall be determined by special laws,” signaling an end to the universal applicability of Republican principles. With Montesquieu giving intellectual cover, one could claim with a straight face that universal principals were only universal in particular climates.61 The inhabitants of the Windward Islands, who are today citizens of different countries, speaking different languages, have no historical memory of the fact that they are descended from people of different colors who once upon a time embraced a vision of the universal Republic, a vision which they shared with the inhabitants of neighboring islands. They, like the historians who narrate their history, recall Fédon’s Rebellion or the Brigands’ War, but they have forgotten the story that their ancestors were so insistent that we should remember: that they carried commissions in the army of the Republic and fought for a greater cause than any one race or any one island. 61. Although Montesquieu condemned slavery, in theory, as “unnatural” and was cited by many abolitionists, he was also the philosopher of choice for supporters of slavery because of his admission that, practically speaking, slavery might be considered rational in particularly hot climates where it was difficult to get people to work other than by force. (See chapter XV of the Spirit of the Laws.)

3

The Politics of Popularity Celebrity Culture and the French Revolution A N T O I N E L I LT I ( T R A N S L AT E D B Y BENJAMIN S. BERNARD AND DAVID MOAK) ■

Every reflection on the French Revolution and its legacy should start with the Eighteenth Brumaire. In the name of the principles of the Revolution, men and women who called themselves liberals encouraged, supported, and even contributed to a coup d’état, which led to an authoritarian regime that blended military dictatorship and hereditary empire. Most liberal intellectuals were quickly disappointed by this political development and turned away from the regime. Nevertheless, we must understand why they welcomed Bonaparte’s rise to power so favorably. The classic answer is that they were confronted by the twin threats of Jacobinism and Royalism and hoped for a strong and personalized executive power that could help re-​ establish a degree of political stability in France. Yet the vexed question of Bonaparte’s personal fame remains important to discuss as well. How important was his celebrity for his success—​and by celebrity I mean not only his military glory but the conspicuous presence of his name and repu­ tation in the public sphere, in newspapers, and in daily conversations? The new centrality of personal renown is in fact key, not just for understanding Bonaparte himself, but more broadly the ambiguities of modern democratic culture, as it emerged from the Revolution.

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Germaine de Staël was one of the liberal thinkers who were ambivalent about Bonaparte, somehow ready to accept his rise to power despite the way he represented an affront to her political principles. Ten years later, she had become a fierce opponent of his. But in her Considérations sur la Révolution française, she wrote of the moment when, at a post-​house, she first heard the news of the Eighteenth of Brumaire coup d’état. It was the first time since the Revolution that there was a proper name on everyone’s lips. Until that point, one would say: The Constituent Assembly did such-​and-​such a thing, the people, the Convention; but now, one only spoke of that man who could stand in for all, and make the rest of humanity anonymous, by cornering celebrity for himself alone, and by preventing all other living beings from ever being able to acquire any.1 In general, historians have commented upon this well-​known quotation by emphasizing the personalization of power under Bonaparte, the way it passed from collective actors (the people, the Assembly) to an individual actor. We know how deeply the Revolutionaries mistrusted personal power and instead preferred a collective exercise of government, both via committees and subsequently with the five-​person executive Directory. From this point of view, Bonaparte’s arrival in power amounted to an overturning, or reversal, of a fundamental political principle of government. Bonaparte’s coup against liberty would remain central to French republican memory and feed the hostility of republicans to the personalization of power all the way down to the Fifth Republic. Such an interpretation of de Staël’s text is clearly not false, but reduces it to a classic political interpretation, that of the republican mistrust of Caesarism. And yet de Staël was saying something different. She was describing the omnipresence of a “proper name”—​not (yet) the concentration of power in the hands of a single person, but rather the concentration of public 1. Germaine de Staël, Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (Paris: Delaunay, 1818), 2 vol., t. II, p. 234.

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curiosity on a “name.” What struck her was not that Bonaparte was doing everything himself, but that people talked about him exclusively. The sort of tyranny she described was a tyranny of fame. She was concerned with the monopoly of celebrity. Faced with Bonaparte’s celebrity, others were not merely subjugated, in every sense of the term, but were thrust into obscurity and anonymity. It was not by chance that de Staël used the word “célébrité”—​celebrity—​ as opposed to glory. According to her, glory was a positive passion, based on admiration for great deeds, and was essential both to political power and to literary greatness. Some years before, in her Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution, she had contrasted the “palm of glory” that was the proper reward of great men, to the celebrity conferred by daily newspapers, which signified a much more ambiguous relation between the public and famous persons, a relation based on a fiction of proximity in which “distance” seemed to disappear.2 While historians have often highlighted the traditional language of “glory” surrounding Bonaparte, Bonaparte also masterfully controlled the new mechanisms of celebrity that arose in the eighteenth century. This was already the case when, during the final years of the Directory, in order to consolidate his public image, he created new newspapers devoted to promoting his image and managed constantly to stay at the center of public attention. Twenty years later, his celebrity was still an important dimension of that most fascinating text, the Mémorial de Sainte-​Hélène, the book of reminiscences dictated to his aide Emmanuel de Las Cases, which the deposed emperor hoped to use to recover his popularity. It has been common to understand the Mémorial as nothing more than Bonapartist propaganda. Yet there is another very effective dimension to the text, which presented the everyday life of Bonaparte through the empathetic viewpoint of Las Cases, a true political “fan,” who continually inserted

2. Germaine de Staël, Des circonstances actuelles et autres essais politiques sous la Révolution, Paris, Honoré Champion, ed. L. Omacini (Paris-​ Genève:  Droz, 1979), p.  121. See also Biancamaria Fontana, Germaine de Staël, A  Political Portrait (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2016).

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himself into the action, as an admirer and even lover of the emperor, and who was happy to benefit from his privileged proximity to the fallen giant. Paradoxically, then, the recovery of Bonaparte’s popularity was actually accomplished through a sort of depoliticization. With the Mémorial, Napoleon reconnected with the popularity of his early career, that same popularity that caused de Staël to fear a tyranny of celebrity. It was not simply a matter of military and political glory, which was arguably the case at the height of the empire, but of a capacity to capture public attention and to elicit empathy, even sentimental attachment, in addition to mere political support. Historians still usually approach questions of individual fame in this period through the category of glory, which they associate with revolutionary heroes and the so-​called great men idolized in the Enlightenment. The French Revolution reinvented the cult of heroes, through its idolization of revolutionary martyrs and its creation of the Pantheon as a final resting place for the “great men of the fatherland.” It also powerfully developed the notion of geniuses, exceptionally gifted men, so powerfully evoked in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, as new idols for a democratic age.3 Thus we still understand glory during the age of Revolutions as a product of Enlightenment ideals. Bonaparte, as Robert Morrissey has shown, in turn inherited this tradition and developed a veritable politics based on glory, which he defined in both military and civilian terms.4 But celebrity is not the same thing as glory. It does not only rely on unanimous admiration for the hero’s great acts, but also, on curiosity, on a desire for intimacy, on a fascination with the totality of the famous man’s life, including his private life. Celebrity is therefore much more ambivalent than glory. Indeed, it can be nourished by the weaknesses of the famous person, and even by scandal. Of course, sometimes celebrity

3. Jean-​Claude Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon, essai sur le culte des grands hommes (Paris: Fayard, 1989); David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France:  Inventing Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Darrin M. McMahon, Divine Fury: A History of Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2013). See also Darrin McMahon’s essay in this volume. 4. Robert Morrissey, Napoléon et l’héritage de la gloire (Paris: PUF, 2010).

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and glory are entangled, as in the case of Bonaparte, but that is not always the case. The child martyrs of the Revolution were anonymous before becoming glorious in death—​never celebrities, in other words—​and numerous celebrities of the period never became become heroes. Celebrity is therefore a specific form of fame, distinct not only from glory but also from mere reputation, a quality that people enjoy only in the specific social and cultural arenas where it is acquired. And whereas glory and reputation are ancient phenomena, which are found throughout European history, celebrity is a phenomenon that arose only in the eighteenth century. It developed, thanks to the joint effects of the rise of new media (press, newspapers, engravings) and also new ideas of the self that presuppose a division between two spheres of activity: the private and the public. Fittingly, celebrity is situated at the intersection of these two major movements of modernity, the increased media coverage of social relations and the affirmation of the private. It refers to the specific form of fame in which individuals become public figures, figures whose image is widely reproduced in public spaces; who are the subject of discourse and commentary in the press as well as in ordinary conversation; and who incite an intense public curiosity that extends to all aspects of their lives, including what would now be called private life. It is usually assumed that celebrity is a very recent phenomenon, linked to the cultural transformations of the twentieth century, especially in America. Even historians who closely study the birth of celebrity culture in Europe often affirm that “only after 1850, with the emergence of the first mass media, did charisma, celebrity and fame explode into the kind of phenomena we know today.”5 Yet, several recent studies show that celebrity as a modern social and cultural phenomenon developed in the eighteenth century, above all in Britain and France.6 No wonder it had serious political consequences during the French Revolution.

5. Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi (eds.), Constructing Charisma. Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteeth Century Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), p. 6. 6.  Tom Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–​1850 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009); Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton

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THE RISE OF CELEBRITY

In the eighteenth century, the rise of celebrity culture was a European phenomenon that first developed in great cities: Paris and London; and, to a lesser extent, Naples, Venice, Vienna, and Berlin. It was encouraged by the changing conditions of urban life, especially the commodification of culture, but most of all by the proliferation of new public media, by what we might call the “media revolution of the eighteenth century”: newspapers multiplied and found large audiences, printed engravings circulated widely thanks to technical innovations. Celebrity culture first developed in artistic arenas, those of the theater, music, and literature—​which is to say, art forms that directly engaged with the public. The development of privately owned theaters, first in London and then in Paris, encouraged this transformation. Urban performances took place outside the ambit of the royal court, and its patronage networks. The commercial dynamics particular to private performances favored the creation of stars. The theaters highlighted the best-​known actors; these men and women drew a public and brought in significant financial rewards. An international market for actors, singers, and dancers developed over time and certain actors became true international stars, whose faces were reproduced and known in all the great European cities. Actors and actresses became the subject of the public’s curiosity and enthusiasm. Garrick in particular was not only enormously famous, but obsessed with his own celebrity. More than two hundred different portraits of him were realized and printed during his lifetime.7 The castrato Tenducci fascinated the London and University Press), 2010; Antoine Lilti, Figures publiques, L’invention de la célébrité (1750–​1850) (Paris:  Fayard, 2014), translated by Lynn Jeffress:  The Invention of Celebrity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017). The present essay is based on the material of this last book. 7. Maria Ines Aliverti, La naissance de l’acteur moderne. L’acteur et son portrait au XVIIIe siècle (Paris:  Gallimard, 1998), pp. 98–​ 99. Heather McPherson, “Garrickomania:  Art, Celibrity and the Imaging of Garrick,” Folger Shakespeare Library (http://​www.folger.edu/​template. cfm?cid=1465). Id., Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2017).

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European publics with his vocal performances and also with his complicated and mysterious love life.8 For such actors or singers, celebrity became an important source of income. When the dancer Augustrin Vestris, one of the young stars of the Paris opera, was hired by the King’s theater in London, the city was overwhelmed by Vestrismania, and the public revelation of the man’s enormous and unusual salary provoked a sharp debate after several newspapers denounced it as immoral. In France, Talma, the most famous actor of the French Revolution and Empire, received numerous enthusiastic letters from admirers and spectators, for whom the label of “fan” is entirely appropriate. Talma was at once an admired actor, a well-​known public figure, and a tourist attraction. As one anonymous correspondent wrote to him: “Going to Paris without seeing Talma is like going to Rome without seeing the Pope.”9 Writers were not to be outdone in this competition for fame. Ever since Paul Bénichou, historians have spoken of the “consecration of the writer” and the new prestige of the philosophe in the eighteenth century.10 But there was another side to writers’ fame, which was the public’s insatiable curiosity—​not only about their works, but also their personalities, and even their private lives. Newspapers did not hesitate to publish stories about the public and private lives of famous persons, and in doing so they used much the same rhetoric as modern tabloids, grounded in the idea that public fi­gures seek publicity, like to be talked about, and that newspapers therefore have the right to be inquisitive and indiscreet. As a consequence, there arose a sort of permanent public surveillance of celebrities. As François de Neufchateau wrote to the Journal de Paris, the first French daily: “Celebrity has above all the inconvenience of giving rise to a sort

8. Helen Berry, The Castrato and His Wife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 9. Archives Comédie française, Talma, 6, f. 76. 10. Paul Bénichou, Le Sacre de l’écrivain (Paris: José Corti, 1973).

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of espionage around the famous man, one that intrudes upon his actions, his words, and even his thoughts.”11 Celebrity culture was also nourished by new forms of biographical writing. The traditional biographical accounts of great men’s lives were replaced by new attempts that highlighted the specificity of individuals, with a stress on singularity rather than on exemplarity. Encouraged by the success of sentimental novels, which evoked empathy, these new biographies insisted on peering into the private life of public figures. “Private lives” became an editorial genre, which extended not only to political figures (such as the Queen, or royal mistress), but also to writers, scientists, or scandalous celebrities.12 But celebrity culture was not only a matter of famous names, revelations about private lives, and biographical narratives. It also had deep roots in the transformation of visual culture—​that is, the massive growth of portraits in public spaces. Until the eighteenth century, it had been quite rare to see portraits of living people in the public sphere; the most common were portraits of the king, on medals or in other media, or portraits of aristocrats in the galleries of their houses. In the eighteenth century, however, portraits became more and more common. The annual exhibitions of paintings in the Salon du Louvre, which were major cultural events in the capital and attracted a wide audience, included many portraits. The production and sales of engraved portraits also grew exponentially. In the second half of the century, dozens of new images of famous people were engraved each year, and dealers sold them by the thousands from the stalls of little shops along the Seine. Inexpensive portraits of political and literary celebrities were advertised in newspapers. Some merchants even specialized in this lucrative business, for example, the printers Esnault and Rapilly with their shop “À la ville de Coutances.”

11.  François de Neufchateau, “Aux auteurs du Journal de Paris,” Journal de Paris, 20 février 1778, p. 204. 12. Olivier Ferret, Anne-Marie Mercier-​Faivre, and Chantal Thomas (eds.), Dictionnaire des vies privées (1722–​1842 )(Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2011).

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Consider just one example: Jean Huber’s 1772 painted portrait of Voltaire, which showed Voltaire climbing out of bed and getting dressed (and in a rather acrobatic position). The picture was copied and engraved, and met with considerable success in Paris as well as in London. Unlike traditional portraits, in which the painter would represent a writer at work, seated in front of his books, or as a gentleman, here it was the private Voltaire that attracted the viewer’s attention. The viewer had the impression of entering into the philosopher’s bedchamber, almost having a secret glance into it. Voltaire’s celebrity was therefore a complex phenomenon, deriving at once from distance and proximity, greatness and familiarity. Jean Huber himself explained to Voltaire that he knew exactly the “dose of ridicule” necessary for his celebrity—​in other words, that he was responding to the public’s desire to humanize the great writer, and to reveal the private man behind the philosophe.13 As a commodity, the portrait of a famous man was no longer a matter of glorification, it had to appeal to the curiosity of the public about every dimension of the man’s life. Celebrity was based on curiosity and sensibility, much more than on genuine admiration. This profound transformation of the conditions of public renown, following what deserves to be called a “media revolution,” did not pass unnoticed by contemporaries. It was now that the word celebrity itself came into common usage. Moralists such as Duclos, Mercier, or Chamfort, made efforts to define it. Chamfort, especially, provided this trenchant definition:  “Celebrity is the advantage of being known by people who do not know you,” which stressed the difference between knowing someone directly, personally, and knowing him through his public image. Chamfort also wrote this more cynical assessment: “Celebrity is a retribution for merit and the punishment of talent,” which suggests that celebrity from the start appeared a highly ambivalent phenomenon, as much scorned and feared as it was desired14. 13. Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Mesiter, etc., éd. M. Tourneux, Paris, Garnier, 1880, t. X, p. 96. See: Garry Apgar, L’art singulier de Jean Huber (Paris: Adam Biro, 1995). 14. Nicolas Chamfort, Maximes et pensées. Caractères et anecdotes (Paris: Garnier-​Flammarion, 1968), p. 66.

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Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, one of the most famous people of his age, very quickly came to experience his own massive celebrity as a curse, a burden, and indeed as a sort of alienation. He could not tolerate being reduced to a public figure that anyone could reinvent at their pleasure, and to live always in the focal point of public attention. This reaction brought about a change in Rousseau’s conception of the public. He no longer saw it as a positive entity that represented a welcome alternative to elite sociability, but rather as something dangerous: a powerful crowd of readers and spectators whose opinions were all too vulnerable to manipulation. Celebrity was not the same thing as charisma.15 It was neither a matter of religious enthusiasm or political authority. It did not entail collective obedience. Celebrity was the mechanism by which a person became well known to countless admirers, curious, and fans.

POLITICAL CELEBRITY

In sum, celebrity was neither a status nor an asset, but a relationship. A  relationship between an individual and the public, and an ambiguous relationship born out of curiosity and empathy, and whose intensity varied greatly, from a merely amused or even ironic interest to the kind of passionate enthusiasm shown by modern fans. This relationship, and the discourses that accompanied it and emphasized its complex and ambivalent effects, had important consequences for politics, which would directly affect the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. The second half of the eighteenth century was marked by the emergence of personalities who derived a large portion of their political legitimacy from their direct connection to the public; for example, John Wilkes in England, who succeeded in incarnating English radical

15. On this notion, which is the other face of personal fascination in politics, see the contribution by David Bell in this volume.

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politics in his fantastic and theatrical personality.16 Historians have often emphasized the new role played by public opinion in the political culture of the period. But there was more than public opinion at work in the concentration of political interest on particular individuals. The phenomenon also derived from the operation of the new mechanisms of celebrity in the political field, as much with newcomers as with traditional sovereigns. Consider, for example, Benjamin Franklin, printer and scholar, born on the Atlantic world’s colonial margins, who became, in Europe at least, the most famous and effective symbol of the American Revolution. Before the Revolution, Franklin already benefited from literary and scientific fame thanks to his work on electricity and his successful almanacs. But it was in Paris, where he served in the 1770s as the representative of the insurgent Americans, that he acquired celebrity and became a true public figure. In Paris, Franklin paid extremely close attention to his public image. He quickly had Duplessis paint a portrait, which became famous. It showed Franklin bareheaded, dressed simply, his vest casually open, all corresponding to the image he intended to convey of a simple man who dressed without ostentation, and was far removed from the customs of European courts. Franklin understood perfectly well the political utility of his celebrity, and hoped that the enthusiastic infatuation he incited as a public figure would aid the American cause. However, the proliferation of his image, which became a recognizable iconographic reference, slipped out of his control. Publishers sold countless engraved portraits of Franklin, while his face appeared on medallions, figurines, and even crockery (figure 4). Franklin himself was both stunned and entertained. In June 1779, he enclosed in a letter to his daughter a medallion engraved by Nini, and claimed that his own face had become “more famous than that of the moon”: 16. George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1981). John Sainsbury, Wilkes:  The Lives of a Libertine (Ashgate: Routledge, 2006). Anna Clark, The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

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The clay medallion of me you say you gave to Mr Hopkinson was the first of the kind made in France. A variety of others have been made since of different sizes; some to be set in lids of snuff boxes, and some so small as to be worn in rings; and the numbers sold are incredible. These, with the pictures, busts, and prints (of which copies upon copies are spread everywhere) have made your father’s face as well known as that of the moon, so that he durst not do any thing that would oblige him to run away, as his phiz would discover him wherever he should venture to show it. It is said by learned etymologists that the name Doll, for the images children play with, is derived from the word IDOL; from the number of dolls now made of him, he may be truly said, in that sense, to be i-​doll-​ized in this country.17 Franklin here emphasizes on the one hand the massive diffusion of portraits and copies of portraits, and on the other hand, the fact that this diffusion eluded the control of the portrait’s subject. This was not a case of political propaganda operating via images, like royal portraits that aimed to represent power and that were to a large extent controlled by the monarchy (with the obvious exception of caricatures). Rather, the circulation of Franklin’s portraits was the product of a new urban culture where images of famous people were eagerly sought and became objects of consumption. In proposing his fanciful etymology that associated an idol with a doll, Franklin was making a joke, but was also suggesting how the public’s desire could in fact transform an individual into an object— ​indeed, into an object that resembled a toy. Franklin left a certain ambiguity lingering: Was the multiplication of his image a flattering honor, or was it a threat and a source of anxiety? This comment of Franklin’s was not an isolated one. It echoed critiques made by contemporaries who worried about seeing portraits of their peers debased to the level of toys or trinkets. Several months earlier, for instance, the French newsletter the Mémoires secrets had commented: “The fashion today is to have an engraving of 17. Letter of Benjamin Franklin, June 3, 1779, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 29 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 612–​613.

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Mr. Franklin over one’s hearth,” but immediately added: “just as one formerly had a puppet: and the portrait of this serious person has become an object of mockery—​almost like the pointless trinkets that were used as toys, thirty years ago.”18 Most of the studies of Franklin’s iconography see the diffusion of his portraits as a sign of his popularity and his mastery of political communications. This is undoubtedly true, but contemporaries, including Franklin himself, were very conscious that the border separating a fashionable image from a trinket was fragile, like the line between the public’s idol and the child’s toy. Celebrity was an object of fascination and an object of derision at the same time. Franklin’s was a face newly launched onto the political stage, in which the tools of celebrity were used for the benefit of the revolutionary struggle against monarchist Europe, even as the man himself took stock of the dangers involved. But traditional sovereigns themselves were not immune from this transformation of political life, and the increased media coverage of powerful figures. Take the case of Marie-​Antoinette. In recent decades, historians from Robert Darnton to Lynn Hunt have drawn attention to pamphlets that attacked the queen, and have seen in them evidence of the “desacralization” of the French monarchy.19 Yet the image of the queen as a victim of unanimous hatred must be revised, because it projects her unpopularity during the Revolution onto her entire life in France. Probably until the very eve of the Revolution, and certainly in the first years of her life in France, Marie-​Antoinette was in fact very popular. Her desire to break with the formalities of etiquette generated enthusiasm from young nobles. Each time she attended the theater or the opera, she was cheered by the Parisian public, which was delighted to see a queen 18. “La mode est aujourd’hui d’avoir une gravure de M. Franklin sur sa cheminée comme on avait autrefois un pantin: Et le portrait de ce grave personnage est tourné en dérision—​à peu près comme celui du futile colifichet qui servait de joujou, il y a trente ans,” Mémoires secrets pour servir l’histoire de la République des lettres en France depuis MDCCLXII jusqu’à nos jours, Londres, John Adamson, 1780, 18 janvier 1777, t. X, p. 11. 19. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Dena Goodman (ed.), Marie-​ Antoinette, Writings on the Body of a Queen (New York: Routledge, 2003). Robert Darnton, The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

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in Paris, away from Versailles. Marie-​Antoinette presented herself as the queen of Parisian fashion, thanks to her taste for fine jewelry and also her audacious alliance with the fashion entrepreneur Rose Bertin.20 Of course her attitudes also aroused criticism both from conservative courtiers attached to etiquette and from reformers who criticized the queen’s spending and her supposedly undue influence over King Louis XVI. In a sense, therefore, Marie-​Antoinette was truly caught in the crossfire. Lacking political instincts, she did not know how to cultivate her popularity and preferred to devote herself to her entertainments and to her clique of friends. As a result, in the 1780s, the very factors that had contributed to her popularity now turned against her. The “Diamond Necklace Affair” is well known. But another political scandal also deserves attention, that of the portrait of Marie-​Antoinette “en chemise.” When, at the Salon in 1783, Elisabeth Vigée-​Lebrun displayed a portrait of the queen in a simple white muslin chemise, of the kind that Rose Bertin was beginning to bring into fashion and that Marie-​Antoinette liked to wear in her private household in the Trianon palace, the scandal was profound. Critics took offense at seeing the queen publicly represented—​at the Académie’s salon, no less—​in a simple dress that seemed to belong to her private life. The light muslin dress, “à la gaulle,” was taken to be nothing more than a chemise, and a portion of the public believed that the queen had been painted in her undergarments. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that the portrait did not include any reference to or even the slightest hint of the presence of the king and the royal family. In other words, the queen seemed to be inviting spectators to view her as a private, autonomous individual, who felt free to amuse herself in clothes of her own choosing, and was decidedly not posing as a queen of France. The irony of the situation was that while Marie-​Antoinette’s Trianon had been designed to protect the queen from the court’s gaze by giving her an intimate, private space of her own, the portrait made public the image of the queen in that same intimate space, exposing her to the gaze 20.  Clare H. Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex. Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 246–​282.

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of the Salon’s numerous visitors. Vigée-​Lebrun was forced to withdraw the painting and substitute a more appropriate one, in which the queen, dressed in a classic silk dress, was seen arranging a bouquet of roses. The muslin dress would nevertheless spur imitations. The portrait, despite the opprobrium of the critics, would enjoy considerable success with the public. Under the name of “robe-​à-​la-​reine,” a queen’s dress, the fashion was widely imitated by the European aristocracy in the 1780s. By the end of the century, the fashion extended widely to elite urban women as well. The political scandal that the portrait caused was not incompatible with the status of fashion icon that Marie-​Antoinette had willingly adopted for herself—​indeed, quite the opposite. Fashion did not just refer to clothing. The clothing depicted in the painting denoted an entire lifestyle, an ideal of freedom and simplicity, in which sensibility was prized over social restrictions. Marie-​Antoinette had therefore become a public figure not in the classic sense of monarchical representation, but in the new sense defined by eighteenth-​century celebrity culture: a person whose particular personality is the subject of public attention and commentary. Even in the first years of the Revolution, despite the discredit from which Marie-​Antoinette now seemed to suffer, politicians as brilliant as Mirabeau and Barnave were convinced that the queen could maintain or recover her popularity, and that indeed she was the best chance to save the monarchy. In their view, the queen could ensure that the institution would have both a constitutional role and a hold on people’s hearts, even as the Assembly would embody democratic sovereignty. Barnave wrote: “Who more than the queen has in her person that which is necessary to seize her potential for power? Has she not always known such shining popularity? If opinion has changed, at least she was never ignored, and as long as the heart has not cooled, it is still possible to bring it back.” The “popularity” that Barnave invoked in order to incite the queen to recapture it remained a promising political concept for years to come. It renewed royal legitimacy on the basis of an emotional connection between the monarchy and that new sovereign, the people. Because this political energy was based on sensibility, on a form of emotional attachment, it seemed to Barnave especially fitting that it should be deployed by a woman, as long as she

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demonstrated her attachment to the Revolution. The rest was a matter of politics, or rather, of advertising: “We will stop at nothing to bring hearts to her,” he promised.21 Because of her hostility to the Revolution, Marie-​Antoinette failed to seize this opportunity. But the notion of “popularity” would become an important one for the Revolutionaries. An Anglicism, the word “popularité” appeared at the very end of the Old Regime and came into common usage during the Revolution. The “popularity” of Mirabeau or of La Fayette was generally spoken about with a great deal of anxiety. Conversely, de Staël accused Mirabeau of trying desperately to “depopularize” her father, Jacques Necker. As for Robespierre, he accused his adversaries of seeking popularity by flattering the people. But he himself encouraged his own popularity within the Jacobin Club and the Sections. In 1792, during the debate over whether France should declare war on Austria, allies of his rival Jacques-​Pierre Brissot, notably Guadet, attacked Robespierre precisely for his growing popularity. “He said that Robespierre aspired to the Tribunate, that he was more ambitious than anyone else and that his very great popularity could do much harm to the public good.”22 Immediately after Robespierre’s fall, Etienne Barry, who styled himself a regenerated Jacobin, gave a speech on the dangers of idolatry in a Republic. According to him, danger arose when the people started to idolize an individual, because of his virtue, or his perceived virtue.23

FROM FAVOR TO POPULARITY

The popularity of revolutionary leaders played an important role in the political arena, but the notion of popularity itself remained difficult to 21. Letters of July 25, 1791, and September 9, 1791, Correspondance de Marie-​Antoinette, pp. 561, 605. See Mona Ozouf, “Barnave pédagogue:  l’éducation d’une reine,” in L’homme régénéré. Essais sur la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), pp. 93–​114. 22. Les Révolutions de Paris, t. XII, p. 150. Hervé Leuwers, Robespierre (Paris: Fayard, 2014). 23.  Étienne Barry, Discours sur les dangers de l’idolâtrie individuelle dans une république. In: Discours prononcés les jours de décadi dans la section Guillaume Tell (Paris: Massot, 1794).

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define. In 1791, L’Ami des patriotes, a revolutionary newspaper edited by a politically moderate lawyer who was also a deputy to the National Assembly, dedicated a long article to the difficult question: “What is popu­ larity?” The article defined the quality as “public favor,” a more common term at the time, and which was part of classical political vocabulary. The popular man was the favorite of the people, as previously there had been favorites of the king. Here the people’s taste had a negative connotation, due to the comparison with the now-​discredited concept of the king’s favor. Such comparisons became commonplace during the Revolution. Emmanuel de Toulongeon wrote in his Manuel révolutionnaire: “Under the Revolution, popularity is what credit and favor was at the royal court. The people, like the King making use of its prerogative and its right of sovereignty, likewise chooses favorites and claims not to have to give any account or any reason for the choices made according to its whim.”24 Popularity, in other words, was as arbitrary as the king’s favor, because it was a matter of emotional preference, not rational choice. L’Ami des patriotes contrasted popularity to public opinion. Popularity was based on an excess of passion, and on the manipulation of opinions. It emerged from collective obsessions that were as sudden as they were ephemeral. Public opinion, by contrast, also significantly referred to as “public esteem,” was based on rational and durable judgment. “Public opinion is always more or less well thought out, but popularity never is. Time affirms public opinion:  it becomes almost always the opinion of history; but time destroys popularity. There has yet to be an example of someone who maintained it up to his death.”25 This contrast reintroduced into the political arena the distinction between celebrity and glory that had been so important in the cultural domain, in which celebrity was always devalued because it was thought of as fleeting, prone to excess, and founded on the curiosity of the masses and not on real merit. This was a contrast that could be traced back at least 24. Emmanuel de Toulongeon, Manuel Révolutionnaire, ou Pensées morales sur l’état politique des peuples en Révolution (Paris: Du Pont, 1795), p. 93. 25. “Sur la popularité,” L’Ami des patriotes ou le Défenseur de la Révolution, no. XI, 1791, p. 295.

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to Cicero, and that was revived during the Renaissance, in the form of a distinction between glory, associated with posterity; and simple fama, associated with the sudden and the arbitrary. But the author of the article in L’ami des patriotes was troubled because, at the height of the Revolution, he could no longer content himself with disparaging the opinion of the people and with relying solely on the judgment of wise men and posterity as Cicero had done. How could one distinguish between these two publics:  the public that on a whim grants its favor to famous men and the public that calmly judges their merits? How could one reconcile the principle of popular sovereignty, and a fortiori the principle underlying elections, and the suspicion that popular favor was arbitrary and misleading, as capricious as the favor of princes? The solution proposed by L’ami des patriotes was faithful to the perspective of enlightened optimism: the development of a true public space would allow the people to form more accurate judgments. The freedom of the press, “in enlightening the people,” would transform it into a true public: “One must not delude oneself: popularity will change course: the influence of contingent applause, the influence of the changeable crowd will diminish continually.” From a distance of two centuries, it is easy for us to conclude that this undaunted optimism was somewhat naive, because the development of the press promoted the mechanisms of celebrity as much as it did the cause of more “reasonable judgments”: the readers of the periodical press are rarely immune from mass obsessions. In truth, the growth of the press, and more generally of the media, was one of the sources of the new celebrity culture, which in turn fed the phenomenon of political popularity. Two themes therefore converged in revolutionary reflections on popularity. The first was a fundamental ambivalence toward the people, related to the tension between the sociological reality of the people—​that it was composed of individuals with desires, shaped by prejudices and passions—​and the political ideal, that of the rational subject of democratic sovereignty. The people was sovereign, but the people could be mistaken, and one of the forces that misled it was the talent of famous and popular men.

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This classical dilemma of democratic thought was revived under the Revolution but also reinforced by a second element: the new power of the media, the importance of the printing press, images, and caricatures. The rise of the “famous man” was not only based on his speaking skills and the acclamations of the crowd, it was also dependent on the widespread diffusion of his name and of his image. This was the ambiguity highlighted in the text of L’Ami des patriotes: Did periodicals serve the education of the people and thus the formation of a critical public opinion, as the majority of enlightened authors believed; or did they serve as vectors of a celebrity culture and as instruments of propaganda in the service of individual popularity?

THEATRICALITY AND CELEBRITY

Mirabeau, more than anyone, perfectly embodied the contradictions of revolutionary popularity in the early years of the Revolution. He was not at all unknown in 1789. He was famous, above all thanks to the scandals he provoked, as a disgraced noble who had attracted the attention of the press and as the author of several libertine works and political pamphlets. The Revolution gave him the opportunity to transform this scandal-​based celebrity into political popularity. Mirabeau was the first political figure to understand the Revolution and the first to take advantage of it.26 His extraordinary capacity for incarnation displayed itself in two forms. First, Mirabeau succeeded in incarnating the principle of popular sovereignty, above all thanks to his famous exchange with the master of ceremonies at the Estates General of 1789 when he led the deputies in refusing to disperse at the King’s order (“we are here by the will of the people, and will only be dispersed by the force of bayonets”). His reputation was further increased thanks to his political eloquence, which made him the most prolific and the most influential speaker of the Constituent Assembly of 1789–​91. But he also incarnated the Revolution due to his theatrical presence, his 26. François Furet, “Mirabeau,” Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française.

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refined sense of mise-​en-​scène, and his continual ability to take advantage of his personal celebrity. Mirabeau was an actor, who was always on stage, who practiced his speeches in front of the mirror while chanting his own name, and who took advantage of his striking physique in order to intimidate his adversaries and to fascinate the public. This theatricality formed a key element of the French Revolution’s political life, which historians have too often downplayed. In reality, spectators applauded and whistled in the Assembly as if they were in the theater; they interrupted speakers and were not hesitant to give vent to their emotions. As Paul Friedland has shown, the Assembly was a place of spectacle, and the porousness between the theater and political life was particularly great during these years27. The theater itself was increasingly considered an important political arena, to be used for the cultural regeneration of the nation and the political projects of the Revolution. As for the parliamentary assemblies, they were both sites of deliberation, where the collective future of the nation was determined; and passionate spectacles, whose principal protagonists were true celebrities. To insist on this porousness reminds us that spectacular politics is not a modern deviation from an older, more rational politics, but has always been a central element of public representation and demo­ cratic debate. Democratic public space did not replace the spectacle of court ritual with abstract deliberation, but with a new type of spectacle, in which citizens were at one and the same time actors and spectators. After all, politics needs a public too. In addition, Mirabeau was a master of public communication. During the Estates General, he published a newsletter that publicized his actions, offered lengthy descriptions of himself, and frequently printed his portrait. The results quickly made themselves felt. In 1789 his image had been a “scandalous” one. Upon his arrival at the Estates General, he was booed by a part of the public. “The insult and the contempt showed him the type of celebrity he possessed,” his friend Etienne Dumont wrote later28. 27.  Paul Friedland, Political Actors:  Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). 28. Étienne Dumont, Souvenirs sur Mirabeau (Paris: PUF, 1951).

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But within several months, Mirabeau had become extremely popular, despite virulent attacks from his political adversaries. His public person­ ality was endlessly fascinating, as was his private life and his romantic relationships. When he fell sick, his newspaper covered the illness on a daily basis; and his doctors felt obliged to publish health reports several times every day, which were reprinted in other papers. In these accounts, one again finds a mélange of theatricality and of communication: “he dramatized his own death,” Talleyrand remarked with irony. Mirabeau’s death, on April 2, 1791, provoked a massive display of public emotion, which surpassed that of an ordinary political event. Michelet later wrote that Mirabeau’s “funeral rites were the biggest, the most popular there had ever been in the world before those of Napoleon.” And Michelet also acknowledged the theatrical, spectacular dimension of the event:  “The streets, boulevards, windows, roofs, trees were full of spectators.” Mirabeau’s funeral was the last act of the public spectacle that his life had been, and for which the people were both the audience and, increasingly, the principal actor.29 Yet, the popularity of Mirabeau would not last long after his death, since the revelations of his secret dealings with King Louis XVI, a year and a half later, would completely change his public image and lead to the expulsion of his body from the Pantheon. Here, once again, the limits of celebrity made themselves felt:  celebrity is subject to short-​term and sudden changes of political passions. It is not to be confused with glory, which implies historical distance and the judgment of posterity. When we think of the political legacy of the French Revolution, we generally look to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the efforts to build democratic sovereignty, and, perhaps, the use of political violence in the name of virtue. Yet, the French Revolution was also a key moment for reflection on the ambiguities of political representation, and especially on the questions of the personalization of power and the visibility of leaders. Of course, one may think that these are questions most suited to non-​ republican regimes. In French history, the story of popularity was for a long time associated with the Bonapartist tradition, from Napoleon’s own 29. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), vol. II, p. 558.

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extraordinary posthumous popularity to the plebiscitary power of his nephew Napoleon III. It was seen by republicans as a threat to democracy. To a much greater extent, the dictators of the twentieth century, from Mussolini and Hitler to Ceausescu, have shown how political communication can be put to the service of a dreadful cult of personality. But democracies have not escaped the problem of their leaders’ celebrity. Quite the contrary! And the marriage of politics and celebrity culture seems only to have accelerated since the 1960s, from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan in the United States, to Tony Blair in England and Nicholas Sarkozy in France, and to Berlusconi in Italy who seemed to incarnate the risks of an antidemocratic swerve into the politics of personal popularity. More recently, the election of Donald Trump, a businessman and former reality TV star, has shown just how far the alliance of politics and celebrity can go. For the majority of commentators, whether journalists or theorists of democracy, this sort of politics, the two characteristics of which are the political entertainment and the staging of the private life of politicians, is perceived not only as a recent phenomenon but as an attack on politics itself, as a sort of parasitic takeover of true politics (which is identified with public deliberation over the common good) by show business. Some denounce the rise to power of media-​savvy personalities and of storytelling, others attack the depoliticization and even the irredeemable vulgarity of our individualist era. The dominant idea, among the theorists of democracy, is that the people want politicians to be more close and similar to them, more concerned by everyday life’s problems, and that political communication meets this legitimate demand for proximity and empathy by an artificial and deceptive display of familiarity. Political celebrity is thus “the perverted expression of a supply and demand of presence,” as Pierre Rosanvallon has put it, and a threat to democracy.30 Yet, as soon as one remembers that these issues were already posed in nearly the same terms at the time of the Revolution, one understands that what we are dealing with is less a contemporary perversion or 30.  Pierre Rosanvallon, La légitimité démocratique:  impartialité, réflexivité, proximité (Paris: Seuil, 2008), p. 316.

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corruption of political representation than a tension that has been present from the beginning in modern democracies. Indeed, this tension was seized upon and described from the start. From the eighteenth century onward, it has been the object of a double critique. The first, classic critique was based on the traditional mistrust of republicans regarding dictatorship, a concentration of power in a single person, and plebiscites. The second critique was concerned with modern forms of popularity: not the acclamation given by the people joined together in a crowd, but the omnipresence of mediated communication among a people that takes the form of a dispersed and disunited public. These two critiques of the personalization of power have often been confused. They were aimed at two related and yet different phenomena, two possible dangers to democracy: one that was inherent in its populist form, the other in modern communication. In fact, as we know, the modern democratic ideal did not just revive the ancient democratic tradition, even when supplemented by the principle of natural right and the practices of political liberalism. Two important innovations characterized the Age of Atlantic Revolutions:  representative government, on the one hand; and the presence of an increasingly mass media, on the other. The first was based, as Bernard Manin has shown, on an “elitist paradox”: election implies popular choice, but also an irreducible distance between the representatives, often chosen on the basis of their fame, and the represented.31 The media, which organize this public deliberative space, also contribute to the development of this celebrity culture. Such a culture, which is based on the play of distance and the fiction of intimacy, allows for the creation of a sense of proximity between the people and their rulers, but it is a fundamentally ambivalent proximity.32 Political philosophy has given us with a very normative conception of the democratic public sphere, in which rational deliberation is seen as the

31. Bernard Manin, Principes du gouvernement représentatif (Paris: Flammarion, 1996). 32.  John B. Thomson, The Media and Modernity:  A Social Theory of the Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

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principal legacy of the Enlightenment33. But the modern public sphere, for better or worse, is not only a critical and rational one, it is also based on shared emotions that appeal to subjectivities. These emotions are stimulated by public spectacles, by cultural representations, and, more and more, by the media. This, of course, does not mean that celebrity politics is not dangerous: it may be a powerful tool for populist demagogues; it may be a threat to an enlightened conception of public debate. But we cannot simply dismiss it as an exterior, corrupting force, something that has no inherent connection to modern democracy. Representative democracy in a media era has been, from the start, impure. And popularity is the name of this impurity, the name of everything that, in the affective relationship between the people and their rulers, lies outside and beyond political rationality. Thus the overlap between the public space of democracy and the public space of media is not coincidental or regrettable. It is not the sign of decline or corruption. It lies at the heart of modern politics itself.

33.  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:  An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).

4

Charismatic Authority in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France DAVID A. BELL ■

Modern readers are often amused by the fact that when Napoleon Bonaparte was an adolescent, the future Emperor of the French briefly dreamed of a career in literature.1 He read widely, if not deeply, in history, philosophy, politics, and fiction. Years later, looking back on his years as an apprentice artillery officer in a dull provincial army posting, he recalled: “I lived like a bear, alone in my room, with only my books for friends.” He noted down recondite vocabulary words that he planned to sprinkle, like little crystals of erudition, throughout writings of his own: rhizophage, cacique, tomogun.2 He tried his hand at many different

1.  See Andy Martin, Napoleon the Novelist (Cambridge, UK:  Polity, 2001). Napoleon’s early works are collected in Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoléon inconnu:  Papiers inédits (1786–​1793), ed. Frédéric Masson and Guido Biagi, two vols. (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1895); and Napoleon Bonaparte, Œuvres littéraires et écrits militaires, ed. Jean Tulard, three vols. (Paris:  Claude Tchou, 2001). 2. See Bonaparte, Napoléon inconnu, vol. II, pp. 258–​67. Rhizophage means a root-​eater; cacique is a Mexican prince, and tomogun is Hindu for greed.

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literary genres. He submitted a philosophical meditation on happiness to an academic essay competition, in which this most ambitious of human beings condemned ambition as a “a violent and unthinking delirium,” and likened it to a fire that devoured everything in its path.3 He sketched out a romantic novel, and drafted Gothic horror stories whose purple prose should convince the most sympathetic reader that, in the end, he made the right career choice: “Having awoken, she saw—​O God!—​she saw a ghost that approached her bed . . . He drew her hand to his neck. O horror! The countess’s fingers sank into his broad wounds, and came out covered with blood . . .”4 Napoleon’s biographers have generally taken two different approaches to these early dreams of literary glory. Some write them off as little more than a passing fancy, which took hold of Napoleon only because this scion of the middling gentry from a poor island province had starkly limited possibilities for promotion in the socially hierarchical armed forces of Old Regime France. Once the French Revolution opened careers to talent, according to this interpretation, Napoleon quickly put his literary ambitions behind him. To quote Steven Englund, from then on Napoleon “chose to ‘write’ his novel on the world, not on paper.”5 Other scholars put more weight on the experience. They suggest that Napoleon possessed a genuinely literary sensibility, and considerable literary talent, both of which he later employed to great effect in the service of his own self-​ representation and propaganda.6 However, they still mostly consider it a youthful fancy. In this essay, I would like to suggest that a deeper link exists between Napoleon’s early literary enthusiasms, and the charismatic political authority he would later acquire. This charismatic political authority, I will

3. Bonaparte, Œuvres littéraires, vol. II, p. 227. 4. Ibid., vol. I, p. 210. 5. Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life (New York: Scribner, 2004), p. 426. 6. Representative of this tendency is Philip Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

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argue, was itself deeply literary in nature. It had roots in the literary culture of Enlightenment Europe, and depended on ordinary members of the public being able to imagine and identify with a political leader in much the same way they might identify with a literary character. In the essay, I will sketch out a genealogy of this type of authority, showing how it took shape in Europe in the mid-​eighteenth century, and was subsequently transformed in the Age of Revolutions. I will argue that contrary to what some historians have suggested, the new concepts and practices of empathetic identification that arose in eighteenth-​century literature did not necessarily promote a liberal politics of rights. To the contrary, their most direct and obvious political effect was to promote forms of intensely emotional identification with—​and submission to—​charismatic leaders. In this respect, just as Enlightenment political theory made possible new justifications for autocratic rule, so Enlightenment concepts and practices of empathy made possible new forms of mass support for charismatic autocrats. In this way, as in so many others, Enlightenment Europe bequeathed as many perils to the modern political world as it did promises. The word “charismatic” may seem out of place in a work of historical analysis, for it is resonant of the timeless and universal. “Charisma” literally means a gift of grace—​suggesting something that cleanses individuals of the muddy specificities of particular times and places, and connects them to the shining purity of the divine. Max Weber, who first developed the concept of charisma, applied it to everyone from Indian shamans to the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith to Kurt Eisner, the German-​Jewish intellectual who led the short-​lived Bavarian republic after World War I.7 But I will suggest in this essay that charismatic authority takes historically specific forms, and I will define an eighteenth-​century form grounded in

7. Many of Weber’s writings on charisma have been helpfully collected in Max Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1968). More recently, see Vanessa Bernadou et al., eds., Que faire du charisme?: Retours sur une notion de Max Weber (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014); Jean-​Claude Monod, Qu’est-​ce qu’un chef en démocratie?:  Politiques du charisme (Paris:  Éditions du Seuil, 2012).

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a specific set of characteristics. I will argue that when these characteristics came together around a single person, the resulting charismatic appeal could become a source of enormous political power. This charismatic appeal took shape above all in printed form—​both words and images—​ and arose out of practices of reading and writing that did not themselves necessarily possess a political dimension. The idea that the literary culture of Enlightenment generated new, extreme forms of adulation is only now becoming generally accepted, thanks in large part to the work of Darrin M. McMahon and Antoine Lilti.8 For years after Paul Bénichou’ s influential work on the “demolition of the hero” in the age of Louis XIV, historians of French culture and literature tended to highlight the way flamboyant, Homeric hero figures fell out of favor in the century before the Revolution.9 It was an interpretation that found support in some famous dicta of the philosophes. Montesquieu: “For a man to tower over all humanity costs too much to all the rest.” Voltaire: “I reserve the name of great men for those who have excelled in useful or agreeable pursuits. The despoilers of provinces are merely heroes.”10 Jean-​Claude Bonnet’s influential book Naissance du Panthéon showed how an important current of eighteenth-​century French thought distinguished between “illustrious men” or heroes, who owed their fame to their great deeds, and truly “great men” whose names glowed in posterity, thanks to their moral qualities—​in other words, their virtue.11 Bonnet showed how this distinction underpinned a largely forgotten eighteenth-​century literary genre, namely the “eulogies of great men” that the Académie Française solicited and showcased during the last half-​century of the old regime, paying

8.  Darrin M. McMahon, Divine Fury:  A History of Genius (New  York:  Basic Books, 2013); Antoine Lilti, Figures publiques: L’invention de la célébrité, 1750–​1850 (Paris: Fayard, 2014). See also the essays by McMahon and Lilti in this volume. 9. Paul Bénichou, Le sacre de l’écrivain, 1750–​1830: Essai sur l’avènement d’un pouvoir spirituel laïque dans la France moderne (Paris: J. Corti, 1973). 10. Both quoted in Jean-​Claude Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon: Essai sur le culte des grands hommes (Paris: Fayard, 1998), p. 33. 11. Ibid.

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particular attention to the master eulogist Antoine-​Léonard Thomas. And Bonnet suggested that this distinction underlay the French Revolution’s alleged preference for egalitarian virtue and self-​sacrifice above all other political qualities. From this perspective, the intense cult of personality that Napoleon Bonaparte established around himself represented a decisive rupture both with the Revolution, and with the cultural practices of Enlightenment France. The phenomenon of a leader worshipped, at least for a time, by a large part of the French population as a virtual demi-​god could have arisen only out of the experience of war and the failure of the radical Jacobin experiment. This is the thesis I  want to argue against here. As I will show, it is impossible to distinguish as neatly as one might like between the emergence of revolutionary republican ideas and practices on the one hand, and the lure of charismatic authoritarian leadership on the other. The two sprang from the same soil—​from an Enlightenment world that valued passion and sentiment as much as it did reason and stoic virtue, and that was as ready to focus passion and sentiment on charismatic individuals as it was to embody reason and stoic virtue in republican institutions. To illustrate these continuities, I will first discuss how three prominent political figures were imagined and represented in the decades before the French Revolution. None of the three were French, and I  will not look solely at French representations, because the subject is one that naturally flows over national boundaries. The literary culture in question was not French alone, but extended throughout Europe and the Atlantic world. But I  will then show how the characteristics associated with these men came to define a particular, powerful form of charismatic appeal that would play a crucial role in the French Revolutionary decade. This is one case where the history of France is very much enriched by setting it in a transnational context. I will start with Peter the Great of Russia. Despite the brutality of his reign, and the autocratic nature of Russian government, Peter was an object of extraordinary attention and adulation throughout the Western world in the eighteenth century. He was the subject of at least ten biographies in

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French, English, and German, including by authors as prominent as Defoe, Fontenelle, and Voltaire. He was also a frequent subject of poetry. One French man of letters, none other than the master eulogist Antoine-​Léonard Thomas, spent much of his career writing a never-​finished epic poem about Peter. This attention echoed the developing cult of Peter in Russia itself, especially in the work of writers like Lomonosov, who provided Voltaire with much of his material. But it also took on a life of its own.12 Peter’s Western admirers consistently represented him as a ruler devoted to the public good. In Thomas’s unfinished poem, the Goddess of Liberty herself praises the Tsar for a supposed hatred of tyranny. “Despotism,” Thomas wrote, “promoted human happiness.”13 Voltaire called Peter one of the greatest legislators in history, compared him favorably to Roman heroes, and credited him with promoting the felicity of the largest empire on earth.14 The admirers also rhapsodized about Peter’s natural gifts, rarely failing to mention his enormous height—​6’8”—​and his physical strength. To the English poet Aaron Hill, he was a “giant-​genius . . . divinely sized—​ to suit his crown’s extent!” Indeed, he “resembled the deity!”15 His English biographer W. H. Dilworth called Peter the “Paragon of Nature.”16 These

12.  On the image of Peter in the west, see Anthony Glenn Cross, Peter the Great through British Eyes:  Perceptions and Representations of the Tsar since 1698 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000); Albert Lortholary, Le mirage russe en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Boivan, 1951); Christiane Mervaud and Michel Mervaud, “Le Pierre le grand et la Russie de Voltaire:  Histoire ou mirage?,” in Le mirage russe au XVIIIe Siècle, ed. Serguêi Karp and Larry Wolff (Ferney-​Voltaire: Centre International d’Étude du XVIIIe siècle, 2001), pp. 11–​35; Emmanuel Waegemans, Peter de Grote in de Oostenrijkse Nederlanden (Antwerp: Koninklijke Bibliotheek Albert I, 1998); Rudolf Minzloff, Catalogue Raisonné des Russica de la Bibliothèque Impériale Publique de Saint-​Pétersbourg: Pierre le grand dans la littérature étrangère, vol. I (Saint Petersburg: Glasounow, 1872). Thomas’s draft has been printed in Antoine-​Léonard Thomas, Œuvres complètes de Thomas, de l’Académie française; précédées d’une notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de l’auteur, six vols. (Paris: Verdière, 1825), vol. V, pp. 53–​336. 13. Thomas, vol. 5, p. 95. 14. François-​Marie Arouet Voltaire, Histoire de L’empire de Russie sous Pierre-​le-​Grand (Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire), 25 vols., vol. 22 (Paris: Antoine-​Augustin Renouard, 1817). 15. Aaron Hill, “The Northern Star,” in The Scots Magazine, 1739, vol. I, p. 226. 16. W. H. Dilworth, The Father of His Country, or, the History of the Life and Glorious Exploits of Peter the Great, Czar of Muscovy (London: Woodgate and Brooks, 1760), p. 135.

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authors all praised Peter as a military hero as well, especially for his famous victory at Poltava over Sweden’s Charles XII in 1709. But Peter’s principal merit, in the Western accounts, was that through his sheer primal strength, genius, and military acumen, he supposedly transformed Russia, single-​handedly, into an entirely new country. For Aaron Hill, “He could not, indeed create Men; but he new-​moulded and inspir’d them.”17 Dilworth, who called his book The Father of his Country, wrote that when Peter came to the throne, the Russians “had nothing of Humanity but their Form” and were “Fierce and Savage as Bears.”18 The French poet Claude-​Joseph Dorat likewise claimed that “from untamed monsters the Tsar made men.”19 These ideas found their way into one of the most popular English poems of the century, James Thomson’s The Seasons, which contained a remarkable portrait of Peter: What cannot active government perform, New-​moulding man? Wide-​stretching from these shores, A people savage from remotest time, A huge neglected empire—​one vast mind, By heaven inspired, from Gothic darkness call’d. Immortal Peter! First of monarchs! He His stubborn country tamed, her rocks, her fens, Her floods, her seas, her ill-​submitting sons; And while the fierce barbarian he subdued, To more exalted soul he raised the man.20 To his Western admirers, then, Peter was not just a monarch, and perhaps not even primarily a monarch. He was a revolutionary legislator.

17. Quoted in Cross, Peter the Great through British Eyes, p. 52. 18. Dilworth, The Father of His Country, p. 135. 19. Quoted in Lotholary, p. 73. 20. James Thomson, The Seasons (Philadelphia, 1764), p. 200.

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But Peter was also represented in a way that allowed ordinary readers to imagine a personal connection with him. This may seem a strange idea to apply to the Tsar of all the Russias, of Moscow, of Kiev, of Vladimir, of Novgorod, Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan and Tsar of Siberia, sovereign of Pskov, etc. etc. etc. But in Western Europe, what caught the imagination of Peter’s biographers was the fact that he had traveled incognito through their countries in 1697–​98, disguised as “Piotr Mikhahilov,” an ordinary desyatnik, or junior officer. His British biographer John Mottley carefully noted that “Peter commonly went about in the Jacket of a Dutch Skipper, that he might the more easily mix with the seafaring people . . . without being taken notice of.”21 Dilworth included an engraving of Peter working as an ordinary sea-​ carpenter.22 These stories gave readers a glimpse of Peter as a man they could imagine meeting personally. My second example is Pascal Paoli, who led the independent state of Corsica between the mid-​1750s and its final absorption by France in 1768. Paoli is largely forgotten today, but at the time he had an enormous vogue in Europe, and indeed across the Atlantic world.23 British Whigs and French philosophes alike seized on him as a symbol of liberty. In some British novels from the late 1760s, characters spoke of “going a volunteer under the brave Paoli” much as Britons of the 1930s spoke of going to fight in Spain.24 In Paoli’s case, the vogue could be traced above all to a single source:  the writer James Boswell, who spent two weeks visiting Paoli in 1765, and published a breathless account of the trip and of Corsica

21.  John Mottley, The Life of Peter the Great, Emperor of All Russia, three vols. (London:  M. Cooper, 1725), vol. I, p. 91. 22. Dilworth, The Father of His Country, p. 22. 23.  On Paoli, see most recently Michel-​ Verge Franceschi, Paoli:  Un Corse des Lumières (Paris:  Fayard, 2005); Antoine-​ Marie Graziani, Pascal Paoli:  Père de la patrie corse (Paris: Tallandier, 2002). 24. See Francis Beretti, Pascal Paoli et l’image de La Corse au dix-​huitième siècle: Le Témoignage des voyageurs britanniques, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 253 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1988). On British volunteers, see, e.g., Miss Melmoth; Or, The New Clarissa. In Three Volumes, 3 vols. (London, 1771), vol. I, p. 256; The History of Jack Wilks, a Lover of Liberty. In Two Volumes. . . . (London, 1769), vol. II, p. 246.

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that became a European bestseller, and launched Boswell’s own literary career.25 In the works of Boswell and other admirers, Paoli came off as a figure surprisingly similar to Peter the Great. All these writers incessantly stressed Paoli’s devotion to the common good and to his fatherland, comparing it to the virtue of the ancients. No less an observer than William Pitt the Elder remarked: “He is one of those men who are no longer to be found but in the Lives of Plutarch.”26 The writers also did not fail to comment, like Peter’s admirers, on their subject’s physique. Boswell described him as “tall, strong, and well made; of a fair complexion, a sensible, free and open countenance, and a manly, and noble carriage.”27 The writers all dwelt at length on Paoli as a military commander, and on his success as a “mighty man of war” leading ragtag partisan forces to victory against the professional Genoese and French armies.28 Boswell also hailed Paoli as “the father of a nation,” and, in the manner of Peter’s admirers, talked about how Paoli hoped to “form the Corsicans” into a new people.29 Boswell, like Peter’s biographers, also did everything he could to help his readers imagine a personal, intimate connection with his subject. Many passages in his Account promised a glimpse of the private individual in his most intimate moments. “One morning I  remember,” Boswell wrote, “I came in upon [Paoli] without ceremony, while he was dressing. I was glad to have an opportunity of seeing him in those teasing moments, when, according to the Duke de la Rochefoucault, no man is a hero to his valet.”30 While revising his first draft for publication, Boswell 25. James Boswell, An Account of Corsica, the Journal of a Tour to That Island, and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli (Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1768). Scholarly edition: James Boswell, An Account of Corsica, the Journal of a Tour to That Island; and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli, ed. James T. Boulton and T. O. McLoughlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 26. Quoted in Boswell (1768), An Account of Corsica, p. 382. 27. Ibid., p. 162. 28.  Michael Bruce, Poems on Several Occasions by Michael Bruce (Edinburgh:  J. Robertson, 1770), 106. 29. Boswell (1768), An Account of Corsica, pp. 302, 299. 30. Ibid., p. 328.

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cut out stories that might reflect badly on Paoli, but he left in what he called “small peculiarities of character,” such as Paoli’s inability to sit still, and his powerful memory.31 Many parts of Boswell’s book adopted the style of a sentimental novel, notably his imagined description of the moment Paoli left his father to return to Corsica:  “The old man, hoary and gray with years, fell on his neck, and kissed him, gave him his blessing, . . . ‘My son,’ said he, ‘I may, possibly, never see you more; but in my mind, I shall be ever present with you.”32 Overall, the image of Paoli in Europe so closely resembled that of a literary character that Paoli himself felt the need to stress the difference in a public letter he sent to several British newspapers: “My character has not been that of a hero of romance, a Quixote, or an Amadis. There is nothing more real than the object I pursue.”33 My final example is also the most prominent:  George Washington. Virtually from the moment he took command of the American Continental Army in the summer of 1775, Washington became an object of intense interest and adulation, not just in America but across the Western world.34 Even in Britain, the country he was rebelling against, the press portrayed him in largely favorable terms.35 His printed portrait—​often reflecting nothing more than the artist’s imagination—​was ubiquitous, and the first short biography, by John Bell, was frequently reprinted on both sides of

31.  Ibid., p.  331. On the writing of the book, see Boswell (2005), An Account of Corsica, pp. xvii–​lii. 32. Boswell (1768), p. 126. 33. “Translation of a Letter from M. Paoli, the Brave Corsican Chief,” The London Magazine, or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer (January 1769), p. 37. 34.  The essential works on the image of George Washington are Paul K. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1988); Barry Schwartz, George Washington:  The Making of an American Symbol (New  York:  Collier Macmillan, 1987); François Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father:  Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Penguin Press, 2006); Wendy C. Wick, George Washington, an American Icon:  The Eighteenth-​ Century Graphic Portraits (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1982). 35. Troy O. Bickham, Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen through the British Press (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), p. 185.

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the Atlantic.36 Like Peter the Great and Paoli, Washington was universally praised for his virtuous devotion to the common good. As Bell wrote: “No man ever united in his own person a more perfect alliance of the virtues of a philosopher with the talents of a general.”37 Yale’s president Ezra Stiles claimed in 1783, in a widely reprinted text, that Washington “convinced the world of the beauty of virtue.”38 These accounts, like those devoted to Peter and Paoli, rarely failed to mention Washington’s exceptional height and physical strength, his physical grace, and his skillful horsemanship. Not surprisingly, Washington also quickly earned the same title that had earlier been bestowed on Peter: “the father of his country,” not just in the sense of an authority figure who takes tender care of his people, but in the sense of a man who literally brings a new nation into being. The phrase was first applied to Washington as early as 1778, by a German-​ language Pennsylvania almanac.39 The American playwright Royall Tyler called Washington “not childless, but the parent of millions, like Christ.”40 John Bell, in a typical burst of hyperbole, compared the general to Moses, Camilius, Leonidas, Gustavus Adolphus, Hampden, and Sydney, He then added: “But these illustrious heroes, though successful in preserving and defending, did not, like Washington, form or establish empires, which will be the refuge or asylum of Liberty banished from Europe by luxury and corruption.”41 Like Peter the Great and Paoli, Washington also attracted enormous attention for his particular personal qualities. The profusion of portraits 36.  John Bell, A Poetical Epistle to His Excellency George Washington, Esq. (Annapolis, 1779, reprinted New  York, 1865). The “Epistle” itself is generally attributed to Charles Henry Wharton. Bell wrote the accompanying biographical sketch. On the reprints, see Bickham, Making Headlines, pp. 197–​99. 37. Bell, A Poetical Epistle, p. 24. 38.  Quoted in William Alfred Bryan, George Washington in American Literature, 1775–​1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 28. 39.  Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims:  The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–​1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 200. 40. Quoted in ibid. 41. Bell, A Poetical Epistle, p. 24.

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testifies to this, and these portraits also appeared in books, magazines, almanacs, children’s primers, sheet music, bank notes, textiles, and ceramics.42 British readers feasted on accounts of Washington’s private life, most of which were simply made up: there were reports of love affairs; and a rumor that Washington’s (nonexistent) daughter had escaped to England after the death of her supposed lover, a loyalist, at the Battle of Long Island.43 In America, such attention took longer to develop, in part because of Washington’s own notorious loathing of familiarity, and concern for his reputation. But after his death the floodgates opened, above all thanks to the itinerant parson and huckster Mason Locke Weems. Barely had Washington’s body grown cold in 1799 when Weems published a breathless, adulatory, hugely popular biography that pried deeply into the man’s private life, happily making most of the stories up, including the one known to every American about the young George chopping down his father’s cherry tree, and then refusing to lie about it.44 Weems’s writing mixed the style of the sentimental novel with the preaching of the Great Awakening, with a dash of Plutarch thrown in for spice, and the author forcefully defended his intrusive approach. “It is not in the glare of public, but in the shade of private life,” he wrote, “that we are able to look for the man. Private life is always real life.”45 To be sure, the representations of these three men differed in important ways. Peter was a monarch; Paoli and Washington were self-​made revolutionary founding fathers. Paoli, unlike Peter and Washington, derived much of his reputation from his tragic defeat and exile after France bought the rights to Corsica from Genoa, and moved in to occupy its new province in 1768, easily overcoming Corsican resistance. As for 42. Wick, George Washington, pp. 3–​19; Schwartz, Making of an American Symbol, pp. 36–​41; Edward G. Lengel, Inventing George Washington:  America’s Founder, in Myth and Memory (New York: Harper Collins, 2011), p. 7. 43. See Bickham, Making Headlines, p. 188. 44.  Mason Locke Weems, The Life of George Washington:  With Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honourable to Himself, and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen (Joseph Allen, 1837 [1800]). On Weems, see most recently Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father, pp. 105–​46. 45. Weems, The Life of George Washington, p. 11.

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Washington, unlike Peter or Paoli, his image soon became inseparable from his willingness to surrender power—​first in 1783 when he resigned his army command, and then in 1796 when he declined to run for a third term as president. In both cases he very consciously reenacted the story of the Roman hero Cincinnatus, who served his country as dictator and then returned to his plough. Thanks to these renunciations, with Washington the theme of virtuous, disinterested devotion to the common good weighed more heavily than with the other two men, and brought him closer to the figure of the classic eighteenth-​century “great man” described by Jean-​Claude Bonnet. As François Furstenberg has written, Washington was in fact “remembered less for his use of power than for his abdication of it.”46 Still, as these quick summaries show, the three men shared a series of important qualities in the minds of their admirers. All were seen as virtuously devoted to the common good. All were also held to have exceptional natural gifts and physical features—​even in Peter’s case, an ability to dominate other men was held to come from nature, rather than from God or from a royal title. All were credited with single-​handedly molding their nations into new forms. All were military leaders, who had personally led men into battle. In all these respects the images of these men resembled stories from classical antiquity—​ particularly those of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Commentators often made such comparisons, remarking that in men like Peter, Paoli, or Washington, heroic antiquity had been reborn. But in one crucial sense, the images of these men, and their relation to the reading public of the Atlantic world, was decided modern: all three were celebrities. Antoine Lilti has recently demonstrated that modern forms and ideas of celebrity took shape in the print culture of the eighteenth century.47 These forms and ideas had roots in the prevailing literary conventions that placed such a high value on sentiment and sensibility.

46. Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father, p. 65. 47. Lilti, Figures publiques.

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As Lilti stresses, celebrities were people with whom ordinary subjects or citizens could feel a personal, emotional connection. They were not people to be admired coolly, from a distance. They were people whose features were familiar from frequent reproduction, and who would be read about the way one read about characters in a novel. Peter, Paoli, and Washington were all celebrities by this definition. Put together, I  would argue that these qualities defined charismatic political appeal in the Age of Enlightenment and during the Atlantic Revolutions, and formed a basis for an actual attainment of charismatic political authority. They amounted to something more than the stoic virtue characteristic of the “great men” eulogized in the orations of the Académie Française. These “great men” by definition loved the common good, and were often portrayed as possessing extraordinary natural abilities—​above all, the quality of genius. And their life stories were expected to elicit a powerful emotional response. Yet they remained, for the most part, remote figures, chill alabaster statues whom ordinary readers could gasp in admiration of, and hope to emulate, but not forge intimate bonds with. The style of the eulogies was what the literary scholar Elena Russo calls, in her important study of eighteenth-​century French prose, the style of the tribune. It was formal, pedagogical, moralizing, humorless, and tending toward the bombastic. Some of the praise showered upon Peter, Paoli, and Washington had these characteristics, but not all, by any means. A great deal of it, instead, adopted something closer to what Russo calls the style of the boudoir, which was playful and intimate: Paoli getting dressed in the morning, Tsar Peter disguising himself to work in a shipyard with his own hands, the wanton young Washington chopping down a tree for the sheer pleasure of it. The style of the boudoir aimed to elicit identification more than emulation. It was, not coincidentally, the dominant style of the eighteenth-​century novel, and the style in which eighteenth-​century celebrities were defined.48

48. Elena Russo, Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics and Authorship in Eighteenth-​Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 16–​44.

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The historically specific form of charismatic appeal attributed to Peter, Paoli, and Washington tallies in many respects with the more abstract description of charismatic authority developed by Max Weber. Weber emphasized, for instance, the importance of emotion in the relationship between charismatic leaders and their followers. He spoke of charisma as creating an “acutely emotional faith” and an “emotional form of communal relationship.”49 He also stressed that charismatic leaders are believed to possess superhuman abilities, thanks to their mysterious perceived connection to the divine, or to some sort of cosmic reality beyond the ken of ordinary mortals.50 Weber noted as well that charisma is not simply the product of a dominant personality, who draws in followers by pure magnetic attraction, but rather a social relationship generated in large part by the followers’ own hopes and expectations.51 This was certainly true of the three men just discussed, whose charismatic appeal had surprisingly little connection to what they actually intended, or even in some cases to what they actually accomplished. It is worth remembering, for instance, that adulation rained down upon George Washington before he had won a single pitched battle, and it not only continued, but increased in intensity throughout his first year in command of the Continental Army: a year that brought mostly disaster for the American armed forces. Although Washington did force the British to retreat from Boston in early 1776, they defeated him badly at the Battle of Long Island in August, and subsequently forced him to abandon New York City and retreat across New Jersey. Even as British officers confidently predicted the imminent crushing of the rebellion, Washington’s top subordinates freely discussed his shortcomings as a commander, and Tom Paine famously spoke of the

49. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et  al., 2 vols. (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1978), vol. I, p. 243. 50. Ibid., vol. I, pp. 241–​45. 51. Ibid.

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“times that try men’s souls.”52 But none of this criticism stemmed the flood of praise.53 John Adams noted this dichotomy as early as 1777, warning the Continental Congress not “to idolize an image which their own hands have molten.”54 He continued to reflect on it, not without a certain resentment and jealousy, throughout his long life, and in 1812 he concluded the following about Washington, in a letter to his long-​time correspondent Benjamin Rush: The great Character, was a Character of Convention. . . . There was a time when . . . Statesmen, and . . . Officers of the Army, expressly agreed to blow the Trumpets of Panegyrick in concert; to cover and dissemble all Faults and Errors; to make that Character popular and fashionable, with all Parties in all places and with all Persons, as a Centre of Union, as the Central Stone in the Geometrical Arch. There you have the Revelation of the whole Mystery. Something of the same kind has occurred in France and has produced a Napoleon and his Empire.55 For Weber, a final characteristic of charismatic, as opposed to patriarchal and bureaucratic types of authority, is that it is untrammeled, unrestrained. Because the authority is personal, grounded on the direct, 52. See Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), p. 264. Thomas Paine, The Crisis, December 23, 1776, at http://​www.ushistory.org/​paine/​crisis/​c-​01.htm, accessed November 3, 2015. The classic biography is Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington, a Biography, seven vols. (New York: Scribner, 1948). See also James Thomas Flexner, George Washington in the American Revolution, 1775–​1783, volume II of his four-​volume biography (Boston:  Little, Brown, 1968); John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington:  The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). 53. See especially Longmore, The Invention of George Washington, e.g., p. 201. 54. Quoted in Schwartz, Making of an American Symbol, p. 22. 55.  John Adams to Benjamin Rush, Quincy, March 19, 1812, in Founders Online, National Archives, at http://​founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Adams/​9 9-​02-​02-​5768, accessed November 8, 2015.

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emotional, and wholly trusting relationship between the leader and his followers, and because it is explicitly anti-​traditional and indeed “revolutionary,” it cannot easily be contained within any sort of formal legal structure. It is a form of extraordinary domination.56 James Boswell captured this aspect of charisma perfectly in a remarkable passage from his Account of Corsica: “Paoli sways the hearts of his countrymen. Their love for him is such, that although the power of [his office] is properly limited, the power of Paoli knows no bounds. It is high Treason so much as to speak against him . . . [His rule is] a species of despotism, founded, contrary to the principles of Montesquieu, on . . . love.”57 The statement could have been made about Peter and Washington as well. Washington willingly submitted to constitutional authority, but almost certainly could have defied it had he wished to.58 Within the American army, many officers urged him to do precisely this toward the end of the revolutionary war. Lynn Hunt has famously argued that eighteenth-​century novels, by fostering “imagined empathy” between readers and fictional characters who might differ from them in gender and social class, made it possible for these readers to believe that all humans were endowed with the same unalienable rights. It is an argument that has been widely discussed and criticized.59 But whether or not one accepts it, I would propose that the forms of identification promoted in eighteenth-​century writing more generally allowed readers to imagine intimate, emotional bonds between themselves and charismatic leaders exercising a “despotism of love” that overrode any constitutional rules, including guarantees of rights. It is worth noting that one of the readers Hunt quotes prominently, to demonstrate the emotional effect that novels could exert in the eighteenth

56. Weber, Economy and Society, vol. I, p. 244. 57. Boswell (1768), An Account of Corsica, p. 162. 58. See, for example, Chernow, Washington: A Life, p. 428. 59. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). See notably the criticisms by Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2010), and Dan Edelstein, “Enlightenment Rights Talk.” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 86, no. 3 (September 2014), pp. 530–​565.

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century, was Samuel Richardson’s friend, the writer Aaron Hill. She quotes his reaction to Richardson’s Pamela: “It takes possession, all night, of the fancy. It has witchcraft in every page of it.”60 But Hill, as discussed above, was also a poetic admirer of Peter the Great, who wrote to the Tsar: While vulgar Kings their views supinely scan, And limit what they would, by what they can; Thy nobler power, with more than mortal sway, Commands—​and makes men able to obey!61 Peter, for Hill, was very much a superman—​far above mere kings—​to whom ordinary rules did not apply, and who ruled through a direct bond with his subjects. It is important to understand that before the French Revolution, there was no necessary contradiction between perceiving charismatic leaders as all-​powerful and unrestrained on the one hand, and as symbols of lib­ erty on the other. As noted, Peter the Great—​an autocrat who in fact ruled in large part through fear—​nonetheless managed to elicit the admiration of observers like James Thomson, a Whig poet who had written a long paean to liberty that made him a particular favorite in British North America on the brink of the American Revolution. British Whigs and reform-​minded writers across Europe associated Pascal Paoli and liberty with relentless enthusiasm, although Paoli’s Corsica was itself no parliamentary democracy, and Paoli ruled his compatriots with a far heavier hand than his admirers acknowledged. Even the fact that all these charismatic leaders were also military leaders did not provoke undue anxiety. Of course, the examples of those overly ambitious generals Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell had an important place in the eighteenth-​century European political imagination. But Peter, Paoli, and Washington all belonged together in a very different category, at least in the eyes of

60. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, p. 45. 61. Hill, “The Northern Star,” p. 227.

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their admirers, because of their status as fathers of their countries. Far from subverting the liberty of their peoples, they were believed to have brought these peoples into being. The figures from myth and antiquity with whom they deserved comparison were not Caesar, but rather the great lawgivers Lycurgus, Numa, and Moses. Washington, in particular, frequently enjoyed the sobriquet of the “American Moses.”62 By the 1770s, observers were recognizing the common features of these charismatic leaders, and were comparing them to each other, making revolutionary charisma a decidedly transnational phenomenon. For instance, the celebration of Paoli extended to the United States, where it helped prepare the way for the later cult of Washington.63 As a symbol of liberty, and of a struggle for independence against an overseas oppressor, Paoli had an even sharper meaning for American revolutionaries than for British Whigs, and between 1755 and 1775, his name appeared in American newspapers nearly two thousand times.64 A  summary of Boswell’s book appeared in an American almanac.65 A tavern outside of Philadelphia gave its name to the first of six towns called Paoli in the United States, and a number of unfortunate Americans grew up with names such as Pascal Paoli Macintosh and Pascal Paoli Leavens.66 As late as 1780, newspapers in New Jersey and Connecticut reprinted a poem praising Paoli, and added this note of explanation: “The character of the above General, and that of our illustrious Commander in Chief, are so similar, that the following selected

62. See Hill, “The Northern Star,” p. 227; Robert P. Hay, “George Washington: American Moses,” American Quarterly, vol. 21 (1969), pp. 780–​791. 63. George P. Anderson, “Pascal Paoli: An Inspiration to the Sons of Liberty,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts: Transactions 26 (1924–​26), pp. 180–​210; Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution; Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–​1776 (London: W. W. Norton, 1991), pp. 161–​182. 64.  America’s Historical Newspapers at http://​www.infoweb.newsbank.com, accessed November 25, 2015. 65.  Thomas More, Poor Thomas Improved:  Being More’s Country Almanack for the Year of Christian Account 1770 (New York: Alexander and James Robertson, 1770), unpaginated. 66. Anderson, “Pascal Paoli,” pp. 189, 200, 204, 209.

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lines made on the former are well adapted and very applicable to the latter—​only for the words CORSICA and PAOLI substitute AMERICA and WASHINGTON.”67 Then, in the 1780s, the cult of Washington spread to France. Many of the French officers who fought in the American War of Independence published breathless accounts of the American commander. Washington’s home of Mount Vernon became a pilgrimage site of sorts for French visitors to America, including the future revolutionary Jacques-​Pierre Brissot, who gladly picked up on the theme of Washington as a new Cincinnatus.68 By 1789, French authors were drawing on the full panoply of literary sentimentalism in their praise of Washington. One typical prose portrait included the lines: “When you see a portrait of our most famous Heroes, do you feel your chest tremble under your hand? Does your eye grow wet with sweet and precious tears? Do your cheeks flush with the fire of admiration?”69 It is often assumed that during the French Revolution, until the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the French themselves managed to resist the lure of the charismatic hero, despite having the example of Washington so prominently in front of them. François Furet argued that before 1794, the revolutionary political dynamic brought success not to those who posed as superhuman heroes, but to those who presented themselves as wholly subsumed into, and inseparable from, the sovereign people. The Revolution, in this account, did not reward those men who made the chests of admirers tremble with passion. It rewarded those who suppressed everything that was unique about themselves, everything that might focus the attention of admirers on the individual as an individual. The figure who best fit this model, at least for a time,

67. The Norwich Packet and the Weekly Advertiser, Thursday, July 27, 1780, 1, with reference to previous publication in The New Jersey Journal. 68. See Bette W. Oliver, Jacques-​Pierre Brissot in America and France, 1788–​1793: In Search of Better Worlds (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), p. 37. 69.  François-​Martin Poultier d’Elmotte, “Sur l’illustre Washington,” Almanach Littéraire, ou Étrennes d’Apollon, 1789, p. 69.

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was Maximilien Robespierre. “What makes Robespierre an immortal figure,” Furet wrote, “is . . . that the Revolution spoke its purest and most tragic discourse through him.”70 Mme de Staël would seem to have lent support to this interpretation, in her frequently quoted remark that when Bonaparte took power, “it was the first time, since the start of the revolution, that a proper name was heard on everyone’s lips. Until then it was said: The National Assembly did such-​and-​such, the people, the Convention did such and such; but now nothing was spoken of but this man who was taking everyone’s place and condemning the rest of humanity to anonymity . . .”71 There is much to be said for this interpretation. Particularly during the five years from 1789 to 1794, French Revolutionaries exhibited a strong suspicion of ambitious personalities. Indeed, words in the revolutionary lexicon carried more opprobrium than “ambitieux”—​as noted, even the young Napoleon felt compelled to denounce the quality. Meanwhile, virtually every revolutionary who achieved a certain level of prominence found himself accused of plotting to seize dictatorial power, like a new Caesar or Cromwell. High-​ranking military figures who commanded significant support among the rank and file came in for particular suspicion. Lafayette, accused of plotting a military coup, had to flee across the lines to the Austrians, followed later by General Charles-​François Dumouriez, who actually did attempt to march on the capital with his army. Charles-​Philippe Ronsin, the Cordelier militant who rose to high rank in the Vendée, died on the guillotine after a trial that featured frequent invocations of the name of Cromwell.72 A great deal of Robespierre’s success came precisely from his skill in claiming that he had no interest in popularity, and wanted only to serve as the pure vessel of the revolutionary will. As he declared in one of his most famous speeches, in early 1792: “I have no idea of how to flatter the people so as to destroy them.

70. François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 87. 71. Quoted in Lilti, Figures publiques, p. 221. 72. Moniteur universel, 25 Germinal, Year II (April 14, 1794), p. 204.

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I do not know the art of leading the people towards the precipice along a path sewn with flowers.”73 It is also true that much of the adulation of particular men in France between 1789 and 1794 focused on politicians who were safely and conveniently dead. Jean-​Claude Bonnet has put particular emphasis on two of these: Honoré-​Gabriel de Riquetti, count Mirabeau, the great orator of the first National Assembly; and the radical journalist and politician Jean-​ Paul Marat.74 Both these men were practically deified after their deaths in 1791 and 1793, respectively. Their admirers turned them, somewhat improbably in both cases, into models of sacrificial virtue who made fitting candidates for admittance to the new revolutionary Panthéon devoted to the “great men of the patrie.” Both had barely settled into this new resting place before the rapidly shifting currents of revolutionary politics led to their discredit and eviction. But Robespierre’s success, the suspicion of would-​be Cromwells, and the adulation of the virtuous dead has, I would argue, blinded historians to the intensity with which French revolutionary public opinion also fixated on living personalities. Even during the years 178–​1794, it is striking just how often this public opinion fixed not only on collective bodies, cold abstractions, and conveniently deceased exemplars of virtue, but on living, breathing, charismatic men. During the first year of the Revolution, the man who received the greatest benefit from this yearning for charismatic leadership was—​ unlikely as it seems in hindsight—​King Louis XVI. Widely hailed as the “restorer of French liberty,” and portrayed in popular engravings as a new Augustus, Louis’ acceptance of revolutionary reforms, grudging or not, elicited genuine public jubilation.75 Even the suspicions of the 73. Maximilien Robespierre, Discours de Maximilien Robespierre sur la guerre, prononcé à la société des amis de la constitution, le 2 janvier 1792 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1792), p. 72. 74. Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon, passim. 75.  See Annie Jourdan, “L’éclipse d’un soleil:  Louis XVI et les projets monumentaux de la Révolution,” in Ian Germani and Robin Swales, eds., Symbols, Myths and Images of the French Revolution: Essays in Honor of James A. Leith (Regina: Canadian Plains Resarch Center, 1998), pp. 135–​148.

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Parisian crowds could transmutate with stunning speed into wild enthusiasm for the king, as numerous accounts of the “October Days,” in which the crowds forced the royal family to leave Versailles for Paris, testify.76 Well before the Revolution, representations of Louis had begun to differ starkly from those of his Bourbon predecessors, playing down his links to his ancestors and his divine right to rule. The process accelerated in 1789 and 1790, and the countless odes, addresses, and pamphlets that now appeared in praise of Louis had far more in common with the earlier paeans to Paoli and Washington than with anything prepared on behalf of Louis XIV. They presented the king as a founder (or, rather, a re-​founder) of his country, and a servant of public liberty. They celebrated his entry into Paris on July 17, 1789, when he put on a tricolor cockade and mixed with the common people.77 To be sure, the gulf between public image and actual intentions yawned even wider in Louis’ case than in those of his charismatic predecessors. He deserved the title “character of convention” far more than George Washington ever did. But Louis was hardly the only individual to become the focus of popular enthusiasm before 1791. As Antoine Lilti has most recently argued, the cult of Mirabeau took on impressive dimensions well before his death. Mirabeau himself assiduously cultivated it, both through the theatrical skill and bombast that he brought to his speeches before the National Assembly, and through the way that he crafted an image of himself as a heroic defender of the people in the chatty, digressive published letters that he addressed to his constituents. He became a more frequent subject of engraved portraits than any other member of the Assembly—​at least two hundred between 1789 and his death in 1791.78 And as the art historian Amy Freund has recently argued, these portraits often featured Mirabeau in casual dress, and highlighted the 76. See M. L. Batiffol, Les journées des 5 et 6 octobre 1789 à Versailles (Versailles: Aubert, 1891), pp. 72–​73. 77. See, for instance, Le triomphe de la nation, ou Louis XVI au milieu de son peuple (n.p., 1789). 78. See Lilti, Figures publiques, pp. 245–​56.

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individuality of his features, in order to create a sense of intimacy with the viewer.79 Even more striking was the degree of personal adulation directed toward Maximilien Robespierre in 1793–​94. Robespierre entirely lacked the physical qualities of a Paoli, Washington, or Mirabeau. He was short, thin, and nearsighted, and spoke in a weak, reedy voice. He could be fussy and pedantic. At a time when most radical revolutionaries wore their hair long and undressed, he insisted on curling and powdering his. His speeches were long, and frequently dry, and he read them out verbatim. In short, he would seem to have been exactly what Furet suggested: a perfect exemplar of revolutionary anti-​charisma. The Times of London wrote that “he possesses none of those physical advantages which captivate and seduce the multitude.”80 And yet, Robespierre did seem to captivate and seduce at least a part of the French multitude, and during the Terror a surprising number of people became personally fixated on him. They ascribed more influence to him than he actually possessed, and pushed him in the direction of personal rule. Although care must be taken in reading appeals from men and women who mostly wanted something from Robespierre, this material nonetheless suggests that the foundation for a cult of personality existed in his case. After his death, the Thermidorian authorities found, among his papers, what they called “an infinity” of letters addressed to him personally.81 These often resembled nothing so closely as the breathless letters written to Jean-​Jacques Rousseau by his admirers. One woman wrote to Robespierre: “you are an eagle soaring in the skies, with a seductive heart . . .” Others claimed that “you enlighten the universe by your writings, you regenerate the human race”; “you fill the world with your renown”; “you are our savior,” “you are the founder of the Republic.”82 79. Amy Freund, “The Legislative Body: Print Portraits of the National Assembly, 1789–​1791,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies, vol. 41, no. 3 (2008), pp. 337–​358. 80. The Times (London), July 16, 1794, p. 2. 81. Papiers inédits trouvés chez Robespierre, Saint-​Just, Payan, etc. (Paris: Baudouin Frères, 1828). 82. See Louis Jacob, Robespierre vu par ses contemporains (Paris, Armand Colin, 1938), pp. 127–​128; Ernest Hamel, Histoire de Robespierre, three vols. (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1867), vol. III, p. 523.

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A widow from Nantes even proposed marriage: “I have been in love with you since the start of the Revolution . . . You are my supreme divinity, my guardian angel.”83 More formal declarations of admiration came in to the National Convention from clubs and municipalities across the country. They reported that children were learning Robespierre’s writings by heart; that babies were being named after him, that at public festivals, crowds were shouting “Vive Robespierre” along with “Vive la République.” A young Englishman who visited Robespierre in early 1794 reported his apparent annoyance at the attention. Robespierre told him: “Why come to me? . . . Everyone applies to me, as if I had omnipotent power.”84 Even if many of Robespierre’s self-​proclaimed admirers wrote out of pure self-​interest, to curry favor, the fact remains that they could envisage Robespierre as a supreme, even all-​powerful leader, with whom they could feel an intimate, intensely emotional connection. Robespierre’s own manifest unsuitability for the role of charismatic leader matters relatively little here. As noted above, charismatic appeal is a social relationship, born out of the hopes and expectations of the followers as much as out of the actions and wishes of the leader. The charisma projected onto Robespierre did not suffice, at this moment of the Revolution, when suspicion of potential Caesars remained such a powerful political leitmotif, to bring him to the position of supreme power that his acolyte Saint-​Just, among others, seems to have envisaged for him.85 But the fact that even he could inspire such longings from at least part of the French public suggests just how strongly the desire for a charismatic leader permeated revolutionary culture. As I hope this brief survey suggests, Napoleon Bonaparte’s charismatic appeal in the years leading up to his seizure of power amounted to anything but a radical break—​either with the French Revolution, or more broadly 83. Cited in Hamel, Histoire de Robespierre, vol. III, p. 524. 84. J. M. Thompson, English Witnesses of the French Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1938), p. 254. 85.  See Bertrand Barère, Mémoires de Bertrand Barère (éd.), Hippoylyte Carnot et David (d’Angers), two vols (Paris: Labitte, 1842–​44), vol. 2, pp. 214–​215.

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with the Atlantic Revolutions in general, or with the Enlightenment world out of which they sprang. It grew directly out of the image of the heroic revolutionary leader earlier associated with Paoli and Washington, and before them with Peter the Great. And it built upon the experiences of the Revolution, and of figures such as Mirabeau and Robespierre. In fact, the connections were surprisingly direct. As a Corsican, who remained devoted to the cause of Corsican independence until well into the Revolution, Bonaparte grew up worshipping Pascal Paoli. Moreover, considerable evidence suggests that he learned about Paoli predominantly from James Boswell’s Account of Corsica. From the ages of eleven to seventeen he lived without a break in France, and had little contact with other Corsicans. But in one of his earliest extant letters he requested a copy of the Italian translation of Boswell from his father, and in his own early references to Paoli, he repeated errors that only occur in this translation.86 So, most likely, Boswell’s romantic, sentimental portrait of Paoli had considerable effect on him. During the Revolution itself, in Corsica, Bonaparte collaborated with Paoli, whom the new regime had allowed to return to the island. The two men broke with each other angrily in 1793, leading to Bonaparte’s exile from Corsica and a new commitment to the cause of the French nation. But almost immediately Bonaparte then fell under the spell of Robespierre, a man for whom he expressed admiration (although not unmixed) for the rest of his life.87 Bonaparte’s infatuation with Paoli and Robespierre helps explain an important difference between his charismatic authority and that of his predecessors. In most of the earlier cases examined here, the charismatic image largely took shape independently from the wishes of the person in question, and sometimes, as in the case of Robespierre, had strikingly little relationship to what that person actually intended. In one sense, all 86.  See Fernand Ettori, “Pascal Paoli modèle du jeune Bonaparte” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 203 (1971), 45–​55, at 50; Aimé Dupuy, “Un inspirateur des Juvenilia de Napoléon: l’Anglais [sic] James Boswell,” Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé 3 (1966), pp. 331–​339, at 337–​338. 87. Patrice Gueniffey, Bonaparte: 1789–​1802, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 159.

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these figures were Characters of Convention, a product of what happens when popular desire fixates on a potent, prominent individual, quite possibly without that person’s approval. John Adams claimed that Bonaparte too was a “character of convention”—​but here, Adams failed to take into account the man’s own efforts. Bonaparte cultivated his charismatic image very deliberately, and with full knowledge of the predecessors. In particular, once he took command of the Army of Italy in 1796 he developed a formidable propaganda apparatus to further his personal reputation among the French public. He founded not one, but two newspapers that reported back on his successes to the French, and he happily posed for artists who wanted to glorify him—​especially the young Antoine-​Jean Gros, who painted the spectacular famous picture of Napoleon’s at the Battle of Arcola.88 In its particulars, the image that Bonaparte cultivated for himself in France during this crucial period of his rise to power fits the model of predecessors like Paoli and Washington in every respect. First, he was portrayed as a figure of uncommon republican patriotism and virtue. Another French paper of the period, not directly sponsored by him, even bore the title Journal of Bonaparte and Virtuous Men.89 His panegyrists frequently compared him to figures from classical history and myth, with one engraving placing his image alongside ones of Hannibal, Alexander, and El Cid.90 Second, the propagandists stressed his extraordinary natural gifts. In his case, they did not concentrate on his physical attributes (although, despite the myth so successfully promoted by British publicists, he was not in fact particularly short), but rather on his extraordinary mental powers—​on his genius. As one of his tame newspapers reported: 88. See Dwyer, Napoleon, pp. 304–​332; Wayne Hanley, The Genesis of Napoleonic Propaganda, 1796–​1799 (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2005); David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), pp. 186–​222. 89. Journal de Bonaparte et des hommes vertueux (1797). 90.  Louis-​Sébastien Berthet, “Buonaparte né a Ajaccio le 15 aout 1769; Annibal; Rodrigue dit Le Cid; Alexandre le Grand” (Paris:  Berthet, 1798), Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Hennin, 12277.

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“He flies like lightning, and strikes like thunder. The speed of his movements is matched only by their accuracy and prudence. He is everywhere. He sees everything. Like a comet cleaving the clouds, he appears at the same moment on the astonished banks of two separate rivers.”91 The same point was conveyed by the visual portraits, which presented him as strikingly handsome, wind-​blown, a pure emanation of nature—​most famously Jacques-​Louis David’s great painting of 1801. Even before he took power in France in 1799, Bonaparte’s propagandists also frequently described him as the “savior” of France. And once he was actually in power, this language became entirely ubiquitous. He never formally took the title of “father of his country”—​probably because his Bourbon predecessors had frequently applied the phrase to themselves—​ but the sobriquet was given to him informally. His propagandists and admirers also frequently called him the “héros régénérateur”—​the hero who regenerated France, literally gave it a new birth.92 Finally, Bonaparte very definitely became a celebrity. Even before he took power in 1799, at least 150 separate engraved portraits of him had appeared.93 As in the case of Washington before him, most were not done from life, and in some cases the artists happily dispensed with even the pretense of verisimilitude. But this diffusion still meant that Napoleon’s face—​or to be precise, a face labeled Napoleon—​was familiar throughout the continent. And while artists tended to portray him quite formally, he also became the subject of stage plays that emphasized his personal qualities—​his loyalty to his friends for instance. Meanwhile, the stories that circulated about him, especially within the French army, emphasized the easygoing manner he had with his men, and his readiness to fight by their sides and to do the sort of things that French kings would have

91. Le courrier de l’armée d’Italie, no. 48, October 23, 1797, p. 206. 92.  See Katia Sainson, “‘Le régénateur de la France’:  Literary Accounts of Napoleonic Regeneration, 1799–​1805,” Nineteenth-​Century French Studies, vol. 30, nos. 1–​2 (2001–​2), pp. 9–​25; Frank Paul Bowman, “Napoleon as a Christ Figure,” in French Romanticism: Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Readings (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 34–​59. 93. French Revolution Digital Archive, https://​frda.stanford.edu, accessed December 20, 2016.

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scorned as utterly below their station.94 For instance, it was widely reported that at the Battle of Lodi, in May of 1796, the former artillery officer stepped in to help load a cannon. After the battle, the soldiers joked that they would elect him their new corporal—​whence his nickname of “le petit caporal.”95 The intensive circulation of these images and stories allowed French people to imagine an intimate, personal connection with Bonaparte, as they might imagine an intimate, personal connection with a celebrity actor or writer. In short, Bonaparte fit himself to the model of the charismatic revolutionary hero earlier represented by Peter the Great, Paoli, and Washington. And Bonaparte drove home this last connection very deliberately after he seized power, taking advantage of the fact that George Washington died just five weeks after the coup of the Eighteenth Brumaire. Napoleon quickly ordered an official mourning period and elaborate memorial ceremonies for the American, designed to highlight the similarities between Washington and himself.96 Their climax was a lengthy eulogy delivered by the poet Louis de Fontanes, which praised both men for healing their country’s wounds, but could not resist adding that Bonaparte “surpassed” Washington in war.97 But unlike Washington, Bonaparte soon used his charismatic authority to claim unlimited, untrammeled power. While he legitimated his rule through plebiscites, in the end he did not see himself simply as the representative of the French people. Far more grandly, he saw himself as reshaping this people, regenerating it, bringing it to a new birth. He was not merely its choice, but its Legislator, in the Rousseauian sense, reviving what had grown cold and sterile, infusing it with a new being. Literary works of the period routinely referred to him in these terms, justifying an authority over which the people, despite the plebiscites, could set no 94. Dwyer, Napoleon, pp. 449–​452. 95. Félix Bouvier, Bonaparte en Italie, 1796 (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1902), p. 533. 96. See Bronislaw Baczko, Politiques de la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). 97.  Louis de Fontanes, Éloge funèbre de Washington:  Prononcé dans le temple de Mars, le 20 pluviôse, an 8 (Paris: Agasse, 1800), p. 29.

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bounds. These characterizations of his authority are best captured by the line Boswell wrote about Paoli, which Bonaparte himself certainly knew: “It is a species of despotism, founded, contrary to the principles of Montesquieu, on . . . love.”98 But, as I have already emphasized, this form of authority was not something born out of the failures of the French Revolution. It was not, as so many people imagined at the time and since, a rupture with everything that had preceded it since 1789. It followed directly out of the Revolution, and beyond that, directly out of the literary culture of the eighteenth-​ century Atlantic world—​the culture that the young Bonaparte had so deeply immersed himself in. The lure of the strongman, of the charismatic leader, arose out of this culture just as surely as did ideas of rights and constitutions and equality. The lure was always there, through every stage of the French Revolution, even as it had also been present in the American Revolution. And with Bonaparte it was realized.

98. Boswell (1768), An Account of Corsica, p. 162.

5

The Fate of Nations Is the Work of Genius The French Revolution and the Great Man Theory of History DARRIN M. MCMAHON ■

To invoke “great men” and the “great man theory of history” in an academic setting today is to invite ridicule, or worse. Nor is it clear that the offense would be lessened by gender inclusivity. Would a “great man and woman theory of history” be any less absurd? True, popular culture may find it impossible to relinquish an obsessive fascination with outstanding individuals, and biographies and magazine profiles remain a cornerstone of the publishing industry.1 From this vantage point, it might be possible to believe that great men and great women pull the levers of history. But professional historians are less easily seduced, conscious of the fact that individuals, however “great” they may be, are always imbedded in social processes and constrained by structures that shape their aims and outcomes.

1. As early as the 1980s, Eric Hobsbawn was expressing bafflement at the continued popularity of biographies. See his “History from Below—​Some Reflections,” in Frederick Krantz, ed. History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Ideology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 13.

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That is especially true of historians of the French Revolution, who have long been sensitive to the power of collective agency and mass action. They know, as well as anyone, how long-​term social, economic, and cultural forces work themselves out over time, subsuming individual actors in their great waves. And they understand, arguably better than most, that even the immensely influential words of charismatic leaders such as Mirabeau, St. Just, Danton, or Robespierre were caught up in wider discourses that gave them shape and meaning. For historians of the Revolution, the ordinary men and women who stormed the Bastille; who rose in the Great Fear in the summer of 1789; who marched en masse to Versailles on the 5th of September; or who rushed to the front at Valmy in 1792 were not “great” in any conventional sense, and had no need of “great men,” or “great women” either, to help them make their history for themselves. As Michelet put it, however grand eloquently, long ago, the Revolution was a living spirit that moved through all hearts. The peuple of France was its own Prometheus, and the French Revolution marked the moment when the people made its entrance on history’s stage. Yet understanding can occlude, and in this case it hides a paradox: that the very same age that conceived of the sovereignty of the people—​ asserting their equality and celebrating their collective agency in such dramatic episodes as the storming of the Bastille—​was also the age that gave birth to the great man theory of history. Indeed, it was the Age of Enlightenment that conceived the powerful myth that great men were the shaping spirits of the age, the motive force of earthly events. The French Revolution consolidated that myth, and seemed to give it substance. Great men, it seemed—​men of thought, men of action, men of genius—​ understood the course of history, and so could direct its path. Perhaps because of modern scholars’ own tendency to dismiss the “great man theory of history” as untenable, there is very little work on the fortunes of the theory itself.2 When considered at all, it is invariably 2. This is overwhelmingly true of historians. There is, however, a reputable psychological literature devoted to the study of leadership and human eminence that, in effect, continues the

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associated with the 19th century, the age of Hegel’s world-​historical individuals and Thomas Carlyle’s hero worship, which imagined history, as the latter famously put it, as the “biography of great men.”3 Nietzsche would later comment in the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life that the “task of history”—​both as a process and as a profession—​was “to inspire and lend strength for the production of the great man.”4 Readers of Plutarch throughout the ages might well have said something similar about the exemplary value of individual lives and the importance of history as magistra vitae.5 Yet they wouldn’t have imagined those lives as the agents of historical change in quite the same way as Carlyle or Nietzsche, both of whom shared a historicist sense that individuals could speak for and channel the vital currents of the age. For Nietzsche, at least, the 19th century was a time in which the gods no longer vied with the heroes to perform great deeds, a time in which neither Providence nor the Holy Spirit could be imagined as lying behind and directing the actions of men, least of all great men, who acted for themselves. Carlyle, by contrast, like Hegel and his followers, remained wedded to an idealist notion of the great man as a conduit of Providence or Spirit. But great men, in their view, were still the incomparable executors of change, “the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that divine BOOK OF REVELATIONS,” as Carlyle put it, “whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some is named HISTORY.”6 “These great individuals represent the

study of great men and, to a lesser extent, great women. See, for example, Dean Keith Simonton, Greatness: Who Makes History and Why (New York: Guildford Press, 1994). 3.  Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-​Worship and the Heroic in History, ed. and intro. Carl Niemeyer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966). 4.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 111. 5. On the tradition of the ars historica and the early-​modern commonplace tracing to Cicero that history is life’s teacher (historia magistra vitae est), see Anthony Grafton, What Was History? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. 1–​61. 6. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, eds. and intro. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 135.

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coincidence of the general and the particular,” Jacob Burckhardt observed in less oracular terms, “of the static and the dynamic, in one personality. They subsume states, religions, cultures, and crises.”7 Great men were history’s agents and also history’s apostles, calling out and signaling tectonic shifts on the horizon. Scholars of considerable stature—​witness Carlyle’s biography of Friedrich the Great or Mommsen’s studies of Caesar—​were ready to illustrate that phenomenon, as were many lesser lights.8 “The progress of society has been inseparably connected with the agency of eminent persons,” declared George Park Fisher, president of the American Historical Association,” toward the end of the 19th century.9 The belief was so widely received on both sides of the Atlantic that it precipitated an explicit reaction. Herbert Spencer was as merciless in ridiculing the pretensions of a great man theory of history as were Engels or Marx, who cast scorn on what the latter described, in a dig at Carlyle, as the slavish “bowing to nature’s noble and wise:  the cult of genius.”10 Yet as late as 1961, E.  H. Carr still felt moved to take a swipe at this stubborn prejudice in his famous Trevelyan Lectures on the question “What is History?” “What I  call the Bad King John theory of history,” he observed, “—​the view that what matters in history is the character and behavior of individuals—​has a long pedigree. The desire to postulate individual genius as the creative force in history is characteristic of the primitive stages of historical consciousness.”11 7.  Jacob Burckhardt, “The Great Men of History,” in Reflections on History, trans. M. D. Hottinger, intro. Gottfried Dietze (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1979), 292. 8. On the extensive literature in Germany and Austria written in this vein, see Julia Barbara Köhne, Geniekult in Geisteswissenschaften und Literaturen um 1900 und seine filmischen Adaptionen (Wien: Boehlau Verlag, 2013), 58–​133. 9. George Park Fisher, Outlines of Universal History, Designed as a Text-​Book and for Private Reading (New York, 1885), 3–​4. 10. Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (London: Henry S. King, 1873); Karl Marx, “Review of Latter-​Day Pamphlets, ed. Thomas Carlyle, no. 1, The Present Time, no. 2, Model Prisons,” first published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politisch-​ökonomische Revue, no. 4, April 1850, available at www.marxists.org/​archive/​marx/​works/​1850/​03/​carlyle.htm. 11. E. H. Carr, What is History, intro. Richard Evans (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 39 and 47–​49.

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Carr’s observation that the pedigree of the great man theory of history was long—​longer even than the 19th century—​was on target. And his invocation of the cult of genius in this connection, like that of Marx, provides a clue of how far back one needs to go in tracing its origins. For genius was absolutely central not only to Carlyle’s conception of the great man, but to the great man theory of history more generally. And although the cult of genius flourished most spectacularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was, in its origins and inception, a phenomenon of the preceding age, the Age of Enlightenment.12 The very term “great men” (grands hommes) was ubiquitous in the 18th century.13 Often juxtaposed to “illustrious,” the term tended to be used in opposition to older conceptions of human eminence that vaunted military heroism, religious sanctity, and the great deeds performed by princes and kings. “Great men” in the newer 18th-​century sense, by contrast, were noteworthy, above all, for their virtue and devotion to the good of humanity, as well as for the products of their minds. Indeed, according to Enlightenment polemicists, grands hommes were necessarily enlightened, combating prejudice, spurning superstition, and working for the progress of humanity.14 Geniuses, most often, were conceived as great men. But they were also something more. An elite of an elite, they benefited from greater license and an even more awestruck reception. As the poet and critic Edward Young put it in his influential Conjectures on Original Composition of 1759, “a genius differs from a good Understanding, as a Magician from

12. On the 18th-​century origins of the cult of genius, see my Divine Fury: A History of Genius (New York: Basic, 2013), esp. ch. 3. 13.  A  simple search on one database of 18th-​century books in English, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, reveals 30,393 uses of the term “great men” between 1700–​1800. For its uses and development in France, see Jean-​Claude Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon:  Essai sur le culte de grands hommes (Paris: Fayard, 1998); and David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France:  Inventing Nationalism 1680–​1800 (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2001), 107–​139. 14. See, for example, Bonnet’s analysis of the work of the “Plutarch of France,” Antoine-​Léonard Thomas, in Naissance du Panthéon, 67–​111.

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a good Architect; that raises his structure by means invisible; this by the skillful use of common tools.” It was for this reason, Young maintained, that “Genius has ever been supposed to partake of something divine.”15 The supposition refused to fade in an enlightened age, which venerated its heroes of the mind, both past in present, as beings set apart. Had not Newton peered into the mind of the creator and then revealed his laws like a privileged prophet? With reason was he hailed as a saint?16 And did not those great geniuses of letters whom the 18th century proudly proclaimed—​men such as Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Rousseau—​see farther into the human soul than mere mortals ever could? There was something extraordinary, even miraculous, it seemed, in genius’s capacity to imagine and create, while at the same time giving form to the inchoate longings of millions. Creators, geniuses were also oracles, who articulated the broader “genius of the people” or the “gen­ius of the age,” even, paradoxically, as they transcended time and place. Shakespeare, for example, spoke for his nation as a kind of patron saint, just as he spoke for human beings everywhere as a universal man. Voltaire, patriarch of Ferney, gave voice at one and the same time to the conscience of humanity and to the conscience of enlightened France. The divine Jean-​Jacques, tribune of the people, channeled the people’s voice.17 If knowledge, as Bacon had said, was power, then to know the world and the human soul was to possess the capacity to shape them, for better or for worse. Enlightened polemicists liked to assume that this power would be put to the good, to further liberty or the progress of mankind. But there was also a recognition from early on that genius could not always 15.  Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. Edith J. Morley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1918), 13–​15. 16.  On the reception and construction of Newton as a secular saint, see Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of a Genius (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), esp. ch. 1. 17.  On the way in which the 18th century began to imagine the individual genius as the spokesman and oracle of what classical and early-​ modern observers had long described as the “genius of the people” (genius populi/​ingenium populi), see my Divine Fury, esp. 131–​132, 216.

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be contained.18 The imagination was unruly, a potentially dangerous force, and geniuses themselves, it seemed to some, were prone to instability, license, madness, or crime.19 As the nephew of Rameau remarks in Diderot’s famous dialogue of that name, “If I knew history, I would show you that evil always arrives on earth by means of some man of genius.”20 In making rules anew, geniuses transgressed the rules that were. Originals, they were unique, one of a kind. The genius was a prodigy, “nature’s favorite,” as Kant put it.21 Diderot preferred to call them “kinds of monsters.”22 But whether for good or for ill, genius could intervene in history, alter human affairs. Well before Marx demanded that philosophers do more than just interpret the world, men and women in the 18th century were ascribing the power to change it to the great men who were geniuses. It is noteworthy in this connection that the 18th century witnessed, in addition to the cult of genius and the great man, the birth of the philosophy of history. It was the age, as Jürgen Habermas has described it, when human making in the world was first united with human knowing. In Habermas’s reading, the conflation of knowing and making, or verum and factum, was a new, partially secularized conception of the agency previously attributed to God, for whom to “know and to do” were one and 18. On the long-​standing associations between genius and evil, see Divine Fury, passim, and my article “Genius and Evil,” in Joyce E. Chaplin & Darrin M. McMahon, Genealogies of Genius (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 171–​182. 19.  See Jan Goldstein, “Enthusiasm or Imagination? Eighteenth-​Century Smear Words in Comparative National Context,” Huntington Library Quarterly 60 (1998): 29–​49, as well as her The Post-​Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–​1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), ch. 1 (“The Perils of the Imagination at the End of the Old Regime”). 20. Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau, ed. and intro. Jean-​Claude Bonnet (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), 50. In addition to my extended discussion in Divine Fury, see Otis Fellows, “The Theme of Genius in Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau,” Diderot Studies, no. 2 (1952): 168–​199; James Mall, “Le Neveu de Rameau and the Idea of Genius,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 11, no. 1 (1977): 26–​39. 21.  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, intro. and trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 187. 22. Diderot speaks of geniuses as monsters in his Elémens de physiologie, ed. J. Mayer (Paris: M. Didier, 1964), 296. He also refers to “le monstre appelé homme de génie” in his Réfutation de l’ouvrage de Helvétius intitulé L’Homme in Oeuvres complètes de Diderot: Revues sur les éditions originales, ed. Jules Assézat, 20 vols. (Paris: Garnier frères, 1875–​1877), 2:290.

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the same. Knowing and making, knowing and doing, then, was a unity appropriated by human beings in the 18th century and inscribed in the saeculum, the profane time of the world. It was henceforth possible to conceive of human history in an unprecedented way as at once knowable and “makeable.”23 One might certainly take issue with aspects of this analysis, pointing out, for example, as Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman have recently done, that 18th-​century observers were adept at identifying invisible hands in systems of spontaneous order where earlier observers had once seen the hand of God.24 Others might express caution about seeing Enlightenment philosophies of history simply as the secularization of theology. And yet the general contention that 18th-​century observers began to attribute agency to human beings that they formerly ascribed to divine or demonic forces—​whether angels or demons, Providence or God, Satan or Fate—​is, I think, well founded.25 The oft-​noted prevalence of conspiracy theories in the age would seem to confirm the point. Not only were conspiracy theories ubiquitous in the 18th century, they were, as Gordon Wood long ago pointed out, testaments to the belief in human agency, dramatizing the capacity of human beings to intervene in, and manipulate, history.26 The cabals and conspiracies of the age might be shadowy and elusive. But their plotters and masterminds were invariably assumed to be human beings. And so they served as substitutes, Wood contends, for the occult forces that had once performed the conceptual work of explaining cause and effect, making sense of the mysterious workings of the world. 23.  Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1988 [1971]), 242–​246. Habermas’s point of departure is the thought of Vico. 24. Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman, Invisible Hands: Self-​Organization and the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 25. See, additionally, Bell’s analysis of the origins of French nationalism in the Cult of the Nation in France, which draws on Marcel Gauchet to make a related claim about human beings’ belief in their capacity to shape their own destinies in the spaces opened up by the gradual “withdrawal of God.” Revealingly, the cult of grands hommes was central to this emergent nationalism and to the conception of the nation as a product of human agency in history. 26. Gordon Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1982): 401–​441.

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Be that as it may, verum and factum certainly came together nicely in the 18th century’s cult of genius. For geniuses were imagined not only as beings with privileged access to the truth, capable of seeing into the heavens or into our souls. They were also understood heroically as creatures of deed, who in revealing their visions and creations, served as bearers of progress, furthering the advance of civilization. This is a refrain that one finds, for example, in d’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia, which numbers Bacon, Descartes, Locke and Newton among the “small number of great geniuses whose works have helped spread enlightenment among men.” “Masters” of the “human mind,” they burst the irons and fetters that had long retarded human advance. Men of genius acted in the world. Descartes, d’Alembert notes, “can be thought of as a leader of conspirators who, before anyone else, had the courage to arise against a despotic and arbitrary power and who, in preparing a resounding revolution, laid the foundations of a more just and happier government.” Locke presented “mankind with the mirror in which he had looked at himself.” All helped pull humanity out of its “infancy” and “barbarism.”27 Although d’Alembert did not invoke it explicitly here, he and others conceived public opinion as the vehicle by which genius extended its sway. Nicolas Chamfort pressed the point in his fittingly entitled Combien le génie des grands écrivains influe sur l’esprit de leur siècle, observing that the genius of a few great “masters of humanity” shaped the spirit of the age by “imposing its sovereignty on the mass of men” through the medium of public opinion.28 Antoine-​Léonard Thomas made much the same point while speaking before the Académie Française in 1767. “The man of genius,” he declared there, “has become the arbiter of the thoughts, of the opinions, and of the prejudices of the

27. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. and intro. Richard N. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 80–​85. 28. Sébastien-​Roch-​Nicolas Chamfort, Combien le génie des grands écrivains influe sur l’esprit de leur siècle, in Oeuvres complètes de Chamfort, 5 vols. (Paris: Chaumerot Jeune, 1824–​1825), 1:203–​204.

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public.”29 Such claims were repeated widely, as men of letters sought, in their eulogies and encomia, to present themselves as virtuous grands hommes—​rivals to the illustrious soldiers, prelates, and princes of old, who had long paraded across the pages of history. Seeking to displace them, they offered a new narrative in which history was fashioned, not by the scepter and the sword, but by the spirit, which drew word and deed, verum and factum together. Observations of this kind, of course, were as much fantasy as reality. And yet as exercises in cultural mythmaking, they were powerful nonetheless, gathering credence not only from the emergence of public opinion as a novel force in 18th-​century society, but from the cult of celebrity, which as David Bell and Antoine Lilti both contend, was itself an Enlightenment creation amenable to a new type of political authority.30 Geniuses, to be sure, were never merely celebrities—​they were invariably famous for their creations and thoughts. And they need not be celebrated at all. Already by the end of the 18th century, one could see the elaboration, thanks in large part to the posthumous cult of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, of what would prove the powerful Romantic myth of the undiscovered genius. The air of magic and inscrutable mystery, moreover, that accompanied the cult of genius and made of its exemplars Promethean and even godlike figures, towering and sublime, was less conducive to the imagined intimacy and identification that, in Lilti’s analysis, was an essential aspect of the cult of celebrity that bound the public to its figures of fascination. Still, there was ample room for overlap. Witness the cases of Voltaire and Rousseau, at once archetypal celebrities and archetypal geniuses. By the end of their careers they did possess a certain power over the thoughts and opinions of the age. And while that power was never unconstrained—​celebrity, like genius, granted license, but it also curtailed and confined—​its extent was still

29.  Thomas is cited in Jean-​Claude Bonnet, “Les morts illustres:  Oraison funèbre, éloge académique, nécrologie,” in Lieux de mémoires, 2 (Part 3): 217–​241. 30.  In addition to Bell’s and Lilti’s contributions to this volume, see Lilti, Figures publiques: L’invention de la célébrité 1750–​1850 (Paris: Fayard, 2014), esp. ch. 6.

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considerable.31 When Voltaire spoke, people listened; when Rousseau declaimed, his followers were moved. Both drew the adulation of celebrity. And both could command the authority of genius that allowed them to serve as the “arbiters” of the thoughts, opinions, and prejudices of the public. Many, to be sure, regretted this influence. Presenting public opinion as the vehicle by which the likes of Voltaire and Rousseau seduced hearts and minds, they accused these philosophes of preying on the people’s innocence and corrupting them with their words.32 From the middle of the 18th century, in fact, tales of plots and conspiracies oddly re-​enforced the proud claims of those such as d’Alembert, who boasted that a few great masters of humanity were conspiring to undermine the “despotic and arbitrary” power of church and state. As Jonathan Israel has shown in such voluminous detail, much of Europe in the 18th century feared that a lone Jew by the name of Spinoza had been all too successful in shaping the spirit of the age.33 One man’s genius was another man’s conspirator—​ an evil genius on the loose. Together the two perspectives reaffirmed a common belief in the power of uncommon individuals to make history with the mind. That Enlightenment belief—​part conviction, part propaganda, part myth—​was already well articulated by 1789. But it was dramatized in spectacular fashion and seemingly confirmed by the events of the French Revolution. In part, this is a familiar story, an aspect of the process that scholars such as Mona Ozouf, Roger Chartier, and Jean-​Claude Bonnet have associated with the Revolutionaries’ cult of grands hommes and

31. The way in which celebrities are ruled by their publics, as much as they rule them, is a central theme of Lilti’s analysis, part of what he describes as the “burden” of celebrity. 32.  On this point, see Amos Hofman, “Opinion, Illusion, and the Illusion of Opinion,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 27, no. 1 (Autumn 1993):  27–​ 60, and McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment:  The French Counter-​ Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 33. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–​1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–​1752 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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their “pantheonization” of key Enlightenment figures.34 In an attempt to ground the revolutionary break of 1789 in a proper paternity and lineage, supporters of the Revolution drew a connection to those great intellectual forefathers who had allegedly prepared and heralded the revolutionary rupture, working tirelessly for the public good. Such assertions were early and insistent, and they received apparent confirmation in the summer of 1791 in the actual pantheonization of Voltaire, whose remains were transferred to the former church of St. Geneviève, the Panthéon, in a ceremony that closely resembled the translation of a saint. Here, it seemed, was convincing proof that the revolutionaries understood how history was made, honoring one of their principal forefathers and progenitors. Counterrevolutionaries, for their part, fully agreed, though they did so with regret. The charge that the Revolution was the consequence of a conspiracy hatched by Voltaire and others philosophes accompanied the Revolution from the start, and was only deepened by the Revolutionaries’ embrace of grands hommes.35 These included not only the great geniuses of France—​Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau—​but others from afar. When news of Benjamin Franklin’s death reached Paris in the late spring/​early summer of 1790, Mirabeau took to the rostrum to deliver an éloge in the National Assembly to the man who was considered by contemporaries and others since as the first American genius.36 Mirabeau, a celebrity himself, and, some said, a genius in his own right, who would soon occupy a place in the Panthéon as grand homme, could claim to know what he was talking about.37 “The genius who freed America and poured a flood

34.  Mona Ozouf, “The Pantheon:  The École Normale of the Dead,” in Realms of Memory:  Rethinking the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, intro. Lawrence D. Kritzman, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 3:325–​429. On the process of pantheonization, see Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1991); Jean-​Claude Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon. 35. On this point, see my Enemies of the Enlightenment, ch. 2. 36.  On Franklin as the first American genius, see Joyce E. Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 37. On Mirabeau as celebrity, see Lilti, Figure publiques, 243–​264.

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of light over Europe” was no more, Mirabeau lamented. This “hero of humanity,” who “restrained thunderbolts and tyrants,” was gone! Lauded at the speaker’s dais and celebrated on the stage, Franklin was universally hailed as an “avenger of humanity,” an “apostle of liberty,” and a “rival of the gods”—​in short, a genius—​who had earned the eternal gratitude of the French people by paving the way for the Revolution of 1789.38 Or so, at least, it was claimed. Franklin’s actual role in precipitating the French Revolution was minimal, at best, and the same could even be said of his role in the American Revolution. “He has done very little,” John Adams observed dryly in a diary entry of 1779, lamenting the fact that “it is universally believed in France, England, and all Europe that [Franklin’s] electric wand has accomplished all this [American] revolution” on his own.39 Adam’s grumpiness betrayed envy. In any case, the kind of skepticism he voiced vis à vis the power of genius was out of fashion in 1779. Writing to his sister in that very year, Franklin joked about being “i-​doll-​ized” in France. “My image is everywhere,” he half-​boasted, half-​ complained—​stamped on clay medallions, fashioned in all sizes, “set in lids of snuff boxes,” and “worn in rings.” The “numbers sold are incredible,” he continued, and these, together “with the pictures, busts, and prints, (of which copies upon copies are spread everywhere) have made your father’s face as well known as that of the moon.” In the new cult of celebrity that merged so well, at times, with the new cult of genius, Franklin was made into an action figure, a doll.40 If John Adams found such idol worship excessive in 1779, it was even more so a decade later. For though the Revolution’s cult of genius was in 38.  Honoré-​Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, “Éloge funèbre de Benjamin Franklin,” delivered on June 11, 1790, accessed November 10, 2016, http://​www2.assemblee-​nationale. fr/​decouvrir-​l-​assemblee/​histoire/​grands-​moments-​d-​eloquence/​mirabeau-​eloge-​funebre-​ de-​benjamin-​franklin-​11-​juin-​1790; Le journaliste des ombres, ou Momus aux Champs Elysées (Paris: Gueffier, 1790), 61. 39. John Adams, Diary of John Adams, vol. 2, entry for June 23, 1779, accessed on November 10, 2016, https://​www.masshist.org/​publications/​apde2/​view?id=ADMS-​01-​02-​02-​0009-​0005-​0012. 40. Benjamin Franklin to Mrs. Sarah Bache, June 3, 1779, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, eds. Leonard W. Labaree et al., 40 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–​1999), 29:61; Lilti, Figures publiques, 91–​94.

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certain respects a natural continuation of the cult that had flourished in the Old Regime, it was also a new departure, in large part because the open attack on the church and the crown that accompanied it removed barriers to its full and free expression. Without priests to frown at excessive claims to human agency and the veneration of idols, without kings to trumpet their sovereignty and to posture as God’s representatives on earth, geniuses could be hailed as never before. The contrasts are striking. In the Old Regime, Voltaire was denied a Christian burial; in the Revolution, he was made a saint in the Panthéon, a church transformed. In the Old Regime, time was punctuated by the rhythms of the Christian calendar and the commemoration of its martyrs, saints, and kings. In the Revolution, men made haste to conceive time marked solely by the interventions of human beings. An early revolutionary almanac reflected this change well, proposing to replace the saints of the liturgical year with “universal” figures, such as Leonardo, Descartes, Racine, Molière, and Voltaire.41 And in 1793, when the revolutionaries abolished the Christian calendar altogether, they vowed to devote a day at the end of the revolutionary year to a “festival of the genius” (fête du génie), one of five proposed holidays to conclude the revolutionary calendar in recognition of those who had benefited the nation. As the former actor Fabre d’Églantine explained in submitting the proposal to the National Convention, the “festival of the genius” would honor the “most precious and lofty attribute of humanity—​ intelligence.”42 The proposal passed, though the fête du génie seems not to have been celebrated amidst the turmoil of war and factional strife. Still, genius did not lack for honors and indemnities. Defending legislation designed to secure the intellectual property of authors, the revolutionary deputy Joseph Lakanal proclaimed “the declaration of the rights of genius.”43 Already, the playwright and politician Marie-​Joseph Chénier 41.  Cited in Serge Bianchi, La révolution culturelle de l’an II:  Élites et peuple, 1789–​1799 (Paris: Aubier, 1982), 200. 42. Fabre d’Églantine in Archives parlementaires, 78:503. 43.  On Lakanal, see Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–​1810 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), ch. 3.

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had decried what he called “a crime against genius” in a passionate report recommending the transfer of Descartes’s remains to the Panthéon. That crime had been perpetrated in the Old Regime, he claimed, by those who refused to properly honor the genius of Descartes. But though the great philosopher never found his way to the Panthéon during the Revolution, his remains were repatriated from Sweden, and rings and other relics were fashioned from his disinterred bones in what, in effect, was a new cult of saints.44 Finally, in a substitution that is wonderfully symbolic of the genius’s newly exalted status, “Genius” took the place of kings on revolutionary playing cards, usurping the rights of sovereigns and claiming the prerogatives of kings.45 That belief, that myth—​ whether celebrated in the Panthéon or bemoaned in counterrevolutionary phrases, such as “the Revolution is the fault of Voltaire”—​highlights a related way in which the revolutionary experience gave a new inflection to the cult of genius. For by connecting geniuses emphatically to politics and political change, the revolutionaries highlighted the twin capacity of extraordinary individuals not just to understand the world, but to change it. Counterrevolutionaries, once again, confirmed the belief, albeit to their chagrin. Even those, such as Joseph de Maistre, who continued to defend the guiding role of Providence in orchestrating human affairs, nonetheless gave world-​historical individuals their due. What Maistre called the “génie infernale” of Robespierre, could move men and make history, even if it was God who ultimately moved Robespierre’s hand in retribution, working in his mysterious ways. La Révolution, après tout, était la faute à Voltaire, la faute à Rousseau—​the fault of great men, diabolically great men, who were perversely worshipped by the revolutionaries as saints. Maistre felt similar ambivalence about the greatest of the grand hommes to emerge from the revolutionary experience, Napoleon, who was widely hailed as a genius, indeed as le génie. A  master of self-​presentation, 44. Rapport fait par Marie-​Joseph Chénier, sur la translation des cendres de René Descartes au Panthéon, séance du 18 floréal, l’an 4 (Paris: De l’imprimerie national, Messidor, an 4 [1796]), 2. 45. See the reproduction from 1794 in my Divine Fury, plate DI.5, opposite page 136.

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Napoleon of course, presented himself in many different ways. He was, in Luigi Migliorini’s words, an “epiphany of the ancients”: at once Hannibal crossing the Alps, Alexander, Caesar, and Augustus, to say nothing of Charlemagne.46 He was a modern hero, too, the wise legislator, the enlightened despot, the military conqueror full of grandeur et gloire. And he was also, as as Lilti and Bell discuss in their respective contributions to this volume, a celebrity and a man of charisma.47 Yet commentators have not fully appreciated the degree to which Napoleon made self-​conscious use of his genius to legitimate his rule.48 We might say, in fact, that part of his genius was precisely the way in which he appreciated the political possibilities of genius—​the political possibilities latent in the cult of genius that had formed over the whole of the 18th century and then were given new impetus by the Revolution itself. For a man who had come to power in a coup, who could claim neither true dynastic lineage nor genuine democratic mandate (however much he might fiddle with the plebiscite), what better way to legitimate his power than by an appeal to that quality the 18th century had proclaimed as the highest human attribute—​genius. Geniuses after all could embody the genius of the people, give expression to its will. This had been an evolving aspect of the cult since the 18th century, and Napoleon, in the wake of Mirabeau and Robespierre—​both of whom sought to channel and speak for the nation as the monarchs of old had incarnated the body politic—​seemed to illustrate the point. At the height of his glory, and even in defeat, Napoleon’s genius was in some measure the genius of France. It is a consistent theme in Napoleonic propaganda. As early as 1797, while serving as the commander of the French army in Italy, Napoleon used his propaganda organ there, the Courrier de l’armée d’Italie, to present himself as a man of the heavens who “flies like lightning and strikes like thunder,” a man who is “everywhere and who sees everything,” because he 46.  Luigi Mascilli Migliorini, Le mythe du héros:  France et Italie après la chute de Napoléon (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2002), 10. 47. See, additionally, Lilti, Figures publiques, 221–​224. 48. On Napoleon’s use of the cult of genius, see McMahon, Divine Fury, 115–​125.

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is in possession of a “vast genius” (un vaste génie). Napoleon, the journal stressed, was “one of those men for whom power has no limits save for his own will.”49 With his rise to political office in 1799, followed by the promotion to life consul in 1802 and then to emperor in 1804, such representations grew ever bolder and more frequent. Mayors, prefects, and even priests made use of their positions as representatives of the realm to laud the emperor as genius, and the genius of the emperor. In theater productions and the ubiquitous festivals held to celebrate military victories and national holidays, Napoleon was regularly addressed as “the genius,” le génie, a title that served as one of the most common descriptions of the consul-​cum-​ emperor in the formal speeches delivered on such occasions.50 In official art, busts, medals, and engravings, finally, a self-​conscious effort was made to present a collective image of Napoleon as a man “who had proven that he sees farther than other men.” “Omniscient, omnipotent, a prophet an oracle,” Napoleon could boast of knowing “more in his little finger than all other heads combined.”51 He was a master of fate, a controller of destiny, for whom the heavens had special regard—​a point that was emphasized in both the propaganda and the popular legend of Napoleon’s comet or star said to follow him across the battlefield, a symbol of his alignment with destiny.52 Napoleon’s own propaganda was echoed back to him both in his lifetime and well after in a cult of genius without precedent. It helped that he had the goods to pull it off. The man could cow a stateroom with his intellect and dazzle his generals on the battlefield, but contemporaries claimed to see more than just a supreme talent for military or administrative affairs. Here was a genius of the highest order. In contemplating 49. Cited in Jean Tulard, Le mythe de Napoléon (Paris: Collin, 1971), 31. 50. McMahon, Divine Fury, 117–​18. 51. Nathalie Petiteau, Napoléon, de la mythologie à l’histoire (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 2004), 25; Annie Jourdan, Napoléon: Héros, imperator, mécène (Paris: Aubier, 1998), 109–​110. 52. On the cult of Napoleon’s “star,” see Darrin M. McMahon, “Die Kometenbahn eines Genies: The Case of Napoléon Bonaparte,” in Wahnsinn und Methode: Zur Funktion von Geniefiguren in Literatur und Philosophie, eds. Hans Stauffacher and Marie-​Christin Wilm (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag, 2017).

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a monument to the emperor in 1807, the social theorist Saint-​Simon put Napoleon atop a list that included the “five greatest heroic geniuses” and the “five greatest scientific geniuses” of all time, besting not only Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, and Caesar, but Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, and Descartes. Napoleon, uniquely, was both a genius of science and a heroic genius of action.53 Later, Clausewitz, in his chapter on “Military Genius” in On War, compared the processing power of Napoleon’s mind “to the gifts of a Newton or an Euler,” which easily grasped and dismissed “a thousand remote possibilities which an ordinary intellect would labor to identify and wear itself out in so doing.”54 Even more extravagantly, as Jean-​Baptiste Decherf has noted, Napoleon was hailed in the 19th century as an artist, who created not in clay, paint, or words, but with living human beings. He was a “Michelangelo of War,” as Victor Hugo remarked, or “a poet in action,” as even detractors such as Chateaubriand and Coleridge grudgingly conceded.55 A man who destroyed the old to create anew, who created originally, without imitation, according to his own laws, in flesh and blood, Napoleon was the prototype of what Germans came to call in the 19th century a Taten-​génie, a genius of action, a genius of deeds. Or as Hegel put it in Jena in 1806, a “world-​historical individual,” realizing Spirit in the world. The great man theory of history—​conjured in the cult of genius in the 18th century and consolidated at the time of the French Revolution—​discovered here its living proof. Napoleon’s bid at world domination would be thwarted soon enough, though the “martyrdom” of defeat did little to tarnish his celebrity or the cult of his genius, both of which were actually enhanced by banishment and death. Meanwhile, the great man theory of history and the cult of gen­ ius that served it so often in flanking support would march on, knowing 53.  Claude-​Henri de Saint-​Simon, “Introduction aux travaux scientifiques du dix-​neuvième siècle,” in Œuvres de Claude-​Henri de Saint-​Simon, 6 vols. (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1966), 6:201–​202. 54. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and eds. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 112. 55.  Jean-​Baptiste Decherf, “Napoléon and the Poets:  The Poetic Origins of the Concept of Charisma,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 10, no 3 (2010): 362–​376.

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great success on the battlefield of culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. Those victories would be won most decisively in German-​ speaking theaters and on German campaigns, where accounts of the große Männer der Geschichte and notions of charismatic leadership flourished in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As no less a chronicler than Jacob Burckhardt conceded, in considering the powerful effects of the cult of great men on his time, “We discover in ourselves a feeling of the most spurious kind, namely, a need to submit and wonder, a craving to drug ourselves with some seemingly majestic impression, and to give our imaginations full play. Whole peoples may justify their humiliation in this way, risking the danger that other peoples and cultures will come to show them they have worshipped false idols.”56 Burckhardt’s fears would be more than realized, though to follow that story in detail here would be to range well beyond the scope of this essay.57 Yet it may not be amiss in closing to point out that when Max Weber put forth, in his mandarin’s prose, his celebrated account of charismatic authority, defining charisma as a “certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities,”58 he did so in cognizance of the tradition of the philosophy of history shared by Carlyle and other proponents of the great man for whom “the monumentalized individual bec[ame] the sovereign of history.”59 The notion of genius, treated as a special instance of a person so endowed, was not far from this analysis, and indeed although Weber understood charisma as a sociological 56. Burckhardt, “Great Men of History,” 270. 57. I treat this story at length in Divine Fury, ch. 6. See also, Julia Köhne, Geniekult, and Köhne, “The Cult of Genius in Germany and Austria at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century,” in Chaplin & McMahon, Genealogies of Genius, 115–​137. 58. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1:241. 59. H. H Gerth and C. Wright Mills make this point in their introduction to their well-​known selection and English translation of Weber’s writings, From Max Weber:  Essays in Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 53.

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category applicable to many places and times, he was not insensitive to its historical development in Europe. It is significant that Weber singled out Napoleon as a new form of charismatic leader, referring specifically to his “rule of genius” as a prime example of a novel form of plebiscitary leadership that derived its legitimacy from purely personal qualities.60 Rumination on the example of Napoleon as an archetype of the great man of history was widespread in Germany, and perhaps it may not be further amiss in closing to mention one other German individual who took the case of Napoleon seriously, a man who also happened, from the vantage point of the practitioner, to be interested in charismatic authority, and who benefited immensely from a cult of genius that flourished around him in the late 1920s and ‘30s.61 That man, of course, was Adolf Hitler, who as Fuhrer not only read until the bitter end Carlyle’s biography of Friedrich the Great, but kept on his bedside table a revealing title, Philipp Bouhler’s Napoleon: Kometenbahn eines Genies, the comet-​path of a genius.62 To make that observation is not at all to draw direct or facile connections between the case of Napoleon and that of Hitler. But it is to suggest that a great man theory of history—​born in the Age of Enlightenment, instrumentalized in the French Revolution, and incarnated in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte—​was part of the inheritance bequeathed to modern political culture by the long 18th century. If the French Revolution witnessed the people’s entrance onto the stage of world history, it also witnessed the emergence of a new star, who could play both hero and villain: the exceptional individual, the great man, the man of genius, who claimed to make of the people’s will his own.

60. Weber, Economy and Society, 1:244. 61. On these connections, see my Divine Fury, 208–​221, as well as my article, “Die Kometenbahn eines Genies. 62.  Phillip Bouhler, Napoleon:  Kometenbahn eines Genies (Munich:  Georg D.  W. Callwey, 1942). Bouhler was a high-​ranking Nazi official. The work was one of Hitler’s “favorite bedtime reading books,” according to Robert S. Wistrich, “Philipp Bouhler,” Who’s Who in Nazi Germany (New York: Routledge, 2011), 11.

6

“New History” The Radical Pasts of the French Revolution, 1789–​1794 JOSEPH ZIZEK ■

“History, yesterday so timid before the Ministers who permitted only praise, has regained its liberty and its rights.  .  .  .  History owes its freedom to your courage, people of France.”1 In January 1790, Jean-​ Louis Soulavie, an ex-​abbé and former practitioner of natural history, used these stirring words to introduce the Mémoires du Maréchal duc de Richelieu, a publishing enterprise that would eventually grow to encompass nine substantial volumes. Soulavie drew upon the intimate conversations and private papers of Armand de Vignerot du Plessis (1696–​1788)—​great nephew of Cardinal de Richelieu, famed soldier, diplomat, and womanizer—​to offer a scorching account of the court aristocracy. Although the work teemed with scandalous anecdotes, Soulavie insisted that it was neither merely an entertainment nor simply an exposure of vices; instead, he claimed to offer a “portrait of despotisme in its dotage [dans sa vieillesse],” exposing those intriguing

1.  Jean-​Louis Soulavie, Mémoires du Maréchal duc de Richelieu, Pair de France, Premier gentilhomme de la chambre du roi, &c., 9 vols. (Paris, 1790), 1:1, 67. The opening section was twice republished as a stand-​alone work entitled Traité de la composition et de l’étude de l’histoire (Paris, 1791).

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ministers and courtiers whose attempts to seize power had woken the people from its “deep lethargy.” Finally, the moment had come to tell the truth about the nation’s chaotic past: “only in the century in which we live, and after the revolution of 1789, have we been granted the chance to write a good history of France.”2 Soulavie’s celebration of the triumph of liberty and his assertion of historical opportunity are familiar aspects of the French Revolution. The contemporary belief in a new beginning—​the notion of historical rupture and the contradictions that follow upon it—​is embedded in all modern historiographical interpretations of the French Revolution; indeed, it has long provided a key justification for considering the Revolution to be the exemplar of world-​historical transformation.3 Following Alexis de Tocqueville’s lead, today’s scholars rarely take contemporaries’ claims of rupture at face value, but the claims themselves remain the starting point for powerful interpretations of revolutionary utopianism and violence, national and collective identity, and the purported “modernity” of the Revolution.4 The notion of revolution-​as-​rupture has likewise structured influential constructions of historical temporality, ranging from Reinhardt Koselleck’s claim for transformation in our “horizons of historical expectations,” to François Hartog’s genealogy of modern “regimes of historicity,” 2. Soulavie, Mémoires du Maréchal duc de Richelieu, 1:78. 3. Rebecca Spang, “Paradigms and Paranoia: How Modern Is the French Revolution,” American Historical Review (2003): 119–​47. 4.  The notion of historical rupture—​what François Furet dubbed “a period when history was set adrift”—​was instrumental to key revisionist works, from Furet’s Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1971), 44 (quoted); to Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1988). Lynn Hunt’s notion of a “mythic present” likewise emphasized the creative possibilities of historical rupture; see Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); as did, in a different way, David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France:  Inventing Nationalism, 1680–​1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). For a critique of the rhetoric of “advent,” see Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1991), esp.  18, 198. The French Revolution’s claim to comparative novelty emerges anew in Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, eds., Scripting Revolution:  A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 3–​4.

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to the idea that our modernity is grounded in experiences of temporal dislocation generated by the Revolution.5 Yet there is also something strange about Soulavie’s pronouncement that France’s history was ripe for rewriting. Today’s historiographical and conceptual frameworks militate against the constructive association of history with radical revolution. Lynn Hunt has insightfully quipped that, with rare exceptions, “the French revolutionaries were too busy making history to write much of it,” and her remark encapsulates a widely shared dismissal.6 The Revolution’s radical phases—​which might be said to stretch from the insurrections of 1789 to the fall of Maximilien Robespierre in mid-​1794—​continue to be identified with anti-​historical and presumably utopian transformation.7 Indeed, recent scholarship on France’s post-​Thermidorian regimes, which were long regarded as mere products of resurgent social forces, now regards them as a sweeping sociopolitical rejection of radical regeneration and an ideological “return to history.”8 5.  Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past:  On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1985); François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2015); Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present:  Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). The classic statement is by Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963; London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2006). 6. Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 65. 7. See François Furet and Mona Ozouf, “Deux légitimations historiques de la société française au xviiie siècle: Mably et Boulainvilliers,” in Furet, L’Atelier de l’histoire (Paris, 1982), 165–​83; H. T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries (Chicago, 1937); Dan Edelstein, “The Egyptian French Revolution:  Antiquarianism, Freemasonry and the Mythology of Nature,” in Dan Edelstein, ed., The Super-​Enlightenment:  Daring to Know Too Much (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010), 215–​41; and Sanja Perovic, The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 8.  Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics After the Terror:  The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2012), 25; Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment:  How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2001), 98. After Thermidor, institutional norms and oversight were reimposed on the practice of history; see Martin S. Staum, Minerva’s Message: Stabilizing the French Revolution (Montreal: McGill–​Queen’s University Press, 1996), 136–​49.

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Yet the dissociation of radical revolution and history overlooks a curious paradox. Between 1789 and 1794, contemporaries responded enthusiastically to calls such as Soulavie’s to remake historical understanding:  pamphleteers, journalists, militants, and educators all explored, sometimes in highly creative ways, the emancipatory historical possibilities unlocked by the nation’s insurrection.9 In other words, the desire to remake but also to rewrite France’s history was not a post-​ Thermidorian departure, but a powerful trope born at the Revolution’s outset.10 Revolutionaries generated a voluminous corpus of writing that, by their standards, merited the appellation of “history,” even though to our eyes its narrative forms, polemical constructions of past and present, and uses of evidence appear somewhat bizarre (its literary quality likewise suffers in comparison to the monumental works of nineteenth-​ century historiography). The tendency to dismiss revolutionary history writing explains why the French Revolution represents a void in the history of historiography, a sterile gap between the multifarious forms of Enlightenment history and the explosion of historical writing inspired by Romanticism.11

9.  A  pioneering but rare contribution is Philippe Bourdin, ed., La Révolution, 1789–​1871: Écriture d’une histoire immédiate (Clermont-​Ferrand:  Presses de l’Université Blaise-​Pascal, 2008). 10. Jainchill and Hesse have separately argued that the Thermidorean demands for a “new history”—​embodied by the activities of individuals such as Henri Grégoire—​represent a break with revolutionary radicalism. Institutionally this is the case, but when Grégoire called for a renewal of history in the Year III in Rapport sur les encouragements, récompenses et pensions à accorder aux savants, aux gens de lettres et aux artistes (Paris, an III) he was repeating an insistence he had issued during the Terror and renewing a trope much-​used in educational discourse. See Grégoire, Rapport sur la bibliographie  .  .  .  séance du 22 germinal, l’an 2 de la République, une et indivisible (Paris, an II); and, for an earlier call, Condorcet, Mémoire sur l’instruction publique (Paris, 1791–​92), 177. 11. For example, The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 3: 1400–​1800, ed. J Rabasa (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012); The Blackwell Companion to Western Historical Thought, ed. L. Kramer and S. Maza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). For a rare exception that considers the Revolution to be significant to historiographical traditions (but not because of its historical writing), see Sophie-​Anne Leterrier, “L’histoire en révolution,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 320 (2000): 65–​75.

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Yet filling this void may change our understanding of how and why contemporaries sought to construct revolutionary experience in and through history.12 We have today lost sight of the fluidity of late eighteenth-​century ways of rendering history and engaging past and present.13 Prior to 1789, there existed no agreed consensus about what should (or could) count as proper history, which was neither a systematic body of knowledge nor a coherent semantic field.14 Eighteenth-​century historical writing comprised remarkably diverse styles and methods:  across its sweep could be found philosophical and civilizational histories generated by the Enlightenment; techniques of documentary erudition and antiquarianism cultivated by Benedictines and others; narratives of Frankish or Gaulish precedents that served as grounds for aristocratic, jurisprudential, and monarchical contestation; expansive and increasingly democratized histories of society, language, arts and sciences; and humanistic collations of virtuous examples drawn from both Ancients and Moderns.15 This fey diversity explains why eighteenth-​ century contemporaries constantly disputed the appropriate subjects of history;

12.  Revolutionary literature, too, was long thought to be creatively sterile, but we have now recaptured a sense of its contemporary dynamism and subsequent legacies. See Julia Douthwaite, The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 13. A key inspiration behind the work of the intellectual historian Hayden White was the desire critically to reassess the professionalization of history and its far-​from-​inevitable adoption of causative realism. For White’s challenge to realism and his reminder of the strange historiographical roads not taken, see A. Dirk Moses, “Hayden White, Traumatic Nationalism, and the Public Role of History,” History and Theory 44 (2005): 321–​22. 14. This point was made decades ago by Ernest Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932; Boston:  Beacon Press, 1955) and given loose empirical support by François Furet, “L’ensemble ‘histoire,’” in François Furet, ed., Livre et société dans la France du XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Moutin et cie, 1970), 2:101–​19. 15. The bibliography is vast, but excellent syntheses include Chantal Grell, L’Histoire entre erudition et philosophie. Etude sur la connaissance historique à l’age des lumières (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993); Blandine Barret-​Kriegel, Les Historiens et la monarchie, 4 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988); Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Donald Kelley, Faces of History:  Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1998).

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disagreed about its scope; fought over its boundaries; and differed over its political, educational, and moral utility. Such inheritances and contestations are visible in the ways revolutionaries grappled with three interrelated challenges between 1789 and 1794. First, in the climate of emancipation surrounding 1789, contemporaries struggled over how best to redefine the persona of the historian and the practice of history. Second, revolutionaries skeptically reexamined the nature of historical testimony in their newly liberated society, asking fundamental questions about what could and should be trusted as a foundation for history. Third, while rethinking the historian’s identity and the proper basis for history, revolutionaries experimented with styles of history designed to illuminate the Revolution’s origins, interpret its course, or explain its relationships to past and future.16 These revolutionary efforts go beyond familiar “uses of history,” if we take that term to denote the instrumental employment of examples, analogies, or precedents from the past.17 Instead, between 1789 and 1794 contemporaries interrogated the very conditions of possibility for historical practice, and explored ways of doing history that were suited to—​and, indeed, enabled by—​insurrectionary freedom.18 Revolutionaries thus expressed a distinctive historical sensibility that grew out of the simultaneous acceptance of historical rupture and historical liberation. “Sensibility” because revolutionary historical practice was rooted in feeling as well as reason; its justification and its power inhered in the cultivation of emotional stances on past and future as 16. I focus on “radicals,” keeping in mind that such categorization is contingent and relative rather than a teleological synonym for “Jacobin.” Only radical revolutionaries faced the dilemma of rejecting the binding value of historical precedent while conceding that history remained relevant. Their opponents, however much they disputed the appropriate role of history and tradition, rarely faced such dilemmas; see Carolina Armenteros, The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs, 1794–​1854 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 17. Revolutionaries drew upon (or rejected) a wide range of contemporary and Ancient exempla; see Thomas Kaiser, “Catilina’s Revenge: Conspiracy, Revolution, and Historical Consciousness from the Old Regime to the Consulate,” in Peter Campbell et. al., eds., Conspiracy in the French Revolution (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2007), 189–​216. 18. For a different approach to “conditions of possibility,” see Daniel Brewer, The Enlightenment Past:  Reconstructing Eighteenth-​Century French Thought (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008), 104.

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much as in the provision of examples, narratives, or documentary proof (pièces justicatives). Between 1789 and 1794, the revolutionary sensibility of history offered a powerful means for contemporaries to address the interplay between human volition, collective processes, and natural attributes. Revolutionaries viewed history as unremittingly voluntaristic, if not always in the processes that enabled it, then certainly in the people who composed it.19 Contemporaries hopefully proclaimed that the new histories enabled by the Revolution would be authentic, because they would for the first time be written by individuals unbeholden to despots. Revolutionaries declared that their new histories would be trustworthy, because the evidence for them had been wrested from the grasp of tyrants or created in conditions of freedom. Finally, revolutionaries insisted that history could help fellow citizens understand the origins and trace the trajectories of collective life. Ultimately, for radicals, the revolutionary practice of history even provided a set of forensic instruments with which to evaluate societal transparency, individual agency, and political conspiracy. Although this sensibility of history proved relatively short-​lived, its experiential and practical legacies still haunt modern historiography.

FREED HISTORY, LIBERATED HISTORIANS

In recent decades, perhaps the most abiding scholarly achievement in the broad field of French Revolutionary history has been our transformed understanding of how eighteenth-​ century contemporaries fabricated a new conceptual universe from familiar resources. The pioneering work of François Furet, Mona Ozouf, Lynn Hunt, and Keith Michael Baker sensitized generations of scholars to the importance of contemporary idioms of rupture and novelty, but also showed how political crisis and temporal acceleration opened unanticipated creative avenues. 19. In other words, their model of historical events remained remarkably human-​scale, much like that discussed in Gordon Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (1982): 401–​41.

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As Keith Baker has compellingly argued, attending to contemporary discourses can help us understand how the concept of revolution was itself “revolutionized” in 1789, transformed from simple “historical fact” into “revolution as political act, decisive expression of the will of a nation reclaiming its history.”20 Indeed, revolutionaries took that project of reclamation literally. By the late 1780s, historical contestation over constitutional precedents had for decades been a staple of the internecine struggle between the monarchy and its own sovereign courts (parlements), and there are compelling analyses to show how and why the pre-​Revolutionary debate converged on the radical rejection of precedents drawn from France’s history.21 But as revolutionaries unmade the institutional structures of privilege and constraint that had defined the literary world of the eighteenth century, they also weaponized long-​existing disputes around authorial independence, historical credibility, and the value of erudition.22 In 1788 and 1789, across the vast public debate unleashed by the summoning of the Estates General through the insurrectionary wave of the summer of 1789, contemporaries insisted that regenerating France also necessitated redefining the persona of the historian in terms of public utility rather than privilege.

20. For the original quotation, See Keith M. Baker, “Inventing the French Revolution,” in Keith M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge:  University of Cambridge Press, 1990), 218–​23; a subtly reworked synthesis is advanced in Keith M. Baker, “Enlightenment Idioms, Old Regime Discourses, and Revolutionary Improvisation,” in T. Kaiser and D. Van Kley, eds., From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 167–​68, 194–​97. See also Pierre Rétat, “Représentations du temps révolutionnaire d’après les journaux de 1789,” in L’Espace et le temps réconstruits: la Révolution française, une révolution des mentalités et des cultures? (Aix-​en-​Provence, Université de Provence, 1990), 121–​29. 21. The literature is enormous, but an excellent example is Dale Van Kley, “New Wine in Old Wineskins:  Continuity and Rupture in the Pamphlet Debate of the French Prerevolution,” French Historical Studies 17 (1991): 447–​65. 22. On the drawn-​out destruction of the system of privilege and censorship, see Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Charles Walton, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009); Simon Burrows, Blackmail, Scandal, and Revolution: London’s French libellistes, 1758–​92 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

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Such redefinition was vital, contemporaries insisted, because France’s distorted understanding of the past was effectively a problem of individual voluntarism: France’s history had been denatured precisely because of the way individual writers had inscribed and transmitted it to the present. Whereas criticism of previous historians was a constant feature of early modern historical debate, by the late 1780s this criticism took on additional polemical weight by focusing on the dire political consequences wrought by sycophants who distorted the nation’s past. Pamphleteers across an emerging political spectrum offered avid readers a series of stinging critiques:  some attacked the “infidelity” of historians who had exaggerated royal power; their royalist counterparts leveled equally harsh critiques against the partiality of writers who defended privileged bodies on the basis of purported historical evidence.23 In the most notorious example, Jacob-​Nicolas Moreau, the royal historiographer who had steadfastly defended royal absolutism for decades, was reviled in 1788 and 1789 for producing “works of servitude and deceit” and for arming the proponents of absolute authority with the tools of historical erudition.24 The individuals who had collated, written, or transmitted history were, to revolutionary eyes, directly complicit in the parlous ignorance into which the nation had been plunged. Revolutionaries had a vast repertoire from which they could draw tropes of corrupted writers or unfaithful historians. They could extract

23.  For examples, see Louis-​Léon-​Félicité de Brancas [comte de Lauraguais], Recueil des pièces historiques sur la convocation des Etats-​Généraux, et sur l’élection de leurs députés (Paris, 20 septembre 1788), 87, 96; abbé Vélin, Apologie de la cour pléniere, par M.  l’Abbé Vélin, de l’Académie des Inscription & Belles-​Lettres, de la Société des Antiquaires de Londres, de l’Académie des Antiquaires de Hesse, &c (N.p., n.d.), 1–​2. 24. Moreau’s attempts to put the French past into monarchical service, via the institution of the Dépôt des Chartes, is analyzed in Keith Michael Baker, “Controlling French History: The Ideological arsenal of Jacob-​Nicolas Moreau,” in Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 59–​85. By the late 1780s, Moreau and his compatriots could be attacked from across the political spectrum; see Antoine de Rivarol, Le Petit Almanach de nos grands hommes ([Paris], 1788), 170; Joseph-​Antoine-​Joachim Cérutti, Oeuvres diverses de M. Cérutti, ou Recueil des pièces composés avant et depuis la Révolution, 3 vols. (Paris: Desenne, 1792), 1:23–​27; and Elie Carcassonne, Montesquieu et le problème de la constitution française au XVIIIe siècle (1927; Geneva, 1971), 524, n. 1.

