The French Revolution: Blake's Epic Dialogue with Edmund Burke

Abstract

Even though French Revolution is more firmly rooted in contemporary events than any of Blake's other Prophetic Books, most critics have considered the poem's political content as little more than a backdrop for his evolving philosophical system. For instance, in one of the most extended readings that the poem has received, John Beer casually dismisses its revolutionary context: begin with the poem is written in favor not of revolution but of liberty. distinction is important. Blake was no headlong supporter of political revolution.' And recently, Barton R. Friedman has presented a more sophisticated, more historically informed version of this same argument, identifying French Revolution as an example of Universal History: The use of one nation's experience -here specifically the American and French Revolutions and the agony they cause Albion -as a microcosm ... of the whole cosmic design. 2 But while Blake undoubtedly thought the French Revolution an event of potentially cosmic significance, he 3 was also keenly aware of its specific social and political ramifications. In contrast to Blake's later, more thoroughly mythologized narratives, French Revolution provides a detailed, if somewhat inaccurate, account of early stages of the Revolution, and, with few exceptions, its characters are larger-than-life versions of the actual historical figures. In fact, rather than an otherworldly prophecy, I believe that French Revolution is essentially a political tract in epic form that represents Blake's most public attempt to enter the ongoing English debate over the French Revolution. Writing in 1791, Blake -like Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine -seeks to counter the chief conservative voice of the time, Edmund Burke, whose 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France had eroded much of the initial English sympathy for the revolutionary movement. What results is a poetic dialogue in which Blake challenges the underlying assumptions of Burke's counterrevolutionary text.4 At the heart of this dispute is a fundamental disagreement about the nature of the French Revolution. To Burke, the Revolution represents a tremendous upheaval in the course of human history, a total inversion of the natural order: