French Revolution Debate Research Articles

History, the Novel, and the French Revolution

A review of Morgan Rooney’s book, The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 1790–1814: The Struggle for History’s Authority (2012).

Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, 1789–1802 by Wil Verhoeven (review)

Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, 1789–1802 by Wil Verhoeven (review)

Review

As someone who has researched, written and taught on the French Revolution debate in Britain for almost two decades, I have long paid lip service to the importance of the American Revolution/War of...

“The Stormy Sea of Politics”: The French Revolution and Frances Burney's The Wanderer

Recent challenges to the pivotal position that Walter Scott has been awarded in terms of the genesis of the historical novel have led to renewed interest in the origins and development of the form, as well as increasing awareness of the diversities of Romantic historical fiction. The variety available within the genre is manifest in the appearance of Frances Burney's The Wanderer and Scott's Waverley within the space of a few months in 1814. Both narratives responded to the momentous events of the French revolutionary period; however, Burney's model of history and fiction fell quickly out of view, arguably as a result of its cosmopolitan principles and Burney's revival of the question of “the wrongs of woman”. This article examines Burney's contribution to the field of Romantic historical fiction, emphasizing the significance of Burney's late historical novel. Tracing The Wanderer's composite historical portrayal of the initial moment of the French Revolution crisis, the article contends that the novel represented an attempt to reopen the broader social, economic and gender issues raised by the French Revolution debate in a period of renewed radical agitation.

Jacobin History: Charlotte Smith's Old Manor House and the French Revolution Debate

Given the fundamental importance of history to the disputes which raged in the 1790s about questions of tradition, authority and social change, and the meaning of the British national past, it is perhaps unsurprising that both radical and anti-Jacobin novelists employed forms of fictional historical narrative to intervene in the French Revolution debate. During the ‘war of ideas’, writers clearly conceived of an active political purpose for the historical novel, and these texts appear as a vital element within the wider response of the British novel to the crisis engendered by the French Revolution. While conservative authors such as Clara Reeve, George Walker and Jane West relied on the genre to counter the threat of revolution, echoing Edmund Burke’s appeal to history to defend the eighteenth-century British political and institutional structure against the encroaches of radical reformers unversed in the lessons of history and experience, a turn to historical fiction simultaneously permitted radical novelists such as William Godwin and Charlotte Smith to extend the pervasive social and cultural analysis of the Jacobin novel into the theatre of history, and promote a spirit of political enquiry and reflection through the medium of the historical. Published during the early years of the pamphlet war, Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793) appears as a key instance of the intersection of the genre of historical fiction with the political and historical dialogue generated by the French Revolution controversy. As Godwin would do at the close of the revolutionary decade in St Leon (1799), Smith employed imaginative historical narrative to issue a direct challenge to the historical view of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), presenting readers with a complex narrative meditation on the American and French Revolutions, and the ongoing debate surrounding the political settlement that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The use of history to comment on contemporary politics was a well-established practice by the eighteenth century, and, in The Old Manor House, Smith undoubtedly drew on the 1770s as a means of offering a displaced mode of political critique in the reactionary climate of the 1790s. The composite historical agenda of the text indicates, however, that Smith’s narrative intentions extended beyond veiled political expression. Composed in a moment marked by the intensifying violence of the French Revolution, the return of The Old Manor House to the period of the American Revolution facilitated a celebration of their shared ideals, allowing Smith ‘to remind her readers of a fact that had slipped from the

Popular Radicalism, Religious Parody and the Mock Sermon in the 1790s

This article examines the role of religious parody in the popular radical movement in Britain in the 1790s, focusing on a collection of little-known mock sermons and the booksellers who published them. Aimed at a plebeian audience, these mock sermons revived an old tradition of religious satire and drew extensively on the resources of popular culture. They functioned to democratize the meanings of religious rituals, as popular perceptions and practices were fashioned into an authoritative mode of radical political discourse. In part, this was a response to the way in which genuine sermons and other religious rituals had become politicized during the French Revolution debate, particularly on occasions such as public fast days. Intriguingly, however, these mock sermons were not opposed to religious belief, despite being written in a style of populist irreverence. On the contrary, they were all published by booksellers sympathetic to popular religious feeling and were evidently intended to appeal to devout as well as sceptical members of plebeian society. In this sense, mock sermons shed new light on the propaganda war of the 1790s, disclosing the complex religious affiliations of the popular radical movement and highlighting the affinities between millennarian and secular patterns of thought.

The Storming of the Bastille in English Newspapers

Discussions of English responses to the French Revolution usually concentrate on the “pamphlet controversy” between such texts as Burke’s Refl ections on the Revolution in France, Paine’s The Rights of Man, and Wollstonecraft’s Vindications.1 The earliest texts most contemporary critics mention are Burke’s seminal Refl ections, which “precipitated a debate over the French Revolution that has continued for two centuries,” and Richard Price’s Discourse on the Love of our Country, which was delivered on 4 November 1789.2 As Stephen Prickett correctly asserts, these “descriptions and images of the French Revolution debate conditioned the ways in which observers actually perceived those events.”3 At the same time, “descriptions and images of the French Revolution,” or at least of individual events that constituted it, were available to British citizens several months before November 1789. The fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, in particular, elicited many reactions in England in such media as print, caricature, and drama. For instance, in August 1789 “a ‘Bastille war’ took place in London as managers of the minor theatres staged rival representations of the events of the Fourteenth of July.” 4 All three dramas were favorably disposed to the storming of the Bastille. On August 31st, the Sadler’s Wells Theater in London put on a play with the title Gallic Freedom; or, Vive la Liberte. Two weeks previously (17 August), the Royal Grove Amphitheatre under the direction of Philip

Lisa Plummer Crafton, ed. The French Revolution Debate in English Literature and Culture. (Contributions to the Study of World Literature, Number 87.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. 1997. Pp. xix, 156. $55.00. ISBN 0-313-30496-3.

