Sarah Horowitz. Friendship and Politics in Post-Revolutionary France.

Abstract

In Paris's Père Lachaise cemetery stands a tomb in which two friends lie buried together. They were Pierre Jean de Béranger, a political radical best known as a poet and songwriter, and Jacques Antoine Manuel, a leading liberal orator in the National Assembly until he was expelled in 1823 for making a speech that endorsed regicide. Though Béranger lived for another 30 years after Manuel's death in 1827, his choice to be buried with Manuel illustrates the importance of friendship in his life, a friendship that was both personally intense and reinforced by his political engagement. It is with this telling anecdote that Sarah Horowitz begins her detailed study of the relationship between friendship and politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. As she states, we cannot know whether so profound a friendship had “erotic as well as platonic” (p. 1) dimensions, but the salient point is that it demonstrates the possibility at that time for two men to make an open statement about their mutual attachment as the most significant relationship in their lives. How, though, did emotional ties of friendship translate into the world of politics?