(cambridge studies in romanticism ) gregory dart-rousseau, robespierre and english romanticism...

This book reopens the question of Rousseau’s influence on theFrench Revolution and on English Romanticism, by examining therelationship between his confessional writings and his politicaltheory. Gregory Dart argues that by looking at the way in whichRousseau’s writings were mediated by the speeches and actions ofthe French Jacobin statesman Maximilien Robespierre, we can gaina clearer and more concrete sense of the legacy he left to Englishwriters. He shows how the writings of William Godwin, MaryWollstonecraft, William Wordsworth and William Hazlitt rehearseand reflect upon the Jacobin tradition in the aftermath of theFrench revolutionary Terror.

Gregory Dart is lecturer in English at the University of York. Hestudied at Cambridge and has published in Victorian Literature &Culture, The Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies and the bulletin of theBritish Association of Romantic Studies.

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ROUSSEAU, ROBESPIERRE AND ENGLISHROMANTICISM

General editorsProfessor Marilyn Butler Professor James Chandler

University of Oxford University of Chicago

Editorial boardJohn Barrell, University of York

Paul Hamilton, University of LondonMary Jacobus, Cornell University

Kenneth Johnston, Indiana UniversityAlan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara

Jerome McGann, University of VirginiaDavid Simpson, University of California, Davis

This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fieldswithin English literary studies. From the early s to the early s a formi-dable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not justin poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes ofwriting. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, andthe political stakes of what they wrote were raised again by what Wordsworthcalled those ‘great national events’ that were ‘almost daily taking place’: theFrench Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, indus-trialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the reform move-ment at home. This was an enormous ambition, even when it pretendedotherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion and literaturewere reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender rela-tions in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbettand Hazlitt; poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and the CockneySchool. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has pro-duced such a wealth of response or done so much to shape the responses ofmodern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of thosenotions of ‘literature’ and of literary history, especially national literary history,on which modern scholarship in English has been founded.

The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by recenthistoricist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challeng-ing corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism theyhave helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, thisone will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, oneither side of the Atlantic and elsewhere.

For a complete list of titles published see end of book

Rousseau, Robespierre and EnglishRomanticism

GREGORY DART

PUBLISHED BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (VIRTUAL PUBLISHING) FOR AND ON BEHALF OF THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia

http://www.cambridge.org

© Gregory Dart 1999 This edition © Gregory Dart 2003

First published in printed format 1999

A catalogue record for the original printed book is available from the British Library and from the Library of Congress Original ISBN 0 521 64100 4 hardback

ISBN 0 511 00760 4 virtual (netLibrary Edition)

‘To my father & mother Edward and Jean,and my two sisters Leah and Katie.’

Contents

List of illustrations page xAcknowledgements xi

Introduction Despotism of liberty: Robespierre and the illusion of

politics

The politics of confession in Rousseau and Robespierre

Chivalry, justice and the law in William Godwin’s CalebWilliams

‘The Prometheus of Sentiment’: Rousseau, Wollstonecraftand aesthetic education

Strangling the infant Hercules: Malthus and the populationcontroversy

‘The virtue of one paramount mind’: Wordsworth and thepolitics of the Mountain

‘Sour Jacobinism’: William Hazlitt and the resistance toreform

Notes Bibliography Index

ix

Illustrations

. Sketch of Robespierre (), by Gérard, muséeCarnavelet, Paris. No. CAR A. page

. ‘Festival of the Supreme Being on the Champ de Mars’ (),watercolour by Naudet, musée Carnavelet, Paris. No. CAR A.

. ‘View of the Chariot which was used at the Festival of the Supreme Being on the Prairial, year two’ (),anonymous engraving, musée Carnavalet, Paris No. CAR A.

. ‘The Sanculotte rendering homage to the Supreme Being’(), engraving by Aveline, musée Carnavelet, Paris. No. CAR NB.

. ‘The Triumph of the Republic’ (), Pierre Michael Alix,musée Carnavelet, Paris. No. CAR A.

x

Acknowledgements

Many people have suffered in the making of this project; countless inno-cent victims have been caught up in its violent and erratic progress. Hereis a list of the ones who made the most heroic efforts to keep it on course.My greatest debt of gratitude is to my former supervisor Nigel Leask, atruly remarkable man, who has been an unfailing source of knowledgeand inspiration to me over the past decade. And not far behind himcome John Whale, John Barrell, Hugh Haughton, Jack Donovan,Harriet Guest, Ludmilla Jordanova, Stephen Copley, Howard Erskine-Hill, Alan Forrest and Norman Hampson, who have all offered con-structive criticism of my work at one time or another, not to mentionJames Chandler and the anonymous readers at Cambridge UniversityPress, whose late suggestions for revision were a great help. In addition,I should like to thank my undergraduate director of studies Fred Parker,for so skilfully fanning the first flames of my revolutionary enthusiasm,and also Louise Hoole, Juliet Osborne and Mark Hallett, for havingbeen prepared to live with the fumes. Finally, I must express my grati-tude to Josie Dixon at Cambridge University Press, for her considerablekindness and understanding during the preparation of the typescript.

xi

Introduction

Unless I had been animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm,my application to this study would have been irksome, and almostintolerable.1

Surprisingly, perhaps, given the mythic status he now enjoys as thearchetype of the modern scientist, the protagonist of Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus () has an approach to science thatis decidedly anti-modern. In the early part of his confessional narrativeVictor describes how his project to re-animate the dead was initiallyinspired by the study of writers such as Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsusand Albertus Magnus, a group of mystics and alchemists considered byhis tutor the ‘progressive’ Professor Krempe to be ‘as musty as they areancient’. For Frankenstein, however, they display a holism that is notice-ably lacking in the disciples of modern natural philosophy:

It was very different, when the masters of the science sought immortality andpower; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed.The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of thosevisions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required toexchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth. ()

Even after having been persuaded of the value of modern experi-mental techniques by the sympathetic Mr Waldman, Victor does notabandon his pursuit of the ancient ideal. Instead he chooses to put theformer in the service of the latter, employing the latest analyticalmethods for his own overwhelmingly animistic ends, attempting to dis-cover the vital unity that binds together the world of matter by syn-thesising a living human being from a collection of dead and disparatebody parts. When seen in this light, Frankenstein’s ‘almost supernaturalenthusiasm’ – the quasi religious fervour with which he approaches his

research – can only serve to reinforce the impression that he is an intel-lectual ‘primitivist’ rather than a ‘progressive’.

Since its first appearance in , Mary Shelley’s famous tale of over-reaching idealism has often been read as a political allegory of theFrench Revolution. In this interpretation of things, Victor Frankensteinis seen as a revolutionary idealist whose attempt to create ‘a new man’reproduces the utopian impulse of , and whose subsequent dis-appointment mirrors its historical failure. Not only the broad contour ofthe narrative, but also many of its incidental details serve to encouragethis line of reasoning. Frankenstein is born in Geneva like that other‘modern Prometheus’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a figure widely recog-nised in the early nineteenth century as one of the intellectual fathers ofFrench republicanism.2 And he gives life to his creature at Ingolstadt inBavaria, which became notorious in the counter-revolutionary histori-ography of the period as the birthplace of the secret society of theIlluminati, the alleged founders of revolutionary Jacobinism.3 Despitethis, however, while demonstrating a full awareness of the symbolicgeography of the novel, most ‘political’ readings of Frankenstein havenot made much of its European setting, preferring to regard the novelin rather narrowly English terms, either as a specific attack on theutopian idealism of Shelley’s father William Godwin, or more generallyas ‘a critique of the revolutionary optimism of the s’.4

This is unfortunate, especially as there is a good deal of evidence tosuggest that recent European history is likely to have been very much inMary Shelley’s mind when she came to write Frankenstein. Significantly,the letters and diaries of the Shelley circle for the Swiss summer of indicate that both Mary and Percy were eagerly devouring the novelsand memoirs of Rousseau around this time, while the latter was dippingliberally into Lacretelle’s Précis Historique de la Révolution Française.5 Somuch so, indeed, that it is tempting to think that, with the fall ofNapoleon the previous year, and the bringing to a close of more thantwenty years of European conflict, both Mary and Percy had beenmoved to undertake a reassessment of the long history of the FrenchRevolution, and of the specific influence of Rousseau upon it.6 And allthe signs are that, for Percy at least, this reappraisal led to a fundamentalrevision in his attitude to the ‘citizen of Geneva’. Where previously hehad considered Rousseau to be in the mainstream of French rationalistthought, from this time onwards he began to make a distinction betweenRousseau and the more sceptical tradition of the Enlightenment, con-trasting the ‘cold and unimpassioned spirit of Gibbon’, with ‘the greater

Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

and more sacred name of Rousseau’, increasingly coming to regard thelatter as ‘the greatest man the world [had] produced since Milton’, andhis celebrated novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloïse, which he was then re-reading, as ‘an overflowing . . . of sublime genius, and more than humansensibility’.7

Evidently, what excited Shelley most about Rousseau’s writing was hisfamously impassioned style, which in the minds of many readers of Juliewas a fully Promethean force, transcending the bounds of eighteenth-century sentimental narrative, breaking down the conventional barriersexisting between writer and reader, to function as an overpoweringlydirect and unmediated conduit of libertarian sentiment. It was this ‘en-thousiasme’ which Germaine de Staël had offered as a model for thepeople of France in her Lettres sur les écrits et le caractère de J. J. Rousseau of, published amid the first stirrings of the revolutionary ferment, andit was this selfsame quality that she was still recommending just over tenyears later, in her epoch-making treatise De la littérature (), this timeas a healthy alternative to the destructive fanaticism which had swept theFirst Republic during the Terror. In her eyes the fact that the Jacobinshad adopted Rousseau as their patron saint did not justify the wide-spread neglect his writings had fallen into on both sides of the channelafter the fall of Robespierre. There was much in Jean-Jacques that wasof enduring value, and clearly distinct from the cold, calculating spirit ofthe Terror.8 A highly sympathetic reader of de Staël, who was deeplyindebted to her post-revolutionary cultural theory, Shelley himself seemsto have concurred with this view, for in the years after , he repeat-edly strove to redeem Rousseau from the tarnishing influence of theFrench Revolution, increasingly interested in the artistic potential of‘enthusiasm’ as an instrument of philosophical and political education.

In this context, it is clearly relevant to our reading of Frankenstein as anallegory of the French Revolution that the central revolutionary hero ofMary Shelley’s novel, for all his deft employment of the sophisticatedtechniques of modern science, is fundamentally a Rousseauvian ‘enthu-siast’ rather than a sceptical philosophe. Most recent accounts of the intel-lectual character of the French Revolution have tended to reproduce theEnglish counter-revolutionary polemic of the period, which representedit purely in terms of a commitment to the systematic materialism of theFrench Enlightenment.9 But Mary Shelley’s rather more nuanced alle-gory exposes the inadequacy of this over-simplified model, inviting us toreassess the complex history of revolutionary Jacobinism. It recalls thefact that its leading mentor had been as profoundly opposed to the

Introduction

iniquitous tendencies of modern commerce–capitalism and its cos-mopolitan project of ‘enlightenment’ as he had been critical of the oldand corrupt aristocratic order of eighteenth-century France. For as weshall see, Rousseau’s highly democratic inflection of neo-Spartan civichumanism was simultaneously both revolutionary and anti-progressive,so that for all the rather abstract nature of his political theory, he was inmany ways as much of a defender of custom and tradition as the Englishconservative Edmund Burke. His intellectual legacy to the FrenchRevolution was thus profoundly at odds with that supplied by the centralphilosophical tradition of the French Enlightenment, which was farmore enthusiastically ‘modern’ in nature. And the contradictions inher-ent in this joint heritage were to contribute greatly to the deep ambiva-lence of revolutionary republicanism, for as Allan Bloom has recentlyremarked, ‘there were many opponents of Enlightenment and its politi-cal project – in the name of tradition or the ancestral, in the name ofthe kings and the nobles, even in the name of the ancient city and itsvirtue. But Rousseau was the first to make a schism within the party ofwhat we may call the left’.10

Few critics of Frankenstein have been willing to acknowledge or discussthe different ideological formations that went into the construction ofrevolutionary politics. Here as in Romantic studies as a whole, theRevolution has too often been seen in remarkably monolithic terms, asa systematic and progressive experiment in government that eventuallyresulted in bloodshed and terror. It is the central argument of this intro-duction, and indeed of the book as a whole, that this unacceptably sim-plistic interpretation – a deliberate fabrication by the great architects ofthe English counter-revolution, Burke and Coleridge – has seriouslyhampered our understanding of the literature of the period. It is mycontention that one cannot hope to fathom the truly paradoxical natureof some of the central texts of English Romanticism without referenceto the tensions and contradictions of French republicanism, a movementthat contained both systematically ‘progressive’ and radically ‘primi-tivist’ elements.

In chapter one of Frankenstein Shelley describes how Waldman suc-ceeds in removing Frankenstein’s prejudice against modern science byshowing him the kinds of things that the new chemists have accom-plished: ‘these philosophers’, he affirms, ‘whose hands seem only madeto dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible,have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses ofnature, and shew how she works in her hiding-places’ (–). Admiring


Frankenstein’s holistic zeal, Waldman suggests that it might be possiblefor him to make use of the latest innovations in science without degener-ating into what he calls a ‘petty experimentalist’ (). As in the FrenchRevolution itself, so too in Mary Shelley’s novel, the visionary project tocreate ‘a new man’ is the product of a collaboration between the primi-tive aspiration towards unity and simplicity and the analytic methodpioneered by the Western Enlightenment. In this way Frankensteindescribes a dangerous ‘chemical reaction’ between the ancient and themodern. Extending the revolutionary analogy, Frankenstein’s construc-tion of the creature can be seen as a metaphor for the politicisation ofthe Parisian sans-culottes by the revolutionary bourgeoisie. Both processescan be seen as the bringing-into-being of a new kind of subjectivity, thebestowal of legitimacy and agency upon a new class of people. In eachcase, however, the creator abandons his creation: historically, the prop-erty restrictions to citizenship contained in the French Constitution of constituted a covert denial of the political demands of the urbanworking-class by the liberal bourgeois Assembly, and thus a clearbetrayal of the latter’s former commitment to the principles of liberty,equality and fraternity.11 And this historical betrayal was to find its liter-ary counterpart in Mary Shelley’s novel, where Frankenstein respondsto the burgeoning subjectivity of the creature by fleeing from his pres-ence.12 In this way Frankenstein offers a telling vision of the displacedsocial tension at the heart of Romantic Manichaeanism, for when thecreature comes in search of his creator in the latter half of the book, andcommits a series of horrific crimes in order to gain his recognition,Victor’s response is simply to turn him into a monstrous counter-versionof himself, which is just another way of denying him subjectivity: ‘I con-sidered the being whom I had cast among mankind [. . .] nearly in thelight of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, andforced to destroy all that was dear to me’ (). Moreover, it could beargued that it is precisely this capacity for egotistical projection thatidentifies Victor Frankenstein as a belated adherent of revolutionaryJacobinism, since (as we shall see in the next chapter) it so neatly mimicsRobespierre’s historical displacement of revolutionary class tensionbetween the sans-culottes and the political bourgeoisie onto the metaphys-ical monster of ‘counter-revolution’.

As is well known, of course, in the second volume of Frankenstein thisstrategy of revolutionary displacement and denial is subjected to a pow-erful critique, as Mary Shelley breaks with all the literary traditionsregarding the representation of revolutionary monstrosity by giving her

Introduction

creature a voice.13 Having tracked Frankenstein down, and forced himto sit and listen to his life history, the monster begins to recount his soli-tary wanderings through the hinterlands of Germany. He recalls seekingshelter near to the cottage of the De Laceys, and of listening to theconversation of the various members of the family. Gradually, he beginsto learn French (significantly, the very language of revolution, in thecontext of this period), and before long has taught himself to read, byporing over certain books that fall fortuitiously into his hands. And cru-cially, the little library that he develops offers a kind of introduction tothe history of European republicanism: Plutarch’s Lives, Milton’s ParadiseLost, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and Volney’s Ruins of Empires. Thismeans that when the creature finally launches a critique of his creator’srevolutionary practice it is itself revolutionary – and republican – inorigin. As he suggests to Frankenstein, it was not his creator’s principlesthat were at fault, but his failure to see them in private as well as publicterms: ‘Believe me, Frankenstein: I was benevolent; my soul glowed withlove and humanity: but am I not alone, miserably alone? You, mycreator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow-creatures,who owe me nothing? they spurn and hate me’. But this does not preventthe creature from finally offering Frankenstein up to Walton and thereader at the end of the book as a kind of hero, a ‘glorious spirit’ ()whose unfortunate failure was at least partly the fault of his recalcitrantand vengeful offspring. And Victor’s last words do nothing to dispel thefeeling of ambivalence that haunts the final pages of the novel, for in adangerous supplement to his final confession he briefly suggests thatsome future enthusiast might actually be able to succeed where he hasfailed: ‘Seek happiness in tranquillity, and avoid ambition’, he tellsWalton, ‘even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishingyourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myselfbeen blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed’ ().

Most critics have sought to align Mary Shelley with the former partof this statement rather than with the latter. Despite Percy Shelley’scomment, in the Preface to the first edition, that the novel was notintended to ‘prejudice any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind’,there has been a strong temptation to read it as a repudiation of theradical politics of the revolutionary decade. In an essay from the lates that still has considerable critical currency, Lee Sterrenburg was toread Frankenstein in terms of a retreat not merely from Jacobin princi-ples, but from the discourse of politics as a whole, an appropriation ofsites of historical importance – such as Geneva and Ingolstadt – into a


narrative of purely private significance. Developing his thesis,Sterrenburg interpreted the confessional structure of the novel as aninternalisation of the political debate on the nature and influence of theFrench Revolution, an attempt to ‘translate politics into psychology’.According to this view of things, Mary Shelley’s aim was to domesticatethe revolutionary narrative, to transform it from a debate on the natureof public man into a vindication of the private affections, and, in sodoing, to register an implicit critique of the radical principles of herparents, and even perhaps of those of her husband. Sterrenburg’sinterpretation offers Frankenstein’s radical internalisation of revolution-ary history as a form of Romantic denial, an overdetermined negationof the legacy of French Jacobinism that is fundamentally conservativein nature.14 In many ways, this reading forms part of an extensive criti-cal tradition of the last twenty years which has been tempted to seemany of the central texts of Romantic literature as just so many dis-placements and denials of history.15 According to this view of things thestrategy of displacement was a means by which writers living in a dis-turbing age could seek to transcend the problems of social and histori-cal reality and then subsequently re-occupy them at the level ofconsciousness. ‘In the case of Romantic poems’, as Jerome J. McGannargues, ‘we shall find that the works tend to develop different sorts ofartistic means with which to occlude and disguise their own involvementin a certain nexus of historical relations’.16 In this introduction, and inthis book as a whole, I would like to challenge the assumption, which iscommon to much contemporary criticism, that Romantic displacementtends to be either explicitly reactionary in nature or else a conservativeretreat from the realm of politics, for in the case of a novel such asFrankenstein an examination of the revolutionary subtext forces us torethink the political meaning of the text.

In his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme of the Frenchémigré priest Antoine-Joseph Barruel gave an hysterically vivid accountof an occult conspiracy against the institutions of royalty, religion andthe law which was spreading its baleful influence all over Europe. Thismovement, which Barruel called Jacobinism, was seen to have origi-nated in the secret sect of the Illuminati founded by Professor AdamWeishaupt in Ingolstadt in , a society substantially composed ofphilosophers and freethinkers holding fiercely deistic and republicanbeliefs. And from these small beginnings it was deemed to have quicklyand smoothly expanded its underground influence, spreading itsnetwork into England and France as well as Germany, until it emerged

Introduction

from the shadows during the crisis of , to terrifying and destructiveeffect. For reasons that must have been to a large extent playful andironic, Barruel’s Mémoires was one of Percy Shelley’s favourite books.Throughout his adult life, he was continually returning to it; he evenmade a point of reading Mary the section relating to the history of theIlluminati during the period of their courtship in .17 Now, when seenin the light of the Shelleys’ continued interest in a text such as theMémoires, the comparative absence of politics from the discursive surfaceof Frankenstein might be seen to take on a different character. For it islikely that what they enjoyed most about Barruel was his representationof revolutionary ‘enthusiasm’ as a kind of parasitic influence, dissemi-nating itself through a series of mysterious relays and transactions, alibertarian spirit that went beyond the traditional bounds of politics,operating as a kind of radical contagion. In Frankenstein both the crea-ture and his creator possess the kind of passionate enthusiasm thataffords them extraordinary powers of eloquence. Perhaps the mostnotable example of this is when Victor exhorts Walton’s crew not to giveup their heroic quest for the North Pole, where he assumes the role of arevolutionary statesman, a Danton or a Brissot: ‘Did you not call this aglorious expedition? and wherefore was it glorious? Not because the waywas smooth and placid as a southern sea but because it was full ofdangers and terror; because, at every new incident your fortitude was tobe called forth and your courage exhibited; because danger and deathsurrounded, and these dangers you were to brave and overcome’ ().Ultimately, of course, it must be admitted that Mary Shelley’s novel doesadopt an actively critical stance to the idealism of its central character.But while it may be true to say that the novel is finally very ambivalentabout revolutionary enthusiasm, it is less certain that the work as a wholerepresents a denial of revolutionary politics, precisely because therepression of the political is so clearly part of its subject. For not merelydoes the early mention of Geneva and Ingolstadt suggest that Victor’sstory may have some degree of allegorical potential, it also highlights itscurious, rather paradoxical status as a narrative that is at once pre- andpost-revolutionary in nature, occupying the kind of political vacuumthat was the shared experience of both Illuminists and post-revolution-aries alike. And this, in turn, may help to explain the finally rather indul-gent attitude the novel adopts towards Frankenstein, its tendency to seehis fundamentally secretive and solitary nature as the product of hisadverse historical circumstances.

Rousseau’s overdetermined absence from Frankenstein is significant


and important in this respect, not however because Mary Shelley wasseeking to deny the political history of the revolution, but because shewas seeking to recapture some of the revolutionary potential of his writ-ings without having to undertake an explicit critique of their historicalinfluence, preferring to let the allegorical narrative suggest one. And thisis where the novel’s emphasis upon first-person narrative is especiallyimportant, for as I hope to show, it can clearly be seen to draw upon arevolutionary tradition of confessional writing that had its roots inRousseau.

In much of the best recent critical writing Romantic autobiographyhas often been seen in terms of a self-conscious desire to escape frompolitics and history.18 But in the autobiographical writings of Rousseau– his Rêveries du promeneur solitaire and his Confessions – the cultivation of thelanguage of isolation and self-martyrdom, the removal of the self fromthe hazards of historical circumstance possessed an explicitly politicalresonance. It was a form of polemical engagement masquerading asresignation and denial. By laying his soul bare in the Confessions, andopenly exploring his former errors, Rousseau had effectively purifiedhimself in print, using autobiography as a means of discovering thatpure, primitive part of himself which remained resistant to the corrupt-ing influences of modern life. Implicitly, he represented the autobio-graphical subject as an anticipation, in individual form, of thetransparency and virtue which would be the defining feature of the idealpolitical community of the future, inviting his readers to break down thearistocratic obstacle to liberty and equality and enter the realm of trans-parency by engaging in a sympathetic reading of his work. And in workssuch as the Dialogues and the Rêveries he contined to develop a powerfulconfessional rhetoric in which the unmediated expression of personalitybecame a powerful force for political change. Indeed as the profoundlyunsympathetic counter-revolutionary polemicist Hannah More wasforced to acknowledge, ‘there never was a net of such exquisite art andinextricable workmanship, spread to entangle innocence and ensnareexperience as the writings of Rousseau’.19 And when seen in this light,the autobiographical ‘enthusiasm’ of the Confessions can be seen as theperfect complement to the more obviously legislative mode of the sameauthor’s Du Contrat Social, simply an alternative means of pursuing thesame republican ideal. In this way the ‘citizen of Geneva’ bequeathed atwofold legacy to the revolutionary generation: he offered a radicallyegalitarian version of the ancient political discourse of civic humanism,but he also developed a highly wrought rhetoric of confession that

Introduction

enlisted ‘modern’ sensibility for the republican cause. The question is,however, whether a detailed examination of this element of Rousseau’sthought can modify our view of the intellectual and political roots ofEnglish Romanticism. During the next seven chapters I hope to showthat a close analysis of the Rousseauvian influence upon revolutionaryJacobinism can shed new light on the confessional writings of WilliamGodwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth and WilliamHazlitt, encouraging us to see them as works of transferred idealismrather than resignation and denial. For as I shall suggest, even in theaftermath of the failure of the Revolution, Rousseauvian confession con-tinued to offer a radical consolation for the disappointments of practicalpolitics, a version of the primitivist ideal that was at once deeply privateand yet full of public resonance.

The framing of the central story of Frankenstein by the narrative ofRobert Walton significantly affects our attitude to its central protagonist.Overpowered by Frankenstein’s passionate openness towards him, andby the bewitching eloquence of his speech, Walton comes to regard himas a kind of persecuted philanthropist: ‘if any one performs an act ofkindness towards him’, Walton tells his sister ‘or does him any the mosttrifling service, his whole countenance is lighted up, as it were, with abeam of benevolence and sweetness that I never saw equalled. But he isgenerally melancholy and despairing; and sometimes he gnashes histeeth, as if impatient of the weight of woes that oppresses him’ (). Theexplorer’s praise of the scientist is no less fulsome even after he has heardthe full horrors of his story. Writing shortly after the latter’s demise headmits not knowing what comment to make ‘on the untimely extinctionof this glorious spirit’ (). And nor is he the sole victim of this idolatry.At the end of the novel even the monster is finally driven to praiseFrankenstein as ‘the select specimen of all that is worthy of love andadmiration among men’ (). This suggests that, contrary to the empha-sis of most modern critical writing, the author’s own attitude toFrankenstein was deeply divided. Undeniably, Mary Shelley offers astrenuous critique of Frankenstein’s anti-social pursuit of self-fulfilment.Clearly we are to see his personal tragedy as a consequence of his neglectof the domestic affections; he himself suggests as much just beforedescribing the birth of the monster (). But the emphasis supplied byWalton and the creature does give credence to the implication ofFrankenstein’s last speech that his ideal was not unworthy, and that hismistake had been to seek it through modern methods; as if he shouldhave seen that the project of revolutionary regeneration would be


achieved not by mechanical but only by moral means. Like Rousseau inhis Confessions, Frankenstein finally succeeds in absolving himself of mostof his former sins and errors, casting off the grime of history to revealhis fundamental virtue. Seen in this light, Shelley’s novel looks less like arepudiation of radical politics than a record of their secret survival, withVictor’s last words offering encouragement to a whole new generationof Illuminati, inciting them to take up the revolutionary baton and bearit bravely into the future.

As a number of historians and literary critics have shown, Englishmiddle-class radicalism during the revolutionary decade was often veryclosely bound up with the tradition of radical dissent, a body of thoughtthat was largely mechanistic, necessitarian and progressive in nature. Itwas a tradition that produced philosophers and polemicists such asJoseph Priestley, Tom Paine, Thomas Robert Malthus and RichardPrice, but it also had a formative influence upon many of the majorcreative writers of the period, figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge,William Godwin, William Wordsworth and William Blake. While in noway seeking to deny the historical importance of this body of thought,or its links with the ‘progressive’ current of the French Revolution, in thisstudy I shall be seeking to identify an alternative tradition, a body ofideas distinct from both philosophical and popular radicalism, a form ofradical politics developed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and mediated byMaximilien Robespierre, which was largely anti-scientific and anti-progressive in nature, and whose significant impact upon EnglishRomantic writing has long been underestimated. In his recent bookRadical Sensibility Chris Jones identified an English tradition of ‘radicalsensibility’ that argued for ‘the autonomy of the individual, the priorityof universal benevolence, and the capacity of men to act on anapprehension of social justice’. This current of thought, he argues, wasclearly distinct from the line of philosophical dissent, ‘largely disowningthe appeal to commerce and materialistic interests which were a featureof Painite and dissenting propaganda’.20 He indicates the importance ofRousseau to this tradition, but without exploring it in any detail, pre-ferring to see its origins in the home-grown ‘benevolism’ of Shaftesburyand Hutcheson: ‘Most of the writers of radical sensibility wereinfluenced by Rousseau’, he declares, ‘especially by his criticism of theartificialities and inequalities of high society. Yet most rejected his flight

Introduction

from society and progress’ (). In many ways Jones has contributedgreatly to our understanding of middle-class radicalism in the revolu-tionary decade, but to my mind one cannot examine radical inflectionsof the discourse of sensibility in the revolutionary decade without refer-ring in more detail to the work of Rousseau, for almost single-handedlyhe helped both French and English Jacobins transform a rather diffuseconcept of social sympathy into an attachment to ‘the people’ which wasat once highly sentimental and yet also highly democratic.

The language of ‘sensibility’ was so ubiquitous in the period that, asJones himself suggests, its ideological polarity is impossible to pin down:‘Sensibility was clearly not a uniform or unitary concept when it couldbe both championed and attacked from so many points of view, and Ithink modern scholarship has erred in trying to impose such a unitaryinterpretation upon it’ (). Evidently, what we are dealing with in the lateeighteenth century is a culture of sensibility, a milieu in which the vocab-ulary of sentiment is being put to a wide variety of political ends. Inorder to narrow the focus of my discussion, therefore, I have chosen toconcentrate on the way in which Rousseau put the ‘modern’ discourseof sensibility in the service of ‘ancient’ virtue, rechannelling Wertherian‘enthusiasm’ into the pursuit of a Plutarchan life. This constituted ahighly distinctive inflection of the language of sentiment, and one thatwas remarkably influential during the Revolutionary period. My task isto see how far it impacted itself upon some of the most celebrated exam-ples of Romantic writing.

In certain ways, it might seem that there is nothing more unnecessarythan another discussion of Rousseau’s ‘influence’. In the many accountsthat have appeared of the French Revolution and the Romantic move-ment, the importance of his writings has scarcely ever been denied. Theproblem is that it has become something of a platitude. Too often inEnglish literary studies he has been rather casually treated as the baggysource of a whole series of contemporary ideas on culture and society,the enthusiasm for nature, for example, or the systematic approach toeducation, or the renewed interest in festivals. Perhaps this is not sur-prising: after all, from time to time, many of the leading figures of thelate eighteenth century used him in this way too. In this study, however,I want to try and delimit and define the ideological status of Rousseau’swork, to re-establish his specific and local importance as a politicalthinker by re-inserting him into the polemical conflicts of his time. Forin my opinion, one cannot hope to understand the nature of hisinfluence upon the Romantic movement without looking at the way in


which his ideas were mediated by the French Revolution, and more espe-cially, by neo-Spartan Jacobinism. An analysis of the career ofMaximilien Robespierre in particular can help to give a specific focus toRousseau’s work, reinvesting discussions of ‘radical’ sentiment andsensibility with historical pressure and meaning. And it may also help toexplain the paradoxical nature of Rousseau’s continuing impact uponEnglish letters in the aftermath of the Revolutionary decade.

As Edward Duffy has shown, Rousseau’s work enjoyed a favourablereception in England in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Workssuch as the Lettre à D’Alembert and his novel La Nouvelle Heloïse identifiedhim as an enthusiastic disciple of primitive republicanism and a critic ofthe corruptions and sophistications of modern urban life. But after theFrench Revolutionaries had adopted Rousseau as their philosophicaland political mentor – ‘their canon of holy writ’ as Edmund Burke putit – his reputation in England suffered a dramatic decline.21 So much so,that by the early s former radicals such as William Wordsworth, whohad once been remarkably sympathetic to Rousseau’s ideas, were nowgrouping him with philosophes like Condillac and Holbach, consideringhis ‘paradoxical reveries’ to be part of the excessively rational andabstract tradition of French thought which was increasingly consideredreponsible for the Revolution’s failure.22 But precisely because there wasincreasing pressure in the post-revolutionary period to repudiate Franceand the French national character, the discussion (or even non-discussion) of the work of Rousseau and Robespierre by former fellow-travellers cannot be taken at face-value.23 Even after the Terror, thedream of virtue and transparency by which the French republicans hadbeen driven was often to survive as a parasite in the work of the EnglishRomantics, to the extent that in his conservative middle age Coleridgewas moved to compare the enduring spirit of Jacobinism to the ghost inShakespeare’s Hamlet, considering that it was still ‘moving and mining inthe underground chambers with an activity the more dangerous becauseless noisy’.24

In the years after conservative pamphleteers and polemicistsincreasingly sought to convince their countrymen and women that theRevolution was a monolithic phenomenon. Most famously, EdmundBurke argued that the French revolutionaries were attempting to trans-form society into a machine. For him Jacobinism represented aphilosophical conspiracy against the natural, organic society that stillprevailed in England. In his representation of things, it was a product ofthe misguided rationalism of the French Enlightenment. Repudiating

Introduction

continental theory and system, he told his readers to return to theirhearths and homes, to cultivate their local and domestic attachments,and to revere the English Constitution as a product of the ‘stupendouswisdom’ of nature.25 Too often Burke’s view of the Revolution as ahomogenous event has been uncritically accepted by twentieth-centuryliterary historians. Critics have tended to accept his portrait of therevolutionaries as ‘sophisters, economists and calculators’ even whenthey have not agreed with his pejorative tone.26 But far from being amonolithic phenomenon, middle-class Jacobinism bequeathed tohistory both a liberal notion of freedom and its absolute denial. In thisrespect the neo-Spartan republicanism of represented a paradoxi-cal and contradictory form of resistance to the constitutionalism of, occupying an uncomfortably interstitial space between pro-gressivism and conservatism. And as I hope to show, it is only throughan analysis of the philosophical and political tensions existing within theFrench revolutionary bourgeoisie during the early s that one canbegin to understand the ‘paradoxical’ influence of RobespierristJacobinism upon the English Romantics.

With this in mind, the first two chapters of this thesis will seek to estab-lish the close relation between political theory and autobiographicalpractice during the French Revolution, firstly by outlining the ideologi-cal underpinnings of Rousseauvian republicanism, and subsequently byexamining its politics of confession. Then I shall endeavour to show howthis can supply us with a new critical context for thinking about EnglishRomanticism. The chapters that follow will look at the ways in whichsome of the leading writers of the period rehearsed and reflected uponthe nature and effects of neo-Spartan Jacobinism, relating WilliamGodwin’s philosophical anarchism to Robespierre’s innovations in ethicsand jurisprudence, Mary Wollstonecraft’s polemical and personal writ-ings to his theory of aesthetic education, and William Wordsworth’srevolutionary poetics to his political psychology of Terror. The fifthchapter will seek to justify discussion of an English ‘Jacobin’ tradition byshowing how Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on Population of drovea wedge between the ‘primitive’ and ‘progressive’ radicals of the period,effectively reproducing the fratricidal split which had riven FrenchJacobinism. Ironically, given Malthus’s stated aim of concluding therevolutionary debate once and for all, he actually served to perpetuateits terms well into the nineteenth century, such was the contentiousnessof his radically reactionary thesis. No one held faster to the terms of thisdebate than William Hazlitt, whose belated republicanism is the subject


of my concluding chapter. In many ways Hazlitt brings this study to afitting close, for in his self-consciously ‘sour’ emulation of the rhetoricalstrategies of Rousseau and Robespierre, he showed how Jacobin confes-sion had degenerated since the turbulent s from an inverted expres-sion of the revolutionary ideal into an incorrigible resistance to reform.

Introduction

Despotism of liberty: Robespierre and theillusion of politics

Concerning the French, I wish Buonaparte had stayed in Egypt,and that Robespierre had guillotined Sieyès. These cursed complexgovernments are good for nothing, and will ever be in the hands ofintriguers. The Jacobins were the men; and one house of repre-sentatives, lodging the executive in committees, the plain andcommon system of government. The cause of republicanism isover, and it is now only a struggle for dominion. There wanted aLycurgus1 after Robespierre, a man loved for his virtue, and bold,and inflexible, and who should have levelled the property of France,and then would the Republic have been immortal, and the worldmust have been revolutionised by example.2

At the end of a letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge of December ,which was written immediately after Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of Brumaire, the young republican poet Robert Southey expressed sen-timents which went directly against the grain of history. Not only did hedistance himself from the counter-revolutionary consensus that wasgrowing in England at this time, he also rejected the claims of Bonaparteand Emmanuel Sieyès that the French Constitution of representedthe final fulfilment of the revolutionary ideal.3 In his impatience withcontemporary politics on either side of the Channel, Southey harkedback to the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, the period lastingfrom to during which the First Republic had been governedaccording to uncompromisingly egalitarian principles. As is well known,this phase was to culminate in Maximilien Robespierre’s infamous‘Reign of Terror’, which resulted in the imprisonment and execution ofmany thousands of people. By fewer and fewer English radicals stilllooked to France as the land of liberty and promise, and an even smallernumber were concerned to rehabilitate Robespierre’s reputation. How

then do we explain Southey’s belated enthusiasm for neo-Spartan prin-ciples? To what extent was it shared by other radical writers of theperiod? And how significant is it to an understanding of EnglishRomanticism in general?

By the later s the leading propagandists of the English counter-revolution were committed to vilifying Robespierrist Jacobinism. Aboveand beyond that, however, they were also keen to collapse the differencesbetween the various phases of the Revolution. In one of the firstextended historical accounts of the period, a two-volume set ofBiographical Memoirs of the French Revolution (), John Adolphus was torepresent it as a uniformly disastrous phenomenon, rehearsing thecharge that had been made earlier and even more forcefully by EdmundBurke in his Letters on the Regicide Peace of –. And as time went on notonly staunch loyalists like Adolphus and Burke, but also former radicalslike Samuel Taylor Coleridge came to endorse this version of events.Ten years after receiving the letter quoted above, Coleridge was strivingto show the ideological unity of the French Revolution by arguing thatphilosophical radicalism, Robespierrist Jacobinism and Bonapartismwere all products of the misguided rationalism of the FrenchEnlightenment.4 Clearly, in order to reject French revolutionary princi-ples wholesale, it was necessary to argue that they made a whole.Southey’s letter ought to remind us, however, not to accept the counter-revolutionary narrative unquestioningly. It alerts us to the fact that it wasactually under construction during this period, and that there were stillother versions of revolutionary history available during the early s.Southey describes Jacobinism in a way that clearly identifies it as a tradi-tion of political primitivism, a ‘plain and common system of govern-ment’ to be contrasted with the ‘cursed complex’ constitution of the newBonapartist regime. The would-be dictator Napoleon Bonaparte andthe liberal constitutionalist Emmanuel Sieyès are both condemned forintroducing a set of legislative arrangements designed to staunch indi-vidual freedom and stifle the exercise of virtue. The Jacobins, by con-trast, are celebrated for their simplicity and austerity, their neo-Spartanenthusiasm for moral regeneration and their anti-modern mistrust ofprivate property. In this way Southey establishes a distinction betweenprimitive simplicity and modern complexity, both of which were cham-pioned at different times during the legislative history of the Revolution,but only one of which, in his eyes, was a proper expression of the revolu-tionary ideal.

In wishing that there had been a ‘Lycurgus after Robespierre’ to bring

Despotism of liberty

about a republic of true liberty and equality, Southey comes close torepeating the sentiments he had expressed five years earlier in a letterfollowing hard upon news of the Thermidorean conspiracy, where hehad described Robespierre as a ‘benefactor of mankind’ whose deathwas to be lamented as ‘the greatest misfortune Europe could have sus-tained’. Despite or perhaps even because of his ‘great bad actions’ hewas seen as the modern incarnation of the ancient legislator, a manwhose courageous pursuit of moral regeneration had been ‘sacrificed tothe despair of fools and cowards’.5 Admittedly, Southey did not alwayssustain this attitude, briefly succumbing to the appeal ofThermidoreanism, which sought to demonise the Jacobin leader as ameans of recuperating the Revolution’s ‘beau idéal’. Nevertheless, for allits fitfulness, the unexpected survival of Southey’s Robespierrismthrough years of political disappointment and disillusionment invites usto question modern assumptions about the decline of radical enthusi-asm among the English radical intelligentsia in the later s.According to most commentators, figures such as Southey, Wordsworthand Coleridge moved slowly but surely away from radical politics in theaftermath of the Terror, so that from onwards they were takinggradual steps on the road to conservatism.6 But Southey’s letters suggestthat this political trajectory may have been more eccentric and unstablethan the orthodox account will allow, prone to curious revolutions ofthought and sudden resurrections of feeling. It also suggests that theleading writers of the English Romantic movement may have had adeeper investment in the political psychology of revolutionary republi-canism than has been generally recognised by literary history, much ofwhich has interpreted the radicalism of figures such as Wordsworth,Coleridge and Southey almost entirely in terms of English traditions ofcivic humanism and/or radical dissent.7

In drawing attention to the crisis of representation that was provokedby the revolution, to the contemporary struggle to give this violent andunpredictable phenomenon some kind of narrative form, RonaldPaulson’s Representations of Revolution was a significant contribution to theliterary history of the s. But in drawing such a hard and fast distinc-tion between French and English versions of the revolutionary ‘plot’,Paulson tends to neglect the interplay of mutual influence. He suggeststhat the French political class wanted to see the Revolution as a neo-clas-sical drama, or a ‘primitivist’ romance, but that the unruliness of itsprogress often made such generic straitjackets woefully inadequate.


Then he goes on to argue that the English, by contrast, tried to makesense of events in France by filtering them through the literary categoriesof sentimental fiction, gothic drama and grotesque farce.8 SincePaulson, a number of critics have sought to fill in the details of his highlysuggestive but necessarily rather general account.9 But there has been noserious attempt to argue for the influence of French revolutionary formsand contexts upon English literary practice. This is not merely a ques-tion of showing that figures such as Wordsworth, Godwin,Wollstonecraft and Hazlitt were well versed in the nice distinctions inFrench politics, but of arguing that the literary dynamics of their workcan only be understood with reference to the complex patterns of plotand counter-plot, denunciation and confession that we find in Frenchrepublicanism. The fact that Southey felt ‘the cause of republicanism’to be over in did not prevent him from fantasising a new Lycurgus.Similarly, in a famous passage on the French Revolution from Book ofThe Prelude of , William Wordsworth admitted to retaining a ‘Creedwhich ten years have not annull’d’ that ‘the virtue of one paramountmind / Would have . . . clear’d a passage for just government, / And lefta solid birthright to the State, / Redeem’d according to example given/ By ancient Lawgivers’.10 In texts such as this the ideology ofJacobinism survived neither as an allegiance to the French nation assuch, nor even as the literary remains of a legislative programme, but asa complex of representational strategies, a characteristic mode of appre-hending the relationship between politics and society.

Before addressing the influence of ‘Jacobinism’ upon EnglishRomantic writing, however, it is necessary to obtain a clearer senseof what we mean by this term. It is important to differentiate ‘Jacobinprimitivism’ from the other forms of Jacobinism to which the Revolutiongave rise, forms such as the liberal theory of ‘complex government’referred to by Southey. The first two chapters of this book will be cen-trally concerned to explore this phenomenon. For it is my contentionthat it is only by distinguishing between the two main bodies of politicaltheory that went into the making of revolutionary ‘Jacobinism’,11 bour-geois liberalism on the one hand, and Rousseauvian civic humanism onthe other – a theoretical distinction that Robespierre tried to transforminto a practical difference between the Jacobins and the Gironde – thatwe can truly understand the political psychology of French middle-classrepublicanism, its fratricidal tensions, its metaphysic of morals, and itsdisplacements of its own class bias.


In the late s the worsening financial crisis in the French governmentfuelled an increasingly widespread and vociferous enthusiasm for eco-nomic and political reform. As the crisis reached its height, Louis XVIagreed to reconvene the Estates General in order that a broad consensuscould be reached on the economic and fiscal measures required toremedy the situation. Emmanuel Sieyès’s celebrated pamphlet Qu’est-ceque le tiers état? was prompted by the king’s pronouncement that the threeEstates should meet and vote separately, as they had done in , andnot as a unified body, as most reformers had hoped. Daringly, Sieyès pro-posed a single national government by the commoners of the ThirdEstate, considering that this was the only way to banish the feudalism andcorporatism which had stifled French life. Drawing heavily on the writ-ings of Turgot, Quesnay and the Enlightenment physiocrats, he arguedfor a system of representative government in which private personswould be able to gather together to assist in the formation of a trulypublic authority while safeguarding the freedom of private commerce.12

In his discussion of the public good and its relation to private concerns,Sieyès unashamedly employed the language of the joint-stock company,indicating the inextricable link which existed at this time between liberalnotions of political reform and the logic of laissez-faire capitalism. In hiseyes, the individual had a ‘share’ in the general good, so it was in his ownprivate interest to make a ‘useful alliance’ with it.

According to Sieyès, the central impediment to the development ofthis enabling separation of public and private, was corporate privi-lege, the system of monopolies and exemptions which characterisedeighteenth-century French society. Of all these corporate interests, thenobility was widely considered to be the largest and the mostunjustified. Having been divested as a body of its former public roleduring the early modern period, by the mid-s the French aristoc-racy had become largely unrelated to the public authority of the state,preserving only the vestiges of its former ‘publicness’, the theatricalshow of privileges, titles and trappings attacked by Rousseau in his Lettreà d’Alembert of . Once brought under public scrutiny, Sieyès believedthat the exclusive principle of aristocracy could not hope to remainintact, for it was ‘alien’ to the nation, ‘first of all on principle, since itsbrief does not derive from the people, secondly on account of itspurpose, since it consists in the defence not of the general but of theparticular interest’.13


Significantly, as he developed his critique, Sieyès was not contentmerely to identify the nobility as an expensive and dysfunctionalmonopoly (–), he was also driven to depict it as an evil sicknessgnawing away at the heart of a virtuous nation (). And in emphasis-ing his opposition to feudal privilege, he regularly slipped from thevocabulary of interest employed by the physiocrats into the republicandiscourse of civic virtue that had been developed by Rousseau.14

While aristocrats will speak of their honour and keep watch over their interest,the Third Estate, which is to say, the Nation, will develop its virtue, because ifcorporate interest is egotism, the national interest is virtue. ()

Amid the excitement of the principles of Rousseauvian civichumanism and bourgeois liberalism were frequently juxtaposed by therevolutionary bourgeoisie, with the result that a quintessentially meta-physical language of public virtue was often dovetailed and confusedwith a fundamentally commercial language of shared interest. However,as the Revolution progressed, the fundamental differences that existedbetween these two discourses began to manifest themselves, and this wasinstrumental in creating the fratricidal tension which came to character-ise middle-class French Jacobinism. But in order to be able to under-stand the historical and political consequences of this ideologicalconfusion, it is first of all necessary to analyse its nature. With this inmind, I shall now seek to contrast Rousseau’s politics of the will with thepolitics of interest that had been developed by the physiocrats.

In his Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts of , Jean-Jacques Rousseaudeveloped his celebrated critique of the progress of civilisation. He con-sidered that contemporary civilisation was corrupting the pursuit ofknowledge; that the development of reason was being inhibited by thedemands and constraints of patronage, salon culture and the literarymarket-place; and that philosophy was being turned into an aristocraticornament, a kind of luxury commodity to be circulated and exchangedlike the latest fashion. His proposed remedy was for the king himself torescue the most enlightened of his subjects from the corruptions of thecourt by appointing them as his independent advisers.15 This gesture wasvery much a response to the circumstances arising from the radicalseparation of the French monarchical state from the private realm ofcivil society during the ancien régime. Debarred from a role in the


political realm of legislation and administration, philosophy had beenleft to shift for itself in the private realm of the market-place and aristo-cratic patronage. Only if philosophers could free themselves from thecorrupting circumstances of economic dependence, Rousseau argued,could they return to the pursuit of virtue and reason. In this, his firstextended analysis of the problems besetting modern societies, he was notfar from the model of enlightened absolutism that was favoured by thephysiocrats. In later works, however, Rousseau grew rather more scepti-cal of the project of Enlightenment, whether conducted from within thebourgeois public sphere in the private realm of letters, or through themachinery of the monarchical state. So much so, indeed, that he gradu-ally came to consider the productions of former colleagues and friendssuch as Denis Diderot, Claude Helvétius and Baron Holbach as tendingto naturalise the unjustices and prejudices of modern society rather thanresist them. He became increasingly sceptical of the value of philosophi-cal and literary debate as a vehicle for political change, and increasinglycommitted to the notion of an unreflective consensus as the sovereignprinciple of legislation.

In the course of his examination of the characteristics of a legitimatestate in the Contrat Social of , Rousseau developed a theory of civilliberty that would allow each individual to enjoy the security afforded bycivil society without renouncing all claim to the liberty that was hisnatural birthright. He did this by introducing a form of citizenship inwhich the individual would identify himself with the general will of thewhole community, renouncing all his natural rights in order to receivethem back on a political basis. According to this view of things, eachman would give himself to no one in giving himself to all. The generalwill would never be oppressive or unjust, in Rousseau’s analysis, since allthe conditions would be the same for everyone, so that no single personwould have any interest in making them burdensome for others.16 In hismind, the achievement of moral liberty through political activity wasmore important than the freedom to pursue one’s private interests: ‘themere impulse of appetite is slavery’, he wrote, in what amounted to aparadoxical critique of Lockean liberalism, ‘while obedience to a lawwhich one prescribes to oneself is liberty’.17

Famously, Rousseau was adamant that the general will could not act:it was a legislative power, not an executive one. Thus it needed a bodyof ministers to implement its laws, a body that would have to be periodi-cally vetted by the sovereign, and replaced at regular intervals to preventit from being corrupted by power. In favour of an elected executive,


Rousseau was nevertheless resistant to the notion of an elected legisla-ture, and implacably opposed to the notion that the latter could everpossess sovereignty, for according to him sovereignty could only ever restwith the nation. ‘Every law which the people has not ratified in person’,he wrote, ‘is null; it is not a law’.18 Unable to suggest ways in which thissovereignty might express itself in a large state such as France, Rousseauescaped from this conceptual difficulty by throwing down a set ofrhetorical challenges to his reader. He implied that the inability of thepresent generation to imagine how an entire people could be assembledto legislate in the national interest was itself a sign of the alienation ofcivilised man: ‘You sacrifice more for profit than for liberty’, he declaredto his readers, ‘and fear slavery less than poverty.’19

The extent to which Rousseau did not offer a practical programmefor the setting up of a republican state has often been noted. Many criticsand political historians have found it extremely abstract in comparisonwith other seminal texts in the history of political theory. Yet it has notperhaps been sufficiently noticed that it is precisely at those momentswhen practical problems begin to crowd in, that Rousseau activelyexploits the modern difficulty of imagining true citizenship. For incertain respects, the deliberately paradoxical style of the Contrat Socialseems expressly designed to force each reader to discover for himself theextent of his own corruption:

In a well-ordered city every man flies to the assemblies: under a bad govern-ment no one cares to stir a step to get to them, because no one is interested inwhat happens there, because it is foreseen that the general will shall not prevail,and lastly because domestic cares are all-absorbing . . . As soon as any man asksWhat does it matter to me? the State may be given up for lost.20

In this startling example of negative thinking, Rousseau defines thepublic good almost exclusively in terms of the private obstacles to be sur-mounted in the course of its pursuit. Crucially, he imagined publicopinion as a form of general sentiment anterior to critical debate, ‘morea consensus of hearts than of arguments’, as Jürgen Habermas haspointed out,21 inviting an entire generation of readers to rediscoverwithin themselves an enthusiasm for civic virtue by goading them to dis-prove his pessimistic assessment of them.

This stands in sharp contrast to the model of municipal governmentpromulgated by the physiocrats. For example, in his Mémoire sur les muni-cipalités of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot had proposed a system inwhich village assemblies representing local property interests would


control their own affairs while at the same time sending delegates tocounty assemblies to address larger questions of policy. These countyassemblies would, in their turn, elect deputies to represent them atregional and then at national level, thus building up a highly organisedconsultative network based on the balancing of interests. And by thismeans, a national network of political discussion would be established,involving propertied citizens at every level, out of which a truly publicopinion would be formed.

Now as is quite evident, this model differed greatly from Rousseau’sconception of the ideal form of political life, which drew heavily on thedemocratic tradition of the ancient republics of Greece. For he consid-ered that full political rights should be accorded to all the men of anation, irrespective of their wealth, and should express itself in the formof a direct participation in the process of legislation. In place of Turgot’sproperty principle, he introduced a strongly affective element into thediscourse of politics, considering an enthusiasm for the public good theonly necessary qualification for citizenship. Moreover, to his mind, thetrue general will of a nation was not an aggregate or critical synthesis ofits individual wills – ‘a will of all’ as in Turgot – it was a metaphysicalprinciple, a form of aspiration towards the public good that necessitateda complete transcendence of private interests. Thus it was that by locat-ing political virtue in the hearts of men rather than in the ownership ofproperty, Rousseau effectively succeeded in reworking ancient civichumanism into a politics of sensibility.

In the English civic humanist tradition of the eighteenth century theindependent landed aristocrat remained the type of the free citizen, hislanded wealth supposedly providing him with a permanent interest inthe wealth of his country as well as a moral bulwark against the cor-rupting influence of credit and commerce.22 In France, however, the per-petuation of feudal privileges and the declining public role of thenobility during the course of the s made it less easy for the pre-rev-olutionary bourgeoisie to regard the abstract figure of the aristocrat asthe model of disinterested virtue. It was not surprising, therefore, that inhis search for a prototype of the free and independent man Rousseau,like Montesquieu before him, was to look to distant models, celebratingthe legislators of seventeenth-century Geneva and fifth-century Greece.Nor was it surprising that he should have found it necessary to fudge thecrucial question of the relationship between land and civic virtue, con-tinually invoking the patriotic zeal of the Spartans and Athenians, andemphasising their fervent local attachments, while consistently under-


playing the extent to which they too had seen property as the absolutefoundation of politics.

Given its appeal beyond the borders of France in the revolutionaryperiod, it is important to emphasise the truly paradoxical nature ofRousseau’s civic humanism. On the one hand the Contrat Social attachedgreat importance to patriotism and local tradition as a means of cement-ing national unity, but it also presumed that it was possible to generate‘primitive’ republican virtue ab initio from a purely theoretical model. Inthis respect it was both a product of, and a resistance to the ‘travellingtheory’ of the French Enlightenment.23 Whereas the new social scienceof Turgot and Claude-Adrien Helvétius was truly cosmopolitan innature, proposing a rational re-organisation of government and the lawwhich was not subject to space or time, in much of Rousseau’s writinggood government was always to be sensitive to local conditions, with theconstitution of a country emerging from the autochthonous customs ofits people.24 Oddly enough, therefore, the Contrat Social represented acurious blend of the ancient and modern traditions, offering a surpris-ingly cosmopolitan rendering of the ‘localist’ ideal. Within its pages itsauthor supplied a theoretical model for the regeneration of a polis, butwithout suggesting how it might have to be adapted to fit specific con-temporary circumstances.25 In this way, as Allan Bloom has recentlyreiterated, ‘Rousseau introduced the taste for the small, virtuous com-munity into the modern movement towards freedom and equality’,26

effectively encouraging the revolutionary fantasy that it might be possi-ble to reinvent a modern nation like France or England in the likenessof a city-state.

Given his solid grounding in physiocratic theory, why, then, did the AbbéSieyès choose to supplement his fundamentally liberal theory of govern-ment with the dangerous rhetoric of Rousseauvian republicanism?According to Keith Michael Baker, he did so because it was the readiestmeans of forestalling the crisis of representation which was threatenedby the proposed revolt of the Third Estate.27 Without a tradition ofparliamentary government, the French monarchical state as it stood in was peculiarly ill-equipped to make the transition from an absolutemonarchy to a modern liberal democracy, primarily because its constitu-tion recognised no sovereign principle apart from the king. Of course,there were occasional assemblies like the aristocratic parlements and the


Estates General, whose purpose was to petition the king on behalf ofvarious sections of his people, but they did so purely as mandataires andnot as representatives. For according to the neo-Hobbesian theory by whichFrance was governed, the king was the sole sovereign principle of thenation, and thus he alone was capable of representing it.

This is not to say that there were not theories of representativegovernment in circulation during the late s. On the contrary, acurrent of thought running from Honoré Gabriel Riquet Mirabeau andTurgot through to François Quesnay and the physiocrats had succeededin developing a number of different proposals for a system of nationalrepresentation. The problem was that this body of theory had conceivedof representation almost entirely in administrative and economic terms,it left the tricky question of political sovereignty entirely untouched.Hence Sieyès’s decision to make use of the Contrat Social in his Qu’est-ceque le tiers état? was almost certainly motivated by the realisation thatRousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty provided one of the onlymeans of justifying the proposed rebellion of the Third Estate againstthe Estates General.28 In his celebrated treatise, Rousseau had made apoint of insisting upon the absolute and inalienable sovereignty of thegeneral will. A monarch might be employed as an executive minister ofa nation, he acknowledged, but it was a dangerous mistake to imaginethat he could ever possess sovereignty. Moreover, it was absolutelyimpossible, according to Rousseau, that a nation could ever be boundagainst its will to a particular constitution, because it was itself theprimary legislative principle of the state, the origin and cause of all lawand government. It is not surprising, therefore, that Sieyès should havebeen keen to employ this concept of popular sovereignty during theconstitutional crisis of , for it allowed him to recommend the trans-formation of the Third Estate into a new national assembly as anexample of the national will reaffirming its sovereign power over andabove a series of unjust laws and antiquated conventions. The only stick-ing-point was that, while Rousseau was very useful to Sièyes on thequestion of sovereignty, he was less than helpful on the matter of repre-sentation. For there was, as we have seen, a profound mistrust of repre-sentative government at the heart of Rousseau’s political theory, andindeed of any principle of political deputation that went beyond the oldmonarchical principle of the ‘binding mandate’. Hence the virtuosicblending of two fundamentally incompatible political discourses – apolitics based on property and interest, and one based on popularsovereignty – that Sieyès was forced to undertake, a blending which was,


initially at least, highly successful, in the sense that it played a major partin actually bringing the constitutional revolution of into being, butwhich was ultimately, however, quite radically unstable, in that it becamea source of increasing political tension as time went on, and the conflictbetween representative government and civic virtue began to make itselffelt.