Lisa Plummer Crafton, ed. The French Revolution Debate in English Literature and Culture. (Contributions to the Study of World Literature, Number 87.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. 1997. Pp. xix, 156. $55.00. ISBN 0-313-30496-3. - Volume 31 Issue 1

Women Novelists and the French Revolution Debate: Novelizing the Revolution/Revolutionizing the Novel

Women Novelists and the French Revolution Debate: Novelizing the Revolution/ Revolutionizing the Novel Gary Kelly It is now accepted that the French Revolution was a cultural as well as political event, or rather that Revolutionary politics were enacted in cultural ways, among others.1 Yet fictionalizations of the Revolution might still seem either tangential to its political realities or a submission of literature, which is supposedly transhistorical, to mere temporality, in the form of propaganda. In fact much writing of the time remains outside the modern literary canon for precisely this reason.2 Even critical opinion of the time saw the novel as an unpromising vehicle for serious discussion of political ideas, let alone ideas inspired by an event that was considered historically unprecedented in its magnitude, consequences, and nature. Moreover, the novel was then widely if erroneously regarded as a "feminine" form, mainly read and written by women, and as a consequence outside the public, political sphere in which revolutions 1 See for example Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 2 See Harriet Kramer Linkin, "The Current Canon in British Romantics Studies," College English 53:5 (Sept. 1991), 548-70. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 6, Number 4, July 1994 370 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION occurred.3 On the other hand, the polarization of the political and the literary that underwrites such judgments originated in reaction to the Revolution, and was part of an elevation of the literary over the political that masks its own political character and the political character of art. It could also be argued, after Mikhail Bakhtin, that "novelization," or the creation of a polyvocal, democratic, dialogical discursive order in place of authoritative, authoritarian, monological ones, was the project both of the Revolution and the novel.4 Thus fictionalizing Revolutionary themes and issues, whether directly or indirectly, would be a way of participating in the Revolution. Furthermore , the subordinate cultural status of the novel and its female writers and readers would make it apt for "novelizing" the literary and discursive order of the time, by introducing the marginal into the centre . Though novels were in fact produced and read equally by women and men, albeit with different inflections, there were cultural grounds for characterizing the novel as "feminine," accounting for its potential as oppositional discourse. By the nature of its claims, the Revolution not only invited "novelizing"—in Bakhtin's sense and as novelistic representation of Revolutionary events, characters, and ideas; the Revolution also enabled and even required revolutionizing of the novel, thematically and formally, in order that it might carry out these tasks. More important, by the outbreak of the Revolution certain kinds of novel had long been implicated in the cultural, social, and political critique that the Revolution embodied. Since the seventeenth century, at least, certain kinds of prose fiction had dealt with private relationships and domestic scenes of life. The domestic or feminine sphere was represented as authentic in contrast to the illusions and relativities of the masculine or public sphere, especially under court government, thereby making domestic fiction into oppositional writing. Varieties of anti-romance represented "reality" in a different set of modes to counter courtly culture, including picaresque low life, satire exposing courtly artifice , and the knowingly super-courtly, or decadent. These kinds of fiction, like those representing private and domestic life, were anti-courtly simply by implying that "reality" and "authenticity" lay elsewhere than at court. The same ideological and cultural work could be accomplished by both The English Rogue (1665-71) and La Princesse de Clèves (1678, in 3 See John Tinnon Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel: The PopularReactionfrom 1760 to 1830 (New York: King's Crown Press, 1943). 4 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). REVOLUTIONIZING THE NOVEL 371 English 1679), and by both The New Atlantis (1709) and Moll Flanders (1722). These varieties of fiction were modifed in the middle third of the eighteenth century, as Enlightenment theorists proposed models of "civil society " to revolutionize the public and political sphere by removing it from court hegemony and imbuing...

"Out of Nature": Blake and the French Revolution Debate

"Out of Nature": Blake and the French Revolution Debate

Republicanism versus commercial society: Paine, Burke and the French revolution debate

Republicanism versus commercial society: Paine, Burke and the French revolution debate

Radicalism and Linguistic Theory: Horne Tooke on Samuel Pegge

In addition to being a radical political journalist and pamphleteer, twice prosecuted by the British government for treason,John Horne Tooke was by far the best-known philologist in the English-speaking world for more than fifty years after the French Revolution. The theory of language and the etymological 'proofs' advanced in support of it in his book, EHEA HTEPOENTA or the Diversions ofPurley, were to appeal not merely to radicals of such various hues as Godwin, Wordsworth, Erasmus Darwin, Bentham, Hazlitt, Peacock, Cobbett, Mackintosh, Brougham, and James Mill, but also to such distinctly un-revolutionary members of the establishment as Archbishop Trench. In America his theories were taken up by Ralph Waldo Emerson and by Noah Webster who was only one of a number of lexicographers fired by the idea of creating a true etymological dictionary on Tookeian principles. But for someone as widely-known and controversial as Tooke, there has been curiously little agreement among subsequent critics as to the relationship between his philology and his politics. Marilyn Butler, for instance, introduces Horne Tooke in a recent anthology on the French Revolution debate as follows: