Crimes of the sign: Politics and performatives in the Treason Trials of 1794

Abstract

AbstractThis paper explores some key topics in the semiotics of law − and the paradoxes related to legality, legitimacy, and interpretation − through a chapter in the history of British radicalism that unfolds around the Treason Trials of 1794. These trials, I argue, staged a wholesale battle around the very nature of the sign. The peculiarities of British treason law and the prosecution’s “constructive” readings made treason wholly into a crime of the sign, framing all of radical culture as criminal and conspiratorial. I argue this by showing how legal meaning, along with guilt and innocence, was negotiated in relation to (1) context, and particularly the French Revolution; (2) the performativity of signs, and most crucially, their capacity for disrupting the status quo; and (3) the dynamic nature of semiosis, whereby historical process and political change cannot be halted or controlled. In the Treason Trials, these concepts are alternately invoked and denied as frames for viewing “factual” evidence and establishing its meanings along partisan lines. Finally, this paper would like to suggest that the legal narratives produced in 1794 can generate insights into discursive strategies still used today to create “facts” and “truths,” shape popular opinion, and justify government interventions.