And so, as we have seen, the distinctive relationship that existedbetween the different ‘Estates’ in eighteenth-century France rendered itdifficult for the bourgeois revolutionaries of to develop their critiqueof the culture of corporatism and protectionism which had brought thenation to the very brink of bankruptcy without launching into an attackon the fundamental principle of aristocracy. And this, in turn, played apart in inhibiting the formation of an English-style coalition of the prop-ertied élite during the constitutional period of the Revolution. Hencebourgeois revolutionaries like Sieyès and Mirabeau found themselvesrapidly impelled to ally themselves with ‘the people’, employing thevocabulary of popular sovereignty which had been developed byRousseau and his followers in an attempt to harness the insurrectionaryenergy of the sans-culottes in the service of their cause. Thus in many ofthe pamphlets of the constitutional period an essentially liberal commit-ment to property, law and freedom from state interference was danger-ously supplemented by the language of ancient democracy.

This served to render the Revolution radical from the beginning,according the popular discontents and disturbances of the period apolitical validity and significance they might not otherwise have pos-sessed. Moreover, the leading members of the Constituent Assemblysucceeded in politicising the urban sans-culottes without ever being pre-pared to placate them, promising liberty, equality and fraternity whilereally only being concerned to pursue a peculiarly modern, highlylimited and inescapably bourgeois notion of freedom. They may havebeen keen to invoke the principle of popular sovereignty in –, butthe Constitution they finally produced in contained a propertyqualification which effectively barred huge swathes of the populationfrom active citizenship.29 Having pandered to the economic and politi-cal aspirations of the working classes, and having allowed, and in manycases encouraged, the growth of a network of political clubs and pres-sure groups in the capital, ultimately they reneged on their politicalpromises. Such hypocrisy was always likely to incite popular resentmentand violence. And indeed it was in this way that the Frankenstein ofbourgeois politics encouraged the wrath of its ‘creature’ the Paris mob.


In this context, tensions began to develop between those bourgeoisrevolutionaries who believed themselves to be genuinely committed toRousseau’s democratic ideal, and those suspected of merely paying lip-service to its principles. In the years following , during which theRevolution was increasingly buffeted by acute financial crisis, foreigninvasion and civil war, the Jacobins emerged as the faction seeminglymost committed to the principle of popular sovereignty, striving to dis-tinguish themselves from what they considered to be the hypocriticalrepublicanism of the Girondins. In the autumn of MaximilienRobespierre, one of the radical leaders of the Jacobin club and a deputyin the newly formed National Convention, was moved to criticise theroom in the Tuileries that had been proposed as the site for the newnational assembly on account of the diminutive size of the publicgallery:

The entire nation has the right to know of the conduct of its representatives. Itwould be desirable, if it were possible, that the representative assembly shoulddeliberate in the presence of all Frenchmen. The meeting place of the legisla-tive body should be a grand and majestic edifice, open to twelve thousand spec-tators. Under the eyes of such a huge number of witnesses, neither corruptionnor intrigue nor treachery would dare to show themselves, the general will alonewould be heeded, the voice of reason and the public interest would have soleaudience.30

Siding with Rousseau against the physiocrats, Robespierre saw ‘publicopinion’ in terms of a single ‘voice of reason’ expressing itself sponta-neously and unreflectively; he did not represent it as a product ofrational-critical debate. Sharing the former’s mistrust of the principle ofrepresentation, he wanted the new assembly hall of the republic to be autopian realm of direct democracy, a room in which a large number ofcitizen-spectators could gather to supervise the workings of the legisla-tive body, considering that no intrigue or faction could survive in such apowerful vessel of the ‘general will’. A product of the general enthusi-asm for transparency which had been a leading characteristic of revolu-tionary politics since , there was nevertheless something almostpathological about Robespierre’s desire for openness, for increasinglyafter it contained within it a paranoid suspicion of opacity, an irra-tional mistrust of any individual or corporate body resisting the search-light of the state. Fuelled by the fantasy of reinventing France as anancient democracy, he decided to dispense with what liberal thinkerssuch as Sieyès and Turgot had considered to be the enabling reciprocityof the public and the private sphere by seeking to render everything


subject to public scrutiny. And finally this developed into an increasingtendency to see private gatherings of any kind as part of an active andmalevolent ‘aristocratic’ conspiracy against the war-torn republic ofFrance.31 It was entirely characteristic, then, that when he ultimatelygained real power in as a member of one of the executive com-mittees of the National Convention, his commitment to popular sover-eignty manifested itself in terms of a terrifying war of public authorityupon the very principle of private life.

Over the last twenty years there has been an ongoing battle within thefield of revolutionary historiography concerning the issue of whetherthe descent of the French Revolution into bloodshed and terror in– was a historical accident – the product of a chaotic confluenceof historical circumstances – or whether it was the logical outcome ofthe political ideology developed by the revolutionaries themselves.Where revisionary historians such as François Furet and Simon Schamahave argued that the widespread violence of the period was theinevitable consequence of the demand for bloodshed encoded withinthe ‘revolutionary catechism’, some commentators, such as the post-marxist historian Gwynne Lewis, have tried to argue that the Terror of– should be seen as an essentially reactionary measure, a desperateattempt to cope with the twin threat posed by the counter-revolution andpopular politics.32 One could argue, however, that this is something of afalse opposition, since these two different approaches are by no meansincompatible, either theoretically or practically. Indeed, as Lewis pointsout, it is actually possible to see them as standing in some kind of dialec-tical relation to one another, the product of a continuing but by nomeans necessary opposition in the field of historical studies betweensocial history and cultural history. In this study, therefore, I shall not beseeking to choose between these two explanatory models, but rather toacknowledge what is powerful and compelling in each, to highlight theadverse circumstances out of which the ideology of the Terror mighthave been seen to emerge, while also acknowledging the fatal principleat the heart of revolutionary discourse, its inescapable dynamic of fra-ternity and fratricide.

Robespierre’s response to the subsistence crisis of – provides agood example of the way in which the ‘revolutionary catechism’ was todevelop under the Jacobins. It came at a time when inflation had risen



. Sketch of Robespierre (), by Gérard, musée Carnavelet, Paris. The textunderneath reads: ‘green eyes, pale complexion, green striped nankeen jacket, bluewaistcoat with blue stripes, white cravate striped with red (sketch from the life at a

sitting of the Convention)’.

to such a height that suppliers of goods and services, such as farmers,merchants and grocers, became increasingly reluctant to part with theirassets. This caused prices to rise still further, setting off violent popularagitation and widespread allegations of hoarding. In response to thissituation, Girondins such as Jean Marie Roland de la Platière and MarieJean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet remained committed to theprinciple of free trade. But as the pressure brought to bear upon theNational Convention by the popular movement increased, Robespierrewas eventually moved to denounce the way in which the policy oflaissez-faire was being exploited by the cupidité homicide of the commer-cial interest.

In a move that was at once revolutionary and thoroughly anti-modern, he subordinated the right of property to the right of sub-sistence:

The food necessary to man is as sacred as life itself. Everything that is necessaryto the subsistence of the community is common property that belongs to societyas a whole. It is only the surplus which may become private property or be givenover to traders. Any mercantile speculation that I make at the expense of myfellows is not trade, it is robbery and fratricide.33

In the network of associations that had been bequeathed him byRousseau there were strong links in Robespierre’s mind between the evilsof commerce, the defence of its principles by Encyclopédistes such asTurgot, the patronage of such philosophes by eminent nobles, and theselfish greed of the aristocracy as a whole.34 This led him to question thedistinction that bourgeois economists had sought to make betweenmodern laissez-faire capitalism and the protectionism of the ancienrégime. For it seemed to him that in the new culture of free trade, cor-porate interests had not been eradicated, they had merely become lessvisible: aristocratic vices continued to lurk beneath the mask of publicpatriotism. Thus his allegation that ‘fratricidal’ sentiments were circu-lating within the class of négociants can be seen to have been based on thefear that the new culture of private enterprise merely perpetuated thecorruption of the feudal state. And the fact that some of the leadingGirondins did not seem to want to take action against hoarders onlyserved to confirm his growing impression that they were in some waycomplicit with the defenders of the old order. Indeed as time went on hebecame progressively more convinced that they were in fact secretlyhand-in-glove, both fuelled by selfish greed, and a desire to exploit themisfortunes of ‘the people’.


In the struggle between the Jacobins and the Girondins that tookplace between and Robespierre sought to associate Brissot35

and his associates with the aristocratic corruption of the ancien régimeby interpreting their professed admiration of the social and political the-ories of the philosophes as indicative of a continuing connection withcourt culture. In his analysis, Jean D’Alembert, Denis Diderot, Helvétiusand many of the other men of letters of the mid-century had all tried topass themselves off as men of independence and virtue, but ultimatelytime had proved them to be mere flatterers of the nobility, salonniers fullyconniving with the existing order. And what is more, they had made theirservility apparent in their persecution of Rousseau, who had recountedtheir universal conspiracy against him in the pages of his posthumousConfessions:

I could observe that the Revolution has made the great men of the ancienregime seem a lot smaller; that if the academicians and mathematicians whichMonsieur Brissot offers to us as models did combat and ridicule priests,36 never-theless they also courted the nobility, and worshipped kings, from which theygained much advantage, and everybody knows the ferocity with which they per-secuted virtue and the spirit of liberty in the person of Jean-Jacques, whosesacred image I see before me, the one true philosopher of that period whomerited those public honours which have since been offered only to charlatansand scoundrels.37

From onwards Robespierre was to make much of this linkbetween the Girondins and the philosophes. He was to deplore the factthat the Rolandins and Brissotins had abandoned the publicity of theJacobin club in order to discuss politics in the resolutely private salons ofthe rich. This confirmed them, in his mind, as ‘ambitious courtiers,adroit in the art of deception, who, hiding behind the mask of patriot-ism, meet frequently with the massed ranks of the aristocracy in orderto stifle my voice’.38 In public, he suggested, the Girondins might wearthe mask of patriotism, but in private they were speculating on thepossibility of improving their personal fortunes and furthering theirpolitical careers. Although they might invoke the principles of libertyand equality, and pay lip-service to the notion of public virtue, theirprivate behaviour showed them to be thorough hypocrites. One of theforemost charges that the Montagnards brought against the Brissotins attheir trial in the autumn of was that they had been ‘speculators’.The insinuation was that not only politically but also financially theserepublican brothers had been ‘playing the Revolution like a casino’, as


François Furet rather memorably described it. And spéculation wasdoubly reprehensible for Robespierre, in that, as in English, it referrednot only to the corrupt practice of gambling in stocks and shares, butalso, on a more explicitly political level, to the operations of a resolutelyprivate imagination, thus reinforcing the connection that the Jacobinswere fond of making between ‘progressive’ philosophy, bourgeois self-interest and moral corruption.

In his important study, Class, Ideology and the Rights of Nobles during theFrench Revolution, Patrice Higonnet gives a compelling account of therepublican phase of the Revolution which does much to explain, and inmany ways to support, Robespierre’s analysis of the political conduct ofthe Gironde. He considers that after the flight of the king to Varennesin , any possibility of a lasting entente between liberal nobles andthe socially conservative bourgeoisie was effectively ruined. As constitu-tional monarchy became less of an option, the middle class was driveninto an alliance with the people against the aristocracy. In – theGirondin faction saw war against Austria and Prussia as a way ofbinding the ‘plebs’ to the government and its constitution. In Higonnet’sanalysis, Brissot and his colleagues constructed the phantom of an aris-tocratic counter-revolution both inside and outside France as a means ofcementing national unity. He considers that their oratory against noblesduring this period was ‘largely for show’, in other words that the nobil-ity was merely a convenient scapegoat for the continuing economiccrisis, a way of deflecting the attention of the sans-culottes from theproblem of subsistence, and of distracting them from their own politicalagenda. He argues that the Girondins had no intention of acquiescingin the demands of the urban working class for a redistribution of prop-erty and for pension schemes for the poor, but they continued to indulgethe rhetoric of popular sovereignty in public while courting conservativeopinion in private.39

While it might be possible to argue that Higonnet seriously under-estimates the nature and scale of the counter-revolution at this time, andthereby fails to grasp the very real grounds the Girondins might have hadfor indulging in anti-aristocratic hysteria, his account of their apparentduplicity is highly illuminating. He sees a gap between their public pro-nouncements and their private sentiments during this period, arguingthat the very fact that their social and domestic movements were slightlyless than transparent to the public gaze was enough in itself to arousethe suspicions of many of their former colleagues in the Jacobin club.40


What rendered Robespierre immune from such suspicions was that hewas known by friends and enemies alike to have no private life. Not onlythat, but he was also known to have no private interests. There was noquestion of him ever having been guilty of any financial impropriety, asthere was with his flamboyant fellow Jacobin Georges Danton, nor ofhim being intemperate or immoderate in any way. Similarly, there wasno question of him having any personal allegiances to interfere with hisrepeatedly professed devotion to the public good. This was one of themain sources of his prolonged popularity, both in the Jacobin club andthe Paris Commune, the mainstays of his power, and in the NationalConvention, where he remained for a long time a figure of unimpeach-able virtue in the eyes of the vast majority of deputies, who remainedconvinced of his incorruptibility even after he had begun to emerge asa propagandist for terrorist principles. One of the most widely readauthorities on the Revolution during the Romantic period, the loyalisthistorian Lacretelle jeune, offers a remarkably vivid, if predictably ratherunsympathetic account of the appearance of complete integrity thatRobespierre displayed:

He was a man with a single thought, a single passion, a single will; his dark soulnever disclosed itself even to his accomplices; as insensible to pleasure as he wasto the affections which pass through the hearts of even the purest of men,nothing could distract him from his stubborn pursuit: invariable in hishypocrisy; it was always in the name of virtue that he would invite sedition orprovoke a massacre.41

Despite his evident mistrust of Robespierre’s ultimate intentions,Lacretelle helps to show why he seemed to embody the discourse ofpublic virtue more fully than any of his contemporaries. By adheringdoggedly to the logic of the revolutionary catechism, by endlessly pur-suing its core values, he was always able to suggest a certain half-heart-edness in his opponents’ political practice, which is one of the reasonswhy a detailed study of his writings and speeches can offer such a pow-erful insight into the political psychology of the Revolution as a whole.42

As François Furet has most memorably put it: ‘Robespierre is an immor-tal figure not because he reigned supreme over the Revolution for a fewmonths, but because he was the mouthpiece of its purest and most tragicdiscourse.’43


Having encouraged a high degree of political consciousness in the Parissans-culottes during the first years of the Revolution, it was difficult for theNational Convention to cope with the monster it had created. And by the enragés in the Paris sections had become so militant that even theradical deputies of the Mountain were finding them hard to control.Jacques Roux one of the leaders of the popular movement, was toexpress his dissatisfaction with the ‘Jacobin’ Constitution of June inthese outspoken terms:

Does it outlaw speculation? No. Have you decreed death for hoarders? No.Have you restricted freedom of trade? No. Well, we must inform you that youhave yet to go to the limits of securing happiness for the People. Liberty is nomore than a hollow mirage if one class freely can force another into starvationand continue unpunished. Equality is a vain mockery when the rich, throughmonopoly, can hold powers of literal life and death over their fellows.44

A political force of considerable power and autonomy, the sans-culotteshad an agenda of their own, and it was one with which the bourgeoisrevolutionaries in the Jacobin club were only partly in sympathy.45

During the autumn of Robespierre had attacked the Girondins foremploying the language of popular sovereignty without a propercommitment to it. But he himself was always to remain implacablyopposed to the systematic redistribution of landed property that waslater demanded by some of the leaders of the Paris sections.46 Despitehis apparently radical assertion of the right to subsistence, he was not,finally, a supporter of the loi agraire. But the history of the Revolutionsince had shown that it was impossible for a bourgeois revolution-ary to be seen to resist the will of ‘the people’, and so in order to disguisehis class bias from both the Paris sections and himself, Robespierre wasforced to displace his conflict with the sans-culottes onto a metaphysicalplane. He did this by transforming the Revolution from a campaign toimprove living standards into a war of public virtue against privatecorruption. Billed as a war of the general will against aristocratic con-spiracy, the revolutionary Terror of – can thus also be seen as anunconscious attempt to flee from the seemingly insoluble conflict thatwas raging at that time between the relative claims of poverty and prop-erty.

In a review in the Deutsch-franzöische Jahrbücher for , Karl Marxcriticised the Jacobins’ neglect of the social and economic causes of


inequality. According to this view of things, Robespierrist politics was anextreme manifestation of the Aristotelian notion of man as first andforemost a zoon politikon:

Far from identifying the principle of the state as the source of social ills, theheroes of the French Revolution held social life to be the source of politicalproblems. Thus Robespierre regarded great wealth and great poverty as anobstacle to pure democracy. He therefore wished to establish a universal systemof Spartan frugality.47

Implemented in response to the increasingly violent demands of theParis sections, Robespierre’s policy of the Maximum, which was institutedon September , was a desperate attempt to guarantee a supply offood to the poor and to eradicate hoarding by fixing the prices of groceryand household items at no more than a third above their level in . Itwas in many ways the inevitable sequel to his affirmation of the right ofsubsistence in . However, as soon as the measure was announced, allof the products which it sought to fix were bought up extremely rapidly,creating an immediate shortage. Soon producers were refusing to supplynew stock, which set off a fresh wave of accusations about hoarding. Inthe Maximum Marx saw, at one and the same time, the laudable expres-sion of egalitarian values and a complete failure to understand the basicprinciples of political economy. In his eyes it identified Robespierre inparticular as the epitome of the purely political intelligence, a man whoexisted entirely in the ‘imaginary’ realm of politics, interpreting eco-nomic inequality simply as a failure of the will. And whether one con-siders it an inept response to the economic problems of the period, or acourageous putting on, in the face of growing popular intimidation, ofthe harness of revolutionary necessity, this politics of the will was acharacteristic of Robespierre’s political theory. Indeed it formed theabsolute foundation of his justification of revolutionary government,which he was always keen to describe as the product of an active andvoluntary policy, rather than a set of desperate and expedient measures.

The first seeds of this new attitude to government were sown in thesummer of , when the revolutionary state began to award itselfextraordinary new powers designed to expedite not only the formulationand implementation of emergency legislation, but also to bring theapprehension and punishment of counter-revolutionary activists undercentral control. This process was already well underway by the timeRobespierre joined the Committee of Public Safety, but it was left to himand his formidable lieutenant Saint-Just to attempt its theoretical and


moral justification. Rocked by the royalist uprisings in north-westernand southern France, and continually harassed by angry allegationsfrom the leaders of the popular movement that the economic situationwas being exploited by the speculative practices of the mercantile bour-geoisie, he was eventually driven to cut through the Gordian knot of therevolutionary crisis by representing it as a single battle of wills:

One would say that the two opposing spirits that have been represented in thepast as disputing the empire of nature are at this significant moment in humanhistory locked in combat, in order to decide forever the destiny of the world,and that France is the stage of this formidable struggle.48

By this means, he transformed economic problems into political prob-lems; and questions of social practice into issues of political conscience.In his hands, the state became less interested in the difficult job of eradi-cating social injustice in civil society, and much more concerned topursue the revolutionary struggle in the ‘imaginary’ realm of politics. Inhis vision of things, everything that remained opaque to Jacobin politi-cal consciousness was re-imagined as a force that was fundamentallyinimical to it. The paradoxical suggestion in the Contrat Social that thosewho broke the laws of the state ceased to be entitled to its protection wasused to justify a purge of all those citoyens who were deemed to have actedin an unpatriotic fashion.49 As Saint-Just announced to the NationalConvention on the October :

It is not only the traitors whom you must punish, but also those who areindifferent; you must punish whoever is passive towards the Revolution anddoes nothing for it. For once the French people have expressed their will, every-thing that is opposed to it is outside the sovereign body; and everything that isoutside the sovereign body is an enemy.50

With the infamous ‘Law of Suspects’ of September , which waspassed in the same month as the Maximum, this approach was given leg-islative authority, for it contained a long list of the many ways in whicha citizen might render him or herself ‘suspect’ in the eyes of the govern-ment, a list which conflated major crimes such as actively conspiring tooverthrow the republic with such vague charges as failing to steadilymanifest one’s devotion to the Revolution. The immediate consequencesof this policy were harrowing, as the English poetess and travel writerHelen Maria Williams made clear, in the course of her vivid eye-witnessaccount of life in Paris during the autumn of :

The prisons became more and more crowded and increasing numbers wereevery day dragged to the scaffold. Suspect was the warrant of imprisonment, and


conspiracy was the watchword of murder. One person was sent to prison becausearistocracy was written on his countenance; another because it was said to bewritten in his heart. Many were deprived of liberty because they were rich;others, because they were learned, and most who were arrested enquired theirreasons in vain.51

This distinctive use of the word ‘suspect’ is highly characteristic of theJacobin period, primarily because it seems deliberately intended toprovoke fear through its elision of the difference between what it mightmean to be suspected of a crime and what it might mean to be guilty ofit. It presented the citizens of the First Republic with a stark choice:either to suspect or to be a suspect; it did not appear to recognise thepossibility that one might occupy a passive position between the two.Robespierre was always to maintain that good citizens had no reason tobe afraid of revolutionary government. As he said to the Convention inhis infamous speech on political morality of February : ‘The firstmaxim of your political creed must be to lead the people by reason andthe enemies of the people by terror.’52 But in many ways his language ofpolitical terror actually seems to have been designed to call the civicvirtue of each and every citizen into doubt, encouraging every man andwoman into a potentially endless round of anxious self-questioning, pre-cisely on account of the equation it made between fear and culpability.Transforming denunciation into a kind of revolutionary virtue, itdemanded from everyone an active engagement in the cause of liberty,politicising every aspect of social life. But it was also concerned to pre-serve the execution of revolutionary government as the ultimate pre-rogative of the committees and tribunals, ensuring that the actualexercise of political terror remained the monopoly of the state.

In Representations of Revolution Ronald Paulson used psychoanalytic theoryto shed light on the political culture of the French Revolution. He sawthe execution of the king in January as a revolutionary ‘killing ofthe father’ which brought about a collective regression in the Frenchpolitical class back to the stage of primary narcissism. In Paulson’s mind,this was linked with another kind of regression practised during theJacobin period: the adaption of neo-classical models of dress anddemeanour. More recently, Dorinda Outram has examined how thebourgeois revolutionaries tried to develop ‘stoical’ modes of behaviour


in order to try and represent to themselves their newfound politicalagency. Developing these insights, it might be possible to see the Jacobinperiod as a kind of historical version of Jacques Lacan’s famous ‘mirror’stage, that moment in the early life of a child when he or she glimpsesits own image in a mirror, and begins to develop a sense of its own sub-jectivity from the free-standing reflection there contained. The autono-my and agency that the still dependent infant sees in this reflection isentirely and completely imaginary, an unreachable ideal to which it willaspire in vain. Nevertheless, Lacan argues, it is only by identifying withthis image that the child begins to construct the fiction of an inde-pendent self, without which he cannot function as an active humanbeing.53

For the children of the French Revolution what was glimpsed in themirror of political theory was the realm of pure politics; and the imagecontained within it was the figure of the public man, a conception atonce at once inspiring and terrifying, inspiring in its ideal embodimentof freedom and autonomy, terrifying in its remorseless exposure ofprivate weakness and personal dependency. For this reason the image ofthe public man with which the revolutionaries identified was to take onthe ambivalence of the famous doppelgänger or ‘double’, eloquentlydescribed by Sigmund Freud in his much-quoted essay on ‘TheUncanny’. Anticipating Lacan, Freud interpreted this double, or mirror-image of the self, as a product of the primary stage of narcissism, seeingit as a figure that could be seen to offer ‘an insurance against the destruc-tion of the ego’, and thus a kind of ‘assurance of immortality’, but whichwas always capable of transforming itself, after that stage had been sur-mounted, into an uncanny ‘harbinger of death’. Thus despite its initialappearance as a guarantee of individual autonomy, the double, inFreud’s terms, always had the potential of becoming a terrifying figureof accusation and retribution.54

To some extent, this dynamic provides a model for thinking about theJacobin illusion of politics, which it might be helpful to regard as a kindof ‘double’ of social reality, an alternative universe of transparent andvoluntary action, acting as a kind of dangerous adjunct to the recalci-trant, reluctant realm of everyday civil society, at once its professed pro-tector and its potential persecutor. But it might also be seen to elucidateRobespierre’s role within the frame of the revolutionary drama, mostspecifically as the figure in whom the terrifying ambivalence of thepublic man was most powerfully present, a statesman who was for many


of his political contemporaries a kind of assurance of immortality,before his eventual metamorphosis into an uncanny harbinger of death.In her seminal work On Revolution Hannah Arendt found the source ofthis doubling and splitting in the very pages of the Contrat Social. In hereyes, it was Rousseau’s fundamentally dialectical definition of civicvirtue that led the revolutionaries to set themselves on the path to self-destruction. For he had suggested that in order to become a true citizenof the main body politic each particular man would have to rise againsthimself in his own particularity, thinking that it was only by this meansthat he would arouse in himself his own antagonist, the general will.Effectively, she reasoned, this meant that in the realm of his politicaltheory, to partake in citizenship ‘each national must rise and remain inconstant rebellion against himself ’.55

In the bitter struggle between the Jacobins and the Girondins whichtook place after the institution of the First Republic in , this ten-dency towards self-division at the heart of revolutionary discourseexpressed itself in terms of recurrent rhetoric of paradox. During thisperiod of republican in-fighting, both factions showed themselves to beassiduous practitioners of the ‘revolutionary catechism’, adopting dia-metrically opposed positions for identical reasons, which meant theyfound themselves employing a language that was often merely an echoof that of their antagonists. True patriotism was always being faced byits masked counterfeit, as Robespierre told the Girondins in November:

Thus, you only speak of dictatorship in order to exercise it yourself withoutrestraint, you only speak of proscriptions and tyranny in order to tyrannise andproscribe.56

Such formulations were to become a leading characteristic of the lan-guage of revolutionary government, which both feared and fed upon thepossibility that there might be an intimate link between apparent oppo-sites. History had taught the Jacobins that what had seemed a unitedfront against counter-revolution was always capable of dividing againstitself, as the revolutionary movement suffered a succession of supposed‘betrayals’ from within its own ranks, firstly from the feuillants, then fromthe Brissotins, and then finally, in the early part of , from both theDantonists and the so-called ultras. Betrayal was the recurrent nightmareof the First Republic, but it also became its energising principle. The sus-picion that people and principles might be subject to uncanny reversals,and that patriotism might turn out to be its opposite, helped to fuel the


policy of the Terror, but not without repeatedly calling the good faith ofits own practitioners into question.

Defending the Terror from the charge that it merely reproduced therepression of the ancien régime, Robespierre gave an extended speechon ‘political morality’ in February in which he offered a strikingformulation which sought to make an absolute distinction between thetwo:

The government of the Revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.57

It is likely that Edmund Burke had this type of statement in mindwhen he said of the French nation in his Letters on the Regicide Peace that‘the foundation of their Republic is laid in moral paradoxes’, and thetemptation for historians has always been to share his rather scornfulview. But while it is of course important to acknowledge the deleterioushistorical consequences of this language of paradox, it is also worthrecognising the way in which, like the vocabulary of suspicion men-tioned above, it was a canny instrument of political terror. It was a pow-erful device because it forced its auditors into an active exploration ofthe distinction between revolutionary government and the absolutism ofthe ancien régime in a way that made any confusion between the twoseem a culpable failure of political understanding, for as Robespierreargued: ‘Those who . . . call the revolutionary laws arbitrary or tyranni-cal are stupid sophists who seek to confuse total opposites.’58 LikeRousseau, he suggested that those readers who found such statementsimpossible were almost certainly thinking too much, and in the wrongkind of way; a paradox, after all, was just another word for a new truth,a truth which had not yet become part of the general orthodoxy.

However, even as Robespierre’s paradoxical rhetoric laboured toestablish the absolute difference between republicanism and aristocracy,it also preserved the possibility of their secret proximity. Unconsciously,it presented them as brothers as well as opposites. And in the extendedanalysis of the nature of counter-revolutionary conspiracy whichformed a central part of the ‘political morality’ speech, Robespierrewent on to explore this fratricidal link, almost in spite of himself. Initially,he tried to strike an upbeat note. Such was the success of the republicanmovement, he argued, that no longer did anybody dare to broadcastaristocratic principles. Unfortunately, however, this did not mean thataristocracy had been totally eradicated; it simply meant that it had beenforced to take up the mask of patriotism, mimicking republican dis-course in an attempt to subvert it from within. Sometimes they had


sought to dilute revolutionary zeal, as the Dantonists had done; some-times, as in the case of the Hébertists, they had urged it to self-destruc-tive excess. In each case true republicans had been temporarily seducedby the mere performance of patriotism, but they would know to be morewatchful in future:

In treacherous hands, all of the remedies to our ills will become poisons; every-thing that you are capable of doing, they will turn against you; even the truthsthat we have just put forward.59

Obsessed by counter-revolution, and yet increasingly unable to dis-tinguish it from itself, in this formulation revolutionary discoursebecomes prey to a form of self-distrust. Thus it became crucial forRobespierre to argue that the real difference between the despotism ofliberty against tyranny and its absolute opposite lay in the inner inten-tions lying behind them, precisely because they were so identical in theireffects. Hence he sought repose in the notion of the conscience as theonly real proof of virtue, a deeply internal principle, existing anterior toboth political language and political praxis, outside the realm of conven-tional representation. And this is why it is tempting to see his laterspeeches in terms of an identifiably Rousseauvian tradition of confes-sion, for as he said on the day preceding the Thermidorean conspiracyagainst him: ‘Take my conscience away from me, and I would be themost unhappy of men’.60



On the October the leading Girondin deputy Jean-BaptisteLouvet rose before the National Convention to accuse MaximilienRobespierre of aspiring to the dictatorship of the new French Republic.In his review of the momentous events that had led up to the dissolutionof the monarchy, Louvet sought to make a distinction between the‘popular’ insurrection of August and the spate of summary execu-tions in the prisons of Paris in September. While the former had been aspontaneous uprising of the people against oppression, ‘the work of all’,the latter had been the perpetrated by a small band of ‘scoundrels’. ‘Thepeople of Paris know how to fight’, he insisted, ‘but they do not knowhow to murder.’ Far from being ‘popular’, in fact, the September mas-sacres had been a deliberate attempt by Robespierre to round up anddespatch his political opponents:

Then we saw this man urging firstly the Jacobins and then the electoral assem-bly to denounce certain philosophers, writers and patriotic orators; then we sawhis deputy conspirators declaring Robespierre to be the only virtuous man inFrance, the only one to whom the task of saving the people could be entrusted;this man who has been full of base flattery for a few hundred citizens, whom hedubbed ‘the people of Paris’, then ‘the people’, and finally ‘the sovereign’ . . .and who, after having celebrated the power and sovereignty of the people, neverforgot to add that he was one of the people himself, a tactic as crude as it isblameworthy, the kind of ruse which has always been useful to usurpers fromCaesar to Cromwell.1

Despite publicly proclaiming themselves to be the defenders of thepeople, the Girondins had become privately unsympathetic to the politi-cal demands of the Parisian working class during the course of .And as this ambivalence began to make itself felt, they became mark-edly less ‘popular’ than their Jacobin counterparts. For while theJacobins were willing to acknowledge the influence of the Paris sections,the Girondins began to favour a political programme based on a broader

and more truly national consensus. This was why Louvet sought toexpose Robespierre’s attempted appropriation of the notion of ‘thepeople’ by questioning how he could treat the actions of the militant sec-tionnaires as if they were an unmediated expression of the general will ofFrance. But he could not make his opposition to the plebeian politics ofthe capital too explicit without attracting the charge of federalism, forin the war-torn climate of it was becoming increasingly moredifficult to argue that more autonomy should be accorded to theprovinces without being accused of seeking to divide the nation againstitself. So in order not to jeopardise his own professed commitment topopular sovereignty, Louvet tried to characterise Robespierre as an‘insolent demagogue’ publicly flattering the people while privately pan-dering to his own personal ambition.

In the reply to Louvet which he presented to the Convention on November , Robespierre gave a strident defence of the SeptemberMassacres. Where fellow Jacobins such as Danton, who had been farmore closely involved with the events themselves, were notably subdued,he was steadfast and outspoken.2 Very deliberately, he placed the mas-sacres in their context, first of all by describing the progress of the warduring the month of August, then by reminding the Convention how theDuke of Brunswick’s manifesto, a virulently counter-revolutionarydocument threatening France with imminent invasion, had heightenedpopular tension in the capital. In the aftermath of the insurrection of August, he argued, the people had seen many of its sworn enemies lan-guish in gaol without being tried or punished, and it was this combina-tion of circumstances that had led to the violence in the prisons:

In the midst of this universal turmoil, the approach of foreign enemies awakesa feeling of indignation and of vengeance smouldering in all hearts against thetraitors who had summoned them. Before abandoning their hearths, theirwives, their children, the citizenry, which successfully stormed the Tuileries,demands the often-promised punishment of conspirators; it runs to theprisons.3

Significantly, there is no division of revolutionary labour inRobespierre’s account of the journées of : the people are depicted asacting unanimously, simultaneously and in unison throughout. The menwho perpetrated the September executions are the same men who areabout to leave for the eastern front to fight for their country; moreoverthey were all present at the storming of the Tuileries on August. Inthis way, by depicting the people as a coherent and unified subjectivity,


Robespierre effectively turned the allegations of factionalism back uponLouvet himself.

In Robespierre’s eyes, the September massacres were produced by thepeople’s impatience for justice; thus they could be regretted but not con-demned. In response to the suggestion that many innocent people hadperished, he insisted that most of the victims were aristocrats complicitwith the counter-revolutionary army pressing upon the borders ofFrance. Once again he accused Louvet of being selective in his sympa-thies, of taking up the cause of aristocrats and conspirators rather thanlamenting the demise of French soldiers fighting in the revolutionarywar. Most spectacularly of all, he responded to Louvet’s charge that theexecutions had been ‘illegal’ by suggesting that he had completely failedto understand the nature of revolutionary action. Adeptly deployingRousseau’s notion of the general will as a sovereign principle superior toall positive institutions and laws he declared that the massacres had onlybeen as illegal as the rest of the Revolution, ‘as the fall of the throne andof the Bastille, as illegal as liberty itself ’.4 On matters such as this, he feltthere was no room for hypocrisy: ‘Citoyens,’ he demanded, addressingthe members of the Convention directly, ‘do you want a revolutionwithout a revolution?’.5

Thus it was that by dealing sympathetically with the motives anddesires of the septembriseurs, and binding himself rhetorically to the causeof the people, Robespierre was able to vindicate himself in the eyes ofthe majority of his colleagues in the National Convention. And at thesame time, he was able to imply that Louvet and his supporters werehopelessly detached from the true springs of revolutionary action, mis-understanding its true meaning. For in refusing to denounce his antago-nist, he made it seem that Louvet was narrowly preoccupied with theactions of individuals, while he himself was capable of rising above suchlimited concerns:

I have given up the easy advantage to be gained by replying to the calumnies ofmy adversaries with more dreadful denunciations. I have sought to suppress theoffensive part of my defence. I have refused the just vengeance that I shouldhave had the right to pursue against such libellers. I demand nothing more thanthe return of peace and the triumph of liberty. Citizens, continue to follow, witha firm and rapid step, your splendid path, and, though it may cost me my lifeand even my reputation, may I work together with you for the greater glory andhappiness of our common fatherland!6

Characteristically, Robespierre’s very claim to public virtue was basedon a kind of refusal, a withdrawal, a retreat into a position of sublime


detachment, somewhere outside of the realm of factional politics. Andthis capacity to play the grand legislator, it might be said, was one of theforemost reasons for his revolutionary longevity, for in assuming this rôle,he sometimes made it seem as if he alone was capable of commandinga general prospect of the Revolution, as if he alone could trace its truetrajectory, and as if he alone had completely identified his interests withthose of the people.7

In the eyes of his political enemies this detachment from the bloodand strife of the main revolutionary struggles was indicative of a suspi-cious and cowardly nature. For his supporters, however, it bespoke anenabling detachment, a perspective which allowed him to see theRevolution with far greater clarity, and with a sympathy that was all themore pure. Within the pages of the Contrat Social Rousseau had spokenat length of the qualities requisite in the ideal revolutionary legislator,but he had also depicted him as an outsider from the community in ques-tion, whose very foreignness would enable him to maintain a certain dis-interestedness of spirit. Without fulfilling that requirement, Robespierrenevertheless assumed a demeanour which was at once enthusiastic andaustere, so that he came to be seen as ‘a man of the people’, after thefashion of some of the old Roman tribunes, rather than as a ‘populist’like Hébert or Marat. Thus it was not by affecting the style and mannersof the sans-culottes, but by endlessly emphasising the transparent reci-procity between his individual will and that of the people, thatRobespierre defined his political character. And by this means he turnedrevolutionary politics into a species of autobiography.

Many contemporary commentators saw the confessional vein inRobespierre’s politics, his willingness to parade his political consciencein public, as a confirmation of his overweening personal ambition. Inthe eyes of John Adolphus, for example, his reply to Louvet was not somuch a defence as ‘an eulogium on himself ’. And as the years passed,this perception of Robespierre as a man consumed by inordinate self-love was to gain a good deal of authority on both sides of the Channel,so that when Sir Walter Scott finally came to pen his account of theFrench Revolution in the late s, it had already become something ofa truism: ‘Vanity was Robespierre’s ruling passion,’ Scott wrote, ‘andthough his countenance was the image of his mind, he was vain even ofhis personal appearance, and never adopted the external habits of aSans-Culotte.’8 But whatever Robespierre’s concern for his reputation anddemeanour, it is not necessary to assume that his self-absorption wasindicative of a desire for dictatorship. He himself maintained that what-


ever influence he possessed in the National Convention was due not topersonal power but to ‘the natural empire of principles’.9 And in recentyears François Furet has seen fit to concur with this view, arguing thathis pre-eminence stemmed from his constant willingness to explain thesignificance of the central events of the Revolution and his ability toembody more fully and more continuously than any of his contempo-raries its fundamental values.10 But if this was indeed the case, how thendid his autobiographical impulse function as an expression of his revolu-tionary principles? What, in short, was the relation between politics andpersonality in the writings and speeches of Robespierre?

For many members of the revolutionary generation the experience ofbeing converted to the principles of liberty and equality was intimatelylinked to, and coeval with, a revolution in their concept of personal iden-tity. In the case of many revolutionary republicans, figures such asJacques-Pierre Brissot, Marie-Jeanne Roland and even Louvet himself,their concept of the self and its relation to society had been completelytransformed by a reading of Rousseau.11 But it is in the political writingsof Robespierre that we find the fullest, most dramatic and most com-pletely self-conscious articulation of this phenomenon. In the Dédicaceaux mânes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau penned shortly before arriving inVersailles in as a representative of the newly summoned EstatesGeneral, he singled out Les Confessions for special praise. Other radicalwriters and pamphleteers of the period had tended to extol the wisdomand virtue of novels and treatises such as Emile and La Nouvelle Heloïse,but for Robespierre, it was Rousseau’s most recent and controversialwork that deserved the highest praise.12

Your example is there before my eyes; your admirable confessions, that openand courageous emanation of the purest soul, which shall go forward into pos-terity less as a model of art than as a prodigy of virtue. I want to follow yourvenerable path, though I may leave nothing but a name of which centuries tocome shall be wholly incurious. I shall be happy if, in the perilous course thatan unprecedented revolution has just opened up before us, I remain constantlyfaithful to the inspiration that I have drawn from your writings!13

Why was Robespierre disposed to see the Confessions – that mostapparently private and perverse of texts – as a prodigy of public virtue?And to what extent did it become a model for his own ‘confessional’style? In the first chapter of this book I examined how Rousseau’s theo-retical critique of the liberal bourgeois Enlightenment insinuated itselfinto the political practice of revolutionary Jacobinism. Developing thisargument, I now want to suggest that an exploration of the relationship


between Rousseau’s autobiographical writings and his works of politicaltheory can help to deepen our understanding of revolutionary republi-canism, allowing us to see the close connection between Robespierre’sdiscourse of confession and the ‘illegality’ of revolutionary justice;between the language of conscience and the politics of Terror.

In the celebrated Discours sur l’Inégalité of , Rousseau depicted manin the state of nature as a creature of self-respect (amour de soi ) andnatural compassion (pitié ), arguing that the invention of private propertyand the development of civil society had instituted conditions of eco-nomic inequality and mutual dependence which had served to alienatehim from this state of primordial bliss. As social conditions began toreshape man’s sense of himself, his behaviour became oriented towardscompeting jealously with his fellow men, desiring to please his superiorsand offering himself as something he was not. Selfishness (amour-propre)began to replace self-respect. And with this loss of integrity came a con-sequent loss of mutual transparency: men began to live externally ratherthan according to their own internal standard, and this externality wasitself the play of mere appearance. This was a development of the argu-ment which had first appeared in the Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts of, in which Rousseau had argued that as civilisation became evermore sophisticated and cultivated, men became progressively moreopaque to one other:

Human nature was not at bottom better then than now; but men found theirsecurity in the ease with which they could fathom one another, and this advan-tage, of which we no longer feel the value, prevented their having many vices.14

Though it may appear that the members of modern society commu-nicate more elegantly and more intelligently than ever before, Rousseauargues, they actually understand each other less, for by insisting upon apropriety that is proper to nobody, civilised discourse has driven a wedgebetween public and private experience, serving to obscure people fromone another in the process.15 And the importunate fantasies and impos-tures fostered by modern trade and commerce represented the finalstage in the process of alienation in this respect, for they served todramatise the final transformation of l’homme into le bourgeois.

According to liberal reformists of the revolutionary period such asAntoine de Condorcet and Thomas Paine, the modern subject was


never more free than when he was permitted to follow his own personalinterests, secure from interference by the state. And throughout theeighteenth century a number of philosophers, most notably DavidHume, had sought to argue the suitability of modern commercialsociety to the intellectual and emotional fabric of the individual self bydepicting man as an animal naturally driven by fantastic desires and irra-tional speculations and hence fundamentally incapable of living accord-ing to the absolute demands of reason.16 For Rousseau, however,modern commercial man was distinctly inferior to the ancient citizensof Rome or Sparta, in whom liberty had been defined in terms of publicvirtue rather than private feeling. As we saw in chapter one, in the ContratSocial () he had tried to develop an alternative to the conditionsof economic dependence and social bondage that characterisedeighteenth-century society. And he did this by describing a different kindof alienation from that which had taken place in modern times, one inwhich l’homme would be transformed into le citoyen, renouncing his naturalindependence in order to receive it back on a political basis, for in iden-tifying his particular will with that of the general, Rousseau argued, theindividual would be able to preserve his moral liberty by pledging alle-giance to a law that was entirely of his own making.

One way of trying to understand the nature and effect of the changesbrought about by the rise of trade and commerce during the eighteenthcentury was to construct narratives of the historical development of civilsociety, and it is in this light that we can understand the work of figuressuch as Adam Ferguson, Edward Gibbon and Lord Kames, and, ofcourse, Rousseau himself. Another approach, intimately connected withthe first, although often occupying an entirely different generic and liter-ary register – that of novels and memoirs rather than formal histories –was to examine these questions through a close analysis of the develop-ment of the individual self. And it is in these terms that we may be ableto understand the rise of life-writing in the early eighteenth century.

In his book on the origins of the English novel, Michael McKeon hasdiscussed the way in which seventeenth-century novels written in the firstperson tended to blend elements of two very different genres of writingabout the self inherited from former times, namely the ‘spiritual auto-biography’ and the ‘true history’. He has described how the confessionalmodels found in St Augustine and the Lives of the Saints graduallybecame democratised during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inthe work of men such as John Bunyan and John Foxe. In this form ofwriting a dialectic was set up between the authorial self and the autobio-


graphical subject, in which detailed reflection on past folly helped todefine the nature of present grace. ‘True histories’, by contrast, wereoften tales of travel and adventure without such a rigid before-and-afterstructure. Digressive and desultory in character, they engaged muchmore with the empirical life of the subject, eschewing the drama ofmoral regeneration in favour of a series of picturesque descriptions andinformative anecdotes. In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe () we cansee both of these generic models struggling for dominance. Written inthe form of a fictional autobiography, this novel is both a conversion nar-rative and a true history, constantly pulling its hero in two directions, ver-tically, into a contemplation of his spiritual trajectory, and horizontally,into new adventures and commercial speculations without form, shapeor end.17

In many ways, Rousseau’s Confessions, which were published post-humously, in two parts, in and respectively, can be seen to haveconstituted a radical inflection of the tradition of spiritual auto-biography. It redefined the traditional narrative of sin and salvation inentirely secular terms, describing the struggles of the self to combat theaccretions of modern corruption. Within its pages, the citizen ofGeneva engaged in a dialogue with his former self, the ingenuous Jean-Jacques, and in so doing attempted to heal the breach that bourgeoissociety had caused between them. By obsessively analysing, explainingand excusing the various forms of alienation that had been suffered byhis youthful self, Rousseau tried to identify himself with the being in hispast, re-establishing and re-confirming through the act of writing anotion of the self that was independent of history and its endless trans-formations.18 His autobiography developed into an extended analysis ofthe way in which the fetters, obstacles and patterns of dependence thatcharacterise modern life serve to alienate and corrupt the natural man,forcing him to live externally, at one remove from self-possession andindependent virtue. In this way the Confessions offered another version ofthe narrative of natural goodness corrupted by civil society that hadbeen developed in the Discours sur l’inégalité. But whereas the latter hadbeen abstract and theoretical, the former was engagingly personal, con-taining a series of vivid and often amusing anecdotes touching upon allaspects of eighteenth-century culture. True to the traditions of spiritualautobiography, however, Rousseau combined an understanding of theway in which social circumstances constructed and constricted humanbehaviour with a belief in the possibility that individuals and even wholesocieties might be able to cast off the trappings of their recent past and


rediscover their former virtue entirely through an effort of will. And aswe shall see, this notion of autobiography as a conscious denial ofhistory was to have an important influence upon the Romantic genera-tion.

In the opening books of the Confessions, Rousseau re-interpreted theseminal moments of his childhood in the light of the philosophical dis-coveries of his later life. In Book I, for example, the discussion of therelation between being and seeming that had appeared in the secondDiscours was reworked in terms of the traumatic personal experience ofbeing accused of stealing a comb. Although he is absolutely guiltless ofMadame Lambercier’s charge, the young Jean-Jacques is horrified torealise the extent to which appearances testify against him. He and hiscousin are devastated by the gap between their internal innocence andthe external show, and this experience destroys the paradisal trans-parency which had characterised their life until that point:

We were there, as the first man is represented to us – still in our earthly paradise,but having ceased to enjoy it; in appearance our condition was the same, inreality it was a totally different manner of existence. Attachment, respect, inti-macy and confidence no longer drew the pupils to their guides: we no longerregarded them as gods who were able to read into our hearts; we became lessashamed of doing wrong and more afraid of being accused; we began to dis-semble, to be insubordinate, to lie.19

Learning that appearances can deceive leads Jean-Jacques and hiscousin to learn to become deceptive. They come to the realisation thatif they are to be punished for crimes they did not commit, they may aswell commit them, especially as crime, if it remains undiscovered, seemsto be no crime at all. In this way they seek to master their grief thoughrepetition. And it is through a series of alienations and revolutions of thissort, Rousseau seems to suggest, that the natural man gradually becomesconversant with the mendacious nature of social reality. Apprenticed toa tyrant of an engraver in Geneva later in book Jean-Jacques is forcedinto theft and deceit, and this gives Rousseau the opportunity to reflectupon the way in which despotism breeds a pact of complicity betweenmaster and slave, property owner and thief: ‘I found that stealing and aflogging went together, and constituted a sort of bargain, and that, if Iperformed my part, I could safely leave my master to carry out hisown.’20 Built into the tyrannical behaviour of the master is an expecta-tion and encouragement of the rebellion of the slave; that is how indi-viduals communicate with one another in the realm of opacity.

During the course of ten years Rousseau deposited all five of the


children borne him by Thérèse Levasseur at the Enfants Trouvés inParis. He returned to this episode on a number of occasions both in theConfessions and its sequel the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire ostensibly inorder to repent but finally in order to justify his conduct. In book ofthe Confessions he declared that he was persuaded by his friends inCommandeur de Graville’s rakish circle that giving his children awaywas the right thing for him to do. In book , however, he was to providea different excuse, asking us to believe that giving his children up to thestate was an act of public virtue. Since he had always felt himself to beinspired by an ‘innate benevolence’ for his fellows, and an ‘ardent love’for the grand, the true, the beautiful and the just, Rousseau found itimpossible to believe that he could have been deliberately wicked. Sowhen he considered the malicious breach of faith on the subject of hischildren that was perpetrated by his former friends Madame D’Épinay,Denis Diderot and Melchior Grimm, he immediately swung fromdefence into attack:

My fault is great, but it was due to error; I have neglected my duties, but thedesire of doing an injury never entered my heart . . . but, to betray theconfidence of friendship, to violate the most sacred of all agreements, to dis-close secrets poured into our bosoms, deliberately to dishonour the friend whomone has deceived, these are not faults, they are acts of meanness and infamy.21

In this way, Rousseauvian confession is always in danger of trans-forming itself into a form of self-justification: ‘never, for a single momentin his life, could Jean-Jacques have been a man without feeling, withoutcompassion, or an unnatural father’, he declares, before adding that:

I shall content myself with saying that such was [my error] that, in deliveringmy children into the hands of public education because I could not bring themup myself, in intending them to become peasants and workers rather thanadventurers and fortune-seekers, I believed myself to be acting both as a citizenand a true father, and looked upon myself as a member of Plato’s republic.22

Throughout the Confessions Rousseau is continually suggesting thatmodern society transforms his every good feeling into its opposite, byforging a radical separation between his intentions and their conse-quences. He even goes on to suggest that it is in the nature of truly virtu-ous impulses that they should be subject to an uncanny distortion as soonas they enter the corrupt world outside, that is why his own behaviourhas been so consistently misconstrued.23 In this way he implies thatwithin the confines of an unjust social order it is the fate of public virtueto become inexpressibly private, so that it can only be signified in terms


of an absence: thus the best way of exercising one’s freedom in con-temporary society, he finally concludes, is to have the courage to donothing.

Other episodes of Rousseau’s Confessions dramatised different aspectsof his political theory. In book an extended reflection on the relation-ship between theft and monetary purchase developed the arguments ofthe second Discours on the corrupting power of a commercial appetite.Rousseau described himself as a man fuelled by natural desires for theassuagement of hunger and for human contact and affection, desiresthat money cannot satisfy because it always poisons all pleasure. Onenever gets one’s money’s worth, in his analysis, because of the role ofmoney in the exchange relationship which is always draining everytransaction of value. As well as obstructing communication betweenmen, it also represents an obstacle between the individual and the objectof his desire: ‘Money tempts me less than things, because betweenmoney and the possession of the desired object there is always an inter-mediary, whereas between the thing itself and the enjoyment of it thereis none.’24 Paradoxically, for Rousseau theft is more virtuous than theaccumulation of monetary wealth because it arises from a spontaneousand unmediated desire for the object.

In book of the Confessions, Rousseau describes how while a footmanin the house of the Comtesse de Vercellis, the young Jean-Jacques hadpublicly attributed to his fellow servant Marion the theft of a ribbon thathe himself had stolen. And he excuses his behaviour by referring to thefundamental goodness of his conscience: ‘Wicked intent was neverfurther from me than at that cruel moment’, he declared, ‘and when Iaccused this unfortunate girl, it is bizarre but true that my affection forher was the cause.’25 He then trawls through his guilty feelings about hisill-treatment of Marion, aware that his besmirching of her charactermust have had a devastating effect on her prospects for future employ-ment, but ultimately he is able to console himself by retreating into theinner world of his intentions, a world in which he is autonomous andself-possessed, and no longer perturbed by the calculation of externalconsequences. And indeed, throughout the Confessions, however muchRousseau berates Jean-Jacques for being periodically seduced by bour-geois desires and appetites, he always concludes each confessionalepisode by stripping away the accumulated layers of acculturation to dis-cover a pure will in his former self that continues to exist anterior to allaction and beyond all representation. Neither a public person, nor anaristocrat, he shows himself struggling to attain independent virtue


while simultaneously being mired in the occlusions, jealousies andinstabilities of civil society. In this way the Confessions gives a private andparticular version of the civic humanist critique of modern society con-tained in the second Discourse, reformulating the narrative of thedevelopment of civil society in terms of the individual trajectory of aman of the Third Estate.

Although it was initially well received, the Confessions was soon seen bymany as an utterly scandalous text. Rousseau’s detractors, of whomthere were many, especially in England, were outraged at the personalweaknesses that his confessional discourse had shamelessly exposed.26

How was it possible, they asked, that a man who admitted to having lied,cheated, thieved, whored and masturbated throughout his life could stillwish to be considered as good? How could a man who had left his fivechildren at the Foundling Hospital in Paris still profess to be virtuous?During the s attacks on the Confessions became especially intense.Feverishly fuelled by the knowledge that the French Revolutionaries hadset Rousseau up as their ‘canon of holy writ’, Edmund Burke was toembark upon a vitriolic ad hominem attack in his Letter to a Member of theNational Assembly of , in which he sought to expose the latter’sconcept of pitié or natural fellow-feeling as an entirely theoretical formof benevolence that masked a practical malignity: ‘Benevolence to thewhole species and want of feeling for every individual with whom theprofessors come in contact’, he wrote, ‘form the character of the newphilosophy.’27

In Burke’s view, the merest acquaintance with Rousseau’s ‘madconfession of his mad faults’ made abundantly clear the extent to whichvanity had been the ruling passion of his life, both theoretically andpractically. Firstly, it was the very foundation of his philosophical system,the defining element of which was nothing but an elaborate defence ofindividual selfishness against the claims of deference and duty. And sec-ondly, it had been the central characteristic of his literary career, so thateverything from his peculiar predilection for dressing in Armeniancostume to his celebrated passion for paradoxes could finally be tracedback to an overwhelming desire in him, so intense as to be almost aspecies of madness, to grab the attention of the public. Thus it washighly fortunate, Burke argued, given the specious attractions ofRousseau’s famously seductive prose, that the British reading public hadbeen wise enough to resist his destructive theories, having a native mis-trust of such ‘paradoxical morality’.

Nor was Burke alone in seeking to assassinate Rousseau’s character.


As the Revolution debate grew more heated, a number of loyalistpamphleteers were to follow his example, using the Confessions as a roughand ready means of criticising the general tendency of FrenchJacobinism as a whole. For example, in Charles Harrington Elliot’s TheRepublican Refuted, which was published in , the author sought toprove the anarchistic nature of revolutionary politics by referring hisreaders to the unconventional, itinerant life of the young Rousseau. Andwhat is more, he endeavoured to sully the reputation of the most cele-brated English republican of the day, Tom Paine, by tarring him withthe same biographical brush: ‘That once generous and gallant nation’,Elliot wrote,

unhappily sophisticated by the late-forged philosophy of ingenious, immoralvagabonds, such as Rousseau and Paine, as devoid of principles as of property,assumed the impenetrable breastplate of republicanism; smiled at the expiringconvulsions of slaughtered innocence; and by unprecedented refinements intheir new spectacles of human butchery, far outcrimsoned even the bloodytreachery of Launay.28

For the defenders of Jean-Jacques, however, who included figures asdiverse as Maximilien Robespierre, Madame de Staël, MaryWollstonecraft and William Hazlitt, Rousseau’s character was to be con-sidered primarily in terms of his good intentions rather than the curiouserrors of his life. Rarely choosing to defend his individual actions, enthu-siasts nevertheless continued to speak of his ‘virtue’, since for them it wasnot what Rousseau had done that was important, what was moresignificant was the fact that through all of his actions he had managedto remain morally independent and fundamentally benevolent, evadingthe traps and pitfalls of a society that was forever conspiring to corrupthim either with cruelty or with kindness. As Germaine de Staël mostwarmly expressed it:

Ah! Rousseau! defender of the weak, friend of the unfortunate, passionate loverof virtue, who has sketched all the movements of the soul, and sympathised withevery form of misfortune, how worthy you are in your turn of that sentiment ofcompassion which your heart knew so well how to feel and express; may a voiceworthy of you rise to defend you!29

According to this interpretation, such things as Rousseau’s petty theftswere to be interpreted in terms of the revolt of the natural man againstsocial oppression, and his lack of property to be regarded as an absolutebadge of distinction. Sometimes radicals sought to shift attention fromRousseau’s personality back to his works, but even then, quite often, they


used the enthusiastic nature of his character as a proof of his philosoph-ical veracity. Thus in his Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke of the leading radical Capel Lloft was to take issue with the charge thatvanity had been Rousseau’s defining characteristic. Far from simplyemerging out of a desire for notoriety, Lloft argued, Rousseau’s so-called‘paradoxes’ were the inevitable consequence of a serious attempt tobreak new ground in the field of political theory. Thus it was not sur-prising that they had taken people aback. And for this very reason, hecontinued, it was of great importance that his political theories shouldbe treated as theories, and not thoughtlessly criticised for their lack ofspecificity. Rousseau himself had warned against the indiscriminateapplication of general principles; indeed he himself had seen the need,especially in relation to politics, for legislators to be sensitive to particu-lar circumstances. Nor had he intended his blueprints for republicangovernment to be imposed insensitively and without modification. Butabove and beyond his defence of Rousseau’s legacy to politics, and theallowance it made for local conditions, the mainstay of Lloft’s defencelay in his enthusiastic account of the effect of Rousseau’s character. Forin a long footnote to his discussion of the Contrat Social, he suggested thatthe only way to make good Rousseau’s paradoxes was to partake of thesame enthusiasm which had brought them into being:

. . . But if the heart does not tell the reader of Rousseau that paradoxes like hisflow from the warmth and force of the heart and are not studied sophismsinvented at leisure and elaborately wrought in contradiction to the sentiment oftheir author – or at least without the vivid concurrence of that sentiment – thatthe world might admire him as a surprising inventor of strange things, – if theheart of the reader does not feel which of these suppositions must be the truth,the person will not be convinced by any arguments: he wants the faculty towhich the proof must apply.30

In this passage, Lloft plays upon the double meaning of the wordparadox, as referring to both a kind of logical impasse, and a new kind oftruth, by suggesting that in order for the former to be transformed intothe latter, there was required a kind of secular leap of faith, which wouldhelp heal whatever contradiction a paradox might be seen to contain,while also making one aware that its apparent illogicality should simplybe seen as the result of an antiquated conception of things. What isinteresting about formulations like this, of course, is that they allow usto see the tendency of revolutionary enthusiasm to become self-justify-ing. Without enthusiasm on the part of the reader, Lloft seems to suggest,Rousseau’s paradoxes are bound to seem contrived. Thus in order to


gain anything from a reading of his work, it is necessary to bring to themthe very same spirit of enthusiasm that they themselves were designedto teach. It is, to say the least, a rather circular, self-confirming argument.

