Pigalle's Voltaire nu: The Republic of Letters Represents itself to the World

Abstract

IN RECENT YEARS much attention has been given to culture of French Revolution, and particularly to its ritual and iconographical dimensions. While Mona Ozouf's work on fete revolutionnaire has been seminal, Maurice Agulhon's study of image of Marianne has extended this cultural approach to Revolution to modern world that it continues to shape.' These studies and those they have inspired have taught us a great deal about how a group or a people new to power assert their status and authority through an appropriation and transformation of traditional ritual and symbolic material. As Lynn Hunt put it in her recent book: exercise of power always requires symbolic practices .... When a revolutionary movement challenges legitimacy of traditional government, it must necessarily challenge traditional trappings of rule as well. Then it must go about inventing political symbols that will express accurately and principles of new order.2 The political culture of Revolution was thus always in self-conscious opposition to that of Old Regime. And because, as Hunt goes on to say, the Bourbons had emphasized symbolic trappings of rule, revolutionaries were particularly sensitive to their significance.3 The revolutionaries were not, however, first group of people to demonstrate a sensitivity to symbolic dimension of Bourbon power, just as they were not first group to challenge traditional government. Even before revolutionaries of 1780s and 1790s, philosophes of 1770s concerned themselves with establishing ideals and principles of a new [political] order, and so they, too, not surprisingly, faced problem of inventing political symbols. Their situation was, of course, significantly different: rather than attempting to define and legitimize a power they had won, philosophes sought to assert a political power they did not hold through transformation of an intellectual and cultural authority that, more and more, they did. While revolutionaries needed to substitute something for representations of a now obsolete royal authority, philosophes were concerned to represent their political identity without being able to deny outright that of monarchy. Their assertion of political identity had to operate in presence of monarchy's, rather than in its absence. Finally, while revolutionaries had