Burke, Paine, and the Newspapers: An "Archaeology" of Political Knowledge 1789-93

Abstract

The MURTHER took place at four o'clock this morning, and was conducted in the most private manner. The Guillotine was erected in ya court of the Temple--a hole was dug in it, into which the King's head fell, and his body precipitated afterward .... (This must be understood as the prevailing report of the moment. It is impossible vouch for its absolute truth.) This scene of infernal assassination, which a base and cowardly faction have now degraded human nature by executing calls for a marked execration which it is not in the power of language convey .... Almighty vengeance must be the portion of who have thus step by step arrived at this damnable crisis. To that awful moment, when the great King of Kings shall sit in tremendous judgement of men and daemons, do we consign the diabolic spirits. It will come, and in thunders speak terrors their hearts, now hardened in human iniquity. THIS DESCRIPTION OF THE FRENCH REGICIDE FIRST APPEARED IN THE St. James' Chronicle on 24th January 1793, and was copied during the next few days in a number of other pro-ministerial newspapers. Its publication was a few days after the execution of Louis Capet, and clearly uses and elaborates upon a rumor suit the political purposes of that newspaper; the French King, murdered at night, in private, the perpetrators using all the cunning of a villain in a Gothic novel keep their crime secret. The Gothic tropes are built up so that, despite the partially-admitted dubiousness of the narrative being reported, a number of eschatological prophesies are made about the results. Today we would probably respond this passage by claiming that it is journalism, as it draws conclusions from facts not yet established, and accepts rumor as fact simply because it suits a particular political agenda. Against this, intend in the following pages argue that the imagination of political action, in this case imagining the King's death, cannot be read as simply bad journalism in the early 1790s; that in fact the equivocal nature of political factuality and truth steins from the whole system of the representation of political events at this time, and that this act of creative imagining is one of the ways in which political activity could legitimately be construed during the 1790s. I hope you do not think me weak enough, wrote Burke in a letter of January 1790, to form my of what is doing here [i.e., in France] upon the representations of newspapers, much less upon of a country in which the true spirit of the several transactions cannot be known. (1) The letter was probably intended for Thomas Paine, or at least reads very like a reply a letter that Burke had received from him a few days before, in which Paine assumes of his addressee an over-reliance on the London press for knowledge of the situation in France. Paine had stated, in the English papers is either untrue or misrepresented (75). So the writers of the most famed political appropriations of the events of the French Revolution, upon which so much debate turned, did not think much of the reporting be found in newspapers. Instead, they claimed more privileged access information, Paine through his friendship with Lafayette and his late presence in France, Burke by a more general appeal men of quality, or, those who have a considerable share in the formation of public measures (79). You really shouldn't believe everything you read in the papers-hardly a surprising sentiment find in the correspondence of two men of letters and active politicians such as Burke and Paine. It is perhaps statements such as these, and also the apparent disparities throughout the eighteenth century between government policy and opinion as expressed in the newspapers, that have led certain historians claim that the influence of the press on political affairs at this time was strictly limited; that the newspapers were much more concerned with the commercial interests of their readers; that people in reality did not believe what they read, or that they did not form effective critical based on what they read; and even if they did, the executive powers worked in a rarefied world that was not influenced by, or rather did not need be particularly bothered with, the formation of outside a relatively small circle attached the court and the cabinet. …