Precisely because it contained such a direct and powerful appeal tothe notion of sensibility, it was often very tempting for radicals to invokethe principle of revolutionary enthusiasm in this way. In that sense, Lloftwas by no means unusual. But it should also be recognised that it wasespecially tempting to do so when discussing Rousseau, because Jean-Jacques himself had done so much to encourage this kind of approach,with the Confessions serving as a kind of posthumous proof of the sincer-ity of the Contrat Social, as well as a potent political force in its own right.In this way Rousseauvian autobiography can be seen to have contrib-uted to the formation of a radical sensibility in two distinct but relatedways: firstly, by politicising the language of sentimental reciprocity,raising private ‘sensibility’ to the level of public ‘enthusiasm’; and sec-ondly by encouraging its readers to take an active and self-reflexive inter-est in the details of its author’s life. For in suggesting that only the trulyvirtuous would understand Jean-Jacques’s behaviour, Rousseau hadeffectively challenged his readers to bring their own lives to bear uponthe reading experience, as a kind of parallel text, inviting them toexamine their own consciences before deciding to condemn him. Somuch so, indeed, that in many of the radical reviews of Rousseau thissense of the barrier between writer and reader having been brokendown is often quite explicit. For example, in the course of an anonymousreview of the second part of the Confessions for the radical AnalyticalReview, Mary Wollstonecraft was moved to chafe against the formality ofher situation in these striking terms:

. . . without screening himself behind the pronoun WE, the reviewer’s phalanx,the writer of this article will venture to say, that he should never expect to seethat man to do a generous action who could ridicule Rousseau’s interestingaccount of his feelings and rêveries – who could, in all the pride of wisdomdespise such a heart when naked before him.31

In this way Rousseau made a significant contribution to the literaryculture of the late eighteenth century, both in England and in France,by actively encouraging his readers to come out from behind the‘phalanx’ of critical detachment and situate themselves in the open fieldof republican transparency.32

As we saw in chapter one, at a number of points in the Contrat SocialRousseau had insinuated that the inability of the modern reader toimagine the conditions under which the people of a particular nation


might be able to assemble together and form a republic was to be seenas an index of his alienation. And in the Confessions he used the samerhetorical strategy in reverse when he made the tacit suggestion that torepeat the judgments of contemporary society upon the character ofJean-Jacques was simply another way of discovering one’s own corrup-tion. Thus his autobiography constituted an extremely manipulative andplayful reworking of his own political theory, for it proposed that in orderfor French society to be regenerated, the general will would have to redis-cover itself by identifying with the individual, rather than the other wayround. Thus it was that, on the eve of the French Revolution, as J. G. A.Pocock has suggested, by ‘paranoically proclaiming that the tensionsbetween personality and society did have apocalyptic possibilities, [and]that the apocalypse had arrived in his own person’ Rousseau was able tooffer an extremely idiosyncratic inflection of the civic humanist tradi-tion.33

Even in the postumous Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (), in whichRousseau had sought to dramatise his renunciation of worldly concernslike literature and politics, there had been a continuing political reso-nance in his discourse of self-martyrdom, as he sought to excuse hiswithdrawal into solitary isolation by arguing that it had been forcedupon him by the persecutions of his enemies.

Everything external is henceforth foreign to me. I no longer have any neigh-bours, fellow-men or brothers in this world. To me the earth is like a strangeplanet I have fallen into.34

After despotism had deprived him of his rightful home, he said, thevery remorselessness of oppression from without had helped him to dis-cover spiritual consolation from within, affording him the private stateof rêverie as a replacement for the public state of Geneva. In this wayhis private contemplations, for all their apparent unconcern with theworld of politics, can still be seen to identify themselves as ways ofrethinking the public. ‘This type of reverie can be enjoyed anywherewhere one is undisturbed’, he had written, in the fifth of his Promenades,‘and I have often thought that in the Bastille, and even in a dungeonwithout a single object before my eyes, I should still have been able todream pleasantly.’35

In this way Rousseau’s autobiographical writings had a powerfulinfluence upon the minds of the Revolutionary generation preciselybecause they gave republican principles an unprecedented sensuousimmediacy and invited the public to reflect upon the politics of aliena-


tion in terms of their own personal experience. Thus it is likely that theEnglish radical anarchist William Godwin had Rousseau in mind whenhe said of Catholic confession that it would be much better if ‘instead ofa practice thus ambiguous, and which has been made so dangerous anengine of ecclesiastical despotism, every man would make the world hisconfessional, and the human species the keeper of his conscience’.36 Inhis idiosyncratic reinflection of the tradition of spiritual autobiographyRousseau had effectively realised this ideal, founding a new, and explic-itly republican style of writing which offered a powerful means of locat-ing the political in the personal and the personal in the political.

In her book The Body and the French Revolution Dorinda Outram has givena compelling account of the cult of neo-classical virtue developed bymen of the political class during the French Revolution. ‘Given thebreakdown of cultural sovereignty and the slow weakening of sover-eignty in the political sphere’, she writes, ‘individuals were forcedincreasingly into self-cultivation in order to validate their claims toauthority in public and private roles.’ In the absence of institutional andcultural models, the ‘stoical’ tradition of antiquity was profoundly usefulto the French in that it provided a means of personifying politicalauthority. According to Outram, the ideal political subject was to eschewboth the anarchic activity characteristic of the Parisian sans-culottes andthe type of sentimental effusion traditionally associated with women, sothat virtue was defined in terms of an absolute self-control. Thus sheargues that the revolutionary ideal of masculinity was ‘a struggle againstsensibilité in all its forms, and in particular against the fusion of subjectand object, reaction and occasion, which was its hall-mark, and whichwomen, contemporaries felt, displayed in such a high degree’.37

While broadly concurring with Outram’s account of the gendering ofrevolutionary identity, I would contend that it is ultimately rather unnu-anced. A detailed analysis of the political rhetoric of the republicanperiod reveals that, on the contrary, the discourse of sensibility was notrepudiated by the French Jacobins, but that it was actively redeployed tosoften the aristocratic emphasis of the Plutarchan tradition of neo-classical virtue. It is true that expressions of sensibility directed towardsindividuals, factions or corporate bodies were often deemed unpatrioticand effeminate, but sentimental effusions directed at ‘the people’ as awhole actually fulfilled a valuable function, serving to democratise the


discourse of civic humanism by putting the warmth of ‘natural’ feelingin the service of public virtue. In this way the language of sympathy wasa crucial supplement to the discourse of neo-classical stoicism becauseit enabled the revolutionary bourgeoisie to build a rhetorical bridgebetween themselves and the sans-culottes, offering a potential solution tothe ‘problem’ of popular politics.

In the speech of November Robespierre attacked Louvet forwhat he considered to be the latter’s excessive sympathy for the victimsof the September Massacres: ‘The sensibility which groans almostexclusively for the enemies of liberty’, he declared, ‘is to me, highlysuspect.’38 For him there was something potentially aristocratic aboutthe language of sentiment when it concentrated on specific groups andfactions; it was only valid when its object was the nation. ‘Under amonarchy’, he declared in a speech on May , ‘it is permitted tolove one’s family but not the fatherland, it is honorable to defend one’sfriends, but not the oppressed.’39 Thus in his defence of the SeptemberMassacres he argued that it was necessary for the representatives of theFrench Republic to seek to channel individual effusions of feeling into abroader current of general benevolence:

We are assured that innocents have perished, the number may have beenexaggerated, but even one is undoubtedly too much. Citizens, weep over thisreal loss. We have wept over it before. He was a good citizen, someone may say;if so, then he was one of our friends. Weep too for the guilty victims, hiddenfrom the vengeance of the law, who finally fell under the sword of popularjustice; but let your sorrow have its season, like all human things. Let us reservesome tears for more touching calamities. Let us weep for the hundred thousandpatriots killed by tyranny, weep for fellow citizens dying in their burning houses,and for the sons of citizens massacred in their cradles, or in the arms of theirmothers. Have you no brothers, children, spouses to avenge also? For Frenchlegislators such as yourselves, your family is the fatherland, it is the entire humanrace, except tyrants and their accomplices.40

As we saw in chapter one, the Constitution of had been a sourceof profound disappointment to the Parisian sans-culottes. Unexpectedlylimited in its franchise, it was one of a series of government measuresthat served to undermine popular faith in the notion of salvationthrough legislation. In times of economic or political emergency, as inSeptember , the sectionnaires became so impatient with what theyperceived to be the impotence of institutions that they decided to takethe administraton of justice into their own hands. As MaryWollstonecraft expressed it: ‘the only excuse that can be made for the


ferocity of the Parisians is then simply to observe, that they had not anyconfidence in the laws, which they had always found to be cobwebs tocatch small flies’.41 What endeared Robespierre to the sans-culotte leadersduring these times of insurrection was precisely the fact that his sympa-thy for the popular cause went beyond the bounds of legality. As HannahArendt has suggested ‘of the men of the Revolution only those survivedand rose to power who became the spokesmen [of the masses] and sur-rendered the artificial, man-made laws of a not yet constituted bodypolitic to the “natural” laws which the masses obeyed’.42

The reciprocity of the authorial voice and autobiographical subjectin Rousseau’s Confessions provided a valuable model for Robespierre inhis dealings with the people. While seeking to give a retrospective coher-ence to the chaotic behaviour of Jean-Jacques, Rousseau had also soughtto maintain that the virtue of the latter lay precisely in the fact that hewas ‘without guile, without skill, without cunning and without prudence,frank, open, impatient and impulsive’.43 And in his response to Louvet,Robespierre mounted a similar double defence of the sans-culottes, justi-fying their actions as one would justify the actions of children, while atthe same time arguing that it was precisely the spontaneous andunreflective quality of those actions that was an absolute guarantee oftheir virtue. He saw that, like the thefts of the youthful Jean-Jacques, theraiding of grocery shops by the people of Paris during the economiccrisis of – represented a virtuous attempt to bypass the fantasyworld of paper money and commercial speculation and engage in amore direct relation with the means of subsistence. As we shall see,Rousseau’s notion of the ‘conscience’ as selfishness pushed to the pointof benevolence was profoundly useful here, for it provided Robespierrewith a means of linking his own personal feelings with the unpredictableenergies of the French people. Thus it was that Robespierre was fre-quently keen to celebrate what he called ‘the pure egotism of uncor-rupted men who find a celestial pleasure in the serenity of a pureconscience and in the ravishing spectacle of the public good’.44

As we saw in chapter , despite their fondness for the rhetoric ofpopular soveriegnty, the Jacobins were ultimately no more willing toaccede to the final demands of the sans-culottes than their Girondin pre-decessors. As since they could not agree to working-class proposals forthe wholescale redistribution of food and land, they had to find a way ofcurtailing the power of the Paris sections without being seen to opposethem. Indeed the Terror of – can be seen as an attempt by thecommittees of the National Convention to establish a monopoly on


revolutionary violence, to take it out of the hands of the enragés and sep-tembriseurs and subject it to institutional control. It could also be inter-preted as a desperate endeavour to heal the gap between revolutionaryaction and political reflection, to bring the destructive and regenerativeimpulse of the Revolution under the aegis of the state. Thus from thespring and summer of , right up until his execution on July ,Robespierre’s response to the spectacle of continuing popular unrestand increasing policy division among the political class of the Frenchbourgeoisie was to seek to transform the Revolution into a war of virtueagainst corruption. To his mind, the continued absence of a unifiedgeneral will suggested that counter-revolutionary sentiments must bemore invisibly and deeply pervasive than anyone had previously sus-pected. In response to this, he considered that it was necessary to mobil-ise the machinery of the state in the war against treason, so that by he was proposing a system of political terror that would enable thepeople to look deep into the hearts and minds of its enemies and bringthem to summary justice. In this way Robespierre was to transformthe politics of conscience from a rhetorical style into an institutionalpractice.

In the busts of Claude Helvétius and Jean-Jacques Rousseau hadbeen displayed alongside one another in the hall of the Jacobin club, anacknowledgement of the extent to which their writings had helped toprovide the philosophical foundation of revolutionary politics. But on December Robespierre demanded that the bust of Helvétius beremoved from its position of honour. As we noted in chapter , duringthe course of the Revolution he had become increasingly mistrustful ofthe current of ‘progressive’ thought represented by Helvétius, and evermore anxious to differentiate it from the ‘primitivist’ tradition withwhich it was so often confused. He found the philosophical rationalismof the leading philosophes and physiocrats profoundly incompatible withRousseau’s voluntarist ideal. And rightly or wrongly, he identified theGirondins with this rationalist tradition, regularly accusing their intel-lectual mentor, the mathematician Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, ofpeddling a ‘treacherous hotchpotch of mercenary rhapsodies’ that hadhindered the dissemination of true knowledge.45 In this context, a brieflook at the epistemology of ethics developed by Helvétius and his follow-ers can help to give us a deeper understanding of Rousseau’s philosophy


of conscience, by highlighting the moral utilitarianism that it sought tonegate. And this, in turn, will allow us to develop a clearer sense of theparadoxical impulse that lay behind Robespierre’s Terror, what wemight think of as its doomed attempt to legalise the ‘illegal’ spirit of theFrench Revolution.

Claude Helvétius’ De l’esprit (), which had grown out of theCartestian rationalism of the seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-turies, was one of the ground-breaking texts in the history of utilitarianphilosophy. During the course of this treatise, Helvétius suggested thatin the sphere of practical ethics it was impossible to fathom the inten-tions of an individual, and that therefore one could only judge moralityfrom actions and their consequences. According to this view of things,human intentions were always selfish on one level or another, for manwas naturally a hedonistic animal, driven solely by the anticipation ofpleasure or pain. Even individual probity, according to Helvétius, wasnothing more than self-interest. And so man was not suited to livingaccording to abstract standards of morality: ‘It is as impossible tolove virtue for the sake of virtue as to love vice for the sake of vice.’46

But rather than deplore this state of affairs, he suggested that oneshould accept it as the foundation upon which to build a system of sociallegislation:

The continual declamations of moralists against the malignity of mankind area proof of their knowing but little of human nature. Men are not cruel andperfidious, but carried away by their own interest. The cries of moral philoso-phers will certainly not change this mainspring of the moral universe.47

It was ultimately the task of the legislator, Helvétius argued, toharmonise each private interest with that of the nation, and to ensurethat individual actions tended towards the public welfare, for it was inthis way alone that good laws would form virtuous men. And the virtu-ous man, in Helvétius’s formulation, would not be someone whosacrificed his pleasure, habits and strongest passions to the publicwelfare, since it was impossible that such a man could exist; rather hewould be someone whose prevailing passions were so conformable to thegeneral interest, that he was almost constantly forced to be virtuous.

The model developed by Jeremy Bentham in his Introduction to thePrinciples of Morals and Legislation of , is perhaps one of the bestexamples of this ‘philosophical radicalism’ in its most extreme form.48

Written while Bentham was being employed as constitutional adviser toMirabeau and the Abbé Sieyès, it constituted a complete theory of


liberal government organised around the Helvétian notion of utility.The purpose of laws, in this version of things, was to organise the pursuitof private interests into a system that maximised the general good, or‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, as Bentham preferredto describe it. These laws were not designed to inspire and enable politi-cal commitment in the heart of the citizen but to inform the individualof the extent to which he was subject to a felicific calculus: ‘The businessof government’, he remarked ‘is to promote the happiness of the society,by punishing or rewarding.’49 Social actions were to be graded andcategorised according to the extent to which they contributed to, ordetracted from, the principle of social utility, and individual crimes wereto be punished according to a strict economy of deterrence. Thus therewas no intrinsic meaning to human action, in Bentham’s ideology oflegislation, it was always to be seen exclusively in extrinsic terms. Despitebeing fully mired in the self-love philosophy of Helvétius and Holbach,however, Bentham did not seek to deny the principle of individualbenevolence, he merely insisted that it lay outside the legislator’sconcern, since from his point of view the intention which prompted anaction could never be as important as its social consequences.

In The German Ideology () Karl Marx was to argue that the rise ofthe utilitarian philosophy was to be seen as part of a philosophicalproject on the part of the industrial bourgeoisie to naturalise and justifythe emergence of modern commercial society. The secret meaning ofthe utility relation, according to Marx, was that one derived benefit foroneself only by doing harm to someone else. ‘For [the bourgeois]’, heremarked, ‘only one relation is valid on its own account – the relation ofexploitation.’50 Thus for him utility theory was nothing more than amystification of the logic of commerce–capitalism. In a society run onutilitarian lines, Marx predicted, the value of a particular relation wouldno longer be considered intrinsic to that relation, it would have to bereferred to an external standard for its final assessment. So, for example,in economic matters, all forms of private exploitation might be justifiedas indirectly contributing to the public good. And similarly, by the sameprocess of externalisation and objectification, the system of publiclegislation governing civil society would come to form the sole repositoryof moral value, leading to a radical separation between personal ethicsand the public good.

In the ‘Profession de Foi d’un Vicaire Savoyard’ from book of Emile(), Rousseau was to engage in a fully fledged critique of Helvetius’smoral philosophy in terms which went some way towards anticipating


the later ideas of Marx. In the person of the eponymous cleric,Rousseau described how he had laid aside traditional religion in favourof a faith based on revealed evidence, in which God was defined as theprimal will of the universe – the creative force that brought everythinginto being – and human free will as an active portion of that force, resid-ing in the individual mind. Having sketched out his beliefs in this way,the vicar then proceeded to launch into a critique of the sensationalismand necessitarianism of Helvétius and Holbach, demolishing theformer’s dictum that perception was the same as judgement by arguingthat ‘to perceive is to feel, to compare is to judge’, and that therefore tofeel and to judge were not the same thing.51

As his argument developed, Rousseau was ultimately to repose upona notion of the ‘conscience’ as the ultimate vehicle of free will and thevessel of moral truth. Not a judgment but a feeling, conscience wassuperior to reason because it offered a spontaneous and therefore selflessform of ethical perception.52 And yet its metaphysical status as an a priorifaculty of insight also served to render it absolutely distinct fromHelvetian ‘sensation’:

Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sureguide for a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free; infalli-ble judge of good and evil, making man like to God!53

Thus Rousseau argued that the pangs of the heart were the surest testof truth or falsehood: ‘I have only to consult myself on what I want todo,’ the savoyard vicar declared, ‘everything that I feel to be good isgood, everything that I feel to be evil is evil: the best of all casuists is theconscience’.54 In this formulation, the conscience was an ethical princi-ple in the human mind that transcended rational calculation, a princi-ple that went beyond the bounds of utility to identify itself with theabsolute good. By defending the notion of a subjective moral sense, amorale sensitive, Rousseau sought to resist Helvétius’s objectification ofsocial morality, to overturn his transformation of goodness into useful-ness and to reverse his alienation of justice into law.

However, in the very force of his negation of this ‘external’ system ofethics, Rousseau risked losing himself in his own ‘internal’ universe. Andin his autobiographical writings this tendency was sometimes especiallypronounced. For example, in the Sixth Promenade of the Rêveries du pro-meneur solitaire he briefly imagined what it would have been like to possessthe mythical ring of Gyges, a magic ornament which was supposed tohave rendered its bearer invisible. Suddenly he found himself indulging


in a dream of sublime power in which it had become his prerogative toadminister justice to mankind:

Perhaps in my light-hearted moments I should have had the childish gaiety towork miracles, but being entirely disinterested, and obeying only my naturalinclinations, I should have performed scores of merciful or equitable ones forevery act of just severity.55

In Emile, Rousseau suggested that benevolence was merely selfishnesspushed to the point of principle, an invisible will acting without fear ofcontradiction, and that in order to be properly disinterested one onlyhad to follow one’s own inclinations, for as long as these inclinations wereunmediated by rational reflection, they would inevitably exist inharmony with the ‘divine conscience’ which partakes of the general willof God. But it is worth noting that in this passage from the Rêveries thefundamental kindliness of the conscience did not preclude it from car-rying out some acts of severe justice the moral foundation of which wasas invisible as the spatial positioning of their perpetrator. This was whatutilitarians like Jeremy Bentham found problematic about sentimentalmorality. For them, it mistook the symptom of moral action for itsground. Disclaiming the necessity of looking out for any extrinsicground, the conscience was not so much a principle of moral action, inBentham’s view, as the negation of all principle, and this was what ren-dered it dangerously unpredictable compared with the utilitarian calcu-lus. Sometimes foolishly indulgent, it would more often be cruel andarbitrary, precisely because there was nothing to check it. Thereforedespite all indications to the contrary, Bentham argued, ‘the principle ofsympathy and antipathy is most apt to err on the side of severity’.56

As we saw in chapter , the French constitution-mongers of hadseen the foundation of liberty and equality almost entirely in terms ofthe declaration and preservation of rights. But in the atmosphere ofnational emergency that characterised the years after , Robespierreand his fellow Jacobins had begun to question this liberal ideology oflegislation. For them, its complex forms and procedures were increas-ingly inappropriate to the revolutionary situation, for they obstructedthe punishment of vice and interfered with the exercise of virtue. Notonly did the law fail to acknowledge the value of ‘illegal’ actions such aspopular insurrection, it also failed to recognise that it was in the very


nature of political conspiracy to be incapable of proof. Thus from thetrial of the king onwards, legal proceedings in cases of political impor-tance were increasingly conducted on the principle that the consciencewas superior to calculation, and that a strong conviction of the guilt ofthe accused could overturn any evidence for the defence. At the trial ofthe Girondins in the autumn of the defendants complained that thepublic prosecutors were not conducting their indictment on a properlylegal basis. However, as John Adolphus pointed out, only the previousyear Brissot had himself declared that ‘in the case of conspiracies it isabsurd to call for demonstrative facts and judicial proofs: that at noperiod have they ever been obtained not even in the conspiracies ofCatiline; for conspirators are not so unguarded in their conduct. It issufficient that there exist strong possibilities’.57 Like so many of therevolutionary generation, Brissot was hoist by his own petard, convictedon a set of principles that he had helped to found, a fact which was notlost on conservative historians such as Sir Walter Scott, who, when con-ducting his account of the Revolution almost thirty years later, made apoint of reminding his readers of the hypocrisy of Brissot and his men:‘it will be recorded’, he wrote, ‘to the disgrace of their pretensions tostern republican virtue, that the Girondists were willing to employ, forthe accomplishment of their purpose, those base and guilty tools whichafterwards effected their own destruction’.58

By it was clear to Robespierre that the people, although funda-mentally virtuous, were profoundly susceptible to counter-revolutionaryflattery. Moroever, he increasingly came to consider that, far from beingsystematically opposed to one another, the Brissotin modérés and thepopular enragés were all been part of the same – fundamentally aristo-cratic – conspiracy to seduce them:

Brissot and the Girondins armed the rich against the people; the faction ofHébert protected the aristocracy by flattering the people in order to oppressthem.59

And such was the extent of the counter-revolutionary conspiracy thateven the clamour of the sections could no longer be considered theauthentic voice of the people. ‘Of what importance is it that Brutuskilled the tyrant?’ Robespierre asked despondently on February ,‘Tyranny continues to live in all hearts, and Rome exists no longer, otherthan in Brutus.’60 Aristocracy had not been eradicated by the physicaldestruction of the king, it had become a metaphysical phenomenon,everywhere at large, threatening to corrupt the minds of the people.


It was in this climate of paranoia and persecution that the principleof revolutionary justice was finally institutionalised by the law of the Prairial, which was presented to the National Convention by theRobespierrist Georges Couthon in the summer of . This measuredispensed with any residual commitment to the role of the defence incriminal trials. A judiciary and jury composed of virtuous patriots, it wassuggested, if left to itself, was quite capable of penetrating the veil ofcounter-revolutionary conspiracy, of bringing aristocratic darkness intothe light of transparent day:

The proof necessary to condemn the enemies of the people is, any sort of docu-ment, whether material or moral, verbal or written, that can naturally obtainthe assent of every just and reasonable mind. The rule of judgement is the con-science of the jurors inspired by patriotism, their goal the triumph of the repub-lic and the ruin of its enemies; the procedure, the simple methods which goodsense indicates in order to come to an understanding of the truth in the waythat the law has set it down. The law offers patriotic juries as a defence forlibelled patriots. It accords no such defence to conspirators.61

Realising the Rousseauvian desire to substitute moral truth for thetruth of facts, the law of the Prairial considered that the guilt or inno-cence of the accused would be evident to the court without a defencebeing necessary, for a revolutionary jury would come to the right deci-sion merely by following its own natural inclinations.62 Even the ten-dency to show fear was considered suspect. For as Robespierre himselfsaid in the immediate aftermath of Danton and Hébert’s death, anxietyof this sort might be seen as a sign of inner corruption: ‘I say thatwhoever trembles at this moment is guilty; because innocence neverfears public surveillance.’63 Primarily this was because, in his eyes, theTerror was directed towards the fostering of liberty and virtue, andtherefore only counter-revolutionaries could wish to oppose it. Virtue-as-sympathy for the plight of the people had been displaced into virtue-as-terror:

If the mainspring of popular government in peace time is virtue, its resourceduring a revolution is at one and the same time virtue and terror; virtue withoutwhich terror is merely terrible; terror, without which virtue is simply power-less.64

In an attempt to purify the Jacobin club of counter-revolutionary ele-ments during the winter of , Merlin de Thionville had proposed thatmembers should render themselves transparent to the general will byanswering the following questions:


What were you in ? What have you done till ? What was your fortunein ? What is it now? If your fortune has increased, how do you explain it?What have you done for the Revolution? Have you ever signed a counter-revolutionary petition? If you are an administrator, journalist, or representativeof the people, have you devoted your efforts only to the service of liberty?’65

Robespierre’s Terror, by contrast, was not centrally concerned withcross-questioning suspects on the nature of empirical evidence, but withscouring their hearts for signs of counter-revolutionary intention. It wasthe inner impulse that mattered to him, not the external behaviour,which was one of the reasons why he was to oppose the proscription ofDanton and Desmoulins for so long, despite the irregularity and impru-dence of their political conduct.

Thus the law of the Prairial that Robespierre and Couthon helpedto produce at the height of the Grand Terror represented a clear reac-tion against the liberal theory of jurisprudence exemplified by the‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen’ of and a firmrejection of the felicific calculus that had been put forward by theutilitarians. In sentencing its subjects to either liberty or death, theRevolutionary Tribunal was to become a secular version of the LastJudgement, steadfastly refusing to engage in the painstaking calculationof crimes and punishments that absorbed Helvétius and Bentham. Andthis was the historical result of Robespierre’s stated desire to create asociety in which liberty and equality would cease to exist externally inthe form of a written body of legislation, having been transformed intoa set of internal principles inscribed within the heart of each citizen:

What is the goal to which we are travelling? The peaceful enjoyment of libertyand equality; the reign of eternal justice, the laws of which having beenengraved, not in marble or on stone, but in the hearts of men, even in those ofthe slave who forgets them and the tyrant who denies them.66

What was characteristically Rousseauvian about the law of the Prairial was thus not merely its emphasis upon the ‘conscience’, but theprofound mistrust of language which that entailed. Just as Capel Lloft,in attempting to defend Rousseau’s paradoxes, had sought a proof fortheir veracity and sincerity outside the realm of language, a proof resid-ing in the very principle of ‘enthusiasm’ itself, so too the judges of theRevolutionary Tribunal were being instructed to search between thelines of each charge of treason, for signs of a political passion which, ifpresent, could heal all apparent contradictions into a harmonious whole,but whose absence could never be excused; a passion, moreover, whose


defining characteristic was that it was quite literally beyond representa-tion, so that, strictly speaking, it could not be identified by ‘signs’ at all.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, for many subsequent commentators on theFrench Revolution, the law of the Prairial was nothing more than aphilosophical cloak to cover tyranny. As Germaine de Staël remarked in:

‘The law,’ said Couthon, in proposing that of Prairial, ‘accords patrioticjuries as a defence for the innocent, but no defence to conspirators’. Are therenot in this maxim all the the elements of well-coordinated speech? At yet has itever been possible to bring together in so few words so many atrocious absur-dities? This net of language, which enslaves the most upright spirit and fromwhich the most powerful mind knows not how to free itself, is one of the great-est evils of an imperfect metaphysics. Thus reason becomes the tool of stupid-ity and crime.67

In this formulation, de Staël shows how in the law of the Prairialthe very forms of reason and of law had been used to further an essen-tially irrational and illegal end. And it is true that its general purpose wasto cut a path through the mechanistic system of Enlightenment ration-ality in order to expedite the execution of revolutionary justice.Nevertheless, what has tended to be neglected in this context, is that oneof the subsidiary aims of the Prairial law, ironically enough, was to tryand put a stop to the bloodthirsty terrorism of rabid Montagnards likeCarrier and Tallien, who had been arbitrarily condemning thousands tothe scaffold in the north-western and southern provinces of Franceduring – in their role as réprésentants en mission to the Committee ofPublic Safety. And this was why Prairial sought to bring the administra-tion of revolutionary justice back under central control, stipulating thatin the future all suspects would have to come to Paris to be tried. Butmore than this, it could also be seen as an attempt to reinvigorate themoral dimension of the Terror because of its suggestion that the funda-mental question when trying suspects was always to be whether theywere good republicans at heart, and not whether they had alwaysbehaved impeccably. One should not over-emphasise this element, ofcourse; fundamentally, the law was designed to make it easier to sentenceand execute suspected traitors. But behind it all there did lie an attemptto purify the Terror by calling a halt to the petty and vindictive purgeswhich had been taking place all over France, and bringing the nation’smind back to the central question of political ‘enthusiasm’. In that senseit constituted a Terror within the Terror, in that one of its prime objectswas to halt the excesses of the Terrorists themselves.


The French cultural historian Marie-Hélène Huet effectivelyendorses this point when she makes a radical distinction betweenRobespierre’s Terror and the popular cult of the guillotine that wascontemporaneous with it: ‘Robespierre denounced the false terrors andplayed a crucial role in putting an end to Carrier’s infamous drowningsin Nantes’, she writes, before going on to argue that ‘Robespierre’s nega-tive Terror’, was ‘precisely the reverse side of this monstrous theatrical-ity that would endow death with a parodic ceremonial in the last twomonths of the Revolution.’ In this way Huet hints that Robespierre’s leg-islative theory of the Terror was actually an attempt to transcend itsexecutive practice:

Robespierre tried to define the Revolution as sublime, as an ideal that wouldtranscend all representation and escape all misrepresentation, as a rhetoricalpurity that could only be expressed in a negative form.68

Of course, as is well known, the guillotine was an extremely recentinvention in , very much a piece of modern technology, primarilydesigned to make the punishment of criminals both more efficient andhumane. Indeed, as Daniel Arasse has shown, at bottom it was theproduct of an essentially rationalist project to maximise the speed andminimise the pain of death,69 and thus a prime example of thephilosophical utilitarianism of the French Enlightenment. But as wehave seen, unlike the guillotine, the policy of the Terror was not simplyor straightforwardly a product of the new social science, as the propa-gandists of the counter-revolution have often sought to maintain.Rather, it stood in an ambiguous relation to the mechanisms of moder-nity. It was a pursuit of ancient Reason through the instruments ofrationality, and hence a disastrous confusion, in de Stael’s terms, of ‘lamorale’ with ‘le calcul’.70

From the very beginning of the Revolution, Robespierre hademployed ‘progressive’ means to pursue an essentially ‘primitive’ ideal.Hence his attempt to conduct representative government in the spirit ofdirect democracy, and his desire to use legal procedures in order to tran-scend the law. And if we follow this line of argument, it does not takemuch to see, even at the heart of the Robespierrist Terror itself, aRomantic spirit of transcendence, a desperate attempt to employenlightened means in order to get beyond the ethical vacuity of theEnlightenment. Whereas other revolutionaries were prepared toembrace the utility of the Terror, its circumstantial necessity,Robespierre always sought to supply it with a metaphysical sanction,


constantly seeking to distract himself from its physical consequences byreferring to its overarching intention. His fantasy was that the Terror wasan entirely internal phenomenon which had entirely internal effects:transforming the hearts and minds of slaves and tyrants, but notaffecting their bodies. Ironically enough, however, he was to becomesynonymous with the guillotine through the very strenuousness of hisefforts to deny its very existence.

As the fortunes of the French armies changed, and the subsistence crisisimproved, a consensus began to grow in the National Convention duringthe spring and summer of that it was no longer necessary or desir-able for Terror to be the order of the day. This finally resulted in the pro-scription and execution of the men who had been its chief defenders onthe Committee of Public Safety: Robespierre, and his supporters andacolytes Couthon, Le Bas and Saint-Just. Of course, it would be pro-foundly misguided to try and absolve the Robespierrists of theirresponsibility for this bloody phase of French history; but at the sametime, it is also important to remember the political motives behind theThermidorean conspiracy which brought about their downfall. When itbegan to dawn upon some of Robespierre’s most bloodthirsty colleagueson the Committee of Public Safety that they might soon be called to taskfor their role in the Terror, either by Robespierre himself, whom they sus-pected of aspiring to a position of dictatorship, or else by the membersof the National Convention, who were reported to be growing tired ofthe endless butchery, they began to depict L’Incorruptible as a despot anda tyrant in order to distance themselves from political blame. To allintents and purposes, men such as Collot d’Herbois, Billaud Varennes,Tallien and Barère had been as fervently committed to revolutionarygovernment as any during the terrible months of –, but becausethey had not shared Robespierre’s obsession to explain, to justify, to con-tinually moralise the Terror, it was relatively easy for them to begin to per-suade the conventionnels that he had been its sole contriver. Nevertheless,they were by no means political innocents. In the words of RobertSouthey, who was to retain a curious fondness for Robespierre, even longafter he had reneged and become a Tory: ‘The Fall of Robespierre wasthe triumph of fear rather than of justice, and the satisfaction with whichit must be contemplated is incomplete because a few monsters even worsethan himself were among the foremost in sending him to the scaffold.’71


That Robespierre himself was mindful of this can be seen from aspeech he gave on Thermidor, Year ( July ), the day beforeTallien’s coup was finally hatched against him, in which he protested tothe National Convention that he was being transformed into a kind ofscapegoat for the Terror. Increasingly he was being treated as if he hadsingle-handedly managed every aspect of its existence, drafting everyindictment, and supervising every execution: ‘There is perhaps not oneindividual arrested, not one citizen persecuted to whom it has not beensaid of me: He is the author of your ills; you would be happy and free, if he existedno more. How can I imagine or relate all of the lies that have been secretlyinsinuated in the National Convention and elsewhere to render mefearful and contemptible?’72 And so, despite all the evidence to the con-trary, he continued to protest his political innocence in the monthsleading up to his downfall, as if he could still detach his ‘primitive’ idealfrom the ‘progressive’ methods by which he had sought to bring it about.Desperately, he sought to reassert the transparent understandingbetween himself and the people which had been the bedrock of hispolitical authority:Who is the tyrant protecting me? Which is the faction to which I belong? It isyou. Which is the faction that has since the beginning of the Revolution over-whelmed all factions and banished all proven traitors? It is you, it is the people,it is principles. That is the faction to which I am devoted, and against whom allcrimes are leagued.73

But as the logic of exclusion fell upon him, he resisted becoming justanother suspect, preferring to exchange the guise of the legislator for thatof the solitary. So that as his political martyrdom approached, he con-tinued to offer himself as a transparent reflection of the will of thepeople, while drawing fervently upon an identifiably Rousseauvianrhetoric of isolation and resignation. As we have seen, in the first‘Promenade’ of his Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Rousseau had protestedagainst the universal conspiracy that had been organised against him,primarily by his former friends the philosophes, but subsequently by therest of the world: ‘So now I am alone in the world,’ he wrote, ‘with nobrother, neighbour or friend, and no company left me but my own. Themost sociable and loving of men has been unanimously proscribed byall the rest.’74 And similarly, in the last weeks of his life, Robespierre wasto represent himself as a thwarted philanthropist whose very virtue hadmade him an object of scorn. ‘Who am I that they accuse?’ he declaredon the day before his death:


A slave of liberty, a living martyr of the republic, the victim as much as theenemy of crime. Scoundrels abuse me; the most indifferent, the most legitimateactions on the part of others, are crimes for me. A man is accused if he evencomes into contact with me. Others are pardoned for their faults, my zeal isturned into a crime. Take my conscience away from me, and I would be themost unhappy of men.75

In Rousseau’s political theory it was suggested that liberty and equal-ity would finally be attained if the individual identified with the generalwill. In his autobiographical writings, however, this polarity wasreversed: both the Confessions and the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire set upthe possibility that the people might rediscover their capacity to assem-ble as a unified general will by identifying with the incorruptible con-science of a virtuous individual. And it was in emulation of this practicethat in his final speech Robespierre offered himself as the utopian prin-ciple within a corrupt state:

For myself, whose life seems to the enemies of my country an obstacle to theirodious plans, I freely consent to sacrifice it, if their awful empire must continueto exist. Who could desire to witness any longer this horrible succession of trai-tors more or less deft at hiding their hideous hearts underneath a mask of virtueuntil the moment when their crimes reached fruition, leaving posterity theembarrassment of deciding which of the enemies of my country was the mostcowardly and the most atrocious?76

According to Jacobin ideology, the guillotine restored the unanimityof the general will by removing the will of the recalcitrant individual,reasserting republican transparency by clearing away the aristocraticobstacle. Here, however, the polarity of the opposition between the indi-vidual and the general has been suddenly reversed. The ‘Incorruptible’depicts himself as the only obstacle to the ‘animosité générale’ of thecounter-revolution, offering to sacrifice himself in order that its uni-versal progress might resume. Thus in Robespierre’s final speechesegotism becomes the paradoxical expression of a disappointedJacobinism. Paradoxical, moreover, in both senses of the word, for it isrevolutionary in its wilful resistance to the prevailing orthodoxy, but it isalso fundamentally contradictory in its misanthropic expression of avanishing civic ideal.

As he had predicted, Robespierre became the prime site for the dis-placement of revolutionary guilt and disappointment in the years afterThermidor. Thus especially in the liberal histories of the period, he wasregularly depicted as a tyrannical figure who had wrecked theRevolution through his hypocritical and bloodthirsty pursuit of an


impractical model of virtue. Gradually, however, he was taken up bycounter-revolutionary historians too, and though they were understand-ably far less interested in putting the sole blame for the Revolution uponhim, they did nevertheless enjoy transforming him into a kind of politi-cal Tartuffe, beneath whose virtuous appearance the darkest ambitionshad lain concealed. And it was this that encouraged historians likeWalter Scott to dwell with fascination upon the ‘fiendish expression’ ofhis death-mask, as if it was only in death that his political disguise hadbeen fully exposed. And indeed, it was precisely because of details likethis that he became the historical source behind many of the maskedand cowled hypocrites that were later to litter the poetry and fiction ofthe period, from Ann Radcliffe’s evil monk Schedoni to ThomasMoore’s Veiled Prophet of Khorassan.77 But aside from his status as oneof the literary daemons of Romantic writing, however, there was another,less obvious side to Robespierre’s revolutionary legacy, which had aconsiderable influence upon the literary practice of the EnglishRomantics: he provided a powerful paradigm of the politics of confes-sion. For in his final speeches, he effectively went beyond Rousseau’scultivation of autobiography as a consolation for private disappoint-ment, transforming his rhetoric of self-martyrdom into a form of politi-cal discourse, and by this means he gave a dramatic demonstration to hiscontemporaries of how confession might offer, at one and the same time,a means of transcending the débâcle of revolutionary history, and alsoa method of incubating its utopian ideal.


Chivalry, justice and the law in William Godwin’sCaleb Williams

The mind is its own place; and is endowed with powers that mightenable it to laugh at the tyrant’s vigilance. I passed and repassedthese ideas in my mind; and, heated with the contemplation, I said,No I will not die!1

Unjustly incarcerated on a charge contrived by his former masterFerdinando Falkland, the eponymous hero of William Godwin’s ThingsAs They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams () discovers in his prisoncell a revolutionary spirit of resistance. Like Rousseau on the road to theprison of Vincennes, suddenly overcome with an overpowering sense ofthe depravity of modern society, Caleb responds to the spectacle ofdespotism by undergoing a powerful revolution of mind; in a momentthe last trappings of feudal deference have fallen from him, and he hasresolved to defy the law and attempt his escape. In this way the doubletitle of Godwin’s novel advertised its double nature: it was at once abiting critique of the English social order and a suspenseful gothic novel.Thirty years after the first appearance of Godwin’s first novel the repub-lican journalist William Hazlitt could still remember its impact: ‘We con-ceive no one ever began Caleb Williams that did not read it through: noone who read it could possibly forget it, or speak of it after any length oftime but with an impression as if the events and feelings had been per-sonal to himself.’ Indeed Hazlitt felt certain that it deserved to occupy acentral place in the national literature: ‘The novel is utterly unlike any-thing else that was ever written’, he wrote, ‘and is one of the most origi-nal as well as powerful productions in the English language.’2

Undoubtedly he was especially fond of Caleb Williams on account of itsradical politics, for the novel contains an extended critique of EdmundBurke’s defence of the principle of aristocracy in the Reflections on the

Revolution in France (). And certainly, on a first reading, its primaryforce lies precisely in its exposure of the ‘poison of chivalry’ that Godwinhad detected in Burke’s writing. But it was also far from complacent inits radicalism. It did more than merely catalogue the crimes of aristoc-racy, it also problematised many of the fundamental radical assumptionsof the period, especially in its questioning of the value of legislativereform. And as I shall argue, in many ways it is precisely the paradoxi-cal nature of this novel – its resistance not only to the ancient fiction ofchivalry but also to the modern fiction of law – which identifies it as atruly ‘Jacobin’ text.

The first part of Caleb Williams, which is narrated to Caleb by his fellowservant the old retainer Mr Collins, deals with the youth of their masterFerdinando Falkland. Collins tells of the way in which Falkland grew updazzled by the ideology of chivalry, by the notion of aristocracy as therule of the best. This leads him to place upon himself strict standards ofcourtesy and conduct, but also to guard his own honour and reputationwith paranoid fervour. A little way into the story, Godwin introduces usto another type of ruler, Barnabas Tyrrel, an arrogant and tyrannicalcountry squire, who ruins a tenant on his estate, Hawkins, for resistinghis wishes, and drives to the grave his niece Miss Melville for refusing tomarry a man of his selection. In the course of these events Tyrrel comesinto conflict with the chivalrous and cultivated Falkland who resists hispetty tyranny by offering a model of benevolent patriarchy. After fre-quently colliding with Falkland on a number of issues, Tyrrel attacks anddisgraces him in public, only to be found dead soon after. Initially, sus-picion falls on Falkland, but it is gradually diverted to Hawkins and hisson, who are, in the end, tried and executed for Tyrrel’s murder.

Caleb Williams, the self-educated son of humble parents, enters thenarrative when he is appointed as Falkland’s secretary some time afterthese events have taken place. By indulging his natural curiosity con-cerning his master’s increasingly eccentric and troubled behaviour, andby piecing together various items of anecdotal and written evidence,Caleb becomes convinced that it was in fact Falkland who had murderedTyrrel. Obsessively driven to uncover the truth, Caleb remains at alltimes fully imbued with a sense of Falkland’s fundamental benevolenceand virtue even after having discovered his secret, and shows no inclina-tion to publicise his knowledge. Nevertheless, when Falkland becomes

Chivalry, justice and the law in Caleb Williams

aware that Williams has plucked out the heart of his mystery, he beginsto persecute him systematically, despite Williams’s protestations ofloyalty and confidence. Eventually Caleb is imprisoned on a false chargeof robbing his employer. He escapes, hiding out in a forest with a bandof anarchist outlaws, before moving to London in order to try and carveout a living for himself, disguised as a Jew. Finally, however, he is trackeddown by Falkland’s agent Gines and brought to the bar. At his trialCaleb is forced to lay a charge of murder against Falkland, and althoughhe has no proof to offer, his generosity and sincerity win from the mur-derer a confession of his guilt. Godwin’s first draft of the ending hadbeen very different; it involved Falkland maintaining his innocence andWilliams being driven to insanity. The revised ending is if anythingmore tragic. His golden reputation ruined, Falkland dies in despairbefore he can be taken to trial, and Caleb is left with the feeling that hehas acted in a manner as bad if not worse than his master: ‘I have beena murderer’, he concludes, ‘a cool, deliberate, unfeeling murderer’ (,).

Throughout the novel, Falkland adheres to a particularly patricianbrand of civic humanism, a cult of neo-classical virtue reminiscent ofthe writings of the late seventeenth-century moralist the Earl ofShaftesbury. For Falkland only a landed gentleman possesses the meansand education necessary to the attainment of moral independence. Inthis respect he is both the embodiment of civilisation and the agent ofits preservation. For him the cultivation of his aristocratic character isfar more important than the reputation of commoners such as theHawkinses or Caleb Williams. He makes this position clear in aconversation that he has with Caleb on Alexander the Great in the firstchapter of volume two. Caleb suggests that one cannot think ofAlexander as a hero, as he was personally responsible for the deaths ofso many men. Immediately Falkland offers an energetic retort:

The death of a hundred thousand men is at first sight very shocking; but whatin reality are a hundred thousand such men more than a hundred thousandsheep? It is mind, Williams, the generation of knowledge and virtue that weought to love. This was the project of Alexander; he set out in a great under-taking to civilise mankind; he delivered the vast continent of Asia from thestupidity and degradation of the Persian monarchy; and though he was cut offin the midst of his career, we may easily perceive the vast effects of his project.(, )

This was the kind of double standard that Tom Paine had sought toexpose in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. In a cele-


brated passage of this book Burke had interpreted the storming ofVersailles as the beginning of a new age of barbarism. Recollecting thebeauty and grace of Marie-Antoinette when he had seen her in hisyouth, he registered his horror at her rough treatment by the Paris mob:

But the age of chivalry is gone. – That of sophisters, economists and calcula-tors has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never,never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proudsubmission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, whichkept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.3

For Burke ‘chivalry’ signified both a spirit of deference towardsancient institutions and hierarchies and a commitment to one’s ownhonour and self-respect. With the rise of commercial society, and itsculture of competitive individualism, he felt that these values were indanger of being forgotten. In order to preserve the benefits of credit andcommerce, it was necessary that there should always be a principle ofsocial stability to counter-balance the frenzied fluctuations of themarket. He considered that if the landed aristocracy was permitted tocontinue its traditional paternal role, the various classes and ranks ofsociety might continue to be connected by a series of organic affiliationsand not merely by the cold links of the cash-nexus. In order for this tohappen, however, it was crucial that the British public be warned awayfrom the dangerous ‘levelling’ tendencies of the French Revolution.4 InPart I of The Rights of Man () the radical pamphleteer Tom Paineendeavoured to show how Burke had concentrated on the short-livedapprehension of a member of the royal family and neglected the eco-nomic distress suffered by large numbers of the French people. A centralelement of Paine’s counter-argument was that aristocratic societiesattached far too much importance to titles, badges and positions, andthat not enough emphasis was placed upon intrinsic qualities of mindand spirit. ‘Mr, Burke should recollect that he is writing History and notPlays’, he wrote of the Reflections, adding that ‘he pities the plumage butforgets the dying bird’.5 In this way Paine argued that Burke’s sophistrieswere far too absurd to be really persuasive, suggesting that it was reallyrather a simple matter to shake off the shackles of deference and to seethe iniquities of aristocracy for what they really were.6

As we shall see, in Caleb Williams Godwin took Burke rather more seri-ously, acknowledging the stubbornness of servility while seeking toexplore the reasons for it.7 After confessing to Caleb that he was respon-sible for Tyrrel’s murder, Falkland becomes increasingly anxious that


his secret will be revealed. So he contrives to accuse Caleb of theft,planting some trinkets in the latter’s trunk to serve as damning evidence.At the private trial, Godwin shows how appearances work against thepoor. Not only the Justice of the Peace but also the people in the audi-ence are far more willing to side with Falkland. His affluence and educa-tion is seen as a guarantee of his disinterested virtue, his socialpre-eminence the visible sign of his moral superiority. However, theaudience is willing to attribute the meanest of motives to Caleb, for inits eyes he is too poor and obscure to possess any ‘character’ at all.8

Realising that he is unable to prove his innocence, Caleb appeals, asJean-Jacques had done before him, to his master’s conscience:

One thing more I must aver; Mr Falkland is not deceived: he perfectly knowsthat I am innocent. I had no sooner uttered these words than an involuntary cryof indignation burst from every person in the room. (, )

The slightest suggestion that there is a gap between Falkland’s publicpersona and his private feelings is seen as the most unnatural insub-ordination and treachery. This point is made even more dramatically alittle later in the novel when Caleb, fleeing from the authorities, encoun-ters by chance his old friend Mr Collins, whom he tries to convince ofhis innocence:

‘Will you hear my justification? I am as sure as I am of my existence that Ican convince you of my purity’.

‘Certainly, if you wish it, I will hear you. But that must not be just now. I couldhave been glad to decline it wholly. At my age I am not fit for the storm, and Iam not so sanguine as you in my expectation of the result. Of what would youconvince me? That Mr Falkland is a suborner and a murderer?’

I made no answer. My silence was an affirmative to the question.‘And what benefit will result from this conviction? I have known you a promis-

ing boy, whose character might turn to one side or the other as events shoulddecide. I have known Mr Falkland in his maturer years, and have alwaysadmired him as the living model of liberality and goodness. If you could changeall my ideas, and show me that there was no criterion by which vice might beprevented from being mistaken for virtue, what benefit would arise from that?I must part with all my interior consolation, and all my external connections.And for what? What is it you propose? The death of Mr. Falkland by the handsof the hangman?’

‘No. I will not hurt a hair of his head, unless compelled to it by a principle ofdefence. But surely you owe me justice?’

‘What justice? The justice of proclaiming your innocence? You know whatconsequences are annexed to that. But I do not believe I shall find you inno-cent.’ (, )


In a notorious section of the Reflections Burke had given a reasoneddefence of prejudice. Rather than resisting the pre-rational preferencesthat one has for one’s national institutions and customs, he argued, oneshould allow oneself to be guided by them, for it was safer for the indi-vidual to put his trust in the wisdom of his ancestors than to consult hisown ‘private stock of reason’, which was necessarily rather meagre incomparision. In this way ‘prejudice’ fulfilled an important political func-tion for Burke: it was the means by which a nation bound its subjectstogether and maintained its moral character.9 Mr Collins representsBurkean prejudice at its most stubborn. His moral sentiments cling soclosely to the crevices and contours of the existing social order that hecannot separate them from an adherence to its orthodoxies withoutlosing his ethical grip. He feels that if he were to discover that MrFalkland is not a virtuous man, he would lose a sense of what virtuemeans, for Falkland is its physical embodiment. Hence he would rathercarry on living in the world of pleasing illusions, with his prejudicesintact, than unveil a truth that would disturb and subvert them. For theseprejudices, he suggests, are what enable him to function and make moraldecisions.

Burke’s defence of prejudice attracted a great deal of scorn from radi-cals such as Paine, James Mackintosh and Mary Wollstonecraft, who con-sidered it a scandalous defence of servility.10 In Caleb Williams Godwinshowed the stubbornness and persistence of prejudice even as hedeplored its survival, for in the context of the novel, Mr Collins’s line ofargument is by no means absurd. Clearly, he recognises that if Caleb isright, and one of the most respected embodiments of aristocratic virtueis a fraud, then the question of whether it was proper for men such asFalkland to be justices of the peace would have to be addressed, whichwould problematise the exercise of provincial justice throughoutEngland. And that is why he wants Caleb to realise that there is no suchthing as justice without consequences. In the case of Mr Falkland, heseems to say, the consequences of his arrest are so fearful that it is safer todrop the charge. But if Caleb does not finally denounce his master, it is fora rather different reason than the one hinted at by Collins. For crucially,Caleb’s silence signifies, above all things, a refusal to put on the mantle ofthe judge, showing that his main aim is not the punishment of his per-secutor, or a reform of the legal system, but the attainment of an entirelyanti-institutional condition of justice. And as we shall see, this attitude tocrime and punishment is remarkably similar to that which had beenexpressed by Godwin himself in his treatise on Political Justice of .


In the chapter entitled ‘Of law’ in Book of the first edition of PoliticalJustice Godwin attacked the discourse of custom that had provided thebasis of English law for centuries. Judicial decisions should not be madeaccording to precedent, he argued, for there is nothing to suggest thatour ancestors were any wiser or more virtuous than ourselves:

Law we sometimes call the wisdom of our ancestors. But this is a strange imposi-tion. It was as frequently the dictate of their passion, of timidity, jealousy, amonopolising spirit, and a lust of power that knew no bounds. Are we notobliged perpetually to revise and remodel this misnamed wisdom of our ances-tors? to correct it by a detection of their ignorance and a condemnation of theirintolerance?11

From the electoral system to the game laws, the British legal systemwas designed to serve the ruling class, according to Godwin. It privilegedthe rich at the expense of the poor. To this extent, he was in full agree-ment with the mainstream radical position that was outlined in the twoparts of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man. However, Godwin soon went beyondPaine’s brief:

There is no maxim more clear than this, Every case is a rule to itself. No actionof any man was ever the same as any other action, had ever the same degree ofutility or injury. It should seem to be the business of justice, to distinguish thequalities of men, and not, which has hitherto been the practice, to confoundthem. (, )

During the latter half of the eighteenth century there was a growingmovement in favour of reforming the theory and practice of the law. Anumber of writers began to suggest ways of rendering the legal systemat once more coherent and more humane, eradicating its injustices andironing out its anomalies. The Italian reformer Cesare Beccaria madeone of the most significant contributions to this movement. His treatiseOf Crimes and Punishments, which was translated into English in ,sought to transform the way in which legislators thought about theirlaws. He argued that punishments were effective only when they werefitted to the misdemeanours they were intended to prevent. Measuresshould be chosen ‘in due proportion to the crime, so as to make the mostefficacious and most lasting impression on the minds of men, and theleast painful impressions on the body of the criminal’.12 He also sug-gested that ‘the disadvantage of the punishment should exceed theadvantage anticipated from the crime’. No longer would petty theft bepunishable by death, but it would always be disciplined and always in


exactly the same way, for uniform application was more of a deterrentthan arbitrary severity. And in the fourth volume of his Commentaries theinfluential English legal theorist William Blackstone came to endorseBeccaria’s view, declaring that ‘crimes are more effectively prevented bythe certainty than by the severity of punishment’, before going on toacknowledge the latter’s general insight that ‘it is absurd and impoliticto apply the same punishment to crimes of different malignity’.13

The principle of utility was central to Beccaria’s approach. LikeHelvétius and Bentham, he was convinced that the regulation of socialbehaviour was more a matter of calculating consequences than of divin-ing intentions.14 When determining punishment, only the effects ofcrime were relevant, not the motivation of the criminal. Godwin agreedwith Beccaria that many of the existing laws of Europe were tyrannicaland that it was rational and humane to seek to reform them. But he alsothought that there were problems with Beccaria’s approach, consideringthat although a system of punishment based on a calculation of conse-quences would undoubtedly help prevent the punishment of minorcrimes with excessive severity, it would also tend to confound criminalswho were possessed of widely divergent intentions. Hence Godwinasked his readers whether a system that levelled these inequalities andconfounded these difficulties could ever be ‘productive of good’. Surely,he reasoned, it was important to take into account motives as well as con-sequences:

Shall we inflict on the man who, in endeavouring to save the life of a drowningfellow creature, oversets a boat, and occasions the death of a second, the samesuffering, as on him who from gloomy and vicious habits is incited to the murderof his benefactor? In reality the injury sustained by the community is, by nomeans, the same in these two cases . . . (, )

Thus, in the course of Political Justice Godwin was to quarrel withliberal reformers as well as with reactionaries. After exposing the extentto which the legal system was complicit with the interests of the rulingorder, he went on to denigrate the capacity of abstract laws to attend toindividual circumstances. For him, legislation was a clumsy andinappropriate method of regulating human actions; it was, in effect, anexternal alienation of the internal principle of justice. So much so, infact, that he repeatedly insisted that laws had no real authority over indi-viduals, since government was nothing more than ‘regulated force’ (,–). And by the same token he also declared his opposition towritten constitutions, arguing that ‘the true state of man, as has already


been demonstrated, is, not to have his opinions bound down in thefetters of an eternal quietism, but flexible and unrestrained to yield withfacility to the impressions of increasing truth’ (, ). And so, in spiteof his general support of the Revolutionary cause he, like Robespierre,was ultimately rather unimpressed by the system of ‘negative’ libertiespromised by the Declaration of the Rights of Man. For in his analysis, posi-tive institution did not lead the way to justice, it simply dictated the chan-nels in which bourgeois self-interest was to be allowed to flow. And finallyhe considered that the exercise of private judgment was a far more reli-able means of furthering social justice and general utility:

Men are weak at present, because they have always been told they are weak, andmust not be trusted with themselves . . . Tell them that the mountains of parch-ment in which they have been hitherto entrenched, are fit only to impose uponages of superstition and ignorance; that henceforth we will have no dependencebut upon their spontaneous justice; that, if their passions be gigantic, they mustrise with gigantic energy to subdue them; that, if their decrees be iniquitous, theiniquity shall be all their own. The effect of this disposition of things will soonbe visible; mind will rise to the level of the situation; juries and umpires will bepenetrated with the magnitude of the trust reposed in them. (, )

In the work of the French physiocrats rational critical debate wasdesigned to facilitate the formation of a truly ‘public’ authority.15 InGodwin, however, the bourgeois public sphere in the private realm wasto be expanded to its furthest extent. It did not merely anticipate publicauthority, it effectively replaced it. In his anarchist vision the state was todissolve entirely, leaving the realm of civil society to become a vast andunregulated forum for public discussion. Under such conditions,Godwin believed that the universal exercise of private judgment wouldeventually produce a rational consensus. If each was allowed to pursuethe line of his or her own reasoning, all would eventually agree.

A more thoroughly systematic thinker than Tom Paine, JosephPriestley or James Mackintosh, Godwin was the most imposing intellec-tual figure among the English Jacobins, deeply versed in the philosophi-cal writings of the French Enlightenment as well as his native traditionof radical dissent. Truly cosmopolitan in his approach, Godwin broughtidentifiably French categories and concerns to his discussion of Englishpolitics. And this was not lost on the conservative press, which attackedhim as a disciple of Rousseau and Helvétius, the twin fathers of FrenchJacobinism.16 But despite his indebtedness to the French Enlightenment,Godwin was to distance himself in Political Justice from the ideology oflegislation that had been developed by Helvétius and his followers.


As we saw in the last chapter, Claude Helvétius had considered that agood system of laws, by carefully regulating the life of the subject, bytactfully shaping his tastes and pleasures, was the best means by whichprivate interest was to be aligned with public benefit. And this approachhad found English expression in Jeremy Bentham’s Introduction to thePrinciples of Morals and Legislation of . ‘Nature has placed mankindunder the governance of two sovereign masters’, Bentham wrote,

pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as wellas to determine what we shall do . . . The principle of utility recognises this sub-jection, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reasonand law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense,in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.’17

With the right institutions a citizen could be conditioned into fur-thering the general good simply by following his own inclinations. For asLeslie Stephen was later to remark: ‘The indefinite modificability ofcharacter was the ground upon which the utilitarians placed their hopesof progress.’18 Godwin shared the utilitarian belief in the human capac-ity for self-improvement, but he did not believe that it could be broughtabout through positive institution. It was not necessary for legislation toharmonise the warring interests of society, because ultimately everyindividual’s interest was identical with that of his fellows, if he could onlybe persuaded to discover it.

Most recent commentators have considered that the central core ofGodwin’s moral and political philosophy is utilitarian in nature. DonLocke has argued that in Political Justice ‘Godwin reveals himself merelyas a classical utilitarian, at one with Bentham and with Mill in consider-ing an action by its consequences, in identifying goodness with happi-ness, and happiness with pleasure.’19 Similarly, Peter Marshall writes that‘[Godwin’s] departures from utilitarianism are more apparent than real. . . whatever he borrows from different and incompatible traditions, heconsistently tried to base his principles on the utilitarian ethic.’20 J. P.Clark even goes so far as to suggest that Political Justice became more con-sistently utilitarian with each revision that Godwin made.21

In many ways, I would suggest, this line of argument can lead to aserious misunderstanding of the historical and political character ofGodwin’s thought. For despite his fondness for the discourse of utility,Godwin employed it in an entirely different spirit from Bentham andHelvétius. He stretched it out of recognition, and transformed it intosomething entirely new. And this is exemplified by the critique of the


division of labour that was contained in Book of Political Justice. Aleading tenet of utility theory was that the division and delegation ofwork contributed to the greatest happiness of the greatest number bymaximising the production of goods and services. In Godwin’s mind,however, it was actually highly pernicious, since the moral cost ofcollaboration was always greater than its supposed material benefits.According to this view of things, co-operation compromised anddegraded the workings of individual reason by undermining the princi-ple of intellectual independence. Through this manoeuvre, bourgeoispolitical economy was subjected to criticism by the very discourse ofutility that it had helped to produce.22

The possibility of effecting a compendium of labour by this means will begreatly diminished, when men shall learn to deny themselves superfluities. Theutility of such a saving of labour, where labour is so little, will scarcely balanceagainst the evils of so extensive a cooperation. (, )

Perhaps even more controversial was Godwin’s assertion that evenprivate property was not in the general interest, since it was not anefficient use of resources. The discourse of rights had attempted tonaturalise the doctrine of self-interest, he argued, but it could not dis-guise the fact that no man was justified in hoarding or garnering any-thing that could be more usefully placed in the hands of others. ‘Fewthings have contributed more to undermine the energy and virtue of thehuman species’ he declared in the edition of Political Justice, ‘thanthe supposition that we have a right, as it has been phrased, to do whatwe will with our own.’23 According to the law of reason, redistributionwas a duty, and absolute equality of condition a desirable and attainableend:

I have no right to dispose of [property] at my caprice; every shilling of it isappropriated by the laws of morality . . . (, )

True liberty and equality, in Godwin’s analysis, was not to be achievedby a programme of laissez-faire legislation facilitating the greatercirculation of goods and commodities, but by a redistribution of prop-erty and a dissolution of government. He imagined a state in which menwould be able to recapture the autonomy and transparency ofRousseau’s primitive society, while continuing to enjoy the benefits ofphilosophical and material progress.24

In his impressive study of Political Justice Mark Philp has argued thatrecent commentators have placed too much emphasis upon its debt tothe philosophes. Philp admits that the initial project of the treatise was


inspired by the readings of Helvétius, Holbach and Rousseau thatGodwin had made in the s, suggesting that one can see theinfluence of French rationalism especially in its opening books. But hethen goes on to argue that Godwin came to question many aspects ofContinental thought during the course of composition, and thatincreasingly he found himself returning to his roots in rational dissent.Throughout his discussion Philp finds it unproblematic to considerRousseau a philosophe, grouping him together with Helvétius andHolbach as disciples of utilitarianism.25 He neglects the extent to whicha text such as the ‘Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar’ offered amoral philosophy which was far more compatible with radical Englishprotestantism than with the hedonistic materialism of the Frenchtradition. Developing this line of reasoning, I would like to argue thatGodwin’s Political Justice owes more to the metaphysic of morals thatwas developed in Emile than most commentators have been prepared toacknowledge.

Godwin had agreed with Helvétius that the life of the individual wasfully determined by his external circumstances, but he also insisted upongiving the utilitarian tradition a new inflection in the distinction he drewbetween the man who was merely a victim of circumstantial necessity,and the man who firmly embraced it. While the non-rational subject wasinvoluntarily caught up in an endless cycle of causes and effects, therational one pursued the course that contributed most to the generalwelfare by balancing the social benefits of an action against its dis-advantages. But Godwinian reason was always more of an internal voicethan an external computation of consequences: ‘We have in realitynothing that is strictly speaking our own’, he wrote in a chapter attack-ing the notion of individual rights, ‘we have nothing that has not adestination prescribed to it by the immutable voice of reason and justice,and respecting which, if we supersede that destination, we do not entailupon ourselves a certain portion of guilt.’ As we saw in the passage onthe law quoted earlier, Godwinian reason aspired to be ‘penetrated’ by‘spontaneous justice’. Despite its professed commitment to the felicificcalculus, it possessed a metaphysical rather than a mathematical soul. Inthis respect it displayed its kinship with the faculty of ‘conscience’ thathad been recommended in Emile:

The less the object of our cares is our own selves, the less we have to fear fromthe illusion of our particular interest, the more one generalises that interest, themore it becomes equitable; and the love of the human race in us is nothing otherthan the love of justice.26


At one point in Political Justice Godwin referred to Rousseau as ‘one ofthe principal reservoirs of philosophical truth as yet existing in theworld’, full of ‘eloquence’ even if his work was characterised by ‘a per-petual mixture of absurdity and mistake’:

Having frequently quoted Rousseau in the course of this work, it may be allow-able to say one word of his general merits as a moral and political writer. Hehas been subjected to continual ridicule for the extravagance of the propositionwith which he began his literary career; that the savage state was the genuineand proper condition of man. It was however by a very slight mistake that hemissed the opposite opinion which it is the business of the present inquiry toestablish. He only substituted, as the topic of his eulogium, the period that pre-ceded government and laws, instead of the period that may possibly followupon their abolition27 . . . He was the first to teach that the imperfections ofgovernment were the only perennial source of the vices of mankind; and thisprinciple was adopted from him by Helvétius and others. But he saw fartherthan this, that government, however formed, was little capable of affordingsolid benefit to mankind, which they did not. (, ; , )

Given his radical individualism, Godwin was bound to be unim-pressed by the collectivist theory of legislation developed in the ContratSocial.28 But despite the evidence of his neo-Spartan political theory,Godwin considered that fundamentally Rousseau had been an anarchistlike himself. Indeed his vision of the perfect free and equal society of thefuture in the latter part of Political Justice owes a lot to the description ofprimitive society contained in the second Discours:If superfluity were banished, the necessity for the greater part of the manualindustry of mankind would be superseded; and the rest, being amicably sharedamong the active and vigorous members of the community, would be burthen-some to none. Every man would have a frugal yet wholesome diet; every manwould go forth to that moderate exercise of his corporal functions that wouldgive hilarity to the spirits; none would be made torpid with fatigue, but all wouldhave leisure to cultivate the kindly and philanthropical affections of the soul,and to let loose his faculties in search of intellectual improvement. (, –)

Theoretically Godwin’s proposals could not have been more libertar-ian and egalitarian, for his proposals for redistribution were more con-crete and systematic than anything in the Contrat Social or the twoDiscours. Practically, however, in defining and determining his utopianend so rigorously, he effectively took away the means. For if Rousseauand Robespierre’s class bias lay in their frequent evasions of the prop-erty question, Godwin’s lay in his refusal – which became ever moreabsolute in subsequent editions of Political Justice – to sanction any formof political collaboration or association:


Instead of making each man an individual, which the interest of the wholerequires, [party] resolves all understandings into one common mass, and sub-tracts from each the varieties that could alone distinguish him from a brutemachine. (, )

The central problem with Political Justice for many of the radicals ofthe s, was that, although it had very successfully woven a blissfulvision of the future, it had actually given very little practical advice as tohow it was to be brought into being, other than recommending patientdiscussion and the universal exercise of private judgement. And giventhe inescapably turbid and theatrical nature of politics during the mid-s, it was not difficult to argue that Godwin’s rather excessivelypatient and philosophical approach was deeply out of tune with thetimes. So much so, indeed, that the English radical speaker andpamphleteer, John Thelwall, who had been a fervent Godwinian in theearly days of Political Justice, gradually came to realise that a completeacceptance of Godwin’s strictures on co-operation would effectivelydestroy the popular radical movement in England. And since he believedthat numbers were necessary to lend power and urgency to populardemands, and that it was only through collective action that the existingorder would be transformed, he increasingly moved away fromphilosophical anarchism, having become convinced that withoutcombination or mass demonstration, the fulfilment of radical aspira-tions would become subject to an indefinite deferral.29

So it was, then, that in the climate of political reaction that character-ised Britain in the later s Political Justice was often considered by radi-cals and conservatives alike as a work of cold abstraction, a perniciousproduct of the systematising impulse of the French Enlightenment. Andlater critics have taken their cue from this, depicting Godwin’s laterworks as a recognition of the insufficiency of abstract reason and abelated acknowledgement of the power of moral sentiments. This is not,however, an accurate assessment of his work. It is true that Godwin’srevisions of Political Justice toned down some of the more stridentlyrationalist formulations from the first edition, but they did not representa fundamental shift in approach. As we have seen, Godwinian reasonwas always the product of an ‘enthusiasm’ for justice. Even in itconstituted itself through a channelling of the passions rather than arepudiation of them. Despite this, however, the image of Godwin as anarch-rationalist continues to pervade discussions of his work. On anumber of occasions, literary historians have been tempted to regardCaleb Williams as an inadvertent critique of the moral philosophy of


Political Justice simply on account of its exploration of the stubbornnessand pervasiveness of the irrational. Adopting a different approach, Iwould like to look at the way in which the novel successfully developedthe central theme of the treatise, expanding upon its general critique ofpositive institutions by exploring the effect of legal prejudice upon a par-ticular set of circumstances.30

At the private trial in the middle of Godwin’s novel, Caleb remains silentabout Tyrrel’s murder, unwilling to accuse Falkland in the context of thecourtroom. He does not want Falkland to be punished, but for his deedto be known and understood, and for his blameworthy but explicableaction to be judged on its own terms, and not according to the generaland unthinking precedents of law. His concern would be to allow theunique nature of the case to be considered sympathetically by eachmember of the jury. In this sense, all the signs are that Caleb is a goodGodwinian by instinct.

Unwilling to accuse his accuser, Caleb can only persist in protestingthat his master knows him to be blameless, to which the presiding justiceof the peace, Mr Forester responds by requesting that he defend himselfwithout appealing to Falkland. Forester sees the issue simply in terms ofthe relation of the individual to the law, a relationship which is to beascertained by the sifting of empirical evidence. What he fails to under-stand, however, is that this legalistic approach, besides operating in fatalcollusion with an unjust social order, fails to comprehend the circum-stances of the case. By concentrating on the criminal charge, Forestereffectively binds Caleb in chains, for the trial is essentially a matter ofconscience between him and his master which transcends the machin-ery of the law.

As the trial proceeds, it is assumed by the jury that Caleb is guilty.When Falkland shows signs of wanting to be lenient, Forester insists thatWilliams’s prosecution is necessary to uphold the principle of deference:‘By this unexampled villainy he makes it your duty to free the world ofsuch a pest, and your interest to admit no relaxing in your pursuit of him,lest the world should be persuaded by your clemency to credit his vileinsinuations’ (, ). The law binds both the accuser and the accused,as it becomes clear to Falkland he must prosecute Caleb in order touphold his reputation. However, Falkland continues to resist a publictrial:


I care not for consequences, replied Mr Falkland, I will obey the dictates of myown mind. I will never lend my assistance to the reforming mankind by axesand gibbets; I am sure things will never go well, till honour and not law be thedictator of mankind, till vice is taught to shrink before the resistless might ofinborn dignity, and not before the cold formality of statutes. If my calumniatorwere worthy of my resentment I would chastise him with my own sword, andnot that of the magistrate; but in the present case I smile at his malice, as thegenerous lord of the forest spares the insect that would disturb his repose. (,)

Here Godwin problematises the whole question of intentions. IsFalkland’s reply a calculated show of mercy towards Caleb designed topre-empt any future revelation? Or is it a spirited defence of the princi-ple of chivalry and a thinly veiled confession of murder? Is it the productof consummate hypocrisy or passionate sincerity? The suggestion is,perhaps, that it is both of these things, and that this duplicity has beenforced upon Falkland by the legal context in which he speaks.

Committed to following the proper procedures of the law, Forestergrows impatient with Falkland’s responses, finding them full of‘romance’ and not ‘reason’:

This is no time to settle the question between chivalry and law. I shall thereforesimply insist as a magistrate, having taken the evidence in this felony, upon myright and duty of following the course of justice, and committing the accusedto the county jail. (, )

Locked in an implacable enmity, Falkland and Caleb are also boundtogether by the recognition that true justice transcends the formal cate-gories of jurisprudence. This is made clear later in the novel whenFalkland persuades Caleb not to reveal that he is a murderer:

Will a reasonable man sacrifice to barren truth, when benevolence, humanityand every consideration that is dear to the human heart require that it shouldbe superseded? (, )

In this passage Godwin rehearses some of his own convictions on theinefficacy of punishment. Falkland feels that true justice would under-stand how he came to murder Barnabas Tyrrel, sympathising with hisfundamental benevolence. In a legal context, however, truth is renderedbarren, for it becomes nothing more than the accumulation of evidence,drained of all ethical content, attending only to the external conse-quences of a crime and not to the inner intentions of its perpetrator.Despite their different perspectives, both Falkland and Caleb share thisnotion of the superiority of private judgment over and above the work-


ings of institutional law, a mutual understanding that their pact ofsilence over the murder of Tyrrel has served to cement.

During the course of the novel Caleb comes to recognise the flaws andcontradictions in the ideology of chivalry. He sees that its notion ofjustice is skewed by a violent class bias and that its aspiration to virtue isundermined by an excessive concern for honour and reputation. But heremains committed to the ideal of moral freedom and independencethat Falkland had once embodied. Conversely, mere appearance is notenough for Falkland either. He is too genuinely committed to theconcept of ‘inborn dignity’ to live comfortably with hypocrisy. In hisheart of hearts he shares Caleb’s scorn for exteriors, and that is why heis so endlessly tormented by the gap between his golden reputation andhis secret crime. In this way Falkland’s relentless pursuit of Caleb can beseen as an attempt simultaneously to prevent and to encourage a neo-Jacobin critique of aristocracy. Throughout the period of their mutualenmity, Falkland remains Caleb’s ideal, and Caleb continues to act asFalkland’s conscience: they are bound together in a complex relationshipof identification and repudiation, silently complicit with the values ofthe other.

One way of understanding this narrative is to see it as an allegory ofcivil society. For the novel offers a fictional version of a historical trajec-tory that was very popular with eighteenth-century historians. Thisinterpretation would tend to see Tyrrel as an embodiment of the primi-tive barbarism that was deemed to have prevailed before the rise ofchivalry, a period during which might was supposed the only right.When Falkland enters the locality, he brings civilised values to the com-munity, principles of honour and duty that go beyond mere physicalforce. In this sense he can be seen as an emblem of chivalry as a histori-cal phenomenon.31 However, the novel does not fail to point out thateven this new and better order has been brought about by an act ofusurpation – in this case, a murder – which hints that this new phase ofcivilisation is merely a gilded version of its predecessor. In this wayGodwin suggests that, even if, in certain respects, chivalry could be seento represent an anticipation of true reason and benevolence, it is never-theless riven with hypocrisy and injustice. He effectively subjects civichumanism to a dialectical critique at once ideological and utopian,exposing its limitations while not wholly dissociating himself from itsmetaphysic of morals. Germaine de Staël was to make a similar point inher account of the history of the relationship between literature andsocial institutions in De la littérature ():


Every institution that is good relative to some danger of the moment but not inrelation to eternal reason, becomes an insupportable abuse after it has correctedabuses larger than itself. Chivalry was necessary because it softened militaryferocity through its respect for women and its religious spirit; but chivalry as anorder, as a sect, as a means of separating men instead of uniting them, had tobe considered as a dreadful evil, as soon as it ceased to be an indispensableremedy.32

The difference is, of course, that whereas de Staël envisaged a smoothtransition from the ‘chivalric’ manners of the past to the ‘republican’virtues of the future, Godwin expressed a certain anxiety about whatthat would entail. Would it usher in a democratisation of the principlesof chivalry? Or would it represent an entirely new way of organising theforces within society, one entirely uncommitted to the principle of per-sonal virtue, and completely drained of all ethical content? Indeed inthis respect he was, like his own character Ferdinando Falkland, clearlyconcerned that ‘Reason’ should not be reduced to a merely legalisticrationality, possessing a profound anxiety about the nature of the newbourgeois order even as he was helping it into being.

As William Godwin was putting the finishing touches to Caleb Williamsin England, Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Couthon were finallyformalising the principles of revolutionary justice in France. In aparadoxical attempt to legalise the illegal spirit of the Revolution, theysought to transform law from a set of external statutes into an affair ofthe conscience. As we saw in the last chapter, the law of the Prairialof dispensed with legal defence in the case of criminal trials, so thatjustice became primarily a matter of ascertaining intentions rather thanfiltering through evidence. This was an attempt to moralise the conductof public authority, moving beyond the ‘negative’ concept of liberty andlegality that had been developed during the legislative phase of theRevolution. In this respect Robespierre’s mistrust of the law was not dis-similar to that of the English conservative Edmund Burke, who hadattacked the French constitution-mongers of in a famous passageof the Reflections:

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of coldhearts and muddy understandings, and is as void of solid wisdom, as it is desti-tute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors,and by the concern, which each individual may find in them, from his own


private speculations, or can spare to them from his private interests. In thegroves of their academy, at the end of every visto, you see nothing but thegallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on behalf of the com-monwealth.33

In a society with no principle of civic unity to offset the strictures ofcold legality, Burke argued, individual citizenship would come to consistof nothing more than learning to rein in one’s own private interests. Thelaw would represent only the visible limits of one’s freedom, it would notprovide a positive definition of liberty. In this way the modern subjectwould be invited to indulge freely in his own ‘speculations’ as long as hedid not transgress its bounds. In this way the Declaration of the Rights ofMan of represented the legislative embodiment of the moderncommercial spirit. As was mentioned before, Burke remained convincedthat the destructive potential of capitalism could only be kept undercontrol if society retained a commitment to ‘manners’. He conceived of‘manners’ in terms of a modernisation of the finer principles of aristo-cratic chivalry and deference which served to soften the workings ofcommercial society, safeguarding its achievements by offsetting its per-nicious tendencies. For him a respect for the aristocracy remained ofcentral importance to the stability of society, as the independent nobil-ity was the fullest embodiment of positive liberty. In deferring to thisclass of men, in acknowledging the moral superiority of land over andabove credit, the middling and lower ranks would preserve a respect forthe abstract principle of moral independence and the possibility of real-ising their full humanity. Not only civilised in itself, the aristocracy wasthus the cause of civilisation in other men. It helped to gather the indi-vidual subjects of a nation around a set of common values, and counter-balance the demoralising effect of commerce.34 In France, however,social conditions were markedly different. By the end of the eighteenthcentury, the nobility had declined into a comparatively functionless andyet still rather exclusive caste. It was not possible for the French civichumanists to highlight the insufficiencies of negative liberty by rein-venting and redeploying the language of chivalry. This was whyRobespierre had been forced to locate political virtue not in property butin the secret passions of the human heart.

Both Robespierre and Burke had been driven to employ the languageof paradox in an attempt to develop a notion of liberty that differed fromthe ‘negative’ formulation supplied by bourgeois jurisprudence. Burkeused oxymoron in order to suggest that politics was far more compli-cated than liberal bourgeois radicals such as Richard Price had been


prepared to allow. In recommending ‘proud submission’, ‘dignified obe-dience’, and the ‘freedom’ of an ‘exalted servitude’ in the passage onMarie-Antoinette, he sought to argue that there was a self-respect to behad from submission that it might not be either pleasant or useful torenounce. He wanted his readers to consider the possibility that theyshould not judge a respect for appearances merely on appearances. ButBurke’s curious compounds were not without their risks, for as his radicalantagonists pointed out, they served to expose the duplicity at the heartof his ideology of chivalry even as they gestured towards its peculiarvalue.35

While Burke was recommending the freedom of servitude,Robespierre was trying to legalise the illegal spirit of the revolution. Aswe saw in these first two chapters, he had spoken regularly of ‘the despo-tism of liberty against tyranny’ in order to suggest that freedom couldbe an active moral force and not merely a set of legal entitlements. Inthe eyes of many contemporaries, however, his constant recourse to oxy-moron only served to dramatise the complicity between revolutionaryJacobinism and the feudal tyrannies of the past.

Godwin’s Caleb Williams offers a compelling commentary to the politi-cal history of the French Revolution precisely because it explores thesecret complicity between ‘primitive’ Jacobinism and feudal despotism,between the metaphysic of conscience developed by Rousseau andRobespierre and the ideology of chivalry espoused by Burke andShaftesbury. In the public trial at the end of Godwin’s novel Caleb pros-trates himself before the jury, begging them to believe that he is inno-cent. In the published version of the ending, his disarming candourultimately persuades Falkland to confess his murder of Tyrrel: ‘I see’,says Falkland, ‘that the artless and manly story you have told, has carriedconviction to every hearer’ (, ). Throughout the novel, Caleb con-stantly employs this rhetoric: ‘I will never believe’, he says at one point‘that a man’s conscience of innocence cannot make other men perceivethat he has that thought.’ In this sense Caleb’s belief in the commu-nicative power of individual sincerity reproduces a central argument ofPolitical Justice: ‘If every man to-day would tell all the truth he knew’,Godwin wrote, ‘three years hence there would be scarcely a falsehood ofany magnitude remaining in the civilised world.’36 But Caleb has noright to resort to this Rousseauvian language of sincerity, for after resolv-ing not to divulge Falkland’s secret, he is neither innocent nor candid forthe predominant part of the narrative.37 Only when he accuses hisformer master of murder in the closing chapters of the book does he


finally make the truth plain. Most of the time, his account of events doesnot add up. As Mr Forester points out to him:

Is this the way to obtain the favour of a man of consequence and respectabil-ity? To pretend to make a confidence and then tell him a disjointed story thathas not common sense in it! (, )

Of course, one of Godwin’s primary purposes in the novel is to bringto the reader’s attention the formidable power of social prejudice. It ismade clear that if at any point in the novel Caleb were to tell the truth,nobody would believe him. Nevertheless, Godwin does also make usaware of the extent to which Caleb is guilty of mauraise foi. He appeals tothe conscience of his auditors but he is unwilling to unburden his own.His prejudice in favour of his master is stronger than his commitment tothe truth. Thus we can speak of a species of ‘bad conscience’ in Calebthat emerges from his refusal to divulge his secret sympathy with the aris-tocratic Falkland and his chivalric spirit. Allegorically this can be seen toexpose the complicity of revolutionary Jacobinism with feudal despotism.

In a chapter ‘On Revolutions’ which was rewritten for the secondedition of Political Justice () Godwin drew attention to the way inwhich the Terror had merely reproduced the despotism of the ancienrégime: ‘Revolution is instigated by a horror against tyranny’, he wrote,‘yet its own tyranny is not without peculiar aggravations. There is noperiod more at war with the existence of liberty’ (, ). In its attemptto legislate virtue into existence the Terror had merely exacerbated theevils of positive institution:

Thus, we propose to make men free; and the method we adopt, is to influencethem more rigorously than ever, by the fear of punishment. We say that govern-ment has usurped too much, and we organise a government tenfold moreencroaching in its principles and terrible in its proceedings. Is slavery the bestproject that can be devised for making men free? Is a display of terror the readi-est mode for rendering [men] fearless, independent and enterprising? (, )

Extending the liberal critique of monarchical government andjurisprudence developed in the Jacobins went on to question thevery nature and value of legislation itself. And whereas Godwin’s cri-tique of positive institutions resulted in a proposal for their dissolution,that of Robespierre merely led to the emergence of a new and morecoercive form of public authority. The law of Prairial revolutionisedthe courtroom, but it did not dispense with it as an institution. Conceivedas a sublime internal principle, revolutionary justice became radicallyunjust as soon as it fell into the hands of individual judges. In theory the


recourse to the conscience was impressively high-minded, in practice itmerely facilitated a series of rapid and ruthless executions. For as JohnAdolphus was to describe:

The only punishment they pronounced was death, and that was applied to suchindefinite crimes as favouring the impunity of aristocracy; calumniating patriot-ism; seeking to vilify the revolutionary tribunal; to corrupt the public mind andconscience; and stopping the progress of revolutionary principles. The neces-sary proofs consisted of every description of document, whether material,verbal or written, which carries in itself self-evidence, and when there werematerial or moral proofs, no witnesses were to be heard. The rule of the sen-tence was the conscience of the jurors.38

Robespierre had been right to pursue the moral renovation of France,according to Godwin, but he had been wrong to pursue it throughlegislation. Curiously, the latter was not averse to the notion of a purga-tion of society, he simply considered that it could not be brought aboutby human agency. Death itself was not an evil, he suggested, unless itwas the product of a deliberate action. Thus in the latter half of thechapter ‘On Revolutions’ Godwin briefly indulged his own fantasy ofregeneration:

The abuses which at present exist in all political societies are so enormous, theoppressions which are exercised so intolerable, the ignorance and vice theyentail so dreadful, that possibly a dispassionate enquirer might decide that, iftheir annihilation could be purchased by an instant sweeping of every humanbeing off the face of the earth, the purchase would not be too dear. (, )

Like Robespierre, Godwin looked forward to the creation of a newrace of men, but he did not believe it could be brought about by leg-islative means. Hence he remained residually sympathetic to the purga-tive impulse of revolutionary Jacobinism while firmly withdrawing itfrom the realm of political praxis. In the years after the Terror, Godwincontinued to reformulate and rearticulate his anarchist principles, but heabandoned the systematic mode of presentation that characterisedPolitical Justice. As we shall see, he preferred the essay form as a mediumwhich advertised the resolutely private nature of his essays in privatejudgment. It was almost as if he felt there had been too much of the leg-islative spirit in his systematic attack on legislation.

This sense of complicity is already present in the final trial scene ofCaleb Williams, where Caleb is finally forced to disclose the nature ofFalkland’s crime. After confessing the truth to the jury he is immediatelyovercome by remorse:


I have told a plain and unadulterated tale. I came hither to curse, but I remainto bless. I came to accuse, but am compelled to applaud. I proclaim to all theworld that Mr Falkland is a man worthy of affection and kindness, and that Iam myself the worst of villains! Never will I forgive myself the iniquity of thisday. The memory will always haunt me, and embitter every hour of my exis-tence. (, )

Conditioned by the circumstances in which he finds himself, Caleb isforced to accuse his master in order to defend himself from accusation.All too aware of the consequences of this, he cannot help but think ofit as an act of murder. The truth has been disnatured by its legalsetting: Caleb’s appeal to the conscience is not an instrument of ‘true’justice but, in spite of all he can do to prevent it, an act of revengeagainst the institution of aristocracy. By a sudden metamorphosis, theRousseauvian solitary has been transformed into a revolutionary terror-ist. In this way Godwin’s novel both reflects consciously upon, andunconsciously repeats, some of the central impulses of ‘primitive’Jacobinism, compellingly aware of its ambivalent status as a politicalideology at once revolutionary and anti-modern, standing in a paradoxi-cal relation to the emergent structures of bourgeois society, caught pain-fully between a democratic vision of the future and the feudal freedomof the past.


‘The Prometheus of Sentiment’: Rousseau,Wollstonecraft and aesthetic education

Pondering the failure of the Norwegian peasantry to follow her enlight-ened advice on child-rearing in the eighth of her Letters Written During AShort Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark of , Mary Wollstonecraftwas moved to comment upon the peculiar resistance to ‘improvement’often exhibited by primitive societies:

Reflecting on these prejudices made me revert to the wisdom of those legisla-tors who established institutions for the good of the body under the pretext ofserving heaven for the salvation of the soul. These might with strict proprietybe termed pious frauds, and I admire the Peruvian pair for asserting that theycame from the sun, when their conduct proved that they meant to enlighten abenighted country, whose obedience, or even attention, could only be securedby awe. Thus much for conquering the inertia of reason; but, when it is once inmotion, fables, once held sacred, may be ridiculed; and sacred they were, whenuseful to mankind. – Prometheus alone stole fire to animate the first man; hisposterity need not supernatural aid to preserve the species, though love is gener-ally termed a flame, and it may not be necessary much longer to suppose meninspired by heaven to inculcate the duties which demand special grace, whenreason convinces them that they are happiest who are most nobly employed.1

Ostensibly, Wollstonecraft considers the possibility of a persistentinertia of reason only in order finally to dismiss it; briefly contemplatingthe usefulness of ‘pious frauds’ before laying them aside. Westerncivilization will soon render such grand impostures a thing of the past,she suggests, once the progress of reason has gained sufficient momen-tum. Implicitly, however, she does admit that this time had not yet cometo pass, half-acknowledging the existence of a disconcerting interregnumbetween superstition and enlightenment.

What identifies Wollstonecraft’s reflections as characteristically post-revolutionary, in spite of the fact that they make no specific reference torecent French history, is their markedly utilitarian attitude to religion, in

many ways a legacy of the Jacobin period. In May , at the height ofthe Terror, Robespierre had sought to counter the demoralising effect ofthe disestablishment of Roman Catholicism a couple of years before, byproposing a new national faith – the so-called ‘Cult of the SupremeBeing’ – a form of deism strongly reminiscent of the ‘Profession de Foid’un Vicaire Savoyard’ contained in Book of Emile. Like Rousseau,Robespierre regarded a revolution in religious feeling as the necessarysequel to the ‘materialist’ revolution which had taken place during theEnlightenment:

Everything has changed in the physical order; everything must change in themoral and political order. Half of the world revolution is already completed;the other half is yet to be accomplished.2

More specifically, he also considered that a spontaneous response toexperience was more conducive to disinterested virtue than the rationalcritical debate favoured by the physiocrats, and he regarded religion asan appropriate way of encouraging this condition of mind:

The master-work of society would be to create a rapid moral instinct in [thecitizen] that will lead him to do good and to avoid evil without the slow assis-tance of reasoning, because the private reason of a man waylaid by his passionsis often nothing but a sophist that pleads their case, and the moral authority ofa man can always be overcome by his self-love.3

However, for all the apparent fervency of these introductory remarks,much of his proposal was decidedly functionalist in its emphasis. In thelast analysis, he recommended religious faith primarily as a means ofcementing national unity and virtue rather than as a moral end-in-itself;indeed he was less interested in establishing the truth of faith than inexploring its social benefits. ‘In the eyes of the legislator,’ he told theConvention, somewhat loftily, ‘everything that is useful to the world andgood in practice is true’.4

As is well known, Rousseau had put forward a similar series of argu-ments in favour of the principle of a civic religion in one of the mostnotorious chapters of the Contrat Social. Christianity was inappropriatefor a republic, he had stated, essentially because it encouraged theprivatisation of religious feeling, thereby failing to establish the neces-sary link between the transcendental order and the state. A nationalreligion would be a much better option in this respect, because it wouldserve to bind the people more closely to their institutions.5 Throughoutthis chapter the emphasis was very much on the social usefulness ofreligion rather than its philosophical truth. And this too was


Robespierre’s central concern in his presentation of the Cult, as he laidaside the expansive rhetoric of Emile in favour of the terselyMachiavellian style of the Contrat Social, defending the dissemination ofuseful fictions by referring back to the ancient legislators of the past,most notably Socrates and Lycurgus:

I know that the wisest among them permitted themselves to supplement thetruth with certain fictions, perhaps in order to appeal to the imagination ofignorant people, perhaps in order to attach them more strongly to their institu-tions.6

With this in mind, it is possible to argue that memories of the repres-sive context of the Cult of the Supreme Being, as well as its seeming badfaith, may well have been present in Wollstonecraft’s mind when shecame to discuss ‘pious frauds’ in her Letters of . The fact remains,however, that a contemplation of the perceived inertia of reason did leadher to entertain – if only briefly – the notion of a careful manipulationof public opinion through civic religion, even if she did not, in the end,indulge it. In this way she did demonstrate a growing interest, highlycharacteristic of both French and English radicals during this period, inthe concept of aesthetic education, the notion that a people might haveto be seduced to follow virtue rather than simply forced to obey it, and thattherefore a project of cultural rather than political regeneration mightoffer the best means of recuperating the tarnished revolutionary ideal.

How and why such early essays in the field of post-revolutionaryaesthetics should have sought to distinguish themselves fromRobespierre’s own belated attempt to dissolve politics into culture at theFestival of the Supreme Being of is one of the central concerns ofthis chapter; but so equally is the distinct but related question of howradical women in particular were to approach the question of politics-as-seduction, for it was bound to have a special piquancy for them,caught as they were between the strong desire to exert an influence uponthe moral and political opinions of their age, and the equally powerfulanxiety of losing the very principle of rational femininity in the processof aesthetic education.

In the eyes of many writers and thinkers of the ‘Thermidorean’period, the Terror was to be interpreted as a misguided attempt to leg-islate virtue into existence: hence the prime historical lesson to be learntfrom its ultimate failure was that it was disastrous to attempt the generaldissemination of republican values through the medium of pure politics.What was required, it was argued, was a more stealthy, surreptitious

Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and aesthetic education

approach to the problem of moral regeneration, an approach thatsought to re-educate people more indirectly, by appealing to them at thelevel of culture. Surprisingly, perhaps, in this context, especially given hisreputation as the intellectual father of French Jacobinism, Rousseau –‘the Prometheus of Sentiment’ as the character of Maria inWollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman was later to describe him – remainedan important figure for the leading cultural theorists of the revolution-ary decade, primarily because of his extensive exploration of the rela-tion of religion to politics and of politics to aesthetics. Of course, writerssuch as Friedrich Schiller and Germaine de Staël were highly aware thathis political theory was widely deemed to have ‘caused’ the worstexcesses of the Revolution, but that did not prevent them from continu-ing to admire his work, for in spite of its associations with the politics ofRobespierre, it still seemed to offer a series of templates within which the‘beau idéal’ of could be re-imagined and re-articulated. Thus it waswith constant reference to works such as the La Nouvelle Heloïse, a workwhich offered a very different version of the Rousseauvian vision ofsocial transparency from that which was contained in the Contrat Social,that writers such as Schiller and de Staël tried to recuperate the educa-tional project of revolutionary republicanism in the s.

The first half of this chapter, then, will seek to locate the origin of thisgrowing interest in aesthetic education in the educational debates of theFrench Revolution, in an attempt to demonstrate the points of contactbetween Rousseauvian aesthetics, Robespierrist politics and post-revo-lutionary cultural theory. And the second half will address the highlycomplex attitudes exhibited by a number of eminent women radicals ofthe period to Rousseau’s theories of aesthetic education. In its most doc-trinal form, Rousseauvian Jacobinism was a highly misogynistic creed.Going against the grain of the French feminist tradition initiated byHelvétius and carried on by Condorcet, both the Contrat Social and Emilehad advocated a high degree of separation between men and women,prescribing a public life on the classical model for the men of his repub-lic, while consigning women to a life of privacy, domesticity and intel-lectual subservience. With this in mind, this section is devoted toexploring the relationship between Rousseau and some of his radicalfemale commentators – eminent figures such as Wollstonecraft, HelenMaria Williams, de Staël and Madame Roland – attempting to squaretheir often fervent interest in his fictional and confessional writings withtheir notably sceptical attitude to his political theory. Primarily, I shallseek to do this by comparing Wollstonecraft’s post-revolutionary writing


with a number of French ‘radical’ texts of the late s, works byCondorcet, de Staël, Louvet and Roland, interpreting the Englishwriter’s shift from political commentary to autobiography in the Lettersof very much in terms of a deliberate attempt – ‘self-conscious’ inthe fullest, most Promethean sense – to wrest meaning and value fromthe unaccountable chaos of revolutionary history.

In recent times, a new wave of cultural historians – most notably MonaOzouf, Lynn Hunt and Dorinda Outram – have contibuted greatly toour understanding of the Revolution by exploring the way in which theleading statesmen of the period tried to develop a unified politicalculture out of the popular traditions and neo-classical paradigms of thepast.7 But their emphasis upon the Revolution as a coherent project ofpublic education has often led them to neglect the philosophical andpolitical divisions which fissured the revolutionary bourgeoisie. In thissection, therefore, I want to restore a sense of ideological conflict to thediscussion of revolutionary culture by comparing the ‘Girondin’ and‘Jacobin’ attitudes to education.

As many historians have pointed out, the project of education wascentral to the French Revolution: from the very beginning the politicalclass recognised that in order for France to pass successfully from onerégime into another, the French people would have to undergo a processof political instruction, so that they might come to understand theirchanged relationship to the state, government and the rule of law.8 Andas we have seen, the political message that was given out by the neworder was initially very confused, a curious blend of old and new politi-cal languages, a dangerous mixture of ci-devant monarchism, modernliberalism and ancient republicanism. Substantially, this did not reallychange much with time: the Revolution was to remain riven by compet-ing principles and contradictory aims. On occasion, however, a politicaldiscourse would succeed in differentiating itself from its rivals, express-ing itself in a relatively pure form. And the field of educational theorycan furnish us with two very good examples of this, each implacablyantagonistic to the other.

Despite the Revolution’s professed interest in the broad concept ofeducation, it was notably unsuccessful in its attempt to revolutionisepractical schooling.9 Indeed it was not until after the fall of Robespierrethat a bill was finally passed setting out the terms for the instruction of


French citizens under the First Republic. Previous to this, however, acouple of abortive attempts had been made to provide a basis for schoollegislation – the liberal bourgeois programme of ‘instruction’ developedby Condorcet in and the Rousseauvian model of public ‘education’proposed by Robespierre in – attempts which should be interestingto us precisely because they were at once both identifiably ‘revolution-ary’ and yet systematically opposed. Subsequent bills, by incorporatingsome of the former’s proposals and blending them with those of thelatter, gradually established a workable system which was to survive wellinto the twentieth century, but they did so by obscuring rather thanresolving the fundamental tension between them. It is worthwhile, there-fore, to give a brief outline of these two abandoned bills, in an attemptto show how and why an identifiably ‘progressive’ notion of stateinstruction gave birth to its ‘primitivist’ (although no less ‘modern’)negation.

The eminent mathematician Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet was oneof the foremost liberal thinkers of the late eighteenth century. Duringthe Revolution he was to play a central role, as a constitutional theorist,as a feminist, and as the philosophical mentor of the Girondin faction.The central argument of his posthumous Esquisse d’un tableau historique duprogrès de l’esprit humain () was that the steady improvement of humanknowledge would gradually help to solve all of the world’s major prob-lems. An inspiration to nineteenth-century philosophical reformers, itprovided the link between the intellectual traditions of the Frenchenlightenment and the new social science, bridging the gap betweenphilosophie, idéologie and English utilitarianism.10 Moreover, in his pam-phlet On Public Instruction, which was published in , Condorcet was tomake a major contribution to the revolutionary debate on education,rehearsing the physiocratic argument that the state had a duty to provideeach citizen – young women as well as young men – with public instruc-tion. Placing great emphasis upon early vocational training, he arguedthat if young people were encouraged to follow a trade at school, hugesocial advantages would inevitably ensue. For when the time came forthem to enter the world of work, the various trades and professionswould receive already trained apprentices, which would benefit tradeand commerce by rendering it more efficient, while also depriving theguilds of their skills monopoly. Issues such as this were always moreimportant, in Condorcet’s mind, than the question of whether earlyspecialisation would tend to imprison children within the confines oftheir class, mainly because, for him as for Emmanuel Sieyès, the progress


of freedom was always conceived in terms of the destruction of corpo-rate privilege.

According to Condorcet the role of public authority was to makeexisting forms of knowledge available to the people, not to tell themhow to live: ‘public authority ought to limit itself to organising instruc-tion,’ he wrote, ‘leaving the rest of a child’s education to his family . . .the duty of public authority is to arm the full force of truth againsterror, which is always a public evil. But it does not have the right todecide where truth or error is to be found’.11 The responsibility formoral and religious education was thus consigned to the privatesphere, while the task of organising instruction was kept in the realmof the public; indeed the social benefit of public schooling was to restupon its very refusal to decide what was beneficial, its self-consciousopen-mindedness rendering it a powerful force for improvement. Inthis way instruction was made to seem as if it were ideologically andmorally neutral, simply the dissemination of useful information. But ofcourse Condorcet’s model of public instruction was not nearly as ideo-logically neutral as it would have liked to pretend. Ostensibly it seemedto have no preferences, but quietly it served to grease the wheels ofcommerce–capitalism by transforming the human subject into anindividuated commodity ready to take his or her place in the adultlabour market.

To some degree, however, Condorcet did attempt to anticipate thisobjection, insisting that his programme of instruction was actuallydesigned to offset the noxious side-effects of modern commercial society,rather than compound them. The best way, according to him, of mini-mising the damage caused by the division of labour in civil life was tomake the individual aware of his place in the social machine. In this wayone of the main purposes of his scheme of public education was to offergreater intellectual equality as a consolation for the lack of social equal-ity (), considering that if the poorer members of society were toreceive proper instruction they would become immune to both thedangerous provocations of sans-culottisme and the false consolations ofreligion. They would realise that society could only be improved byscientific progress, and this in turn would encourage them to contem-plate the progress of the human race both in the past and in the future,a vision which would render them patient and philosophical in the faceof present adversity, offering both an impulse to political virtue and asecular vision of immortality:


If this indefinite improvement of our species is a general law of nature, as Ibelieve, man must no longer consider himself as being bound to a fleeting andisolated existence, destined to vanish after an alternation of happiness andsorrow for himself, of good and evil for those whom chance has made his neigh-bours. He becomes an active part of a great whole, a co-worker in an eternalcreation. In a momentary existence in a speck of space, he can by his effortsencompass all places, bind himself to all centuries, and still act long after hismemories have disappeared from the earth. ()

As in Immmanuel Kant’s celebrated pamphlet What Is Enlightenment?the separation of the private realm of labour from the public realm ofcritical thought was seen by Condorcet as positive and enabling. Hisidea was that by contemplating his existence as a mere cog in themachine of human progress the individual would be able to drawenough intellectual satisfaction and spiritual sustenance to cope withthe inevitable constraints upon his physical existence. As he argued inhis posthumous treatise the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès del’esprit humain of ‘the whole system of human labour is like a well-made machine, whose several parts have been systematically dis-tinguished but nonetheless being intimately bound together, form asingle whole and work toward a single end’.12 For a later generation ofphilosophers, who had lived through the first phase of mechanicalprogress, it was far more difficult to be so unequivocally enthusiasticabout the effects of commerce and industry. Thomas Carlyle’s suspicionwas that the endless pursuit of higher levels of production was radicallydevoid of any identifiable goal, that machinery had, in every sense ofthe word, no end.13 For Condorcet, however, the vision of society as amachine rendered everything significant and full of purpose, and thatwas why it was important for this vision to be disseminated as widely aspossible. For significantly enough he feared that without a system ofpublic instruction to inform men and women of its benefits, theprogress of enlightenment might appear unequal and unjust. Indeed heeven expressed an anxiety that without such general tuition, it mightactually become so:

The revolutions brought about by the general advance of the human racetowards perfection must certainly lead to reason and happiness. But how manypassing misfortunes would be necessary to pay for it, if general instruction didnot draw men closer together? How far would that epoch recede if the progressof an enlightenment that was never equally distributed fed an eternal war ofgreed and treachery among nations, as among the various classes within them,rather than uniting them in that fraternal exchange of needs and services thatis the foundation of common happiness.14


Of course, for the ‘primitivists’ in the Jacobin movement, the projectof enlightenment favoured by Condorcet did feed an eternal war ofgreed and treachery precisely because it was so closely tied to thedevelopment of commerce and industry. In their eyes, rationality wasjust another word for bourgeois self-interest. Occurrences such as thealleged food hoarding by bourgeois négociants during the subsistence crisisof had convinced them that the modern system of commerce wasnot a fraternal exchange but a fratricidal struggle. Hence they mistrustedany model of public instruction which placed an emphasis upon politi-cal economy, considering it a form of counter-revolutionary sophistrydesigned to enslave rather than enlighten the people. In the speech onthe Cult of the Supreme Being of Robespierre was to argue thatduring the early years of the Revolution the common people of Francehad possessed a firm understanding of liberty and equality, untilCondorcet had sought to deliver them back into the hands of the aris-tocracy with his obscurantist sophistries, and it is likely that he had thelatter’s pamphlet Sur l’Instruction Publique as well as his constitutional writ-ings uppermost in his mind:

Artisans had shown themselves perfectly able to understand the rights of man,when this scribbler, who had almost been a republican in , stupidlydefended the cause of kings in . Labourers were relaying the light of phi-losophy all over the countryside, when the academician Condorcet, formerly agreat mathematician in the judgment of the literary, and a great belletrist in thejudgment of mathematicians, later a timid conspirator, despised by both parties,was working ceaselessly to obscure it by the treacherous hotchpotch of hismercenary rhapsodies.15

In order to explore this antagonism further, and to relate it to the deepideological fissure at the heart of French Jacobinism, I now want toargue that the model of public education that Robespierre developed in can be seen as a deliberate attempt to oppose what he perceived asthe alienating effect of Condorcet’s plan of liberal instruction.

The educational plan of Louis le Peletier, which had been abandonedunfinished at the latter’s death in February , and then subsequentlyrevised and presented to the National Convention by Robespierre in Julyof the same year, constituted an unashamedly Jacobin response to theinstructional theories of Condorcet, much more evidently neo-Spartanin inspiration, and markedly less proto-feminist in emphasis. Thepurpose of a republican school system, in Robespierre’s eyes, was tocondition and shape the moral character of the citizen: ‘I am con-vinced’, he remarked, when presenting the paper, ‘of the necessity of


carrying out a complete regeneration, and, if I may express myself thus,of creating a new people.’16 Where Condorcet had wanted to promoteequality of opportunity, Robespierre offered equality of experience.Where the scheme of the former had been designed to encourage chil-dren to cultivate specific skills in preparation for their entry into adiversified labour market, that of the latter placed more of an emphasisupon physical and moral virtue.

To regulate one’s life, to submit to the yoke of an exact discipline, these are twohabits that are important to the happiness of social existence. They must com-mence in childhood; acquired at that age, they become a second nature.17

Le Peletier had argued that both girls and boys should be trained towork the land, explaining that ‘it is the first, it is the most necessary, it isthe most widespread occupation of man, moreover, it gives us all ourbread.’18 His plan encouraged various forms of collective activity, theidea being that the sharing of common experiences would lead the citi-zenry to develop common opinions, and that these opinions wouldinevitably be collectivist. In this way, republican values would be dis-seminated uniformly across every rank and region of society. There wasanother reason, however, for Le Peletier’s emphasis on physical work: inhis eyes, it was also a way of keeping children out of trouble when theywere not attending lessons. Instruction, he argued, although useful inmany ways, did not however attend to the ‘moral being’ of the individ-ual, and this meant that, once out of the classroom, children were alwayslikely to relapse into bad habits:

As for the moral being, some useful instruction, some study periods, this is thenarrow circle within which the proposed plan is contained. It is the work of afew hours only; but the rest of the day is abandoned to the hazard of circum-stances, and the child, when the lesson is over, soon finds himself returningback, perhaps to the softness of luxury, perhaps to the pride of vanity, perhapsto the uncouthness of poverty, perhaps to the indiscretions of boredom.Unhappy victim of vices, errors, misfortune, of curiosity regarding the thingsaround him, he will be a little less ignorant than before, the schools will be a bitmore numerous, the school-masters slightly better than today; but shall wereally have formed men, citizens, republicans; in a word, shall the nation havebeen regenerated?19

In Le Peletier’s, public education would not be doing its job unless itundertook to police every child constantly, for it was always to be sus-pected that as soon as a boy or girl escaped from the open field of thepublic gaze, he or she would soon sink into ‘aristocratic’ sloth and


depravity. Not content that the education system should inculcate thetraditional responsibilities of gender and profession, he demanded thatit should completely control the individual’s moral environment.20 Thushe demanded the kind of perpetual vigilance from the state system thatthe précepteur had exerted upon the hapless Emile in Rousseau’s famoustreatise. And so, in the acute ideological severity of this bill the deepstructure of Rousseauvian Jacobinism can be seen to emerge:Robespierre’s fundamental attitude not only to the instruction of chil-dren, but to that of the citizenry as a whole, stands revealed, mostnotably his fear that nothing less than a total cultural training wouldeffect the re-education of the French people.

Of course, Robespierre was forced to recognise that while childrencould be subjected to constant supervision until such time as they couldregulate themselves and each other, it was not possible for the state toexert such a constant system of surveillance upon the contemporaryadult population – frustratingly enough, the very section of the com-munity who most required reform. So he was increasingly driven to seekcivic unity through the manipulation of aesthetic effects, to encourageforms of collective activity in which everyone might discover a sense oftheir new identity while learning to police the recalcitrant behaviour ofeveryone else. And this was one of the reasons why the concept of thefestival became such an important part of his project to educate a newgeneration of French republicans: it was a way of forcing the people ofFrance back to school. Thus it is not necessary to regard the Festival ofthe Supreme Being, as many commentators have tended to do, simplyas a product of Robespierre’s vain ambition to become the high priestof the Revolution, but rather as a logical consequence of the politicalaesthetic bequeathed to him by Rousseau, which taught that virtue couldneither be taught by a process of rational instruction, nor simplyimposed by force. As Jürgen Habermas has pointed out, ‘since [theRousseauvian legislator] could rely neither on force nor on public dis-cussion . . . he had to take refuge in the authority of an indirect influence,“which can compel without violence and persuade without convinc-ing”’. It was not surprising, therefore, that from onwardsRobespierre himself was increasingly drawn to the concept of aestheticeducation, since even in the pages of the Contrat Social ‘Rousseau’sdemocracy of unpublic opinion ultimately postulated the manipulativeexercise of power.’21


Plant a pole crowned with flowers in the middle of a square, assemble thepeople, and you will have a festival. Even better: put the spectators into theshow; make them actors themselves; contrive it that everyone sees and adoresthemselves in others, and everyone will be bound together as never before.22

This was the recipe for a rural festival that Rousseau had given in hisLettre à d’Alembert of . His central argument in the treatise was thatthe theatre was a corrupt form of entertainment on account of the dis-tinction it made between those who acted and those who watched, sincein his opinion this perpetuated aristocratic notions of publicity, accord-ing a representative publicness to certain privileged persons, and con-signing the rest of the population to private obscurity. As Goethe’sWilhelm Meister put it: ‘On the boards a polished man appears in hissplendour with personal accomplishments, just as he does in the upperclasses of society’.23 For Rousseau the public aura of the aristocracy, likethat of theatrical actors, was based on an imposture, so that to be enam-oured of the theatre was, in a certain sense, to be in love with one’s ownslavery, since the stage was merely a reproduction of the deceptions anddivisions of feudal society. The festival, on the other hand, was a formof spectacle peculiarly appropriate to a republic, for it obliterated thepernicious obstacle at the heart of theatrical representation in render-ing each participant simultaneously an actor and a spectator. At a festi-val, according to Rousseau, every man and woman ceased to be a privateperson and was encouraged to identify with the collective. By bridgingthe gap between being and seeing, it transcended the imposture at theheart of all representation, effecting the embodiment of a unifiedgeneral will, or as Jean Starobinski has interpreted it, bringing about asituation in which ‘each individual is alienated by the gaze of others, andeveryone is returned to themselves by a universal recognition’.24

Despite its popularity in the middle of the eighteenth century, fewrevolutionaries referred to the Lettre à d’Alembert in their discussion ofrepublican festivals. More often they drew on the description of a Swisswine harvest in Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Heloïse () in which manyof the same arguments had been rehearsed in fictional form. In this fes-tival the entire community of the Swiss village of Clarens, peasants andnobles alike, take part in the grape harvest, with all class differences tem-porarily laid aside. Significantly, Rousseau represents this event as autopian moment out of time, an experience of pure transparency inwhich individual desire is sublimated into general benevolence.


Moreover, it is also depicted as an event which is at one and the sametime both useful and enjoyable, fruitful and yet frugal, and thus themodel for a new kind of political economy – rationally organised andyet anti-capitalist – in which the distinction between work and leisure haseffectively been dissolved. As the novel’s protagonist Saint-Preux reportsto his English friend Lord Bomston:

Everyone sings, everyone laughs all day long, and yet work does not suffer.Everyone lives in the greatest possible familiarity with one another; everyone isequal, and nobody forgets themselves . . . One dines with the peasants at theiraccustomed hour, just as one works with them . . . The sweet equality that reignshere re-establishes the order of nature, it forms an instruction for some and aconsolation for others, and a link of friendship for all.25

However, all is not quite as idyllic – or as effortless – as it seems. Forexample, we are told early on that Baron de Wolmar, the benevolent dic-tator of Clarens, has made a great number of preparations in advanceof the harvest, preparations designed to manipulate and police the activ-ities of his band of workers. And he bears a close resemblance to theRousseauvian legislator of the Contrat Social in this respect, combining afervent commitment to strong government with an atheist’s belief in thesocial utility of a collective faith, as is evident from the way in which heuses his wife, the passionate and conscientious Julie, as a kind ofbeneficent civic deity, before whose altar the rest of the community,including Saint-Preux, is only too willing to kneel:

Julie! Incomparable woman! You exercise in the simplicity of your private lifea despotic empire of wisdom and beneficence: you are for the entire region adear and sacred despot that everyone would wish to defend and preserve withtheir life, and you live more securely, and more honorably in the middle of anentire people whom you love, than kings who are surrounded with all their sol-diers.26

One of the most popular works of fiction published during the eight-eenth century, La Nouvelle Heloïse was rapidly translated into manydifferent languages after its first appearance in . As Robert Darntonhas shown, its highly direct and emotive style inspired countless readersto seek to emulate the sentiments of its central characters.27 But what isless often commented upon is the fact that it was also seen as a blueprintfor the institution of a virtuous republic.28 For in the eyes of many theClarens section of the novel offered a more attractive utopian visionthan the Contrat Social, and what was more, it actually suggested ways inwhich such a vision might be brought into being, containing a number


of detailed descriptions of civic organisation and household and gardenmanagement, which helped to provide a cogent vision of the way inwhich a particular version of republicanism might work itself out inpractice.

The Festival of the Supreme Being finally took place on June ,under the artistic direction of the fervently Robespierrist revolutionarypainter and designer Jacques-Louis David. As befitted a nation at war, itcontained a considerable element of military display. Nevertheless, thatdid not prevent it from possessing a decidedly pastoral tone in compari-son with previous revolutionary fêtes, such as the Festival of Reason of. After a speech given by Robespierre outside the Tuileries palace,there was a vast procession to the Champ de Mars, led by a huge chariot,towed by rows of oxen, containing many sheaves of corn and numerousagricultural implements, with a statue representing natural abundanceenthroned at its head. At the Champ de Mars a tall tree spread itsboughs over the summit of a huge, artificially constructed Mountain.On their arrival, the deputies of the National Convention sat downbeneath the leaves of this overarching tree of liberty, surrounded bygroups of little boys with garlands of violets on their heads, by youngmen with wreaths of myrtle, and by older men wearing oak, ivy and oliveleaves. Strictly patriotic throughout, and full of references to the naturaland political virtues of France, the iconography of the festival was nev-ertheless highly reminiscent of the Swiss fête in Rousseau’s Julie, notmerely because of its emphasis upon harvest, but also because of itshighly significant use of the symbolism of the Mountain, a broad refer-ence to the grand tradition of Alpine simplicity as much as an explicitallusion to the political ‘Montagne’ which formed the radical wing of theNational Convention.29

Conceived at a time of increasing political anxiety, when manyrevolutionaries wanted to see an end to the Terror but were unsure abouthow to bring it about, the Festival of the Supreme Being was in manyways the fullest and most desperate expression of Robespierre’s utopianimagination, his final attempt to define and disseminate his vision of thefuture. And the fact that it drew so slavishly on Rousseau’s work, andmost especially on the Emile and La Nouvelle Heloïse, does much to explainnot only its comparatively doctrinaire character, but also its conspicu-ously ‘sentimental’ appeal. So much so, indeed, that it has been sug-


gested that the reason why Saint-Just chose not to attend was becausethe programme of the festival was not neo-classical enough for his tastes;whatever republican feeling it sought to evoke had been thoroughlyfiltered through Jean-Jacques Rousseau.30

One of the facets which may have rendered Rousseau’s description ofthe wine-harvest especially useful to Robespierre and David was itsdetailed account of the actual organisation of the fête at Clarens; itsconcern for the fine points of administrative detail. In his narration ofthe event to Lord Bomston, Saint-Preux spent a lot of time enthusingabout the way in which the harvest harmonised the aristocracy and thepeasantry, work and play, but he also could not help noticing the way inwhich the whole spectacle was carefully stage-managed by Julie’shusband, the atheist philosopher Baron de Wolmar. For example, he tellsus that for the duration of the evening reception which succeeded theday’s work, the appearance of equality was very carefully arranged: ‘Inorder to prevent envy and regret’, he notes, ‘one endeavours not to putout before the eyes of these good people anything that they could notfind in their own homes.’ But there were also other, and more insidiousways in which the festival constituted an extensive exercise in socialmanipulation, as he slowly began to discern. In the first place, through-out the day, Wolmar effectively operates a proto-Benthamite system ofsurveillance, policing proceedings and administering justice. He rewardsthe hardest workers, but ruthlessly punishes irregular behaviour:

One drinks with discretion, liberty has no other limits than those of decency.The presence of such respected masters restrains everybody, without preventingthem from being easy and gay. If someone does happen to forget himself, onedoes not disturb the festival with reprimands; but he is discharged without failthe following day.31

Above and beyond this, however, the reader is increasingly madeaware, through Saint-Preux’s hints and guesses, of the extent to which itis not merely drunkenness and bad behaviour that the administration atClarens is seeking to root out, but private sentiments or reflections of anykind. The narrator himself almost falls victim to this purgative impulsewhen he falls into a drunken melancholy when gazing upon Julie atdinner, and yet even her frowns of disapproval cannot quite dispel hisuncontrollable feelings of remorse: ‘Then, in letting my eyes rest uponher and recalling distant times, I am taken over by a sudden shudder, andan insupportable weight falls upon my heart, leaving me with a grievousimpression that is only painfully effaced.’32


In passages such as this, the novel exhibits a deep sensitivity, fargreater than anything in the Contrat Social, to the destructive effect of awar on private sentiments. In the Contrat Social the pursuit of civic virtuewas always defined in terms of the individual’s internal struggle betweenhis own national and personal allegiances. But in La Nouvelle Heloïsehowever, much greater stress was placed on the broader implications ofthis putative Kulturkampf – the process was always seen in an identifiablysocial context. And throughout the earlier work, Rousseau exhibited anirresolvably ambivalent attitude to this question. For even if in manyways his sketching of Wolmar’s Clarens does look eagerly forward to theutopian imaginings of the Lettre á d’Alembert and the Contrat Social, his con-tinued sympathy for the character of Saint-Preux, who always stands inan uncomfortable relation to the utopian arrangements, can already beseen to anticipate the many heartfelt descriptions of exclusion and alien-ation that one finds in the Reveries and the Confessions. In his later politi-cal theory it is true that Rousseau became extremely keen to recommendthe manipulative use of power by a ‘benevolent’ legislator; but in thepages of Julie he was by no means averse to exploring what it would feellike to be a victim of such manipulation.

Of all the accounts of the Festival of the Supreme Being, perhaps themost influential, at least in Britain, was the one given by the English poetand Girondin sympathiser Helen Maria Williams in her Memoirs of theReign of Robespierre of . Writing, like the Rousseau of Julie, in thepersona of the sentimental letter-writer, Williams was to reproduce thecentral facets of Saint-Preux’s festival critique in her extensive attackupon the coerciveness and hidden cruelty of Robespierre’s utopianpageant. She made much of the rather mechanical nature of the cere-mony, as if to highlight the extent to which Jacobin politics representednothing but a kind of lifeless simulation of true republican feeling: ‘Atthis spot’, she wrote sarcastically, ‘by David’s command, the mothers areto embrace their daughters; at that, the fathers are to clasp their sons;here the old are to bless the young; there the young are to kneel to theold; upon this boulevard the people are to sing; upon that, they mustdance; at noon they must listen in silence, and at sunset they must rendthe air with acclamations.’33 Many modern commentators have tendedto agree with the criticism implict in Williams’ analysis. Mona Ozouf, forexample, in her influential book on the Revolutionary fêtes, was to makethe general point that ‘utopian festivals always have that air of order andregulation that begins by discouraging fantasy and ends by punishingit’.34 For Williams, all of the charges which Rousseau had brought


against the theatre applied with increased force to Robespierre’s festival,which offered itself as the very antithesis of hatred and bloodshed, butwhich had terrorist principles inscribed at its very heart. And it was theperfect symbol of the reign of Robespierre in this respect, in the sensethat behind its rhetoric of transparency there lay concealed a despoticwill to power: ‘the glowing festoons appeared tinged with blood’, shewrote, ‘and in the background of this festive scenery, the guillotine roseabove the disturbed imagination’. At the centre of Williams’s accountwas the representation of Robespierre as a kind of political Tartuffe, a‘foul fiend’ who was using the mask of political sanctity to disguise hisbase longings. Not content to be the Cato of the Revolution, he wasaspiring to become its Savonarola:

Upon a tribune in the centre of the theatre, Robespierre, as president of theConvention, appeared, and having for a few hours disencumbered the squareof the Revolution of the guillotine, this high priest of Moloch, within view ofthat very spot where his daily sacrifice of human victims was offered up, coveredwith their own blood, invoked the Parent of universal nature, talked of thecharms of virtue, and breathed the hope of immortality.

In this remarkably vivid version of events, the figure of Robespierreas a Machiavellian legislator is given great prominence. Like Wolmar heis depicted as a coldly detached figure, an atheist seeking to use religionfor his own ends, standing at some distance from the illusory spectaclehe has seen fit to encourage. On countless occasions during theRomantic period, this interpretation was rehearsed and reformulated,both in historical accounts of the Revolution, and in the realm of liter-ary fiction. One specific detail of Robespierre’s performance at the fêtewas often reworked in later renderings. After having given his speech atthe Tuileries, he had descended from the tribune, ‘armed with the flameof truth’, as David’s programme note has it, and moved towards amonument raised on a circular basin, representing the monster‘L’athéisme’. And from the middle of this monster, which he proceededto set on fire, the figure of ‘Sagesse’ was supposed to appear.Unfortunately, when it did emerge from beneath the flames, the figureof ‘Sagesse’ was hopelessly blackened and scarred, a powerful sign, inthe eyes of many later commentators, of the rotten and misguidednature of Robespierre’s political wisdom, as well as a potent symbol ofthe ugly visage which lay behind his ‘mask’ of virtue. Sometimes thistrope operated at quite a simple level, as in Lacretelle’s Précis historique,where it was used to represent Robespierre as the arch-hypocrite ofrevolutionary politics, or in Tom Moore’s orientalist fantasy, ‘The Veiled


Prophet of Khorassan’ (a kind of displaced allegory of the Jacobinismof the s), in which the seemingly virtuous leader of a revolutionaryMoslem sect is both literally and symbolically unmasked, at the veryheight of some wild festivities, as a mendacious and murderous fraud.

In other representations, however, the central significance of the fes-tival was interpreted in much broader terms, with its rather mechanicalsimulation of popular unity and fellow feelings being seen as the abolutedeath-knell of the revolutionary project of régéneration. In severalaccounts the apparent lack of vitality in Robespierre’s personaldemeanour became a metonym for the lifelessness of French societyunder the Jacobins. Thus the great nineteenth-century historian JulesMichelet, in the midst of an account of the Jacobin period that was inother respects not entirely unsympathetic to Robespierre’s tragic pre-dicament, described David’s commemorative sketch of Robespierre atthe festival as ‘like a cat drowned long ago, and reanimated by galvan-ism, or perhaps like a reptile which stiffens as it raises itself up, with anunspeakable look, of terrifying civility’.35 In Michelet’s mind, the festi-val dramatised not only Robespierre’s political mendacity but also thedreadful gap between his apparent commitment to a politics of freedomand the will and his actual enslavement to the forces of historical neces-sity: ‘The Moral Authority, by which I mean Robespierre, this censor,this purger, this saviour, this messiah, who was summoned to save society,was more than anyone the slave of the Terror. He seemed its master. Thehorror of his double role struck him more and more’.36 And of course,one way of thinking about this ‘double role’ – Robespierre’s status asboth the avenging angel and the abject automaton of history – is to re-emphasise the way in which it arose out of his own paradoxical attemptto pursue ‘primitive’ virtue by ‘progressive’ means, to employ theincreasingly mechanistic structures of modern bourgeois society –representative democracy, the press, the law, the guillotine – in order torediscover the principle of ancient freedom, a violent rejection ofmodernity that was at one and the same time hopelessly dependent uponits forms. And it was this that rendered him at once the Julie and theWolmar of the fête, hence one should not think of the hastily con-structed figure of the Mountain erected on the open plain of the Champde Mars simply as a piece of political hypocrisy, a deliberate attempt todisguise the bare and unfeeling scaffolding of modern government,without equal consideration of the extent to which it was also an hysteri-cal replacement of the guillotine, a form of violently overdetermineddenial.


. ‘Festival of the Supreme Being on the Champ de Mars’ (), watercolour by Naudet. ‘At the Champ de Mars a tall tree spread itsboughs over the summit of a huge, artificially constructed Mountain. On their arrival, the deputies of the National Convention sat downbeneath the leaves of this overarching tree of liberty, surrounded by groups of little boys with garlands of violets on their heads, by young

men with wreaths of myrtle, and by older men wearing oak, ivy and olive leaves.’

Over the last fifteen years, a significant amount of scholarly work hassuccessfully shown that far from being the founding text of Anglo-American feminism that it had long been considered, MaryWollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman of actuallyemerged out of a long tradition of eighteenth-century feminist writing,rehearsing arguments that had already been mooted much earlier byfigures such as Mary Astell and Mary Wortley Montagu.37 Nevertheless,as has readily been acknowledged, what was distinctive aboutWollstonecraft’s treatise was the extent to which it latched onto the termsof the political debate that was raging in England and France at the timeof its initial composition. As a number of recent critical studies haveshown, the early years of the Revolution had seen the development ofan energetic campaign in favour of political rights for women. So muchso, indeed, that until the Jacobin backlash of –, French feministssuch as Olympe de Gouges had been able to give a considerable publicprofile to this cause.38 And their opinions had been shared by some ofthe more progressive male philosophers of the period, most notablyAntoine-Nicholas de Condorcet, who had argued that since womenwere as capable as men of acquiring and employing the faculty ofreason, they should undoubtedly possess the same civic rights.39

Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman was thus very much aproduct of the legislative moment of –, sharing much of the ration-al confidence of Condorcet and Tom Paine, despite the fact that theperiod of its composition coincided with the appearance of the FrenchConstitution of , which effectively excluded all women from citizen-ship.40

Outspokenly progressive in her views, Wollstonecraft was extremelydismissive of the neo-Spartan current of revolutionary politics, andindignant at the attitude to women that it entailed. It was highlyappropriate, therefore, that of all the male theorists of female educationwho came under attack in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Rousseauwas the one who most excited her indignation.41 In the fifth book of histreatise Emile, ou l’éducation of Rousseau had argued that young menshould be trained for a life of independent action and public virtue,while young girls ought merely to be prepared for their future role aswives and mothers. In a notorious piece of double-dealing, he hadinsisted upon the absolute duty of women to defer to their fathers andhusbands on all matters of importance, while arguing that this would not


. ‘View of the Chariot of the Festival of the Supreme Being’ (), anonymous engraving. ‘After a speech given by Robespierre outsidethe Tuileries palace, there was a vast procession to the Champ de Mars, led by a huge chariot, towed by rows of oxen, containing many

sheaves of corn and numerous agricultural implements, with a statue representing natural abundance enthroned at its head.’

prevent them from getting their own way in much of their daily life ifthey made proper use of their ‘amiable weaknesses’. In the VindicationWollstonecraft described this division of sexual labour as a ‘philosophyof lasciviousness’. She denied that women were less capable than menof following the dictates of reason and virtue, suggesting that it hadmerely come to seem that way because of the corrupt state of femaleeducation. Young girls were taught to cultivate their sensitivities in orderto be more attractive to men, and this meant that many women reachedadulthood suffused with a highly debilitating romantic sensibility. Andcontemporary novels, such as Rousseau’s own Julie had played an espe-cially pernicious part in this process, by encouraging young women toenvelop themselves in a tissue of deceitful dreams and fantasies, dis-tracting themselves from their actual servitude. In order to remedy this,therefore, Wollstonecraft proposed a radical revolution in educationalpractice, suggesting that if boys and girls were treated more equally,women would be able to pursue the same robust occupations and culti-vate the same virtuous aspirations as their male counterparts.

One of the most curious aspects of Wollstonecraft’s position was thatin the first years of the French Revolution she had been an enthusiasticadmirer of Rousseau’s work. In the Analytical Review for she haddefended the Confessions from the charge of immorality by arguing thatit was both rationally instructive and emotionally improving. Not onlyhad Rousseau made a valuable contribution to the history of the humanmind, she argued, but it was ultimately impossible, despite all of hiserrors, not to identify with the warm effusions of his heart.42 However,as we have seen, during the legislative moment of – Wollstonecraftbecame an increasingly enthusiastic devotee of the discourse of rationalperfectibility, and this encouraged the self-consciously progressive reap-praisal of Rousseau contained in the Vindication. Reworking her formeremphasis, she depicted his character as an unstable compound of ideal-ism and sensuality, a volatile mixture which it had been the task of hiswork both to offset and to justify, and which helped explain his constantalternation between visions of public virtue and celebrations of privateappetite. According to this view of things, Jean-Jacques came to be seenas a prime example of the same corrupt femininity that Rousseauhimself had attempted to segregate and control.

The vision of social and political progress which was laid out in theVindication had clear affinities with that put forward in Condorcet’s pam-phlet On Public Instruction published the previous year. And it is highlylikely that Wollstonecraft sought out its author when she was introduced


to the leading members of the Girondin faction during her residence inFrance in –.43 But her acquaintance could only have lasted a fewmonths, for in the summer of the Jacobin party were to call for thearrest of twenty-two of the leading Girondins, and many ofWollstonecraft’s new friends were immediately imprisoned or sent intohiding. In response to this predicament, figures such as Jacques-PierrreBrissot, Manon Roland, Jean-Baptiste Louvet and Helen MariaWilliams set about writing Rousseauvian confessions to justify theirpolitical conduct. Of their number, Condorcet alone refused to adopt amerely personal perspective, embarking instead upon his Esquisse d’untableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain in an attempt to reaffirm therevolutionary project of social perfectibility.

In many ways, Condorcet’s resolutely ‘progressive’ influence can beseen to have had a palpable effect on Wollstonecraft’s Historical and MoralView of the French Revolution of , for in the course of this work, she tootried to take a broad view of revolutionary history, subsuming the birthpangs of the new nation into a broader narrative of historical progress:‘It is perhaps difficult to bring ourselves to believe that out of this chaoticmass a fairer government is rising than has ever shed the sweets of sociallife upon the world,’ she declared, ‘but things must have time to find theirown level’.44 Addressing the failure of the legislative phase of the FrenchRevolution, she blamed the peculiar mixture of idealism and depravityin the French people, describing the national character as if it wasmerely that of Rousseau writ large: ‘unmindful of the dreadful effectsbeginning to flow from an unbounded licentiousness,’ she argued, ‘[theConstituent Assembly] continued to pursue a romantic sublimity ofcharacter, dangerous to all sublunary laws’ (, ). Instead of beingpatient and gradual in their emphasis, the French had been volatile andpreremptory; instead of trusting to the gradual progress of reason, theyhad sought to establish a republic of virtue all at once. Like Condorcet,she believed that the people had not yet learnt the lessons of Turgot andthe physiocrats, who had taught ‘that the prosperity of a state dependson the freedom of industry; that talents should be permitted to find theirlevel [and] that the unshackling of commerce is the only secret to renderit flourishing, and answer more effectually the ends for which it is politi-cally necessary’ (, ). In short, the revolution had been impeded byviolence because the French had been too much like ill-educatedwomen, full of a kind of revolutionary vanity and excitabilityinappropriate to the business of rational legislation. Thus it was exces-sive sensibility which had led to the atrocities: ‘so weak is the tenderness


produced by sympathy, or polished manners, compared with thehumanity of a cultivated understanding. Alas! it is morals, not feelingswhich distinguish men from beasts of prey!’ (, ).

Looking back over the history of France, she considered that it wasperhaps not surprising that the revolution had resulted in violence, forthe corrupting influence of despotism had long deprived the people ofall respect for justice and the law (, ). Ostensibly she believed thatthe French would continue to approach true reason and virtue, whileoccasionally expressing doubts about how this was going be achieved.45

In general terms she endorsed Condorcet’s notion of the civilising roleof commerce, but that did not prevent her from acknowledging AdamSmith’s remarks on the brutalising effect of the division of labour (,). And she was also driven to question his optimistic model of publiceducation, while discussing the original debate over the ‘Declaration ofthe Rights of Man’.

Several members argued that the declaration ought to conclude and notprecede the constitution; insisting that it was dangerous to awaken a somnam-bulist on the brink of a precipice; or to take a man to the top of a mountain, toshow him a vast country that belonged to him, but of which he could notimmediately claim the possession. ‘It is a veil,’ said they, ‘that it would be impru-dent to raise suddenly – it is a secret that it is necessary to conceal, till the effectof a good constitution puts them into a situation to hear it with safety’. (, )

The suggestion that the people might have to undergo a process ofcultural re-education before receiving political instruction, that theinculcation of manners might have to precede the reception of laws runsthrough much of the Historical and Moral View. And this is just one of theways in which Wollstonecraft moves beyond the ‘instructional’ model ofpolitical emancipation favoured by Condorcet to contemplate a more‘educational’ approach, as if the failure of the legislative period of theRevolution had forced her to rethink the rationalist equation of knowl-edge and virtue. It is worth noting, moreover, that in the passage quotedabove the ‘Declaration’ is both a prospect and a precipice: an indirectrecognition on Wollstonecraft’s part of Edmund Burke’s insight thatwhen compared with the positive concept of freedom expressed by thechivalric tradition, the revolutionary discourse of rights offered anentirely legalistic definition of liberty that was potentially quite demoral-ising in nature.46

Many republicans were to find it impossible to write progressivehistory in the aftermath of the Terror, since for a large number of fellow-travellers the spectacle of mass death, accompanied by increasing polit-


ical disappointment, had begun to call the entire project into question.Symbolically, Rabaut St Etienne’s liberal Précis historique de la RevolutionFrançaise had stopped short at , only to be completed after its author’sdeath by the monarchist historian Lacretelle jeune. In this context, it isperhaps understandable that, when she returned to England in Wollstonecraft was to abandon her Historical and Moral View in order tohelp her friend Joseph Johnson publish a handful of works recentlypenned by some of her former revolutionary acquaintances: Jean-Baptiste Louvet’s Mémoires, which told of his harrowing experiences as aproscrit on the run from the Jacobin authorities during the reign ofRobespierre, Madame Roland’s posthumous Appel à la posterité impartielle,a series of autobiographical and political writings written in prisonduring the autumn of , as well as Condorcet’s more formal andabstract Esquisse. What cannot have failed to strike Wollstonecraft, as sheread through the memoirs of Roland, was the extraordinary power ofher first-person narrative, the energy and persuasiveness of her plain-speaking style. Probably Louvet had much the same effect. But whatmust also have affected her was the explicit use which both these writersmade of the tropes and techniques of Rousseau, his confessionalrhetoric and his fictional topoi. For a writer who had sought to movebeyond her early enthusiasm for Rousseau in the early s it must havebeen a singularly intriguing experience to find Jean-Jacques beinginvoked and imitated in this way, and to such powerful effect, by writerswho were otherwise broadly sympathetic to her own ‘progressive’ posi-tion. So much so, indeed, that it may have encouraged her to rethink herattitude, not only to Rousseau’s Confessions and his Nouvelle Heloïse, butalso to the relationship between femininity and sensibility, women andwriting, for when she next came to reflect on recent European history, itwas in the context of a deliberately confessional, more openly ‘appeal-ing’ document, the Letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark of .

Set in a small community in the Swiss Alps, La Nouvelle Heloïse describeshow a friendship develops between a humble tutor, Saint-Preux, and hispupil, Julie d’Etange, the daughter of a wealthy nobleman of the region.Saint-Preux’s affection for Julie soon flames into an importunate roman-tic desire deeply inappropriate to their difference in status. Their love isbriefly consummated, but Julie subsequently repents her passion, andsomewhat theatrically embraces a life of religious piety and domestic


obedience, allowing herself to be married off to one of her father’sfriends, the middle-aged rationalist and atheist Baron de Wolmar.Almost suicidal with despair, Saint-Preux leaves the little community totravel the world, and on his return Baron de Wolmar and Julie invite himto live with them on their estate at Clarens. Clarens boasts a smoothlyregulated domestic economy that Rousseau clearly intends us to regardas a model of fairness and rationality. During his stay, Julie encouragesSaint-Preux to sublimate and diffuse his desire for her, to rechannel hisardour into a broader network of social and domestic affections. Herinfluence gradually resocialises him, healing him back into the commu-nity as a whole.

During the course of this section of the novel, we are made aware ofthe extent to which Julie has been transformed into an instrument ofWolmar’s benevolent dictatorship, nurturing and shaping the affectionsof the community at the wine-harvest while he discreetly monitors itsmoral economy from a distance. At the end of the novel she falls fatallyill, and as she dies she is moved to confess her continuing love for Saint-Preux. Just before she expires she makes him promise to stay on atClarens after her death to tutor her children. In this way the novel offersus an ambiguous ending that it is possible to read either in terms of thereturn of repressed ‘revolutionary’ desire, or as the final stage in thedomestication and sublimation of Saint-Preux’s passion. Julie’s deathitself can be read either as a form of republican martyrdom, or as anexample of Christian renunciation: ‘No, I shall not leave you’, she writesto Saint-Preux in her last letter, ‘I shall wait for you. The virtue thatseparated us on earth will unite us in the eternal resting-place. I die withthis sweet expectation: only too happy to purchase at the expense of mylife the right to love you forever without crime, and to tell you that onemore time!’47

Such was the popularity and influence of La Nouvelle Heloïse that Burkesingled it out for special consideration in the extended attack onRousseau in his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly of . For notonly was it Rousseau’s best-known work, it was also the work in whichhis paradoxical theories had been given their most seductive form, henceit was especially needful of rebuke. In Burke’s eyes, it was a veritablesource-book of revolutionary morality: its account of the love-affairbetween a humble tutor and the daughter of a wealthy Swiss aristocratwas full of ‘metaphysical speculations blended with coarse sensuality’.48

It was not surprising, therefore, that the French Revolutionaries hadused it to propagate those principles by which every servant might think


it if not his duty at least his privilege to betray his ‘master’, principleswhich tended ‘to destroy all the tranquillity and security of domestic life;turning the asylum of the house into a gloomy prison.’49 That this novelwas not merely Burke’s bête-noire becomes evident when we look at theAnti-Jacobin pamphlets of the later s. In the early sections of herStrictures, for example, Hannah More expressed her concern that, withthe decline of the English radical movement since , Jacobinism hadnot disappeared, it had merely gone underground. In this light, she sawthe continued influence of Rousseau’s novel among writers and readersalike as a very dangerous sign, primarily because of the specious appealof his celebrated prose style:

Novels, which used chiefly to be dangerous in one respect, are now become mis-chievous in a thousand. They are continually shifting their ground, and enlarg-ing their sphere, and are daily becoming vehicles of wider mischief. Sometimesthey concentrate their force, and are at once employed to diffuse destructivepolitics, deplorable profligacy, and impudent infidelity. Rousseau was the firstpopular dispenser of this complicated drug, in which the deleterious infusionwas strong, and the effect proportionably fatal. For he does not attempt toseduce the affections but through the medium of the principles. He does notpaint an innocent woman ruined, repenting, and restored; but with a far moremischievous refinement, he annihilates the value of chastity, and with per-nicious subtlety attempts to make his heroine appear almost more amiablewithout it.50

The explicit opposition of Burke and More only serves to suggest thatthe novel enjoyed continued favour in this period, and to indicate thatits popularity was always potentially linked to its supposed political char-acter. Again, as in the case of the Confessions, it was a case of the mediumbecoming the message. In her Lettres sur . . . Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Germaine de Staël had been prepared to acknowledge that the skeletonof the narrative was not perhaps as edifying as it might have been, butshe was also determined to assert that if it did not possess a moral ‘plan’then it nevertheless had a very moral ‘effect’, inspiring the very noblestof sentiments even while relating the most troubling of stories. Mostimportantly of all, in her opinion, the novel exemplified the power oflove as a force for improvement; functioning not as a tale of seduction,but as a treatise on the power of female aesthetic education, the reshap-ing of male sensuality into social virtue.51

The novel was quite unlike any of Rousseau’s other works in thisrespect. The neo-Spartan emphasis of the Contrat Social was not nearlyso much in evidence, and nor was the chauvinism which characterised


the last book of Emile. Indeed, in the early stages of the novel, there wasa substantial critique of the tyrannical treatment of women by fathersand lovers alike, and in the second half, an extended analysis of theactive role which ‘bourgeois’ women might play as moral leaders of thecommunity. Admittedly, there was also much in the work that manyeighteenth-century feminists would have found pernicious. As has beenmentioned above, a substantial section of Mary Wollstonecraft’sVindication of the Rights of Woman had been devoted to a critique of itsromantic idealism. Nevertheless, for de Staël the novel still provided akind of model for the ideal role of an enlightened woman in modernsociety, and it was on these terms that she continued to recommend itthroughout her career. It can even be seen to have inspired one of herown novels Corinne, ou L’Italie (), which explores the character ofanother exceptional young woman who grows up to become the moti-vator, mediator and mentor of the various men who gather around her.Partly de Staël’s enthusiasm for the novel was a product of her peculiar,paradoxical, and somewhat contradictory form of feminism, which washeavily influenced by the French salon culture of the mid-eighteenthcentury. In broad terms she acquiesced in the notion that women wereprimarily intended for domestic and maternal duties, but she did alsobelieve that there ought to be exceptions to this general rule: mostnotably, talented women, by which she meant women of her own ratherprivileged social and educational background, should be free to pursuetheir own careers, become authors, and take a full part in public life. AndJulie was a highly positive role model for de Staël in this respect, for shewas in many ways a revolutionary version of the salon hostess, a womanwhose muse-like qualities were put in the service of the entire commu-nity and not merely an exclusive clique.

What is more, many contemporary commentators were to share deStaël’s enthusiastic appraisal of the novel as a fundamentally libertariantext, to the extent that it remained extremely popular in radical circlesthroughout the revolutionary period, not least among female readers, forwhom it provided an empowering alternative to the notoriously mis-ogynistic Emile. But for all its continued popularity, interpretations of it,and allusions to it, did undergo a significant change during the course ofthe s. In the early years of the Revolution, for example, it was mostoften seen in its political aspect, as a fully-blown essay, in fictional form,on the rehaping of private feeling into public virtue. Friedrich Schiller’sLetters on the Aesthetic Education of Man of – is a case in point.Although ostensibly a theoretical treatise on the educative capacity of


aesthetics, its epigraph was explicitly borrowed from La Nouvelle Heloïse –‘If it is reason which makes a man, it is feeling which leads him’ – as ifto draw attention to the fact that the abstract ménage à trois that Schillerwas proposing between Sense, Reason and Aesthetic Education had itsfictional counterpart in the educational arrangement between Saint-Preux, Wolmar and Julie that was attempted at Clarens. Expresslywritten out of a desire to try and recuperate the revolutionary ideal afterthe failure of the first phase of constitutional legislation, Schiller’s trea-tise was directly contemporaneous with the Festival of the SupremeBeing, and like Robespierre, its author can be seen to have beenreflecting on the political lessons to be learned from Wolmar’s use ofJulie to re-educate the modern populace. In order to improve the morallife of the individual, Schiller argued, culture would have to interposeitself between the subject in his capacity as a sensuous, living being, andthe onerous demands of public virtue, acting as ‘a third character, whichakin to both the others, might prepare a transition from the rule of mereforce to the rule of law, and which, without in any way impeding thedevelopment of moral character, might on the contrary serve as a pledgein the sensible world of a morality as yet unseen’.52 And by choosing anepigraph from La Nouvelle Heloïse Schiller was able to use an extremelywell-known novel in order to reinforce his point, since the figure of Juliewas so obviously such a perfect personification of this ‘third character’.

In the latter part of the decade, however, when La Nouvelle Heloïse wasdiscussed or invoked, there was far less emphasis placed upon Clarens asa template of utopia. Instead, there were many more references to thosesections of the novel, in which libertarian sentiment had expressed itselfin a romantic rather than a legislative manner. In the memoirs of theproscribed Girondins, many of which were written either in prison or inexile during the fatal months of the Terror, we find La Nouvelle Heloïsebeing put to new uses. In the writings of Marie-Jeanne Roland, forexample, the character of Julie actually provided the lens through whichshe interpreted her revolutionary experience, but in a manner verydifferent from either Schiller or de Staël.

Having been inspired at a very early age by the figure of Rousseau’sheroine, Roland spent much of her early epistolary life in emulation ofher literary character. And after the outbreak of the Revolution itself,she began to carry out the role of Julie on a more political level, hostingone of the leading radical salons of the early s, at which she enter-tained many of the leading republicans of the age, includingRobespierre himself, who was at one time a close friend and ally. And


later, she was to become increasingly involved in the business of govern-ment itself, offering her husband, Jean-Marie Roland, the Minister ofthe Interior, an enormous amount of unofficial and undisclosed helpwith the propaganda work of the new Bureau de l’esprit public. Given heroutstanding talents, and the considerable if largely covert influence sheexerted upon ministerial politics during –, it was not perhaps sur-prising that when the Jacobins turned against women in public lifebetween –, Marie-Jeanne was to fall foul of the virulent popularpress, rapidly coming to be seen as a kind of Girondin version of thatother female political intriguer Marie-Antoinette. After the proscriptionof the Gironde, and her own subsequent imprisonment, she began tofeel increasingly betrayed by the Revolution in general and byRobespierre in particular, whom she had once considered to be an‘honest man’. And she also grew increasingly frustrated by the licentious-ness and barbarity of the French people as a whole; so much so, in fact,that she regularly punctuated her prison memoirs with heartfeltharangues:

Liberty – She is for proud spirits who despise death and yet know how to admin-ister it. She is not made for this corrupt nation which only leaves the bed ofdebauchery or the jaws of misery in order to brutalise itself in licentiousness,reddening as it wades through the endless streams of blood flowing from thescaffolds! She is not made for such feeble individuals who try to preserve theirown lives while the fatherland laments, as civil wars ravage it, and destructionand fear are spreading everywhere. 53

What is striking about Roland’s ‘Dernières Pensées’, which werewritten at the very end of her life, when she must have known her dayswere numbered, is that for all their explicit opposition to the JacobinTerror, they are still strikingly close to Robespierre in their ideologicalcharacter. Contrary to the example of many members of the Gironde,they do not condemn the French for their use of political violence, andnor do they criticise the revolutionary cult of public sacrifice, insteadthey constitute an appeal for a return to true republican values, such asvirtue and restraint. And Robespierre himself was often to strike a sim-ilarly neo-Spartan note in his speeches at this time. Given this resem-blance, it is interesting that, apart from listing its excesses, one of theprimary means by which Roland differentiated herself from the Jacobinregime, was by rehearsing and recycling the romantic topos of LaNouvelle Heloïse. In the last months of her life she wrote many ardentletters to her lover, the proscribed Girondin François Buzot, letters whichMary Wollstonecraft herself may have helped to deliver. Primarily, of


course, these were private letters. But there is also a great deal of inter-nal and external evidence to suggest that they were also intended forposthumous publication, and that Jeanne-Marie considered them as apossible means of intervening upon the revolutionary debate, as well asa settling of her private accounts. And the likelihood of this increaseswhen we observe the highly self-conscious way in which she recreates thedynamic between Julie and Saint-Preux in these last letters, creating afield of republican transparency between herself and her lover in orderto dramatise the opacity of the political situation which continued to sur-round them. For example, in a particularly heart-rending letter writtenshortly before her execution, she undertook a direct pastiche of Julie’sfinal words:

And you whom I dare not name! – You who will be better known one day whenthe world laments our common misfortune; whom the most terrible of passionshad not prevented from respecting the barriers of virtue, will it afflict you to seeme precede you to that place where nothing can prevent us from being united?– There dreadful prejudices, arbitrary exclusions, hateful passions, and mani-fold tyrannies will be no more [. . .] Adieu, no, I am not leaving you; to leavethe world is for us to come together.54

In allusions such as this, it will be immediately evident that lessemphasis was being placed upon Julie’s gradual training of Saint-Preux,and more on the stubborn survival of their youthful romantic longing, alonging which was explicitly defined against the imperfectly ‘utopian’structure by which they were surrounded, without being any the less‘political’ or ‘republican’ in feeling on that account. And by this means,Roland was able to use ‘private’ feeling as a means of criticising thepublic tyranny of the First Republic without threatening her credentialsas a hard-line defender of republican values. As she herself said in oneof her letters: ‘Unknown and ignored I can, in silence and retreat, dis-tract myself from the horrors which are tearing apart the bosom of mycountry, and await, in the practice of private virtue, the conclusion tothese evils’.55 Ultimately, of course, given her status as a married womanwith a lover, Roland’s claim to private virtue was really rather problem-atic, and thus her publisher Bosc decided to suppress almost all of thereferences to Buzot in the first edition of the Mémoires, for fear that itmight harm the Girondin cause. But even in the published version,Roland was still to able to offer her private affections as an emblem ofpublic virtue under siege.

A similar emphasis was evident in another one of the Girondin nar-ratives of the period, Jean-Baptiste Louvet’s Mémoires, which were


published shortly after his emergence from hiding in –. And in thiscase there was no need for the same degree of censorship. For through-out this harrowing tale of persecution and pursuit, Louvet was able tooffer his love for his own absent wife Lodoiska as a kind of utopianlonging, comparing it to the thwarted affection of the exiled Saint-Preuxin the early part of Rousseau’s novel. Describing his exile in the Juraduring –, he was not afraid to evoke the descriptions ofSwitzerland contained in ‘the sublime and virtuous Rousseau’, nor toidentify himself closely with Rousseau’s protagonist, as he rangedamong the savage rocks of Meillerie in anxious anticipation of a recon-ciliation with his beloved. And in this way he was able to give hisenforced exile a republican pedigree, distracting attention from the factthat in moving backwards and forwards across the border withSwitzerland, he had transformed himself, if only briefly, into an émigré.56

Thus for both Roland and Louvet the love of Julie and Saint-Preux wasa model of republican martyrdom, a consolation for the failure of therevolution, and a promise of future liberty and equality. And selectiveallusion to the novel was crucial in helping to give their memoirs a prop-erly public status, for it was only by drawing upon the novel’s representa-tion of love as the germ of civic feeling that Louvet and Roland wereable to use their own experiences of romantic estrangement to affirmthat, in spite of the direful effects of persecution and suffering, publicvirtue was still alive and well in France, and no less hardy for having beentemporarily incubated in a private form.

As is well known, Wollstonecraft’s Letters [from] Sweden, Norway andDenmark began life as a series of personal missives written to herestranged American lover Gilbert Imlay, a merchant and entrepreneurwith whom she had lived during her time in France.57 Only later werethey collated, augmented and revised into a full-scale travel bookoffering an extensive analysis of the social conditions then prevailingamong the little-known countries of Scandinavia. Condorcet hadpraised travel writing in the Esquisse as a valuable contribution to histori-cal progress, considering that a comparative study of the social customsand institutions of different nations would contribute greatly to theaugmentation and advancement of knowledge. In this context,Wollstonecraft’s Letters could be seen as an attempt to move beyondpolitical disappointment into a new realm of philosophical enquiry,


incorporating elements of the emergent discourse of social science intothe popular genre of travel literature. But simply to interpret the lettersin this way would be to neglect their highly personal character, for thesociological observations and political reflections scattered throughoutthe text are always made subservient to the self-consciously confessionalform of the whole. Nevertheless, it is my contention that this autobio-graphical element does not offer a repudiation or rejection of the projectof social perfectibility, but a tactical manipulation of it. It is an indul-gence in the personal as a means of intervening upon the political, andin this respect, like the Girondin memoirs, an intriguing return to, andrenegotiation of, the sentimental writings of Rousseau.

As befits the circumstances of their composition, Wollstonecraft’sLetters offer a series of ever-changing impressions of the societies sheencountered in Scandinavia. Upon her first arrival in Norway, shepraises the simplicity of its peasant life, feeling herself briefly trans-ported back to the ‘golden age’. She then goes on to describe how hersurroundings encourage her to forget the horrors she had witnessedduring the French Revolution, rekindling her waning ‘enthusiasm’ forsocial improvement. And she also relates how the sentiments arising inher as a result of the contemplation of the beautiful forms of natureserve as a reminder of her affection for her fellow-beings, and in particu-lar her loved ones, making her feel less like a ‘particle broken off frommankind’. As her trip develops, however, ‘primitivist’ effusions such asthis are increasingly forced to compete with sentiments more straightfor-wardly ‘progressive’ in nature. Despite being intrigued by various detailsand practices of Scandinavian life, Wollstonecraft increasingly affirmsthe absolute superiority of modern civilization to rural simplicity, asso-ciating it with the refinement of enjoyment and the raising of moralconsciousness. And as the Letters continue, this ‘progressive’ voicebecomes more pronounced, as the author becomes more than ever con-vinced that the virtues of a nation bear ‘an exact relation’ to its scientificimprovements.

One curious feature of the Letters, however, and something which anumber of previous critics have often commented upon, is the extent towhich Wollstonecraft suppresses what many of her contemporaries sawas the necessary link between commercial development and socialimprovement. For many eighteenth-century commentators commercewas one of the most powerful motors of civilisation, fuelling travel andenquiry, encouraging different peoples from different lands to relate toone another in ever more peaceable, friendly and mutually beneficial


ways. Others, by contrast, most notably Rousseau, considered com-merce simply as the breeding-ground of luxury and selfishness. As forWollstonecraft, it seems that during the s she grew progressivelycloser to the position adopted on this issue by her future partner WilliamGodwin, who was at one and the same time a firm champion of ration-al improvement and a critic of the general effects of commercialexchange. The structural irony that haunts Wollstonecraft’s Letters, ofcourse, is that while its author celebrates travel as a catalyst of enlight-ened enquiry and general social improvement, she neglects to mentionthat her trip to Scandinavia had been both prompted and facilitated bythe principle of trade, for it was in essence a commercial errand forImlay which had taken her to the Baltic states in the first place.Regardless of this, however, for Wollstonecraft as for Godwin, ‘enlight-enment’ was a self-conscious project, not a mere side-effect of thegeneral expansion of trade and industry.

In the Letters this philosophic spirit is necessarily somewhat aloof fromthe world, but it is also oddly in tune with the sights and sounds ofnature, the beauty and harmony of which, in Wollstonecraft’s mind,effectively anticipate the social improvements of the future, thus devel-oping into a source of utopian sentiment at once powerful and painful.As in Godwin, therefore, Wollstonecraft’s ideal society is at one and thesame time a realm of free enquiry, a site of open debate and discussion,a highly ‘civilized’ place and a place of almost pastoral simplicity, a socialorder transparent not only to itself but also to nature. Unlike PoliticalJustice, however, the Letters do not fully indulge their prophetic spirit, theydo not, finally, attempt to legislate the future, and at no point doesWollstonecraft give in to the lawgiving impulse. But as we shall see, theconcept of legislation, and the figure of the legislator, is nevertheless acrucial element in the text.

From the very beginning, Wollstonecraft makes much of her solitari-ness, and the people that she meets are highly conscious of it too. Indeedshe often has the impression that she is all the more interesting to theScandinavians because of her unusual status, as a single woman travel-ling alone in a foreign country. Yet she does not merely explore her soli-tude, she also exploits it, and in a number of interesting ways. Partly sheuses it to dramatise her own emotional isolation, her estrangement fromthe rest of mankind. But also, in a distinct but related move, she uses itto indulge a fantasy of herself as a Rousseauvian législateur. As we saw inchapter , in the Contrat Social the legislator was a fundamentally solitaryfigure, an outsider, a foreigner, whose very foreignness, indeed, was what


gave him the capacity to function as a disinterested lawgiver. And in hervarious encounters in Scandinavia, Wollstonecraft actively seeks to iden-tify herself, on a number of separate occasions, with this singular type,sympathising with the reforming instincts of Queen Matilda, forexample, but also, and more significantly, implicitly comparing herselfwith the aforementioned ‘Peruvian pair’, having conspicuously droppeddown, like them, as if from the sky, into the very heart of a primitive andalien society.

Essentially this comparison is intended to point a contrast: thatwhereas the Peruvian pair effectively managed to improve the mannersof a nation, Wollstonecraft’s attempts to improve Scandinavian domes-tic practice fall on decidedly deaf ears. Without the additional help of a‘pious fraud’, it seems, reason alone is not yet powerful enough tocounter the forces of custom and prejudice. There is a consolation forthis, however, which is the discovery by Wollstonecraft of another kindof power, the power that solitude brings, its capacity to generate sym-pathy among her readers as well as her acquaintances, a discovery whichhas implications not only for her personal but also for her literary char-acter. For increasingly in the Letters Wollstonecraft begins to adopt thepersona of the solitary legislator, whose sentimental idealism comes torepresent a kind of utopian principle in itself, as well as an index of theunregenerate nature of the society which surrounds her. As in the fifthof Rousseau’s Rêveries, the ‘state’ of nature is represented as the onlyplace in which the solitary legislator feels at home; it alone constitutes arealm in harmony with his or her own internal ‘nature’. But the compari-son with Rousseau does not end there, for in their very openness anddirectness, Wollstonecraft’s Letters, like the Confessions and La NouvelleHeloïse, can be seen to function not merely as an expression of sensibil-ity but also as a test of it. For in the published version of the text,Wollstonecraft’s impassioned plea for Imlay to cast aside his ‘commer-cial spirit’ is, of course, directed as much to the reader as to her recalci-trant lover – a characteristically Rousseauvian manoeuvre, whichundermines the traditional barrier between author and audience, andeffectively offers an extremely powerful ‘negative’ version of the utopianspirit.

Of course, the fact that the author of the Letters is writing to an actualinterlocutor, and not, as in Rousseau’s Rêveries, simply ruminating in aself-created vacuum, makes a huge difference. One of the reasons whyWollstonecraft’s use of the letter-form is so powerful is that she employsit in such a way as to recall, but also differentiate herself from, several of


its more celebrated former practitioners: Sterne’s Yorick, of course, butalso Werther, and most of all, perhaps, the two lovers from La NouvelleHeloïse. That the monologic structure of the Letters recalls the atmosphereof inner suffering depicted in Goethe’s novel was to some degreeacknowledged by Godwin when he referred to its author as a kind of‘female Werther’ in his Memoirs of . And what de Staël was to say ofGoethe’s hero – that he was an example of the fate of a noble spiritsuffering under a bad social order – was also preeminently true ofWollstonecraft, and of the way in which she presented herself. But aboveand beyond this, there is a broader allusion in the Letters to one of themost celebrated sections of La Nouvelle Heloïse: that part of the novelwhen Saint-Preux is forced to leave Clarens because of the importunacyof his desires for Julie, temporarily retreating into exile at Meillerie, a sitehigh up in the mountains on the other side of the lake, where he writesto her of the simple, virtuous life of the people of the Pays de Vaud, whohave helped in various ways to soften his love-lorn anguish. And inreworking the topos of these famous letters, once again Wollstonecraftinvokes Rousseau in order to distance herself from him, firstly by takingthe man’s part in the sentimental narrative, the part of the active exile;secondly by refusing to idealise her ‘primitive’ retreat; and thirdly by pro-viding only one half of the dialogue – emphasising her role as a passion-ate, energetic, inquiring woman, while also dramatising the culpablenon-responsiveness of her correspondent.

It is important, therefore, to read Wollstonecraft’s continued commit-ment to rational instruction over and above the temptations of ‘piousfrauds’ in the context of the ongoing project of personal re-educationundertaken by the Letters as a whole, for throughout her discussion of thesocial and cultural conditions prevailing in the Norway, Sweden andDenmark, and the means by which they might be improved, she makesa series of attempts to ‘improve’ her correspondent and former loverGilbert Imlay by seeking to cajole him, tease him, even to seduce him tovirtue. Eschewing Robespierrist ‘education’ on a public level, sheremained seriously committed to it at the level of the private. And thisbecomes increasingly explicit in the closing letters, where Wollstonecraftdescribes her estrangement from her ‘demon lover’ as a direct result ofhis passion for commercial speculation. In the Historical and Moral Viewshe had accused commerce of dividing the French people; in the Lettersshe charged it with dividing her lover from herself, reworkingRousseau’s classic opposition between artificial corruption and naturalvirtue:


Ah! shall I whisper to you – that you – yourself, are strangely altered, since youhave entered deeply into commerce – more than you are aware of – neverallowing yourself to reflect, and keeping your mind, or rather passions, in a con-tinual state of agitation – Nature has given you talents, which lie dormant, orare wasted in ignoble pursuits – You will rouse yourself, and shake off the viledust that obscures you, or my understanding, as well as my heart, deceives me,egregiously – only tell me when? (, –)

In the preface to the Discours sur l’Inégalité Rousseau had representedthe historical decline of natural man in terms of the ancient statue ofGlaucus, a monument ‘so disfigured by time, seas and tempests, that itlooked more like a wild beast than a god’.58 Like Glaucus, Imlay hasbeen disfigured by history, his natural virtue so obscured by commercialtrafficking that he has become scarcely recognisable. And thus one cansee that, despite her ostensible opposition to Rousseau’s political theory,Wollstonecraft was still prepared to redeploy his rhetoric of regenera-tion, reworking images from a public text such as the Discours in a res-olutely private context, in order to give force and emphasis to hercritique of Imlay. And in many ways this is quite characteristic of theway in which Rousseau’s criticism of contemporary society acquired thestatus of a regulative principle in the work of a number of English andFrench radicals after the Jacobin Terror, of the way in which his ideal ofsimplicity and transparency passed from public policy back into therealm of sentimental literature, no longer a viable alternative to moderncommercial society, but still powerful as a form of cultural critique.

Throughout the Letters Wollstonecraft cultivates the language of soli-tary sensibility as a means of cajoling and berating the conscience of herreader. So too in the Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire of Rousseau haddefended his retreat into solitary exile by declaring that society hadforced him to live alone. In another and more transparent world, heargued, he would have been truly sociable; as things were he was fatedto be a solitary. Then he proceeded to recount the rural pleasures thathe would never have known had it not been for his enemies.59 In this wayhe suggested to his readers that at some future point they might be ableto share in his meditative ecstasies, while insinuating that they wouldhave to undergo a species of moral regeneration in order to do so.Rehearsing Rousseau’s rhetoric of self-martyrdom, Wollstonecraftopposed her own internal joys to the slings and arrows of an increasinglyoutrageous fortune. She too expressed her ambivalence concerning theparadoxical freedoms of exile: ‘I cannot immediately determine,’ shesays at one point, in a phrase that recalled Rousseau’s characteristic


phraseology, ‘whether I ought to rejoice at having turned over in this soli-tude a new page in the history of my own heart’ (, ).60 In this wayshe invites the reader to share the fruits of her newfound inwardness,while suggesting that they could only be shared by a conscience that wassympathetically open to hers.

As many commentators have pointed out, ‘sensibility’ is seen morepositively in the Letters than in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In herclassic study of Wollstonecraft’s work, Mary Poovey has described thisshift in terms of a movement away from the ultra-rationalist feminismof the early s towards a new formulation which acknowledged theimproving power of feeling. Poovey interprets this in biographical terms,seeing Wollstonecraft’s growing acceptance of her own feminine sus-ceptibility as a courageous response to the trials and tribulations of herrelationship with Imlay.61 But it is also possible to see Wollstonecraft’s‘brave new vulnerabillity’ in rather more polemical terms. In the case ofthe Letters from Sweden, the wounded persona adopted by the author canbe interpreted as a self-conscious manipulation of the language ofsensibility designed to make a tactical intervention in the revolutionarydebate. As William Godwin put it in his Memoirs of the Author of theVindication of the Rights of Woman of : ‘If ever there was a book cal-culated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to bethe book’. Godwin was remarkably astute in this respect, recognisingthat behind Wollstonecraft’s peculiar mixture of confident socialobservation and vulnerable personal reflection there lay a deliberatestrategy of aesthetic education.

As we have seen, in the months and years that followed the death ofRobespierre, a number of republicans and fellow-travellers were drawnto reflect on the theory of aesthetic education as a means of teachingpolitical virtue. In her treatise De la Littérature of Germaine de Staëldeveloped a thoroughly feminised conception of aesthetic education tocontrast with that of Friedrich Schiller. She blamed the excesses of theTerror upon the exclusion of women from political and cultural life thathad taken place during the Jacobin period. ‘since the Revolution,’ sheargued, ‘men have thought it politically and morally worthwhile (utile) toreduce women to the most absurd mediocrity’.62 Without the mediatinginfluence of women, the pursuit of Spartan simplicity had degeneratedinto mere brutality, hence she suggested that it was time for men to stopvictimising women, and for women to stop victimising themselves, espe-cially as it was clear that they had an important role to play in the cul-tural life of the republic, restraining the competitive, political instincts of


men and promoting the aesthetic assimilation of republican values. Afervent follower of Rousseau, de Staël preferred the feminised model ofpublic education which had been developed in La Nouvelle Heloïse to theone outlined in the Lettre à d’Alembert. In her ideal vision of things, liter-ature was to be a ‘dear despot’ uniting the whole community, after themodel supplied by Julie at the wine harvest of Clarens. And like Julie, thetalented woman was to benefit from this arrangement by becoming akind of nurse-maid of reason, acquiring a respected status in the com-munity, no longer condemned to ‘[wander] through her solitary exis-tence like an Indian pariah’, as she was under the Jacobins (–).63

Like de Staël’s talented woman, Wollstonecraft depicts her restlessmovement from social observation to introspective reflection, from thecity to the mountains and back, as an unrequited love of the ideal.Choosing not to inform the reader of the commercial errand she wasrunning in Scandinavia for Imlay, she invites him or her to imagine thather peregrinations are prompted not by business but by emotional neces-sity.64 Even in the published version of the Letters it is clear that the authorhas been transformed into a vagabond by the indifference of her lover,so that she is forced ‘to hide the starting tears, or to shed them on mypillow, and close my eyes on a world where I was destined to wanderalone’. Indeed it is the perennial condition of a woman of intelligenceand fine feeling, she suggests, to be restless and without a home:

My imagination hurries me forward to seek an asylum in such a retreat from allthe disappointments I am threatened with; but reason drags me back, whisper-ing that the world is still the world, and man the same compound of weaknessand folly, who must occasionally excite love and disgust, admiration and con-tempt. (, –)

In both sets of Girondin memoirs the Jacobin obstacle that separatedLouvet and Roland from their respective lovers was what defined eachrelationship as the symbol of a distant vision of transparency, liberty andequality. Similarly in the Letters from Sweden, the author’s unrequitedpassion for her American lover is worked up into an emotion of politicalsignificance. The difference lies in the fact that in Wollstonecraft’sversion Imlay was himself the obstacle. In this way this radical woman’scontinuing attachment to, and increasing frustration with, the failedRevolution is figured metonymically in her relationship with her demonlover.65 Thus, while from the standpoint of the rational legislatorWollstonecraft could still affirm the principle of social perfectibility,when viewing things from the perspective of the solitary woman, it


seemed as distant as ever. And it was this that led her to reflect ironicallyupon her daughter’s future, in one of the most celebrated passages of theLetters:

You know that as a female I am particularly attached to her – I feel more thana woman’s fondness and anxiety, when I reflect on the dependent and oppressedstate of her sex. With trembling hand I shall cultivate sensibility, and cherishdelicacy of sentiment, lest, whilst I lend fresh blushes to the rose, I sharpen thethorns that will wound the breast I would fain guard – I dread to unfold hermind, lest it should render her unfit for the world she is to inhabit – Haplesswoman! what a fate is thine! (, )

There was no point in educating her daughter to be intelligent andsensitive, Wollstonecraft suggested, for it would only turn her into anoutcast like her mother. In passages like this, it is clear the extent to whichfeminine sensibility has been deliberately radicalised.66 It is no longer, asit was in the Vindication, a faculty complicit with the institutions of patri-archy, it is a utopian principle, an educative force, a symbol of the gapbetween the present state of society and one of true liberty and equal-ity. In this way Wollstonecraft succeeds in reinflecting Rousseau’s lan-guage of solitary martyrdom, and supplying it with an entirely newmeaning. Like Robespierre in his final speeches, she effectively reworksthe former’s confessional rhetoric in order to develop a politics of dis-appointment. And so, despite the fact that it could no longer be offeredas a microcosm of the general will, in texts like this the Rousseauvian selfcontinued to survive as a political gadfly on the back of contemporarysociety, a means of privately incubating the revolutionary ideal at a timeof retreat and retrenchment.


Strangling the infant Hercules: Malthus and thepopulation controversy

With his Essay on the Principle of Population of Thomas Malthus madeone of the most significant and lasting contributions to the counter-revolutionary cause in England, as important, in its way, as Burke’sReflections of . Seeking to capitalise on the perceptible decline of theBritish Jacobin movement during the late s, and on the consequentwaning of radical enthuasism among the English middle class, Malthusthought he saw an opportunity to settle the ongoing debate on theFrench Revolution forever, by subjecting its fundamental principles to athoroughly mathematical – and therefore unanswerable – critique.Primarily, he sought to do this by exploding the radical assumption thatinstitutions were the main cause of human happiness or misery: ‘inreality,’ he wrote, ‘they are mere feathers that float on the surface incomparison with those deeper seated causes of impurity that corrupt thesprings and render turbid the whole stream of human life’.1

Taking issue wth the discourse of perfectibility that had been popular-ised by Godwin and Condorcet in the first half of the revolutionarydecade, Malthus argued that man was above all things an animal drivenby sexual instinct and the need for food, fatally incapable of gainingrational control of his bodily needs and passions. He stated his case withquasi-scientific precision: ‘Firstly, that food is necessary to the existenceof man. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary andwill remain nearly in its present state.’ And by introducing his theory inthe form of a ratio, he sought to pass it off as a statement of objectivetruth: ‘Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintancewith numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparisonwith the second . . . This implies a strong and constantly operating checkon population from the difficulty of subsistence’ (). Society would

never be able to free its inhabitants from want, he contested, in an argu-ment that was as controversial as it was striking, because it was anabsolute law of nature that population would always press upon theexisting food supply. In his eyes, it was impossible for men to restraintheir urge to reproduce; only vice and misery – by which he meantillness, disease and death – would ever be able to keep population at astable level, for if any nation were to produce more food than its citizensrequired, more children would immediately appear to swallow up thesurplus. This meant that there was at the very heart of the human condi-tion an anti-utopian element deeply inimical to the cause of perfectibil-ity. Even Godwin’s anarchist utopia, assuming it could ever be achieved,would not be immune from the cruel calculus of the population princi-ple, since its régime of ease and plenty would inevitably lead to over-population, and this in turn would result in the eventual return of socialinequality and the reinstitution of private property.

The impact of Malthus’s Essay upon political debate in Englandcannot be over-emphasised. Indeed it struck many of the leadingmembers of the English Jacobin movement with the force of a truecounter-revolution. During the early s the philosophical radicalismof the French and Scottish Enlightenment had been considered to beeminently compatible with the utopianism of the French Revolution. Inthe work of figures such as Mackintosh and Priestley in England, as wellas Condorcet in France, the new disciplines of political economy andsocial science had been put squarely in the service of the revolutionaryideal. However, almost single-handedly Malthus succeeded in changingall that, not merely by making counter-revolutionary use of discourseswhich had seemed wholly revolutionary only a few years before, but alsoby effectively appropriating them for the reactionary cause, so that itbecame very difficult, in the ensuing years, for old-style Jacobins to findany support for their egalitarian vision in the discourses and practices ofmodern political economy.

For reasons that it will be important to explore, the rise of the popula-tion principle to popularity was nothing short of meteoric. By the earlyyears of the nineteenth century Malthus’s theory had gained a largenumber of adherents, not least among the writers and editors of thathugely influential organ of Whig opinion, Francis Jeffrey’s EdinburghReview. And this in turn led to a corresponding rise in the public profileof Jeremy Bentham’s equally counter-revolutionary policies, from hisplans for the rationalisation of the legal system to his initiatives onpauper management. The effect of the rise of the new school of reform


upon English middle-class radicalism was quite devastating. Not onlydid many old-style Jacobins become increasingly alienated fromworking-class politics during this period (partly as a result of the Pittite‘Terror’ of the late s, which had forced the dissolution of most ofthe old political clubs and corresponding societies, and partly out of agrowing fear of Parisian ‘sans-culottisme’), but they also becameincreasingly divided against themselves, with a split opening up betweenunrepentant ‘enthusiasts’ such as William Godwin, WilliamWordsworth, John Thelwall and William Hazlitt, who were to remaincommitted to the revolutionary ideals of , and new-style ‘progres-sive’ reformers, men such as Samuel Romilly and Francis Place whoincreasingly followed the teachings of Bentham and Malthus. Onepurpose of this chapter is to show how this fissure within English poli-tics effectively reproduced the split at the heart of French middle-classJacobinism, how it was shot through with the same feeling of fratricidalbetrayal. The other is to begin to explore the peculiarly frustrated,fragmented and inward-looking nature of English Jacobinism inthe immediate aftermath of Malthus’s Essay, which forms the back-ground and context for Wordsworth and Hazlitt’s subsequent ‘politics ofconfession’.

