Utopie romantique et Révolution française

Abstract

Robert Sayre and Michael Lowy, Romantic Utopia and the trench revolution The article takes as its point of departure the conception that Romanticism is a critique of the modem world and its bourgeois civilization in the name of values from a pre-modern, pre-capitalist past. Among the Romantics one can find both partisans and adversaries of the French Revolution. In the camp of the partisans there exists an apparently paradoxical current ; politically moderate, but socially radical. Politically, it rejects the « excesses » of the Revolution, its Terror and authoritarianism. Socially, it is more advanced than the Jacobins in that it aspires to a Utopian socialism based on a community of land and goods, Rousseauist in inspiration, it dreams of the return to a Golden Age. The character of Gauvain in Hugo's novel Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-Three), could be seen as its « ideal-typical » figure. Among the political and literary groups that belong to such a configuration, are : the « Social Circle », certain of the « red priests », the French Rousseauists Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Restif de la Bretonne, and the English Romantics Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Blake. The article develops three examples in detail : Nicolas de Bonneville of the « Sodal Circle », Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and Coleridge.