The Book After the French Revolution

Abstract

The modern book appears to be denuded of its associations with either holiness or embodiment. A book is a book, equivalent to a mundane sense of contents. Letter appears to give way to spirit alone. This chapter considers the French Revolution as a threshold of modernity in attitudes towards writing and the press, including concepts of copyright and the free press. These ideas are examined both in relation to the production of books, and in the representation of writing in visual art, such as David’s Death of Marat. Rather than a process of desacralization, this is revealed as a crisis in the idea of ‘spirit’. The concept is analysed philosophically in relation to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and then historically in the revolutionary quarrels between Robespierre and other Jacobins, and the use of the guillotine as a literal metaphor of justice. As reason triumphs, the repressed body returns.