In the years following a wave of bad harvests, coupled with theeffects of the Revolutionary war, exacerbated rural distress and urbandiscontent in Britain and Ireland. The crisis provoked an extendedpolemical controversy, which increasingly shifted the focus of the revolu-tion debate from legal and political to economic and fiscal affairs. TomPaine’s Agrarian Justice (), which was written in response to a sermonby the Bishop of Llandaff on ‘the wisdom of God in having made bothrich and poor’, represented the leading republican contribution to thedebate. Incensed at the bishop’s complacency, Paine denied that povertywas divinely ordained, declaring it to be merely a function of badgovernment. Placing the right of subsistence before the right of prop-erty, he argued that landowners should be made to pay a ground rent forthe privilege of growing crops on land that nobody (strictly speaking)could own since it was ‘the free gift of the Creator common to the humanrace’. A national fund would be created through this ‘ground-rent’,which would enable a lump sum to be given to each citizen when he orshe reached the age of majority. ‘The plan here proposed’, Paine

Malthus and the population controversy

insisted, ‘will benefit all without injuring any. It will consolidate the inter-est of the republic with that of the individual.’2

In response to proposals such as this, Malthus’s highly paradoxicaland yet remarkably powerful reply was that a redistribution of wealthwould not, ultimately, improve the lot of the poor, since it would notincrease the amount of food in the system: ‘It may appear strange, butI believe it is true that I cannot by means of money raise a poor manand enable him to live much better than he did before, without propor-tionably depressing others in the same class’ (). And his response tothe poor law policy of Pitt was equally uncompromising. After the badharvest of , and the subsequent distress which it engendered, themagistrates of Speenhamland in Berkshire had decided to supplementthe wages of the poor according to a given standard, a decision whichPitt had initially approved and offered as a model for other parishes tofollow.3 For Malthus, however, such an extension of the existing systemof poor relief actively undermined the principle of individual self-reliance. In his eyes, it was highly irresponsible for any parish to encour-age any degree of security or comfort in the poor families under itscharge, for this would merely encourage them to have more children.4

It was not that Malthus thought the poor should be left to their misery:his central argument, even in the comparatively uncompromising edition of the Essay, was that the best way to ameliorate poverty wouldbe to abolish the poor laws and to improve the workhouse system, sincethis would impel people to live more frugally, and to foster only as manychildren as they could themselves support. His intention was rather totransform radically both the temper and the terms within which reformwas henceforth to be contemplated. For example, the primary purposeof his proposed system of national education was not to inspire thepoorer classes with the spirit of ‘improvement’, but to inform them ofthe extent to which their lives were ruled by economic necessity. In hiseyes, the absolute pervasiveness of the population principle rendered itimperative that each member of the labouring class ought to be madeto understand the principles of political economy: ‘Hard as it mayappear in individual instances, dependent poverty ought to be held dis-graceful’, he wrote, ‘a labourer who marries without being able tosupport a family may in some respects be considered as an enemy to allhis fellow labourers’ (). In this way, he extended the vocational empha-sis of Condorcet’s plan of public instruction, while dispensing with thelatter’s commitment to social perfectibility:


The principal argument of this essay tends to place in a strong point of viewthe improbability that the lower class of people in any country should ever besufficiently free from want and labour to obtain any high degree of intellectualrefinement.

One consequence of the division of intellectual labour which hasbeen characteristic of western civilisation since the beginning of thenineteenth century has been that economists and social historians havealways tended to regard the classic works of political economy simply interms of their contribution to the development of economic thought.Thus, for example, Malthus’s Essay has regularly been treated as if itwere simply a set of practical suggestions designed to facilitate thetransition from an agrarian to a capitalist economy.5 Cultural historianshave been somewhat wiser in this respect, recognising that it was also anextremely wide-ranging sermon on politics, theology and social moral-ity, which sought to revolutionise contemporary attitudes to land, wealthand class, and transforming existing attitudes to the nature and value ofhuman life.6 In as well as in subsequent editions of this epoch-making treatise, Malthus advertised and introduced his work as if itwere a disinterested scientific inquiry, as if the ‘melancholy hue’ of hisvision were based on an impartial and objective sifting of the evidence;quite soon, however, this tone was dropped, and as commentators likeColeridge, Hazlitt and Cobbett were quick to recognise, the treatisetransformed itself into a Mandevillian tirade.

In the concluding chapters of the Essay this trend reaches its climaxwith the author’s outspoken assertion that ‘moral evil is absolutely nec-essary to the production of moral excellence’ (). The world would nothave been populated, Malthus argued, but for the operation of the prin-ciple of population, which in every generation has necessitated anongoing search for food, provoking activity, exertion and progress, end-lessly facilitating human endeavour. On this principle, he activelyopposed the plan of contraception offered by Condorcet (which other-wise might have been seen to negate completely the operation of thepopulation principle), solely because it removed the element of moralstruggle from the life of the subject, thus contravening God’s providen-tial plan.7 In this way Malthus can be seen not only to have naturalisedbourgeois competition, but also to have supplied it with a theologicaljustification.

From the influential eighteenth-century Anglican divine WilliamPaley, Malthus had drawn the notion that Christian morality should


manifest itself in terms of a proto-Benthamite calculation of conse-quences and not in mere effusions of the ‘conscience’.8 But he was todiffer from Paley in this insistence on the necessity of vice and misery.‘Evil no doubt exists’, Paley had argued, ‘but it is never, that we can per-ceive, the object of contrivance’.9 For Malthus, in contrast, it was one of‘the inevitable laws of our nature’ that some human beings – the idle,the weak, the incapable – must suffer from want. ‘These are the unhappypersons’, he remarked ruefully, ‘who in the great lottery of life havedrawn a blank’ ().

Nothing can appear more consonant to our reason than that those beings whichcome out of the creative process of the world in lovely and beautiful formsshould be crowned with immortality, while those that come out misshapen,those whose minds are not suited to a purer and happier state of existence,should perish and be condemned to mix again with their eternal clay. (–)

Paradoxically, however, the fact that Malthus considered poverty to benecessary and inevitable did not lessen the extent to which he saw it asa crime. This was a distinctive feature of the version of the essay,but it was by no means eradicated in the later, less overtly controversial,revisions. A notorious passage added to the edition furnishes an aptexample:

A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistencefrom his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not wanthis labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, hasno business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant coverfor him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if hedo not work upon the compassion of some of her guests. If these guests get upand make room for him, other intruders immediately appear demanding thesame favour. The report of a provision for all that come fills the hall with numer-ous claimants. The order and harmony of the feast is disturbed, the plenty thatbefore reigned is changed into scarcity; and the happiness of the guests isdestroyed by the spectacle of misery and dependence in every part of the hall,and by the clamorous importunity of those who are justly enraged at not findingthe provision which they had been taught to expect. The guests learn too latetheir error, in counteracting those strict orders to all intruders, issued by thegreat mistress of the feast, who wishing that all her guests should have plenty,and knowing that she could not provide for unlimited numbers, humanelyrefused to admit fresh comers when her table was already full.10

In a passage of striking rhetorical power and persuasiveness, Malthusgives his reader a seat at the mighty feast of human nature, only to showhow charity can cause a single intruder to grow rapidly and withoutwarning into a ravening, rapacious mass, transforming plenty into


scarcity in the blinking of an eye. No longer a Christian act offsetting theinequality of fortunes, it has suddenly been transformed into an irre-sponsible gesture exacerbating the problem of poverty, a sociallydestructive action. In encouraging his readers to identify with the guestsat the feast, Malthus strives to warn them of the disastrous consequencesof thoughtless benevolence. And he does this by preying upon a doublefear, both the fear of poverty, and the fear of being impoverished by thedependent poverty of others. At once, we can see how he might havebeen able to exert such a powerful effect upon his contemporaries, notonly because his practical proposals possessed some validity – in manyways his analysis of the old poor law was remarkably acute – but alsobecause he created a sublime fear of the mass in anybody who had any-thing to lose, setting the independent working classes against theirweaker and more precariously situated brethren. Indeed here at a locallevel we can see why the population principle had such a devastatingeffect on the minds of a whole generation, converting, in the course oftwenty years, not only huge swathes of the aristocracy and the new busi-ness class to his way of thinking, but also convincing many members ofthe lower ranks, such as independent farmers and artisans, that newsystems of pauper management based on saving schemes and the work-house would have to replace existing methods of poor relief, so that bythe middle years of the nineteenth century Malthusian ideology hadbecome a part of the Victorian social orthodoxy, much to the anger anddespair of cultural commentators such as Dickens and Carlyle.

In his Reply to Malthus of – which was produced in response tothe publication of the third edition of the Essay in the previous year –the ‘Jacobin’ essayist and critic William Hazlitt sought to counter thegrowing influence of the population theory by arguing that it was notthe persuasiveness of Malthus’s mathematial proofs which had enabledhim to gain such rapid acceptance with the reading public, but hismanipulation of post-revolutionary class anxiety. Population, inMalthus’s hands, was made to resemble an ever-growing mob of sans-culottes that was always threatening to wrest property and wealth from therespectable ranks of England, and it was this that had given him an Iago-like hold upon the public ear:

By representing population so often as an evil, and by magnifying its increasein certain cases as so enormous an evil, he raises a general prejudice against it.11

‘He has given the principle of population a personal existence’,Hazlitt declared, ‘conceiving it as a sort of infant Hercules, as one of that


terrific giant brood, which you can only master by strangling it in itscradle.’ And Population was indeed ‘an infant Hercules’ in Malthus’srepresentation, an oppressed subjectivity always capable at any momentof mushrooming from one into many, a revolutionary mass reaffirmingitself ever more powerfully after each rebuff. Taking this into account,Hazlitt considered that the only way to defuse the sublime anxiety whichMalthus had instilled was to painstakingly point out the diseased natureof these catastrophic imaginings: ‘The gentleman seems greatly alarmedat his own predictions’, he observed, before going on to suggest that likeEdgar leading Gloucester to an imaginary precipice in Shakespeare’sKing Lear, Malthus was threatening to seduce an entire generation into aneedless ‘Euthanasia’ (, , ).12

But in spite of the best efforts of writers such as Hazlitt and Godwin,Malthus’s apocalyptic vision was to inspire a long-standing fear of therevolutionary mob in the minds of the English middle-classes.Appearing first in , and then in , , , and ,each new edition of the Essay on Population seemed always to interveneupon the realm of public debate at a time of economic distress andradical agitation, as if to remind a forgetful generation of the futility ofpolitical idealism. But by the same token, it should also be pointed outthat it did also inadvertently serve to link the crises of the s and swith the revolutionary struggles of the s, a fact which was not loston essentially anti-Jacobin commentators such as the radical WilliamCobbett and the Tory Robert Southey, who both thought Malthus a pro-foundly dangerous figure because of his unwitting regeneration ofrevolutionary feeling. Paradoxically enough, therefore, especially givenits profoundly counter-revolutionary bias, in many ways the Essay actu-ally helped to perpetuate the revolutionary tradition in England in theearly years of the nineteenth century, by supplying contemporary dis-turbances with a deep historical resonance. As in Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein, so too in Malthus’s Essay, every time the grotesque figure ofrevolutionary Jacobinism was condemned to mix again with its eternalclay, it always seemed to return to haunt its author, more powerfully andmore vengefully than before.

One of the things that inflamed many former Jacobins aboutMalthus’s description of the mighty feast, was that it made it seem as ifpoverty were just a vulgar intrusion upon the consciousnesses of the rich,an invasion of the order and harmony quite properly enjoyed by thepropertied classes. In the first edition Malthus had defended this doublestandard by arguing that ‘God [was] constantly occupied in forming


mind out of matter’ (). It was in the nature of things, according tohim, that only a certain number of people in society could ever hope tolive in order and harmony, possessing the financial independence toallow them to be truly free. Thus despite the supposedly universalapplicability of the population principle, he finally came to suggest thatit was entirely right that the middle and upper classes should be able tooccupy a realm of ‘mind’ that was independent of the struggles of theworld of ‘matter’, but that the lives of the poorer members of the com-munity, by contrast, would always be ruled by material necessity. Withthis theoretical division, Malthus helped to reinforce that growing ten-dency in modern society to treat the respectable and the working classesas if they were entirely different species, a tendency that the FrenchRevolution had temporarily succeeded in retarding, without finallybeing able to destroy.13

Despite his rhetoric, however, Malthus was not really recommendingthat people who were unable to feed themselves should be left alone tostarve. Even in the first edition of the Essay, which was by far the moststrident, there was an acceptance that it might not be either possible ordesirable to abolish the poor laws immediately, and that there might wellbe occasions when the selective bestowal of charity could still be sociallybeneficial. More insidiously perhaps, he was arguing that individualsliving in any kind of proximity to poverty gave up the right to be sub-jects, and that therefore the state should cease to consider them as such.Thus his plan of identifying and then relieving the deserving poorentailed an increasingly intrusive and interventionist model of paupermanagement which was nevertheless free of any moral responsibilitytowards the objects of its supervision.14

For Malthus’s antagonists, a series of heated questions were con-stantly presenting themselves: How could he argue that human life wasfully determined by material circumstances only to conclude his essay byseeking to re-introduce the notion of moral freedom in a new and exclu-sive form? How could he declare that political institutions did not countin the question of vice and misery, while at the very same time arguingfor the abolition of the Poor Laws and the institution of county work-houses? How could he deny the right of subsistence, when he hadconfirmed the right of property? But the more they sought unsuccess-fully to draw attention to his contradictions, the more they were forcedto recognise how difficult it was going to be to reverse the conceptualrevolution he had effected, for as Hazlitt himself realised, the Essay onPopulation had almost single-handedly banished one notion of social


improvement and replaced it with another; destroying the universalprinciple of revolution and replacing it with a new policy of ‘paupermanagement’ that was ‘preached only to the poor’.15

Even as early as the late s, on the eve of the Malthusian revolu-tion, a number of innovative reformers were already at large in Britain,waiting for the opportunity to implement a change in approach. In his pamphlet Pauper Management Improved, Jeremy Bentham had envis-aged reducing rural distress and lessening the parish rate by setting up ajoint stock company to organise the maintenance and employment ofthe burdensome poor through a network of ‘industry houses’. ANational Charity Company would be endowed with certain coercivepowers ‘for apprehending all persons, able-bodied or otherwise, havingneither visible nor assignable property, nor honest and sufficient meansof livelihood, and detaining them and employing them till some respon-sible person will engage for a certain time to find them employment, andupon their quitting it, either to resurrender them, or give timely notice’.It was also to have ‘powers of apprehending non-adults of diversedescriptions, being without prospect of honest education, and causingthem to be bound to the company in quality of apprentices’.16

Bentham’s proposal envisaged each industry house possessing themultiple function of a factory, hospital, bank and house of correction. Itwas to police the desires of the poor, rewarding virtue and frugality, pun-ishing idleness and vice. In this way the industry house would instil in itsinmates a set of associations, both pleasurable and painful, that wouldultimately reinforce a respect for industry and good morals. And it woulddo this as much by cleansing and regulating the pauper’s environmentas by appealing to his moral sense. Bentham showed how his Panopticondesign was peculiarly suitable to the fulfilment of this function, for ithelped to construct each individual as a discrete object of surveillance,promoting discipline and morality:

. Morality; in as far as depends upon . Discipline: for the perfection of whichthere should be . Universal transparency. . Simultaneous inspectability atall times. . [sic] On the part of the inspectors, the faculty of being visible orinvisible at pleasure. . On the part of the building, faculty of affording separa-tion, as between class and class, to the extent of the demand, as detailed in thelast chapter. . Means of safe custody, in relation to the dangerous and otherdisreputable classes. ()

Bentham’s prose is itself an industry house of language: each num-bered cell of meaning, truncated and desiccated according to a rigorouseconomy of expression, is only rendered intelligible by the larger struc-


ture that surrounds it. And his ruthlessly efficient style reflects his ruth-lessly efficient system: at all times, he was concerned that his industryhouses should squeeze every possible drop of value out of their projectedinmates. Perhaps most significantly of all, he recommended a rigid divi-sion and separation of labour, with every pauper working for and byhimself, so that his performance could be monitored accordingly.Maximum value, it was supposed, would be gained from the spirit ofcompetition that would prevail, with Bentham holding great store bywhat he called the principle of self-supply, the idea that the paupers inan industry house would easily be able to clothe and feed themselves ifthey were managed correctly. His vision was of a regime so efficient thatit would pay for itself.17

. All-employing principle. Reasons – Health, amusement, morality, (i.e.preservation from vice and mischief) as well as economy – Not one in a hundredis absolutely incapable of all employment. Not the motion of a finger – not astep – not a wink – not a whisper – but might be turned to account, in the wayof profit, in a system of such a magnitude. ()

The contrast between Bentham and Malthus’s proposals for paupermanagement and the utopian theories of the French Revolutionaryperiod is very striking. Whereas in the early s it had seemed that thenew social science would work to eradicate poverty and social inequal-ity, after it became increasingly clear to radicals such as Hazlitt andGodwin that this apparently progressive and libertarian body of thoughtwas actually deeply complicit with the existing order. By taking the neo-scientific methodology of Condorcet one stage further, Malthus andBentham had transformed it out of all recognition. Far from merelyattempting to improve the material conditions of the poorer classes, theywere also seeking to police their everyday activities more assiduouslythan ever before. So much so, indeed, that it became increasingly clearto writers like Godwin and Hazlitt that the new discourse of philosophi-cal radicalism, for all its apparent progressivism, was actually deeply intune with the worst interests of the upper and upper-middle classes,especially on the issue of pauper management, where it justified the in-iquities of society on scientific grounds, while removing the feudalresponsibility of the rich to look after the poor.18 Malthus and Benthamhad done more than merely defend privilege socio-scientifically, theyhad made it seem as if the discourse of social science was naturally andinevitably on the side of privilege, and that any form of systematicmateralism was inextricably linked to the politics of reaction. Notsurprisingly, therefore, this elicited a fratricidal split in the broad church


of middle-class radicalism, driving a wedge between the growing bandof philosophical radicals and the few surviving English Jacobins. It is theeffect of this split upon their literary practice that I shall now seek toexplore.

To give money to beggars, William Godwin argued at the beginning ofhis essay on the subject in The Enquirer of , was to encourage anunedifying form of human behaviour that some scoundrels and trick-sters had turned into a profession. Every day one was accosted on thestreets of London by beggars, and forced to yield up one’s moneybegrudgingly, often unconvinced that one was dispensing one’s charityin the proper fashion or to the proper person:

A suspicion of duty joins itself with the desire to rid ourselves of a troublesomeintrusion, and we yield to their demand. This is not, however, an action that weview with much complacency, and it inevitably communicates a sentiment ofscepticism to the whole system.19

More than this, however, Godwin conjectured that even the indis-criminate relief of genuine paupers might be productive of ill conse-quences, primarily because, in the end, ‘men should be taught to dependupon their own exertions’. And as he warmed to his theme, Godwinrehearsed many of the arguments that Malthus was soon to make hisown: ‘To contribute by our alms to retain a man a day longer in such aprofession, instead of removing him out of it’, he argued, ‘is not an actwe can regard with much complacence’ (, ). In the first edition ofPolitical Justice () Godwin had insisted that it was an absolute moralduty for the individual to follow the course of action which contributedbest to the general well-being of society as a whole. And in the first partof the essay ‘On Beggars’ he endeavoured to follow this principle, byarguing that, strictly speaking, one should always dispense one’s charityto institutions designed to reform the deserving poor rather than to indi-vidual street beggars.

In the second half of his essay, however, he performed a dramaticvolte-face, bringing the ethical implications of systematic benevolenceradically into question. Despite having conceded that it might be moreuseful and hence more rational to refuse to relieve private beggars infavour of giving to public charities, he was finally forced to add that suchdifficulties and objections were ‘scarcely of such weight, as to induce a


man of feeling and humanity uniformly to withold his interference’.Confronted with the signs of distress, was it either possible or indeeddesirable for a man to remain impervious to the appeal being made uponhis senses and sensibilities in favour of a utilitarian calculation?Ultimately, it was surely not beneficial to make moral decisions on thebasis of such an abstract notion of philanthropy:

A virtuous man will feel himself strongly prompted to do an action, even whenthere is only a probability that it may alleviate great misery, or produce exquis-ite enjoyment. Nothing is more suspicious than a system of conduct, which,forming itself inflexibly on general rules, refuses to take the impression, andyield to the dictates of circumstances as they arise. (, )

Many commentators have often interpreted the works that Godwinproduced in the later s as moving away from the principle ofabstract benevolence recommended in Political Justice towards a model ofpublic virtue more closely grounded upon the domestic affections. Andindeed there is a fair amount of evidence for this view. In the essay ‘OnBeggars’, for example, Godwin was to comment that ‘the rule that oughtto govern us in our treatment of mankind in general seems to be bestunderstood in the case of kindred and relations. Here men are com-monly sufficiently aware that, though it is possible to dispense assistancewith too lavish a hand, yet assistance may be given, in proportion to mycapacity to assist, with much advantage and little chance of injury’ (,). Above and beyond this, however, it is possible to argue that this wasnot so much a retreat from the principle of abstract benevolence as a tac-tical shift in its mode of presentation, a change of emphasis promptedby the rise of Benthamite utilitarianism, and not by a fundamentalchange in ethical stance.20

As we saw in chapter three, even in the first edition of Political JusticeGodwin had considered ‘reason’ as the controlled exercise, rather thanthe denial, of feeling. In the aftermath of the French Revolution,however, he was often considered by radicals and reactionaries alike tobe a champion of cold rationality, and this seriously damaged his repu-tation across the political spectrum. Mindful of this, and evidentlyanxious to distinguish his notion of reason from that of Bentham andhis followers, he saw The Enquirer as an opportunity to reformulate andin some sense to re-emphasise the conscientious aspect of his own moralphilosophy. Thus in the course of the essay ‘On Beggars’, he employedthe language of sentimental morality in order to denounce the would-be utilitarian legislator:


Who art thou, that assumest to deck thy brows in frowns, and to drive away thesorrows of thy brother by imperious tones and stern rebuke? . . . the case of theman who demands my charity in the streets is often of the most pressing nature. . . and is therefore no proper field for experiments. (, )

By this means, he made a deliberate attempt to dissociate himselffrom the enthusiasm for system-building which had characterised theearly s, and of which his own Political Justice constituted an enduringproduct. He almost suggested as much in the Enquirer’s preface:

While the principles of Gallican republicanism were yet in their infancy, thefriends of innovation were somewhat too imperious in their tone. Their mindswere in a state of exaltation and ferment. They were too impatient and impetu-ous. There was something in their sternness that savoured of barbarism. Thebarbarism of our adversaries was no adequate excuse for this.21

In the second edition of Political Justice () Godwin had arguedthat the central mistake of the Jacobins had been their attempt toimpose public virtue by legislative means. Appropriately enough, there-fore, when he came to write The Enquirer in he sought to suppressany covert links between his writing and the tyrannical principles of theTerror by dropping the methodical, prescriptive, not to say ‘legislative’style which had characterised Political Justice. His ostensible purpose inThe Enquirer was still to ‘further the cause of political reform’, in thatsense, at least, he was not recanting his revolutionary principles, butsimply rehearsing his opinions more tentatively and sceptically thanbefore, repeating many of the insights of Political Justice in a moredeliberately piecemeal fashion: ‘The author has attempted only a shortexcursion at a time’, he wrote, ‘and then, dismissing that, has set outafresh upon a new pursuit’. The central purpose of Political Justice, ofcourse, had been to encourage every reader to exercise his or herprivate judgment; but the treatise itself had delivered its own privatejudgments in such a resolutely authoritarian ‘public’ manner, that in theend it had developed into an extremely imposing and authoritativeedifice. In The Enquirer, by contrast, Godwin attempted to match themedium more closely to the message, by showing the workings ofreason, but not prescribing its ultimate end. Thus he made a point ofpresenting the essays contained in the volume ‘not as dicta, but as thematerials of thinking’.

In many ways, this shift was entirely characteristic of the radicalwriting of the later s, for in the aftermath of the failure of the leg-islative phase of the French Revolution, many republicans and radicals


were to find themselves returning to the more inquiring spirit of ration-al critical debate which had characterised the bourgeois public sphereduring the latter part of the eighteenth century. Increasingly former‘Jacobins’ moved away from pamphlets and treatises and began to con-centrate on more imaginative and occasional writing, cultivating anexplicitly anti-systematic style which deliberately avoided any suggestionof legislative arrogance. In part this was an attempt to counter the anti-Jacobin charge that, like the ill-fated French, the England’s literary radi-cals were hopelessly addicted to extremes, endlessly given to despoticabstractions of thought and slavish excesses of feeling. In part, however,it was also a matter of choice, a conscious decision to differentiate them-selves not only from the constitution-mongering of the early s, butalso from the utilitarian writing of the later decade. In this respectGodwin’s Enquirer was very much of a piece with works likeWollstonecraft’s Letters of and even with Wordsworth andColeridge’s Lyrical Ballads of .

This is not to say, however, that the works of these writers were notshot through with a perceptible and sometimes painful ambivalencetowards the new school of reform. In the essay ‘On Beggars’ forexample, Godwin was clearly deeply torn between two conflictingdesires: the desire to place the exercise of social morality upon a ratio-nal and objective footing, and the desire for it to continue to be suppleand subjective in its operation, in other words, a ‘morale sensitive’. Whathe liked about the discourse of utility was its fundamentally ‘rational’nature; what he disliked was its rigidity and externality, its alienationfrom the realm of subjective moral action. Indeed in ‘On Beggars’utility-theory is represented as being of so systematic a nature that farfrom facilitating mutual intercourse and understanding between indi-viduals, it actually interposes itself between them, serving to renderthem opaque to one another, just like the first calculations of self-inter-est in Rousseau’s second Discours. And it was for this reason, perhaps, thatGodwin ultimately preferred to repose upon the notion of ‘conscience’at the end of the essay. The problem was, of course, that in this formula-tion there was little to distinguish conscience from private sentiment,that most whimsical and arbitrary form of social feeling. One way ofaccording ‘conscience’ greater objective validity would have been to seekto raise it into a form of public duty, but this would immediately haverisked repeating one of the characteristic mistakes of revolutionaryJacobinism, which had been to try and transform it into a principle oflegislation. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the conclusion to ‘On


Beggars’ is if anything rather conventional, a bland acquiescence in theprinciple of the conscience as the best guide. So much so, indeed, that itwas only in his rehearsal and subsequent repudiation of the utilitariancalculus that Godwin was able to advertise his continued commitmentto radical reform. Thus it was in the gap between the two halves of hisessay that the writer’s disappointed Jacobinism found expression, withits bifurcated structure serving as a potent reminder of the extent towhich, in the aftermath of the revolutionary Terror, a split had takenplace between the politics of conscience and the ideology of legislation.And it is in this respect that ‘On Beggars’ can be seen, above all things,as an overdetermined denial of Robespierre, bespeaking a continuingdesire for society to be transformed into a transparent community offeeling, while betraying an identifiably post-revolutionary anxiety aboutwhat would happen if one sought to legislate it into existence.

In a different way, much of the poetry written by William Wordsworthduring the late s displays the same sense of revolutionary ambiva-lence. In his blank-verse poem ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, whichwas composed in – and published in the second edition of theLyrical Ballads, Wordsworth was to launch an explicit attack upon the‘political economists [who] were about that time beginning their warupon mendicity in all its forms’.22 Like Godwin, he agreed that beggarsshould be indulged and relieved rather than incarcerated and reformed,but he was also concerned to defend the principle of charity from theonslaught of the new social science. And he did this by showing how anold beggar might play a useful role in a rural community:

But deem not this man useless. – Statesmen! yeWho are so restless in your wisdom, yeWho have a broom still ready in your handsTo rid the world of nuisances; ye proud,Heart-swoln, while in your pride ye contemplateYour talents, power and wisdom, deem him notA burthen of the earth. ’Tis Nature’s lawThat none, the meanest of created things,Of forms created the most vile and brute,The dullest or most noxious, should existDivorced from good, a spirit and a pulse of good,A life and soul to every mode of beingInseparably link’d. (lines –)

In general terms, Wordsworth’s project in the Lyrical Ballads was tooppose the dividing and rationalising impulse of the new social science


with a philosophy propounding the interconnectedness of all things, acreed that was implicitly democratic and egalitarian in its implications.He implicitly resisted Bentham’s effort to mechanise human society byrecommending that it should organise itself in accordance with theharmonious natural order. And as he was to suggest in the Preface whichhe added in , poetry was one of the most appropriate ways ofopposing the progress of the dissecting intellect, because it worked indi-rectly upon its readers, as an instrument of aesthetic education.

Appropriately enough, therefore, in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’Wordsworth’s fluid and contemplative blank verse, a medium in whicheverything was made to seem ‘inseparably linked’, offered a strikingcounterweight to the truncated prose of Pauper Management Improved:

Where’er the aged Beggar takes his rounds,The mild necessity of use compelsTo acts of love; and habit does the workOf reason; yet prepares that after-joyWhich reason cherishes. And thus the soul,By that sweet taste of pleasure unpursu’dDoth find itself insensibly dispos’dTo virtue and true goodness. (lines –)

Addressing the problem of vagrancy in a rural context, Wordsworthseeks to suggest that beggars are a valuable part of the village commu-nity, developing a notion of ‘use’ which is quite distinct from the princi-ple of bourgeois exploitation outlined by Bentham. Over the years theold beggar in the poem has been ‘used’ kindly by everyone in the village,so that he has become the means by which the community represents itsown ‘goodness’ and ‘virtue’ to itself, and it is in this sense that he ishimself profoundly ‘useful’. In this way Wordsworth used the languageof utility against the utilitarians, suggesting that the relief of beggars ina rural community did not necessarily lead its inhabitants to cultivatesentiments of social protest either for or against such figures, but oftenserved to supply them with spiritual consolation for the materialdifficulties of their own lives.

In many ways, therefore, the overall message of ‘The OldCumberland Beggar’ was implicitly democratic. Its assertion that ‘wehave all of us one human heart’ (line ) was clearly intended to carryan identifiably egalitarian weight and meaning. Nevertheless, the poem’sflirtation with the language of Christian resignation did place it in anambivalent relation to the discourse of reform, for from the argumentthat beggars fulfilled an important role in society simply by being


beggars it was, of course, but a short step back to the extremely tradi-tional affirmation – made by both Burke and the Bishop of Llandaff inresponse to the famine of – of the wisdom of God in having maderich and poor. In this way Wordsworth showed himself to be caughtbetween a Benthamite interest in reform and a Burkean respect forcustom and tradition. Like its eponymous hero ‘The Old CumberlandBeggar’ can thus be seen to wander without a home, unwilling to acceptthe administrations of either the workhouse or the church, ultimatelydestined to find its final resting place in a deathless but also ratherinhuman realm of Nature:

And let him, where and when he will, sit downBeneath the trees, or by the grassy bankOf high-way side, and with the little birdsShare his chance-gather’d meal, and, finally,As in the eye of Nature has he liv’d,So in the eye of Nature shall he die.

(lines –)

One of the problems with this poem, as David Simpson has pointedout, is that in transforming the beggar into a kind of living monumentto the aesthetic education of the village, Wordsworth does tend toneglect the extent to which he is, or was, a suffering human being in hisown right.23 He concentrates solely upon the effect the old man has uponother people, and not upon what he is in himself. So, as the means bywhich the community represents its own freedom to itself, the beggarenables Wordsworth to represent the village poor as subjects rather thanas objects, and to resist the tendency of Benthamite pauper manage-ment. But as a figure in himself, he is curiously hollow, only in the finallines is there a kind of concession to his consciousness.

But what is interesting is that the Beggar is a kind of parody of therevolutionary legislator in this respect, for like one of Rousseau’sfavoured lawgivers, he is a stranger, who comes from outside the polis inorder to raise its collective consciousness, even if unlike him, he has noprogramme of his own, acting merely as the occasion for moral andsocial improvement, its catalyst, as it were, rather than its active pro-ducer. And so, precisely because of his self-conscious use of the discourseof utility, it is difficult to believe that Wordsworth himself is not, in acertain specific sense, ‘using’ the beggar in the course of this poem, usinghim as a means of demonstrating a particular political effect – the spec-tacle of popular civic virtue – without having to locate or identify a polit-ical will existing prior to that effect. It is as if, like Rousseau’s Baron de


Wolmar letting Julie rule the fête, Wordsworth has sought to withdrawhimself from what was, in fact, a highly self-conscious experiment in theliterary presentation of republican feeling, so that he can give it theappearance of customary virtue, and suppress its continuing links withthe revolutionary tradition.

On February the Whig minister Samuel Whitbread, attemptingto take advantage of a brief cessation of hostilities in Europe, broughtbefore the House of Commons a bill to reform the Poor Laws. Strivingto reduce the number of people claiming parish relief, he proposed aplan of national education, an overhaul of the workhouse system, andthe institution of saving schemes to stimulate thrift among the labouringclasses. Not only in its content but also in its overriding tone, the billowed an acknowledged debt to the Essay on Population.24 Indeed in hisprefatory remarks Whitbread made a point of endorsing Malthus’s anti-utopian vision: ‘I believe man to be born to labour’, he argued, ‘that acertain portion of misery is inseparable from mortality and that all theplans for the lodging, clothing, feeding of all mankind with what may becalled comfort, are quite impossible in practice.’25

Whitbread’s bill was thrown out by the Lords in August after amotion by Lord Liverpool, an indication of continuing Tory suspiciontowards the new social science. But the very fact that such a bill was pre-sented to the House of Commons in the first place does tend to show thedegree of respect with which the new theories of pauper managementhad already come to be regarded by influential sections of the BritishEstablishment. And Malthus’s reputation did nothing but grow duringthe s and s. Initially his champions had been the Whigs; gradu-ally, however, he made converts among the Tories. And whereas theleading reviews were prepared to dismiss the writings of the republicanWilliam Godwin as excessively rationalistic, in the far more systematicand neo-scientific work of Malthus they saw only the disinterestedexpression of truth. So respected did his Essay become, indeed, thatwhen the working-class radical Francis Place published his pioneeringplan of contraception in , he offered it as a supplement to thepopulation principle, curiously enough, rather than a refutation of it.26

There were dissenting voices, however, which interrupted the generalchorus of approval. During the s the journalist and pamphleteerWilliam Cobbett had been an outspoken defender of the Tory cause,


regularly defending the English Constitution against the accretion ofFrench principles. And as an independent farmer, he was one of the veryclass of men whom Malthus’s proposal of poor law reform had soughtto relieve from the heavy burden of local taxation. Indeed this may havebeen one of the reasons why he was initially so enthusiastic about theEssay on Population. ‘Before the rays of Malthus’s luminous principle’, hewrote in , ‘the mists of erroneous or hypocritical humanity instantlyvanish, and leave the field clear for the operation of reason.’27 Thepresentation of Samuel Whitbread’s Poor Law Bill of , however,produced a violent reversal in Cobbett’s sympathies. Quite simply, hewas appalled at the extent to which the Malthusian revolution had sanc-tioned a systematic objectification of the poor.28

If a plan like this were really to be adopted, I, for my part, should not be at allsurprised, if someone were to propose the selling of the poor, or the mort-gaging of them to the fund-holders – Aye! You may wince; you may cry Jacobinand Leveller as long as you please. I wish to see the poor men England what thepoor men of England were when I was born; &, from endeavouring to accom-plish this wish, nothing but the want of the means shall make me desist.29

An increasingly energetic campaigner against the deterioration ofliving standards among the rural working classes during the early yearsof the nineteenth century, Cobbett soon began to develop a ferventdesire to restore the independence and comparative prosperity that heimagined them to have enjoyed in the past. So much so, indeed, thatduring the course of his career, Cobbett developed an ever-growingsense of the terrible injustices being suffered by the contemporarylabouring class, and this transformed his Toryism into a form of popularradicalism that was ostensibly opposed to the dying tradition of French-style Jacobinism while sharing some of its political instincts. In his ‘Letterto Parson Malthus’ in the Political Register of May he responded toMalthus’s denial of the right of subsistence by rehearsing Robespierre’scritique of the right of property, declaring that ‘the property in land cannever be so complete and absolute as to give the proprietors the rightsof withholding the means of existence, or of animal enjoyment, fromany portion of the people; seeing that the very foundation of thecompact was, the protection and benefit of the whole’.

On this point the Tory paternalist Robert Southey agreed withCobbett the popular radical. In the December issue of the QuarterlyReview for Southey published a review of Colquhoun’s Propositionsfor Ameliorating the Condition of the Poor in which he suggested that the rulingclasses would be signing their own death-warrant if they abandoned


their moral responsibility to the poor. Like Cobbett, he felt that theextremism of the Essay on Population was always in danger of expeditingthe very anarchy which it professed to forestall, inadvertently reanimat-ing the lingering ghost of revolutionary Jacobinism rather than buryingit once and for all:

The numerous claimants at Mr Malthus’s feast of nature, who, as he tells us,‘have no right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, no business to bethere’, would very soon begin to ask the luckier guests what better title theythemselves could produce, and resort to the right of the strongest. ‘You havehad your turn at the table long enough, gentleman’, they would say, ‘and if thosewho have no places are to starve, we will have a scramble for it at least.’30

What was alarming for Southey was not merely the prospect ofworking-class revolution, which he saw as a very real danger, but theinsufficiency of the utilitarian response to it. Presented with the wide-spread abjection and misery of the new industrial working class,Malthus could only deny the people the right of subsistence, and offer amathematical explanation for his denial. And this led many old-styleTories to make common cause with the popular radicals in their attackson philosophical radicalism.31 Indeed as the nineteenth century pro-gressed, it was not uncommon for figures as deeply opposed as Southeyand Cobbett to be seen exchanging sparks of thought and feeling on thisissue, for as Edward Thompson has pointed out, when it came to theworkhouse ideology of Malthus and Bentham, ‘the starting point oftraditionalist and Jacobin was the same’.32

As we saw in chapter one, during the s Southey had been a ferventrepublican, more outspoken in his radical sympathies than either of hisfriends Samuel Taylor Coleridge or William Wordsworth. During theearly years of the nineteenth century, however, he became increasinglyworried that the popular anarchy of the Jacobin period was going to bereproduced in England. Like the methodists and evangelicals, he beganto look to religion as a means of tranquillising and controlling theworking classes.33 Appropriately enough, therefore, he became res-olutely opposed to secular programmes of instruction like Whitbread’splan, campaigning instead for Dr Bell’s proposal for a national system ofeducation organised under the aegis of the Anglican Church. So muchso, indeed that by he was regularly asserting that the only way ofpreventing revolution in England was to re-introduce the Christian faithto the cities and industrial areas of Britain, and to re-organise the dis-pensation of charity.

Between the popular agitation of William Cobbett and the Christian


Toryism of Southey, middle-class republicans like Hazlitt were veryuneasily caught. He shared many of their misgivings about Malthus’stheory, but was unable to follow either of them to their final destination.In his Reply to Malthus of he had responded to Whitbread’s educa-tional initiative by insisting that poverty was the result of bad govern-ment and not a lack of formal schooling in the labouring classes: ‘we arecreatures not of knowledge’, he argued, ‘but of circumstances’ (, ).And Cobbett had made the same point in the Political Register of October , declaring that while ‘the education [bill] was to producegood morals . . . this was merely for the purpose of preventing lazinessand other vices, which more immediately tend to increase the poor-rates’. Both Cobbett and Hazlitt agreed that Whitbread’s education planwas not designed to supply the poor with the knowledge that wouldmake them free, it was merely to inform them of the extent to whichtheir lives were ruled by necessity. ‘Enable them to eat and drink’,Cobbett insisted, ‘before you learn them to read and write’. And Hazlittwas to sum up his own attitude to pauper management in remarkablysimilar terms:

For my part, I place my heart in the centre of my moral system. I do not lookon the poor man as an animal, or a mere machine for philosophical or politicalor economic experiments. I know that the measure of his sufferings is not to betaken with a pair of compasses or a slip of parchment. I would rather be pro-scribed and hunted down with him than join in his proscription by those whomade it their practice to attack the weak and cringe to the strong.34

Like Cobbett, Hazlitt refused to join in the proscription of the poorman, but unlike him he was unable to make common cause with himeither. For despite professing a notional commitment to the classless idealof the French Revolution, he found it increasingly difficult to transcendhis own class bias. So that whereas Cobbett was to begin to oppose thenew school of reform by developing a vigorously ‘reactionary’ agendafor the amelioration of the living conditions of the industrial and agrar-ian working classes, Hazlitt adopted a position that was at once defiantand defeatist.35 ‘What are we to do for [the poor]?’ he asked in the Replyto Malthus when considering the question of national education, beforeanswering himself limply ‘the best answer would perhaps be, let themalone’ (, ). The problem was that, from Hazlitt’s point of view,modern initiatives seemed to fall into two categories: either they wereprogrammes of instruction designed to prepare the individual for hisentry into the labour market, or projects of rechristianisation intendedto provide him with a prospective consolation for its injustice and uncer-


tainty. Whichever model was chosen, education was no longer an essayin the cultural construction of the citizen, as it had been during theutopian moment of the French Revolution, but a blueprint for the pro-duction of a docile subject. And this left Jacobins like him in a veryuncomfortable position with regard to the discourse of ‘improvement’:

The advantages of education in the abstract are, I fear, like other abstractions,not to be found in nature. I thought that the rage for blind reform, for abstractutility and general reasoning, had been exploded long since. If ever it wasproper, it was proper on general subjects, on the nature of man and hisprospects in general. But the spirit of abstraction driven out of the minds ofphilosophers has passed into the heads of members of parliament: banishedfrom the heads of the studious, it has taken up its favourite abode in the Houseof Commons . . . It has dwindled down into petty projects, speculative detailsand dreams of practical, positive matter-of-fact improvement. (, )

Central to this passage is Hazlitt’s painful realisation that the dis-course of improvement had been appropriated by a generation of politi-cal ‘trimmers’ uncommitted to the cause of liberty and equality, whoseallegiances were not, like his, with the Jacobin ideal of the early s.With the rise of philosophical radicalism, he recognised, the rhetoric ofrevolution had given place to that of reform, and a Painite politicalagenda based on the natural rights of man had ceded place, under pres-sure from the population principle, to a Benthamite plan for regulatingthe wasteful and counter-productive appetites of the poor. Andsignificantly, such was the baleful influence of the utilitarian revolutionthat it effectively undermined Hazlitt’s own belief in the continuingviability of the Revolutionary ideal, leaving him in the paradoxical posi-tion of being a self-styled ‘revolutionist’ who was at one and the sametime impatient for change and yet sceptical of ‘improvement’.

To summarise, then, during the early years of the nineteenth century,it was in the uncertain realm between the clamours of popular radical-ism and the rechristianising programme of the Tories and Evangelicalsthat middle-class republicans loyal to the libertarian ideal of the FrenchRevolution attempted to grapple with the rising influence of thephilosophical radicals. William Godwin, William Hazlitt and the youngWilliam Wordsworth tried to oppose the utilitarianism of Malthus andBentham without succumbing to the consolations of Christian Toryismor tumbling into the tumult of working-class politics. They attempted tomaintain a reformist attitude despite the fact that to all intents and pur-poses the philosophical radicals had appropriated the discourse ofreform. In their very belatedness, therefore, they dramatised the slow


decline of middle-class republicanism in England. Nevertheless, as weshall see, the peculiar power and intensity of an entire current ofRomantic writing can be seen to have emerged out of the very sense ofideological discomfort and displacement that was felt by such figures.Indeed many of the structural idiosyncrasies and thematic innovationswhich characterise their work were actually produced by their forcedoccupation of an uneasy, interstitial space between popular, progres-sive and conservative positions none of which they felt capable ofembracing.


‘The virtue of one paramount mind’: Wordsworth andthe politics of the Mountain

Shortly after returning from France in the spring of , the youngWilliam Wordsworth wrote a pamphlet against Richard Watson, theBishop of Llandaff, for having betrayed the cause of liberty. Formerly aFoxite liberal sympathetic to the Jacobin cause, Watson had publiclyrenounced his support for the Revolution when he heard of the execu-tion of Louis XVI in January . Suitably enough, therefore, whenWordsworth came to draft his reply, he responded to the bishop in a self-consciously ‘republican spirit’, treating English politics as if it were amerely an extension of the French conflict:

Conscious that an enemy lurking in our ranks is ten times more formidable thanwhen drawn out against us, that the unblushing aristocracy of a Maury or aCazalès is far less dangerous than the insidious mask of patriotism assumed bya La Fayette or a Mirabeau, we thank you for your desertion.1

During the constitutional period Lafayette and Mirabeau hadappeared to be fervent supporters of the cause of freedom, but as theRevolution had progressed, their complicity with the old order had beenunmasked. And it was this and other examples of political betrayalwhich inspired the belligerent Girondin Jacques-Pierre Brissot to call forthe mass desertion of traitors during the war crisis of . It is notice-able, therefore, that in charging Llandaff with a similar kind of treach-ery as that exhibited by Lafayette and Mirabeau the young Wordsworthwas not merely attaching himself to the republican cause, he was alsoshowing himself to be highly conversant with the French version of ‘therevolutionary plot’, inhabiting the Manichaean psychology ofJacobinism, and reproducing its habits of mind.

But what was the exact nature of Wordsworth’s youthful republican-ism? How, if at all, was it different from the general enthusiasm of manyyoung English radicals for the French Revolutionary cause? And how

important was it to his later writing? In seeking to answer these ques-tions, it is my contention that a fresh questioning of the poet’s early poli-tics, in the light of what we have uncovered about the paradoxical natureof revolutionary republicanism, can give a new perspective on hismature poetic practice. In the eyes of most commentators, Wordsworthwas a supporter of the Girondin faction during his time in revolutionaryFrance, untarnished by the political extremism of Robespierre and theMountain.2 But as I hope to show, this is a tenuous argument, not onlybecause much of it is highly conjectural and anecdotal, but also becauseit does not offer a convincing reading of the literary evidence.Admittedly, Wordsworth was not explicit about his revolutionary alle-giances in the Letter to Llandaff, but there may have been a number ofdifferent reasons for this. It is possible that he did not see his politicalcommitment in factional terms. But equally, even if he had done, hemust also have known that, when addressing an English audience, themost politic approach would be to base his argument on principles ratherthan personalities. That said, however, the crucial point must surely bethat on the issues that split the revolutionary factions, the Letter to Llandaffconsistently follows the Montagnard line, refusing to condemn the September Massacres and defending the execution of Louis XVI.

Of course, this places Wordsworth well outside the English govern-ment consensus of the time. For the Prime Minister William Pitt themurder of the king was ‘the foulest and most atrocious deed which thehistory of the world has yet had occasion to attest’, an action whichcould be seen to ‘strike directly against the authority of all regulargovernment, and the inviolable person of every lawful sovereign’, givingGreat Britain no choice but to declare war.3 But it was not merely theEstablishment that responded in this way. A considerable number ofEnglish radicals had also been troubled by the prospect of revolutionaryregicide, most notably Tom Paine, who had used his position as a deputyof the French National Convention to beg for leniency towards ‘citizenCapet’. It is notable, therefore, that above and beyond its opposition tothe war, the Letter to Llandaff should have sought actively and positively tojustify the principle of political violence, an extremely radical position,even for a youthful enthusiast: ‘Alas!’, Wordsworth wrote, in a passagereminiscent of Robespierre’s reply to Louvet, ‘the obstinacy and perver-sion of men is such that [liberty] is often obliged to borrow the very armsof despotism in order to overthrow them, and in order to reign in peacemust establish herself by violence. She deplores such stern necessity, butthe safety of the people, her supreme law, is her consolation’ ().


In the latter half of this century, there has been a current of criticalthought which has endeavoured to link Wordsworth’s youthful radical-ism exclusively with the English republican tradition of the seventeenthcentury stemming from James Harrington and the Earl of Shaftesbury.4

And the discovery of this pattern of influence has undoubtedly affordedimportant new insights into his poetry, most recently in the work ofDavid Simpson and Nigel Leask. But somewhat surprisingly perhapsthere has been a comparative neglect of the extent to whichWordsworth’s understanding of this tradition was mediated by theinfluence of Rousseau and Robespierre. Too seldom, for example, has itbeen recognised that the most fervent expressions of republican senti-ment in the Letter to Llandaff are couched in identifiably Rousseauvianterms. For example, in response to Llandaff’s allegation that a republicwas ‘a tyranny of equals’ Wordsworth cited a passage from the ContratSocial suggesting that the bishop had come to love his own slavery: ‘it iswith indignation’, he wrote, ‘I perceive you “reprobate” a people forhaving imagined liberty and happiness more likely to flourish in the openfield of a republic than under the shade of monarchy’ (). And he alsogave a characteristically Jacobin retort to the latter’s defence of theBritish Constitution, repeating Jean-Jacques’s assertion that the EnglishParliament was merely the servant of a corrupt corporate interest. ButRousseau’s legacy to the young Wordsworth was not simply a series ofsecond-hand shibboleths. It actually shaped his concept of citizenship. ForWordsworth, like Rousseau, saw the proper business of government asthe expression and execution of a unified general will, rather than thebalancing of competing interests, so that when he came to describe thenature and purpose of representative government, he did so in markedlyanti-liberal terms, interpreting it as a necessary compromise between theideal of direct democracy and the size and complexity of the modernnation state. Most significantly of all, perhaps, there was an identifiablyRousseauvian aesthetic behind the young radical’s revolutionary vision,as can be seen from the telling passage in which he swept aside Llandaff ’sscepticism about the viability of popular sovereignty by referring hisreaders to the exemplary status of the inhabitants of Switzerland:

. . . as governments formed on [democratic principles] proceed in a plain andopen manner, their administration would require much less of what is usuallycalled talents and experience, that is of disciplined treachery and hoarymachiavelism; and at the same time, as it would no longer be their interest tokeep the mass of the nation in ignorance, a moderate portion of useful knowl-edge would be universally disseminated. If your lordship has travelled in the

Wordsworth and the politics of the Mountain

democratic cantons of Switzerland you must have seen the herdsman with thestaff in one hand and the book in the other. ()

Both culturally and historically, there were many similarities betweenthe mountain republics of Switzerland that had been celebrated byRousseau and the English Lake District where Wordsworth had spent hisearly youth. In both regions there survived a tradition of ‘primitive’virtue that could be contrasted with the corruption of modern commer-cial society. On his Alpine walking tour of Wordsworth had takenwith him Ramond de Carbonnières’ French translation of WilliamCoxe’s Sketches of the Natural, Civil and Political State of Swisserland (),which drew heavily on Saint-Preux’s reflections on the simplicity andvirtue of Alpine life in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloïse, representing the Swissas a ‘happy people, the nature of whose country, and the constitution ofwhose government both equally oppose the strongest barriers against thebaneful introduction of luxury’.5 And in his annotations to the translatedtext, Carbonnières had actually gone beyond the rather cautiousWhiggism of his English source to offer a more thoroughlyRousseauvian vision of the democratic nature of Swiss life. It issignificant, then, that when Wordsworth came to give a poetic accountof his travels in the mountains in the Descriptive Sketches of , he choseto reproduce Carbonnières’s emphasis, praising the Swiss mountaineerfor fiercely guarding the freedom and independence he had inheritedfrom Rousseau’s ‘natural’ man: ‘The slave of none, of beasts alone thelord, / He marches with his flute, his book, and sword, / Well taught bythat to feel his rights, prepared / With this “the blessings he enjoys toguard”’ (lines –).

Throughout the time of the poem’s composition France had beendesperately defending its eastern borders from foreign invasion, and thisreflected itself in the highly militant tone of Wordsworth’s celebrationof the Alps as a landscape of liberty:

Even here Content has fix’d her smiling reignWith independence child of high Disdain.Exulting mid the winter of the skies,Shy as the jealous chamois, Freedom flies,And often grasps her sword, and often eyes,Her crest a bough of Winter’s bleakest pine,Strange ‘weeds’ and Alpine plants her helm entwine,And wildly pausing oft she hangs aghast,While thrills the ‘Spartan fife’ between the blast.6


Gradually this martial emphasis was to become more pronounced, asthe poet referred to several battles which the Swiss in very small numbershad gained over their oppressor the house of Austria:

where Freedom oft, with Victory and DeathHath seen in grim array amid their stormsMixed with auxiliar Rocks, three hundred forms;While twice ten thousand corselets at the viewDropped loud at once, Oppression shrieked and flew.

(lines –).

In this way Wordsworth’s celebration of Swiss republicanism adver-tised itself as a thinly disguised and displaced expression of Jacobinbelligerence. And this revolutionary subtext was made all but explicit atthe end of the poem when the poet broke off from his reveries to addresshimself directly to the current plight of the French Republic, expressingthe confident hope that the ‘innocuous flames’ of the present conflictwith the monarchies of Europe would result in the ‘lovely birth’ of‘another earth’. Clearly, then, in the Descriptive Sketches Wordsworth wasusing Rousseau’s vocabulary of natural independence and mountainvirtue to fuel a neo-Robespierrist zeal for ‘primitive’ regeneration. Andso too in the Letter to Llandaff his enthusiasm for the ancient ideal couldbe felt in his virulent critique of modern life (‘the corruption of thepublic manners [and] the prostitution which miserably deluges ourstreets’) which displayed a distaste for urban dissimulation and deprav-ity that was highly reminiscent of Rousseau’s second Discours and theParis sections of La Nouvelle Heloïse.

Just over ten years ago, in the course of his important studyWordsworth’s Historical Imagination David Simpson was to make the asser-tion that ‘implicit or explicit reference to an ideal of agrarian civic virtueis the major organisational energy that runs through a great deal ofWordsworth’s prose and poetry’, showing convincingly that the image ofa community of Lakeland statesmen living a life of industry, domestic-ity and frugality had the status of a regulative principle in his work,underpinning all of his most important utterances, if only rarely findingfull expression.7 So too in Nigel Leask’s The Politics of Imagination inColeridge’s Criticial Thought, published at about the same time, the agrar-ian model was seen as providing the most convincing and coherentexplanation of Wordsworth’s politics, not only during the period of hisfirst collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but also in relation tohis subsequent apostasy from the cause of liberty and its effects upon his


poetic practice. According to Leask’s perspective, Wordsworth partedcompany with the Revolution as soon as it became clear that its valueswere in conflict with the highly local and provincial version of theEnglish commonwealth tradition upon which his agrarian politics hadalways been based.8

Coherent and compelling as these accounts still are, it is my conten-tion that it would not have been easy for such an enthusiastic fellow-trav-eller as Wordsworth to come to such a lucid recognition, especially if weconsider his early acquaintance with Rousseau. For as we saw in the firsttwo chapters, by alternately extolling seventeenth-century Switzerlandand fifth-century Sparta, the author of the Contrat Social had succeededin blurring the distinction between civic and agrarian humanism,merging one imperceptibly into the other. He had also obscured the rela-tionship between property and public virtue in his paradoxical sugges-tion that a large modern nation like France could be reinvented as if itwere a mountain republic or an ancient city state. And whereas in thework of Encyclopédistes such as Helvétius and Holbach the modern statewas to be founded upon rational laws rather than national customs, inRousseau there had been a great stress upon the importance of local cir-cumstances. In a very real sense, then, his universal template for politi-cal revolution was a truly ‘festival ideal’ in that its vision of thetransformation of the ‘whole earth’ into a ‘favour’d spot’ alwaysaccorded a special metonymic status to the spectacle of ‘local’ freedomand transparency. 9 His ‘localist’ theory of legislation was very different,in this respect, from the ‘cosmopolitan’ theory that characterised themain current of the French Enlightenment. That said, however, it mustalso be recognised that his work did still contain what we might think ofas a ‘cosmopolitan’ dimension, for regardless of the emphasis upongradual change and local customs in the Lettre à d’Alembert and in theconstitutional plans for Poland and Corsica, the blueprint for govern-ment that was offered in the Contrat Social was still highly abstract andhighly prescriptive, giving the ground rules for a properly democraticstate without detailing the practical means by which it might be broughtinto being. And so, by fudging the question of land and property,Rousseau had succeeded in developing a republican vision that was atone and the same time free from the aristocratic bias of the Englishtradition of civic humanism and yet also clearly different from the liberalbourgeois model of government favoured by the leading philosophes, avision which helped supply the French revolutionaries with a radicallyegalitarian concept of public virtue, while also enabling English fellow-travellers like Wordsworth and Robert Southey to reinvent the


. ‘The Sanculotte rendering homage to the Supreme Being’ (); engraving byAveline. A suggestively neo-Rousseauvian, quasi-Alpine inflection of the iconography

of sans-culottism, designed to coincide with the inauguration of the Cult of theSupreme Being.

commonwealth tradition of Harrington and Shaftesbury in uniquelydemocratic and universal terms.

Of course, Simpson is right to argue that Wordsworth’s agrarian idealwas always more coherent as a negative critique of modern life than asa positive alternative, but we should not assume that the poet himselfwas always consciously aware of this.10 Rather, we can suggest that,throughout his poetic career, the impracticality, marginality and relativeobsolescence of this ideal – what was in effect its radical belatedness –was often repressed, and that in texts like The Prelude as well as in earlypieces like the Descriptive Sketches, it continues to express itself in terms ofa poetics of mountain sublimity, the metaphor for an increasingly‘unspeakable’ sign of desire. With this in mind, the following chapter willseek to offer a reappraisal of the influence of Rousseau’s paradoxicalpolitics upon Wordsworth’s revolutionary poetics, an influence whichwas, as I hope to show, crucially mediated by the Jacobins of –, andmost notably, by the figure of Maximilien Robespierre.

In the opening section of his Essai sur les Révolutions of – the formerémigré François René de Chateaubriand made a set of comparisonsbetween revolutions ancient and modern in order to place the disastroustrajectory of the French Revolution in a meaningful historical context.In one of a series of disconnected and desultory reflections, he linkedthe extreme egalitarianism of the Jacobins with that of the ancientSpartan legislator Lycurgus:

The Jacobins, following him step by step in their violent reforms, intended toannihilate commerce, to eradicate literature . . . they mirrored him above all intheir requisition of property, and their preparations for the promulgation of theagrarian law.11

Neither the Spartans nor the Jacobins had been satisfied with merelyreforming the laws, Chateaubriand argued, they had sought to createa new kind of human being. In this respect ‘One cannot refuse theJacobins the awful tribute of having been consistent in their principles,having perceived with genius that the radical vice existed in manners,and that given the present state of the French nation, with its inequal-ity of fortunes, its differences of opinion, it was absurd to dream of ademocracy without a complete revolution in morals.’12 Fundamentally,he agreed with Condorcet that the Jacobins had seen their task as one


of public education rather than public instruction.13 But whereas thelatter had contrasted ancient and modern notions of liberty in order toprovide a clearer definition of the liberal principles upon which hebelieved the progress of civilisation ought to be based, Chateaubriandtook an entirely different tack, arguing that the recurrence of theancient in the modern during the Jacobin period had effectively under-mined the very possibility of social perfectibility. During the course ofhis treatise, he compared the French Revolution with the revolutionsof Greece and Rome, and to a lesser extent, with the English CivilWar of the seventeenth century, developing a theory of Western historyas an endless series of repetitions, the detailed study of which wouldcure the post-revolutionary generation of the dangerous taste forinnovation:

One can pronounce that the majority of things that one might have wanted toconsider as novel in the French Revolution was already to be found in thehistory of the Ancient Greeks. Now we possess this important truth: that man,feeble in his methods and his mental habits, does nothing but repeat himselfendlessly, that he gyrates in a circle, which he tries in vain to escape.14

After the Thermidorean conspiracy of , the demise of theJacobin régime and the subsequent end of the Grand Terror, many radi-cals on both sides of the channel were suddenly suffused with new hopefor the future of the French Republic. But in order to bring the publicround to their way of thinking, it was necessary to counter this conserva-tive version of revolutionary history as a disastrous series of repeti-tions.15 In The Fall of Robespierre, which was written hastily in July of ,Coleridge and Southey represented the recent events of the ninth ofThermidor as a classical tragedy out of which would emerge a fairerform of things. In according the history of Jacobinism this genericdignity, they were implicitly opposing the assertion of writers such asBurke and Chateaubriand that the ‘revolutionary plot’ was nothing buta grotesque farce. However, in choosing to rewrite Robespierre’s fall asa modern version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar they inadvertentlybetrayed the inability of traditional forms and narratives to represent thecomplex progress of the Revolution. During the course of the play, thecharacter of ‘Tallien’ represented himself as another Brutus opposingthe tyranny of the modern Caesar Robespierre, but the character of‘Robespierre’ himself repeatedly called this analogy into question, byidentifying himself as the true Brutus to Louis XVI’s Caesar. In therevolution itself, every new upheaval had overturned the existing struc-


tures of signification, transforming heroes into villains and patriots intotyrants. In this respect The Fall of Robespierre, almost in spite of itself,offered a vivid demonstration of how difficult it was to develop aprospective vision of the Revolution in the aftermath of the Terror, forin seeking to repress at the level of plot the anti-progressive nature of therevolutionary narrative – what we might think of as its compulsive urgeto repeat – Coleridge and Southey were forced to acknowledge it at thelevel of character, so that in sanctioning the endless swapping and steal-ing of neo-classical identities they filled the stage with Brutuses who allsounded identical, collapsing political difference by merging theRobespierrists with their Thermidorean successors, and effectively con-ceding Burke’s claim that there was absolutely no difference betweenthem.

Given the problems of narrative and agency generated by the Jacobinphenomenon, an exaggerated emphasis upon the personal tyranny ofRobespierre was frequently deemed by republicans to be the only meansof recapturing the revolutionary momentum. In The Fall of Robespierrethis expressed itself in a speech at the beginning of act in which theeponymous protagonist reflected upon his revolutionary career:

Mouldering in the graveSleeps Capet’s caitiff corse; my daring handLevelled to earth his blood-cemented throne,My voice declared his guilt, and stirred up FranceTo call for vengeance. I too dug the graveWhere sleep the Girondists, detested band!16

After the summer of Robespierre was regularly used as a politi-cal scapegoat by the French Thermidoreans and their English republi-can allies: indeed he became the prime site for the displacement ofradical guilt and disappointment.17 And as we saw in chapter two, hehimself recognised that he was being transformed into the lightning rodof revolutionary culpability, for as he declared on the day before hisarrest:

They are particularly determined to prove that the Revolutionary Tribunal wasa tribunal of blood, created by me alone, over which I despotised in order toexecute the virtuous as well as the vicious, because they desire to turn everyoneagainst me.18

In a very real sense, therefore, the campaign against Robespierre wasas much an attempt to deny the chaotic nature of French popular poli-tics during the first five years of the Revolution as to defame the memory


of the ‘Incorruptible’. What could not be acknowledged by theThermidoreans because of the demands of the ‘revolutionary cate-chism’ was that political life in France after had been less like a neo-classical drama which respected individual agency and personalintegrity and more of a grotesque popular carnival beyond the controlof public authority. Seen in this light, the Thermidorean demonisationof Robespierre can be viewed as a means of recovering the bourgeoisideal of active citizenship albeit in a highly negative form. Paradoxicallyenough, it was only by exaggerating the power formerly possessed by the‘Incorruptible’ that his successors could recapture a sense of their own.

In the months after Thermidor there was a great temptation amongradicals and republicans to argue that a resolutely private ambition hadlurked behind Robespierre’s apparently disinterested intervention uponthe public stage of the Revolution. Memoirs began to appear in whicha number of the martyred Girondins, as well as some of their more for-tunate colleagues, were to draw attention to the hypocrisy and cynicismof the so-called ‘Incorruptible’. In the Appeal to Impartial Posterity thatMadame Roland had penned in prison in the months before her execu-tion in the autumn of there was a detailed account of the career ofher former ally and latter-day tormentor. Roland admitted that duringthe early years of the Revolution Robespierre had appeared the absoluteepitome of independent virtue, but then she went on to describe how thefrightening extent of his personal ambition had become increasinglyevident: ‘That Robespierre’, she wrote, ‘whom I once thought an honestman, is a very atrocious being. How he lies to his own conscience! Howhe delights in blood!’19 And similarly, for the former proscrit Jean-BaptisteLouvet, Robespierre and Marat had been ‘vile imposters and infamousroyalists’ whose real purpose, in spite of all their democratic rhetoric,had been nothing less than the restoration of despotism.20 In Englishliterary circles Helen Maria Williams was to provide the main conduitof this current of republican feeling, representing Robespierre to theBritish reading public as a ‘foul fiend’ whose performance at the Festivalof the Supreme Being of had been the most consummate feat of‘impious mockery’. For other English radicals, however, the real enemywas the English Prime Minister William Pitt, whom they considered tohave effectively brought the Terror into being through his zealousprosecution of the French war. Shifting his ground from the position hehad adopted in the Fall of Robespierre, Coleridge was to give a broadlysympathetic account of Robespierre’s character in his Bristol lectures of, accepting the paradox that he had become a tyrant in order to


destroy tyranny, while continuing to argue that his ends may not havebeen ignoble, even though he had certainly lost them in the means: ‘theardor of undisciplined benevolence seduces us into malignity’,Coleridge wrote, ‘and wherever our hearts are warm, and our objectsgreat and excellent, intolerance is the sin that does most easily beset us’.21

Pitt, on the other hand, was treated with unmitigated scorn. And JohnThelwall struck a similar note in an article written for The Tribune in thesame year when he made an extended comparison between the charac-ters of Robespierre and the Prime Minister, differentiating between the‘incorruptible’ public-mindedness of the former and the cruelty andservility of the latter, before concluding that ‘Robespierre had a mindtoo great to be debauched by anything but ambition.’22

It is in the context of this double vision of Robespierre – as hypocriteand enthusiast – that we should interpret Wordsworth’s attempt torepresent the Revolution as tragedy in his gothic melodrama TheBorderers of . This was Wordsworth’s first extended examination ofthe republican phase of the French Revolution after the Terror, and itshowed its author to be deeply aware of the questions it raised con-cerning notions of narrative and agency. The two ‘revolutionary’ char-acters in the play, Rivers and Mortimer, are members of a band ofmedieval outlaws opposed to the injustices of the feudal order. Mortimeris in love with Matilda, but Matilda’s father Herbert has forbidden herto marry an outlaw. The play opens with the hypocritical misanthropeRivers telling Mortimer that Herbert is not Matilda’s real father. He thensuggests that Herbert and the aristocratic tyrant Clifford are conspiringto compromise her virtue, and proceeds to play upon Mortimer’s anxi-eties about this imagined plot by describing how Herbert has attemptedto destroy his reputation with Matilda:

. . . he coins himself the slanderWith which he taints her ear. – For a plain reason:He dreads the presence of a virtuous manLike you, he knows your eye would search his heartYour justice stamp upon his evil deedsThe punishment they merit. – All is plain.23

Following in the footsteps of the patron saint of apostasy, Herbert hastainted the ear of another innocent Eve. As a secret traitor to the causeof freedom it is therefore fitting that he should inspire an especiallyviolent loathing in its more fervent adherents. Thus the hypocriticalrevolutionary Rivers calls upon Mortimer to make Herbert’s slanderspublic. He shows him the ideal of public virtue to which he must aspire


if he is to ascend to the realm of independence and reason, depictingjustice as a way of seeing rather than a legal procedure, a summary judg-ment rather than a slow sifting of evidence. In this way Rivers effectivelyencourages Mortimer to adopt the political psychology of the Terror:

– passion, then,Shall be a unit for us – proof, oh no,We’ll not insult her majesty by timeAnd place – the where, the when, the how and allThe dull particulars whose intrusion marsThe dignity of demonstration. (, ii. –)

Like the perpetrators of the laws of Prairial, Rivers is convinced thatthe dull particulars of bourgeois jurisprudence should be abandoned inorder that the truth can assert itself passionately and spontaneously. Sowith increasing fervour he urges Mortimer to execute Herbert, declar-ing that such an act would have ‘virtue for a thousand lives’. And hecounters Mortimer’s misgivings by offering his own version of theRobespierrist equation of terror and virtue:

Benevolence that has not the heart to useThe wholesome ministry of pain and evilIs powerless and contemptible. (, I. –)

In parodying the language of revolutionary paradox, its confidentconfusion of opposites, Wordsworth emphasises its profound absurdity.And yet he also manages to evoke the dangerous sublimity of its rhetoric.Soon after, having been convinced by Rivers of the need for a universalpurge, Mortimer responds bitterly to news that the king has agreed to areform of the constitution: ‘The deeper malady is better hid –’, he tellshis men, ‘The world is poisoned at the heart’ (, iii. –). Yet hisattempts to commit himself to revolutionary regeneration are remark-ably unsuccessful. In act he abandons Herbert to God’s judgment,leaving him out on a wild heath at night, his resolution to administerjustice having been broken by the stirrings of his ‘natural’ compassion.

Anticipating Herbert’s imminent death, Rivers reveals his innocenceto Mortimer, and makes a confession of his own former crimes. Whileon a sea voyage in his youth Rivers had been persuaded by his shipmatesinto abandoning their captain on a desert island, only becoming awarethat the latter was innocent of the crimes attributed to him when it wastoo late to return and save his life. Thus, as he himself partly under-stands, it was to dispel his overwhelming sense of guilt that he threwhimself into criminal activity. In the preface to The Borderers


Wordsworth embarked upon a further explanation of this phenomenon,describing Rivers rather succinctly as a man who ‘commits new crimesto drive away the memory of the past’.24 In a striking anticipation ofSigmund Freud’s concept of ‘the urge to repeat’ he then went on toexplain that ‘in every course of criminal conduct every step that wemake appears a justification of the one that preceded it, it seems to bringback the moment of liberty and choice’ ().25 So by persuadingMortimer to murder an entirely innocent man, Rivers believes that hewill be able to master his own crime by causing another to repeat it:‘Henceforth’, he says, at the beginning of act , ‘I’ll have him / Ashadow of myself, made by myself ’ (, ii. –). In this way he considersthat he will be able to make Mortimer and to have him, to rediscover hisown identity by possessing his own copy, with Mortimer becoming theshadow against which he will define his newfound sense of freedom.And so, like the authorial self writing the life of the autobiographicalsubject, Rivers rehearses his former experiences in order to master them.He is unlike an autobiographer, of course, in that his replotting of hisformer crime represents not so much a creative revision as a simplereplication of himself, with the result that his act of repetition serves onlyto reconfirm his enslavement to the past.

At the very climax of the play, Mortimer does cause the death ofHerbert, but only accidentally. He forgets to leave him his scrip of foodwhen he abandons him on the heath. Like Rivers before him, there wasno coherent intention behind his action. Momentarily sympathetic toMortimer’s predicament, Rivers encourages him to see this experienceas a rite of passage: ‘Enough is done to save you from the curse / Ofliving without knowledge that you live’ (, iii. –). In this phrase,revolution is depicted in terms of a fortunate fall from nature into self-consciousness. It is as if it is only by murdering the Father that the revolu-tionary son can come to a fuller understanding of the true nature ofagency and identity. Mortimer cannot bind himself to his deed, however,and nor can he believe that he is capable of redemption. After confess-ing the truth to Matilda, he resolves to wander the earth ‘till heaven inmercy strike me / With blank forgetfulness, that I may die’ (, iii. –).He exiles himself from civil society, considering himself to have com-mitted an unforgivable crime against nature: ‘I am curst’, he announcesbefore his departure, ‘All nature curses me and in my heart / Thy curseis fixed’ (, iii. –).

In the past The Borderers has often been seen as a critique of the revolu-tionary subversion of the traditional hierarchies of society.26 According


to this view of things, the old, blind and dispossessed aristocrat Herbertis the ailing embodiment of Burke’s ‘second nature’, exhibiting all of thepiety, loyalty and family feeling that the latter thought the Jacobins hadsought to destroy. But while the play does encourage us to think ofMortimer’s action as a crime against ‘nature’, it does not attempt to ‘nat-uralise’ the aristocratic order. Many of the anti-feudal sentiments in theplay are given to the hypocritical Rivers, but the sections dealing withthe tyranny of Clifford and the servility of Robert still represent afervent critique of ancient despotism. In this sense Wordsworth’s‘nature’ still has more in common with the festival vision of Rousseauthan with the hierarchical concept developed by Edmund Burke.Contrary to the emphasis of most commentators, then, The Borderers isnot unequivocally critical of Jacobin politics, for ultimately it offers ustwo contrasting figures of the Robespierrist revolutionary. In RiversWordsworth shows a Terrorist in whom private speculation lurksbeneath the mask of public virtue. His fellow borderers come to realisethat ‘Power is life to him / And breath and being; where he cannotgovern / He will destroy’ (, iv. –). And indeed, behind his rhetoricof regeneration, he is driven only by self-seeking ambition. To thisextent, he closely resembles the representations of Robespierre in theGirondin memoirs of the period. In Mortimer, however, Wordsworthdescribes with some sympathy the workings of a mind genuinelyseduced by the ideology of the Terror in his resistance to an identifiablyGothic social order. He is another version of the Robespierrist revolu-tionary, a figure of radical sensibility rather than cold rationality, a mis-guided enthusiast rather than a selfish hypocrite. And what renders TheBorderers a subtler exploration of the psychic structure of Jacobinismthan The Fall of Robespierre is its awareness of this doubleness withinrevolutionary narrative, its complex dynamic of passive suffering andactive repetition. Wordsworth does more than simply contrast the com-pulsive and misanthropic Rivers and the enthusiastic and benevolentMortimer – Madame Roland’s Robespierre with that of Coleridge – hesuggests that there is a profound kinship between them. In this way hemakes it clear that both men are haunted by the ideal of the public man,by an image of autonomy and subjectivity that is forever beyond theirgrasp. Like the French Jacobins, Wordsworth’s protagonists pursue theirideal of political legitimacy by identifying with one another, by strivingto situate themselves within a self-enclosing circle of fraternity, seekingidentity in duplicity, and integrity in self-duplication. However, as theyboth come to recognise, revolutionary action leads not to the collective


achievement of self-presence, but to the isolating experience of aliena-tion and self-division:

Action is transitory, a step, a blow –The motion of a muscle – this way or that –’Tis done – and in the after-vacancyWe wonder at ourselves like men betray’d.Suffering is permanent, obscure and darkAnd has the nature of infinity. (, iv. –)

Thus in spite of Wordsworth’s continuing republican sympathies, theconclusion to The Borderers finally offers an essentially reactionary visionof revolution, depicting it as a fundamentally passive experience, a formof tragic repetition. And this must have been at least partly to do withthe very constraints of the dramatic genre itself, which precisely becauseof its fundamentally classical conception of the nature and scope ofhuman action was in many ways peculiarly unsuited to resolving theproblem of duplicity and self-division at the heart of revolutionary ex-perience. As I hope to show, in his autobiographical epic The Prelude of, Wordsworth was to find a narrative structure within which therevolution could be represented not successively but simultaneously as adisastrous crime against nature and a paradigim for the acquisition offreedom and self-consciousness, where revolutionary duplicity, in otherwords, took on a new and more positive character. For the autobio-graphical mode provided a means by which Wordsworth was able tohave it both ways, ostensibly repudiating the revolutionary legacy whilesurreptitiously redeeming it, and it is in this specific sense, as I hope todemonstrate, that The Prelude can be seen as a fundamentally Jacobinpoem against Jacobinism.

In his important study Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, NicholasRoe has given an exhaustive account of Wordsworth’s political trajec-tory in the revolutionary decade, supplying his work with a richer his-torical context than ever before. There are problems, however, with hisuse of The Prelude of as an index of the poet’s state of mind duringthe s. Firstly, such a strategy does not take into account the changein Wordsworth’s political opinions in the intervening years, the extent towhich the rapid progress of the English counter-revolution had blightedhis radical enthusiasm and driven it underground. Secondly, andperhaps just as importantly, it does not pay sufficient attention to the


question of genre. For example, a distinction should really be drawnbetween the retrospective of the Jacobin period contained in book ofWordsworth’s epic autobiography and the ‘revolutionary plot’ of agothic melodrama such as The Borderers, and this is as much a questionof form as of content, for while the latter remains constrained by theformal requirements of dramatic narrative, The Prelude dovetails thetraditional quest motif of classical epic and romance with the genericmodel of confessional autobiography developed by Rousseau, effectivelyremaking the French Revolution by transforming it into a habit of mind.

When investigating the political ideology of a literary work it is impor-tant to remember that we have try to account for it as well as to explainit. And in order to emphasise this difference, it is helpful to remind our-selves of Michel Foucault’s celebrated distinction between the history ofthought and the historical study of discourse. Whereas the formerattempts to establish what past statements meant to say, Foucault argues,‘the analysis of the discursive field is orientated in a quite different way’

We must first grasp the statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence;determine its conditions of existence, fix at least its limits, establish its correla-tions with other statements that may be connected with it, and show what otherforms of statement it excludes.27

In the field of Romantic studies, Alan Liu’s virtuosic monographWordsworth: The Sense of History is one of the most successful applicationsof this theory of ‘emergence’ to have appeared in recent years. Drawingheavily on the work of Macherey, Liu argues that many of the leadingliterary texts of the romantic period emerge ‘precisely through a criticalor second-order negation: the arbitrary but nevertheless determineddifferentiation by which they do not articulate historical contexts’, wherethe discursive breaks and generic instabilities within these texts, theircharacteristic forms of refusal, become an important component oftheir ultimate historical meaning. In Liu’s eyes, Wordsworth’s Prelude isone of the best examples of this phenomenon, precisely because it con-stitutes such a strong denial of the invasiveness of history that it cannothelp but represent, in a dialectical sense, one of history’s deepest realisa-tions.28 Thus he argues that Wordsworth’s refusal to give a properly ref-erential account of the Jacobin period in The Prelude is soover-determined that it actually gives us a remarkable insight into thehistorical narrative that he is unwilling or unable to tell.

In his analysis of The Prelude Liu is superbly attentive to the role ofgenre in determining what can and cannot be said at a particular time.


The problem is, however, that in offering autobiography as the literaryform most suited to the denial of history, he often neglects the extent towhich particular genres like autobiography can become politicised inhistorically specific ways. Hence he tends to regard Wordsworth’s verseepic as a text existing always already well outside the terms of the revolu-tion debate. And when he does gesture towards politics in relation to ThePrelude, it is in casual acceptance of James Chandler’s thesis that by the poet had become a disciple of the Burkean counter-revolution,agreeing with Chandler that ‘the creed of Wordsworth’s “spots of time”was an ideology against ideology’ while also seeking to make the pointthat ‘the influence behind such ideology was not only Burke’s philoso-phy of prejudice applied against a specific French philosophy but also apre-philosophical exercise of denial – an effort by the Imagination tocontain the phenomenal event that most seized Imagination at the timeof its composition’ (). Now, to my mind at least, one of the difficultieswith a reading such as this, which represents The Prelude as a ‘reactionary’negation of revolutionary history, is that it fails to acknowledge theextent to which, in the wake of Rousseau’s Confessions, fully wroughtautobiography was, at least during the early years of the nineteenthcentury, a dangerously radical form in both Britain and France, not leastbecause of its continuing potential to challenge existing notions of therelationship between private reflection and public politics, the individ-ual personality and history. Hence the rest of this chapter is designed tochallenge the view that The Prelude of constitutes a counter-revolu-tionary ‘denial’ of revolutionary Jacobinism, and that it represents anearly anticipation, in confessional form, of the Burkean ideology ofcustom and tradition that was later put forward in The Excursion. On thecontrary, I want to argue, a detailed analysis of Wordsworth’s manipula-tion of autobiographical form will help to show that in The Prelude‘denial’ is a rhetorical strategy with an identifiably radical purpose,emerging clearly out of the revolutionary tradition of confession fos-tered by Rousseau and Robespierre.

Of course, in order to argue for the continuing influence of Rousseauupon Wordsworth’s poetic maturity one has to negotiate at least onemajor difficulty, the fact that after the mid-s Wordsworth hardly everrefers to him, either in his literary work or in his private letters. AsJacques Voisine noted, the poet demonstrates ‘a surprising muteness’29

on the subject, especially when one considers his early enthusiasm forthe ‘Citizen of Geneva’, and their shared interest in primitivist republi-canism. Now there are, of course, a number of possible reasons for this


curious silence. One is that Rousseau’s increasing notoriety after naturally caused cautious radicals like Wordsworth to become wary ofciting him as an influence. Another interpretation, more favourable toJames Chandler’s thesis, is that by the late s the poet had effectivelydismissed Rousseau as a false and deluded thinker, having already begunto move away from radical politics. But perhaps the most compellingexplanation of all is the one put forward by W. J. T. Mitchell, who hasargued that the over-determined absence of Rousseau fromWordsworth’s mature poetic practice is a matter of profound literaryand political significance. In the case of a text like The Prelude, he sug-gests, the repression of Rousseau’s influence actually functions as anorganising principle of the poetic narrative, with Wordsworth takingevery possible opportunity to differentiate himself, both as a pioneeringautobiographer and as an autobiographical subject, from Jean-Jacques’example, precisely because of his growing anxiety about the underlyingparallels – both philosophical and biographical – that might be seen tolink him to the ‘father’ of the Revolution. In this interpretation of things,Mitchell imagines Wordsworth to have become gradually convinced, astime went on, by the terms and inferences of Burke’s attack onRousseau’s ‘revolutionary’ vanity, but also to have become increasinglyaware that there were certain elements in his own former life and workthat were vulnerable to the same critique: after all, in looking back uponhis early career, Wordsworth could not have failed to notice that, notonly had he once been deeply sympathetic to Rousseau’s primitivist pol-itics, but also that he too, like Jean-Jacques, had been a wanderer, avagabond, and an absentee father. Thus one way of making sense of thepoetic narrative of The Prelude, Mitchell suggests, is to see it as a piece ofwriting expressly designed to differ from the example of Rousseau, withthis difference manifesting itself both thematically, in terms of a deliber-ate swerving away from The Confessions’ candid treatment of sexuality,and also formally, in terms of a deliberate eschewal of the latter’sfamously familiar prose style.30

In many ways, of course, this conception of The Prelude as a self-con-sciously English negation of its French ‘Jacobin’ predecessor could beseen to provide a perfect supplement to Liu’s notion of the poem as aoverdetermined ‘denial’ of recent history, where Rousseau’s Confessionsbecomes just another part of the revolutionary experience thatWordsworth wanted to repress. But there is more to it than that. Forwhile there is undoubtedly much evidence to suggest the deliberatesuppression of the influence and example of The Confessions in The


Prelude, there are also a number of ways in which Wordsworth’s poemcan be seen to draw surreptitiously upon the rhetorical model of itsnotorious predecessor, and upon the continuing radical potential of first-person narrative itself. For above and beyond its repudiation of the toneand address of Rousseau’s autobiography, it is actually structured by thesame oscillating dynamic of confession and self-exculpation, whereinthe avowal of guilt is used over and over again as a means of affirmingindividual agency and identity. And so, just as in the episode of Marianand the ribbon in book of The Confessions, where Rousseau begins byconfessing everything and yet ends up by finding himself guilty ofnothing, Wordsworth’s re-staging of his own revolutionary history inbooks – involves him first of all acknowledging his former politicalerrors, then displacing them on to the scapegoat figure of Robespierre,before finally recuperating many of the central elements ofRousseauvian republicanism in a suitably subdued and repatriatedform, as a kind of Jacobin ‘parasite’ inside an English ‘host’. There isthus a fundamental duplicity about The Prelude: at the level of polemic itlaunches a violent critique upon the Jacobin phenomenon, a critiquewhich is, in the broadest sense at least, quite compatible with Burkeanconservatism; but at the same time, in the profoundly ‘revolutionary’conduct of its narrative, and also in its endlessly unstable patterns ofidentification, there is much to suggest a tacit renegotiation and reloca-tion of the republican ideal. And the fact that, in the version atleast, Wordsworth never refers explicitly either to Rousseau or to Burkeis very suggestive in this respect, for not only does it hint that he mayhave found it practically impossible to choose between these two figuresat that moment in time, to define himself either for or against the revolu-tion as a historical phenomenon, it also suggests that it might have beenabsolutely crucial to his autobiographical and political project that heshould retain a certain indirectness of manner when tracing its course,not so much because he wanted to ‘deny’ history per se, but because hewanted to escape from the fixed terms of the revolution debate. Or, toput it another way, it may be possible to argue that it was precisely byexploring the experience of revolutionary duplicity, by adopting an atti-tude to the Revolution which was simultaneously one of affirmation anddenial, that Wordsworth sought to rediscover some of the enviableenergy of revolutionary republicanism, attempting to salvage theutopian impulse of the early s by actively re-inhabiting itsManichean division of mind.


In the prose introduction to his Poems of Wordsworth was todescribe the Imagination, the agent of all creative perception, as funda-mentally figurative in nature. For him the human mind came to knowl-edge by a process of conferral and abstraction, constantly refiguring andreinventing its environment. And these figurings worked according tostrict laws, with the natural world sustaining and legitimating certainidentifications and generalisations, which could then provide the basisfor a general consensus on the nature of things. With some of the socialand economic developments of his time, however, most notably theonset of industrialisation and urbanisation, Wordsworth felt that ‘thehealthful state of association’ that used to exist between man and nature,and hence between man and man, was increasingly being disturbed,thus bringing the very possibility of social consensus into question.31

Under contemporary conditions, he feared, the Imagination wasbecoming increasingly rebellious and rootless, refiguring the world inways that were not licensed by the visible nature of things in themselves,to the obvious detriment of the nation’s moral and spiritual life. And theonly remedy to this situation, according to him, lay in a return to thetraditional conditions of rural existence, for nature alone offered anenvironment which was at once both full of change and yet unchanging,supplying endless opportunities for the exercise of the figurative faculty,while at the same time keeping it in close communion with the perma-nent forms of things.32

In many ways The Prelude of can be seen as an anticipation of thistheory of the imagination in autobiographical form. In its early booksthe poet describes the moral influence of the natural sublime upon hisyouthful self ‘purifying thus / The elements of feeling and of thought,/ And sanctifying, by such discipline, / Both pain and fear until werecognise / A grandeur in the beatings of the heart’ (, –). In thecelebrated boat-stealing passage from book , for example, he depicts thesudden appearance of a mountain out of the darkness of the lake as aform of admonition:

. . . and after I had seenThat spectacle, for many days, my brainWork’d with a dim and undetermin’d senseOf unknown modes of being . . . (, –)

Seen in this light, the early books of The Prelude can be read in termsof the ongoing struggle of the infant to grasp and realise its ‘unknown


modes of being,’ the abstract intimations of early childhood that are alsointimations of abstraction. According to the eighteenth-century psy-chologist David Hartley, it was through the gradual generalisation ofsense perceptions that the human mind developed the capacity to figureabstract ideas. To borrow the explanatory terms employed by JohnBarrell, Hartley imagined the developing mind moving from a percep-tion of such things as ‘lofty cliffs’ to the eventual entertainment of whatmight be termed ‘lofty thoughts’, which would later manifest itself interms of a graduation from the language of sense to the language ofmorality and from the language of nature to the language of politics. AsBarrell has shown, in a poem such as ‘Tintern Abbey’ Wordsworth canbe seen to ‘use’ the figure of his sister Dorothy to signify this graduation,for in its closing section he represents himself as having ascended to theworld of abstract thought, while she is seen as remaining in the moreinfantile world of sense perceptions. In this way she fulfils a double func-tion, simultaneously reminding him of his past self and also confirminghis present superiority.33

The value of this grounding of abstract thought in the particularitiesof nature is addressed in the ‘London’ books of The Prelude, in which thepoet reflects upon the perniciousness of modern commercial society ina way that is highly reminiscent of Rousseau. In the modern city, accord-ing to Wordsworth, personal integrity has been replaced by meretheatricality:

Folly, vice,Extravagance in gesture, mien, and dress,And all the strife of singularity,Lies to the ear, and lies to every sense,Of these, and of the living shapes they wear,There is no end. (, –)

Individuality in the modern city has been transformed into a theatri-cal performance, an assemblage of external effects, so that the individ-ual is forced to wander outside of the realm of his personality in orderto distinguish himself from the crowd. But the problem is that everyother member of the crowd is striving to make themselves noticed too,so that in the desperate desire to signify, each is forced into an endlesscompetition against all. Signification escalates and multiplies into mean-inglessness. Far from expressing personal character, this parade of‘gesture, mien and dress’ merely obscures it. And ultimately thiscommodification of the self serves to create an atmosphere of mutual


incomprehension and moral confusion, of which Bartholomew Fair isthe absolute type:

Oh, blank confusion! and a type not falseOf what a mighty City is itselfTo all except a Straggler here and there,To the whole swarm of its inhabitants;An undistinguishable world to men,The slaves unrespited of low pursuits,Living amid the same perpetual flowOf trivial objects, melted and reducedTo one identity, by differencesThat have no law, no meaning, and no end;Oppression, under which even highest mindsMust labour, whence the strongest are not free!

(, –)

Substantially this passage is a meditation on the corrupting influenceof commerce, in which the word ‘objects’ can be seen to signify both thecommodities that enslave and alienate human labour, and the humanaims that identify themselves with those self-same commodities. Itdepicts a system in which the ‘slaves’ of a mighty city are doomed topursue the commodity through a system of circulation that is without‘end’. Moreover, this purposeless and ceaseless activity oppresses themiddle-class poet as much as the urban worker ‘unrespited of low pur-suits’, for as our eye moves from the end of one line to the beginning ofanother, we are surprised to find that in the city ‘even highest minds /Must labour’ under its noxious influence. Only the steadiest and mostsuperior of spirits are able to resist:

But though the picture weary out the eye,By nature an unmanageable sight,It is not wholly so to him who looksIn steadiness, who hath among least thingsAn under sense of greatest; sees the partsAs parts, but with a feeling of the whole.

(, –)

Wordsworth clearly intends for us to identify this figure with the poeticnarrator himself, as he rises above the distracting details of the city toattain ‘a feeling of the whole’, his memories of the Lake District servingto root and tether his imagination in a way that enables him to remainsteady while all about him is turning. And in the following book of The


Prelude this steadying process is made explicit. Returning to the LakeDistrict after the disappointments of London, he comes into his moraland political inheritance. He describes meeting a mountain shepherdwhom he has known since his early youth, and then proceeds to offer thisshepherd as the supreme embodiment of the agrarian humanist ideal,an emblem of independence and virtue and a bulwark against the accre-tions of modern corruption.

Man free, man working for himself, with choiceOf time, and place, and object; by his wants,His comforts, native occupations, cares,Conducted on to individual endsOr social, and still follow’d by a trainUnwoo’d, unthought-of even, simplicity,And beauty, and inevitable grace. (, –)

Here the world of facts, what Rivers considered ‘time / And place –the where, the when, the how and all / The dull particulars’ of existence,provide the foundation of the shepherd’s mental and moral freedom.And as with the figure of the ‘statesman’ in the letter that Wordsworthpenned to Charles James Fox in , his ownership of ‘little properties’provides a moral ground for the exercise of social virtue ‘with choice /Of time and place and object’.34 Whereas the city-dweller is foreverchasing his own tail in a whirling confusion of objects and objectives, theshepherd has a consistency of purpose that is commensurate with thefixity of the natural objects that surround him. And while making it clearthat the shepherd’s virtue is grounded upon a specific set of conditions,Wordsworth clearly offers him for general emulation. Even as the poetcelebrates his particularity, he cannot resist transforming him into ageneral ideal. In this respect he is presented in a remarkably similar wayto the ‘natural man’ in the Descriptive Sketches.

So, then, while clearly immune to the seductions of cosmopolitanism– the free-floating desire of the modern commercial order – the auto-biographical subject of book is nevertheless tempted by the possibil-ity of universalising the local ideal, of regenerating the modern worldaccording to the ancient civic model. And indeed in book of ThePrelude Wordsworth actually suggests it was the accumulated experiencesof natural sublimity in his early childhood that served to predispose himto revolutionary enthusiasm, making free reference to the fact that longacquaintance with ‘Familiar presences of awful Power’ had served ‘tosanction the proud workings of the soul, / And mountain liberty’ (,


–). And so, the sense of freedom eventually gave rise to the notionof Freedom, or to put it in another and slightly more disconcerting way,the final result of the episode of the mountain in book , we mightsuggest, was an enthusiasm for Montagnard politics.

Taken as a whole, the revolutionary books of The Prelude depict thedreadful consequence of abstract enthusiasm sundering itself from theworld of particulars. During the period of his first residence in France,the occupation of the realm of ‘lofty thoughts’ enabled the poet todevelop a general commitment to liberty and equality, but ultimately thisled him away into the vertiginous moral ‘despair’ of revolutionaryJacobinism. The poet then describes how, on returning to England afterthe débâcle of the Terror, his sister Dorothy’s childlike fascination withnature inspired him to reacquaint himself with its details. He tells howshe supervised his slow convalescence from Jacobinism by reconnectinghis abstract thoughts to the world of particular things, deconstructing‘Freedom’ into the local freedoms that are specific to a particular timeand place. In this way she helped him to palliate and repatriate hisrepublican idealism, by tempering its former sublimity and by relocat-ing it in an explicitly English context: ‘I too exclusively esteem’d thatlove, / And sought that beauty,’ he remarks, ‘which, as Milton sings, /Hath terror in it’ acknowledging to his sister that she was responsible forsoftening down this ‘over-sternness’ (, –, ). Appropriately,the paradigmatic landscape of liberty shifts from the terrifying andsublime spectacle of Switzerland which he had described in theDescriptive Sketches of , to the gentler and more beautiful mountainscenery of the Lake District that he was to celebrate in his Description ofthe Scenery of the Lakes of . Thus in books and of The Prelude,Wordsworth describes how Nature helped to restore the Imaginationafter the psychological and political crisis of the French Revolution, refo-cussing and redirecting his Jacobin universalism into a specificallyEnglish form of agrarian humanism.

Beyond this narrative of public disappointment and private retreat,however, there is something disingenuous in Wordsworth’s treatment ofthe visionary faculty which advertises its enduringly radical nature. Inthe description of the ascent of Snowdon which forms the climax of ThePrelude he describes how the nocturnal cloudscape that he witnessed inthe mountains came to seem ‘the perfect image of a mighty Mind’, anemblem of the perfect fit between Nature and Imagination in the tran-scendental realm of absolute reality:


The Power which theseAcknowledge when thus moved, which Nature thusThrusts forth upon the senses, is the expressResemblance, in the fulness of its strengthMade visible, a genuine CounterpartAnd Brother of that glorious facultyWhich higher minds bear with them as their own.

(XIII, –).

In the relative peace and liberty of the British landscape, the ‘gloriousfaculty’ of the Imagination has finally found its ‘Brother’ in Nature, amirror image of itself which serves to confirm its power and sanction itspoetic activity. And hard upon the heels of this triumphal moment therecomes a passage on the Imagination which recapitulates the epic questof the poem as a whole:

This faculty hath been the moving soulOf our long labour: we have traced the streamFrom darkness, and the very place of birthIn its blind cavern, whence is faintly heardThe sound of waters; follow’d it to lightAnd open day, accompanied its courseAmong the ways of Nature; afterwardsLost sight of it, bewilder’d and engulph’d,Then giving it greeting, as it rose once moreWith strength, reflecting in its solemn breastThe works of man and face of human life,

(, –).

During the revolutionary books the poet confessed that his moralconfusion was caused by the active misuse of the figurative faculty. Headmitted that it was a period during which ‘Imagination’ had itselfbecome ‘false’ by overreaching its bounds and identifying itself with adestructive enthusiasm to renovate the world. In this passage from book however, Wordsworth seems to suggest that during the RevolutionImagination was not so much a bloodthirsty activist as an innocent inhiding, so that like the ‘conscience’ in Rousseau’s Confessions, it effectivelybides its time, waiting for the moment to re-emerge spotless and withouttaint from beneath the grime of history, its recent errors fortuitously for-gotten and effaced. Just as we had come to think of Imagination as amortified Mortimer, repenting former crimes, it reappears as a resurgentRivers, seeking to banish past guilt. In this respect the river of theImagination is more successful than the Rivers of Wordsworth’s earlyplay, for its re-emergence on Mount Snowdon actually does seem to


bring back the moment of liberty and choice. For in this passage it re-presents itself as a ‘legislative’ power which predates the executive errorsof the Jacobin period, an enshrinement of the spirit of the past for futurerestoration.

In his seminal study Wordsworth’s Second Nature James Chandler hasseen The Prelude as a poem in which the Imagination is chastened andsubdued by the débâcle in France into a recognition of the value ofBritish customs and institutions, laying aside the primitive ‘nature’ ofrevolutionary ideology in favour of the traditionary principle of ‘secondnature’ developed by Edmund Burke.35 And indeed Burke’s version ofthe Revolution, and of Rousseau’s role within it, did become increas-ingly influential in the post-revolutionary period. But Wordsworthhimself was remarkably slow to accede to this trend. For many years hepreferred to suffer in political isolation rather than identify himself withthe growing counter-revolutionary consensus. The outbreak of thePeninsular War came as a veritable godsend in this respect, since in risingto defend the principle of Spanish independence he could at long lastwholeheartedly align himself with the national crusade againstNapoleon while continuing to remain true to his libertarian instincts.Nor did this necessitate a compromise of his fundamental political prin-ciples, since it was possible for him to argue that, in contrast with thesituation prevailing in the revolutionary decade, the spirit of true repub-licanism was not now with the French, who had long since been cor-rupted by the cold, conquering, systematising influence of Napoleon,but with the Spanish patriots and their English allies, who better under-stood the inextricable relationship between political principles likeliberty and public virtue and the autochthonous spirit of a particularnation or locality. Hence when in the Convention of Cintra he suggestedthat the Spanish rebels would do better to cultivate their own nativespirit of liberty rather than dabble with the political philosophy of theFrench Revolution, he did so primarily because he considered that inorder to cultivate true public virtue it was necessary to look to one’s localtradition, a principle which he might have drawn as easily fromRousseau as from Edmund Burke. At the same time, however, hisrhetoric did suggest that he was increasingly coming to regard the‘native’ productions of the French republican tradition as intrinsicallyproblematic: ‘The Spaniards are a people with imagination’, he wrote,‘and the paradoxical reveries of Rousseau and the flippancies ofVoltaire, are plants which will not naturalise in the country of Calderónand Cervantes’.36 But for all that the Convention of Cintra might be seen to


mark a significant stage in the slow decline of Wordsworth’s youthfulrepublicanism into Burkean conservatism, from an essentially secularand egalitarian ideal to a belief in Anglicanism and feudalism, it is notnecessary to infer that The Prelude was part of the same stage in theprocess. For in the years during which he was engaged upon the poem,Wordsworth stood in a far more problematic relation to the growingcounter-revolutionary consensus. He had not entirely rejected therevolutionary paradigm; he was still concerned to reclaim what he couldfrom the wreckage of the s, seeking to translate the underlying prin-ciples of revolutionary ‘primitivism’ into an English Lakeland idiom,and also to transfuse some of its visionary energy, its utopian ideal.

In embarking upon this project of political salvage work, Wordsworthmust have been aware of the extent to which, above and beyond all othergenres, autobiography provided one of the best means of retrievingwhat was valuable in the past. And it is difficult not to believe thatRousseau would have been a powerful example in this respect, for oneof the leading characteristics of his confessional discourse had been itsongoing dynamic of confession and self-justification, by which meansthe author had been able to reject former errors, and then subsequentlyredeem them, in a way that seemed both natural and persuasive, and notmerely a rhetorical sleight-of-hand. So that when Wordsworth began toundertake a reassessment of his own past, this confessional dynamicmust have been highly appealing, not least because it would allow himto have things both ways, simultaneously to register his absolute rejec-tion of French Jacobinism, while continuing to put its legacy of ‘reno-vating virtue’ in the service of his ‘localist’ ideal.

In book of The Prelude of Wordsworth describes his residence inParis during one of the most dramatic periods of the French Revolution.Arriving in the capital in October , just a few weeks after theinsurrection of August, the September Massacres and the institutionof the First Republic, he is greeted by the sound of news hawkersannouncing the accusation of Maximilien Robespierre by Jean-BaptisteLouvet. Immediately the poet goes on to describe the scene in theNational Convention ‘when Robespierre not ignorant for what mark /Some words of indirect reproof had been / Intended, rose in hardihood,and dared / The man who had an ill surmise of him / To bring hischarge in openness’. He describes Louvet’s subsequent attack, and the


lack of support he gained from his ‘irresolute friends’, before com-menting that it was the failure of those ‘whose aim / Seemed best’ whichultimately led to the débâcle of the Terror. But whose aim seemed best?It is likely, as most commentators have suggested, that Wordsworth isreferring to the more moderate Girondins rather than the notoriouslyextreme Jacobins, but he is by no means explicit about his political tra-jectory. The potent vagueness of his confessional manner makes itdifficult to situate him within the republican conflict. Ostensibly, theautobiographical voice of defines itself in absolute opposition tothe Terror. But even the poet’s retrospective Girondism is haunted by thememory of his former allegiance to the Mountain:

Well might my wishes be intense, my thoughtsStrong and perturb’d, not doubting at that time,Creed which ten shameful years have not annull’d,But that the virtue of one paramount mindWould have abash’d those impious crests, have quell’dOutrage and bloody power, and in despiteOf what the People were through ignoranceAnd immaturity, and, in the teethOf desperate opposition from without,Have clear’d a passage for just government,And left a solid birth-right to the State,Redeem’d according to example givenBy ancient Lawgivers. (, –)

As James Heffernan has pointed out, Wordsworth’s probable admira-tion for the political morality of ‘Girondin’ moderates such as Louvet’s‘irresolute friends’ and his political mentor Michel Beaupuy was alwaysaccompanied by a sense of their ineffectuality: ‘Even as he denounces“bloody power”, Heffernan writes, ‘he is asking for radically effective“virtue”, for someone like Robespierre, who spoke as the apostle ofvirtue, and declared that terror was nothing but prompt, severe,inflexible justice.’37 As is well known, the party of the Mountain gainedits name from the high wall of the left-wing of the National Conventionwhere the radicals chose to sit. Robespierre himself had drawn onRousseau’s celebration of Alpine republicanism in his description of thisMountain, depicting it as the ‘height of patriotism’ and defining aMontagnard or Mountaineer as ‘nothing other than a pure, reasonableand sublime patriot’.38 Thus in hankering for the virtue of ‘one para-mount mind’ to abash ‘those impious crests’ Wordsworth’s anti-Robespierrist tirade rehearses the very language of Alpine virtue coined


by Rousseau himself. The mature poet aligns himself with Louvet whilesimultaneously endorsing the cult of the ‘paramount’ legislator thatLouvet’s ‘Denunciation’ of had explicitly sought to expose. And inrecollecting and resurrecting the desire for the State to be ‘redeem’daccording to example given / By ancient Lawgivers’ the poet betrays theneo-Spartan roots of his former Jacobinism. It is as if, like Southey in hisletter to Coleridge of , he is calling for a ‘Lycurgus after Robespierre’to carry on the work of Revolution, where the figure of the‘Incorruptible’ comes to represent a political ‘double’, at one and thesame time both the type and the anti-type of the ideal ‘public man’.

It is instructive, in this respect, to compare this section of book withsome of the prose histories of the republican period which were pub-lished at this time. As we have seen, Adolphus had refused to make anydistinction between the martyred Girondins and their Jacobin per-secutors, arguing that ‘there is hardly an objection made by Brissot tothe intrigues, the views and the crimes of the opposing party but applieswith equal or greater force to his own’.39 He maintained that the opposi-tion between the Brissotins and the Robespierrists had been merely cir-cumstantial, that it had been produced by their competition for politicalpower, and not by any fundamental moral or political differencebetween them. For him, they were all, in principle, Jacobin terrorists:their shared rhetoric pointed to their shared beliefs. ‘Danton . . . appearsto have justly appreciated Brissot in this respect, when he declared that“a fraternity with either faction was the brotherhood of Cain, and thatBrissot, like Robespierre, would have condemned him to the guillotine”’(, ). And as we have seen, it was in a vain attempt to undermine thisgrowing orthodoxy that English radicals such as Helen Maria Williamssought to distinguish the virtuous republicanism of Brissot and theGirondins from the tyrannical behaviour of Robespierre and hissupporters in the Mountain.40

History will judge between Brissot and Robespierre . . . [It] will not confoundthese sanguinary and ambitious men who passed along the revolutionaryhorizon like baneful meteors, spreading destruction in their course, with thosewhose talents formed a radiant constellation in the zone of freedom anddiffused benignant beams on the hemisphere till extinguished by storms anddarkness.

One of the earliest strategies adopted by apologists of the FrenchRevolution had been to try and ‘naturalise’ it as an event or series ofevents by describing its progress using metaphors from geology andastronomy.41 Williams carries on this tradition by making nature and


history transparent to one another. In her version of events the Jacobinsand the Girondins were only apparently similar. Time would show thatthe blaze created by the former was terrifying but temporary, while the‘radiant constellation’ of the latter would be both inspiring and lasting.It is significant, therefore, that given Wordsworth’s familiarity withWilliams’s text, his retrospective Girondism should have been socomparatively unconvincing. Moreover, it is also rather interesting that,when considered alongside the natural imagery from the Memoirs,Wordsworth’s reference to the Mountain’s ‘impious crests’ beingabashed by ‘the virtue of one paramount mind’ should be so curiouslyself-defeating, registering an absolute opposition to the actual policies ofthe Mountain, while at the same time fully endorsing its political aes-thetic.

In it was still possible for moderate republicans like Williams toput their trust in History, to argue that as soon as the Revolution hadbeen completed, the bewildering flux of the Terror would become sub-sumed into a progressive linear narrative.42 By , however, at the timewhen Wordsworth was composing The Prelude, Europe was embroiled inthe second phase of the Napoleonic conflict and the memories of therepublican period of the French Revolution were rapidly receding. Inthis climate, it was not easy for him to share Williams’s blithe confidencein the future, and nor was it especially useful to toe her Girondist line.So rather than rehearsing the Themidorean ‘plot’ she had adopted, hegave an entirely different version of recent history, one much moreclosely linked with the conservative historiography of the period, inwhich the revolution was seen as a series of repetitions and returns, asuccession of legislative hopes and executive disappointments, from thejournées of to Napoleon’s coronation as Emperor in :

When we see the dog returning to his vomit, when the sunThat rose in slendour, was alive, and movedIn exultation among living cloudsHath put his function and his glory off,And, turned into a gewgaw, a machine,Sets like an opera phantom. (, –).

But as we shall see, what is curious and distinctive about The Prelude isthat far from putting this narrative technique to a reactionary end, asBurke and Chateaubriand had done, Wordsworth was to give it a decid-edly radical spin, showing how in confessional autobiography, unlikehistory or drama, there was not merely an agony in repetition, but also‘the return of liberty and choice’.


In book of The Prelude which describes the first phase ofWordsworth’s residence in France, the poet relates how in passing ‘intoa theatre of which the stage / Was busy with an action far advanced’ hebecame eager to give a ‘form and a body’ to the narrative into which hehad entered, to accord the Revolution the generic status of comedy,tragedy or romance. Unable to affix it to a literary category, he is forcedto veer from one extreme to the other, firstly by suggesting that theRevolution was so unprecedented that it broke all of the rules of narra-tive, that it was a ‘mockery of history, the past and that to come!’, thenby arguing that it seemed ‘like nothing out of nature’s certain course’and absolutely concordant with the general scheme of things. As thenarrative moves on to the most violent and unpredictable phase of theJacobin period, the Revolution is increasingly described in terms of aseries of uncanny reversals. Describing the period immediately afterEngland had declared war on France in February , Wordsworthwrites of the sense of inner conflict created by his continued support forthe First Republic. This phase was ‘not as hitherto, / A swallowing oflesser things in great; / But change of them into their opposites,’ a timein which differentiations of concept and character became radicallyunstable, in which liberty came to resemble tyranny and in which virtuewas equated with terror, ‘and thus a way was open’d’, as Wordsworthlater puts it, ‘for mistakes / And false conclusions of the intellect, / Asgross in their degree and in their kind/Far, far more dangerous’ (,–). And with the onset of the revolutionary Terror he describes howhe began to experience the revolution as a species of internal conflict:

Through months, through years, long after the last beatOf these atrocities (I speak bare truth,As if to thee alone in private talk)I scarcely had one night of quiet sleepSuch ghastly visions had I of despairAnd tyranny, and implements of death,And long orations which in dreams I pleadedBefore unjust Tribunals, with a voiceLabouring, a brain confounded, and a sense,Of treachery and desertion in the placeThe holiest that I knew of, my own soul. (, –)

The version of this passage has the poet full of a sense ‘Death-like, of treacherous desertion, felt, / In the last place of refuge, my ownsoul’, which suggests that others have been doing the deserting.43 The text, however, is much more willing to explore the complex cross-


currents of revolutionary culpability, for when the poet is hauled beforethe tribunal it is with a sense ‘of treachery and desertion’ that is muchmore difficult to locate, as if somewhere deep inside he felt himself tohave failed the cause of liberty. Shortly afterwards, however, there is aviolent reaction, in which he rises above these feelings of victimisationand culpability, rechannelling his guilt into a pursuit of the guilty, and,just like Rivers before him, rediscovering in repetition a resurgence ofagency:

But as the ancient Prophets were inflamedNor wanted consolations of their ownAnd majesty of mind, when they denouncedOn Towns and Cities, wallowing in the abyssOf their offences, punishment to come;Or saw, like other men, with bodily eyes,Before them in some desolated placeThe consummation of the wrath of Heaven,So did some portion of that spirit fallOn me, to uphold me through those evil times,And in their rage and dog-day heat I foundSomething to glory in, as just and fit,And in the order of sublimest laws;And even if that were not, amid the aweOf unintelligible chastisement,I felt a kind of sympathy with power,Motions rais’d up within me, neverthelessWhich had relationship to highest things.

(, –)

Such is the counter-revolutionary zeal of this section, its deep invest-ment in the self-destructive recoil of the Terror, that it comes danger-ously close to the very psychology of Terrorism itself. And Wordsworthmust have noticed this when he came to revise the passage in his lateryears, or he would not have thought it necessary to ‘sanctify’ its senti-ments in the way that he did. For example, whereas in the version, the ancient Prophets the poet refers to are curiously bothinside and outside the revolutionary abyss, passing lofty judgment uponoffences to which they are themselves syntactically linked, in the version these Prophets are far more morally detached from the revolu-tionary action, and the poet himself is animated with feelings of‘devout humility’ and the ‘acquiescences of faith’ as well as ‘daringsympathies with power’. Ultimately, then, the poet sympathises muchmore wholeheartedly with the ‘wrath of heaven’ in the version,


while continuing to identify with the objects of its wrath. And such isthe duplicity of the language in this earlier rendering, its inescapablydual aspect, that it succeeds in being at once both Burkean andRobespierrist, a piece at once for and against the Terror, as if even in Wordsworth still found it impossible to rehearse a set of unequiv-ocally counter-revolutionary sentiments without unconsciously incu-bating within them a Jacobin ‘ghost’.

In the concluding section of the Memoirs of the Reign of RobespierreWilliams gave an account of the trial of the former head prosecutor ofthe Revolutionary Tribunal, Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, the man whohad administered the infamous Prairial laws:

On May st I was at the revolutionary tribunal when the charges againstFouquier-Tinville and his accomplices were re-read after all the witnesses hadbeen heard. On entering the hall I was seized with a feeling of profound horror.So many persons who had been dear to me had met their doom there, and nowthe benches where they had sat were occupied by their murderers. There wasscarcely any need for the jury to deliberate. It only remained to apply the lawand pronounce the judgement. And as though all the circumstances of the trialhad been arranged to show the punishment of heaven, the very words usedwere those with which the condemned had been wont to judge the innocent:the accusation being one of conspiracy against the safety of the FrenchRepublic, and the penalty being death.44

This scene might be seen to form an objective, historical counterpartto Wordsworth’s nightmarish tableau on his ‘sympathy with power’. Itdescribes one of those uncanny moments when the providential historyof the Revolution seemed to have come full circle, with the head prose-cutor of the Jacobin regime standing in the dock hearing his ownrhetoric used against him. The difference is, of course, that whileWilliams keeps an ironic detachment from the proceedings,Wordsworth, like Shakespeare’s Lear directing the storm, activelyidentifies with the principle of sublime justice, imagining it as a functionof his will, while continuing to feel his continuing links with the baseobjects of its vengeance.

In one sense, the rest of book can be seen to continue this dynamicof repudiation-as-repetition, since the poet goes on to describe therejuvenation of his revolutionary enthusiasm after the death ofRobespierre, before subsequently confessing the extent to which it repre-sented nothing but a repetition, in internal form, of the characteristicforms and practices of the Terror, ‘tempting region that’ he remarks,referring to the field of philosophical speculation, ‘for Zeal to enter and


refresh herself, / Where passions had the privilege to work, / And neverhear the sound of their own names’ (, –). Then he describesthrowing himself into ‘the philosophy that promised to abstract thehopes of man / Out of his feelings’, which many critics have identifiedas the philosophical anarchism of William Godwin, seeking to demon-strate what happens when moral speculation is colonised by a species of‘false imagination, placed beyond / The limits of experience and oftruth’ (, –).

I took the knife in handAnd stopping not at parts less sensitive,Endeavour’d with my best of skill to probeThe living body of societyEven to the heart: I push’d without remorseMy speculations forward; yea, set footOn Nature’s holiest places. (, –)

In a radical internalisation of the executive practice of the Terror, thepoet’s mind has become transformed into a kind of court-room for thepursuit of philosophical truth. Soon time-honoured sentiments andprejudices are being brought to the bar, with the mind being forced toconfess ‘her titles and her honours’ as if she were an aristocratic suspectat Fouquier-Tinville’s revolutionary tribunal:

Thus I fared,Dragging all passions, notions, shapes of faithLike culprits to the bar, suspiciouslyCalling the mind to establish in plain dayHer titles and her honours, now believing,Now disbelieving; endlessly perplexedWith impulse, motive, right and wrong, the groundOf moral obligation, what the ruleAnd what the sanction, till, demanding proof,And seeking it in everything, I lostAll feeling of conviction, and in fine,Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,Yielded up moral questions in despair. (, –)

Quite often, in the past, this section of the poem has often been con-sidered an attack on revolutionary ‘rationalism’. But as we saw in the firstfour chapters, the philosophical and political theorists of the ‘rational-ist’ school did not perplex themselves with ‘impulse, motive, right andwrong’. Theorists such as Bentham and Condorcet preferred to seemoral and legal problems in utilitarian terms; they did not try to fathom


intentions, but to calculate consequences. It makes more sense, then, Iwould argue, to suggest that this section of book , like The Borderers,represents not so much an attack on rationalism as an attempt ‘to showthe dangerous use which may be made of reason when a man has com-mitted a great crime’, for as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein it is the use ofreason rather than reason itself which is the main focus of the text, or toput it another way, its concern is to exhibit the danger of employing ‘pro-gressive’ methods to pursue a ‘primitive’ ideal, as the poet attempts topursue a highly internal notion of truth while using an analytic methodthat is the philosophical equivalent of the guillotine. In this way books and of The Prelude can be seen to represent a full-scale confession ofrevolutionary culpability, describing how the dynamic reversals ofrevolutionary history became reflexes of the mind, and how, by acomplex process of repudiation and repetition, the youthful self of thenarrator found himself putting on the mantle of Robespierre andrehearsing his public errors in the private tribunal of his mind. But theyare also confessional in another sense, for while it is undoubtedly truethat the autobiographical voice of defines itself in explicit opposi-tion to the Jacobin Terror, it does also continue to betray a continuinginvestment in Jacobin habits of mind, most notably its politics of the willand of ‘paramount virtue’, as if retaining a residual belief in ‘primitivist’republicanism, in spite of the ravages of history.

