On Their Tiptoes: Political Time and Newspapers during the Advent of the Radicalized French Revolution, circa 1792–1793

Abstract

In his 1937 magnum opus, The Historical Novel, Hungarian literary critic Georg Lukacs suggested that new ideas about - and implicitly, about time itself- laid foundation for development of historical novel. According Lukacs, the quick succession of . . . upheavals associated with the French Revolution, revolutionary wars and rise and fall of Napoleon . . . for first time made a mass experience.'''' Whereas individuals during Enlightenment viewed Progress ... as an essentially unhistorical struggle between humanist reason and feudal-absolutist unreason, succeeding generations came think of time in terms of the inner conflict of social forces, so that history itself is bearer and realizer of Lukacs wrote from a Marxist perspective and was therefore deeply concerned with showing diverse ways in which writers in post-Napoleonic era addressed question of modern bourgeois society arose out of class struggles between nobility and bourgeoisie. No matter how one views Lukacs's politics, it is hard deny potential explanatory power of his insight that the huge, rapidly successive changes of French Revolution and Napoleonic rule pushed humans to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned.1That insight was fully explored only as a generation of revisionist scholars began challenging Marxist interpretation of French Revolution. More specifically, historians like Mona Ozouf, Lynn Hunt, and Jeremy Popkin revitalized scholarship on French Revolution by paying close attention previously understudied elements like festivals and press. The collective emphasis on textual analysis and cultural symbols brought into relief French revolutionaries' dynamic understanding of temporality. New ideas about time and history, it seems, were intimately related far-reaching transformations in political culture, and any attempt explain either of two phenomena must necessarily consider other.2Taken together, prescient analysis of Lukacs and wave of innovative work on French Revolution invite new ways of evaluating various aspects of early United States. In particular, they draw attention way in which advent of radicalized French Revolution - series of international events taking place between imprisonment of King Louis XVI (August 10, 1792) and onslaught of Terror (September 5, 1793) - prompted American newspaper writers and readers address concepts of contemporaneity in a more rigorous fashion than ever before. This sustained engagement with notions of time did not materialize without problems, and partisan discussions of proper mode of interpreting recent events and newspapers ensued. The resulting cacophony, which revolved around Federalist challenges Democratic-Republicans' belief that revolutionary time moved more quickly than regular time, destabilized traditional efforts pinpoint present moment on a preordained timeline. French Revolutionary intelligence thus assumed prominence as both cause and reflection of initial American encounters with a concept of political time divorced from inherited notions of Protestant providence, Whig cyclical history, and Scottish enlightenment progress. In a halting, unintended manner, American newspaper writers and readers broached subject of contingency.3A study of newspapers in 1792-1793 also reveals, more broadly, how profoundly radicalized French Revolution molded American political culture. Historians have known for years that French Revolution influenced United States, but too often they have been content assert existence of that influence without probing its nature in full. That is unfortunate because certain parallels between Gallic and American political development are sufficiently striking that they provide a case study of transnational history, of way in which various forces cross over political boundaries and spur same type of change in multiple national entities. …