Abstract
Is N 1820 Wordsworth removed the tale of Vaudracour and Julia from the Poem to Coleridge, where it formed roughly the second half of Book 9, and published it separately. Few readers have bemoaned its absence from the i850 version of the poem finally known as the Prelude. However, Vaudracour and Julia plays an important role in the i 805 version. Written in the contemporary and popular form of melodrama, this tale expresses a belated protest against the ancien re'gime's abuses of citizens' natural rights. In it Wordsworth indicates how he would have his contemporary reader read the French Revolution in the era of Napoleon: as a program for political liberty that had been guided by a moderating, philosophy, and undermined not by the reformist nature of this philosophy (those anti-traditionalist aims of the revolutionaries attacked by Edmund Burke) but by misguided, violence. Of course, in representing Girondin and Montagnard politics in this binary fashion, Wordsworth either ignores or is ignorant of the fact that the Girondins advocated some of the most radical programs early in the Revolution, such as agrarian reform and the abolition of primogeniture. They did not begin to oppose the Montagnards until May 1792, when Brissot and Robespierre split over the issue of the war, fol-
Published Version
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