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such messages implicitly or overtly from the Enlightenment’s attacks on sterile erudition and its demands that history become philosophical and rational. Even more prominently, such tropes belonged to the idioms of eighteenth-​ century classical republicanism, not only via Jean-​ Jacques Rousseau’s mid-​century disdain for history and historians, but through the indictments of servile men of letters proferred in the 1770s by Gabriel Bonnot de Mably and Jean-​Paul Marat, indictments that would be recycled into the revolutionary decade.25 More broadly, some revolutionaries desired to rectify the errors of historians past; in early 1789, the journalist and future Girondin, Nicolas de Bonneville, launched an ambitious multi-​volume history of Europe by criticizing the failings of authors such as Bossuet, Pufendorf, and Voltaire, insisting that “it is not that men lack the truth, it is rather that truth is lacking in men.”26 It was striking but not unprecedented for radicals to suggest, as did Camille Desmoulins in July 1789 (in a precocious call for republican government), that despite the best efforts of sycophantic writers, France’s past was nothing but a “long sequence of bad kings.”27 According to such a storyline, the French past had been betrayed by its presumed custodians—​particularly (but not exclusively) those in the pay of monarchs—​and only the liberated conditions of the Revolution would allow that betrayal to be redressed.28 Irrespective of inspiration,

25. Rousseau’s Emile (1762) indicted the fashion for “critical history,” which the novel’s fictional preceptor dismissed as “only an art of conjecture, the art of choosing among several lies the one best resembling the truth.” See Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, Emile:  Or, On Education, trans. Alan Bloom (New  York:  Basic Books, 1979), 238. On Rousseau’s general hostility to history and historians; see Peter Robinson, “Jean-​Jacques Rousseau and History: Moral Truth at the Expense of Facticity,” Rethinking History 12 (2008):  417–​31. Classical republican critiques of corrupted historians and writers may be found in Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, De la manière d’écrire l’histoire (Paris, 1783), 111; and Jean-​Paul Marat, Les Chaînes de l’esclavage (1774; Paris, [1793]), 178–​80. 26. Nicolas de Bonneville, Histoire de l’europe moderne, depuis l’irruption des peuple du nord dans l’empire romain, jusqu’à la paix de 1783 3 vols. (Geneva, 1789–​1792), 1:42–​43. 27. Camille Desmoulins, La France Libre (1789), 29–​30. 28.  The historian Gabriel Brizard insisted that a French “Tacitus” was only possible under a monarch benificent enough to permit open criticism of his ancestors; Brizard, Discours

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the revolutionary challenge to writerly dependence had two crucial consequences. First, the insistence that historians must be liberated from patronage relationships dissociated revolutionaries from prior absolutist traditions that history’s dignity derived from (or somehow depended upon) its association with power or with great men—​ indeed, if anything, it communicated a lasting suspicion of the overt ambitions and hidden designs of such individuals.29 Second, because revolutionaries explicitly defined the problem of a corrupted history in terms of human intention and nefarious individual agency, the liberated historical voice stood in opposition to both panegyric praise of individuals and calumny of patriotic deeds (a common trope for revolutionaries would be to proffer true history as refutation of “calumny”). When revolutionary writers proudly advertised their wares to readers by announcing “do not expect to find the work of a historiographer, or Academician, nor one of those servile productions enveloped by the Censor’s approbation,” they were not just indulging a rhetoric of liberation, but also signaling that the grounds by which the historian might claim public esteem were shifting.30 historique sur le caractère et la politique de Louis XI (Paris, [1791]), 12. Tacitus was widely cited by revolutionaries as an exemplar to which historians should aspire even though, in many ways, he was a paradoxical figure of admiration; see Catherine Volpilhac-​Auger, Tacite en France de Montesquieu à Chateaubriand in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 313 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 29. On the connection of history with monarchs, see Orest Ranum, Artisans of Glory: Writers and Historical Thought in Seventeenth-​Century France (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 1980); and Louis Marin, Portrait of the King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). For revolutionaries, deciding what kind of “greatness” deserved admiration would prove complicated, not least because living exemplars might eventually prove unworthy. On the example of the comte de Mirabeau, whose postmortem idolization was followed by disgrace, see Joseph Clarke, Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France:  Revolution and Remembrance, 1789–​1799 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp.  174–​75. Radical journalists such as Jean-​Paul Marat inveighed against the tendency to exalt presumably great men such as Jacques Necker (and, later, the marquis de Lafayette); in January 1790 Marat excoriated Necker “like posterity will judge him one day and here I will only be the historian writing in advance of his century.” See Marat, Oeuvres politiques, 1789–​1793, eds. Jacques de Cock and Charlotte Goetz, 10 vols. (Brussels: Pôle Nord, 1989–​1995), 588. 30. Soulavie, Mémoires du Maréchal duc de Richelieu, 1: 3–​4, 65–​67.

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Precisely because revolutionaries reframed the identity of the historian as patriotic (and selfless) commitment to the nation, expectations about a writer’s independence could be wielded to establish or undermine public legitimacy. This could be declared overtly as, for example, in early 1790, when the deputies of the new National Assembly solemnly agreed that even authors who were “worthy to write our histories” should not be royal stipendiaries, for “if we want to have historians, we must not pay historiographers.”31 Such redefinitions of legitimacy could also unfold via public controversy and ephemeral contestation, as in May 1791 when a brief scandal unmade the reputation of the aged philosophe and historian abbé Guillaume-​Thomas Raynal. To revolutionaries, Raynal was renowned as co-​author of the eighteenth century’s most famous attack on European colonization, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1770) and admired as a seeming victim of despotic persecution. When a letter purportedly by him criticizing the Revolution as anarchic was read at the rostrum of the National Assembly in May 1791, patriotic writers swiftly excoriated Raynal for slandering liberty and betraying his responsibilities as a practitioner of “philosophical and political history.”32 The expectations attending the persona of the liberated historian could thus be fashioned into a potent weapon. The Revolution’s effective democratization of print led to the remaking of other authorial identities, such as that of journalist, and here as well the imprint of the new persona of the historian could be felt. Scholars

31.  Archives Parlementaires, 11:383, 18:68–​69 [hereafter AP.]. The loosely defined position of royal historiographer was, by the late 1780s, generally an object of derision (albeit still sometimes a lucrative one), and it never possessed consistent duties or remuneration. See François Fossier, “A propos du titre d’historiographe sous l’Ancien Régime,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 3 (1985): 361–​417; and Chantal Grell, ed., Les Historiographes en Europe de la fin du moyen âge à la révolution (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-​Sorbonne, 2006), 127–​56. 32. Anacharsis Cloots, Ecrits révolutionnaires 1790–​1794, ed. M. Duval (Paris: Editions Champ libre, 1979), 179–​80; André Chénier, Oeuvres en prose de André Chenier, ed. de Fouquières. (Paris:  Garnier, 1881), 81–​82. The letter was probably not written by Raynal, but produced as a political manoeuver utilizing his fame; Robert Griffiths, Le Centre perdu:  Malouet et le monarchiens (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1988), 120.

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have long recognized that revolutionary journalism helped to fabricate for readers an experience of daily periodicity “establishing the lived as history and revealing history as lived.”33 Patriotic journalists thus often felt compelled to provide readers with historical narration or explication; the editor of the Courrier de Versailles, future Girondin Antoine-​Louis Gorsas, captured this desire in 1789 when he promised to be a “trustworthy Historian of the events that have taken place before my eyes.”34 Connections between journalism and history were arguably reinforced by the idealized contrast between the liberating power of print and the malign influence that rulers might exert over it; in his own brief journalistic career, Maximilien Robespierre famously claimed in late 1792 that under Europe’s monarchies the title of “gazette” had become synonymous with fiction, and that “history itself is a novel” because potentates used the press to deceive their peoples.35 Contemporary writers nevertheless recognized a tension between the day-​to-​day work of the journalist and the reflective responsibilities of the historian.36 To some, this tension became more apparent as the Revolution accelerated. By late 1793, the journalist Camille Desmoulins, scant months before a fateful break with his childhood friend Maximilien Robespierre, alluded to the difference between reportage suited to contestation and writing meant to provide historical analysis:  “I must write, I  must set down the slow pencil of the history of the revolution, which I sketch in my fireside nook, in order to once more take up the breathless, rapid pen

33.  Claude Labrosse and Pierre Rétat, Naissance du journal révolutionnaire (Paris:  Editions Champ libre, 1989), 126, 154. 34. Le Courrier de Versailles à Paris, et de Paris à Versailles 93 (October 9, 1789): 118. For other radical examples, see Patriote français, prospectus [1789]; Révolutions de France et de Brabant 2 (n.d.), reprinted in Camille Desmoulins, Oeuvres 10 vols. (Munich, 1980), 2:87. Conservative journalists were probably more likely to emphasize their status as contemporary “historians,” but radicals did so as well; Hugh Gough, The Newspaper Press in the French Revolution (London: Routledge, 1988). 35.  Lettres à ses commettans 9 (November 23, 1792), in Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, 10 vols (Paris, 1910–​1967), 5:75. 36. Gough, Newspaper Press, 10.

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[plume] of the journalist and follow the revolutionary torrent at breakneck pace [à bride abbatu].”37 Such tensions aside, the revolutionary belief that the historian was trustworthy only when emancipated from dependence left an important imprint. Rhetorically, it offered ways for individuals to claim the mantle of historian and defend such claims before the revolutionary public; no longer was it necessary to have any type of institutional approbation or even previous experience as a writer of history (indeed, the latter could be a disadvantage). Claims of independence were, of course, hardly reliable as descriptors of an author’s real condition, but revolutionaries strove to avoid the pejorative appearance of patronage or writerly subjugation.38 Even the nomenclature—​ “encouragements”—​ adopted in 1793 by the French Republic implied distancing the author from self-​interest; patriotic writers and men of letters were portrayed as voluntarily participating in a collective endeavor rather than performing services for individual remuneration.39 Although the terminology of encouragement applied to all creations of “genius” (as revolutionaries dubbed it), it did powerful symbolic work in the domain of history, by delegitimizing previous historians and by declaring that past and present would be regenerated by individual acts of patriotic voluntarism.

HISTORICAL CREDIBILITY: FROM PUBLICITY TO SENTIMENT

For revolutionaries, emancipating the persona of the historian was an essential precondition for cultivating a new history, but insufficient unless the resources and materials on which historians depended were likewise liberated. To contemporaries who believed that the records of France’s past

37. Le Vieux Cordelier 1 (December 1793). 38. The original meaning of “sans culottes” derived from a joke mocking literary servility; see Michael Sonenscher, Sans-​Culottes:  An Eighteenth-​Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 39. Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics, 138–​40.

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had been distorted by nefarious individuals, and who sometimes described the events unfolding around them with incredulity and amazement—​ using terminology such as “miraculous” and “dreamlike”—​the need for protocols on which to establish a credible history was pressing.40 Yet how might revolutionary recitals be more trustworthy than the tainted past? The most persuasive response by revolutionaries was literally to insist that the nation’s insurrection had uncovered the foundations for historical truth, by revealing secrets and publicizing documents that had previously been concealed by the powerful.41 The warrant of historical credibility rested precisely in the vaunted notion of transparency before the new public. The canonical example came with the taking of the Bastille, that obsolescent fortress that had, even before 1789, been transformed into a symbol of despotism, and that now became a symbol of freedom.42 The importance of the Bastille’s symbolic legacies should not lead us to overlook the contemporary exhilaration over the discovery of the fortress’s administrative papers and police archives. As early as mid-​July 1789, a leading radical journalist excitedly invited his readers to ponder “what an immense collection of libelles, what a quantity of titles, or registers of imprisonment, in short, of materials for history have been found in the Bastille.”43 In the immediate aftermath of July 14, this trove of documents was scattered by a crowd of besiegers, curio collectors, and even foreign agents who

40.  The contemporary sense of incredulity is well noted in Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 11; and also Lynn Hunt, “The World We Have Gained: The Future of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 108 (2003): 4–​6. For a celebrated contemporary example, see Louis-​Sébastien Mercier’s Adieux à l’année 1789 (Paris, 1789). 41.  This could be understood as a reversal of the traditional notion of arcana of state, symbolized most powerfully in the eighteenth century by Louis XV’s confidential diplomatic scheme (“Secret du Roi”). On the thirst for hidden information, see Robert Darnton, “An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-​Century Paris,” American Historical Review 105 (2000): 1–​35. 42. Hans-​Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 43. Révolutions de Paris 1 (July 12–​17, 1789): 18 (note 1).

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descended on the site, but revolutionaries strove to reconstruct the archive.44 The process of re-​collecting these materials unfolded in public, with journalists inviting Parisians to inspect the documents on-​site to verify their authenticity, and reiterating pleas to those with documents in their possession to return that evidence for the nation’s benefit.45 Subsequently, the reconstructed collection was serially published as La Bastille dévoilée (1789), a work praised by reviewers as an “archive of Despotism” designed to inculcate in patriotic hearts the salutary hatred—​an emotion deeply wound into the revolutionary sensibility—​ of ministerial and royal depredation.46 This early model of historical exposure, as well as the metaphor of “archive” on which it depended, provided a revolutionary template to connect the civic value of transparency and the transparent veracity of publicity.47 Publicity, in effect, changed the valence of the archive, permitting radicals to reject the binding power of documentary precedent in constitutional matters while simultaneously accepting the 44.  This archive’s dispersal is central to the argument in Burrows, Blackmail, Scandal, and Revolution, esp. 192ff. Profiteering and collecting mania were also at work; see Tom Stammers, “Bric-​ a-​ Brac of the Old Regime:  Collecting and Cultural History in Post-​ Revolutionary France,” French History 22 (2008): 298–​300. See also Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 39. 45.  Municipal authorities investigated individuals—​such as the playwright and sometime spy, Pierre-​Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais—​who were suspected of sequestering such documents; Procès-​verbal des séances et délibérations de l’assemblée générale des électeurs de Paris . . . (Paris, 1790), 2:298. On serialization and public access, see Charpentier, La Bastille devoilée, ou Recueil de pièces authentiques pour servir à son histoire (Paris, 1789), 1:1, 3–​5. 46. Gabriel Brizard, Adresse à tous les districts au sujet des papiers de la Bastille, par un citoyen du district de Saint-​Germain-​des-​Prés ([Paris], 1789), 3–​4. According to one contemporary witness, Brizard personally witnessed the pillage of the archive, including the theft of incriminating documents by an unidentified aristocrat; see Michel de Cubières-​Palmézeaux, Dorat-​Cubières, citoyen français, à Jean Acton, premier ministre du roi de Naples sur une injure faite à la nation française, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1792), 78–​99. The same documentary collection would subsequently be revised and republished by Louis-​Pierre Manuel under the title La Police de Paris dévoilée (Paris, [1791]); even today, Manuel’s collation remains an important primary resource for historians. 47. The term “archive” could be used to describe the documentary detritus of the Old Regime but also that of revolutionary regimes preceeding the First Republic of 1792. For examples, see Soulavie, Mémoires du Maréchal duc de Richelieu, 4:236; and Révolutions de Paris 171 (October 13–​20, 1792).

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educative and instructive value of collating documents for public exposure.48 After 1789, contemporaries would repeatedly bring to public view some hidden aspect of the monarchy’s documentary heritage; cull those documents to transform them into an indictment; then insist that the critique was credible because of the secrecy in which such documents had formerly been held and the transparency that the Revolution had conferred upon them.49 Provisionally, then, revolutionaries began to consider the documentary heritage of the past trustworthy precisely because it had been surrendered unwillingly, liberated forcibly, or exhumed inadvertently. Such rhetorics of exposure accompanied the initial formation of the National Archives in 1789, where (after suitable triage) many of the papers enshrining feudal obligations would be stored. Such rhetorics were visible across 1790, when the National Assembly touched off controversies by publishing the monarchy’s pension lists (the so-​called livre rouge), an act that radicals argued had infuriated the nation’s enemies, “reveal[ing] their hidden thefts from the public treasury.”50 After the abolition of monarchy in September 1792, this notion of documentation as historical indictment became even more explicit; the nascent French Republic claimed that it would preserve selected evidence of the monarchy’s perfidy “as materials precious for history” and permit their public and institutional scrutiny.51 48. Similar rejections of the binding power of precedent coupled with the exemplary value of past history resonated in the pre-​revolutionary debate; see Cérutti, “Mémoire pour le people français” [1788] in Oeuvres diverses de M. Cérutti, 1:41, 9. 49. Charpentier, La Bastille devoilée, 1:5. Soulavie, Traité, 14–​21. 50.  Cordeliers Club meeting as reported in AP 15:252. The documents comprising the livre rouge were delivered to the Assembly’s Committee on Pensions only after recurrent delays that reinforced deputies’ suspicions that the ministry intended deceit; see AP 12:30–​31; 15:358. The King’s reported displeasure at the publication of the lists was taken as proof of their legitimacy; see AP 13:52. 51. See AP 52:434–​35. Soulavie was among those entrusted by the Convention with analyzing the secret cache of diplomatic and administrative papers in the armoire de fer, discovered after the King’s abortive flight to Varennes; excerpts were published as La Politique de tous les cabinets de l’Europe pendant les règnes de Louis XV et de Louis XVI (Paris, 1793), which claimed that exposure of the “secret views” of Europe’s crowned heads was “a new benefit of the Revolution” [Preface, n.p.].

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A doubled rhetoric of exposure and preservation shaped how contemporaries looked back on the monarchy but also how they perceived various iterations of revolutionary governance itself. The same logic of preservation and exposure might apply to the memoirs of pre-​ 1789 actors and also to the judicial sequestration of conspirators’ papers into and through the Terror. Nor did claims for historical or legal preservation exclude the possibility of purging old materials after they had fulfilled the appropriate revolutionary purpose.52 Destruction might well be acceptable whenever testimony had done its work of indictment and could be supplanted by a newly patriotic heritage created by revolutionaries themselves. Here, too, the rhetoric of emancipation and freedom performed important symbolic work:  the Revolution’s creation of a renewed documentary heritage allowed contemporaries to testify to and before posterity. This desire explains the tenor (and sometimes even the paratextual apparatus) surrounding numerous genres of revolutionary writing and institutional record-​keeping. The need to create accurate records of collective deliberation was justified as a duty toward posterity across institutions as varied as the National Assembly or Convention, voluntary associations, and political clubs.53 The claim to speak to posterity likewise marked personal memoirs and those contemporary genres that exhibit what we now think of as witness testimony, life writing or autobiography.54 Revolutionaries celebrated personal memoirs not just as ways to preserve immediate testimony (however partial), but also on the grounds that post-​insurrectionary freedom for the first time enabled such writings to provide appropriate 52. On the revolutionary ambivalence to “paperwork” see Kafka, The Demon of Writing. 53. On procès-​verbaux, see AP 20:288 and Procès-​verbal des séances et délibérations de l’assemblée générale des électeurs de Paris (Paris, 1790), x–​xiv. 54. Across the eighteenth century, such forms of writing were rarely thought to involve the critical skills typically identified with the writing of history—​composition, selection of evidence, narrative construction, philosophical reasoning—​but they were still justified as an essential scaffolding or prelude for proper history. See Henri R-​P. Griffet, Traité des différentes sortes de preuves qui servent à établir la vérité de l’histoire (Liege, 1769), 121, 355–​62.

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chastisement or reward in the lifetimes of protagonists.55 Neither the memoir nor the autobiography was an inherently radical genre, of course, and neither was explicitly regarded by contemporaries as proper history writing; but revolutionaries adeptly used such genres as virtuous self-​justification of revolutionary life experience. In the case of doomed revolutionaries—​Jacques-​Pierre Brissot, Madame Roland, and a host of others—​such forms of auto-​justification were often framed as testaments to posterity, which would render just judgment only after the author’s death.56 Since revolutionaries frequently celebrated the paper trails they were preserving or making anew for posterity, it would be tempting to assimilate these to the eighteenth century’s well-​known penchant for sensationalist epistemology, the belief that appropriately curated artifacts, signs, and uses of language could provide access to true knowledge or reliably shape the regenerated human being.57 Contemporaries did sometimes seek to endow historical evidence with an external apparatus of legitimacy; one enterprising writer, for example, sought to buttress his account of the seizure of the Bastille with the signatures of dozens of vainqueurs as a warrant of the reliability of his narrative.58 Yet, despite such cases, it would be misleading to assume that revolutionaries apprehended either documentary evidence or eyewitness testimony in consistently

55. Prior to 1789, by contrast, memoirs offering such criticism played up their aura of illicit disclosure, which was of course a selling point to contemporary audiences, and generally assumed that full candor could only come posthumously. 56. The extent to which factional discord made such genres a means to communicate individual constancy, probity, and authenticity of feeling during and after the Terror is a key argument in Marisa Linton, Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. 274–​76. 57. See Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class; and Sophia Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-​ Century France (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2001). 58. Jacques Beffroy de Reigny claimed the approbation (with signatures) of sixty participants in the assault; de Reigny, Précis exact de la prise de la Bastille (Paris, 1789); de Reigny, Supplément nécessaire au précis exact de la prise de la Bastille, avec des anecdotes curieuses sur le même sujet (Paris, 1789).

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empirical ways.59 Liberating the sources of history from despotism, or creating purified testimonies for the future, did not in themselves answer the question of how to interpret such evidence. Revolutionaries often suggested that veracity might lie beyond literal accuracy or textual fidelity, and reside instead in patriotic sentiment and virtuous affinity. Thus, the journalist Jean-​Paul Marat routinely insisted to his readers that factual certainty mattered less than his own authentic striving on the people’s behalf: “I can make errors, doubtless, but my heart is pure as the light of heaven; I abhor license, I will never, in crushing vice, outrage virtue.”60 Radicals approached documentary proof much as they appropriated the work of philosophes such as Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas and catchphrases were propelled into revolutionary consciousness less through literal fidelity to Rousseau’s texts than through what Carla Hesse has called “orthopractic” reading, which fabricated sentimental communion between the author and his interpreters.61 This may explain a curious feature of many Revolutionary and post-​revolutionary compilations, which are often dismissed today as apocryphal because they mingle different narrative voices or transgress the boundary between an author’s words and those of his or her subjects; such literary devices are

59. Prior to 1789, many of those who would later carve out revolutionary careers—​particularly Marat and Brissot—​embraced scientific skepticism (particularly directed at the Academies) and even historical pyrrhonism, insisting primarily on the role of inspired individuals rather than corporate bodies; see Jacques-​Pierre Brissot, De la Vérité ou Méditations sur les moyens de parvenir à la vérité dans toutes les connaissances humaines (Paris, 1782). For an overview of how Brissot has been incorporated into histories of skepticism, see Sébastien Charles, “From Universal Pyrrhonism to Revolutionary Scepticism:  Jacques-​Pierre Brissot de Warville,” in S. Charles and P. J. Smith, eds., Scepticism in the Eighteenth Century: Enlightenment, Lumières, Aufklärung, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 231–​44. 60. Ami du peuple 26 (October 6, 1789). Such claims could also be used in the service of history proper; Nicolas de Bonneville disclaimed pedantic exactitude in facts and terminology in favor of attention to the social pact and the rights of nature: “To discover these antique and sacred rights there is no need for the assistance of foreigners, no need to leaf through books and compile them; I have found these rights near me and in my heart . . .” de Bonneville, Histoire de l’europe moderne, 1:42. 61.  Carla Hesse, “Reading in extremis:  Revolutionaries Respond to Rousseau,” in Charles Walton, ed., Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011), 145–​57.

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better understood as glimpses into different protocols of credibility, many of which rested in the domain of feeling and sentiment.62 Revolution-​era audiences could view such techniques as warrants of a writer’s authenticity or, conversely, as evidence for an author’s sentimental communion with his or her subject.63 Just as the Revolution had destabilized the persona of the historian, it likewise brought renewed skepticism to bear on the evidence of history and provided constructive ambitions to build testimony for the future.

WRITING REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY: ORIGINS, AGENCY, POSTERITY

In many ways, history writing came surprisingly easily to revolutionaries who also proclaimed historical rupture. On the one hand, this can be explained by the way in which the Revolution was immediately historicized by contemporaries. The Estates General and National Assembly were the objects of historical narration from the moment they began; from mid-​ 1789 onward, journalists steadfastly pioneered the day-​to-​day depiction of revolutionary events as well as the melodramatic portrayal of the nation’s hopes and fears; pamphleteers and orators routinely used historical language and tropes to convey the experience of witnessing moments of epochal significance, experiencing existential crisis, or creating a sense of distance from a loathed past.64 The early years of the Revolution seethe with idiosyncratic attempts to offer restorative histories of controversial moments from the French past, ranging from despotic reigns to religious 62. This blurring was characteristic of different modes of eighteenth-​century writing and may also be glimpsed in the “amalgamated voice” of the Napoleonic memoir; see Robert Morrissey, The Economy of Glory: From Ancien Régime France to the Fall of Napoléon, trans. T. L. Fagan (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014), 151–​58. 63. Soulavie’s adoption of a first-​person authorial voice in Richelieu’s memoirs was regarded by one reviewer as proof of his intimacy with his subject; Ancien Moniteur, 4:455. 64. Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 4–​6; and Warren Roberts, Jacques-​Louis David and Jean-​ Louis Prieur, Revolutionary Artists: The Public, the Populace, and Images of the French Revolution (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000).

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persecution to aristocratic abuses, while self-​ proclaimed historians offered the public epistolary histories of revolutionary events, civic calls to remembrance, and even ambitious subscription projects that combined (as did many revolutionary newspapers) textual narration and engraved imagery.65 Modern scholars usually regard such contemporary exercises less as instances of historical practice than as manifestations of the French Revolution’s creation of a genealogy of origins.66 Yet any attempt to pinpoint the first proper histories written during the French Revolution will necessarily be presentist and arbitrary, tacking between the modern analyst’s perspective and the alien sensibilities of dead revolutionaries.67 It is imperative to recognize that eighteenth-​century contemporaries adjudged history by their own standards; they readily assumed that certain genres of writing were indispensable to historians without being considered history writing, and they generally concurred that history required some kind of formal narrative structure and “unity of plan” that differentiated it from pure erudition and provided it with overall coherence or some type of closure.68 This difference was often articulated by 65.  Gabriel Brizard, Du massacre de la Saint-​Barthelemi, et De l’influence des etrangers en France durant la Ligue (Paris, [1789]); Théophile Duvernet, Histoire de la Sorbonne, dans laquelle on voit l’influence de la théologie sur l’ordre social, 2 vols. (Paris, 1790). An anonymous proposal in 1790 suggested that each new militia formation be accompanied by an historian to capture its achievements for posterity; see Nouvelle composition de la milice ([Paris], 1790), 4. For the most ambitious fusion of visual and textual history, presented in a massive subscription project that attained Europe-​wide celebrity, see Claudette Hould, La Révolution par la gravure. Les tableaux de la Révolution française (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002). Powerful reappraisals of revolutionary memory and material culture are offered by Rolf Reichardt and Hubertus Kohle, Visualizing the Revolution: Politics and the Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-​Century France (London: Reaktion Books, 2008); and Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013). 66. Chartier, Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, 4–​5, 87–​89. 67. François-​Alphonse Aulard was one of the earliest major scholars to try to pinpoint contemporary works that “could legitimately be called histories” of the Revolution; see F.-​A. Aulard, Etudes et leçons sur la révolution francaise, 6eme serie (Paris, 1910). 68. For a revolution-​era assessment of the “poetique” of historical writing, see Soulavie, Traité, 16–​25. Eighteenth-​century treatises often recycled or repurposed historiographical maxims

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contrast: revolutionary journalists were acutely aware that the periodicity of their work, even when proffered as historical testimony, inevitably meant deferral or incompleteness. Readers of revolutionary newspapers were thus repeatedly assured by prominent radical journalists—​Jean-​ Paul Marat, the self-​declared Ami du Peuple; Camille Desmoulins, editor of the Révolutions de France et de Brabant; Louis-​Marie Prudhomme, proprietor of the Révolutions de Paris—​that they would receive at the appropriate time a complete “history of the Revolution,” although none of these projects achieved fruition exactly as promised.69 There were at least two key modalities of revolutionary history that did provide readers with forms of narrative closure, and for simplicity we might categorize these as “philosophical history” and “criminal history,” labels that also hint at continuities with older genres. The Revolution’s implementation of philosophical history is visible in two well-​known examples: Jean-​Paul Rabaut de Saint-​Etienne’s Précis historique de la Révolution française (Paris, 1791–​92) and the marquis de Condorcet’s posthumous Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (published 1795). The Revolution’s variant of criminal history is perhaps lesser known, but to contemporaries it would have been strikingly visible in works such as Louise-​Félicité Guynement de Kéralio’s Les Crimes des reines de France (1791) and Louis-​Thomas Lavicomterie de Saint-​Samson’s Les Crimes des rois de France (1791), which began a consistent campaign of revolutionary attacks on Europe’s ruling orders. that could be traced back several centuries; such critical continuities are emphasized by Kelley, Faces of History, 203–​55. 69. Marat first mentioned the project for a “Histoire de la Révolution” on 28 January 1790 and in mid-​October 1792 he issued a prospectus for a work entitled Ecole du Citoyen that was billed as a “philosophical history” of the Revolution. The work never appeared; see Marat, Oeuvres politiques, 646–​47, 4918–​22. Of the major radical journalists, only Prudhomme survived the Revolution, and his completed history was published as Histoire générale et impartiale des erreurs, des fautes et des crimes commis pendant la révolution française, à dater du 24 août 1787, 6 vols. (Paris, An V [1797]). This work, too, was billed as a new type of history writing, and I have analyzed it in Joseph Zizek, “‘Plume de fer’: Louis-​Marie Prudhomme Writes the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 26 (2003): 619–​60.

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The philosophical histories (as well as the revolutionary careers) of Rabaut and Condorcet exhibit fascinating and poignant commonalities. Both men won renown as propagandists, journalists, and political activists from 1788 onward; both carved out reputations as proponents of constitutional rights and reasoned politics; both were marginalized by factional struggles before being fatally compromised by involvement with Girondin governance; and both went into hiding before arrest and eventual death.70 In the immediate aftermath of the Terror, each man’s work was enhanced by an aura of martyrdom, which helped ensure republication of their respective oeuvres across the nineteenth century. Rabaut’s Précis is sometimes described as the first attempt at a synthetic history of the Revolution; it narrated the progress of Enlightenment and the gradual recognition of the French people of its own rights, a process of education fostered by the leading philosophes of the eighteenth century, but brought to culmination by oppressive despots—​Louis XIV in particular—​who incited the French to transcend their own dissolute habits.71 Condorcet’s celebrated Sketch, first published posthumously under the Thermidorian Convention, has ever since stood as (and often been vulgarized as) an exposition of the Enlightenment notion of historical progress; tracing human development over ten epochs, he charted a long-​term struggle between reason and superstition, knowledge and error, and his confidence in mankind’s future perfectibility stemmed from the revelation of the “links by which nature indissolubly united the progress of enlightenment with that of freedom, virtue, and respect for man’s natural rights.”72 In intellectual architecture, each of these works was deeply embedded in the conjectural and stadial histories of the eighteenth century, and 70.  Rabaut died by guillotine in December 1793, Condorcet most likely by his own hand in March 1794. 71.  Rabaut, Précis, 71. For a typical acknowledgement of the text’s primacy, see Antoine de Baecque, ed. Pour ou contre la Révolution: De Mirabeau à Mitterand (Paris: Bayard, 2002), 67, 163–​64; or Aulard, Etudes et leçons sur la révolution francaise, 6: 34–​39. 72. M. J. A. N. Caritat de Condorcet, “Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain,” in A. Condorcet O’Connor and M. F. Arago, eds., Oeuvres de Condorcet, 12 vols. (Paris, 1847–​1849), 6: 20.

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such antecedents have been insightfully analyzed by leading scholars.73 There is no need to retrace their storylines here, except to underline that each work encompassed the critical skepticism that was part of the broader revolutionary challenge to historical practice. Rabaut and Condorcet linked ignorance to domination in ways familiar to any proponent of Enlightenment discourse, albeit at different temporal scales. Each author pointed to the sequestration of knowledge by the alliance of priests and rulers, and narrated how that sequestration was contested and overturned in decades (Rabaut) or over centuries of progress (Condorcet). For Condorcet, that initial monopoly of knowl­ edge and literacy—​the wellspring of superstition—​was the decisive instant that produced the entire history of domination. In different ways, each author also pointed to how historical error—​both individual and systemic—​was complicit in subjugation. For Condorcet, the tendency of historians to focus attention only on the great was a typical failing of the “Ninth Epoch” of human history (which extended from Descartes to the Revolution), and blame extended beyond individual writers. Haphazard knowledge of the masses of humanity, reliance upon myths and legends, ignorance of the gap between ideals and lived practices meant that it was “not just to the degradation [bassesse] of historians . . . that we must attribute this shortage of monuments by which we can trace the most important part of human history.”74 Each author thus offered history as a corrective:  they shared the conviction that history’s value to the Revolution was instructive rather than

73.  The literature on Condorcet is vast, but essential signposts in English are Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet:  From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1975); Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments:  Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2001); and David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity (Cambridge:  University of Cambridge Press, 2004). Rabaut is still served by the classic biography, André Dupont, Rabaut Saint-​Etienne, 1743–​1793: Un protestant défenseur de la liberté religieuse (Strasbourg, 1989). Condorcet’s manuscripts reveal that only the concluding Tenth Epoch (“The Future Progress of the Human Spirit”) was composed entirely during the Revolution; see Baker, Condorcet, 346–​48. 74. Condorcet, “Tableau historique,” 232–​34.

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foundational.75 For Rabaut, this was embedded in the very structure and purpose of his Précis. He adopted a theatrical metaphor—​the Revolution as “scène dramatique”—​with the constitutional moment of September 1791 as both narrative fulcrum and closure: “the mass of the French are stable, the constitution is finished, and the moment has arrived when it is possible to write the history of the revolution.”76 Yet the work’s artificial brevity and its compressed scope were polemical necessities: Rabaut proclaimed the work’s purpose was to “destroy the impressions that the enemies of liberty have propagated against France,” and its brevity was meant to enable wide and cosmopolitan circulation of its message.77 Rabaut thus identified his history as a personal intervention in the recurrent contest between sycophantic writers, who spread calumnies, and free historians, who narrated truths. In very different ways, both works also shared the conviction that historical exemplarity exposed a dynamic contestation between past and present. Condorcet expressed this conviction via the metaphor of a chain of logic linking past events to future patterns. To grasp how human reason unfolded through time meant, for Condorcet, offering probablistic reflections on the shape of the future, which in the Tenth Epoch (“The Future Progress of the Human Spirit”) took the form of eventual destruction of inequalities between nations and peoples and the indefinite “betterment” of humankind.78 For Rabaut, by contrast, the enlightened 75. For Rabaut, this perspective could be traced back to his pamphleteering around the Estates General in 1788, when he had disparaged the reliance of the privileged orders on past traditions and precedents (“They draw upon history . . . but history is not our code”). Jean-​Paul Rabaut de Saint-​ Etienne, Considérations sur les intérêts du Tiers-​Etat, adressées au peuple des provinces ([n.p.], 1788). 76. Rabaut, Précis, 62–​64. 77. In this respect, it was quite successful. The Précis historique de la Révolution française was widely republished (with multiple English translations circulating in the Anglo-​Atlantic world, and Rabaut favorably likened to Tacitus) and long outlived its author, circulating in the nineteeth century as the spine of a longer history completed by the ex-​revolutionary Charles Lacretelle. 78.  I  here adopt Keith Baker’s observation that the idiomatic uses of “perfectionner” in the eighteenth century were considerably less rigid than a literal English translation would suggest. See Condorcet, “Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind:  Tenth Epoch,” trans. K. Baker, Daedalus 133 (2004): 65.

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future foreseen in the Précis—​however much it might be shadowed by oncoming war—​provided France with a vital advantage. As he noted in an addendum of 1792, the incomprehension monarchs showed toward the novelty of the Revolution would be their downfall: “they always read the future in the past; according to them, what was must always be.”79 Rabaut and Condorcet produced histories in which the lessons of the past were dynamic rather than static: the principles and politics that would determine the future were different from the past, and the overall revelation of history was to show how new collective actors and principles—​peoples, nations, reason—​might rupture the chains of injustice laid by time and cemented by prejudice and error.80 By contrast with these philosophical histories, which charted the Revolution’s achievements by looking forward into (generally) hopeful futures, the genre of criminal history looked back into monarchical pasts to lodge a biting indictment. Revolutionary criminal histories were born in a moment of specific crisis: from the summer of 1791 onward, in the aftermath of the Royal Family’s abortive flight to Varennes, a public critique of monarchy and an upwelling of debate over “republican” alternatives began to shape revolutionary discourse, while from early 1792 onward the Revolution’s decision to embark on European war irrevocably radicalized politics and personalities. In this climate, the contributions of writers like Louis Lavicomterie and Louise de Kéralio become significant because they belonged to one of many ideological and personal networks that propelled republican ideas into revolutionary politics. Lavicomterie, a fervent Jacobin, propagandized republican ideas from 1790 onward, 79.  As Rabaut noted, revising his initial theatrical depiction, “France has not finished its Revolution, but it has begun it”; see Rabaut, Reflexions politiques sur les circonstances presentes. Pour servir de suite au Précis de l’histoire de la révolution française ([Paris], [1792]) 10, 24–​25. 80.  Condorcet forcefully argued that it was valuable to compare societies and nations “over the passage of time” to glimpse how peoples had “been plunged” into error, superstition, and misery. Such understanding was essential to the spread of enlightenment and the success of the great revolution France was experiencing: “. . . do we not need to study carefully in the history of the human spirit those obstacles still to be feared, and the means we have to overcome them, so that the happiness promised us can be less dearly bought, extend more rapidly across a great space, and be more complete in its effects?” Condorcet, “Tableau historique,” 21, 23–​24.

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eventually gaining election to the National Convention and serving on the Committee of General Security.81 Kéralio’s career was, by contrast, less politically radical but even more remarkable by contemporary standards. A pre-​revolutionary novelist, historian, translator, and academician, after 1789 Kéralio became a revolutionary activist, pioneering female journalist and editor, member of the radical Cordeliers club, and—​in partnership with her husband, François Robert—​a propagandist in favor of republicanism.82 In many ways, their revolutionary histories of royal crime bear the imprint of circumstances but also show the connectedness of radical publishing networks. Lavicomterie’s indictment of royal criminality initially appeared in early 1791, under the auspices of Louis-​Marie Prudhomme’s publishing enterprise (the profitable heart of which remained the newspaper Révolutions de Paris); it was then hastily reissued after the flight to Varennes, and again republished in late 1792 during the discussion over the king’s fate. It was, by revolutionary standards, enough of a commercial and political success to be commended by leading Jacobins such as Robespierre; employed in revolutionary classrooms; translated and republished in English and German; and to provide a template for a comparable series of works by Lavicomterie detailing the crimes of German emperors, Turkish despots, and Italian popes.83 The success of 81.  An excellent discussion of Lavicomterie’s contribution—​ although one that excludes his histories of crime in favor of his political pamphleteering—​ is Raymonde Monnier, Républicanisme, Patriotisme et Révolution française (Paris:  Editions L’Harmattan, 2005), 179–​88, 211–​21. 82.  A  superb analysis of Kéralio’s work, which emphasizes how her history writing and her fiction both offered subtle challenges to the prevailing gender order, is Hesse, The Other Enlightenment, 89–​103. I  am indebted to this account but differ from it. The linkage of her criminal history to emancipatory gender politics is challenged in Annie Geffroy. “Louise de Kéralio-​Robert, pionnière du républicanisme sexiste,’ Annales historiques de la Révolution française 344 (2006): 107–​24. 83. Louis-​Thomas Lavicomterie de Saint-​Samson, Les Crimes des rois de France, depuis Clovis jusqu’à Louis Seize (Paris, 1791). The work gained Robespierre’s praise in November 1792; Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, 9:82–​83. Louis-​Marie Prudhomme built a multi-​edition publishing success from Lavicomterie’s subsequent writings, many of which went into repeated editions and endured beyond Thermidor. They included Les crimes des papes, depuis S. Pierre jusqu’à Pie VI (Paris, 1792), Les crimes des empereurs d’Allemagne, depuis Lothaire I  jusqu’à

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Lavicomterie’s work may have inspired Prudhomme to commission Kéralio’s Crimes des reines as a pendant, since that work announced itself as a needful supplement to a partial narrative, “to the extent that history, until now confined to the recital of the crimes of kings, will be incomplete unless we join to it the crimes of queens.”84 Without retracing the specific litanies of crime offered by Lavicomterie and Kéralio, it is worth pointing out that both began from the premise that previous historians had transmitted deceptive stories. Lavicomterie’s historical skepticism had been voiced in earlier pamphlets, which alerted revolutionaries that the evidence on which they could draw was detritus surviving “the ravages of time and war,” but also the product of centuries of disfigurement by sycophants, whose efforts had produced “these disfigured tatters [of history], shamefully altered by those forgers who, under the name of historiographers, have been paid to mislead, deceive, and betray both their century and posterity.” Yet Lavicomterie insisted that “the history of France is to be remade. Enough of these antique and mutilated monuments remain that we can create a corpus that will satisfy philosophy.”85 As Kéralio put it in a similar vein, if kingship and queenship were equally execrable, this judgment emerged for the revolutionary reader via the very “deeds consecrated in our own historical monuments.”86

Leopold II (Paris, 1793), and Les crimes des empereurs turcs depuis Osman I  jusqu’à Sélim IV (Paris, 1794). Like Prudhomme’s newspaper, all these works also utilized engravings—​generally quite modestly but intentionally—​to reinforce the textual message with visual symbolism. 84.  Louise Félicité Guynement de Kéralio, Les Crimes des reines de France, depuis le commencement de la monarchie jusqu’à Marie-​Antoinette (Paris, 1791), v. Prudhomme was for many years wrongly credited with authorship of the work; I here follow both Lynn Hunt and Carla Hesse in attributing it to Kéralio, an attribution supported by François-​Louis Bruel, Un siècle de l’histoire de France par l’estampe, 1770–​1870. Collection de Vinck 8 vols. (Paris, 1909–​68), 2:371. 85. Louis-​Thomas Lavicomterie de Saint-​Samson, Du peuple et des rois; par M. de Lavicomterie (Paris, 1790), iii–​iv. Kéralio likewise criticized historians such as Abbé Vély, whose sympathetic rendering of evil queens showed that he “knew only how to be an academician, valet of the great and of women, and stipendiary of a Court.” Kéralio, Crimes des reines, 29–​30. 86. Kéralio, Crimes des reines, 3.

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The revolutionary reading of both the sources and histories of the past was thus recuperative and transformative, able to reveal the hidden truth of successive royal reigns. But this revealed truth was emotionally wrenching; the spectacle of innocent victims elicited the grief of the historian-​witness, for whom “tears fall onto the page” (sometimes joined by fury) at the recounting of repeated massacres and horrors. For Lavicomterie, this emotional rapport was precisely what differentiated the feeling individual, the philosophic observer, from the “hereditary monsters” who cared nothing for their people (despots not only devoured their people’s substance, but literally drank their subjects’ tears and blood). The monstrous example of Charles IX, “of whom I cannot speak without shuddering,” meant that the historian even begged the reader to be spared a full enumeration of his crimes: “it would require a volume that one would devour in terror [avec effroi], sobbing, drenched with tears.”87 Ultimately, the purpose of a criminal history was to offer a narrative with an instructive lesson. Lavicomterie argued that the history of royalty—​ a story of both public crimes and private vices—​must draw down “the anathemas with which peoples must strike their criminal heads,” destroy any vestige of reverence for monarchs, and finally undeceive a people kept in ignorance of its own history. France’s past revealed that the “infernal trinity” of monarchy, heredity, and inviolability had caused disasters almost beyond comprehension:  “One need only reflect upon history to be convinced that it is the source not just of France’s ills but even those of Europe, of the entire world.”88 Kéralio likewise insisted that the litany of France’s queens, denatured by their ambitions, by their penchant for luxury, showed the dangers of powerful women. In a critical reflection on the National Assembly’s own deliberations in 1791 about the monarch’s powers, she claimed the examples of past debacles such as Agincourt were 87. There are repeated statements of emotional distress in Lavicomterie, Crimes des rois, xx, 48, 74, 114, 234, 250, 204; in his earlier pamphlets he had expressed the feeling of encountering the past even more starkly: “My tears soaked the pages of the history of our ancestors when, all alone, by myself, I spent nights retracing the centuries that had preceded, ripened, brought about the revolution”; Lavicomterie, Du peuple et des rois, xiv–​xvi. 88. Lavicomterie, Crimes des rois, i, iv, vii, xiv, lxi.

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instructive: “the monument to mourning presents future centuries with the fatal example of the crimes of a queen.”89 The combined narrative of massacres, queenly deceits, and regal disruptions was Manichaean:  the nation had to choose whether it wished to be free or live enslaved. Philosophical and criminal histories thus exhibited different orientations but converged in the belief that history was both educative and judgmental. On the one hand, this is surely a reason for the persistence of the historical metaphor of “tribunal,” which remained a favored trope to convey the authority of posterity.90 On the other hand, this might lead contemporaries to defer ultimate judgment; Rabaut, for example, noted that it was easy for contemporaries to grasp the “general causes” of the Revolution, but “posterity alone can know the secret causes behind the individual events that have filled the course of the revolution.”91 Others were more optimistic that revolutionary historical practice had diagnostic and judgmental value, precisely because it could speak of exemplarity or revelation, individual criminality or collective struggle. Indeed, this is where the diversity of revolutionary histories and their tripartite exploration of authorship, evidence, and narration most powerfully converges with revolutionary politics. Modern scholarship has renewed our understanding of the degree to which revolutionary radicalism—​particularly those variants linked to violent regeneration—​ was interpenetrated by idioms such as classical republicanism, histories of commerce, or stadial analyses that could lead in quite different political directions.92 Significantly, many of these idioms or discourses were

89. Kéralio, Crimes des reines, 170–​71. 90. On the tribunal metaphor, see Chantal Grell, Le dix-​huitieme siecle et l’antiquite en France, 1680–​1789, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 2:1067–​69; and Grell, L’Histoire entre erudition et philosophie, 129. Public opinion likewise relied upon metaphors of tribunate, but the key difference might be that such metaphors were already embedded in a centuries-​old rhetorical tradition of history, whereas for concepts such as opinion or nation the association was much newer, and possibly less familiar. 91. Rabaut, Précis, 61. 92.  For example, “classical republicanism” anxiously diagnosed processes of corruption and decay through time; eighteenth-​century conceptions of commerce were embedded in

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substantively historical; that is to say, they typically sought to address problems visible only through the flow of time, whether that meant fearful trajectories of corruption, Manichean choices in the present, or different ways to connect natural and social identities. We can illuminate such discourses further if we recognize that revolutionary historical practice and revolutionary political discourse either cross-​pollinated one another or shared critiques of individual action, historical evidence, and meaningful narrative. In 1791 and 1792, for example, Maximilien Robespierre could use the divisive debate over war to attack the excessive historical credulity that played into the hands of political charlatans (notably the Girondins): among the vices that the Revolution had not yet changed was “the habit never to link past events to present and future, to act and reason in politics, if I  dare say, from day-​to-​day, and above all to never keep in mind for consecutive days the malicious intentions of the most corrupt government.”93 While summarizing the Convention’s political debates in October 1792, Robespierre charged fellow writers to watch over their deputies and dispel the ignorance that was so deadly in time of revolution: “the duty of the patriotic and loyal historian is to depict those scenes which, although they appear of little importance in themselves, develop the spirit of intrigue that has too much influence over public affairs.”94 Radicals could take a similarly skeptical view of how best to ferret out conspiracies. For them, documentary proof might be misleading or matter less than the perceptual experience of Revolution, whose very

philosophical histories of civilizational change; and contemporary attitudes to public debt were enfolded in stories of dour futurity built upon patterns of state aggrandizement. For excellent distillations of these storylines, see Keith Michael Baker, “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-​Century France,” Journal of Modern History 73 (2001):  32–​53; Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce:  Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2010); Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge:  Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2007). 93. Robespierre, Oeuvres, 8:157–​58. 94. Robespierre, Oeuvres, 5:80.

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events might supply the tools for political or historical judgment. In mid-​ 1791, for example, Marat defended the practice of early denunciation in a journalistic open letter to Camille Desmoulins, arguing that in time of Revolution, the requirement for conclusive evidence might be a vulnerability: “In order to judge men, you always want definitive proof of their deeds, clear and precise. Often for me, it is their inactivity or their silence at great moments that suffices. In order to believe in a plot, you need juridical proof; for me, it is enough to see the general trend of events, the alliances of the enemies of liberty, the comings and goings of certain agents of government.”95 Robespierre sounded similar themes, advancing in April 1793 a powerful condemnation of his Girondin opponents to argue that political conspiracies could literally be “read in events” and that documentary proofs were superfluous for some purposes: “public deeds, for example, are the evidence that I advance, and if they do not suffice for this or that individual, at least they satisfy public opinion, they satisfy the Nation which, like history, judges impartially.”96 By late 1793, with one factional struggle won and the task of regeneration still looming, Robespierre could make such claims more explicitly about factional enemies and conspirators: “Citizens, written proofs are the weakest; it is the history of the Revolution that condemns them.”97 Why does this convergence between historical practices and political discourses matter to our understanding of the Revolution? It matters because the shared language of historical skepticism, historians’ agency, and historical revelation—​ whether of conspiratorial ends or collective destinies—​shifts our attention to the contemporary historical framing of political idioms and languages. One might object that, in fact, revolutionaries were merely appropriating preexisting practices and 95. Ami du peuple (5 May 1791) in Marat, Oeuvres Politiques, 2826, 5052. Robespierre had noted in 1791 that it could be extraordinary difficulty to secure “judicial proofs” against those who could use the resources of government to envelop their projects in mystery. See Robespierre, Discours sur la liberté de la presse in Oeuvres, 7:321, 325, 328–​30. 96. Robespierre, Oeuvres, 9:409, 376–​78, 415. 97. .Robespierre, Oeuvres, 10:136; see also AP, 75:537.

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forms of eighteenth-​century historical writing. To a certain extent, this is indisputably the case; but perhaps the more helpful analogy here is to Keith Baker’s analysis of the “oppositional” idiom of classical republicanism. Baker shows how this language could be changed—​metastasized, moralized, transformed—​when the institutions and practices that formerly constrained it were removed and when it became a mechanism to perpetuate and intensify situations of crisis.98 In many ways, the sensibilities and practices of revolutionary history possessed the same corrosive (or expansive) possibilities. Historical practice could provide revolutionaries with a vocabulary of critical skepticism; supply tools to frame individual and collective volition; and offer examples—​positive as well as negative—​from which instructive lessons or strategies might be drawn. The convergence between historical and political discourses also matters because it places familiar frameworks into new contours. Take, for example, historians’ tendencies to dichotomize categories such as “nature” and “history” in revolutionary discourse. Robespierre famously insisted on 7 May 1794 (18 Floréal, An II), in a conscious echo of Rousseau, that mankind’s past revealed that “his rights are engraved in his heart, and his humiliation in history.”99 Such a pronouncement can be read, on the one hand, as a differentiation of timeless natural virtue from a profane human world, and historians who have emphasized this dichotomy have offered brilliant interpretations of revolutionary culture, stressing the utopian ends to which revolutionaries could turn nature or the ways that nature could provide alternatives to human volition.100 On the other hand,

98. Baker, “Transformations of Classical Republicanism,” esp. 44–​47. 99. Robespierre, Sur les rapports des idées religieuses et morales avec les principes républicains, et sur les fêtes nationales in Oeuvres, 10:443–​44. 100. In two brilliant but very different readings of the foundational purposes to which nature could be turned, Dan Edelstein and Mary Ashburn Miller have shown how revolutionaries legitimated violent transformation via the languages of nature rather than the idioms of human volition. See Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago:  University of Chicago, Press, 2009); Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution:  Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–​1794 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). Miller’s narrative evacuates voluntarism

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claims such as Robespierre’s also hint at ways that revolutionaries might construct complementary relationships between history (understood as instructive rather than foundational) and nature (understood as foundational and instructive). Revolutionaries needed both the register of nature and the register of history: one to provide the ideal trajectory; the other to show how that ideal trajectory had been waylaid by human malice or ambition, error, or ignorance.101 We can see the complementary relationship unfolding in one of the Revolution’s most famous acts of rupture justified in the name of nature: the Revolutionary Calendar. In October 1793, Gilbert Romme presented his report on the new temporal system to the National Convention, insisting that the abolition of monarchy and the inauguration of the Republic signified a new epoch:  “Time has opened a new book in history.”102 Yet propagandists retailing this new book could place it in a familiar library. One almanac-​pamphlet thus celebrated the advent of the Year One, but emphasized the need to instruct future generations with “the registers of human misfortune.” From the days of Athens and Sparta, the spectacle of kings triumphant and peoples enslaved was mobilizing—​“Young Republicans! the lesson is in the example!”—​while the play of virtue and crime into the present showed how “the French Republic one and indivisible is founded on the experience of the past.”103 from violence, yet suggests that revolutionaries deferred the ultimate judgment of the efficacy of violence to posterity (168). 101.  For example, Robespierre’s report of May 1794 on revolutionary morality observed that “vice and virtue shape the destiny of the world.” It was precisely the constancy of nature—​“at all times the human heart is, deep down, the same”—​that made the history of conspiracies intelligible and vice versa: “the same instinct or the same political system has dictated to men the same course. . . . The movements of political leaders . . . were almost always the same thing. Their principle feature was a profound hypocrisy.” Robespierre, Oeuvres, 10:446–​48, 452–​54. 102.  Gilbert Romme, Rapport sur l’ère de la République  .  .  .  Séance du 10 septembre 1793 (Paris, 1793), 2. 103. François-​Jean Dusausoir and citoyen G***** [attrib. Jean-​François Génin], Livre indispensable aux enfans de la liberté, où ils trouveront: 1° le tableau moral et raisonné des symboles de la République; 2° un précis historique et moral de quelques fondateurs et de quelques martyrs de la liberté; 3° Des moralités générales sur la nécessité des bonnes moeurs, et l’émulation des armes dans la République, 2nd ed.(Paris, an II), 43, 71–​72. Yet that experiential lesson, too, was

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CONCLUSION

From 1789 to 1794, revolutionaries innovated upon multiple historical repertoires in order to fabricate practices appropriate to an epoch of liberation. History and historical knowledge—​who wrote it, what it was grounded upon, what purposes it served—​were linked in a variety of ways to individual voluntarism and collective liberty. Revolutionaries found it possible to conjure either a closed history of the past, most often under the sign of criminality; or an open-​ended history of the present, most often as a dynamic struggle that could be illuminated by (but was not indebted to) history. Revolutionaries sought to remake the historian’s identity, reframe historical credibility, and cast revolutionary experience into historical idioms that could communicate the lessons of Revolution and preserve its achievements for posterity; but, equally, such idioms allowed revolutionaries to diagnose—​with varying degrees of confidence—​the dangers hiding beneath emancipation, the overt and insidious workings of despotism, and the weight of personal ambition. Historical practices offered ways to defend the Revolution’s meaning externally, before imagined readers and audiences, but also ways to disentangle the skeins of internal conspiracy. Revolutionary historical practice, in other words, melded contemporaries’ sense of volitional contribution, historical constraint, and temporal possibility. Although the French Revolution’s engagements with history grew out of a specific eighteenth-​century context, they offer insights that may be valuable beyond the temporal and geographical boundaries in which they emerged. First, a revalorization of the diversity of revolutionary historical practice may better attune us to the reciprocal dynamic between actor-​ centric perspectives on knowledge and the construction of narrative self-​understandings, both individual and collective.104 ephemeral; the foundational declaration (but not the historical analysis) was removed in subsequent editions of the pamphlet reprinted in the Thermidorian period. 104. The substantial benefits to recapturing an actor-​centric perspective (whether epistemic or narratological) are shown in Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 279–​80;

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To examine revolutionary historical practice is to glimpse the mutual reshaping of lived events and constructed experiences, and the flexible way that contemporaries defined and redefined history and its purposes. By interrogating this mutuality, we can better understand why contemporaries were obsessed with posterity and why they agonized over the French Revolution’s own status as history. Claims for rupture were themselves the manifestation of an intense, deeply felt historical sensibility that engaged the past, addressed the present, and targeted the future. Second, revalorizing revolutionary historical practice restores to us a sense of its creativity and allows us better to grasp the “politico-​literary juncture” between eighteenth-​century writing and its enduring legacies.105 Revolutionary historical practice has vanished from our purview largely because of negative reactions to it, initially by its post-​Thermidorian successors, and then subsequently by generations steeped in the positivist and professional turns of the nineteenth century.106 It is no surprise that we remain alienated from the historical sensibilities of the revolutionary era, but transcending that alienation may bring interpretive and methodological benefits.107 After all, the historical pyrrhonism of eighteenth-​century revolutionaries seems considerably more intelligible to us in our present moment of populist anger, mediatized demagoguery, and “fake news.” and Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment:  A Genealogy (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2010), 28, 99–​103. Sarah Maza has championed the “endeavor to take [contemporary] language seriously on its own terms,” Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 7–​11. 105. The term is from Douthwaite, The Frankenstein of 1790, 2. 106.  Scholars have long been aware of the “reactionary” aspects of Leopold von Ranke’s redefinitions of historical method, but it is worth noting that subsequent constructions of objectivity tended to elide both Ranke’s emotional experiences of archives and his staunch antipathy towards revolutionary change; see Kaspar Rijsbjerg Eskildsen, “Leopold Ranke’s Archival Turn: Location and Evidence in Modern Historiography,” Modern Intellectual History 5 (2008): 425–​53. 107.  For example, Jean-​Louis Soulavie’s historical productions were largely dismissed as polemical through the nineteenth century, as in Albin Mazon, Histoire de Soulavie (Naturaliste, Diplomate, Historien) 2 vols. (Paris, 1893), 2:208–​13. Today, Soulavie’s documentary efforts have been adjudged as surprisingly authentic (and in some cases indispensable) by John Hardman, The Life of Louis XVI (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), x–​xi.

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Finally, a recognition of the radical importance of history to revolutionaries firmly re-​situates the French Revolution within the wider family of eighteenth-​century revolutions, and allows us better to appreciate the distinctive frameworks by which eighteenth-​century contemporaries—​ Americans, Haitians, Dutch—​articulated their experiences of transformation.108 French revolutionaries showed that it was possible to write something called history from within an event perceived as a startling temporal (and epistemic) rupture; not all revolutionaries faced or made similar choices, which reminds us that the power of different historical sensibilities must be contextualized against the cultural repertoires available to various revolutionary moments. Yet even the most cosmopolitan and widely shared practices could be repurposed in unanticipated ways, which helps explain why the French Revolution continues to lend itself to so many different “scripts” of political action, and why revolutions can be readily narrativized in layered genealogies that extend into our present.109 Ultimately, contemporaries’ attempts to read and write the meaning of revolution invoked an historical sensibility that merits our attention, however strange or “unhistorical” it might seem at first glance. Revolutionaries reframed the historians’ identity; exhibited extreme skepticism about historical sources; and appropriated, adapted, and invented narrative techniques to carve out tales of continuity and discontinuity, secrecy and publicity, sentimentality and reason, history and nature. Their historical practices involved a dynamic process of selection, refinement, and appropriation that enabled them to construct temporal and personal connections 108. The French Revolution becomes, in this light, an instance of intercultural reflection and exchange. See Janet Polasky, Revolutions without Borders:  The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2015); Caitlin Fitz, Our Sister Republics:  The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016); and Lester H. Cohen, The Revolutionary Histories: Contemporary Histories of the American Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). 109. Sarah Knott, “Narrating the Age of Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 73 (2016): 3–​36. Likewise, Baker and Edelstein’s Scripting Revolution reveals the remarkably diverse ways that contemporary actors could understand historical possibility in different revolutionary settings. Perhaps historical sensibilities should be understood not as a solitary “script” of revolution, but as a “scripting language” amenable to highly different constructions of temporality and historicity.

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in diverse and often contradictory ways. French Revolutionaries could readily discard the past as guiding precedent and yet write something they considered history, because for them history was not primarily about the binding or losing power of the past. History was a set of rhetorical identities, evidentiary protocols, and purposive justifications that could speak to present and future; and could illuminate, interpret, and convey the deeply felt experience of living a memorable epoch. But the historical weapons honed by revolutionaries after 1789 could also be turned against their creators. If history was truly a tribunal, then the exposure of corrupted writers, the renovation of distorted sources, and the diagnosis of conspiratorial ambition pertained to both past and present. The same historical sensibility that so powerfully excoriated the monarchy could likewise be deployed to indict before posterity the men of the Terror.110 So it was ironic (but perhaps not really a surprise) that in 1801, after an eight-​year publishing hiatus, Jean-​Louis Soulavie re-​emerged into public life with a work entitled Mémoires historiques et politiques du règne de Louis XVI. That work, which he described as the sober outcome of “ten years of proscriptions,” began with a stirring peroration to its readers: “History, yesterday so timid before the Ministers who permitted only praise, has regained its liberty and its rights. . . . History owes its freedom to your courage, people of France.”111 To its practitioners and its readers, revolutionary history was less a tabula rasa than a palimpsest, in which the subtle tracery of the old could be glimpsed beneath the inscription of the new.

110. Bronislaw Baczko’s claim that “ending the Revolution” involved a Thermidorean inversion of radical rhetoric remains compelling; see Baczko, Comment sortir de la Terreur. Thermidor et la Révolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). 111.  Jean-​Louis Soulavie, Mémoires historiques et politiques du règne de Louis XVI, 6 vols. (Paris, 1801), 1:i–​ii.

7

The Thermidorians’ Terror Atrocities, Tragedies, Trauma HOWARD G. BROWN ■

The “Terror” as a distinct period of the French Revolution was largely a construct of lawmakers who took the reins of government after the defeat of Robespierre and his closest allies. The more one examines the later discursive construction of the Robespierrist regime as a “reign of terror,” the more it becomes evident that its psychological effects on the French population in general were inextricably entwined with the subsequent period. There is no doubt that the repression, coercion, and state-​ authorized violence perpetrated in France between March 1793 and July 1794, the most extensive dates usually given for the “Reign of Terror,” directly impacted a large number of French men and women. But it was far from the majority of the population. Equally important, it was during the year following the parliamentary coup d’état of 9–​10 Thermidor Year II (July 27–​28, 1794)  that an exceptionally effective communication of suffering through text and image compelled the French to see the preceding period as a coherent phenomenon based on ubiquitous fear. It was during this so-​called Thermidorian period that French women and men saw the interplay between atrocities and tragedies, the difficulty of distinguishing victims from perpetrators, and the deployment of a sentimentalist idiom all reach their height during the French Revolution.

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This combination of developments during the post-​Thermidor period made “the Terror” into a collective trauma, one that gave French men and women a greater sense of sharing in the larger fate of the nation. In many ways, it was the version of the Terror constructed by the Thermidorians1 that France as a nation continued to “work through” for decades to come. The concept of “collective trauma” is not intended to suggest a multitude of individual traumas as they might be diagnosed by a modern psychiatrist.2 Nor is it simply mass suffering. Rather, a collective trauma is a shared social and cultural experience. The sociologist Jeffrey Alexander explains collective trauma as a social process “that defines a painful injury to the collectivity, establishes the victim, attributes responsibility, and distributes the ideal and material consequences. Insofar as traumas are so experienced, and thus imagined and represented, the collective identity will become significantly revised.”3 In other words, collective traumas are not the natural or inevitable consequences of large-​scale violence, but are culturally constructed in ways that often distort, exploit, or obscure the personal tragedies and individual incidents upon which they are built. The cultural construction of a collective trauma involves communicating the experiences of victims of mass violence so effectively to those not directly impacted by events that it alters their sense of identity and thereby significantly restructures social relationships. Provoking emotional and cultural responses to experiences of violence and suffering beyond a

1. “Thermidorians” were politicians and publicists whose public lives came to be shaped by their opposition to Montagnards, Jacobins, and sans-​culottes. Quite a few Thermidorians had once belonged to these groups, but turned against their erstwhile allies mainly for reasons of political expediency. Such an obvious volte-​face derived, in large part, from the public backlash against the political rhetoric, social leveling, and coercive methods of Year II. 2. For an alternative approach that focuses on diagnosing the psychological damage done to individuals, see Ronen Steinberg, “Trauma before Trauma: Imagining the Effects of the Terror in Post-​Revolutionary France,” in David Andress, ed., Experiencing the French Revolution (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013), 177–​99. 3.  Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, Piotr Sztompka, eds., Collective Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2004), 22.

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face-​to-​face community is more effective among those who share a sense of common identity; however, it can also help to create that shared sense of identity.4 Beginning in the late summer of 1794, a massive dissemination of pamphlets, newspapers, and pictorial prints exposed and framed the year of events before the death of Robespierre as a “reign of terror” in ways that carried the emotional consequences of the original violence to a vastly larger number of people, many of whom had lived at relatively safe distance from extreme political violence. William Reddy has argued that the sweeping shift from the externalized emotions of eighteenth-​ century sentimentalism to the introspective intensity of nineteenth-​ century romanticism began in the immediate aftermath of 9 Thermidor Year II.5 As we shall see, however, it was actually the highly politicized use of pathos during the Thermidorian period of the Convention that, by helping to turn the events of 1793–​94 into a collective trauma experienced by all of France, did the most to bring down the “emotional regime” of sentimentalism. Some scholars who study trauma are convinced that “the recollective reconstruction of an event” is more important in generating its traumatic effects than is the initial experience alone.6 Responses to the events of Year II support this claim. Despite the general pall of repression that hung over France in 1793–​94, it was not until months after the death of Robespierre that most Frenchmen learned of the many injustices and atrocities committed in Year II. Thus, it was after Thermidor that images and discourses of violence had the greatest psychological impact on the general population of France. This was certainly not the

4.  On the general effects of communicating suffering beyond face-​to-​face communities, see Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Marcelo M. Suárez-​Orozco, eds., Cultures under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. the introduction, and Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. by Graham Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 30–​34. 5.  William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling:  A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 6. Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner, eds., Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–​1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 20–​21.

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case in Paris, the region of the Vendée civil war, the principal cities of Southern France, or departments along the frontiers. Most residents in these areas had enough personal experience of local incidents of bloody resistance and repression to be directly affected emotionally if not materially. However, it took the Thermidorian period to turn the various episodes of repression and coercion deployed in 1793–​94 into a truly national trauma known as “the Terror,” henceforth, understood as a period during which the entire country of France had been victimized by a sanguinary dictatorship. Plenty of people experienced real and deep fear under the Revolutionary Government of 1793–​94, as the Montagnards and their allies around the country intended. The discourse of terror as a necessary tool of government emerged during the many-​faceted crisis of 1793 when the National Convention faced a massive revolt in the Vendée, the threat of foreign invasion in the northeast and southwest, and the so-​called Federalist revolt in key cities across the south. The sans-​culottes insurgency of 4–​5 September 1793 in Paris may not have led the Convention officially to put “terror on the daily agenda” (terreur à l’ordre du jour), as historians long believed, but many agents of the Revolutionary Government talked and acted as if it had.7 The frequent use of this phrase by those actively engaged in repression during Year II gave Thermidorians the basis to turn it into a caricature of that year.8 As a result, the guillotine became an omnipresent symbol, a synecdoche of the fledgling republican regime. Even those who did not belong to the most proscribed groups, such as priests, nobles, financiers, 7. On the emergence of this singular phrase and its widespread use during Year II, see Annie Jourdan, “La journée du 5 septembre 1793: La terreur a-​t-​elle été à l’ordre du jour?” in Michel Biard and Hervé Leuwers, eds., Visages de la Terreur:  L’exception politique de l’an II (Paris, 2014), 45–​60, which is a response to Jean-​Clément Martin, Violence et Révolution: essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national (Paris, 2006), 186–​93. See also Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–​1794 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 149–​50, 200. 8.  This retrospective discourse on terror was so pervasive that it even became a way for individuals to describe their personal experience of the regime. For example, a surgeon from Monségur (Gironde) named Olivier explained his situation as an official “suspect” even after he had been released from prison: “the terror being still the order of the day at my place/​in me (chez moi) . . .” Archives Nationales (hereafter AN) D III 102, d. 2.

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wholesale merchants, and tax collectors, ran the risk of being arrested as “suspects” under the elastic law of 17 September 1793. In addition, the massive mobilization of men and matériel for war, including imposing the Maximum (fixed price ceilings on numerous basic commodities) and requisitioning a wide range of supplies for the war effort, put almost anyone who engaged in the market economy, from bakers and shoemakers to bankers and horse breeders, at risk of denunciation and persecution. Personal wealth, resisting requisitions, even political passivity, could all turn individuals into official “suspects.”9 With these wrenching realities duly noted, it is easy to exaggerate the threat posed to most French men and women by the Revolutionary Government of Year II. Even many specialists, finding themselves compelled to describe the cruelties and civil strife of 1793–​94, seem to forget that most parts of the country did not experience much violence at the time: in fact, fully half of France’s eighty-​four departments (averaging 350,000 persons each) had a dozen or fewer citizens executed by revolutionary justice.10 Moreover, historians have not paid much attention to the differences between what the population of France knew was happening during the so-​called “Reign of Terror” and what they were told about it thereafter.11 To be sure, some of the “grandes mesures” of Year II were made public as they unfolded. For example, several newspapers published a letter sent to the Paris Commune that praised the extreme violence being used to subdue rebels in the Vendée. However, the brutality of the repression was often obscured by vague rhetorical language, such as describing the Loire River as “a revolutionary torrent” carrying away the detritus 9. Michel Biard, Missionaires de la République: Les répresentants du peuple en mission (1793–​ 1795) (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 2002), 326. 10.  Donald Greer, Incidence of the Terror (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1934). Laurent Brassart, “‘L’autre Terreur’:  portrait d’une France (presque) épargnée,” in Biard and Leuwers, Visages de la Terreur, pp. 167–​83, sketches the sharp contrasts between various regions and cities. 11.  Historians too often debate the origins and justifications for “the Terror” as if everything that occurred at the time was generally known to the functionaries who served the regime throughout France. E.g., Patrice Gueniffey, Politique de la Terreur: Essai sur la violence révolutionnaire (Paris: Gallimard, 2000).

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of the Vendée.12 Despite the Jacobins’ endless discourse on “enemies of the people,” constant search for “conspirators,” and demands to punish “moderationism,” the actual measures being taken in certain parts of the country were only vaguely known, if at all. Augustin Cochin, in his study of Jacobinism, noted:  “The silence maintained about these enormous actions is not the least curious feature of this strange period. France was suffering from the Terror—​one could say that she was unaware of it—​and Thermidor was at first a deliverance, but then a discovery: people went from surprise to surprise for months and months.”13 Jules Michelet also recognized the extent to which the Thermidorians discovered the excesses of Year II. “It was an immense Dantesque poem which, from circle to circle, led France down into this hell, still little known even to those who had traversed it.”14 Private diaries confirm this impression. An English woman in France throughout the three years of the Convention remarked a few weeks after 9 Thermidor that her earlier letters had only provided “some faint sketch of the situation of the country, and the sufferings of its inhabitants—​I say a faint sketch, because a thousand horrors and iniquities, which are now daily disclosing, were then confined to the scenes where they were perpetrated; and we know little more of them than what we collected from the reports of the Convention, where they excited a laugh as pleasantries, or applause as acts of patriotism.”15 Moreover, despite increased administrative centralization and an official rhetoric that justified terror, the so-​called “Reign of Terror” was neither consistent nor coherent. In short, those features of the regime that constituted “the Terror” were largely experienced at the local level as the arbitrary actions of representatives on mission and revolutionary militants who acted with little

12. Alain Gérard, “Par principe d’humanité . . .”: La Terreur et la Vendée (Paris: Fayard, 1999). 13. Les sociétés de pensée et la démocratie (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1921), 118, quoted in Bronislaw Baczko, Comment sortir de la Terreur: Thermidor et la Révolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 191. 14. Histoire de la Révolution française, 10 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1893-​98), viii. 70–​71. 15. Anonymous [Charlotte Biggs], A residence in France, during the years 1792, 1793, 1794, 1795, described in a series of letters from an English Lady . . . 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1796–​97), 2:139–​40.

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or no accountability, rather than being understood at the time as a system of government.16 It was the first Thermidorians, those deputies who actually defeated Robespierre and his acolytes, who presented the improvised government of Year II as a “system of terror” operated by “terrorists” (both neologisms at the time) with supposedly devastating emotional consequences for the entire population. According to the deputy Tallien, “the system of terror” had divided “the republic into two classes:  those who caused fear and those who felt fear.” The extreme fear imposed on most of the population amounted to “terror,” which he defined as a real disorganization of the soul that leaves nothing but the ability to suffer and the resources of despair.”17 Tallien’s famous psycho-​emotional interpretation of the Robespierrist regime became woven into the fabric of politics over the following year. Jacques-​Charles Bailleul, in a speech to the Convention on March 19, 1795, provided a similar description: “Terror dominated all minds, oppressed all hearts—​it was the government’s strength  .  .  .  The human self (moi) no longer existed; every individual was nothing but a machine, coming, going, thinking or not thinking, according to how the tyranny pushed him or animated him.”18 Historians have largely rejected Tallien’s self-​serving explanation for the “system of terror,” and yet a great many of them have retained his general framework,19 thereby treating the government that emerged in Year II as a more pervasive and systematic exploitation of fear than it actually was. Such an approach conflates the events of Year II with how most people

16.  See, in particular, Colin Lucas, The Structure of the Terror:  The Example of Javogues and the Loire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); Martin, Violence et Révolution, 155–​236, and Biard, Missionaires de la République, 183–​279. 17. Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur [hereafter Moniteur] xxi. 612–​15 (11 Fructidor an II). 18. Le Moniteur, 29 Ventôse an III. 19. Compare Haim Burstin, “Entre théorie et pratique de la Terreur: un essai de balisage” in Michel Biard, ed., Les politiques de la Terreur 1793–​1794 (Rennes:  Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008), 39–​52 and Mona Ozouf, “The Terror after the Terror: an Immediate History” in Keith Michael Baker, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 4: The Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3–​18.

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in France came to learn about them in Year III.20 The fading of political conformity in the summer of 1794 enabled an increasingly independent press once again to play the game of mirrors in which publicists sought to shape public opinion by claiming to speak on its behalf. New, overtly “reactionary” newspapers systematically denigrated the regime that existed before the “happy revolution” of 9 Thermidor. Revelations about the extent to which the fledgling republican government had presided over massacres and atrocities came from a combination of debates in the National Convention, trials before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and, above all, an outpouring of anti-​Jacobin publications. Thus, published accounts of collective atrocities and personal tragedies played central roles in how the Thermidorians’ came retrospectively to define the revolutionary government of Year II as “the Terror,” and thus a collective trauma for all of France. Shortly after Tallien’s speech, one of the most successful pamphlets of the entire Revolution appeared. Seventy thousand copies of the Queue de Robespierre (Robespierre’s Tail, i.e., his remaining acolytes) were distributed throughout France in the last week of August 1794 and thereby launched a prolonged effort to punish the so-​called “great guilty” (grands coupables) on the two committees of the Revolutionary Government and their Jacobin supporters, held responsible for one million murders (!)  throughout France. Like many Thermidorian pamphlets, Queue de Robespierre—​and the two dozen other pamphlets that played on its title—​ depended more on verve and hyperbole, than on tangible evidence.21 Such pamphlets reveal how little even well-​placed politicians and publicists knew about events that would soon become hallmarks of the Terror

20. Bronislaw Baczko, Politiques de la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 163, asserts that the intensity of the “black legend” generated by Thermidorians about Robespierre reflected “the extent of the trauma provoked by the Terror.” 21.  François Gendron, La Jeunesse dorée:  Épisodes de la Révolution française (Quebec:  Les Presses de l’Université de Québec, 1979), 36–​37; Michel Biard, “Après la tête, la queue! La rhétorique antijacobine en fructidor an II -​vendémiaire an III” in Michel Vovelle, ed., Le tournant de l’an III: Réaction et Terreur blanche dans la France révolutionnaire (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 1997), 201–​13.

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and yet how powerful even a modicum of evidence could be when fully exploited. Revelations about the excesses of Year II accelerated with the trial of ninety-​four members of the elite at Nantes sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris on charges of “federalism,” an accusation often levied against refractory moderates in the provinces who resisted Montagnard domination. The trial in mid-​September 1794 inspired another massive spate of publicity. Pamphlets and newspapers reported breathlessly on the sordid practices of revolutionary repression that had accompanied the fight against the royalist rebels in the Vendée. The appalling suffering of the accused—​37 of the original 132 city notables had died on route or in prison before the trial had even begun—​had become national news, but even that was quickly surpassed by tales of the mass drowning of thousands of prisoners in the Loire, often conducted at night and with elaborate rituals of humiliation. Mass shootings without trial, sexual abuse of female prisoners, and plundering corpses all became central features of the reportage. Even newspapers distributed to the peasants of Alsace reported these details “in the local idiom” despite the distance from Paris, let alone the Vendée.22 The trial of the Nantais inexorably led to the impeachment and trial of Jean-​Baptiste Carrier, accused along with the Revolutionary Committee of Nantes of perpetrating atrocities in the Vendée. The revelations at this second trial further fueled a national obsession with an emerging narrative of atrocities. Weeks of extensive press coverage revealed lurid details of arbitrariness, corruption, sexual exploitation, and wholesale slaughter, regardless of age or sex, especially the systematic drowning of thousands of prisoners in the Loire. A lively contemporary engraving by Jean Duplessis-​Bertaux captures many elements of the testimony given at trial (Figure 7.1). It shows well-​armed men loading victims into flat-​bottomed skiffs and barges, then either sinking the boats or

22.  Gilles Feyel, ed., Dictionnaire de la presse française pendant la Révolution 1789–​1799, La presse départementale, 4 vols. (Ferney-​Voltaire: Centre International d’Étude du XVIIIe siècle, 2005–​2014), i. 275.

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Figure 7.1:  “Drownings in the Loire by order of the ferocious Carrier.” Detail of etching by Jean Duplessis-​Bertaux (Paris, 1797). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

simply throwing victims overboard. Both the brutality and the suffering that accompanied such sinister activities is amply depicted. Men strike struggling victims with swords, cudgels and poles; women and children in a boat near the bank extend imploring arms toward the perpetrators; and dogs devour corpses that have already washed ashore. As this image illustrates, the horrifying “facts” of the matter—​that there had been twenty-​three separate noyades, that men and women had been stripped naked and tied together in “republican marriages,” etc.—​were quickly fixed in synthetic accounts and early histories, too many of which are still repeated today.23 The publicity that arose from the trials regarding repression at Nantes put, in the words of Bronislaw Baczko, “l’horreur à l’ordre du jour.”24 At the time, deputies also rose in the Convention to denounce both army generals and fellow deputies who had directed the brutal military repression in the west. When one deputy read aloud General Turreau’s orders to one

23.  E.g., Reynal Sécher, Le Génocide franco-​française:  La Vendée-​Vengé (Paris:  PUF, 1986), which was published in English translation in 2003 and reissued in French in 2006. 24. Baczko, Comment sortir de la Terreur, 202–​3.

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of his column commanders to “disarm and slaughter everything in his path, without distinction of age or sex,” “the entire assembly responded with an expression of horror.”25 Descriptions of other atrocities added to the mood. Even before Carrier could be convicted and executed, citizens from Bédoin in the Vaucluse appeared in the Convention to describe the total destruction of their town, including the burning of five hundred houses, in retaliation for a liberty tree having been chopped down. Deputy Goupilleau followed them to the podium, adding that when he arrived at nearby Orange in August 1794, he found a trench full of five hundred corpses that had to be covered over, as well as six other trenches and a large quantity of quicklime intended to accommodate another twelve thousand bodies. Moreover, the Popular Commission there had sent men as old as eighty-​seven and boys as young as six to the guillotine. Unaware that they had just heard gross exaggerations—​the Commission of Orange sentenced “only” 332 individuals to death—​the deputies in the National Convention rose as one to swear that they had had nothing to do with such “atrocities.”26 The term “atrocities” became a leitmotif of the ensuing debate about culpability. If members of the Revolutionary Government were not held accountable, argued Deputy F.-​P.  Legendre, then the National Convention itself would be blamed. His litany of atrocities, which highlighted the noyades at Nantes, the mitraillades at Lyon, and the excesses of Lebon at Arras, has come to characterize “the Terror” ever since. However, this was the Thermidorians’ Terror, initially crafted to focus responsibility on select members of the Revolutionary Government of the Year II, especially Robespierre.27 This interpretation of the Terror as the fruit of a narrow tyranny was fortified by two lengthy reports 25. Moniteur, xxii.118. 26. Moniteur, xxii. 675. Such exaggerations and how they may have impacted contemporaries is missing from positivist inquiries such as that of Émile Le Gallo, “L’Affaire Bédoin,” La Révolution française 300 (1901): 289–​310. 27. Jean-​Clément Martin, Robespierre: La fabrication d’un monstre (Paris: Perrin, 2016), 240–​61, illustrates the extent to which the Thermidorians blamed Robespierre for the violence of the Terror, including that committed by his factional opponents.

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developed by investigative committees of the Convention. The blatant bias and interpretive hyperbole of these reports were effectively masked by the mass of sensational, unpublished documents that they included as supporting evidence. The first report, based on Robespierre’s private papers, developed the thesis of a bloody tyranny, “a reign by terror,” constructed through acolytes and place seekers. The second focused on other key members of the two “great committees.” The opening paragraph of this second report crystalized the Thermidorians’ version of the Terror: The land of liberty covered in prisons, giving way under the weight of scaffolds, soaked in the blood that watered it every day; terror hung over all heads; desperation inundated all souls; mourning spread to all families; dismay in all cities; revolutionary armies roaming the departments, preceded by fear, accompanied by devastation, and followed by death.28 In short, according to the most thorough investigation undertaken to date, the tyranny of the Year II had produced emotional suffering in every person, family, city, and department in the country; even the Convention had been oppressed (a vital exculpatory point for fellow deputies). Both reports received massive publicity throughout the country.29 The pursuit of the “great guilty” on the Revolutionary Government included a focus on Collot d’Herbois, a member of the Committee of Public Safety sent on mission to manage the repression after the siege of Lyon. The gruesome details of the mass shootings (mitraillades) undertaken there had becoming widely known, thanks in part to an 28. Rapport fait au nom de la commission chargée de l’examen des papiers trouvés chez Robespierre et ses complices, par Ed.-​B. Courtois (16 Nivôse III) and Rapport fait au nom de la Commission des vingt-​un, . . . pour l’examen de la conduite des Représentants du Peuple Billlaud-​Varennes, Collot-​d’Herbois & Barère, membres de l’ancien Comité de Salut Public, & Vadier, membre de l’ancien comité de Sûreté générale, fait par ... Saladin (12 Ventôse III). 29. E.g., L’Anti-​terroriste, ou Journal des principes, (Toulouse), 28 Ventôse III, which reproduced the report’s opening paragraph verbatim.

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early history of the siege published at Lausanne and then Paris.30 Here readers learned how victims, some tied together in groups, others attached to trees on the plane of Brotteaux, had been shot on mass, at times using cannons filled with grapeshot, with hussars then sabering survivors to death. The Journal de Lyon embroidered on these events. Its inaugural issue of February 17, 1795 was devoted to a single article, “Collot-​d’Herbois. Cris de Vengeance.” The editor, Alexandre-​Michel Pelzin, maximized the emotional impact of the atrocities: “Come close,” he beseeches his readers, “their groaning will inform you that, after the impact of the fatal blow, they hung for a long time suspended between life and death, that their cries of suffering echoed beyond the river, and that later their bodies were chopped to pieces by steel and the palpitating limbs thrown in the Rhone.”31 By focusing on Collot d’Herbois (and not his equally culpable fellow deputy Joseph Fouché) the Thermidorians’ were painting a picture of the “Reign of Terror” that began as a small, rather improvised, group portrait. A  large number of figures were only added to the background after the sans-​culottes uprisings in Paris in the spring of 1795. Before those epochal uprisings, however, two other men had become part of the selective portrait of those responsible for the Terror: Fouquier-​ Tinville, the malleable prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris; and Joseph Lebon, an aggressive Representative on mission to the armies of Northern France, both of whom became proxies for the abuses of revolutionary justice. The atrocities committed by the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris had quickly become common knowledge in the wake of Thermidor. Eight months of pamphleteering and judicial investigation preceded the trial of Fouquier-​Tinville and twenty-​three other members of the Revolutionary Tribunal. This abundance of publicity had fully discredited the inner workings of revolutionary justice

30. Relation du siège de Lyon: contenant le détail de ce qui s’y est passé d’après les ordres et sous les yeux des représentans du peuple Français. (Lausanne, 1794). 31. Emmanuel de Waresquiel, Fouché: Les silences de la pieuvre (Paris: Tallandier/​Fayard, 2014), 135–​208, quote from 151.

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in Paris, which included fixing the number of victims in advance of trials and concocting prison conspiracies in order to judge and execute batches of prisoners at a time.32 This escalating pursuit of victims was captured in a contemporary print, in which the executioner was depicted as so enthusiastic about his work that, when he ran out of victims, he could not resist cutting off his own head (Figure 7.2).33 Such mockery synthesized some of the shocking statistics revealed in the spring of 1795. At the time, avid readers could even subscribe to a serialized report that provided details on 2,742 individuals executed by guillotine in Paris between August 1792 and August 1794.34 Neither souvenir, nor memorial, such a serial publication could only prolong the agony of discovery. It soon became the turn of Joseph Le Bon to be put on trial for “excesses.” His crass and deadly methods while on mission had initially been excused by Barère on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety as merely “a bit harsh” (“des formes un peu acerbes”). By the spring of 1795, however, the public had been well informed of the large number of victims—​said at the time to exceed 550—​guillotined during Le Bon’s mission.35 Two men who had been imprisoned at Arras (but escaped the guillotine), Poirier and Montgey, published a series of sensational

32.  A  former juror on the tribunal stoked outrage by publishing some the most successful pamphlets of the Thermidorian period: Causes secrètes de la Révolution du 9 au 10 thermidor, par Vilate, ex-​juré du tribunal révolutionnaire de Paris, détenu à la Force (Paris, 15 Vendémiare III), 70 pp.; followed by Continuation des causes secrètes . . . transférés et détenu au Luxembourg (Paris, 25 Brumaire III), 71 pp., and Mystères de la mère de Dieu dévoilés (Paris, 8 Pluviôse III), 94 pp. On the trial itself, see especially Alphonse Dunoyer, Fouquier-​Tinville, Accusateur public du Tribunal révolutionnaire, 1746-​1795 (Paris: Perrin, 1913), 190–​408. 33. This image served as frontispiece to Coittant, Prisons de Paris. 34. Liste générale et très-​exacte, des noms, âges, qualités et demeures de tous les Conspirateurs qui ont été condamnés à mort par le Tribunal Révolutionnaire, établi à Paris . . ., 10 issues (Paris, Year III) covered executions from 17 August 1792 to 15 August 1794. A supplement (issue 11) provided detailed coverage of the trial of Carrier and expanded the list to a total of 2,807 guillotinés by the time the tribunal ended on 24 May 1795. 35.  The campaign peaked when Armand Guffroy presented the Convention with a printed exposé that included documents and ran to over 600 pages: Les secrets de Joseph Le Bon et de ses complices, deuxième censure républicaine (Paris, 10 Ventôse, an III).

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Figure 7.2:  “Government of Robespierre.” Samson the executioner, having already guillotined various groups of people, cuts off his own head. Frontispiece from Philippe-​Edmé Coittant, Almanach des prisons (Paris, 1794). Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University.

pamphlets charging Le Bon and his acolytes with numerous abuses of power, including public humiliation, sexual degradation, and personal enrichment.36 Their publicity campaign included one of the 36. Poirier et Montgey notably published: Les angoisses de la mort, ou idées des horreurs des prison d’Arras (Paris, Thermidor II [1st ed.] and [2nd ed. augmented], an III); Idées des horreurs des prisons d’Arras, ou les crimes de Joseph Lebon et des ses agens (Paris, an III); Atrocités commises envers les citoyennes ci-​devant détenues dans la maison d’arrêt dite de la Providence à Arras, par Joseph Lebon et ses adhérens (Paris, Nivôse III). During the trial, Poirier added Le dernier gémissement de la humanité, contre Jh. Lebon et complices adressé à la Convention nationale

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Figure 7.3:  “The Harsh Means of Joseph Lebon.” Etching by Charles Normand after drawing by Louis Lafitte (Paris, May 13, 1795). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

most notorious prints of the Thermidorian period, “Harsh Means” (Figure 7.3). The elaborate engraving appeared in May 1795 and helped to make Le Bon the Thermidorians’ totemic figure of terror, a cannibalistic drinker of blood who joined with tigers in devouring the bodies, male and female alike, piled up beneath two guillotines representing the revolutionary tribunals at Arras and Cambrai. “Drinkers of blood,” “cannibals,” and “tigers” were among the most common epithets applied to the Jacobins (Paris, Messidor III). Le Bon recognized the effectiveness of these pamphlets by describing the mockery to which he was subjected during his transfer to prison: “Go, villain, go, they will give you women to enjoy, then guillotine them afterwards. Oh, the monster!” Joseph Le Bon à la Convention nationale, lettres justificatives (Paris, an III), lettre 1, note 2.

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of Year II. The accompanying text explains these allegorical allusions, as well as elucidating the female nude standing in the cloud: she represents Truth holding Poirier’s pamphlets, which led to the release of prisoners shown in the background. The interplay between text, image, and action during the Thermidorian period is nowhere better illustrated than in this one engraving. Moreover, its depiction of distraught survivors on the edge of an abyss of death gave it emotional impact as well. Not only would it have especially struck viewers who had been arrested the previous year, almost anyone who had escaped the direct consequences of repression could easily read the fear and desperation on the faces of the survivors. In addition to its emotional content, the allegorical density of “Harsh Means” allowed it to embody almost all of the main tropes that accompanied the revelation of atrocities committed during 1793–​94. In fact, as a visual statement of the Terror as a multifaceted atrocity, and Thermidor as sudden relief, it was unsurpassed. Furthermore, the origins and content of “Harsh Means” suggest that it was the influence of the Thermidorian press even more than factional struggles in the Convention that turned the bloody repression of Year II, which had largely been a regional phenomenon, into a national trauma known as the Terror. During Year III, perhaps more than at any other time during the French Revolution, pamphlets and newspapers shaped public opinion and political action alike. The impulse came from Paris, but the provincial press also gave local meaning to the Thermidorian definition of the Terror.37 Despite the hardships and economic chaos that accompanied the harsh winter of 1794–​95, a surprising number of newspapers sprang up around the country. Almost all of these were vehemently anti-​Jacobin. Moreover, a number of provincial papers that had managed to continue publishing despite the censorship of Year II, usually by remaining almost apolitical, began in late 1794 to adopt the rhetoric of horror and culpability associated 37.  A  few right-​wing journalists acted in concert to help define and dismantle “the Terror,” but even a participant in this group admitted the powerful influence of publicists outside his circle. Charles de Lacretelle, Dix années d’épreuves pendant la Révolution (Paris: Allouard, 1842), 198–​208.

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with Thermidorian propaganda. And yet other papers that had backed the revolutionary government of Year II experienced a sudden reorientation in Year III as their editors underwent a conversion experience similar to that of Tallien. As a result, by the summer of 1795, all major cities in France had anti-​Jacobin newspapers.38 The regional readership for such papers meant that their Thermidorian diatribes spread like so many oil stains, each with a certain local color, into surrounding areas. The surge in newspaper publishing in 1795 also embroidered on the tapestry of terror in various smaller cities and towns. Even such modest backwaters as Figeac and Vesoul spawned local newspapers steeped in Thermidorian vitriol.39 Most of these provincial papers reprinted articles from the moderate or right-​wing press in Paris, such as the Journal de Perlet, and added moving anecdotes about victims of revolutionary justice. Above all, they specialized in denouncing local “terrorists” in language that reflected a clear nationalization of Thermidorian rhetoric. The obscure Le Décadaire du Cantal wrote about “the tyrants and Vandals,” “these monsters whose fury still floats on waves of blood,” “these cannibals with claw-​like hands,” “these venimous reptiles,” before demanding the punishment of a handful of local agents of the Revolutionary Government. Even the old Affiches de Sens suddenly became more political than it had ever been before, and took to excoriating the former Representative on mission, a moderate Montagnard named N.-​S. Maure, as a “cannibal” and a “monster” who told a prisoner’s children that he would give them “the head of their father to play boules with!!!” Le Reveil-​Matin, published for a few months at Châlon-​sur-​Saône, felt obliged to insist on the ubiquity of fear under the previous regime: “Ask yourself about the constant fear 38.  Hugh Gough, The Newspaper Press in the French Revolution (London:  Routledge, 1988), 120–​23. See Feyel, Dictionnaire de la presse, 1:409; 2:281; 4:185–​86, 227–​28, 322–​36, for examples of newspapers that altered their political orientation in Year III, and 1:93–​94, 1:257, 1:343; 3:408, for examples of newly created anti-​Jacobin newspapers in major cities. 39.  For the political orientation of the following newspapers, see Feyel, Dictionnaire de la presse:  Journal patriotique de Grenoble (1:409); L’Ami de la Constitution républicaine—​Arras (2:262); Courrier de Calais (2:81); Feuille rémoise (2:242); Le Décadaire du Cantal—​Aurillac (2:338–​39); L’Ami des principes—​Brest (3:6); L’Original—​Dijon (3:167–​68); Le Vengeur de la patrie et de l’humanité—​Vesoul (3:392); Le Censeur—​Figeac (3:444).

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under which you lived during that frightening reign, and, if you respond that you were never afraid of being arrested and taken away from your home at night, if you never trembled for your property (even if a worker), then I would say that you are a terrorist or their agent.”40 Thus, the full range of the periodical press, from regionally influential papers published daily in major cities to local papers produced three times a month in provincial towns, served to propagate a Thermidorian version of the Year II as a series of horrific atrocities and injustices that were ubiquitous in France and unprecedented in history. The extent to which this rhetoric came to define the previous regime, even in areas of general tranquility, is apparent from a placard posted in the Norman market town of Louviers in Year III. The placard was addressed to “the villains who temporarily constituted the Revolutionary Committee of Louviers” and described these men—​no doubt neighbors and well known to the authors—​as “monsters” and “cannibals” who “wanted the agrarian law” (to redistribute land) and “craved blood.” Such language would seem to suggest that the Eure had seen some truly bloody repression, but, in fact, it experienced no more than the internment of a few hundred suspects (including thirty-​two at Louviers) and a mere four executions.41 Here then is a prime example of the Thermidorians’ Terror at work where there had been very little “terror” in the first place. How many French men and women like those imprisoned at Louviers experienced an even greater sense of fear, and hence potentially personal trauma, once the Thermidorian imaginary persuaded them that they had only narrowly escaped the guillotine? Arbitrary arrests, house searches, administrative purges, requisitions, and dechristianization, even in areas that did not experience significant physical violence, provided the basis for a sense of psychological violence that became all the more powerful after the fact. The fear that such milder forms of coercion may have induced helps to explain the effectiveness of Thermidorian claims about the pervasiveness 40. Quotes from Feyel, Dictionnaire de la presse, 2:339; 3:305, and 3:249. 41. Bernard Bodinier, “Un département sans Terreur sanguinaire: l’Eure en l’an II” in Biard, Politiques de la Terreur, 111–​26.

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of the “reign of terror.” Having seen a prominent citizen locked up because a son had emigrated or a widow punished with a crippling fine for being “religious and an aristocrat,” made it easier for citizens to believe that they had barely avoided a blood bath in their own region, that by some quirk of fate, they had not seen a guillotine decapitating neighbors in the local town square. Moreover, the sense of having been part of a pervasive oppression helped to extend the language of atrocity to all verdicts rendered using revolutionary procedures. Victims described verdicts as “atrocities” or “rendered atrociously,” even when they only imposed fines.42 Along with massive reporting on the atrocities of Year II came a flood of personal accounts of the tragedies wrought that year. Whereas the two concepts—​atrocity and tragedy—​sit comfortably together, their contrasting moral resonances evoked different emotional responses. Reporting atrocities provoked anger and demands for retribution; revealing tragedies elicited sympathy and fellow-​feeling. Although the two are not mutually exclusive, invoking atrocities emphasizes perpetrators whereas describing tragedies puts the focus on victims. By late 1794, prison memoirs had become a wildly popular new genre of revolutionary literature.43 Many of these appeared as individual accounts published by survivors determined to describe their suffering, as well as to clear their names and demand retribution. Equally popular were collections of anecdotes gathered from former prisoners. These elaborated on the squalid physical conditions of prison life—​overcrowding, damp cells, fetid mattresses, putrid latrines, rotten food, etc.—​as well as the psychological effects of imprisonment under an arbitrary regime. The manifold sources of fear stand out:  cruel and arbitrary jailors, betrayal by police spies or fellow prisoners, trial by a revolutionary tribunal, and 42. AN D III 102, d. 17, petition from Jean Gauzan, and 104, d. 28, petition from Jean-​Edmont Serres. 43. There were important antecedents in the Enlightenment, and even in the early Revolution, with the publication of La Bastille dévoilée, ou Recueil des pièces authentiques pour servir à son histoire, 3 vols. (Paris, 1789). I  am grateful to Jeffrey Freedman for his observations on this chapter and providing me with a manuscript version of his article “Dangers Within: Fears of Imprisonment in Enlightenment France” Modern Intellectual History (2016): 1–​26.

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possibly death by guillotine. These were often conveyed by describing how other prisoners responded to the torments and anxieties of prison life. In this new genre, concrete quotidian concerns make the suffering easy to grasp and an inspiration for empathy. Such concerns took precedence over attempts to explain the causes of the suffering. Instead, they relied on simple caricatures of the larger context, such as calling the Robespierrist regime “the bloodiest tyranny that has ever desolated the world.”44 One of the most successful examples of prison memoir, the Almanach des prisons, ou Anecdotes sur le régime intérieur de la Concièrgerie, du Luxembourg, etc., sous le tyrannie de Robespierre (Paris, 1794), opens with the following line: “During the reign of Maximilien the First, all the atrocities, all the horrors that the most industriously ferocious imagination could invent, were the order of the day.”45 The editor merely adds that he has included only the experiences of known patriots while excluding counterrevolutionaries who received their just punishment. In other words, his tragedies reconstituted the Terror largely in terms of victims alone. His volume quickly reached a fourth edition, then spawned another three whole volumes of similar stories. Clearly there was a large and avid readership for such publications, which appeared in great number throughout the Thermidorian period.46 44. Honoré Riouffe, Mémoires d’un détenu, pour servir à l’histoire de la tyrannie de Robespierre (Paris, 1794), iv. 45. Almanach des prisons, Avertissement de l’éditeur. 46. Ph.-​E. Coittant, Tableau des prisons de Paris, sous le règne de Robespierre, Pour servir de suite de l’Almanach des prisons . . . (Paris, 1794), 198 pp.; Second tableau des prisons de Paris . . . (Paris, 1795), 169 pp.; and Troisième tableau des prisons de Paris . . . (Paris, 1795), 162 pp. Coittant explained this series of intermittent publications: “Our goal, after publishing the Almanach des prisons, was to produce a complete work on all the bastilles that covered the soil of Paris, but the public’s curiosity, which seeks to know immediately the smallest details about the victims of the petty tyrants who devastated France, as well as the horrors to which they fell prey, prevented us from undertaking such an immense task.” Hector Fleischmann, Les prisons de la révolution (Paris: Publications modernes, 1908), 16, makes three significant points about Thermidorian prison narratives: 1) they constitute an “unparalleled outpouring of accounts”; 2) their merit comes from being lively, colorful, and having the “charm of reality”; 3) they include features that reflected the “sensibility of the period, in the sentimentalist manner of Jean-​Jacques Rousseau,” which may have moved contemporaries, but which “often seem ridiculous” several generations later.

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The genre of prison memoirs tapped into a deep cultural proclivity for works imbued with pathos. The last third of the eighteenth century witnessed a flowering of pathos in plays, novels, autobiographies, and even in private correspondence. Pathos excites pity or sadness, it stirs tender or melancholy emotions. Thus, creating pathos meant putting suffering on display as a privileged means to make compassion contagious.47 When P.-​J.-​B. Nougaret published Histoire des prisons de Paris et des départements as a four-​volume set in June 1797, he assured readers that he had no intention of inciting hatred or undermining the current regime. Rather his introduction explained that he had “read avidly, and with the most painful pleasure, the harrowing accounts of the sufferings that innumerable victims of Robespierre experienced in their cells. [His] tears had flowed, like those of all France, when reading the writings which, to be highly engaging, had only to describe naively these unprecedented horrors.”48 In short, the effectiveness of these simple narratives in communicating suffering to others, thereby generating tears of sympathy, was their principal merit. Moreover, most of the narratives, anecdotes, and verses that filled Nougaret’s volumes had first appeared in Year III. Even though the editor added a few explanatory notes about his sources, he did not always identify the original victims by name. The resulting ambiguity could add to the potential universality of the experience. Whether or not the reader had suffered serious persecution during Year II, the lack of precise political context and the anonymity of particular sufferers made it easy for others to identify with these victims of terror and tyranny. Furthermore, Nougaret’s title page officially dedicated the four-​volume collection “to all those who had been detained as suspects” during a period when, as he 47. Anne Coudreuse, Le goût des larmes au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: PUF, 1999), esp. 8–​9. 48. See also A.-​F. Delandine, Tableau des prisons de Lyon, pour servir à l’histoire de la tyrannie de 1792 et 1793 (Paris, 1797), 3: “As for me, I only want to recall precious memories and console myself with soft tears over the pains I suffer. Even in my prison, I want to soften them by describing them. My heart holds no desire to call for the punishment and massacre of men who were often more misled than guilty, induced into misdeeds by example, afraid not to pass for patriots, increasing public terror by their own fear, of obscure, uneducated, unenlightened men, deprived of everything, who had been given a homicidal hope to have everything, to steal everything.”

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put it, “millions of Frenchmen” had been killed for their wealth. Clearly his republication of Thermidorian prison narratives was based on their effectiveness in generating a sense of shared suffering among far more Frenchmen than had actually been imprisoned by the Revolutionary Government of Year II. Nougaret was far from being the only author to exaggerate the human devastation wrought by the “system of terror.” Various claims were made about the extent of the repression, sometimes on the basis of specious, though perhaps persuasive, calculations. Guffroy, in his book-​length pamphlet, The Secrets of Joseph Lebon and his Accomplices, wrote that there had been “fifty thousand [surveillance] committees of the most tyrannical dictatorship. Each committee had twelve members chosen from among the most ignorant, the most turbulent and the most corrupt men. . . . Well hey, supposing that each member committed only one error and one injustice, there would be one million, two hundred thousand victims of the most appalling proscription on the surface of a country that we sought to regenerate with liberty.”49 (Recent historians put the combined total of deliberate executions—​with or without verdicts—​and deaths in prisons at 35,000–​40,000.50) Other Thermidorians provided no basis for their statistics and simply folded them into speeches and pamphlets denouncing various aspects of the now defunct dictatorship. One of the most influential and impassioned statements on the human toll was undoubtedly that published by the deputy Maximin Isnard, the central portion of which was reproduced in the Moniteur, the leading newspaper of the period. Civil war ignited; Robespierre elevated to a dictatorial throne; the Convention mutilated, powerless, subjugated; the reign of terror 49. Les Secrets de Joseph Le Bon et de ses complices (Paris, 10 Ventôse III). 50. See Jean-​Clément Martin, “Dénombrer les victimes de la Terreur: La Vendée et au-​delà” in Biard and Leuwers, Visages de la Terreur, 155–​65. Other exaggerations included, Georges-​ Victor Vasselin, Mémorial révolutionnaire de la Convention, ou, Histoire des révolutions de France, depuis le 20 septembre 1792 jusqu’au 26 octobre 1795, 4 vols. (Paris: Mallio et Colas, an V–​1797), 3: 246, which calculated that two million Frenchmen had been imprisoned and that 500,000 had died violently.

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established; the proconsulate introduced; all sentiments of nature stifled;  .  .  .  fifty thousand bastilles stuffed with so-​called prisoners of state;  .  .  .  one hundred thousand victims executed, struck down or submerged; three hundred thousand defenders of the Convention’s unity proclaimed outlaws at the stroke of a pen; six hundred thousand true republicans forced to emigrate; millions of families, widows, orphans, drowned in their tears; entire departments put to the sword and consumed by flames, vast regions providing no harvest other than bones and brambles; the elderly massacred and burned in their beds of pain; children slaughtered at the maternal breast; virginity violated even in the arms of death; monsters of the ocean fattened on human flesh; the Loire rolling more corpses than stones; the Rhône and Saône changed to rivers of blood; the Vaucluse a fountain of tears; Nantes a tomb; Paris, Arras, Bordeaux, and Strasbourg become butcheries; Lyon in ruins, the Midi a desert, and all of France a vast theater of horrors, pillage and murder (emphasis added).”51 Isnard’s statistics were utterly impossible to verify, but the French Revolution was helping to propagate a statistical way of thinking and, thus, his inflated rhetoric may not have discredited his inflated totals. Embedded as they were in one of the most vivid and comprehensive Thermidorian descriptions of the “Terror,” such numbers may have been particularly compelling. Even if contemporary publicists overstated the human toll inflicted by the regime of 1793–​94, Thermidorian efforts to define and disavow the “system of terror” conferred the status of victim on a very large number of people. As noted earlier, Jeffrey Alexander has made the ability to identify the perpetrators of mass violence and respond to the needs of its victims important components of his definition of a collective trauma. The Thermidorian Convention’s struggles to determine culpability 51.  Proscription d’Isnard (Paris, Frimaire Year III), 41–​43; Moniteur, xxiii. 618 (issue of 18 Ventôse III).

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for the excesses of Year II and its clumsy efforts to identify and punish perpetrators are well known and central to the political narrative of the period. Interwoven with this struggle, however, was another, largely unexplored, narrative about the Thermidorians’ handling of victims.52 The flood of publications that revealed atrocities and recounted tragedies forced the government to respond to the suffering of victims. This proved particularly difficult in the circumstances of Year III. Just who counted as true victims of the Robespierrist regime was not easy to determine. Many of those subjected to harsh measures had helped to precipitate the crisis of 1793 by openly resisting the republic (refractory priests, counterrevolutionary royalists, and Vendéans); others manifestly declined to support the fledgling republic in its time of greatest need (constitutional royalists and émigrés); and yet others hoped to establish a revolutionary republic, but disagreed—​sometimes violently—​over who should do it or how it should be done (Girondins, Hébertists, Dantonists). The distinctions that needed to be made between these disparate groups, though often difficult, appeared in danger of disappearing during the first six months of 1795, especially during debates over annulling verdicts, restoring property, and rehabilitating reputations. A major contribution to the debate over how to deal with victims of the Terror came from the abbé André Morellet, a well-​known philosophe, when he published Le cri des familles in late 1794. His wildly successful pamphlet began with a rather expansive definition of victims, one which arose from a typically Thermidorian version of the Terror. He claimed that “Frenchmen had shuddered under an oppression for which history offered no parallel” and went on to describe “the shooters and drowners of Lyon and Nantes, the crazed and ferocious men, the Robespierres, the Carriers, etc., who for so long had made France a prison and a tomb.”53 Morellet’s pamphlet implied that almost anyone who had been punished 52. For a rare exception, see Ronen Steinberg, “Reckoning with the Terror: Retribution, Redress, and Remembrance in Post-​Revolutionary France,” in David Andress, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014), 487–​502. 53. Le cri des familles, ou Discussion d’une motion faite à la Convention nationale . . . relative­ ment à la révision des jugemens des tribunaux révolutionnaires (Paris, 1794). On the success

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during this terrible period was perforce a victim of injustice. Therefore, the Convention needed to rectify the wrongs of the previous regime by returning seized property, especially to families whose heads of household had been executed. As one would expect from an aging philosophe, Morellet made his case logically and rationally, referencing the notorious judicial travesties of Calas and Sirven during the Enlightenment. But it would take more than reason and precedent to convince the Convention to act. The case for compensating victims required a particularly Thermidorian blend of politics, justice, and emotions. This combination appeared in full force in March 1795 when François-​ Antoine de Boissy d’Anglas, a rising paragon of Thermidorian morality, gave one of the most impassioned speeches ever heard in the National Convention. Although Boissy d’Anglas based it on Morellet’s arguments, he added four noteworthy issues of his own—​personal responsibility, moral conscience, social reputation, and empathy for others. The speech rested on two interlocking Thermidorian claims, one inculpatory and the other exculpatory:  1) that most of the violence perpetrated by organs of the revolutionary government during 1793–​94 had been criminal; and 2) the bulk of deputies in the Convention, like himself, had acquiesced to these extreme measures due to a constant threat of violence hanging over them. But times had changed. He and his fellow deputies may not have been able to prevent “the imprisonments, the despoliations, the massacres without number and all the injustices of which we were the witnesses and the victims,” Boissy stated, but since 9 Thermidor “our responsibility has become total.” Boissy d’Anglas made this new moral responsibility personal by calling on deputies to confront their individual consciences. Moreover, unless he and his fellow deputies acted to rectify the injustices of Year II, they would be held responsible for them; therefore, their reputations hung in the balance. “France, Europe, and posterity will demand a most rigorous account of all the bad we did not prevent and the good we did not do.” Even

of this pamphlet, see Jean-​Pierre Guicciardi, ed., Mémoires de l’abbé Morellet de l’Académie française sur le dix-​huitième siècle et sur la Révolution (Paris:  Mercure de France, 1988 [original 1821]), 399–​400.

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the dead were present in the chamber, judging them and asking for recompense for lost loved ones. “Legislators, let us do our duty: we cannot revive those struck down by crime, but let us at least console their spirits which, at this very moment, follow us, surround us, beseech us, and float about this place.” Consoling the spirits of the dead meant returning property to their families, an act that would restore the reputation of the Conventionnels. Boissy d’Anglas’ speech combined the ethics of justice and the duty of character with the emotions of compassion. He claimed a consensus on seeing the verdicts of the Revolutionary Tribunal as “judicial murders” and the concurrent seizures of property as “thefts [that] plunged one hundred thousand innocent families into misery.” “The cry of these families strike our ears, their mourning saddens our faces, their tears pierce our hearts.” The “painful suffering” and “mortal anxieties” that the deputies had themselves felt during the previous regime ought to make them all the more sensitive and virtuous. If deputies were truly sensitive, they would be moved by the suffering of victims and act to alleviate it. “What! Their wives, their children watched them die, and for a year they have been bathed in tears, plunged into the worst misery—their pain should disarm us!” Put in this light, compassion for the human suffering caused by the Terror ought to overcome any political arguments against annulling verdicts and compensating victims. Contemporaries who heard or read Boissy d’Anglas’ speech would have recognized his appeal to empathy and compassion as a return to the moral aesthetics of Enlightenment sensibility and public expressions of “fellow feeling.” This was a striking repudiation of 1793–​94 when true patriots were repeatedly called upon to overcome their natural feelings. Various scholars have explored the revolutionaries’ efforts to manipulate the grammar of sensibility or sentimentalism, the vocabulary of which was suffering, innocence, virtue, pity, and sympathy, contrasted with persecution, villainy, cruelty, and callousness.54 The most obvious manifestation

54. David Denby, Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–​1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 154. See also, Cecilia Feilla, The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

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of sensibility was the unabashed shedding of tears, especially by men in public. Several such events marked the Revolution, notably at moments of tension when revolutionaries hoped to overcome factional conflict.55 Such events did not, however, occur during the prolonged crisis of 1793–​94, when the factions were more likely to shed blood than tears. Nonetheless, it is a mistake to conclude that the Terror did irreparable harm to the moral aesthetics of sensibility or the power of sentimentalism.56 Rather, it was the complicated developments of the Thermidorian Convention, especially its responses to the atrocities and tragedies of 1793–​94, that ultimately most blunted the affective power of sentimentalism. Jacobins repeatedly used the sentimental rhetoric of intense feelings, referring frequently to the heart as a natural source of truth and virtue. These common rhetorical flourishes have led scholars to conclude that sentimentalism achieved a form of apotheosis during the Terror.57 However, the Jacobins’ use of sentimental language can be misleading. What appear as efforts to evoke strong emotion, as was common in the idiom of sensibilité, were either attempts to foster indignation and inspire revolutionary élan, or, rather ironically, part of Jacobin efforts actually to subvert the sentimentalist emphasis on human fellow-​feeling. As a political regime that relied on generating unusual levels of fear—​though not ubiquitous terror—​in order to govern effectively, the Revolutionary Government of 1793–​94 faced severe challenges in overcoming the prevailing emotional regime of the late eighteenth century in which the pathos of sentimentalism played such a large role. William Reddy has explored this challenge with great aplomb, but not without adding some confusion

55. On the tension between sensibility and revolutionary violence, see Pierre Trahard, La sensibilité révolutionnaire (1789–​1794) (Paris:  Boivin, 1936); Denby, Sentimental Narrative, esp.  139–​65; and Anne Vincent-​Buffault, Histoire des larmes XVIIIe—​XIXe siècle (Marseille: Rivages, 1986), 84–​102. Sophie Rosenfeld, “Thinking about Feeling, 1789–​1799,” French Historical Studies 32 (2009): 697–​706, surveys research on emotions during the French Revolution. 56. Denby, Sentimental Narrative, 3, explicitly makes this claim. 57. This conclusion may have been drawn from contemporary critics of the Revolution who “saw [the Terror] as the result of artificial and ultimately inhumane sensibility exalted throughout the century.” Coudreuse, Gout des larmes, 6.

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as well. He describes the “quasi-​official Jacobin brand of sentimentalism” as an attempt “to transform a series of sudden, intense emotions . . . into a veritable system of government.” During the years of increasing strength, leading Jacobins used the sentimentalist idiom to depict certain groups, such as mutineers at Nancy and patriots at Avignon, as martyrs to counterrevolutionary conspiracy.58 Once they attained power, however, Jacobin efforts to manipulate the central logic of sensibility required asserting the superior woes of “the people,” or even better, the needs of all “humanity,” over the suffering of actual individuals.59 As a result, Jacobin rhetoric turned away from pity, sympathy, or compassion, which were the very heart of sentimentalism.60 In fact, as Reddy himself notes, Jacobins struggled against “false pity,” the sort of feeling that would spare the life of a convicted aristocrat, refractory priest, or even wayward fellow revolutionary. Jacobin discourse was not devoid of expressions of compassion. This was especially true in Jacobin discourse, which sought to manipulate the central logic of sensibility by asserting the superior woes of “the people,” or even better, the needs of all “humanity,” over the suffering of actual individuals. Likewise, natural sensibility was to be transformed into passionate love and courageous self-​sacrifice for the causes of liberty and equality; however, these objectives could only be secured by ruthlessly destroying the enemies of the republic. Therefore, far from truly rooting their actions in the sentimentalism of the age, the Jacobins found it better to cultivate stoicism and the civic virtue of antique republicanism.61 58. On sentimentalist elements in the Jacobins’ revolutionary rhetoric up to 1792, see David Andress, “Living the Revolutionary Melodrama:  Robespierre’s Sensibility and the Creation of Political Commitment in the French Revolution” Representations 114 (Spring 2011):  103–​28. Andress notes that sentimentalist rhetoric enabled Robespierre to turn the people into a “collective individual” and himself into a “heroic victim,” thereby creating the sentimentalist basis for fusing himself (or better his revolutionary “self ”) with the people and its suffering. 59. Bara and Viala, both young boys elevated to the status of republican martyrs, were exceptions that confirmed the rule. 60. Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medecine of Eighteenth-​Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 2–​3. 61. David A. Bell, Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1650–​1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 154–​59, suggests that natural impulses had to be subordinated to the demands of republican citizenship.

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In doing so, they merely borrowed elements of the prevailing sentimentalist idiom as a means to make a transition away from genuine emotional sensitivity and toward a severe secular ideology. A more accurate summary of the Jacobins’ attitudes toward sentimentalism, therefore, would be this contemporary statement: “it is necessary to banish sensitivity, because, in times of revolution, it pushes the soul into spinelessness; to banish pity, because it saps courage; to banish philanthropy, because it hinders action.” Joseph Fouché, one of the most ruthless agents of the Revolutionary Government, put the Jacobins’ view even more succinctly: “pity and sensitivity are crimes of lèse-​liberté.”62 What could be clearer? The essence of the Terror contradicted the essence of sentimentalism. In contrast, the Thermidorians’ deployment of the sentimental idiom was far more straightforward and compelling. For that reason, the rhetoric of sensibility and sentimentalism experienced an especially rich flowering during Year III. In other words, Reddy’s claim that the sentimentalist idiom had begun to be erased “almost immediately after Thermidor” is clearly wrong.63 In fact, as the speech by Boissy d’Anglas in March 1795 illustrates, sensibility continued to shape France’s political culture well after Thermidor. Boissy d’Anglas’ virtuoso performance had wrapped Morellet’s carefully reasoned arguments in a brilliant rhetoric that blended ethics and empathy. These features also appeared together in the many petitions sent to the Convention asking it to rectify judicial errors and excesses committed since the spring of 1793.64 Given that narrative texts had been especially influential in generating the culture of sensibility and sentimentalism during the late eighteenth century, it is not surprising that petitioners who sought to rectify what they claimed to be gross injustices turned to the themes and rhetoric of sentimentalism to make their cases.

62. Both quotations are from Trahard, Sensibilité révolutionnaire, 84–​85. Martin, France abimée, 165–​74, also provides examples of revolutionaries suppressing displays of pity or compassion. 63. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 208. 64. On the Convention’s procedural responses to these petitions, see Jean-​Louis Halpérin, “Les décrets d’annulation des jugements sous la Convention” in Michelle Vovelle, ed., La Révolution et l’ordre juridique privé: rationalité ou scandale? (Orléans: CNRS, 1988): 457–​68.

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In so doing, they found themselves formulating their accounts in ways that mirrored fictional texts that had been designed to “represent, repeat, and celebrate the act of being moved.”65 Petitioners invoked an array of personal, emotional, and moral considerations that went far beyond matters of law. Thus, by 1795, pathos again took the stage, only not as fiction, but as a powerful reality. Individuals once persecuted as “suspects” naturally wove prevailing Thermidorian themes into their petitions for rectification. Most commonly, this involved asserting that they were victims of the “appalling system of terror,” or the “tyranny of Robespierre,” or, equally common, of his local “henchmen” or “our tyrants.” Furthermore, authors frequently emphasized the profound emotional impact of being a suspect or spending time in prison. A former parlementaire remarked that the law that proscribed him “caused the birth of despair in his heart,” which was only later replaced by “joy at escaping the decemviral inquisition.”66 The elaborate expressions of emotional suffering included in many petitions invoked the sensibilité that was expected of readers at the time. Note the lengthy petition written on behalf of relatives of those condemned at Bordeaux, dozens of whom signed explicitly as widows or orphans: “Oh, citizens, forgive our excessive pain, our despair; return us to our fatherland, return us to ourselves, in the name of humanity, in the name of justice, for the glory of the French nation, for your glory . . . authorize the revision of verdicts for Frenchmen unjustly condemned.”67 This petition then took on a censorious tone that derived from a powerful and widely shared sense that the victims of the Terror were more than suffering supplicants; they occupied the moral high ground, could expect lawmakers to be moved by their situation, and insisted on an appropriate response. Here is where pathos made its greatest demands on politics. Despite the rising tide of petitions, the debate about annulling verdicts and compensating victims dragged on for months. Government action 65. Denby, Sentimental Narrative, 4. 66. AN D III 106, letter from J.-​L.-​A. Juin, 1 Vendémiaire IV. 67. AN D III 99, d. 1.

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depended on distinguishing between counterrevolutionary conspirators rightly condemned and innocent victims of a horrible tyranny. Boissy d’Anglas had claimed that among “the innumerable mass of dead . . . very few are guilty,” which meant that adopting a policy of restitution toward the “unprecedented mass of innocent victims” was simply expiation for a criminal regime, even if it inevitably restored fortunes to “some families of the guilty.”68 This position was too extreme for most lawmakers at the time. It took a further shift in the political climate to compel them to act decisively on matters of rehabilitation and restitution. Two failed sans-​culottes uprisings in Paris in the spring of 1795 encouraged the Convention greatly to expand the range of men held responsible for the “system of terror.” Following the events of 12–​13 Germinal III (April 1795), when an armed demonstration threatened the seat of government, the Convention ordered a general disarmament of all so-​ called “terrorists,” that is men known “to have participated in the horrors committed under the tyranny that preceded [9 Thermidor].”69 This vague language provided legal cover for a general settling of scores at the local level. The trend toward persecuting revolutionary militants was further encouraged by the failed insurrection of 1–​2 Prairial (June 1795). Thereafter, the Convention ordered the arrest and imprisonment of servitors of the former regime, especially members of surveillance committees and revolutionary commissions. This law led to the arrest of some thirty thousand Jacobin agents and officials.70 Such an approach made individuals politically, morally, and even juridically responsible for actions that had usually been taken collectively. It also automatically cast a pall of presumed guilt over their actions during Year II, thereby further justifying vigilante violence against erstwhile patriots now dubbed “terrorists.” Taking these major steps toward defining the supposed perpetrators of the Terror was matched by a gradual expansion of the Convention’s 68. Moniteur, xxiv. 24 (30 Ventôse III). 69. Moniteur, xxiv. 190 (21 Germinal III). 70.  Albert Mathiez, After Robespierre:  The Thermidorian Reaction, trans. by C. A. Philips (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965), 178–​80, 220.

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efforts to delineate and then compensate their victims. Various laws adopted in the first half of 1795 rehabilitated tens of thousands of people who had emigrated or been subjected to revolutionary justice during 1793–​94, notably everyone who participated in the Federalist revolts. This combination of laws served to crystalize a semi-​official Thermidorian distinction between who should be classed as victims and who should be classed as perpetrators of the “Reign of Terror.” Such distinctions were hardly crystal clear, however. Above all, it became extraordinarily difficult to apply retributive justice in a way that could effectively pardon error and punish crime.71 Furthermore, the process of parsing victims and perpetrators took place in a thickening atmosphere of politicized pathos in which public mourning and commemoration of the dead became the springboard for popular vengeance.72 Thus, the Convention’s efforts to identify and deal with both perpetrators and victims of the Terror served to legitimize the growing trend toward vengeance in the provinces. As the revelations of atrocities grew more grizzly, as the number of prison accounts multiplied, and as the tide of petitions rose, public attitudes moved beyond pity and compassion to embrace vigilante violence. Thus, during the spring and summer of 1795, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between the execution of avowed counterrevolutionaries who had resisted the republic in the name of God and King, and largely innocent victims condemned merely for being aristocrats, tax farmers, or priests—​or somehow inappropriately revolutionary. For example, the leaders of Lyon in the spring of 1795 vaunted everyone who had defended the city during the siege of 1793 as champions of revolutionary liberty, including advocates of monarchy.73 Speeches in the Convention and before local assemblies, newspapers, and pamphlets circulated nationally and

71.  Howard G. Brown, “Robespierre’s Tail:  The Possibilities of Justice After Thermidor” Canadian Journal of History (2010): 503–​35, describes the complexities of this process. 72. For examples of funereal commemorations that provoked calls for vengeance, see Alphonse Balleydier, Histoire politique et militaire du peuple de Lyon, 3 vols. (Lyon: L. Curmer, 1845–​46), 3:135–​43; and Le Gallo, “L’Affaire Bédoin,” 310. 73. Journal de Lyon.

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regionally, and handbills and broadsides plastered on walls around the country, repeatedly amalgamated various episodes of 1793–​94 into a single Terror, all of whose victims appeared increasingly innocent. As the Thermidorians struggled to turn their version of the Terror into a set of laws that would deal with both perpetrators and victims, they soon became aware that the republic itself was increasingly at risk. A gen­ eral collapse of state authority at the national level and intense factional struggles at the local level fueled renewed political violence. As officials of the Revolutionary Government around the country began to lose their grip on the populace, their opponents and surviving victims dubbed them “terrorists” and began hunting them down. The political trends and propaganda efforts of 1795 served to justify a wave of revenge killings in areas where revolt and repression had been worst in 1793.74 A series of spectacular prison massacres and prisoner ambushes, as well as hundreds of individual lynchings and isolated murders, swept the Rhône valley and the Mediterranean coast. Some two thousand individuals associated with the reign of Terror in the region died in this prolonged surge of vengeance.75 At the same time, in Western France, a widespread guerrilla struggle known as chouannerie emerged in the wake of the depredations of the Vendée civil war. Numerous small chouan bands used surprise assaults, kidnappings, and assassination to retaliate against agents of the republic who had assisted with the repression of Year II. In both the south and west, the popular violence of 1795 and beyond was highly local in purpose and content. Most of the attacks on Jacobins came from people who knew them personally and who sought revenge on behalf of their family or community.76 Local authorities with a Thermidorian perspective justified revenge killings as the natural fruit of grief and emotional trauma. After a mob broke into the prisons at 74.  Bronislaw Baczko, “Une passion thermidorienne:  la revanche” in his Politiques de la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 165–​338. 75.  Michel Vovelle, “Massacreurs et massacrés:  Aspects sociaux de la contre-​révolution en Provence après Thermidor” in François Lebrun and Roger Dupuy, eds., Les résistances à la Révolution (Paris: Imago, 1987), 141–​50. 76.  Colin Lucas, “Themes in Southern Violence after 9 Thermidor” in Colin Lucas and Gwynne Lewis, eds., Beyond the Terror. Essays in French Regional and Social History, 1794-​1815

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Lyon and massacred a hundred Jacobins, the municipal authorities composed an address to “the French people and the National Convention” in which they explained the slaughter as a spontaneous outburst of popular fury. The address is a model of Thermidorian pathos that both insulted the recently murdered and almost sympathized with the killers: “It will not be the smallest crime of these monsters [the dead Jacobins] to have forced virtue to appear cruel for a moment. . . . The nation and the law were powerless against nature’s impetuous fervor, and it was by giving itself over to sobs of despair and tears of sorrow that a people, misguided by its excessive misfortunes and its own sensibility, committed these fearsome acts of vengeance.”77 Clearly the magistrates believed that retributive justice, even if promptly and efficiently delivered, would have been insufficient balm to heal the emotional wounds of their fellow lyonnnais. As the prison massacres of the Midi demonstrate, the Convention’s orders first to discredit through surveillance, then to disarm, and finally to arrest former agents of the Revolutionary Government exacerbated the vigilante violence directed against them. As a result, whole new categories of victims emerged from the turmoil of Year III. A  sense of profound victimization now spread to include perpetrators of the revolutionary violence of 1793–​94, men who had acted out of “an excessive zeal and blind rage for liberty,” as it was later put.78 With thousands of Jacobin functionaries languishing in local jails around the country, it is not surprising that the Convention began to receive petitions from documented “perpetrators” who also claimed to be the “victims” of injustice. The petition from Henry Maury, a battalion commander in the Army of the Pyrenees, illustrates the continued use of the sentimental idiom by an official “terrorist” to describe his predicament. Maury explains that, after (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); D. M. G. Sutherland, The Chouans: The Social Origins of Popular Counter-​Revolution in Upper Brittany, 1770-​1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Murder in Aubagne: Lynching, Law and Justice during the French Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 77. Quoted in Baczko, “Une passion thermidorienne,” 226. 78. Camus in Council of 500 on 15 Floréal IV (4 May 1796), Le Moniteur, an IV, 919.

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having been arrested and imprisoned on the orders of a Thermidorian representative on mission, he has been left “to groan in irons for four months for mistakes in which my heart took no part; my ordeal comes from having been a member of an Extraordinary [Military] Commission, and this ordeal, I say with all the sincerity in my soul, has as its cause the happiness of humanity, because in the terrible functions that I performed during a period of two months, I had the satisfaction of having contributed to saving a host of innocents, whom personal hatred and vengeance had sent before us with all the appearance of the greatest crimes (emphasis added).”79 Other petitioners adopted similar language. They also sought to distinguish themselves from true villains of the Terror. Pierre Dalbarade, who boasted of having led the army to victory in Spain through his expertise as a mountain guide, asserted that had done nothing “for which he could reproach himself ” while serving on a military commission during Year II. On the contrary, like Maury, he claimed to have helped free many innocent people and insisted that his extraordinary commission should not be compared to the one at Orange and several others “which had committed horrors unworthy of republicans.”80 For our purposes, it does not matter whether either Maury or Dalbarade, both successful officers in the republic’s armies, deserved to be punished for their part in the domestic repression carried out in Southern France in Year II. But it is worth emphasizing that they, too, had spent months in prison treated as suspects who endangered the republic and, therefore, whose fate—​as well as personal reputations—​hung in the balance. Moreover, they, too, framed their experiences in sentimentalist terms: despite their patriotic service, pure hearts, virtuous intentions, and services to humanity, they had suffered personal misfortune they did not deserve. It should be clear by now that the Terror had hardly exhausted the sentimentalist idiom. On the contrary, it was a powerful structuring force in the most quintessentially Thermidorian discourses of Year III. The 79. AN D III 94, d. 6. Note that Maury included a copy of an early certificate of civic conduct and contemporary attestations from the other officers in his battalion. 80. Ibid.

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proliferation of pathos in the accounts of atrocities and tragedies that poured off the presses helped to turn largely localized experiences of violence and repression into a more intense collective trauma that brought France together as a nation. Such accounts also turned the political tide against the Jacobins both inside and outside the Convention. By the summer of 1795, the category of “innocent victims of the Terror” had expanded massively, encompassing most people who had been subjected to revolutionary judicial procedures and all manner of émigrés who had fled France as part of the “Federalist” revolts. Thanks to the renewed power of sentimentalist rhetoric, such as Boissy d’Anglas employed in his speech of March 1795, the Thermidorian Convention committed itself to restoring victims’ property and, in broad terms, rehabilitating their reputations. Identifying victims and defining their rights was one side of a coin; the other side was identifying perpetrators and prescribing their punishment. This proved more difficult. The trials and executions of high-​profile agents of the Revolutionary Government, such as Carrier, Fouquier-​Tinville, and Le Bon; the deportation of a few “great guilty” such as Collot d’Herbois; as well as the summary hearing and execution of six Montagnard deputies held responsible for the Prairial insurrection, set the tone for yet more retributive justice. The Convention, through a series of laws passed between November 1794 and July 1795, had come to define tens of thousands of former servitors of the Revolutionary Government as “terrorists,” many of whom found themselves in prison by the summer of 1795. Such laws seemed to encourage, if not to legitimize, forms of “popular justice” undertaken by vigilantes, especially in the south and west. The sweeping nature of the anti-​terrorist laws, as well as the sporadic violence and outright massacres they encouraged, combined to turn erstwhile perpetrators into new kinds of victims. Not surprisingly, they too, deployed the sentimentalist idiom to restore their reputations, regain their freedom, and gain the protection of the law. Thus, the Terror was not the apotheosis of sentimentalism. Rather, it was a period of confusion and open assault on the central aspect of sensibility, pity and compassion for others. These sentiments returned in the Thermidorian period (literally with a vengeance), which led to a further

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expansion of categories of victim. The Convention had already made various legal provisions for victims that restored property to them or their families and in the process served to rehabilitate victims’ reputations. Petitions to the Convention illustrate the extent to which the Thermidorian discourse on the atrocities of the Terror and the sentimentalist idiom that accompanied them had become framing devices for personal narratives of tragedy and victimization. However, former servitors of the Revolutionary Government also became adept at deploying the sentimentalist idiom associated with victims because the Convention’s legislation directed at perpetrators (generally dubbed “terrorists”) was too broad (that is, it provided no mechanism to distinguish errors from crime) and because it encouraged “popular justice” in the form of lynchings and massacres. The Convention failed to establish an effective form of retributive justice for the Terror and so, threatened with a rising tide of royalism, it ended its legislative existence on 4 Brumaire IV with an amnesty for all “acts related to the revolution.” The amnesty put paid to its prolonged efforts to create a clear distinction between victims and perpetrators. In fact, a law adopted the previous day (3 Brumaire IV), effectively excluded substantial numbers of would-​be victims of the Terror (émigrés and refractory priests) from the category of true victims (so to speak). Moreover, neither the Directory nor the populace fully accepted the amnesty, and continued to ostracize and persecute many former “terrorists.”81 By the time of the amnesty in November 1795, so many people, with such a wide range of experiences and attitudes toward the Revolution, had turned to the sentimentalist idiom, that its political potential had become largely exhausted. Some of this resulted from the near banality of human suffering by this point in the Revolution. Charlotte Biggs, an English lady who had spent more than a year in prison at Amiens, noted in mid-​ June 1795, “Nothing since our arrival at Paris has seemed more strange than the eagerness with which every one recounts some atrocity, either committed or suffered by his fellow-​citizens; and all seem to conclude, that the guilt or shame of these scenes is so divided by being general, that 81. For most of this paragraph, see Brown, “Robespierre’s Tail.”

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no share of either attaches to any individual.”82 By adopting the amnesty, the Convention abandoned any effort to choose between actual crimes and circumstantial errors of judgment, and thereby prolonged the difficulty of working through the collective trauma known as the Terror. The amnesty of 4 Brumaire IV may have blunted the political force of the sentimentalist idiom, but it did not end the national reckoning with revolutionary violence during the Convention. The experience of violence during the French Revolution was documented in ways that paid particular attention to the fate of individuals as part of trying to capture the full trauma of the period. In 1796, Louis-​Marie Prudhomme published his Dictionnaire des individus envoyés à la mort . . . pendant la Révolution, which contained the individual names, occupations, and dates of death of 13,863 judicial victims of the French Revolution. This was not a wildly inaccurate tally, that is until he added greatly inflated estimates of the number killed in civil strife (900,000) and foreign war (over 1 million), as well as the number of people the Revolution had terrorized into committing suicide (4,700), the number of women it killed by inducing premature childbirth (3,400), and the number of people driven insane out of fear and grief (1,500)—​that is, trauma. When Prudhomme republished the Dictionnaire as part of his six-​volume Histoire générale et impartiale des erreurs, des fautes et des crimes commis pendant la Révolution française in 1797, he highlighted the personal experiences of revolutionary victims by including hundreds of vividly written anecdotes, many hastily adapted from sources printed in Year III. Some of his claims were clearly exaggerated—​such as the tanning of human skin for use as clothing—​but readers did not know better and would have been captivated by his powerfully emotive writing. Furthermore, a number of tables and printed images formally organized the many atrocities and acts of injustice into a compendium of individual tragedies that again appeared as a great collective trauma.83 Prudhomme’s overall approach is captured well in the crowded foldout print and its accompanying key in volume 1 (Figure 7.4). As this image 82. A residence in France, 440. 83. See Joseph Zizek, “‘Plume de fer’: Louis-​Marie Prudhomme Writes the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 26 (2003): 619–​60.

Figure 7.4:  “Tableau of some of the Crimes committed during the Revolution and especially under the National Convention.” Anonymous engraving from Louis-​Marie Prudhomme, Histoire générale et impartiale des erreurs, des fautes et des crimes commis pendant la Révolution française, 6 vols. (Paris, 1797), vol. 1 frontispiece. Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University.

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shows, Prudhomme knew how to combine individual suffering with mass slaughter to obtain maximum emotional impact. Compare the image of the breastfeeding baby being ripped from its mother’s bosom before she was sent to the guillotine with the mass of people in tumbrels on the way to be executed. But Prudhomme was not an anti-​revolutionary. In fact, he had been a successful revolutionary journalist during the early 1790s and was reviving his career by denouncing the obvious dangers of political violence. As a result, Prudhomme’s collection of verbal and pictorial representations of atrocities was moderately ecumenical. His pictorial montage reveals how victimization spread to include those who had perpetrated the revolutionary violence of 1793–​94. Most of Prudhomme’s print is devoted to aspects of the Terror, including all of the most famous atrocities of 1793–​94:  the drownings at Nantes, the burning of Bédoin, the mass executions by cannons at Lyon, and the firing squads at Toulon. However, Prudhomme’s montage also includes several massacres of Jacobins committed by opponents of the Revolution in 1795. This reminds us that political massacres did not end with the overthrow of Robespierre. In fact, an image emerged of organized murder gangs ravaging the Midi. These were known as compagnies du Soleil in Provence and compagnies de Jésus in the Lyonnais. Though largely mythical, the widely accepted notion that such murderous organizations operated at the behest of royalist émigrés illustrates the breakdown of community and interpersonal trust that typically characterize collective trauma. To summarize then, in the years 1794 to 1797, a massive proliferation of printed descriptions and images of violence, and especially of hitherto little-​known atrocities, combined with exaggerations, an array of new discursive tropes, and a reinvigoration of sentimentalist rhetoric to magnify the social and psychological impact of the violence of 1793–​94, as well as to stretch that impact well into 1795 and beyond. On one hand, seeing the amalgamation of various sorts of “victims” into a barely differentiated mass, and, on the other hand, seeing the repeated inflation of the significance of various acts of violence, suggest a clear association between individual suffering and collective trauma. The organizing strategies, images, and tropes used to represent violence,

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whether that violence was criminal or political, collective or individual, revolutionary or anti-​revolutionary, suggests that the suffering of individuals was being successfully communicated—​and systematically exploited—​to create what amounted to a wider collective trauma experienced by many more French men and women than actually suffered serious persecution, or even profound fear, under the Revolutionary Government of 1793–​94. Whether individuals managed to keep their distance from revolutionary turbulence or found themselves caught up in it, they witnessed an “explosion of sensibility,” often experienced collectively.84 The result left most of the French feeling vulnerable and unwilling to put their trust in the institutions of the fledgling republican regime.85 Thus, the Thermidorians’ Terror as a “recollective reconstruction of events” became a collective trauma experienced at the full range of levels, from the individual, to the community, to the region, to the nation. By emphasizing the dual dynamics of perpetrators of atrocities and victims of tragedies, the Thermidorians’ version of the Terror created a national consciousness of suffering that helped to turn “peasants into Frenchmen” in ways that Eugen Weber never explored.

84. Béatrice Didier, Écrire la Révolution, 1789–​1799 (Paris: PUF, 1989), 275. 85. The elections of October 1795 had the lowest turnout of the decade (an average of 11%) and yielded thousands of local judges and administrators who offered little support to the fledgling republic. Moreover, the vast majority of municipalities failed to create a functioning National Guard until years later. Malcolm Crook, Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 131–​34; Howard G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution:  Violence, Justice and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 23–​46, 182–​85.

8

Of Revolutions and the Problem of Choice SOPHIA ROSENFELD ■

The story that opens this article is, by now, familiar in its broad outlines. It concerns the rise of commercial activity and, especially, new consumption patterns that began in the century leading up to the Age of Revolutions. Who now disputes that the appearance on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean of all kinds of desirable new goods for purchase, from tea sets to ribbons, constituted one of the major social and economic developments of this period? The purpose of this article is, however, less to draw attention to all these enticing new commodities or the uses to which they were put than it is to recast the narrative: as a tale about the relationship between economic and political choice. One path for this line of inquiry has already been laid out in good part by the eminent historians Colin Jones and Timothy Breen, writing respectively about the French and American Revolutions. Both have, in the last twenty years, constructed enticing models of revolutionary action and ambition out of what they have identified as the increasingly commonplace eighteenth-​century experience of choosing among a plethora of consumer options.1 But do they get the story right? Is this a model with 1. See Colin Jones, “The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 101, no. 1

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the explanatory power to replace or even hold its own against the rise of the bourgeoisie, the expansion of the public sphere, the realization of Enlightenment notions of liberty and equality, or any of the other grand narratives long offered to account for the novelty of the political forms that came into being in North America and France at the end of the eighteenth century? My own argument starts from the premise that Jones and Breen are, in different ways, certainly on to something important about the links between mentalité and social practice among consumers in the eighteenth-​ century Northern Atlantic world. Indeed, their claims about choice, and particularly about the symbiotic relationship between new forms of behavior and an emergent ideology centered on the positive function of these behaviors, have not been fleshed out or scrutinized to the degree they should. That is one of the goals of the present essay—​which is why I begin with an extensive account of the emergence of choice-​making as both an action increasingly required of ordinary people in their role as consumers and a growing value unto itself. However, as the second half of this essay seeks to demonstrate, when eighteenth-​century conceptualizations of all this perusing and selecting of merchandise are explored in detail and then against the backdrop of nascent forms of democratic choice, it becomes apparent that the direct political ramifications imagined by these two leading historians do not hold up. Little real continuity between the commercial and political spheres is evident either at the level of social practice or psychology. The path to our current faith in and superabundance of choice across the many domains of human existence was, in fact, immensely less straightforward or initially totalizing than either Breen or Jones suggests. It also had much less to do with the so-​called Age of Revolutions than one might instinctively (Feb. 1996): 13–​40; and Timothy Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Detailed overviews of the arguments of both texts can be found later in this essay. On the current appeal among historians of linking the realms of consumption and citizenship, see Kate Soper and Frank Trentmann, eds., Citizenship and Consumption (London:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), esp. Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann, “Civic Choices:  Retrieving Perspectives on Rationality, Consumption, and Citizenship,” 19–​33.

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think. Ultimately, though, these negative claims have positive implications not only for our understanding of the inner workings of revolutionary political culture; they also have real consequences for how we think about the relationship among markets, democracy, and choice in the present and, potentially, the way any ideology takes form. *** Let us start, then, by reviewing the standard consumption story itself, or at least a subplot that has had particular significance in the historical imagination as of late. This narrative begins with the fact that during the latter half of the seventeenth century, a novel product arrived in substantial quantities in the main cities of northwestern Europe. Eventually it found its way deep into the countryside and down the social scale as well. That commodity was cottons from the Indian subcontinent, which were often known by the generic term calicoes or indiennes. Partly the appeal of this good was its price point, especially when compared with silk. Mainly its allure stemmed from the fact that it allowed ordinary people to clothe their homes and their bodies alike in bright colors and elaborate, quasi-​ exotic patterns, many of them customized by Indian manufacturers specifically for European buyers. That, and the fact that the colors of these new fabrics also held fast in the wash.2 The so-​called “calico-​craze”—​the rising demand in the late seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries for cottons adorned with stripes, checks, or flowers that was aggressively promoted by East Indian trading companies—​soon spawned protectionist opposition almost everywhere it had made itself felt. Between the 1680s and the 1720s, state-​mandated bans on the importation, sale, purchase, even wearing of Indian cotton were imposed in much of Europe, including France and England, though

2. On cotton and textile history in a global framework, see K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–​1760 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1978); Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World. A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–​1850 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009); and Sven Beckert, The Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014).

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significantly not in their North American colonies to which it was exported. Moral arguments against the widespread adoption of these gaudy cottons abounded. So did economic arguments about the nefarious effects of the consumption of these foreign goods, the way they threatened local livelihoods in practical terms. And yet, even these bans did not really stem demand, and by the second half of the eighteenth century, the bans themselves were mainly abandoned. In the meantime, domestic European manufacturers of textiles, often working in materials other than cotton or in cotton-​linen blends, produced cloth with new patterns, not to mention new kinds of decorative accessories, at an accelerated rate, replacing Indian goods with similar products for a wide range of customers on both coasts of the Atlantic.3 This is not to say that cotton or imitations of cotton displaced in popularity all other kinds of cloth in the pre-​revolutionary era; that development belongs to a much more modern moment that we associate with industrialization and full-​blown imperialism.4 But printed, deco­ rated fabrics (more than the specific styles of goods or clothes made out of them) became the centerpiece of “fashion” in the eighteenth-​ century French and Anglo-​American worlds especially.5 Consumers

3. On the politics of cotton regulation in eighteenth-​century Europe, with an emphasis on England, see Natalie Rothstein, “The Calico Campaign of 1719–​1721,” East London Papers 7 (1964): 3–​21; and the works of Beverly Lemire: Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–​1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); “Fashioning Cottons:  Asian Trade, Domestic Industry and Consumer Demand, 1660–​1780,” in The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, vol. 1 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003), 493–​512; and ed., The British Cotton Trade, vols. 1–​4 (London:  Pickering and Chatto, 2009). 4.  On this point, see especially the revisionist account of Jon Styles, The Dress of the People:  Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-​Century England (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2007). 5.  On the idea of fashion, see Beverly Lemire, ed., The Force of Fashion in Politics and Society:  Global Perspectives from Early Modern to Contemporary Times (Farnham:  Ashgate, 2009); Joan DeJean, The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour (New  York:  Simon and Schuster, 2006); Michael Kwass, “Big Hair:  A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-​Century France,” American Historical Review (June 2006):  631–​59; and William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Empire

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prized a particular dress or quilt primarily for the quality and design of the fabric out of which it was constructed. As such, calicoes joined a growing array of other durable commodities that satisfied no essential need but were similarly valued above all for their aesthetic or decorative potential. That category included porcelain, patterned carpets, lacquered cabinets, and elaborate clocks, some imported ready to sell, some “finished” in Europe, and some out and out domestic imitations. All of these goods helped extend the category of “luxury” to ever more Western European and colonial families’ lives, at least in an aspirational way.6 What interests us here, especially, is the outsized effect these goods, and especially calico and its imitators, had on commerce—​ and more specifically, consumption—​the way they stood at the center of what Michael Kwass has recently called “a buying spree of historic proportions” with psychological as well as more obvious socioeconomic consequences for all involved.7

of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-​Century France,” Past and Present 206, no. 1 (2010): 81–​120. 6.  On the expanding market for “luxury” goods, as well as intellectual responses to it, see Christopher Berry, The Idea of Luxury:  A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1994); Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, ed., Consumers and Luxury:  Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–​1850 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1999); Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds., Luxury in the Eighteenth Century:  Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (London:  Routledge, 2003); Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005); John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue:  Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2006); and Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things:  How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-​ First (New  York:  Harper, 2016). On the social consequences of the pursuit of luxury, see Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1993), which takes the story into the nineteenth century; Daniel Roche, A History of Everyday Things:  The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–​ 1800, trans. Brian Pearce (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1997]) and The Culture of Clothing:  Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Regime, trans. Jean Birnell (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1994 [1989]); and Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–​1800 (London: Routledge, 2002). 7.  Michael Kwass, Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 2.

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Consider first the case for the supply side in this transformation of mental habits and eventually values. As is well-​known, the new fabrics, as they arrived in Europe, formed the linchpin—​initially in the biggest cities of England,8 France,9 and the Low Countries,10 and gradually in 8. On English retailing history, see H. Mui and L. H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-​ Century England (London:  Routledge, 1989); Nicholas Alexander and Gary Ahehurst, eds., The Emergence of Modern Retailing, 1750–​ 1950 (London:  Routledge, 1998); Nancy Cox, The Complete Tradesman:  A Study of Retailing, 1550–​1820 (Farnham:  Ashgate, 2000); John Benson and Laura Ugolini, eds., A Nation of Shopkeepers: Five Centuries of Retailing in Britain (London:  I. B.  Tauris, 2002); Helen Berry, “Polite Consumption:  Shopping in Eighteenth-​ Century England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series, 12 (2002): 375–​94; Kathryn Morrison, English Shops and Shopping (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Andrew Hann and Jon Stobart, “Sites of Consumption:  The Display of Goods in Provincial Shops in Eighteenth-​Century England,” Cultural and Social History 2 (2005):  165–​88; and “Shopping Streets as Social Space: Consumerism, Improvement and Leisure in an Eighteenth-​ Century Town,” Urban History 25 (1998): 3–​21; Nancy Cox and Karin Danneil, Perceptions of Retailing in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007); Jon Stobart, Andrew Hann, and Victoria Morgan, Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in the English Town, c. 1680–​ 1830 (London:  Routledge, 2007); Ian Mitchell, Tradition and Innovation in English Retailing, 1700 to 1850: Narratives of Consumption (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); and Jon Stobart, ed. Selling Textiles in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 9. On French retailing history, see Carolyn Sangentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets: The Marchands Merciers of Eighteenth-​ Century Paris (London:  Victoria and Albert Museum, 1996); Robert Fox and Anthony John Turner, eds., Luxury Trades and Consumerism in Ancien Régime Paris. Studies in the History of the Skilled Workforce (Farnham: Ashgate, 1998); Natasha Coquery, Tenir boutique à Paris au XVIIIe siècle. Luxe et demi-​luxe (Paris: Editions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2011) and ed., La Boutique et la ville:  commerces, commerçants, espaces et clientèles, XVIe–​XXe siècle (Tours: Centre d’histoire de la ville moderne et contemporaine, 2000); and Françoise Bayard, “De Quelques boutiques de marchands de tissus à Lyon et en Beaujolais aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” De la fibre à la fripe. Le textile dans la France méridionale et l’Europe méditerranéenne (XVIIe–​XXe s.), ed. Geneviève Gauignaud-​ Fontaine et al. (Montpellier: Publications de l’Université Paul-​Valéry, Montpellier 3, 1998), 429–​ 58; Jennifer Jones, Sexing ‘la Mode’: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France (London: Berg, 2004); and Joan DeJean, How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 144–​69. 10.  On Dutch retailing history, see Danielle van den Heuvel and Sheilagh Ogilvie, “Retail Development in the Consumer Revolution:  The Netherlands, c.  1670–​c. 1815,” Explorations in Economic History 50, no. 1 (2013):  69–​87; van den Heuvel, “New Products, New Sellers? Changes in the Dutch Textile Trades, c. 1650–​1750,” in Selling Textiles in the Long Eighteenth Century:  Comparative Perspectives from Western Europe, eds. Jon Stobart and Bruno Blondé (London:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 118–​ 37; and Clé Lesger, “Urban Planning, Urban Improvement and the Retail Landscape in Amsterdam, 1600–​1850,” in The Landscape of Consumption:  Shopping Streets and Cultures in Western Europe, 1600–​1900, eds. Jan Hein Furnée and C. Lesger (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 104–​24.

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smaller ones11—​of a new system of marketing and distribution. This system was coterminous with the establishment of fixed location shops, often clustered in arcades, galleries, or special shopping streets, designed purely for the business of selling, rain or shine. Such shops matter to our story because, in these interior spaces, mercers, drapers, and other dealers in textiles developed the art not only of closing the deal but, first, of displaying the options and of creating, stoking and, finally, shaping and organizing shoppers’ desires.12 In better stores, these options were increasingly arranged to dramatic, sensory effect to lure both serious customers and passersby. Fabric was hung from hooks inside shops or on the sides of entranceways in enticing folds that stretched down to the floor. It was also presented in bolts on shelves or open presses, where it could be reflected in mirrors and illuminated by candles, lamps, and sconces. It was eventually featured in the panes of glazed glass store windows, an innovation of the later eighteenth century that resulted in something like a visual menu of options from which the shopper could pick, at the same time as it encouraged more generalized acquisitiveness.13 As Daniel Defoe already put it in 1726 in his The Complete English Tradesman, “It is true, that a fine show of goods will bring customers . . . but that a fine shew of shelves and glass windows should bring customers, that was never made a rule in trade ‘til now.”14 Windows too continued to improve in 11. On Europe as a whole, see the volumes edited by Bruno Blondé with an international team of scholars: Buyers and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006); Retailers and Consumer Changes in Early Modern Europe. England, France, Italy and the Low Countries (Paris:  PUFR, 2005); and Fashioning Old and New: Changing Consumer Patterns in Western Europe, 1650–​1900 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), among others. 12. On drapers as precursors to department stores in this regard, see Claire Walsh, “Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-​Century London,” Journal of Design History 8, no. 3 (1995): 157–​76; and “Newness of the Department Store: A View from the Eighteenth Century,” in Cathedrals of Consumption:  The European Department Store, 1850–​1939, eds. Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jauman (Farnham: Ashgate, 1999), 46–​71. 13.  Hentie Louw, “Window-​Glass Making in Britain, c.  1660–​c. 1860 and its Architectural Impact,” Construction History 7 (1991): 47–​68. 14. Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, in Familiar Letters; Directing him in all the several Parts and Progressions of Trade (London, 1726), 312–​13. Even earlier, the importance

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size and luminosity and thus potential for display. And in the latter half of the eighteenth century, in larger stores in both Paris and London, fixed prices on goods sometimes appeared, ensuring yet more opportunity for consumers to make comparisons, whether between different products for sale in one space or between similar products in different shops.15 Retail drapery warehouses in England experimented with cash sales to similar effect, making financial transactions less rooted in personal exchange or reputation than when dependent entirely on credit.16 In such places, workshops were often situated just next door, close by but out of sight, so that, once purchased, finished goods could be taken away immediately but without in any way enmeshing the consumer in the system of production. Choosing increasingly became but one step in the process that led from manufacturing to acquisition and, finally, consumption, a distinctive action unto itself. Even in the considerably less populous North American colonies—​ which were, after all, initially established in a good number of cases as commercial enterprises—​ the same pattern held. In the early 1700s, according to Sarah Kemble Knight’s colonial travel diary, shops were beginning to dot the landscape, but rural customers especially had to “take what they [the merchants] bring [out to the counter] without Liberty to choose for themselves.”17 By the end of the century, shops had (at least in the case of Virginia) become the most common non-​domestic, single-​ function buildings, from urban centers all the way to the backcountry

of display in shops was emphasized by Jacques Savary in Le Parfait négociant ou instruction générale pour ce qui regard le commerce des marchandises de France et des pays étrangers (Paris, 1675); see Claire Haru Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex:  Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 187–​88. 15. On this practice, see Olivier Dautresme, “Une Boutique de luxe dans un centre commercial à la mode: l’exemple du ‘magasin d’effets précieux à prix fixe’ au Palais-​Royal à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” in La Boutique et la ville, 239–​47. 16. Styles, The Dress of the People, 171–​73. 17.  See the travel diary of Sarah Kemble Knight (1704), cited in Ann Martin Smart, Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 156.

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frontier. Merchants, in competition with each other, had also increasingly developed specialized inventories and focused on their display, setting goods out in windows and on shelves behind the ubiquitous counter, and adding heat and light to their interiors precisely so as to give consumers’ eyes and hands access to all the options available to them for keeps should they agree to pay the requisite price.18 What is more, for those who could not witness it all up close, the shop and its ethos could, in a sense, come to them. Sample books and cards displaying small examples of the available options in fabric and other commodities could be and were sent by post to retailers and shoppers alike (though such books were banned in the mid-​ 1760s in France, where they led, it was thought, to the plagiarizing of patterns).19 So too regional newspapers in France and in North America regularly ran paid announcements with long lists of exotic-​sounding goods rife for imagining in all their bounty. And trade cards of the mid-​eighteenth century frequently featured images of goods spilling out of the frame or the charms of a particular store interior. The purpose, clearly, was seduction of the customer, but also aiding that same customer in the business of choosing. For in effect, retailers became advertisers in ways that proprietors of market 18. On the growth of shops and shopping in North America, see, in addition to Smart, Buying into the World of Goods: Carole Shammas, The Pre-​Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000); Richard Bushman, “Shopping and Advertising in Colonial America,” in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 139–​46; Ann Martin, “Frontier Boys and Country Cousins: The Context for Choice in 18th-​Century Consumerism,” in Historical Anthropology and the Study of American Culture, eds. LuAnn DeCunzo and Bernard Herman (Winterthur, DE:  Winterthur Museum, 1996), 71–​102; and Christina J. Hodge, Consumerism and the Emergence of the Middle Class in Colonial America (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2014). There is also a well-​developed literature on shopkeepers as social types, including Thomas Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise:  Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). 19. On sample books, see Mark Elizabeth Burbridge, “The Bower Textile Sample Book,” Textile History 14, no. 2 (1983):  213–​21; Natalie Rothstein, ed., A Lady of Fashion:  Barbara Johnson’s Album of Fashions and Fabrics (New  York:  Norton, 1987); and Rothstein, Silk Designs of the Eighteenth Century (Boston:  Bulfinch, 1990). See also Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets, 105–​7, on national efforts to control the ownership of fabric designs and avoid knock-​ offs, including the banning of sample books.

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stalls had never been. What up-​to-​date shopkeepers tended to emphasize was range and variety and novelty, the many possibilities of toutes sortes available at every price point, for the benefit of the customer and his or her taste.20 As one eighteenth-​century merchant in the Connecticut Valley bragged rather typically, his shop contained “the most universal assortment of goods, that can be found in any store in the Commonwealth.”21 The French fashion press, starting with the Mercure galante in 1672, similarly stoked interest in competition among designs and goods, especially once illustrations were added later in the same decade. Needless to say, no one was expected to buy it all. Eighteenth-​century shopkeepers, in effect, took on a new function as agents of consumer choice.22 It is important to note, however, that the variety which sellers offered was frequently presented in “better” venues as of the curated sort, not as an unlimited number of options. As such, choice might be described as itself having happened in two stages. In both France and England, mercers and other kinds of high-​end shopkeepers took pains to suggest that they had available a wide array of “choice” textiles or objects choisi or du plus beau choix in the sense of preselected for their quality and taste in an era before brands. It was from this already-​chosen set of possibilities that customers would then be able to make their own further selections. From the beginning, those in charge of selling took on

20. On trade cards and newspaper advertising; see Maxime Berg and Helen Clifford, “Selling Consumption in the Eighteenth Century: Advertising and the Trade Card in Britain and France,” Cultural and Social History 4 (2007): 145–​70; and “Commerce and the Commodity: Graphic Display and Selling New Consumer Goods in Eighteenth-​Century England,” in Art Markets in Europe, 1400–​1800, eds. Michael North and David Ormrod (Farnham:  Ashgate, 1998), 187–​200, esp. 197–​99; Jon Stobart, “Selling (through) Politeness: Advertising Provincial Shops in Eighteenth-​Century England,” Cultural and Social History 5 (2008):  309–​28; Clemons Wischermann and Elliott Shore, Advertising and the European City. Historical Perspectives (Farnham: Ashgate, 2000); Chloe Wigston Smith, “Clothes Without Bodies: Objects, Humans and the Marketplace in the 18th Century: It Narratives and Trade Cards,” Eighteenth-​Century Fiction 23, no. 2 (2010-​11): 347–​80; and for examples, Theodore Crom, Trade Catalogues, 1542-​ 1842 (Melrose, FL:  T. R.  Crom, 1976); and Ambroise Heal, London Tradesmen’s Cards of the XVIII Century: An Account of their Origin and Use (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1968). 21. Bushman, “Shopping and Advertising in Colonial America,” 245. 22. Cox, The Complete Tradesman, 28.

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the additional job of aiding in choice-​making by creating and supplying a quality menu of options and then directing taste within it. (Today we might call this process marketing or, more technically, the building of “choice architecture.”) The practice may have begun with commercial auction houses, though historians have not, in general, accorded them much attention.23 We have a good if now largely forgotten example in the London-​based auctioneer Christopher Cock, who, in the first few decades of the eighteenth century, was among a small handful of men who were in the process of turning sales of secondhand goods into marketplaces for luxury items and a fashionable form of entertainment. From his many and generally free or low-​cost printed catalogues of objects to be sold, as well as his recurring advertisements in the London press, we can learn much about Cock’s sales techniques, not to mention the nature of his offerings. Auctions took place at set times, over a few days, in central urban locations, from Mr. Cock’s own home in the Great Piazza in Covent Garden to the former Mrs. Savage’s “India warehouse” over the New Exchange in the Strand. Interested parties were invited to viewing days, when the merchandise could be perused and appetites whetted well in advance of the actual business of bidding and buying. Cock was especially skilled at creating opportunities for potential consumers to see all the things that they could eventually decide to purchase. And at every stage, he made full use of the idea of choice at two levels. Cock insisted first upon the importance of his own function in the area of preselection. Starting in the 1720s, he routinely promised that

23. The literature on the early history of auctions includes: Robin Myers, “Sale by Auction: the Rise of Auctioneering Exemplified in the Firm of Christopher Cock, the Langfords, and Henry, John and George Robins (c. 1720–​1847),” in The Sale and Distribution of Books from 1700, eds. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1982), 126–​63; Brian Learmount, A History of the Auction (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1985), 23–​28; Cynthia Wall, “The English Auction: Narratives of Dismantlings,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 31, no. 1 (1997):  1–​25, and The Prose of Things:  Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), chap. 6; and Jeremy Warren and Adriana Turpin, eds. Auctions, Agents and Dealers:  The Mechanisms of the Art Market, 1660–​1830 (London: Wallace Collection, 2008).

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what he would have on offer to his undefined public was not only “choice books” or a “choice library” or even “the Choiceness and Scarceness of the Editions”—​all designations that can already be found in book auction catalogues from the previous century, as well as at the head of publishers’ compendiums like Choice Songs and Ayres (1673), and that Cock found ingenious ways to reuse. Our high-​end London auctioneer additionally announced that he would be displaying, variously, “choice pictures,” “choice and noble pieces of antiquities,” “a choice collection of medals in gold and silver,” and, more generally, “choice effects.”24 Other things for sale he described as “exquisite” and “valuable,” but also “curious,” “rare,” “scarce,” “matchless,” or “uncommon.” What gave his objects these powers is that they had already been selected based on the superior determinations or curatorial acumen of previous, eminent owners (now deceased or, sometimes, merely bankrupt). Left-​behind goods became not old or used or out-​of-​style, but “choice” in the sense of chosen or selected by someone, like Mr. Cock himself, with knowledge, standing, taste, and skill. But then spectators (“the curious”) and serious purchasers alike were offered a second opportunity should they show up for the actual events or even just chance upon one of Cock’s detailed catalogues for perusal. That was to use their own powers of discernment to decide among this variety of obscure or rarely seen offerings. When Cock announced the sale in 1744 of “Part of the Valuable Spanish Silks and other Effects of the St. Joachim Prize, taken by His Majesty’s Ship the Monmouth, Capt. Charles Wyndham,” attendees found themselves presented with a “Great Choice 24. See, for example, the following catalogues associated with sales held by Mr. Cock: Collection of Mr. Geminiani’s Choice Pictures (London, 1725), Rich Household Furniture: Fine Side-​Boards of Plate and Other Choice Effects (London, 1733), A Catalogue of Signor Sterbini’s Curious Collection lately brought from Rome, consisting of the greatest variety of choice and noble pieces of antiquities (London, c. 1733), A Catalogue of Mons. Beauvais’s Collection . . . [including] a choice collection of medals in gold and silver . . . and other curious effects (London, 1739), A Catalogue of the particulars of the dwelling house, coach-​house, and stable . . . of Sir Joesph Eyles, Deceas’d. Likewise, all the household and other furniture; consisting of . . . great Choice of the old fine Japan China . . . (London, 1740); A Catalogue of the Entire Library of Mrs. Katherine Bridgeman: (of Cavendish Square) deceas’d: consisting of a choice collection of books (n.l., 1743), and A Catalogue of the Entire and Choice Library of Thomas Pelha junior, Esq. (London, 1744).

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of the richest Gold and Silver Brocades,” as well as a “great Variety of Gold and Silver Lace for Petticoats and Robings, of the most beautiful Patterns” and a number of other fabrics (i.e., “taffety,” “colour’d Genoa velvet”), including those described, quite honestly, as “mildew’d,” from which to pick.25 The same went on another occasion for a “great Choice of the old fine Japan China.”26 It was obviously a sales pitch that worked. From book and art auctions in Paris, to dockside sales generated by British ships pulling into the Boston harbor, to Forster’s Linen Warehouse in central London, customers were repeatedly told by mid-​century that they would confront situations in which plentiful “choices” or “a great Choice” would be available, but also required of them.27 Of course, not all choice-​related activity came about in the eighteenth century as a result of customers capitulating to business owners’ directives. On the contrary, faced with this new array of organized goods, consumers on both sides of the Atlantic, it appears, developed their own set of behaviors and expectations. On the demand side, urban and, eventually, many rural customers learned in practice in the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not only what to do with novelties like new forms of fabric, or how to consume them, but also how to decide among them in the first place. One of the great English neologisms of the second half of the eighteenth century was the verb “to shop” or “to go a shopping,” meaning not just to buy but first to engage in the act of perusing 25. A Catalogue of Part of the Valuable Spanish Silks and Other Effects of the St. Joachim Prize, taken by His Majesty’s Ship the Monmouth, Capt. Charles Wyndam . . . which will be sold by Auction, by Mr. Cock (London, 1744), 1, 3. 26. A Catalogue of the particulars of the dwelling house, coach-​house, and stable . . . of Sir Joesph Eyles, Deceas’d. Likewise, all the household and other furniture; consisting of . . . great Choice of the old fine Japan China . . . (London, 1740). 27. For these examples, see respectively Vente d’un choix de . . .tableaux et dessins (Paris, Dec. 29, 1777) or Notice d’un choix de livres (Hotel de Bullion, Nov. 12, 1784); The Cream of All Sorts of the Best Winter Goods, just imported in the last ship from London by Albert Dennie . . . He imports the choice of goods, and has fresh supplies in every ship . . . His warehouse is upon Dyer’s Wharf [Boston] . . . (Boston, c. 1745); and the advertisement for Forster’s Linen Warehouse, promising “a great Choice of ready-​made Shirts of all Prices,” in The Public Advertiser (Feb. 14, 1764), cited by Lemaire, Fashion’s Favorite, 192. In each case, choice functions something like a synonym for the variety from which the customer can pick.

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and choosing among all those choice goods.28 Tourists’ accounts of visits to London, Bath, Paris, Philadelphia, and other leading commercial cities on both sides of the Atlantic regularly dwelled on the extraordinary range of goods available for sale, with decorative textiles high on the list, and, even more, on the physical and mental activity of selecting among them.29 So did novels, themselves a relatively new consumer product of the eighteenth century in which consumer behavior was often mined for its social and psychological effects.30 (Jane Austen, at the tail end of this period, retrospectively provides us with a window onto the ways the semi-​public activity of walking along shopping streets and putting down money for desired objects became a new arena for sociability and entertainment centered on choice-​making.31) All of this was made possible not just by the decline in 28. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the 1760s as the moment of the first appearance of this term in print. However, Samuel Johnson included the verb “to shop” in the 1756 edition of his dictionary: “To frequent shops: as, they are shopping”; see Cox and Daniel, Perceptions of Retailing in Early Modern England, 145. Online databases suggest a surge in the employment of both “to go a shopping” and “shopping” in novels and travel writing in the 1780s and ‘90s. The English term “shopping” can be found in French texts, too, starting in the mid-​19th century, though other, older terms for visiting stores continue to be used in French as well, including “courir des magasins.” 29. On German and other European tourists’ responses to commerce, see Heidrun Homburg, “German Landscapes of Consumption, 1750–​ 1850:  Perspectives of German and Foreign Travelers,” in The Landscape of Consumption, 104–​ 24; and James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–​1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). On the relationship between consumer society and the growth of cities, see Glennie and Thrift, “Modernism, Urbanism, and Modern Consumption,” Environmental Planning D: Society and Space 10, no. 4 (1992): 423–​43. 30.  Among works on consumption and the British novel, most of which also concentrate on the gendered dimension of the experience, see Elizabeth Kowaleski-​Wallace, Consuming Subjects:  Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1997); Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) and “Counter Publics: Shopping and Women’s Sociability,” in Romantic Sociability. Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–​1840, eds. G. Russell and C. Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and E. J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in 18th-​Century England:  Literature, Commerce and Luxury (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 31.  For two different approaches to choice as a theme for Austen, see Richard Handler and Daniel Segal, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), chap. 4 (“Hierarchies of Choice”); and Michael Suk-​Young Chwe, Jane Austen, Game Theorist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). Specifically on Austen’s use of shops as spaces for characters to reveal their moral character as they make judgments, see Barbara Benedict,

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prices for what would have been real luxury goods in earlier centuries, itself fueled in part by low-​paid and enslaved labor outside of Europe. It was also—​according to economic historian Jan de Vries—​spurred by greater household effort within Europe going to market labor; European families became more industrious precisely so as to be able to consume more and in new ways.32 Women also took on the added responsibility of making many of the key purchases for those households,33 whether in fashionable shops for the better-​off or among peddlers and hawkers of secondhand goods for the less affluent.34 This activity was made acceptable by its close linkage to women’s traditional roles as caretakers for their family, keepers of home and hearth. But it held at least some promise in the century before the Age of Revolution of a new form of freedom or, more specifically, independ­ ence: to make decisions and to act upon them in the public sphere. By the end of the eighteenth century, shopping for consumer goods was firmly established as more than merely a form of provisioning. It had potentially become a means to display one’s family’s taste and status (or hoped-​for status) to the exterior world; a social activity that connected one to others in new kinds of networks and forms of exchange; and an arena for asserting one’s own knowledge and preferences. It had to be done right. “The Trouble with Things: Objects and the Commodification of Sociability,” in A Companion to Jane Austen, eds. Claudia Johnson and Ciara Tuite (Chichester: Blackwell, 2009), 343–​54. 32.  See Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution:  Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 33. On shopping and gender, see, in addition to the works on the novel cited above, Jennifer Jones, “Coquettes and Grisettes: Women Buying and Selling in Ancien Regime Paris,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 25–​53; Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter. Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); and Claire Walsh, “Shops, Shopping and the Art of Decision Making in Eighteenth-​Century England,” in Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in England and North America, 1700-​1830, eds. John Styles and Amanda Vickery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 151–​77. 34.  See Laurence Fontaine, ed. Alternative Exchanges:  Second-​Hand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004); and Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme, eds. Modernity and the Second-​Hand Trade. European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700–​1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), as well as Roche, The Culture of Clothing, 344–​63.

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As such, an industry soon arose, beyond mere advertising, whose purpose it was to help one navigate the world of choice, controlling and optimizing within the range of available options. As early as the second half of the seventeenth century, guidebooks to textiles for sale in England, such as The Merchant’s Warehouse laid open: or the Plain Dealing Linnen-​ Draper shewing how to Buy all sorts of Linnen and Indian Goods . . . for all sorts of Persons, started to appear.35 What they detail is how to pick well given one’s needs and station, yes, but also how not to be deceived by faulty goods or faulty prices; how not to be seduced by luxury; how, in short, to avoid picking badly according to the social conventions of the moment. A formal set of behaviors and practices, along with new information and protocols for navigating these pathways, emerged in tandem to establish choice-​making in the consumer world as an increasingly ordinary responsibility associated with economic but also personal autonomy. *** That, at least, is an enhanced version of a now quite standard story that we regularly tell ourselves about our past. What has just been described is a phenomenon that has, for the last thirty-​five years or so, been known as the “consumer revolution” and sometimes, more specifically, as the “retail revolution.” The precise timing of this revolution, its geographical contours, the extent of its social foundations or reach across classes: these all have been subject to wide debate in more recent years. The result has been some scaling back of the original claims of the historians Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and others about the extent of a recognizable “modern” consumer culture, motivated by the emulation of one’s social betters as well as a growing sense of individual autonomy, emerging prior to the Industrial Revolution.36 Surely, the revisionists are right that many

35.  J. F., The Merchant’s Ware-​House Laid Open (London, 1696), reproduced in The British Cotton Trade, 1660–​1815, vol. 1, 209–​234. 36.  On the idea of a consumer revolution, see Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-​Century England (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1982); Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behavior and

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older consumption practices, from gift giving to frequenting fairs, endured through the eighteenth century and into the next one; that emulation was only one motivation among many; and that “revolution” is something of a misnomer for what happened in the world of buying and selling in the era of the Enlightenment.37 We might also note that the role of both formal laws and social norms, including those derived from manners, in constantly restraining the abundance of choice and creating tight parameters over who got to choose, what got chosen, and how those choices were made, has generally been underemphasized in accounts of the eighteenth century (though I have tried to draw attention to them in the preceding narrative). The larger point is that, with the passage of time since the publication in 1982 of the pathbreaking volume The Birth of Consumer Society:  The Commercialization of Eighteenth-​Century England, claims about the invention of consumerism have largely become more sober. Yet over the last two decades, the significance of this consumption-​ focused paradigm has also been expanded insofar as scholars have asked us to consider the relationship between the “consumer revolution(s)” and the “political revolutions” that seem to have followed in the same part of the world in fairly rapid succession. One mode has been to try to re-​ establish the political-​economic foundations of the Age of Revolutions, Material Culture in Britain, 1660–​1760 (London:  Routledge, 1988); John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods: Consumption and Society in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London:  Routledge, 1993); John Brewer and Ann Bermingham, eds., The Culture of Consumption:  Image, Object, Text (London:  Routledge, 1995), as well as Daniel Roche’s pioneering The Culture of Clothing and A History of Everyday Things. To historicize this turn in the scholarly literature, see Frank Trentmann, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Peter N. Stearns, “Stages of Consumerism: Recent Work on the Issues of Periodization,” Journal of Modern History 69 (Mar. 1997): 102–​17. For a recent challenge to this narrative by one of its founders, see John Brewer, “The Error of our Ways: Historians and the Birth of Consumer Society,” Cultures of Consumption Working Paper no. 12, June 2004. 37.  Another alternative is François Crouzet’s multiple revolutions:  a first in the seventeenth century centered on selling luxury and semi-​luxury goods to the upper and middle classes in the Low Countries, then England, then France; a second in the eighteenth century centered on English mass-​produced goods; and finally a third in the United States in the twentieth century; see “Some Remarks on the métiers d’art,” in Luxury Trades and Consumerism in Ancien Régime Paris, 263–​86.

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taking seriously, for example, debates about free trade or sovereign debt inside an increasingly competitive imperial world as central to the advent of revolutionary politics. Such moves might be seen as part and parcel of an effort to return economic causes and consequences to our discussions of the coming of the French and American Revolutions without resorting to the old Marxist account of the advent of capitalism and the making of a frustrated but ultimately triumphant middle class.38 Another, less prominent refrain, though, has been that what links the two kinds of revolution—​and indeed makes one a stimulus for the other—​is precisely a shared emphasis on personalized, individual choice as a form of behavior, on the one hand, and as a cultural value or disposition toward the external world, on the other. In a now quite canonical article of 1996 entitled “The Great Chain of Buying:  Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” Colin Jones begins by proposing the following characterization of France’s population on the eve of the Revolution: “By 1789, moreover, the nation—​which had, as we have seen, been fashioned from the accumulation of civically minded customers within a commercial society—​was used to making choices.” Two sentences later, he goes on to suggest that a structurally similar development was to occur shortly thereafter in the political sphere, requiring analogous skills:  “In the revolution, we might hypothesize, citizen-​ voters were 38. See, as examples, in the recent literature on the French Revolution: Kwass, Louis Flandrin and the Global Underground, but also Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce:  Globalization in the French Monarchy (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2010); Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2015); Guillaume Daudin, Commerce et prospérité: la France au XVIIIe siècle (Presses de l’université Paris-​Sorbonne, 2011); and William Sewell, “Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-​Century France” and “Connecting Capitalism to the French Revolution:  The Parisian Promenade and the Origins of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-​Century France,” Critical Historical Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 5–​46. See too the newest histories of the Age of Democratic or Atlantic Revolutions, which also tend to emphasize political economic factors: David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c.  1760–​1840 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and Willliam Max Nelson, eds., The French Revolution in Global Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); and Joseph C. Miller, The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), esp. my own article on the French Revolution.

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presented with a series of political consumer choices and were called on to evaluate the quality and the utility of the political commodities offered.” In other words, citizens were ready, even predisposed, before 1789, thanks to growing commercialism, to do what the French Revolution was to ask of them. Studying the Affiches, the advertising and news sheets that proliferated across France in the second half of the eighteenth century, Jones argues, “allow[s]‌us to grasp something of the processes by which the post-​1789 citizen had [already] been fashioned in the marketplace constructed by the prerevolutionary world of print.”39 This claim is not directly repeated in Jones’s more recent book on the era of the French Revolution, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon, of 2002. But in it the Affiches again function as a key node in a relatively new network, a community of buyers and sellers that, at odds with traditional culture, was committed to exchange on a relatively egalitarian footing. And as Jones suggests, drawing partly on the pioneering work of Daniel Roche on the rise of a commodity culture of “everyday things” during the late Old Regime, this experience prepared ordinary people, in terms of habits and outlook alike, to become actors in the French Revolutionary drama in which the political sphere would increasingly come to resemble this new economic one in terms of both its ideal form and what it asked of its members.40 Taking this argument for the late eighteenth-​century emergence of the citizen-​consumer even further, Timothy Breen has made a related case for the American Revolution. In his 2008 book entitled The Marketplace of Revolution:  How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, he emphasizes the way pre-​revolutionary consumption not only helped colonists to develop the habits of mind needed for citizenship in a republic—​namely, choice-​making centered around taste—​but also made possible the politics of boycotts, or choosing to refrain from consumer choosing, that amounted to a key form of mobilization and political 39. Jones, “The Great Chain of Buying,” 39. 40.  Jones, The Great Nation:  France from Louis XV to Napoleon (London:  Penguin, 2002), esp. 182–​84, 366–​67.

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community-​building across the North American colonies in the prelude to the war. As he puts it: “What gave the American Revolution distinctive shape was an earlier transformation of the Anglo-​American consumer marketplace . . . Suddenly, buyers voiced concerns about color and texture, about fashion and etiquette, and about making the right choices from among an expanding number of possibilities.” He then goes on to explain that, paradoxically, the “invitation to make choices from among competing brands, colors and textures—​decisions of great significance to the individual—​held within itself the potential for a new kind of collective politics.” In the buildup to the declaration of national independence, “the concept of freedom of choice was elevated into a right,” which also meant a basis for community resistance, so that a private act (consumption) became a public, political one with lasting consequences.41 For both Jones and Breen, then, the novel experience of choosing among nonessential goods on offer in the new, increasingly impersonal and horizontally networked marketplace and world of advertising had the unintended and unforeseen, but ultimately salubrious consequence of producing a transformation in the mental lives of ordinary people. That was a new enthusiasm for making selections among preselected options based on personal, interior preferences, and a new sense of self as autonomous choice-​maker to go with it that was ripe for an extension into new terrain well beyond cottons, furniture, or even books. In this version of events, consumption does not cause political revolution in any direct way. But consumption in the form of choice-​making becomes nothing less than a path to individual empowerment under the banner of citizenship and then a prelude to (and for Breen, aid in) collective sacrifice and emancipation. In other words, it helps make possible and effective the set of political practices that we still associate with democracy. But these claims also bring us back around to our original question as to whether Jones and Breen and others are right about this synergy or, at least, link. We are perhaps primed at present to be sympathetic to

41. Breen, The Marketplace Revolution, xv, xvii, and 190.

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these arguments because of the faith, so prevalent in the United States and across much of the globe today, in both expanded opportunities for choice-​making and expanded “choice menus” as paths to freedom. Choice is where our economic and our political values now seem to coincide, mutually reinforcing one another. Yet, as a few astute commentators have recently started to warn us, the well-​established scholarly trend of envisioning the eighteenth century as the birthplace of global mobility, entrepreneurship, and even the heroic, activist consumer has too easily allowed us to draw teleological connections to, and even potentially to justify, the way we live and think now.42 This remains the case even as we become more aware of the links between the rise of new forms of consumption, on the one hand, and the expansion of enslaved labor, economic dislocation, and environmental degradation, on the other. Here it is hard not to see a similar pattern. In a valuable effort to turn choice-​making into a historical variable—​a learned rather than natural practice with historical consequences—​our esteemed historians of choice have, it seems, actually helped de-​historicize and further naturalize our current way of imagining, talking about, and even acting in relation to this contemporary value. They have done so by assuming that choosing happens in a similar fashion, with similar meaning attached, across different realms of decision making and that, as a shared ideal, choice must necessarily have been built into the culture of consumerism and the culture of democratic politics alike from the get-​go. In this telling, the archetypical eighteenth-​century consumer-​citizen, born of the Atlantic retail revolution, can only have approached the market and political life, or calicoes and candidates for office, with an essentially unified sense of self 42. See Francois Furstenberg, “Atlantic History in the Neoliberal Age” (unpublished talk, 2015), and David Steigerwald, “All Hail the Republic of Choice: Consumer History as Contemporary Thought,” Journal of American History (Sept. 2006):  385–​403, on shifts in recent decades in writing on consumer culture. There is a parallel literature aimed at de-​naturalizing the idea of markets that underlies free trade ideology; see Douglas A. Irwin, Against Trade: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Mark Bevir and Frank Trentman, eds., Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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as independent decision maker. Or, to put this a bit differently, Breen and Jones have ended up giving a strawman, a being much like the rational-​ choice actor so familiar to us as the centerpiece of the social scientific imaginary of the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries, an eighteenth-​century birth. In the final part of this essay, I would like to propose that we put the business of choosing back under the microscope and throw out our prior assumptions about periodization and, indeed, both eighteenth-​century consumption and eighteenth-​ century democracy along the way. For when we examine both consumer choice and political choice together, especially in the latter part of the century, we see that not only were they non-​homologous in the ways that they operated; they also evolved in surprisingly divergent ways. That holds true whether we look to the Anglo-​American world or the French one, to the buildup to revolutionary upheaval or well into the nineteenth century. What is more, neither the economic nor the political sphere produced someone who, in the eighteenth-​century imagination, resembles the human model so central to contemporary social scientific practice: the rational consumer-​citizen, intent upon maximizing his utility and expressing his freedom through his stable, personal preference determinations in a variety of kinds of markets. The better question might actually be how and why these two initially quite disparate domains—​the world of commercial choice and the world of political choice—​ever come to resemble one another to such a degree that consumer behavior in economic terms could, by the mid-​ twentieth century, be thought of a potential model for studying political behavior. But that is a question for another day. My task is first to dispel the view of the trans-​Atlantic Age of Revolutions, as most capably and eloquently advanced by Jones and Breen, as portending any kind of synergy around choice as we understand it now. *** To make this case, let us finally look afresh at both sides of this equation—​ and not just at behavior that we think should translate into a recognizable mindset, a liberal sense of self-​as-​independent-​chooser avant la lettre.

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Instead, we need to turn our attention to how that behavior was understood in its own moment. First, consumer choice: one reason it caused so much handwringing in eighteenth-​century print culture is certainly that it seemed to upset the existing social hierarchy, allowing status potentially to be decoupled from appearance.43 There were, after all, many variants of the “what if servants find a way to purchase fine clothes” lament, all rooted in the assumption that any suggestion of imitation of one’s social betters would result in sexual and social disorder, the very kind of egalitarianism that revolution would only exacerbate. This was not an idle anxiety either; new retail conditions seemed to make this a kind of confusion a real possibility. As one French guidebook of 1715 explained to visitors, in a Parisian shop selling pre-​made clothes, “there are clothes for all sexes, all sizes, and all sorts of ranks (conditions), and one has only to choose (choisir).”44 But the other primary reason for all the reproaches is because “shopping” came increasingly to be perceived as rooted in what contemporary observers called whim or fancy and we might call fleeting desire. The anonymous author of the previously mentioned The Merchant’s Ware-​ House of 1696 assumed that more information—​about quality, price, and use value—​would necessarily lead to objectively better decisions on the part of drapers, seamstresses, and consumers alike. This is just what most classical economists still take for granted. However, the rise of patterned calicoes, along with advertising playing on their allure, moved much purchasing in the eighteenth century in what contemporaries believed to be the other direction. That is toward decisions made on the basis of subjective and unstable criteria (since the difference between the different options was usually largely aesthetic rather than practical) and toward what has fashionably been called self-​fashioning. The latter term is used to mean an effort to fit in loosely with broad cultural trends but

43. As this applied especially to calico, see Chloe Wigston Smith, “‘Calico Madams’: Servants, Consumption and the Calico Crisis,” Eighteenth-​Century Life 31, no. 2 (2007): 29–​53. 44. Sieur Louis Liger, Le Voyageur fidèle, ou le guide des étrangers dans la ville de Paris (Paris, 1715), 364.

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also to make oneself, through consumption, a distinctive representative of one’s distinctive personality, aspirations, and values, themselves often fluid depending on circumstances.45 The Mercure Galante was already reporting more than a hundred years before the outbreak of the French Revolution that “there are no more general fashions, because there are too many particular ones . . . everyone dresses according to his [or her] fantasy.”46 Moreover, we know both men and women in the middling and even to some extent the lower classes in urban areas went “a shopping” in the eighteenth century. The consumer choices of men of various backgrounds are heavily documented in day books and records, including purchases of cloth for wives and daughters to consume, and even enslaved peoples of both sexes frequented stores in rural North America. But the act of shopping was increasingly coded as feminine and leisured (a “fashionable female amusement” in the words of William Alexander, M.D., in his grandly titled The History of Women, from the earliest antiquity, to the present time47). That designation placed it a world away from male rationality, including that of most shopkeepers—​to the detriment of both women and consumer culture. This, indeed, is what many eighteenth-​century novels make clear, as even those written by women authors, for women readers, typically depict their heroine-​consumers as indecisive, easily seduced by novelty or folly, or in need of social guidance as to how to choose properly. Eighteenth-​century businesses quickly learned to cater to and, indeed, build upon this gendered epistemology. To be successful, pattern drawers and printers, according to a 1747 English guidebook, needed to have “a fruitful Fancy, to invent new Whims to

45. It is important to note that Stephen Greenblatt himself gives “self-​fashioning” a more restrictive meaning in his classic book Renaissance Self-​Fashioning:  From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 46. Le Mercure galante (July 1677), cited in Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex, 115. 47. William Alexander, M.D., The History of Women, from the earliest antiquity, to the present time (Philadelphia, 1796 [Dublin, 1779]), vol. 1, 108.

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please the changeable Foible of the Ladies  .  .  .  [and] a wild kind of Imagination, to adorn their work with a regular Confusion, fit to attract the Eye but not to please the Judgment.”48 Shopkeepers found themselves ostensibly competing with each other for women’s fickle affections too. By the start of the eighteenth century, it was already a commonplace to claim, as Bernard Mandeville did, that “In the choice of things we are more often directed by the Caprice of Fashions, and the Custom of the Age, than we are by solid Reason, or our own Understanding,” but also “the reasons some of the Fair Sex have for their choice [of shop] are often very Whimsical and kept as a great Secret.”49 That tension between choice as an opportunity for rational judgment and liberation, on the one hand, and choice as driven by unfounded desire and, consequently, a source of psychic strain, on the other, was to color most eighteenth-​century accounts of the experience of shopping itself. In the same year (1786) that Immanuel Kant insisted in his Conjectures on the Beginnings of Human History that the initial discovery of choice both opened up the freedom for people to craft their own futures and introduced unending anxiety into human history,50 the German writer Sophie von La Roche wrote breathlessly but nervously of window shopping in London. As she put it, “Behind great glass windows absolutely everything one can think of is neatly, attractively displayed and in such abundance of choice as almost to make one greedy.”51 Fanny Burney’s fictional Evelina says much the same thing: when she’s taken out “a shopping,” mercers show her

48.  R.  Campbell, The London Tradesman (1747), 115, cited in Lemaire, Fashion’s Favorite, 83. On the modification of products to suit taste, including whim, see too John Styles, “Product Innovation in Early Modern London,” Past and Present 168 (2000): 124–​69. 49. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees; Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. Part II, (London, 1729), 286, and The Fable of the Bees; Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. Part I, 3rd ed. (London, 1724), 406. 50. Immanuel Kant, “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History” [1786], in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 221–​34, esp. 224. 51.  Sophie in London, 1786, being the Diary of Sophie von La Roche, trans. Claire Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933), 87.

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so much stuff that she is “almost ashamed” not to be able to buy it all.52 Earlier in the century, the Dutch travel writer Joachim Chrisoph Nemeitz, describing all the fashionable boutiques lining the arcades in the Palais de Justice in Paris and all the inducements to visit them, noted that what was most difficult was “to choose in which boutique one wants to make one’s purchases.”53 Choosing is here a pleasure but also a burden, an occasion for a battle within oneself over greed, guilt, self-​expression, compassion, and self-​discipline, in addition to being a ritual that must be properly performed. Moreover, as early as the first decades of the eighteenth century, Mandeville and Defoe both identified the fact that the battle was not entirely internal either; the actual business of buying and selling involved a complex psychological power struggle between polite but determined adversaries. One repeat motif of novels and travel accounts of the second half of the century was the merchant taking advantage of the dazzled female consumer and robbing her, via his or sometimes her presentation of seductive goods, of more money than she had. But the other is the rise of the frequenting of shops as a social activity that involved groups of women throwing their weight around as consumers and finding pleasure by actually rejecting the game of choice, that is, endlessly looking, conversing, and browsing (as we now label it) without buying, and thereby constantly thwarting the ambitions of middlemen eager to close the deal. “Shopping, as it is called” according to our English expert on the history of women, who was at pains to distinguish this new activity from mere buying, is a process whereby “two, three, or sometimes more ladies, accompanied by their gallants, set out to make a tour through the most fashionable shops, and to look at all the most fashionable goods, without any intention of laying out one single sixpence. After a whole forenoon spent in plaguing mercers and milliners, they return home, either thoughtless of their folly,

52. Fanny Burney, Evelina: or, A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, 3rd ed. (Dublin, 1784 [orig. 1778]), 24, 25. 53.  Joachim Christoph Nemeitz, Séjour de Paris, c’est-​à-​dire, Instructions fidèles, pour les voiageurs de condition (Leiden, 1727), 595.

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or which, perhaps, is worse, exalting at the thoughts of the trouble and disturbance they have given.”54 Similarly, Louis-​Sébastien Mercier, in his great Tableau de Paris, noted that when one is visiting shops in Paris, “often times one leaves the store after a long discussion without having bought anything,” though he blamed this effect on the customer having been made “dizzy from the merchant’s babble.”55 What comes through in both accounts is that choosing was best thought of as a game requiring some measure of cunning on both sides of the counter. In popular discourse, eighteenth-​century shoppers seem to oscillate among gluttony or lack of restraint in choosing everything; choosing poorly by “over-​ valu[ing] her own Judgment as well as the Commodity she would purchase,” in Mandeville’s terms;56 and a failure to choose at all (though we know from probate inventories that an awful lot of stuff did end up in people’s homes). The larger point is that the appearance of something like an expanded menu of options and the cultivation of consumer choice, especially in the world of silks, cottons, and other textiles, does not seem to have produced anything like an ideal liberal consumer consciousness in this moment. And even if we were able to locate one archetypical consumer of the eighteenth-​century variety (a dangerous assumption, albeit one common to the scholarship on consumption), it would still seem quite hard to find enough examples to conclude that we would end up with a confident, utility-​maximizing shopper who was primed to enter the new marketplace of politics in the last quarter of the eighteenth century with this kind of hyper-​rational mindset. Turning to politics in the last years of the eighteenth century does not, however, get us closer to finding that idealized autonomous choice-​maker. Arguably, when the idea of “choice” entered the political culture of revolutionary North America or France in the last decades of the eighteenth century attached to consent and then representation, it built even less on the 54. Alexander, The History of Women, vol. 1, 108. 55. Louis-​Sébastien Mercier, Parallèle de Paris et de Londres: un inédit, ed. Claude Bruneteau and Bernard Cottret (Didier érudition, 1982), cited in Jones, Sexing la Mode, 167. 56. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees . . . Part I, 405.

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kind of individuated choosing behavior or the conceptualization of choice with which classical economists have made us familiar. Certainly the historian fails to discover a rational political actor calculating what matches his or her internal preferences or judgments and acting on that basis, as imagined by social and public choice theorists since the second half of the twentieth century. But we also do not get someone whose conception of choice seems in any way borrowed from or even parallel to the late seventeenth-​ or eighteenth-​century purchaser of calicoes, paralyzed by the plethora of options or eager to have everything he or she fancies at once. Rather, we find a marked, and indeed self-​conscious, divergence. Of course, what constitutes political choice-​making and the significance accorded to that choice in the Age of Revolutions can, as both Jones and Breen rightly suggest, be considered in multiple ways. Political choice can, in practice, refer to the many informal decisions made by ordinary people, used to thinking of themselves previously as subjects, about whether or not to place themselves in new civic roles by joining a political club, participating in a boycott, or otherwise taking matters into their own hands and then whether to do so in support of one side or the other in a very public struggle. Breen calls these decisions, when made in support of revolution, “choices for political freedom,” which might be another way of saying, choices in favor of the expansion of opportunities for choice-​ making in the future.57 We are, however, destined to come up foiled if we hope to find something in terms of either behavior or ideology resembling contemporaneous consumer choice here in this informal political realm even when the big issues at hand belong to the realm we now call political economy. The late eighteenth-​century choice to identify as a Jacobin or Patriot, for example, or to take up arms, or to wear a revolutionary cap, or to forgo tea, is better understood as belonging to the more traditional register of Hercules’s choice: to do the right and moral thing, as defined by community values, or not.58 In this binary decision making world, the only 57. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution, 151. 58.  Hercules’s Choice (between the paths of virtue and vice) was one of the most common allegories to be employed in eighteenth-​century poetry, painting, and opera. For one influential

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good option is to take the just rather than the unjust or depraved path, and virtue is what is really at stake. Certainly that was how contemporaries painted such choices in both pro-​revolutionary and counterrevolutionary camps. Neither weighing the varied options nor actualizing one’s personal taste in a bid for greater personal independence or distinction describes what revolutionary politics required French or British North American revolutionary actors to do in “choosing” to enter the collective fray either in support of or against a cause or course of action. Perhaps we stand on stronger ground, though, if we look at formal choice-​making in the case of elections, as Jones hints we should by his use of the term “citizen-​voters” in reference to revolutionary France. Tellingly, neither Jones nor Breen draws this parallel too closely. But the result of considering this pairing is nevertheless revealing. Comparison underlines just how differently in the late eighteenth-​century Atlantic world the nascent realm of political choice—​which, in theory, stayed rooted in notions of the general will or common good, and in practice, remained largely communal—​was understood from the equally burgeoning realm of consumer choice. Consider casting a vote, the key procedure by which formal political choice-​making was conceptualized and institutionalized in the Age of Revolutions in a bid to make tangible the notion of the rights of citizens to self-​determination and the sovereignty of the people. The significance of “choice” (typically, of one’s representatives rather than of specific laws or policies) does appear from time to time in the discussion of the purpose of elections in both revolutionary France and revolutionary America, though the terms duty and obligation appear more frequently.59 But more to the point, and what is more surprising, is actually how little attention was initially accorded in either context to precisely how this essential act in the rendition of the story, see The Tattler no.  97 (Nov. 22, 1709):  http://​spenserians.cath.vt.edu/​ TextRecord.php?action=GET&textsid=33786. 59.  See, for example, Considérations sur l’importance du choix des représentants de la Nation (1789); Louis-​Claude de Cresy, Aux élécteurs. Lettre sur l’attention qu’ils doivent apporter dans leur choix (1790); or A.-​A.-​C. Mossy, Adresse au people français, sur l’importance du choix des électeurs et des députés de la Convention (1792).

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demonstration of newly claimed popular sovereignty was to be instituted. The business of suffrage is almost absent from Tom Paine’s Common Sense of 1776. Ditto for the Abbé Sieyès’ 1789 What is the Third Estate?, apart from the critical discussion of the voting procedure to be used in the Estates-​General; the question of how the French National Assembly, once constructed, will represent the nation’s will is ignored. Perhaps because the idea of elections required attention to the persistence of divisiveness and disagreement and thus the fracturing of the revolutionary body politic, the manner in which future popular elections were to be held did not emerge as a key theme in the early literature of either great revolution. And in practice, in both new national contexts, radical heterogeneity remained the norm, just as it had been before the revolutionary era, with multiple kinds of voting, encompassing various approaches to secrecy and publicity, individualism and collectivism, continuing unabated and often unremarked upon in different locations on both sides of the Atlantic. That included forms of balloting, but also voting by acclamation, voting à haute voix, and voting with a show of hands or by moving to one side of the room or the other.60 Indeed, even once elections became a fact of revolutionary culture, it is hard to find much structural similarity between any of these late eighteenth-​century forms of voting for political representatives and new practices of shopping, aside from the designation in both cases of 60.  On the varied methods of voting employed in the era of the French Revolution, see Malcolm Crook, Elections in the French Revolution: An Apprenticeship in Democracy, 1789-​1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Philippe Tanchoux, Les Procédures électorales en France de la fin de l’Ancien Régime à la Première Guerre Mondiale (Paris: CTHS, 2004); Yves Déloye and Olivier Ihl, L’Acte de vote (Paris: Presse de Sciences Po, 2008); and Olivier Christin, Vox Populi. Une histoire du vote avant le suffrage universel (Paris: Le Seuil, 2014), which stresses continuity with older practices across the revolutionary divide. On voting methods in the revolutionary era in North America, see Richard Dinkin, Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689-​1776 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1977); Robert Dinkin, Voting in Revolutionary America: A Study of Elections in the Original Thirteen States, 1776–​1789 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1982); and Alec C. Ewald, The Way We Vote: The Local Dimension of American Suffrage (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009). See too Malcolm Crook and Tom Crook, “The Advent of the Secret Ballot in Britain and France, 1789-​1914: From Public Assembly to Private Compartment,” History xcii (2007):  199–​237 and “Reforming Voting Practices in a Global Age:  The Making and the Remaking of the Modern Secret Ballot in Britain, France and the U.S., c. 1600–​c. 1950,” Past and Present 212, no. 1 (2011): 199–​237, which stress the late and difficult introduction of the secret ballot on both sides of the Atlantic.

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special, bounded spaces in which these respective ritualized activities were to occur. The one was to take place only on special, infrequent occasions strictly regulated by formal law, the other almost incessantly (in considerable contrast to an older world of marketplaces and fairs) according to evolving, largely informal social norms. The nature and display of the options, as well as the recording (or not) of the results, were equally different in form. Moreover, the social composition of those invited to participate in the two rituals diverged markedly from one another along both gendered and class axes, distinctions that were increasingly reinforced by rules of state. In sum, nowhere did voting seem to build upon models derived from the world of commerce either theoretically or structurally despite the assumption of Jones, Breen, and others that changes in consumption (if not production) habits had to have predated and undergirded any profound political change. It is worth considering some of the particulars as voting was institutionalized as the standard means of determining citizens’ representatives to new, national political assemblies. In revolutionary France, even when voters were explicitly instructed to make a “choice,” as in elections for deputies to the National Assembly, those same voters were given no formal menu of options or slate of candidates from which to pick or even any guidelines as to the criteria on which their decision should be based. Instructions to voters hung in electoral assembly halls in May of 1790 asked them to swear to name “only those whom you have chosen (choisis) in your soul and conscience as the most worthy of public confidence, without it having been determined by gifts, promises, solicitations or threats,” but also without giving any further suggestions about who those people might be, or where they could be found, or how they could distinguished from their peers.61 Furthermore, while certainly ephemeral

61. On the lack of a slate of candidates in revolutionary France, see Archives parlementaires XV, 704, cited in Malcolm Crook, “Le Candidat imaginaire, ou l’offre et le choix dans les élections de la Révolution française,” Annales historiques de la révolution française, no. 321 (2000): 91–​ 110. Apart from a brief experiment in 1797, declared candidates were only formally required in French elections starting in 1889; see Christophe Voilliot, Le Candidature officielle:  une pratique d’état de la Restauration à la Troisième République (Rennes:  Presse universitaire de

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printed propaganda, including newspapers and pamphlets, played a role akin to print-​based advertising when it came to trying to persuade citizens about the value of a particular course of action, the appeal was always to citizens’ commitment to the general good or the good of the nation, not choices reflective of personal, interior preferences or tastes or interests. Individuals were largely absent from the process, both as candidates and as voters. Moreover, even as women continued to participate in informal ways in the culture of politics, the realm of electoral politics was, in the late eighteenth century, growing more definitively coded male in both practice and theory, that is, attached to a notion of the independent self (in the Anglo-​American as well as the French world) very much at odds with the contemporary image of the feminine, whimsical, or aestheticized consumer.62 One might say, of course, that when we are speaking of revolutionary France, we are referring to the land of Rousseau, one of history’s great oppo­ nents of formal elections as a means of crafting political outcomes. How could we rightly expect anything but the (collective, male) general will to have been the imagined epistemological and psychological foundation for political decision making? In the distinctive Rousseauian ideology of the French Revolution, even the idea of voting depending on the aggregation of multiple individual and potentially conflicting decisions about a future course of action constituted a potential threat to the unity of the nation. We should not be surprised, then, that suffrage in the 1790s was generally framed as a means

Rennes, 2005). On the significance of this policy, see too Patrice Gueniffey, Le Nombre et la raison: la Révolution française et les élections (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 1993). A theme that appears in literature like Louis-​Alexandre Epilly’s Avis aux citoyens François, sur le choix des officiers municipaux, des assemblées de districts et de départements (1790 or 1791) is how not to be deceived in picking, which, in a sense, underlines the difficult task with which revolutionary citizens were presented. 62.  Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer:  French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), suggests that the possibility of extending political rights to women was so fraught from the beginning partly because the unique individual had long been understood to be coded male in contradistinction to a female ‘other.’ But for the era of the French Revolution, her focus is on the epistemology of the imagination, not choice-​making or consumer behavior.

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to reflect rational public opinion63 and to reaffirm community values—​as it had long been the case in electoral scenarios in monarchical France. But interestingly, the new American state constitution writers worried in the 1770s and ‘80s about much the same thing (even as some of them proposed “experiments” with secret balloting designed, as in France just a decade or two later, to limit social pressure at the polling station from above or below). No consensus emerged in the wake of American independence about whether it was communities or aggregates of individuals whose sentiments were being measured by the franchise, much less about the proper form in which voting should take place. The Federalists who did so much to shape the form of the Constitution in 1787 also tried to place sovereignty simultaneously in individuals and communities, including states and regions, and deliberately avoided prescribing any single, national suffrage regime.64 And the English, whose suffrage traditions were initially widely emulated in the new United States, were even more resistant, well into the nineteenth century, to any form of the nascent psychology of market choice or the emergence of personal preference being appropriated to political ends. This was despite the fact that money flowed in multiple directions during eighteenth-​and early nineteenth-​century British parliamentary elections; polling literally took place in marketplaces across the land; and consumer culture was perhaps most developed in England’s many towns and cities. Not only was the voting for representatives, or members of parliament, that did occur in late eighteenth-​century Britain largely ceremonial, fully public (and to a greater degree than in France or the new United States), and consistently communal in nature, rooted in the idea of a trust being bestowed on some—​a limited body of electors—​to determine the needs of all. It was also, even after important 63. On public opinion as rational in the French revolutionary political imaginary, see the essay by Antoine Lilti in this volume, as well as the classic essay by Keith Baker, “Public Opinion as Political Invention,” in his Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 64. On therejection of national voting standards in the United States, see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2001), as well as the works on voting in the early republic cited in note 60.

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changes in the law in the early part of the century, infrequent, and it was only rarely employed in the service of real contestation or the creation of a choice between defined options until the second half of the nineteenth century. If voting in post-​1789 France featured so much choice as to render the idea of choice-​making irrelevant, voting in England featured so little as to have the same effect.65 Discourse, meanwhile, ran in the same direction as practice. In the early 1860s, John Stuart Mill was only reinforcing what still constituted the dominant wisdom of the day (with the exception of Australia) when he argued that the introduction of the secret ballot at the national level constituted a threat precisely because it would make individual whim and taste—​the dangerous kinds of motivations long associated with market-​ based behavior, he implied—​the foundation of political choice. As Mill explained it, the great risk of secret, individuated voting was that a man would henceforth to able to “use a public function for his own interest, pleasure or caprice” and bestow his vote “simply as he feels inclined.”66 Political choice, on other words, would be reduced to something like private desire or aesthetic preference rather than manly, objective judgment about the collective good. But even for advocates of ballots, individuation, and secrecy in elections, whose ranks grew on both sides of the Atlantic in the second half of the nineteenth century, drawing parallels between the commercial and the political spheres remained largely anathema. It might even be argued that fear of contamination—​of the mindset of the (whimsical, indecisive, self-​interested, easy swayed, feminine) shopper rubbing

65.  Frank O’Gorman, “Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies:  The Social Meaning of Elections in England, 1780–​1860,” Past and Present, no. 135 (1992):  79–​115, see 80. On the tradition of open voting in British parliamentary elections and its meaning from the eighteenth century onward, see too Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England, 1734–​1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); John A. Phillips, Electoral Behavior in Unreformed England:  Plumpers, Splitters, and Straights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); and Jon Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 66.  See J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government [1861], in Utilitarianism ed. Geraint Williams (London: Dent, 1993), 325–​32, for the heart of his argument against the secret ballot.

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off on or determining that of the voter—​is one reason both a compulsory secret ballot and female suffrage were such late developments across the Atlantic world. Only with the rise of political parties able to play the role of middlemen or “choice architects” long occupied by persuasive merchants did voting access and practice begin to change across much of the Western world to reflect a growing sense that individual citizens needed protection, on a person-​by-​person basis, for the honest expression of their distinctive (and frequently selfish) interior preferences.67 In other words, it might be more accurate to think of democratic revolution happening in two stages, with the institutionalization of the idea of individual choice in politics occurring a good hundred years after the introduction of popular sovereignty, that is, only from the 1870s onward. And it would still be another seventy-​five years, until the mid-​twentieth century, for the citizen-​ consumer, under the aegis of a new kind of thinking about choice both in popular discourse and in the social sciences, to be imagined as a single psychological entity. Today, as we contemplate the possibility of mail-​in and Internet voting conducted at the kitchen table as the primary act of citizenship, an activity demanding many of the same mental skills and habits as ordering goods online, political and consumer culture do seem indelibly linked. This association is reinforced in advertising of all sorts, where choice is a key value and term. It is also reinforced by human rights discourse in which the right to choice in consumer goods and the right to political choice, not to mention choice in profession, place of residence, marriage partner, religion, and many other arenas, are inscribed in twinned, even mutually constitutive, ways even as we accord substantially greater moral weight to some of these decisions than others. What this article has aimed

67.  On the joint rise of the secret ballot and mass voting in nineteenth-​century England, France, and elsewhere, see Christophe Jaffrelot, “L’Invention du vote secret en Angleterre,” Polix 22 (1993): 43–​68; Alain Garrigou, Histoire sociale du suffrage universel en France (1848–​ 2000) (Paris: Seuil, 2002), esp. 197–​210; Richard Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-​ Nineteenth Century (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Romain Bertrand, Jean-​Louis Briquet and Peter Pels, eds., Cultures of Voting:  The Hidden History of the Secret Ballot (London: Hurst, 2007), as well as the articles of Crook and Crook cited in note 60.

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to illustrate is that we cannot read this ideology backward onto the eighteenth century without introducing a kind of anachronism into the historical record. That also means rejecting the assumption that our current discourse stressing the maximization of both choice-​making and choices as a path to freedom indicates a natural mental synergy between these two realms and thus an inevitable cause, or even direct consequence, of the age of twin consumer and political revolutions. In the present era of behavioral economics—​which seems, oddly, to have had a very limited impact on the writing of history, at least so far—​we should think again before we choose to see all choice-​making as rooted in the same psychological instincts; one of its key empirical findings is that the performance of choosing, as well as the nature of the choices made, is variable and always extremely context-​dependent.68 We might think again too before we choose to see choice, as conceptualized in a modern market setting, as the source of the experience of citizenship in a democratic polity rather than one of its more recent products. Finally, perhaps we can also use this brief effort to restore historicity to choice as a chance to reconsider the relation of social practices to the formation of ideology more generally. Intellectual historians should indeed be encouraged not to overlook new behavioral modes as a key source for new ideas, especially ones that will become close to hegemonic. In this case, it is hard to imagine the value of choice becoming so doxic (to borrow a term from Pierre Bourdieu) in the modern West without the experience of choosing becoming so widespread but also so unexceptional, even habitual over time. From catalogues to ballots, the technologies of

68.  On the minimal impact of behavioral economics on history writing, and especially the limited role of “irrationality” in accounts of the decisions or choices made by historical actors, see Naomi Lamoreaux, “Reframing the Past:  Thoughts about Business Leadership and Decision Making Under Uncertainty,” Enterprise and Society 2 (2001):  632–​59. On lack of attention to context in traditional economic approaches to choice, see Richard Harper, Dave Randall, and Wes Sharrock, Choice, The Sciences of Reason in the 21st Century: A Critical Assessment (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2016). For a rare example of a historical study that draws on cognitive work in economics, albeit for a different historical period, see Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Social-​Control and Well-​Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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choice, the number and kinds of options, the opportunities for making selections, and the types of people routinely engaged in one of these forms of choosing all grew exponentially between the end of the seventeenth and the start of the nineteenth centuries. But that said, it is also clear that all choosing activities should not be thought of as the same or even analogous practices. For social practices are themselves always inscribed already in ideational frameworks and beliefs about meaning, as well as social frameworks; that is true even when those practices appear to be new. In this case, the explanatory mechanisms that emerged around the advent of new forms of consumption and the advent of new forms of political life were quite different from the start even as the behaviors they supported appear, in retrospect, to have had something in common structurally. That likely made the experience of, say, voting in a revolutionary assembly in France feel very different both from the experience of shopping in an eighteenth-​century boutique and from the experience of voting today—​ despite the similar mental task and the common recourse to the linguistic-​ conceptual category of choice required across all of these realms. What Jones and Breen have rightly done for us is to draw our attention to the kinds of mundane behaviors and activities—​from reading the want ads in a local paper to examining options in ribbons in a provincial store—​ that lie at the root of popular ideas and make them resonate. However, in the case of revolutions and choice, these examples also inadvertently warn us against any kind of determinism. There is no evidence, to put it more directly, that perusing the Affiches in Nantes in the early 1780s or buying accessories in Charleston in the early 1770s predisposed a person to make particular choices, or indeed any kind of choices, in the political realm or even to support a politics in which choice was celebrated as an ideal for human flourishing. All we can conclude is that the historian who really wants to understand intellectual shifts must stay alert to the constant but indirect interplay among changing social practices and behavior, changing emotional and psychological experience, and changing ways of conceptualizing and talking about both. The full story of the growing power in modern life of the idea of choice—​aesthetic, affective, intellectual, and indeed political—​has yet to be written.

INDEX

Adams, John, 119, 130, 146 Affiches, 210, 254, 272 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’, 83, 144 Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia, 142 Alexander, Jeffrey, 194, 216 Alexander, William, The History of Women. . ., 259, 261–​262 Almain, Jacques, 6 Almanach des prisons, 213, 213n46 American Revolution consumerism as precursor to, 243–​245, 253–​255 declaration of rights and, 23–​24, 24n76, 32 early defeats of, 118–​119 Franklin and, 90–​92, 146 French officers fighting in, 123 human rights violations during, xvii Paoli and, 122 political rights in, xxi, 268 popular sovereignty and, 22 study of, xiv L’Ami des patriotes, on popularity, 96–​98 Antraigues, Louis-​Alexandre Launay,  Comte d’, 19 Mémoire sur les Etats Généraux, 15–​16,  16n55 Appiah, Anthony, Africana, 43n2 archives of the Bastille, 168–​170, 169nn44–​47,  212n43

Archives parlementaires constitutionalism of, 15 on historians, 165, 165n31 livre rouge, publication of, 170, 170n50 national rights, defense of, 23, 38 on natural law, 19 rights language in, 36nn133–​134 on self-​government,  15–​16 Arendt, Hannah, 22 Armitage, David, xviii art celebrity and, 85–​86 as visual culture (see visual culture) Aulard, François-​Alphonse, 175n67 Austen, Jane, 249, 249n31 autobiography. See memoirs Bacon, Francis, 139 Baczko, Bronislaw, 192n110, 202 Bailleul, Jacques-​Charles, 199 Baker, Keith Michael, xxiii–​xxiv on Declaration of Rights, 30 on historical rupture, 160–​161 on idiomatic uses of “perfectionner,” 179n78 Inventing the French Revolution, 162n24 on political culture, xv on republicanism, 187 Scripting Revolution, 155n4, 191n109 Barnaud, Nicolas, 36n134 Barnave, Antoine, 33, 94–​95 Barry, Etienne, 95

274

Bastille archives of the, 168–​170, 169nn44–​47,  212n43 seizure of, 172, 172n58 symbolism of, 168 La Bastille dévoilée (archives from Bastille), 168–​170, 169nn44–​47,  212n43 Beaumarchais, Pierre-​Augustin Caron de, 169n45 Bell, David A., xiii, xxvi, 104 on Bonaparte, 149 on celebrity, 143 The Cult of the Nation in France, 141n25, 155n4, 221n61 On term la nation, 17 Bell, John, 113–​114 Bénichou, Paul, 86, 107 Bertin, Rose, 93 Bèze, Théodore de, 5–​6 Biggs, Charlotte, 230–​231 black legend of Robespierre, 200n20 Blackstone, William, 17 Boissy d’Anglas, François-​Antoine de, 218–​219, 222, 224, 229 Bonaparte, Napoleon authority of, 132–​133 as celebrity, xxv–​xxvi, 80–​84, 131–​132 as charismatic leader, 128–​131, 152–​153 genius of, xxvii, 148–​151 Napoleonic constitution, 79 Paoli, admiration for, 129 propaganda of, 130–​133, 149–​150 rise to power and popularity of, 80–​84, 100–​101, 108, 124 Robespierre, admiration for, 129 slavery in Caribbean, restoration of, 50, 77 Washington compared to, 132 writings of, 104–​105, 104n1 Bonapartism, 50 Bonnet, Jean-​Claude, 116, 144–​145 Naissance du Panthéon, 107–​108, 125 Bonneville, Nicolas de, 163, 173n60

Index

Boswell, James, An Account of Corsica, 111–​113, 120, 122, 129, 132 Bouhler, Philipp, Napoleon: Kometenbahn eines Genies, 153 Boulainvilliers, Henri de, Etat de la France, 18, 19 Breen, Timothy, 236–​237, 257, 263–​264,  272 The Marketplace of Revolution, 254–​255 Brewer, John, The Birth of Consumer Society, 251–​252 Brigands’ War, St. Lucia, xxv, 41, 43,  70–​72 Brissot, Jacques-​Pierre, 95, 123, 172, 173n59 Britain. See Great Britain Brizard, Gabriel, 169n46 Discours historique sur le caractère et la politique de Louis XI, 163–​164n28 Brown, Howard G. , xxvii, 193 Burckhardt, Jacob, 137, 152 Burney, Fanny, 260–​261 Burns, Robert, 143 Burrows, Simon, Blackmail, Scandal, and Revolution, 169n44 Cahiers de doléances, 24–​29, 24nn77–​78, 25n83, 39 calico craze, xxviii, 238–​239, 258, 258n43 Camus, Armand-​Gaston, 39 Carlyle, Thomas, xxvii, 136–​138, 152–​153 Carr, E. H., 137–​138 Carrier, Jean-​Baptiste, 201–​203, 229 Cassirer, Ernest, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 158n14 Catholicism, 6–​7, 147 celebrity culture, xxv–​xxvi, 80–​103 Bonaparte and, 80–​84, 131–​132 charisma and, 89, 116–​118 cult of celebrity, 84–​85, 143, 146 defined, 88 geniuses and, 83, 143–​145 glory vs., 82–​84, 96–​97, 100 great man theory of history and, 143–​145

Index

political celebrity, 89–​95, 99–​103, 143 popularity and, 95–​98 rise of, 85–​89, 116–​118 theatricality and, 98–​103 Chamfort, Nicholas, 88 Combien le génie des grands écrivains influe sur l’esprit de leur siècle, 142 charisma, xxvi, 104–​133 of Bonaparte, 104–​105, 128–​131 celebrity culture and, 89, 116–​118 defined, 152 French Revolution and, 123–​128, 133 imagined empathy with fictional characters and, 120–​121 of Paoli, 111–​113 of Peter the Great, 108–​111 political authority and, 105–​106, 117 relationship between leader and followers, 118–​120, 128, 132 as transnational phenomenon, 122–​123 of Washington, 113–​116 Charles IX (king of France), 183 Chartier, Roger, 144–​145 Chateaubriand, François-​René, 151 Chénier, Marie-​Joseph, 147–​148 chouannerie (guerrilla struggle), 226 Chrétien, Pierre, 61–​62 Cicero, 4, 97, 136n5 citizenship. See also political rights consumer choice and, 237n1, 254 natural impulses vs., 221n61 political participation and, 270–​271 civil war, revolution as, xviii Clausewitz, Carl von, On War, 151 Cochin, Augustin, 198 Cock, Christopher, 246–​247 Coittant, Philippe-​Edmé, 206–​207, 206n33, 213n46 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 151 collecting mania, 169n44 collective rights individual rights vs., 19–​23, 37 national rights as, 15–​16 collective trauma of “terror” period, 194–​196, 194n2, 216, 229, 231–​235

275

Collot d’Herbois, Jean-​Marie, 56, 56n24, 204–​205,  229 commercial auction houses, 246–​247 common good, 101, 112, 114, 116–​117, 264 Communism, xviii comparative revolutions, xvi, xvi–​xviii conciliarism, 6, 13, 28 Condorcet, Marie-​Jean-​Antoine-​Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de on comparing societies over time, 180n80 death of, 177n70 draft declaration of, 26 Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, 176–​180 literature on, 178n73 on natural rights, 9–​10 philosophes, connections to, 26–​27 reputation and career of, 177 constitutional rights, natural law and, 2–​3, 12–​13, 16, 16n57, 23–​24 constitutionalism, 12–​23, 32–​37, 40 consumer choice, xxviii–​xxix, 236–​272 anxiety and, 260–​262 commercial auction houses and, 246–​248 consumer revolution and, 251–​252 consumption narrative and, 238–​257 culture and, 239–​240, 253–​254, 258–​260,  268 democracy and, 237–​238, 255–​256 formalized behaviors surrounding, 251, 252, 259–​260 individual empowerment and, 250, 255 marketing and advertising, 244–​248,  254 political rights and, 237–​238, 253–​257, 262–​272 as precursor to revolutions, 252–​255 prices, decrease in, 249–​250 as right, 255 shopping as novel activity, 248–​250, 249n28, 260–​261 social hierarchy, upset of, 258 store and shop arrangements and, 242–​245

276

Coquereau, Jean-​Baptiste-​Louis,  38–​39 Cordeliers club, 181 corporate rights, 2, 13–​14, 17, 19 corruption of history, 162–​164, 163n25, 192 human rights, ignorance and contempt of, 9 republicanism on, 184–​185n92 Corsica. See also Paoli, Pascal Bonaparte and, 129 French control of, 115 cotton fabrics, xxviii, 238–​239, 258 counterrevolutionaries executions of, 61 great man theory of history and, 145, 148 rights of, 33, 37–​39 “terror” period and, 213, 221, 224, 225 victims vs., 224 in Windward Islands, 52, 56, 56n24, 61, 66 Couthon, Georges, 37 criminal history, 176, 180–​184 criminals, individual rights of, 33, 37–​39 Crouzet, François, 252n37 cult of celebrity, 84–​85, 143, 146 cult of genius, xxvi, 137–​138, 142–​143, 146–​151 cult of heroes, 83–​84, 101 culture. See also celebrity culture; great man theory of history; visual culture collective trauma of “terror” period and, 194 consumer choice and, 239–​240, 253–​254, 258–​260,  268 race vs., 76 voting and, 265 Darnton, Robert, 92 David, Jacques-​Louis, 131 Le Décadaire du Cantal, on “terror” period, 210 Decherf, Jean-​Baptiste, 151 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

Index

as central achievement of revolution, xix clergy on, 28–​29 creation of, 25–​27, 30–​31 ideas, credit for, 24–​25, 38–​39 national vs. natural rights in, 23, 30–​31 political violence and, 32–​33 rights language of, 5, 9, 11, 21n68, 27–​30,  36n133 Defoe, Daniel, 261 The Complete English Tradesman, 242 Delandine, A.-​F., Tableau des prisons de Lyon, 214n48 Delgrès, Louis, 63, 68, 77–​78 democracy. See also political rights consumer choice and, 237–​238, 255–​256 political celebrity and, 99–​103 slavery, abolition of, 47 study of revolutions, xiii–​xvi deprivation of rights, 33, 37 Desan, Suzanne, xx Descarte, Rene, 142, 148 Desmoulins, Camille, 163, 166–​167, 186 Révolutions de France et de Brabant, 176 despotism,  12–​23 Diderot on geniuses, 83, 140, 140n22 on natural rights, 7 Dillon, Arthur Richard, 28 Dilworth, W. H., 109–​111 documentation as historical indictment, 169–​170, 170n48, 170nn50–​51 Dorat, Claude-​Joseph, 110 droit des gens, 67n41. See also human rights Dubois, Laurent, 47 Dumont, Etienne, 99 Dumouriez, Charles-​François, 124 Duplessis-​Bertaux, Jean, 201–​202 Dupont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel, 25–​27 Duport, Adrien, 25 Dusausoir, François-​Jean, 188n103 economic rights, 10–​11. See also consumer choice; trade Edelstein, Dan, xxiv–​xxv, 1, 187n100 Scripting Revolution, 155n4, 191n109

Index

Edict of Marly (1714), 14–​15 Edict of Nantes (1685), 7 Edict of Versailles (1787), 28 Eighteenth Century Collections Online, 138n13 elected officials, 16 Engels, Friedrich, 137 England. See Great Britain Englund, Steven, 105 Enlightenment antecedents to, 212n43 celebrity and, 143–​145 charismatic authority and, 106–​107 great man theory of history and, 135, 138, 144–​145 historical writing and, 157, 177–​178 ideals of, 83 legacy of, 102–​103 origins of, 2 Estates General Declaration of Rights, 25, 27, 29 First Estate of, 28–​29 historical narration of, 174 Mirabeau and, 98–​99 national rights of, 13–​16, 24, 30 nobility and, 24, 24n78, 26, 27 Third Estate of, 19–​22, 24, 24n78, 27–​29, 39 (see also National Assembly) voting procedure, 265 Fabre d’Églantine, Philippe, 147 fabric, xxviii, 238–​239, 258 fame. See celebrity culture fashion, 239–​240, 258–​260, 259n45 Fédon, Julien, 73 Fédon Rebellion of Grenada, xxv, 41–​44, 42–​44nn2–​3, 67–​69,  72–​76 fête du génie, 147 Fields, Barbara Jeanne, 78 Filangieri, Gaetano, 23–​24 Fisher, George Park, 137 Fleischmann, Hector, Les prisons de la révolution, 213n46 Fontanes, Louis de, 132 Fouché, Joseph, 205, 222

277

Fouquier-​Tinville, Antoine Quentin, 205, 229 France. See also French Revolution; National Assembly abolition of slavery in, 46, 60 American revolution and, 123 Britain, war with, 59–​62 Corsica, control of, 115 coup (1770), 12 Edict of Marly (1714), 14–​15 Edict of Nantes (1685), 7 Edict of Versailles (1787), 28 history, distortions of, 162–​164 Marie-​Antoinette and,  94–​95 monarchy, dissolution of, 35–​36, 36n133, 51–​52, 170 as place of origin of human rights, 46, 46n5 political rights in, 269 slave rebellions and, 41–​79(see also Windward Islands) Vendée civil war, 196 Frank, Jason, 22 Franklin, Benjamin, 23, 90–​92, 145–​146 Freedman, Jeffrey, Modern Intellectual History, 212n43 Freemasons, 26 French Caribbean. See Windward Islands French Revolution. See also counterrevolutionaries; National Assembly; National Convention calendar revisions during, 147, 188 Caribbean slave rebellions, effect on, 41–​79 (see also Windward Islands) celebrity culture and, 80–​103 (see also celebrity culture) charismatic leaders during, 123–​128, 133 consumer choice vs. political choice and, 236–​272 (see also consumer choice) consumerism as precursor to, 253–​254 criticisms of, 165 Franklin’s role in, 146 globalization and, xx great man theory of history and, 134–​153 (see also great man theory of history)

278

French Revolution (cont.) historical record of, 154–​192 (see also history of French Revolution) history of rights and, 38 intercultural reflection on, 191, 191n108 national vs. human rights during, 2–​3 paradigm for, xiii–​xv, xviii–​xxiv political legacy of, 100 politics of rights and, 40 rights conflicts and, 1–​40 (see also rights conflicts) “terror” period of, 193–​235 (see also “terror” period of French Revolution) theatrical incarnation of, 98–​99 French Revolution of 1830, xvi Freund, Amy, 126–​127 Friedland, Paul, xxv, 41, 99 Furet, François, xv, xxiii–​xxiv, 38, 123–​124,  160 Interpreting the French Revolution, 155n4 Livre et société dans la France du XVIIIe siècle, 158n14 Furstenberg, François, 116 Galiani, Ferdinando, 10–​11 Garrick, David, 85 Gaspar, David Barry, 45n4 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., Africana, 43n2 Gauchet, Marcel, 38, 141n25 Geffroy, Annie, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 181n82 Génin, Jean-​François, 188n103 genius of Bonaparte, 148–​151 celebrity culture and, 83, 143–​145 cult of, xxvi, 137–​138, 142–​143, 146–​151 evil and, xxvii, 139–​140, 140n18, 140n22, 144 great man theory of history and, 137–​140, 140n22, 142–​143, 146–​153 kings vs., 147–​148 of the people, 139n17, 149 public opinion and, 142–​143, 144n31

Index

Gilbert du Motier, Marie-​Joseph Paul Yves Roch. See Lafayette, marquis de globalization,  xx–​xxi glory vs. celebrity, 82–​84, 96–​97, 100 Gorsas, Antoine-​Louis, Courrier de Versailles, 166 Goyrand, Gaspard, 61, 63–​69, 73 Great Britain constitutionalism in, 16–​17 France, war with, 59–​62 globalization and, xx Grenada, rebellion of, 73–​76 influence on French conception of national rights, 15n51 Magna Carta, 2 political rights in, 268–​269 Saint Lucia, invasion of, 68–​69, 71–​72 slave rebellions in Caribbean and, 41–​43, 43n2, 50 Windward Islands, control of, 61–​62, 65–​67, 69, 77 great man theory of history, xxvi–​xxvii, 134–​153 celebrity culture and, 143–​145 collective agency and, 134–​135 genius and, 137–​140, 140n18, 140n22, 142–​143, 146–​153 history’s dependence on, 164, 178 human agency and, 140–​141, 141n25 modern scholars on, 134–​136, 135–​136n2 origins of, 136–​138 rejection of, 137 term usage, 138, 138n13 great men eulogies of, 107–​108 heroes vs., 107 Greenblatt, Stephen, 259n45 Grégoire, Henri, 67n41 Rapport sur les encouragements . . ., 157n10 Grenada, xxv, 41–​44, 42–​44nn2–​3, 67–​69,  72–​76 Griffiths, Robert, Le Centre perdu, 165n32 Gros, Antoine-​Jean, 130 Guadeloupe British control of, 61–​62

Index

French Revolution and, 53–​56, 77–​78 slave rebellion in, 50 Terror of, 63 Guffroy, Armand-​Joseph, The Secrets of Joseph Lebon and his Accomplices, 215 guillotine, 196, 203, 206–​207 Habermas, Jürgen, 140 Haiti. See also Saint-​Domingue independence of, 41–​42n1, 49, 55n23 narrative of revolution in, 43–​48 revolution, effect on Caribbean, xxv, 41–​43, 41–​43nn1–​2, 47–​49, 49n11, 69–​71 Hardman, John, The Life of Louis XVI, 190n107 Hartog, François, 155–​156 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 136, 151 Helvétius, 7 Henri IV (king of France), 6 Hercules’s Choice, 263–​264, 263–​264n58 heroes. See also charisma; great man theory of history cult of heroes, 83–​84, 101 great men vs., 107 Hesse, Carla, 157n10, 173 The Other Enlightenment, 181n82 Hill, Aaron, 109–​110, 121 historical pyrrhonism, 173n59 historical skepticism, 186–​187 history of French Revolution, xxvii, 154–​192 comprehensive account of, 176–​177 credibility and transparency of, 167–​174 documentation as historical indictment, 169–​170, 170n48, 170nn50–​51 historical rupture and, 154–​160 liberated historians and, 160–​167 non-​historical writings and, 171–​172, 175 origins, agency, and posterity of writings, 174–​188 radical revolutionaries and, 156–​157, 157n10, 159n16 scripts of, 191, 191n109 Hitler, Adolf, xxvii, 153

279

Hobbes, Thomas, 7, 13n44 Hobsbawn, Eric, 134n1 Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’, 10, 11, 11n36 Huber, Jean, 88 Hugo, Victor, 151 Huguenots, xxiv, 5, 7, 36n134 Hugues, Victor, 60–​64, 67, 69, 73, 75 human rights. See also natural rights and law Caribbean slave rebellions and, 49–​50 consumer choice and, 270 corporate rights vs., 17 criminals, individual rights of, 33, 37–​39 droit des gens term and, 67n41 France as place of origin of, 46, 46n5 history of, 1–​3, 3n8 intellectual origins of, 4–​11 national rights vs., 2–​3, 12–​15, 13n44, 19–​23 national security vs., 23 natural law and, 2–​3 political legitimacy of revolutions and, xvii, xix, xxn19 revolutions to transmit ideas about, xx–​xxi talk, 3–​11, 3n8, 4n9, 5n13, 17 human rights regimes, xix–​xx Huguenot revolutionaries and, 5 origins of, 2 Hunt, Lynn on historical rupture, 155n4, 156, 160 on imagined empathy with fictional characters, 120–​121 Inventing Human Rights, 46n5 on Marie-​Antoinette, 92 on rights language, 3n8, 4n9 on study of French Revolution, xiii–​xv,  xx imperialism, xxin24, 239 intellectual imperialism, 50 Industrial Revolution, 239 intellectual property rights, 147 Iranian Revolution of 1970s, xvi Isnard, Maximin, Proscription d’Isnard, 215–​216 Israel, Jonathan, 144

Index

280

Jacobins Bonaparte and, 80 fall of, 229 people’s rights, defense of, 38 revenge killings and, 226–​227 “terror” period and, 198, 200, 208–​209, 220–​222, 220n57, 221n58 Thermidorians vs., 194n1 Windward Island rebellions and, 58, 60 Jainchill, Andrew, 157n10 James, C. L. R., Black Jacobins, 47 Jaume, Lucien, 38 Jefferson, Thomas, 25–​26 Jennet, Jean, Histoire de la république des Provinces-​Unies, 4 Johnson, Samuel, 249n28 Jones, Colin, 236–​237, 253–​255, 257, 263–​264,  272 The Great Nation, 254 Journal de Lyon, on “terror” period, 205 journalists, redefinition of, 165–​166 Jurieu, Pierre, 14n48 Kant, Immanuel, 140 Conjectures on the Beginnings of Human History, 260 Katz, Friedrich, Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution, 42–​43n2 Kéralio, Louise-​Félicité Guynement de, 181n82, 183 Les Crimes des reines de France, 176, 182, 182n84 Kerméné, Captain, 55, 58 Knight, Sarah Kemble, 243 knowledge, monopoly of, 178 Kwass, Michael, 240 La Boétie, Etienne de, 5 La Roche, Sophie von, 260 La Rochefoucauld-​d’Enville, Louis-​Alexandre de, 23, 26 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, Instruction donnée par S.A.S. Monseigneur le duc d’Orléans, 25, 30 Lacretelle, Charles de, 179n77

Lacrosse, Jean-​Baptiste, 52–​56, 58 Lafayette, marquis de celebrity of, 95 Declaration of Rights and, 25–​26, 31 historians on, 164n29 suspicion for plotting coup, 124 Lakanal, Joseph, 147 Lambert, Jean-​Joseph, 63–​65, 75 Lameth, Alexandre de, 26 Las Cases, Emmanuel de, Mémorial de Sainte-​Hélène,  82–​83 Lavicomterie, Louis-​Thomas. See Saint-​Samson, Louis-​Thomas Lavicomterie de Le Bon, Joseph, 205–​207, 208n36, 229 Le Chapelier, Isaac-​René-​Guy, 34 Le Mercier de La Rivière, Paul, 8 Le Roy, Charles-​Georges, 10 Lebas, Philippe-​François-​Joseph, 61, 63, 68 Lefort, Claude, 38 Legendre, F.-​P. , 203 Léo, Elizabeth, 45n4, 58–​59n30 life writing, 171 Lilti, Antoine, xxv, 80 on Bonaparte, 149 on celebrity, 116–​117, 143, 144n31 on heroes, 107 on Mirabeau, 126 Linton, Marisa, Choosing Terror, 172n56 literacy, monopoly of, 178 literature. See media; memoirs; novels livre rouge, publication of, 170, 170n50 Locke, John, 22, 142 Second Treatise,  12–​13 Louis XIV (king of France), 7, 14 Louis XV (king of France), 14–​15, 168n41 Louis XVI (king of France) charismatic leadership of, 125–​126 Marie-​Antoinette, influence of, 93 Mirabeau and, 100 rights of the people, violation of, 35–​36 luxury goods, 239–​240, 252n37 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 163 Maistre, Joseph de, 148–​149

Index

Major, John, 6 majority, tyranny of, 22 Mandeville, Bernard, 260–​262 Manin, Bernard, 102 Manuel, Louis-​Pierre, La Police de Paris dévoilée, 169n46 Maoism, xviii Marat, Jean-​Paul as corrupt writer, 163 discredit of, 125 on errors in writing, 173 on evidence, 186 on great men, 164n29 Oeuvres politiques, 176n69, 186n95 as radical journalist, 176 scientific skepticism and, 173n59 Mariana, Juan de, 6 Marie-​Antoinette (queen of France), 92–​95 Marinier (gens des bois commander), 65, 68, 77 Markoff, John, 27 Marly, Edict of (1714), 14–​15 Martin, William G., From Toussaint to Tupac, 42n2 Martinique, 53–​58, 61 martyrdom, 177, 221, 221n59 Marx, Karl, 137, 140, 253 Marxism, xiv–​xv, xviii, xxii Maultrot, Gabriel-​Nicolas, Maximes du droit public françois,  12–​13 Maupeou, René Nicolas Charles Augustin de, 3, 12, 38 Maure, N.-​S., 210 Maury, Henry, 227–​228 Maza, Sarah, 190n104 McKendrick, Neil, The Birth of Consumer Society, 251–​252 McMahon, Darrin, xxvii, 107, 134 media advertisements for goods and, 244–​246,  254 biographies and profiles, popularity of, 134, 134n1 celebrity, rise of, 84, 86–​88, 92, 97 on Franklin, 90–​92

281

freedom of, 97 historical opportunity and, 157 journalists, redefinition of, 165–​166 on political campaigns, 266–​267 political celebrity and, 102–​103 power of, 98 prison memoirs, 212–​216, 213n46, 214n48 on Revolutionary Tribunal, 201 on “terror” period, 195, 197, 200–​202, 205–​211, 209n37, 225–​226, 229, 231–​234 transparency in, 168–​170 on Washington, 114–​115 Mémoires secrets, on celebrity of Franklin, 91–​92,  92n18 memoirs as historical documentation, 171–​172, 171n54, 172n55 of prisoners of “terror” period, 212–​216, 213n46, 214n48 The Merchant’s Warehouse (anonymous), 251, 258 Mercier, Louis-​Sébastien, Tableau de Paris, 262 Mercure Galante, on fashion, 259 Mey, Claude, 12–​13, 13n44 Michelet, Jules, 100, 135, 198 Migliorini, Luigi, 149 Mill, John Stuart, 269 Miller, Mary Ashburn, 187–​188n100 Mintzker, Yair, xiii Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Assembly, criticism of, 33–​34 celebrity of, 95, 98–​100, 125, 126–​127 Declaration on the Rights of Man and,  26–​27 discredit of, 125, 164n29 on Franklin’s death, 145–​146 on rights, 9 modern revolutions, xvi–​xviii modernity, celebrity and, 84 Mommsen, Theodor, 137 monarchy, abolition of, 35–​36, 36n133, 51–​52,  170

282

Montagnards, 194n1, 196, 201, 229 Montesquieu, 7, 7n20, 79, 79n61, 107 Moore, John, 71–​72 morality Hercules’s Choice and, 263, 263–​264n58 “terror” period and, 218–​221 Moreau, Jacob-​Nicolas, 162, 162n24 Morellet, André, 11, 11n35 Le cri des familles, 217–​218, 222 Mori, Jennifer, Britain in the Age of the French Revolution, 43n2 Morrissey, Robert, 83 Mottley, John, 111 Mounier, Jean-​Joseph, 31 Moyn, Samuel, xix–​xx, xxn19 Nantes, Edict of (1685), 7 Nantes trial, 201–​203 nation, defined, 17–​22 National Assembly (France) Declaration proposals submitted to, 25, 29, 38–​39, 67n41 elections for, 266 formation of, 170 on historians, 165 historical narration of, 174 national rights and, 3, 33–​35, 34n122, 38 nation’s will, representation of, 265 politics of rights and, 40 rights of man and, 37 spectators attending, 99 National Convention (France) abolition of slavery in Windward Islands, 79 calendar revisions, 147, 188 decrees to Windward Islands, 52 Louis XVI, trial of, 35–​36 “terror” period and, 200, 202–​204, 224–​225 Vendée revolt, 196, 196n7, 198 national rights as collective rights, 15–​16 constitutionalism and, 12–​23 English influence on conception of, 15n51

Index

human rights vs., 2–​3, 12–​15, 13n44,  19–​23 natural rights and law vs., 23–​32, 36–​37, 36nn133–​134 self-​government rights and, 15–​16 theory of, 23 national security vs. individual rights, 23 natural constitutionalism, 2n6, 16, 16n57 natural law theory, 2–​3, 12, 16–​19, 21, 33 natural rights and law constitutional rights and, 2–​3, 12–​13, 16, 16n57,  23–​24 French theory of, 18 human rights as, 4–​8 national rights vs., 23–​32, 36–​37, 36nn133–​134 origin of, 1–​2 Physiocrat principles on, 7–​9 religion on, 28–​29 nature geniuses as favorites of, 137, 140 idioms of, 187–​188, 187–​188n100 natural law theory and, 33 revenge killings during “terror” period, 227 revolutionary discourse and, 187–​188 rights derived from, 5, 22, 39, 116, 173n60 (see also natural rights and law) Necker, Jacques, 95, 164n29 Nemeitz, Joachim Chrisoph, 261 Neufchateau, François de, 86–​87 Newton, Isaac, 139 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, 136 Normand, Charles, “Harsh Means,” 208–​209 Nougaret, P.-​J.-​B., Histoire des prisons de Paris et des départements, 214–​215 novels as consumer good, 249, 259 sentimentalism and, 113, 115, 116, 123, 129

Index

Ouverture, Toussaint l’, 43n2 Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, 42 Ozouf, Mona, 144–​145, 160 Festivals and the French Revolution, 155n4 Paine, Tom, 118–​119 Common Sense, 265 Palmer, R. R., 47 Paoli, Pascal Bonaparte’s admiration for, 129 celebrity of, 116–​117 charismatic appeal of, 118, 120 as father of his country, 112, 121–​122 overview of, 111–​113 Peter the Great and Washington compared to, 115–​116, 122–​123 Paris Parlement, 3, 12, 38 pathos, 214, 220, 223, 225, 227 Pélage, Magloire, 63 Pelzin, Alexandre-​Michel, 205 personal memoirs. See memoirs Peter the Great (Tsar of Russia) celebrity of, 116–​117 charismatic appeal of, 118, 120–​121 as father of his country, 110, 121–​122 overview of, 108–​111 Paoli and Washington compared to, 115–​116, 122–​123 philosophes genius and celebrity of, 144 on natural rights, 10, 13 natural rights writings, 7 on Paoli, 111 political rights, 5, 9 on victims of “terror,” 217–​218 philosophical histories, 176–​180, 184 philosophy of history, 140–​142 Physiocrats, xxiv declaration of rights, demand for, 24, 27 as French theory of natural law, 18, 21 on nation preceding state, 19 rights talk, promoting, 3, 7–​11 on social contracts, 21

283

Pitt, William, 112 Plessis, Armand de Vignerot du, 154 Plumb, J. H., The Birth of Consumer Society, 251–​252 Plutarch, Lucius, 136 “poetique” of historical writings, 175–​176n68 Poirier et Montgey, Louis Eugene, 207–​209, 207–​208n36 political celebrity, 89–​95, 99–​103, 143 political rights cahiers requesting, 27 consumer choice and, xxviii, 237–​238, 253–​257, 262–​272 for free black people, xix, 46n5, 53 as natural rights, 5, 9, 27 for Third Estate, 21 for women, xix, 267, 267n62, 270 political violence, xvii, 32–​37, 100. See also “terror” period of French Revolution Popkin, Jeremy, 42n1 popular justice, 225–​230 popular sovereignty, 31–​32, 38, 98, 265 popularity and celebrity culture, 95–​98 populism, xvii, xxii post-​revolutionary age, xvi posterity of historical writings, 174–​188,  175n65 prison massacres and ambushes, 226–​227 prison memoirs, 212–​216, 213n46, 214n48 profiteering, 169n44 property ownership intellectual property rights and, 147 natural rights associated with, 8–​9, 11 in Windward Islands, French régime change and, 51–​54 protectionism, 238–​239 Protestants, rights granted to, 28 Prudhomme, Louis-​Marie, 181–​182nn83–​84,  182 Dictionnaire des individus envoyés à la mort, 231 Histoire générale et impartiale des erreurs, 176n69, 231–​234 Révolutions de Paris, 181

284

public debt, 185n92 public opinion on charismatic figures, 125 genius and, 142–​144, 144n31 political culture and, 90 popularity and, 96–​98 suffrage and, 267–​268 on “terror” period, 209 tribunal metaphor and, 184n90 Puri, Shalini, 44n3 Quesnay, François, 7–​10, 7n22, 18 Queue de Robespierre, 200 Rabaut de Saint-​Etienne, Jean-​Paul on causes of Revolution, 184 death of, 177n70 on French Revolution, 180n79 pamphleteering around Estates General of, 179n75 Précis historique de la Révolution française, 176–​180, 177n71, 179n77 race. See also slavery Caribbean rebellions and, xxv, 49, 52–​54, 59, 64–​66, 68–​69, 78 culture vs., 76 political rights and, xix, 46n5, 53 radical journalists, 176, 176n69 Ranke, Leopold von, 190n106 Raynal, Guillaume-​Thomas, Histoire philosophique. . ., 165, 165n32 Reddy, William, 195, 220–​222 regicide, 6 Reign of Terror. See “terror” period of French Revolution Reigny, Jacques Beffroy de, 172n58 religion Christian calendar and, 147 cult of genius and, 146–​147 national rights and, 34 natural rights talk and, 28–​29 republicanism on corruption and decay, 184–​185n92 historical writing on, 187 idiom of, 163, 184, 187

Index

propaganda on, 181 slave rebellions and, 43n2, 50, 52–​55, 70, 75, 77 study of American Revolution and, xiv retail revolution, 251–​252 retributive justice, 225–​230 Le Reveil-​Matin, on “terror” period, 210–​211 Revolutionary Calendar, 147, 188 Revolutionary Government. See National Assembly; National Convention; “terror” period of French Revolution Revolutionary Tribunal “terror” period and, 61, 200–​201, 205–​206, 206n32, 219 in Windward Islands, 63 Rials, Stéphane, 29 Ricard, Étienne-​Pierre-​Sylvestre, 55–​59, 56n24, 62 Richardson, Samuel, Pamela, 121 rights conflicts, xxiv–​xxv, 1–​40 constitutionalism and political violence,  32–​37 human rights, intellectual origins of, 4–​11 national rights and constitutionalism,  12–​23 national vs. natural rights, 23–​32 Riquetti, Honoré-​Gabriel. See Mirabeau, Comte de Rivage, Justin du, Revolution Against Empire, xxi Robert, François, 181 Robespierre, Maximilien black legend of, 200n20 Bonaparte’s admiration for, 129 celebrity of, 95, 124–​125, 127–​128 on criminal histories, 181, 181n83 on evidence, 186, 186n95 on French Revolution, xxii on great man theory of history, 148 on history, 185, 187–​188 on journalism, 166 on national rights, 34–​36, 35n129, 36n132 on revolutionary morality, 188n101 “terror” period, blame for, 203, 203n27, 213 on Vendéen rebels, 33

Index

Rochambeau, vicomte de (Donatien-​Marie-​Joseph de Vimeur), 55–​56, 55n23, 56n24 Roche, Daniel, 254 Roland, Jeanne Manon, 172 romanticism, 157, 195 Romme, Gilbert, 188 Ronsin, Charles-​Philippe, 124 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 101 Rosenfeld, Sophia, xxviii–​xxix, 236 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques on celebrity, 89 elections, opposition to, 267 Emile, 163n25 genius and celebrity of, 143–​144 history, disdain for, 163, 163n25 on natural rights, 7, 16 The Social Contract, 20 social contract narrative of, 18, 20 royal historiographers, 162, 165,  165n31 royalism, 40, 80, 230. See also counterrevolutionaries Rush, Benjamin, 119 Russia. See Peter the Great Russian Revolution of 1917, xvi Russo, Elena, 117 Sabathier, Saint-​André, 58, 59n30 Saint-​Domingue national rights and, 34 slave rebellion in, xxv, 41–​43, 41–​43nn1–​2,  48–​49 surrender to Dessalines, 55n23 Saint-​Lambert, Jean-​François,  10 Saint Lucia Brigands’ War, xxv, 41, 43, 70–​72 British control of, 61–​62 defense against British invasion, xxv, 68–​69,  71–​72 French Revolution and, 53–​55, 57–​61 gens des bois of, 64–​67, 71–​72 Saint-​Samson, Louis-​Thomas Lavicomterie de, 180–​183,  181n81

285

Les Crimes des rois de France, 176, 181n83, 183n87 Du peuple et des rois, 182n85 Saint-​Simon, Claude-​Henri,  151 Saint Vincent, French Revolution and, 41–​43, 42–​43n2,  67–​69 sans-​culottes, 56, 167n38, 194n1, 196, 224 scholasticism, 2 scientific skepticism, 173n59 Scott, Joan Wallach, Only Paradoxes to Offer, 267n62 self-​fashioning, 258–​260,  259n45 self-​government, right to, 15–​16 sentimentalism in novels, 113, 115, 116, 123, 129 “terror” period and, 218–​222, 220n57, 221n58, 227–​230 Shakespeare, William, 139 Shapiro, Gilbert, 27 Sheehan, Jonathan, 141 shopping as novel activity, xxviii, 248–​250, 249n28, 260–​261 Sieyès, Emmanuel Declaration of Rights and, 25, 27 Délibérations, 30 Qu’est-​ce que le tiers état?, 19–​23, 21n68, 30, 265 Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions, xxin24 slavery abolition of, 27, 46–​47, 49–​50, 60–​61, 79 Montesquieu on, 79n61 natural rights and, 10 racial equality vs., 52–​53 rebellions against, 41–​79 (see also Windward Islands) restoration in Caribbean, 50, 77 shopping activities and, 259 social contract narratives, 18, 20–​23. See also national rights Société des Trente, 25, 26 Soulavie, Jean-​Louis, 170n51, 190n107 Mémoires du Maréchal duc de Richelieu, 154–​156, 154n1, 174n63, 192 Spencer, Herbert, 137

286

Spinoza, Baruch, 144 Staël, Germaine de, 95, 124 Considérations sur la Révolution française,  81–​82 Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution, 82 states, nations preceding, 18 status, consumer choice and, 250, 258 Stiles, Ezra, 114 stores and shops, 242–​245, 259–​260. See also consumer choice; shopping Tacitus, 163–​164n28 Tallien, Jean-​Lambert, 199 Talma, François-​Joseph, 86 Target, Guy-​Baptiste, 39 taxation natural rights and, 28 popular consent for, 13 Tenducci, Giusto Fernando, 85–​86 Terror of Guadeloupe, 63 Terror of Rochefort, 61 “terror” period of French Revolution, xxvii–​xxviii, 193–​235 amnesty for all acts related to, 230–​231 collective trauma of, 194–​196, 194n2, 216, 229, 231–​235 government, lack of trust in, 235, 235n85 individual rights, suppression of, 37 mass violence and murder during, 201–​209, 215–​216, 225–​229 morality and sentimentalism, 218–​222, 220n57, 221n58, 227–​230 prisoners’ accounts of, 212–​216, 213n46, 214n48, 223 public’s knowledge of, 197–​200, 197n11, 205–​210 revenge killings and retributive justice, 225–​229 Robespierre and, 127–​128 suspects, arrests of, 197, 211–​212, 223, 227–​228 system of, 199 terreur à l’ordre du jour phrase, use of, 196, 196nn7–​8

Index

Thermidorian interpretation of, 203–​205, 203n27, 209–​212 victims, restitution for, 216–​220, 223–​225, 229–​230 writings on, 172n56 theater, celebrity and, 85–​86, 98–​101 Thermidorians. See also National Convention; “terror” period of French Revolution black legend about Robespierre and, 200n20 defined, 194n1 historical rupture and, 157, 157n10 interpretation of “terror” period, 203–​205, 203n27, 209–​212 revenge killings, 226–​227 sentimental idiom and, 218–​222 “terror,” responsibility for, 216–​219, 235 Windward Islands and, 63 Thibaudeau, Antoine Claire, 33 Third World revolutions, xvii Thomas, Antoine-​Léonard, 107, 109, 142–​143 Thomism, 6 Thomson, James, The Seasons, 110, 121 Thouret, Jacques Guillaume, 34 Tocqueville, Alexis de, xv, xviii, 38, 155 Toulongeon, Emmanuel de, Manuel révolutionnaire, 96 tourism, 249 trade, natural rights and, xx, 8–​9, 27. See also consumer choice treason, 39, 76, 120 tribunal metaphor of history, 184, 184n90, 192 Truillot, Michel-​Rolph, Silencing the Past, 47 Turgot, Anne-​Robert-​Jacques,  10 Turreau, Louis Marie, 202–​203 Tyler, Royall, 114 United States, 52–​53. See also American Revolution Vattel, Emer de, Le Droit des gens, 12, 14 Vély, Paul François, 182n85

Index

Vendée civil war, 196–​198, 201, 226 Versailles, Edict of (1787), 28 Vestris, Augustrin, 86 Vigée-​Lebrun, Elisabeth,  93–​94 Vimeur, Donatien-​Marie-​Joseph de, 55–​56, 55n23, 56n24 virtue Bonaparte and, 130 celebrity culture and, 95 charisma and, 125 great men and, 107–​108, 117, 138 Hercules’s Choice and, 263–​264, 263–​264n58 political violence and, 100 sentimentalism and, 220 Washington and, 114 visual culture and Bonaparte, 131 celebrity culture and, 87–​89 charismatic authority and, 114–​115, 126–​127 and Franklin, 146 historical writings and, 175, 175n65, 182n83 political celebrity and, 90–​94 “terror” period and, 206–​209, 231–​234 Voltaire genius and celebrity of, 143–​145, 147 on great man theory, 139 on heroes, 107 on natural rights, 7, 7n20 on Peter the Great, 109 portrait of, 88 voting rights. See political rights Vries, Jan de, 250 Wahrman, Dror, 141 Walvin, James, The Atlas of Slavery, 43n2 Washington, George Bonaparte compared to, 132 celebrity of, 116–​119 charismatic appeal of, 118, 120 death of, 132 as father of his country, 114, 121–​122

287

overview of, 113–​115 Peter the Great and Paoli compared to, 115–​116, 122–​123 Weber, Eugen, xxviii Weber, Max, xxvi, 106, 118–​120, 152–​153 Weems, Mason Locke, 115 West, Michael O., From Toussaint to Tupac, 42n2 White, Hayden, 158n13 Wilkes, John, 89–​90 Wilkins, Fanon Che, From Toussaint to Tupac, 42n2 Windward Islands, xxv, 41–​79. See also specific islands abolition of slavery in, 60–​61 African influences in, 46 alternative narrative of rebellions in,  51–​70 British control of, 61–​62, 65–​67, 69 French régime change and, 51–​52 French war with Britain and, 59–​62 Grenada, rebellion of, 72–​76 narrative of rebellions in, 43–​48, 44n3 rebellion objectives, 49–​50, 53 rebellions in, 41–​43, 41–​43nn1–​2 slave rebellion vs. Revolution, xix,  69–​71 witness testimony, 171 women gender politics and, xix, 180–​181, 181n82, 183–​184, 267, 267n62 political rights for, xix, 267, 267n62, 270 shopping activities of, 250, 259–​262 Wood, Gordon S., 141 Empire of Liberty, 42n2 William and Mary Quarterly, 160n19 writers, celebrity of, 86–​87 Wyndham, Charles, 247–​248 Young, Edward, Conjectures on Original Composition, 138–​139 Zizek, Joseph, xxvii, 154 French Historical Studies, 176n69