Of central importance here, both in relation to book and to ThePrelude as a whole, is the revolutionary conduct of the narrative itself.Even in its early books, The Prelude is full of temporal digressions andasides, sudden prospects of the future and unexpected returns to thepast. In book , however, this characteristic takes on a new aspect, as weare invited to recognise the revolutionary potential of a sudden resurrec-tion of past ideals. Most notably, this is true of the passage beginning ‘Opleasant exercise of hope and joy’, which interrupts an account of theThermidorean period with the famous invocation: ‘Bliss was it in thatdawn to be alive!’ (, –). A number of critics have spent a longtime puzzling over this passage; for some it is an essentially ironic per-formance, detailing the naive idealism of in the light of the deepdisappointment of ; for others, however, it is a genuinecommemoration of the millenarian atmosphere of the early s. Tomy mind at least, it is not necessary to choose between these two inter-pretations: the passage does hint that there was something flimsy andfantastical about the revolutionary enthusiasm of the early s, that itwas ‘romantic’ in the fullest sense, but it does also suggest that the auto-


biographical voice of is still imbued with considerable retrospectivefondness for that former vision: ‘Why should I not confess,’ Wordsworthwrites, ‘that earth was then / To what an inheritance new-fallen / Seemswhen the the first time visited, to one / Who thither comes to find in ithis home? (, –). In fact, what is really striking about the passage isthat it stages such a striking interruption of the poetic narrative, burst-ing into the chronological continuum with all the force of a revolution-ary moment. And this instantly serves to disturb that sense of theRevolution as a historical failure, an endless cycle of violent repetition,and reintroduces it into the body of the text as a still-nourishing ‘beauidéal’; a recollected state of being, a ‘spot of time’.

To the French revolutionary mind, almost the only way of thinkingabout the republican tradition was in terms of the discontinuous historyof a few small ‘spots of time’ – short-lived nations and city states likeSparta, Rome, Florence, Geneva – isolated from one another byinnumerable generations. As Robespierre himself had confessed, in hisspeech on the Cult of the Supreme Being of May : ‘Posterityhonours the virtue of Brutus, but it only permits to exist in ancienthistory. The centuries and the earth have hardly reposed for a moment,and only on a few points of the globe. Sparta shines like a star in theimmense darkness’.45 And in a certain sense, the passage quoted abovefrom The Prelude could be seen as a poetic version of just such anotherspot of time – the utopian moment of , snatched briefly from theoblivion of the past. Ultimately, it could be argued, the overridingpurpose of book is to identify the emptily theatrical nature of what DeQuincey called ‘the gorgeous festival era of the French Revolution’, theextent to which the sun of French liberty ultimately proved to be nothingbut ‘a gewgaw, a machine [. . .] an opera phantom’, and also perhaps toidentify the misguided ambition of the revolutionary project, whose endit was to regenerate ‘not favour’d spots alone’ (as in the republicanhistory of the past), ‘but the whole earth’. But for all that, however, therepudiation of French republican forms by Wordsworth was far fromtotal. Indeed the nature and shape of the revolutionary ‘romance’ wasto remain an important element in his work, for as I hope to show, evenin the later books of The Prelude, which represent the poet returning toEngland to embrace its native landscape and traditions, there is evidenceto suggest the enduring influence of the republican tradition upon hisconceptualisation of English liberty, with the festival moments of theRevolution continuing to insinuate themselves into his recollections ofprivate virtue.


Wordsworth’s most authoritative account of the recovery of the past asan inspiration to the future occurs in the famous ‘spots of time’ passagefrom book of The Prelude. ‘There are in our existence spots of time’,the poet writes, ‘Which with distinct preeminence retain / A renovatingvirtue’

A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,That penetrates, enables us to mount,When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.This efficacious spirit chiefly lurksAmong those passages of life in whichWe have had deepest feeling that the mindIs lord and master, and the outward senseIs but the obedient servant of her will. (, –)

Through his private memories, the poet says, it was possible for himto recover the strength and goodness, the ‘vivifying virtue’ that he lostduring the Jacobin period. In Wordsworth’s Second Nature James Chandlerhas argued that ‘the discipline represented by the spots [of time] is ulti-mately a psychological manifestation of a national character and anative tradition’.46 For him the poem is fundamentally Burkean innature, a critique of the rationalist idealism of the French Revolutionand a defence of English custom and prejudice. And he sees the ‘spots’very much in terms of a renewed sense of the relationship betweenEnglish landscape and English liberty. But what Chandler’s accounttends to neglect is the fact that Wordsworth may have been prompted toreject the ‘rationalistic’ tendency of French Enlightenment thoughtwithout necessarily rejecting the principles of Rousseauvian republi-canism. For as we saw in chapter one, works such as the Contrat Social andthe Lettre à d’Alembert may have been somewhat systematic in their form,but they also possessed a strong emphasis upon custom and tradition. Somuch so, indeed, that on the question of ‘locality’ Rousseau shared a lotof common ground with Burke, while putting that ground to entirelydifferent ends.47 It is not a foregone conclusion, therefore, that we shouldsee the celebration of native tradition in Wordsworth as automaticallyBurkean in nature. And whereas in relation to The Excursion there is acompelling argument to suggest that Wordsworth’s poetic sensibility hastaken on an identifiably Burkean cast, The Prelude is far more ambivalent.For contrary to Chandler’s thesis, many of the ‘spots of time’ inWordsworth’s Prelude are not merely affirmations of local spirit and


tradition, but also memories of the first stirrings of preeminent ‘moun-tain’ virtue. And their very status as ‘spots’ serves to extract them fromtheir surrounding context, as if they were private versions of the greatrepublican moments of the past, ‘small islands in the midst of stormywaves’ (, ), rather than true emblems of traditionary process like the‘spoken epitaphs’ in The Excursion. And it is for this very reason that the‘renovating’ power they supply is often highly ambiguous in nature, atonce deeply rooted in a particular context, and yet potentially extensivein its ambition, a means of private ‘restoration’ which still retains thecapacity to fuel a public ‘regeneration’.

In the childhood reminiscence from book that is used to exemplifythe theory of the ‘spots’, Wordsworth describes coming upon a hollowin the midst of a ‘rough and stony Moor’ near his home, where a longtime ago ‘a Murderer had been hung in iron chains’:

The Gibbet mast was moulder’d down, the bonesAnd iron case were gone; but on the turf,Hard by, soon after that fell deed was wroughtSome unknown hand had carved the Murderer’s name.

(, –)

When he reascended the bare Common Wordsworth saw a lone Girlby ‘a naked Pool’ carrying a Pitcher in the ‘blowing wind’, an imagewhose ‘visionary dreariness’ impressed itself deeply upon his mind. Hecontinues by recalling the happy occasion when he returned to that spotwith his wife Mary and his sister Dorothy, and how it became suffusedwith ‘the spirit of pleasure and youth’s golden gleam’, concluding thathe cannot fail to have benefited from the divine radiance of theseremembrances, ‘and from the power / They left behind’ (, –).According to Thomas Weiskel such ‘gestures of self-inquisition’ in ThePrelude ‘become the mere feinting of a mind learning how knowledge isopposed to efficacious power’.48 In this interpretation, Wordsworthlearns that he can recover a sense of freedom and choice from the essen-tially traumatic and terrifying experiences of the past by transformingthem from historical events into natural phenomena, by ‘denying’ someof the more painful details of a tale or history in order that they can bereconfigured as a succession of sounds or images. As he said of Louvet’sconfrontation with Robespierre in the National Convention, ‘these arethings / Of which I speak, only as they were storm / Or sunshine to myindividual mind, / No further’ (, –). Unlike Rousseau, Wordsworthdoes not believe that he can wholly recollect the past, or that it is espe-


cially helpful to do so. He is more concerned to retrieve the how ratherthan the what of history, to recover the structure but not the content offormer desire. But this is not necessarily a reactionary tactic. For it couldalso be seen as the means by which the poet was actively seeking to softenand beautify the ‘harsh sublimity’ contained in the catastrophicmoments of past history in order to recapture some of their ‘renovatingvirtue’.

In her important book on the French Revolutionary festivals, MonaOzouf has described how the Jacobins sought to use nature as a meansof verifying the narrative fact of revolution. Indeed the calendar ofrevolutionary festivals can be seen as nothing less than a deliberateattempt to ‘naturalise’ History, to transform it into Time, a natural andharmonious cycle which would subsume and tranquillise all ‘historical’violence.49 But for those who came after the Revolution, the relationshipbetween nature and history was bound to be more fraught. As Alan Liuwrites, ‘whereas the Revolutionary fêtes declared an ideology premisedupon nature’s transparency to history, Wordsworth’s fêtes will argue anideology requiring nature to be opaque to history’.

After the shock of the high Terror and of the declaration of war betweenEngland and France, nature – the verification of Imagination interveningbetween history and ideology – became a blind or screen: a fact for its ownsake.50

Thus according to Liu’s thesis Nature comes to mask History inWordsworth’s Prelude and Time becomes human to the extent that it isarticulated through a denied narrative mode. ‘When revolutionaryhistory vanishes,’ Liu continues, ‘what remains is lyric inscription whosezero degree story, like the bare name, span of dates, or short verse of anepitaph – points away from the buried narrative to an imagined, eternalhistory.’ This is as much as to say that like the Pastor in The Excursion thepoet in The Prelude is content to let the ‘green herbs [. . .] softly creep’over the head-stone of history, in order that he will be reminded ‘lessimperiously’ of the past.51 According to this view of things,Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic operates like the ideal grave in hisEssay on Epitaphs of – as ‘a tranquillising object’ from which‘resignation in course of time springs up [. . .] as naturally as the wildflowers besprinkling the turf with which it may be covered, or gatheringround the monument by which it is defended’.52 But what Liu neglectsis that in The Prelude the masking of history does not constitute a resigna-tion of the Jacobin ideal, but its tactical transferral. It is the means by


which the poet resituates the paradigm of liberty in an identifiablyEnglish context.

There is one passage in the poem in which this process is to somedegree laid bare, the moment when Wordsworth describes the deepexultation he felt when first hearing of the death of Robespierre. And itis in a brief discussion of this section (, –) that I will seek to con-solidate my argument, precisely because it seems so characteristic of theway that Wordsworth uses the ‘spots’ in The Prelude as a whole. Thepassage is preceded by a section in which the poet describes how, evenduring the ‘disastrous period’ of the Terror, he still found ‘bright spots’of hope and joy. He tells how he could not help remembering ‘the gladtime’ when he had been travelling through France for the first time withRobert Jones, recollecting the day ‘when through an arch that spann’dthe street, / A rainbow made of garish ornaments, / Triumphal pompfor Liberty confirmed, / We walked, a pair of weary Travellers, / Alongthe town of Arras, place from which / Issued that Robespierre, whoafterwards / Wielded the sceptre of the atheist crew’. And soon mem-ories of the festival atmosphere of inevitably lead the poet to medi-tate on the subsequent fate of Arras during the the Terror ‘groaningunder the vengeance of her cruel Son’, and then to reflect on how the‘blameless spectacle’ afforded by his first glimpse of the town returnedto mock him ‘under such a strange reverse’.

Immediately after this comes Wordsworth’s description of themoment when he first heard of Robespierre’s death, one of the happi-est days of his life, as he describes it, and one which deserves, he says, ‘aseparate chronicle’. Setting the scene, he describes how he was walkingalong the ‘smooth and level sands of Leven’, gazing at the hills andmountains of his birthplace in the distance, at the moment when heheard the news. Having already been told that this was the day on whichRobespierre was finally ‘levell’d with the dust’, the reader is immediatelyencouraged to read the landscape of Leven as an anticipation of thesmooth and level prospect that the death of the Incorruptible is about toopen up. With this monstrous obstacle removed, the passage seems tosuggest, the poet will finally be free to look toward the distant vision ofhope and joy imaged in the play of light above the mountains of hisbirthplace, a ‘fulgent spectacle’ that is fundamentally steadfast andsecure in nature, strongly contrasting with the artificial and flimsy spec-tacle that he had witnessed at Arras, and far more lasting than HelenMaria Williams’ radiant constellation of the Gironde. Then in a furtherdigression, Wordsworth describes how he looked at this prospect with a


fancy ‘more alive’ for having just visited the grave of his old schoolmas-ter, the man who had encouraged him in his earliest essays in poetry,deeming him ‘not devoid of promise’. Throughout this passage, the poetrepeatedly emphasises the gentleness and peace of the setting, thesmooth and level nature of Leven Sands, with the tide having retreatedto a ‘safe distance’ far from the shore. The ruins of an ancient ‘Romish’chapel stands in the sea nearby, and ‘not far from this still Ruin all theplain / Was spotted with a variegated crowd / Of coaches, Wains, andTravellers, horse and foot, Wading, beneath the conduct of their Guide /In loose procession through the shallow Stream / Of inland water’.

So far, this section reads like a microcosm of the broad narrative ofThe Prelude as a whole, in which the French Revolution is depicted as adistracting ideal which temporarily prevents the poet from discoveringwhat turns out to be his true inheritance, the philosophic and poetic pat-rimony contained in the sites and scenes of his own childhood. However,as the poet learns of Robespierre’s death, the relationship betweenexternal nature and internal feeling become much more complicated, asthe stresses and storms of internal feeling threaten to spill over into thelandscape:

Great was my glee of spirit, great my joyIn vengeance, and eternal justice, thusMade manifest. ‘Come now ye golden times’,Said I, forth-breathing on these open SandsA Hymn of triumph, ‘as the morning comesOut of the bosom of the night, come Ye:Thus far our trust is verified: behold!They who with clumsy desperation broughtRivers of blood, and preached that nothing elseCould cleanse the Augean stable, by the mightOf their own helper have been swept away;Their madness is declared and visible,Elsewhere will safety now be sought, and EarthMarch firmly towards righteousness and peace.’Then schemes I framed more calmly, when and howThe madding Factions might be tranquillised,And, though through hardships manifold and long,The mighty renovation would proceed:Thus, interrupted by uneasy burstsOf exultation, I pursued my wayAlong that very shore which I had skimmedIn former times, when, spurring from the ValeOf Nightshade, and St Mary’s mouldering fane,


And the Stone Abbot, after circuit madein wantonness of heart, a joyous crewOf School-boys, hastening to their distant home,Along the margin of the moonlight sea,We beat with thundering hoofs the level sand.

(, –)

Ostensibly, Wordsworth’s ‘Hymn of Triumph’ represents astraightforward critique of the politics of the Terror. Surreptitiously,however, it seems to draw energy and virtue from the object of its scorn.And significantly, the reference to the spirit of vengeance was droppedin the version of the poem, as if Wordsworth was later moved totry and distance himself from an emotion which had increasingly cometo be identified, by a whole series of writers on the Revolution from JohnThelwall to William Hazlitt, as Robespierre’s fatal flaw.53 Nevertheless,in both versions of this passage, the poet’s faith in the Revolution dieswith the dying, only to be born with the dead. Functioning as a kind ofscapegoat, as in the Thermidorean representations of the previousdecade, Robespierre’s demise releases not only new hope, but alsoJacobin desire, as Wordsworth expresses a newfound zeal for renovationcouched in the form of a scarcely veiled fantasy of political ambition.Suddenly he imagines himself as the new ‘public man’ as he dances onthe grave of the old, ‘a Lycurgus after Robespierre’ capable of tranquil-lising the ‘madding Factions’ and helping the ‘mighty renovation’ toproceed. He experiences an ‘exultation’ that immediately links him tothe formerly ‘exultant’ town of Arras, mentioned not long before, andwhich expresses itself in ‘uneasy bursts’ as if it were an incoming tide, orgathering wind, natural forces that would inevitably serve to threaten thepeace and tranquillity of Leven.

Evidently, the latter part of the passage strives to offset the ‘uneasy’effect of this burst of exultation by linking it with the seemingly inno-cent joy the poet felt as a young boy horse-riding with his fellows alongthe margins of the self same spot of Leven Sands. Significantly, however,this ‘spot of time’ serves to remind us of an earlier section of the poem,in which those schoolboy games were described in more detail, with thelast line of this passage from book exactly echoing line of book .And in that earlier description, there was a clear suggestion that the‘wantonness of heart’ exhibited by the boys represents a kind of disrup-tion of the tranquil spirit of Furness Abbey and its environs, a desecra-tion of which the young Wordsworth was himself partly aware. Thuswhile the passage in book ostensibly seeks to establish a contrast


between the poet’s heartfelt and harmonious attachment to the place ofhis birth, and the vengeful attitude to Arras that was adopted byRobespierre, it also cannot help confessing the extent to which the‘primitive’ zeal of Jacobinism was actually present in embyro in the poet’sown boyhood, as the smooth and level sands of Leven are disturbed andkicked about by his wanton, joyous spirit.

Only a month before his death Robespierre had presided over the cel-ebrated Festival of the Supreme Being, in which a dazzling display oflight and colour had been arranged to illuminate an artificial mountainspecially constructed on the Champ de Mars, and hymns had been sungto the future regeneration of the French Republic. Memories of thissymbolic invocation to mountain virtue – which was at once a celebra-tion of Rousseauvian Alpine virtue and the virtue of the Montagnardfaction – cannot help but impinge upon the play of light Wordsworthdescribes hovering over the hills of his birthplace on the day of his death.And this is not merely a question of Wordsworth replacing the ‘brightspot’ of French liberty at Arras, a short-lived and fragile prospect, ‘asmall island in the midst of stormy waves’ with the more ‘fulgent spec-tacle’ he sees over Hawkshead. It is also that the scene on Leven Sandsis so clearly imagined as the realisation of its previous revolutionarymodel. Unlike Helen Maria Williams’s ‘radiant constellation’ of theGironde, it improves on the spectacle of the Cult of the Supreme Beingby rendering it real. A piece of corrupt urban theatre, a kind of politicalBartholomew Fair, has been given a more thoroughly primitive, a morecompletely republican setting, surrounded by the permanent forms ofnature. The false and bloody sublime of the Montagnards, which was,as it were, a kind of desperate gesturing towards an ethos of neo-Spartanvirtue, has been replaced by the true and healthful sublime of theLakeland mountains, which represents its softer and yet more lastingembodiment. In this way the poem returns the festival ideal of theFrench Revolution to its local setting. But as we have seen, such isthe ‘renovating virtue’ of this landscape that it always carries within itthe possibility of conquest and expansion, of generating ‘uneasy bursts’of universal ambition that threaten to repeat the regenerative idealismof the Terror. Hence Wordsworth’s desire to displace this idealism intothe past, to circumscribe and contain his revolutionary zeal by relocat-ing it in the ‘spots of time’ of his own childhood, past moments whichcan be seen to provide a ‘fructifying virtue’ precisely because of the factthat, like the ancient ‘spots’ of Rome and Sparta, they stand at ‘a safedistance’ from the present, and can never return. And by this means the


. ‘The Triumph of the Republic’ (), anonymous colour engraving. At the centreof the image is a huge mountain, with two tables inscribed ‘Rights of Man’ and ‘Acte

Constitutionnel’ placed at the top. From these tables forks of lightning are beingemitted, which have succeeded in casting down a group of despots into the lake below

(a Medusa-like figure, and a priest can just be seen struggling in the waters of thelake), and also in setting fire to a city in the background. As at the Festival of the

Supreme Being, a liberty tree is placed nearby the mountain, around which a group ofhappy sans-culottes and their children are dancing.

dangerous dynamic of repudiation-as-repetition that haunts the revolu-tionary books of The Prelude is replaced by the more positive one of rep-etition-as-redemption, in which the sublime experiences of childhoodsimultaneously rehearse and replace the Jacobin will to power, subjectingit to an endless deferral, transforming it into ‘something evermore aboutto be’.


‘Sour Jacobinism’: William Hazlitt and theresistance to reform

When Rousseau stood behind the chair of the master of the châteauof –, and smiled to hear the company dispute about the meaningof the motto of the arms of the family, which he alone knew, andstumbled as he handed the glass of wine to his young mistress, andfancied she coloured at being waited upon by so learned a youngfootman – then was first kindled that spark which can never bequenched, then was formed the germ of that strong conviction ofthe disparity between the badge on his shoulder and the aspirationsof his soul – the determination, in short, that external situation andadvantages are but the mask, and that the mind is the man – armedwith which, impenetrable, incorrigible, he went forth conqueringand to conquer, and overthrew the monarchy of France and thehierarchies of the earth.1

In the sixteenth of his Conversations with Northcote () William Hazlittwas to cite an episode from book of the Confessions in an attempt toexemplify how its author had ‘stamped his own character and the imageof his self-love on the public mind’. Like Robespierre before him, hebelieved that Rousseau’s autobiography had exerted an immenseinfluence upon the French Revolution, far more significant, in its way,than his works of educational or political theory. For in his eyes theConfessions had succeeded in firing an entire generation with enthusiasmfor the principles of liberty and equality through its extended account ofits author’s heroic opposition to the ancien régime. Where many nine-teenth-century commentators, especially in England, had found them-selves concurring with Burke’s remarks upon Rousseau’s transgressiveegotism, Hazlitt was to defend it as a Promethean force which, in its veryexcess, had served to counter aristocratic prejudice, and popularise theprinciple of meritocracy.

Writing almost forty years after the storming of the Bastille during aperiod of profound political reaction, Hazlitt strongly identified withRousseau’s incorrigibility. As a freelance journalist struggling for auton-omy in a literary culture plagued by political censorship and editorialcontrol, he too wished to remain unbowed by his ‘external situation’,continuing to profess his commitment to republican principles despitethe apparent triumph of Legitimacy.2 It was hardly surprising, therefore,that he should have been inspired by Rousseau’s celebration of the intel-lectual superiority of the paid lackey. But what lay behind hisdetermination to celebrate the Confessions at the expense of Rousseau’sother writings? And why was he so keen to represent Jacobinism as if itwere primarily a question of personality rather than of policies or prin-ciples? In order to explore some of these issues, this chapter will under-take to place Hazlitt’s highly idiosyncratic conception of politics in thecontext of developments in the literary market during the early nine-teenth century, interpreting it as a self-conscious response to historicalchanges in the mode of cultural production; for as I hope to show, notonly was he aware of the extent to which his literary conditions weredetermined by social and economic circumstances, he actually made itpart of his subject, using it as a means of dramatising his paradoxicaland conflicted attitude to the splintering of the English Jacobintradition.

Anxious to prevent his position as a journalist from jeopardising hisstatus as a critic, many writers on Hazlitt over the past twenty years havebeen keen to argue for the fundamental coherence of his philosophical,aesthetic and political opinions, often seeking to argue that, for all itsapparently fragmented and occasional nature, there is an underlyingunity and consistency to his work. Selecting their own canon of impor-tant essays from the extensive range of his writings, they have tended torepresent him as if he was an independent man of letters, neglectingthose elements which do not fit in with their particular model. In thischapter, while remaining deeply indebted to the insights of critics suchas Seamus Deane and David Bromwich, I want to argue that Hazlitt’swriting is much more self-contradictory than even they have been pre-pared to allow, that it is riven with significant and interesting inconsis-tencies produced by the triangular conflict between his aesthetic tenets,his political principles and the circumstances of his literary production.3

And what is more, I want to suggest that in many ways Hazlitt washimself aware of this element in his writing, with many of the reflectiveessays he wrote in the s having been deliberately designed as sites of


contradiction, spaces in which the tensions and oppositions of the post-revolutionary period are given dramatic representation.

As we saw in chapter five, like many unregenerate Jacobins, Hazlitt wasimplacably opposed to the reformist programme of the Benthamitemovement, which he saw as a pale shadow of the legislative enthusiasmof the revolutionary decade, considering that the project to regeneratethe human race had ‘dwindled down’ in the hands of the new school ofreform ‘into petty projects, speculative details and dreams of practical,positive matter-of-fact improvement’ (, ). Foremost among his objec-tions to the utilitarians was their conception of the human mind itself,which they considered to be fundamentally passive in nature, ultimatelythe product of its external circumstances, and therefore eminentlycapable of endless readjustment and re-training. One of the radicalaspects of this circumstantial theory was that, since it saw moral ideasas the final result of a long process of mental associationism taking placewithin each individual in response to its immediate surroundings, itplaced great importance upon the role of environmental factors in theformation of the self. Thus in an article on ‘Prisons and PrisonDiscipline’, which was published in , James Mills argued that thedepravity of criminals should not be seen as the product of any intrin-sic deficiency, but as a product of their environment, which led quitenaturally to the notion that no individual, no matter how apparentlyvicious, should ever be considered entirely incapable of reform, since itwas always possible that a controlled change of environment couldbring about a change in his or her mental habits.4 And in the article on‘Education’ which he produced for the supplement to theEncyclopaedia Britannica, Mill was to place an even greater emphasis uponthe idea that by completely regulating an individual’s environment, andby controlling the flow of sensations and impressions that he received,the state would be able actively to form and shape the development ofhis moral character: ‘thus much is ascertained,’ he wrote, ‘that the char-acter of the human mind consists in the sequences of its ideas: that theobject of education, therefore, is to provide for the constant productionof certain sequences, rather than others’.5 For Hazlitt, however, as formany critics of the utilitarian movement, this approach to the educa-tion of the human subject was profoundly pernicious, not merelybecause it was based on a profound misunderstanding of the workings

‘Sour Jacobinism’: William Hazlitt and the resistance to reform

of the mind, but also because of its fundamentally mechanical nature.In his article on education Mill had argued that one purpose of theutilitarian system of education would be to try and offset the damagingeffects of the modern division of labour by supplying the labourers andmechanics of the future with a broad intellectual framework enablingthem to transcend the narrow confines of their profession. But toHazlitt’s mind, the prevailing tendency of the Benthamite school wentquite the other way. For him, its proposals on law, on education, onprison discipline and on pauper management adopted a narrowlyinstrumental and therefore underlyingly exploitative attitude to thehuman subject. Far from resisting the fragmentation of modern society,it actually seemed deeply committed, as a body of thought, to theproject of remodelling society in accordance with the rigid principles ofpolitical economy, to rendering society more rational and more efficienteven at the cost of transforming every man and woman into a veritableautomaton: ‘This is their idea of a perfect commonwealth’, as Hazlitt wrote,in an article for The Plain Speaker ‘where each member performs his partin the machine, taking care of himself, and no more concerned abouthis neighbours, than the iron and wood-work, the pegs and nails in aspinning-jenny’ (, ).

Thus for Hazlitt it was distressing enough that the early s hadseen the Benthamites successfully hijack the political discourse ofreform, and refashion it in accordance with their own agenda. Whatmade matters worse was that they were increasingly seeking to direct theprinciple of reform at individuals as well as institutions. Indeed, as wehave seen, it was in many ways an inevitable tendency of the utilitarianphilosophy that human beings should be regarded as just so much rawmaterial waiting to be ‘improved’. Hazlitt’s problem was that, althoughhe thought this tendency profoundly dangerous, he was forced to admitthat it was also extremely dynamic. Arising from the ashes of the revolu-tionary project of regeneration, it had won an increasing number ofconverts in the ensuing years, and with the decline of the revolutionaryideal it soon found itself with no real rival, there having emerged no seri-ously viable radical alternative, within middle-class politics at least, tooppose to its philosophy of extreme individualism.

Somewhat despairingly, then, Hazlitt was often moved to counter theclaims of the circumstantial determinists by seeking to celebrate the verystubbornness and recalcitrance of ordinary human nature, its deepincorrigibility, which was an extremely paradoxical move for one whosepolitical loyalties lay with the millenarians of . Thus in the essay ‘On


Personal Character’ which appeared in the London Magazine in March, the innate criminality of Hogarth’s Idle Apprentice took on anoddly utopian aspect, simply because it had proved itself to be proofagainst all the forces of ‘improvement’:

Look at the head of Hogarth’s Idle Apprentice in the boat, holding up hisfingers as horns at Cuckold’s Point, and ask what penitentiary, what prison-dis-cipline, would change the form of his forehead, ‘villainous low,’ or the concep-tions lurking within it? (, )

Of course, as a guarantee of freedom, the principle of biologicaldeterminism was ultimately no more preferable than the utilitarianemphasis upon circumstance, as Hazlitt must have known. But thatwas not the point. For him, the important thing was that the notion ofpersonality represented a form of conceptual resistance to the police-philosophy of the Benthamites on the one hand, and to the socialinequalities of Regency society on the other. It was a way of opposingboth reaction and reform. And if there was a slight element of flippancyin his celebration of the ‘incorrigibility’ of Hogarth’s Apprentice, hiswritings on Rousseau found him more steadily in earnest. For in the heroof the Confessions, as we have already seen, he could point to a characterwhose radical resistance to reform had been of profound political value,whose refusal to bend and bow with the times had helped to bring abouta truly revolutionary moment. Potentially, of course, such a politics ofpersonality was deeply anti-republican. The Jacobins themselves hadbeen very much aware of this, and had been constantly on the lookoutfor would-be demagogues and dictators interested in developing a cultof hero-worship. And Hazlitt himself, in a number of his own criticalwritings, not least in the celebrated essay on ‘Coriolanus’, was fullycapable of recognising that, inscribed within the very concept of per-sonal heroism itself there might be a tendency to idolise the freedom ofthe privileged individual and to forget the libertarian claims of the mass.But to some degree this problem could be seen to have resolved itself inRousseau, for he was, in effect, a new kind of hero, one in whom the freeexpression of personality had never been autocratic or despotic, but hadalways carried with it a deeply egalitarian resonance.

That is not to say, however, that Hazlitt did not fully acknowledge theparadox of Rousseau’s revolutionary incorrigibility. He was, in thisrespect, a good deal more penetrating than many of his liberal contem-poraries, who were often so desperate to defend Jean-Jacques fromBurke’s charge of vanity that they ended up by bowdlerising his work.


For example in his Essay on Christianity Shelley was to offer a remarkablyunconvincing account of Rousseau’s character, which he compared tothat of another celebrated revolutionary martyr, none another thanJesus Christ himself, not only on account of their both having beenchampions of the principles of benevolence and equality, but also, soShelley argued, because of the great similarity in their habits of thoughtand feeling.6 Better known, however, and rather more convincing, wasGermaine de Staël’s eulogium, which was first published in the Lettres sur. . . Jean-Jacques Rousseau of , in which Jean-Jacques had beenexcused his unfortunate errors on the principle that he was, first andforemost, an abstract idealist, a man who lived in dreams and visions,whose imagination had been his predominant faculty.

In his essay ‘On the Character of Rousseau’, written for The Examinerin , Hazlitt was to launch a critique of de Staël’s view, essentiallybecause he saw it as a serious misjudgement both of Rousseau’s author-ial personality and of the nature and tendency of the imagination. ForHazlitt the imagination was a fundamentally disinterested faculty, a formof intensified sympathy, and in that sense a principle that effectively tran-scended the bounds of the self. In Rousseau, however, he saw only exces-sive sensibility, an ‘acute or morbid feeling of all that related to his ownimpressions, to the objects of his life’, a faculty which had ‘tyrannised’over both his imagination and his reason, insinuating itself into all of hisworks. Like Burke before him, Hazlitt was even tempted to see the cele-brated Discourse on Inequality as a covert expression of this ‘excessiveegotism’:

Hence in part also his quarrel with the artificial institutions and distinctions ofsociety, which opposed so many barriers to the unrestrained indulgence of hiswill, and allured his imagination to scenes of pastoral simplicity or of savagelife, where the passions were either not excited or left to follow their ownimpulse, – where the petty vexations and irritating disappointments of commonlife have no place, – and where the tormenting pursuits of the arts and scienceswere lost in pure animal enjoyment or indolent repose. (, )

But where Hazlitt differed from Burke was in the fact that, against allodds, he found a utopian element in all of this self-absorption.Paradoxically enough, it was precisely on account of his intenseselfishness, Hazlitt thought, that Rousseau had exerted such a powerfuleffect on subsequent readers:

Every feeling in his mind became a passion. His craving after excitement wasan appetite and a disease. His interest in his own thoughts and feelings wasalways wound up to the highest pitch; and hence the enthusiasm which he


excited in others. He owed the power which he exercised over the opinions ofall Europe, by which he created numberless disciples, and overturned estab-lished systems, to the tyranny which his feelings, in the first instance, exercisedover himself. The dazzling fire of his reputation was kindled by the same firethat fed upon his vitals. (, )

And in a footnote appended to this section, Hazlitt went on to explain,in rather more detail, exactly what he meant:

He did more towards the French Revolution than any other man. Voltaire, byhis wit and penetration, had rendered superstition contemptible, and tyrannyodious: but it was Rousseau who brought the feeling of irreconcilable enmity toranks and privileges, above humanity, home to the bosom of every man, –identified it with all the pride of intellect, and with the deepest yearnings of thehuman heart. (, n)

The difficulty was that, for Hazlitt, this Promethean conception ofRousseau went directly against the grain of his own metaphysics. In hisvery first publication, the Essay on the Principles of Human Action of ,he had been preoccupied with attempting to refute the self-love philoso-phy of Helvétius and Holbach as a means of undermining the intellec-tual basis of the discourse of utilitarianism. And he did this bycircumventing the long-running philosophical argument about whetherselfishness or benevolence was the natural disposition of man, and byundertaking to deconstruct the opposition between them. In order forsomeone to be behaving selfishly, Hazlitt reasoned, they would have tobe acting in the interests of their future self, a self which had not, strictlyspeaking, yet come into being, whose conditions and circumstances werenot yet known, and whose very existence was therefore, in a sense, quiteimaginary. But if a man was able to sympathise with an imaginary futureself, then surely he was also capable of sympathising with anotherpresent self, that is, another person, for such an effort of sympathy wouldinvolve exactly the same kind of self-projection. Thus it was impossibleto argue that selfishness was inherent in the nature of man because it wasitself grounded upon the very same principle of imaginative sympathythat provided the foundation of benevolence. And it was by this meansthat Hazlitt sought to unravel the methodology of Benthamism, whichbased its theory of social legislation upon the notion that society wascomposed of a mass of self-interested individuals, whose interests wereall fundamentally opposed, and who therefore required governinginstitutions which did not bother to concern themselves with motives butonly with effects.

However, Hazlitt’s attempt to reinstate sympathy to its former role as


a guiding principle of social and moral philosophy was singularlyunsuccessful. Written in the same spirit of abstract inquiry that hadcharacterised Godwin’s Political Justice, the Essay on the Principles of HumanAction had fallen ‘still-born from the press’, largely, according to itsauthor, because it had been written in a style that was too dry and meta-physical for his readership’s taste. Hazlitt’s essay on sympathy had failed,in a way, to be sympathetic; a lesson he was to take very much to heart.So much so, indeed, that he may well have had this early failure in mindwhen he reflected upon the continuing appeal of Rousseau’s Confessionsin the mid-s. For here was a text which had positively demandedsympathy from its readers, had effectively torn it out of them, forcingthem to discover within themselves the grounds and conditions of dis-interested and virtuous action. The difficulty was, of course, thatRousseau was so conspicuously lacking in sympathy himself, havingbeen so powerfully caught up in his own thoughts and feelings that hehad tended to neglect those of others. And this, it could be argued, wasprobably one of the reasons why Hazlitt decided to represent him as aPromethean figure, a combination of Titanic legislator and holy scape-goat, who had, by indulging selfishness to excess, somehow succeeded inredeeming it, transforming it into its opposite.

It is perhaps significant, therefore, that Hazlitt’s ‘On the Character ofRousseau’ should have been written just at the time when its author wasbeginning his career as a reflective essayist, as if it had suddenly becomeclear to him, through his re-interpretation of the Confessions, firstly thatautobiography was a powerful means of dramatising the sympatheticprocess, and secondly that, precisely because of the principle of reci-procity that it encouraged between writer and reader, it was still, poten-tially at least, a radical form. And just over ten years later, with theexperience of many autobiographical essays behind him, he was to offeran even more confident and complete account of the process by whichRousseau’s egotism had engendered universal sympathy, during afriendly debate in the Conversations of Northcote :

Before we can take an author entirely to our bosoms, he must be another self;and he cannot be this if he is not one but all mankind’s epitome. It was this whichgave such an effect to Rousseau’s writings, that he stamped his own characterand the image of his self-love on the public mind – there it is and there it willremain in spite of everything. Had he possessed more comprehension of thoughtor feeling, it would only have diverted him from his object. But it was the excessof his egotism and his utter blindness to everything else, that found a corre-sponding sympathy in the conscious feelings of every human breast. (, )


In this formulation, egotism emerges as a valuable conduit of sympa-thetic feeling, the best way for a writer to encourage in his readers a trulyelastic response. Of course, in the Conversations Hazlitt does not have itall his own way, indeed it is one of the chief strengths of this book, andgrist to its author’s mill, that the conversations contained within it shouldhave offered such a vivid representation of the possibilities and problemsof intellectual sympathy between strong personalities. For example, inthe course of the conversation quoted above, ‘Northcote’ raises a ques-tion which had been conspicuous by its absence in the ‘Character ofRousseau’, the question of Rousseau’s influence upon the FrenchRevolution itself, not merely as a political prophet but as a philosophicaltheorist whose ideas actually shaped its course. Having listened toHazlitt’s eulogy, he responds by stating that the name of Rousseau wouldbe forever associated in his mind with ‘all the gloomy humours of a mob-government, which attempted from their ignorance to banish truth andjustice from the world’, to which the character of Hazlitt offers no realreply (, ). Ten years before, in the ‘Character’ of Hazlitt hadalmost entirely suppressed the link, which many of the commentators ofthe s, most notably Wollstonecraft and Burke, had been so very keento make, between Rousseau’s personality and his political theory. And itis interesting to reflect on why this might have been so: perhaps he con-sidered that in order to recuperate Rousseauvian autobiography as aform of radical discourse it was necessary to repress the extent to whichit was associated with the politics of the Contrat Social.

The historical moment of Hazlitt’s essay may have been significant inthis respect, for it was written during a period of great change in the fieldof European politics, with every nation readjusting itself to life afterNapoleon. As Simon Bainbridge has shown, Bonaparte was a great herofor Hazlitt, so much so, in fact, that for a long time he considered himthe last upholder of the fundamental principles of the Revolution, notprimarily because of his role as a legislator, which it was difficult to rec-oncile with the ideals of , but because of what he was in himself, aman of genius who had exposed the double sham of monarchy and aris-tocracy by relying solely upon his talent to carry him to the top.7 As hisbiographers have shown, Waterloo was a great blow to Hazlitt; for him,it seemed to him that the fall of Napoleon signalled the final triumph ofthe principle of Legitimacy over liberty and equality. But it wasalso equally disappointing in another way, because of the way in whichit showed another one of his idols to possess feet of clay. Up untilthe mid-s Wordsworth had been an important figure for him, a


fundamentally democratic poet heroicially opposing a predominantlyreactionary literary establishment. But with the publication of TheExcursion in , and then the Thanksgiving Ode shortly after the victoryat Waterloo, the extent of Wordsworth’s abandonment of the cause ofliberty had become glaringly apparent.

Having lost two such champions of the Jacobin cause, it was perhapsnatural, then, that Hazlitt should have found himself returning toRousseau in the years after Waterloo. Jean-Jacques was, after all, a writerin whom republican values had always found a steadfast champion. Andyet even so, it is still quite significant that, just at the very beginning ofhis career as a reflective essayist, he should have been moved to ponderthe citizen of Geneva’s politics of confession. Partly, he must have beenassessing the viability of Rousseau as a revolutionary hero, examiningwhether his character and career might be seen to offer an alternativemodel to that of Wordsworth or Napoleon. And yet above and beyondthis he must also have been keen to assess whether the reflective style ofRousseau’s autobiographical writing might not provide some kind oftemplate for his own.

What was especially valuable about the Confessions, it seems, forHazlitt, was the democratic quality of Rousseau’s recollections, theextent to which, because of the very simplicity of his prevailing passions,every class of reader was able to read them with sympathy. As Hazlitthimself put it: ‘We are never tired of this work for it everywhere presentsus with pictures which we can fancy to be counterparts of our own exis-tence’ (, ). And it was this combination of democratic politics andaesthetic appeal that rendered Rousseau both rich and rare. For as JohnWhale has pointed out, there was a deep tension in much of Hazlitt’swork between politics and aesthetics, so that many of the qualities thathe considered valuable in an aesthetic context – imaginative intensity,sensibility, suggestibility – he tended to consider as perniciously ‘aristo-cratic’ in political terms; while regarding a substantial number of theforemost virtues of political radicalism – rationality, common sense, arespect for hard facts – as rather deficient and deadening if they everstrayed into the realm of aesthetics.8 Thus it was that he found himselfadmiring Burke because he had produced the most imaginative proseever to grace the world of politics, while criticising him, almost in thesame breath, for having used his literary imagination to bedazzle theEnglish public into an acceptance of aristocratic principles. And in hisessay on ‘Coriolanus,’ Hazlitt had even gone so far as to raise thepossibility that there might be an aristocratic tendency at the heart of


poetry itself, that it might be dangerous for republicans to play on thesee-saw of literary sublimity precisely because of the dialectic it set upbetween perceiving subject and sublime object, constructing aestheticresponse in terms of an ongoing oscillation between the abject worshipof power and its proud possession, an endlessly alternating current ofstrength and weakness, tyranny and servility. One obvious example ofthis was the Windsor Keep passage from Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord – apassage that Hazlitt himself could not help admiring – which repre-sented a deliberate attempt to prop up the institution of the monarchythrough the manipulation of a sublime effect. But for Hazlitt the‘Coriolanus’ principle was also present in some supposedly radicalworks, Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage for instance, in which he considered thatthe fundamentally reactionary nature of Byron’s narrative personaalmost completely undermined the apparent liberalism of the poem’scontent. Indeed such was the nature of Harolde, Hazlitt argued, that inconfronting the great natural and historical monuments of Europe, hewas always seeking to bask in their reflected glow, offering himself up tothe reader as a kind of sublime object, deserving of awestruckcontemplation. With Rousseau, however, it had been a different matter,as he showed in an article ‘On Byron and Wordsworth’ which was firstpublished in :

When Rousseau called out – ‘Ah! voilà de la pervenche!’ in a transport of joy at sightof the periwinkle, because he had first seen this little blue flower in companywith Madame Warens thirty years before, I cannot help thinking that any aston-ishment expressed at the sight of a palm-tree, or even of Pompey’s Pillar, isvulgar compared to this! (, )

Reversing expectations, Hazlitt finds the poetry of the noble lordByron more ‘vulgar’ than that of the vagabond Rousseau, preciselybecause the former is so concerned to flaunt its nobility. When con-fronted with the sites of classical antiquity Hazlitt suggests, Byronexpresses the feelings that any schoolboy would have been expected tohave if presented with the same scene, and yet thinks all the better ofhimself for having had them. Whereas Rousseau, by contrast, even whenhe is indulging in a series of deeply personal recollections, does so inorder to appeal to the reader, and not simply to awe him. In this respect,Hazlitt suggests, he is superior even to the Wordsworth of The Excursion.Significantly, in order to force home his point, he refers to those sectionsof the Confessions and the Rêveries in which Rousseau described the asso-ciative link by which the sight of a little periwinkle had reminded him of


his former lover and protector Madame de Warens, long since deceased.And what is notable about this choice is that it was a means of supply-ing an answer not only to Byron, but also to Burke, whose famousrecollection of Marie-Antoinette in the Reflections provides an instructivecontrast with the passage on the little blue flower. For what is distinctiveabout Rousseau’s act of recollection is that it is prompted by an objectthat is insignificant in itself, so that in reading the passage the reader isimmediately made aware of the fact that its ‘sublime’ effect is entirelyproduced by a contemplation of the power – or ‘virtue’ – of the mind toresist the ravages of time. As in Wordsworth, therefore, one is shown that‘sublimity’ is something which is generated not from without but fromwithin. But to a greater extent even than Wordsworth, Rousseau createsa spirit of fellowship with his reader because of the relationship he setsup between the objective triviality of his memories and their deep sub-jective significance, for as Hazlitt himself was to describe it, when talkingabout the same passage in his ‘Character of Rousseau’: ‘Rousseau’sexclamation . . . comes more home to the mind than Mr Wordsworth’sdiscovery of a linnet’s nest’ because ‘prose is better adapted to expressthose local and personal feelings, which are inveterate habits of mind,than poetry, which embodies its imaginary creations’ (, ). In thismood, it was not so much the ‘political’ dimension of the Confessionswhich appealed to Hazlitt, but the fact that by engaging in a detailedexamination of his own absolute uniqueness Rousseau had somehowsucceeded in unveiling a general truth about the relationship betweenmemory and identity, discovering a principle of democratic commonal-ity in the very singularity of his own feelings.

Thus it was the purpose of Rousseau, in Hazlitt’s reflective essays ofthe s, not merely to remind him of the political apostasy of Burke,Byron and the Lake Poets, but also to provide a charm against their aes-thetic power. And this led him to return, again and again, to the variouslandscapes of liberty that were littered through Rousseau’s writings,visions which predated and outshone those of Wordsworth, Coleridgeand Byron, and which could therefore serve as a reminder of the ideal-ism of the revolutionary decade:

We spent two whole years in reading these two works [The Confessions and LaNouvelle Heloïse] and (gentle reader, it was when we were young) in shedding tearsover them.

– ‘As fast as the Arabian treesTheir medicinal gums.’


They were the happiest years of our life. We may well say of them, sweet is thedew of their memory, and pleasant the balm of their recollection! There are,indeed, impressions which neither time nor circumstances can efface. (, )

In this way Rousseau’s personal reminiscences became part ofHazlitt’s own past, so that the former’s way with memory filled thememory of the latter. And this was not simply a matter of praisingRousseau’s confessional mode, but of seeking to emulate it. Quite oftenthe two went hand in hand, as in this passage from the essay ‘On GoingA Journey’ in which Hazlitt used Rousseau in order to take a swipe atthe Lake poets:

It was on the tenth of April, , that I sat down to a volume of the NewHeloïse, at the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken. Theletter I chose was that in which St Preux describes his feelings as he first caughta glimpse from the heights of Jura of the Pays de Vaud, which I had broughtwith me as a bonne bouche to crown the evening with. It was my birthday, and Ihad for the first time come from a place in the neighbourhood to visit thisdelightful spot. The road to Llangollen turns off between Chirk and Wrexham;and on passing a certain point, you come all at once upon the valley, whichopens like an amphitheatre, broad, barren hills rising in majestic state on eitherside, with ‘green upland swells that echo the bleat of flocks’ below, and the riverDee babbling over its stony bed in the midst of them. The valley at this time‘glittered green with sunny showers,’ and a budding ash-tree dipped its tenderbranches in the chiding stream. How proud, how glad I was to walk along thehigh road that commanded the delicious prospect, repeating the lines I have justquoted from Mr. Coleridge’s poems! But besides the prospect which openedbeneath my feet, another also opened to my inward sight, a heavenly vision, onwhich were written, in letters large as Hope could make them, these four words,L, G, L, V; which have since faded into the light ofcommon day, or mock my idle gaze.

‘The beautiful is vanished, and returns not.’Still would I return some time or other to this enchanted spot; but I wouldreturn to it alone. What other self could I find to share that influx of thoughts,of regret, and delight, the traces of which I could hardly conjure up to myself,so much they have been broken and defaced! I could stand on some tall rock,and overlook the precipice of years that separates me from what I then was. Iwas at that time going shortly to visit the poet whom I have above named.Where is he now? Not only I myself have changed; the world itself, which thenwas new to me, has become old and incorrigible. Yet will I turn to thee inthought, O sylvan Dee, as Thou wert, in joy, in youth and gladness, and thoushalt always be to me the river of Paradise where I will drink of the waters oflife freely! (, )

Displaying his characteristic genius for allusion, Hazlitt makes hisvalley rebound with echoes of the Lakers. In providing an occasion for


the author to reflect upon the continuity of his own feelings, Hazlitt’s‘Sylvan Dee’ fulfils the same purpose as Wordsworth’s ‘Sylvan Wye’ inthe Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey of . And as inResolution and Independence the work of memory helps him to counter thegreat fear of a descent from ‘youth and gladness’ into ‘despondency andmadness’. In this way Hazlitt draws strength from some of the mostpowerful lines of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetry, while at the sametime developing an ironic critique of them. For by parodyingWordsworth’s early expressions of steadfastness, he endeavours tosuggest that, politically speaking, the poet has been anything but con-stant. And similarly, by citing snatches of Coleridge’s early poetry beforebreaking off to ask ‘Where is he now?’, he succeeds in recalling theradical promise of his early years, while also highlighting his subsequentdecline.

Significantly, during the course of his rewriting of Tintern Abbey,Hazlitt makes clear that he is unlike Wordsworth in that he has noDorothy at his side to share his reflections, suggesting that what was oncea collective commitment to the ideals of the French Revolution has longsince dwindled into a solitary recollection. And in this way he can beseen to cultivate the figure of the Rousseauvian solitary, offering himselfas the still point of a turning world, a utopian principle, resisting thedesperate decline of history. For in Hazlitt as in Rousseau, memoryserves to restore the present self to a sense of its real identity. It does not,as in Wordsworth’s dialectical autobiography, confront the authorial selfwith a ‘being’ in its past with whom it has but tentative and problematiclinks. And so, like Rousseau’s ‘natural man’, Hazlitt represents himselfas a revolutionary idealist frozen in the past, continuing to endurebeneath the grime of history, intact and essentially unchanged, anunshakeably incorrigible spirit, patiently biding his time.9 ‘What sur-prises me in looking back to the past’, he wrote, in his ‘Farewell to EssayWriting’ of March , ‘is to find myself so little changed in the time. . . the continuity of impressions is the only thing on which I pridemyself.’ Steadfast in his continued commitment to the ideals of theFrench Revolution, he considered that ‘great principles and originalworks are a match even for time itself ’ (, ); for him as for Rousseau,there was no history of the self, only a history of the way in which timeand circumstances served to alienate it from the outside world or fromself-knowledge. In this way both writers can be seen to have developeda cult of personal character which was designed to resist the progress of‘practical, positive matter-of-fact improvement’ (, ).


In a review of The Excursion published in The Examiner in , Hazlittdismissed Wordsworth’s newfound Christian optimism with a dramaticflourish:

. . . nor can we indulge with him in the fond conclusion afterwards hinted at,that one day our triumph, the triumph of humanity and liberty, may be com-plete. For this purpose we think several things necessary which are impossible.It is a consummation which cannot happen till the nature of things is changed,till the many become as united as the one, till romantic generosity shall be ascommon as gross selfishness, till reason shall have acquired the obstinate blind-ness of prejudice, till the love of power and of change shall no longer goad manon to restless action, till passion and will, hope and fear, love and hatred, andthe objects proper to excite them, that is, alternate good and evil, shall no longersway the bosoms and businesses of men. (, )

In The Excursion Wordsworth had recommended a return to thenational church as a means of consoling the disappointed ‘solitaries’ ofhis generation for the failure of the French Revolution. Religious unityand spiritual equality were offered as transcendental alternatives to thetransparency and community of the Jacobin festival ideal. Hazlitt,however, refused to be consoled, reasserting his continuing commitmentto the principles of ‘humanity and liberty’ while representing their‘triumph’ as an impossible dream. Like Robespierre in the last speechbefore his death, Hazlitt’s pessimism was thus revolutionary rather thanreformist, registering itself as a personal resistance to history. ‘What doesit matter that Brutus has killed the tyrant,’ Robespierre had asked, in hiscelebrated speech on political morality, ‘Tyranny continues to live on inpeople’s hearts, and Rome exists nowhere but in Brutus.’10 Similarly,Hazlitt was increasingly to depict himself as the last of the Jacobins; amicrocosm of the unified general will, ‘till the many become as unitedas the one’.

Or so it sometimes seems, for although Hazlitt regularly emulatedRousseau’s rhetoric of confession, he was very guarded on the questionof his civic ideal. In the essay ‘On Reason and Imagination’, forexample, he described the Contrat Social as ‘– a work of great ability butextreme formality of structure,’ whose author had been ‘too ambitiousof an exceedingly technical and scientific mode of reasoning, scarcelyattainable in the mixed questions of human life’ (, ). This withholdsmore than it gives out, suggesting that behind Hazlitt’s purely stylisticcritique he had a profound suspicion of Rousseau’s neo-Spartan politics.


And this can be further glimpsed in some of his scattered reflections onthe notion of a public spirit, all of which suggest how aware he was ofthe extent to which such a concept had been manipulated, by both thepolitical left and right. In the conclusion to the essay ‘On PersonalCharacter,’ for instance, he asked:

Suppose public spirit to become the general principle of action in the commu-nity – how would it shew itself ? Would it not then become the fashion, likeloyalty, and have its apes and parrots, like loyalty? The man of principle wouldno longer be distinguished from the crowd, the servum pecus imitatorum. There isa cant of democracy as well as of aristocracy; and we have seen both tri-umphant in our day. The Jacobin of was the Anti-Jacobin of . Theloudest chaunters of the Paeans of liberty were the loudest applauders of therestored doctrine of divine right. (, )

According to Hazlitt’s analysis, Robespierre’s Festival of the SupremeBeing, and the celebration of Wellington’s victory were but two sides ofthe same pernicious coin. Thus he was prepared to acknowledge thecounter-revolutionary version of the Jacobin period as a time duringwhich an artificially contrived public opinion had outlawed the exerciseof private judgment, while insisting that exactly the same could be saidof the atmosphere in England at the time of Waterloo. And in this wayhe showed something of his dissenting, neo-Godwinian roots, for funda-mentally, he was too much of an individualist not to be profoundly sus-picious of the Revolution’s collectivist phase.

In his mature journalism this commitment to the value of privatejudgment over and above that of public opinion expressed itself in anunconscious distinction he frequently made between the people and thepublic. In the modern period, as he saw it, public opinion was no longerthe consensus of the judgments of private people engaged in publicdebate, nor was it the spontaneous reflection of common sentiment. Ithad become a dangerous abstraction, with an independent existence,fatally prone to the manipulations of the government and the media.‘The public ear,’ he wrote, ‘is at the mercy of the first impudent pre-tender who chooses to fill it with noisy assertions, or false surmises, orsecret whispers’ ‘– so that we may safely say the public is the dupe ofpublic opinion, not its parent’ (, ).

When Hazlitt invoked ‘the people’, however, he was referring to aspontaneous popular principle which he could still admire:

Mobs, in fact, then, are almost always right in their feelings, and often in theirjudgments, on this very account – that being utterly unknown to and dis-connected with each other, they have no point of union or principle of co-oper-


ation between them, but the natural sense of justice recognised by all personsin common. (, )

Significantly, he was was only prepared to align himself with ‘thepeople’ against the private interests of corporate bodies if he could con-sider them as a collection of individuals independently following acommon purpose. He remained remarkably faithful, in this respect, tothe Rousseauvian concept of a spontaneous, unreflective general will.But as soon as the popular interest began to form itself into anythingresembling a corporate body he grew highly mistrustful, for perhapseven more than Robespierre himself, he was profoundly suspicious ofthe politics of faction. In many ways, this was the individualism ofPolitical Justice in its residual form, and as with Godwin, it can be seen asan unconscious form of resistance to the growing challenge of working-class combination. Paradoxically enough, therefore, by invoking themoral economy of the eighteenth-century English mob, Hazlittbetrayed the limits of his own bourgeois radicalism, because in so doinghe effectively confessed the extent to which he was opposed to radicalcombination of any kind. Thus despite the fact that he had been quickto expose the class hypocrisy of the utilitarians in his Reply to Malthus, hewas to remain hampered, all the same, by a class bias of his own. Foreven though he continued to express his commitment, throughout hiscareer, to the principle of popular sovereignty, that did not prevent himfrom remaining opposed to the principle of popular politics.

In part this was a response to the French Revolution itself. Theoreticallysupportive of Rousseau’s political theory, he was also mindful of the wayin which it had been employed by popular pressure groups and revolution-ary factions, and of the way in which the peculiarly abstract nature of theprinciple of the general will had rendered it fatally prone to misappropria-tion and impersonation. When ‘the cant of public spirit’ had become thefashion, he argued, politics had been transformed into mere parrotry. Andin his Life of Napoleon of he was to depict Robespierre as the absoluteembodiment of this form of political ‘dandyism’.

[Robespierre’s] refinements in theory, his cruelties in practice might comeunder the denomination of political dandyism, or were the height of fashion, theopinion of the day carried to excess and outrage, because he had no feelings ofhis own to oppose to a cant-phrase or party-Shibboleth, or to qualify a verbaldogma. (, –n)

On occasions like this, there is little to separate Hazlitt from conserva-tive historians such as his contemporary Sir Walter Scott, who also


depicted Robespierre as a contemptible political automaton in therevolutionary section of his own Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Elsewhere inthe Life, however, Hazlitt was to represent the Incorruptible as if he hadbeen a true idealist, recalling the emphasis made in the mid-s byColeridge and Thelwall: ‘I do not conceive it impossible’, he remarked,‘that he thought of [the Social Contract and the Profession of Faith of ASavoyard Vicar] when the mob were dancing round him at his own door’.And thus, without making explicit comment on the appropriateness ofRobespierre’s reading of Rousseau, he was able to acknowledge that ithad probably served to harden his political resolve: ‘Evil is strong enoughin itself ’, he commented, ‘when it has good for its end it is conscienceproof ’ (, ).

Given Hazlitt’s long-standing resistance to the Jacobin cant of publicspirit, then, it is not perhaps surprising that his revolutionary longings,when they came to be expressed in his reflective essays, tended to articu-late themselves in terms of a series of extremely private prospects ofpast liberty, rather than open meditations upon its festival ideal. Forexample, if we return to the passage from ‘On Going A Journey’ whichwas quoted earlier, we can see that, above and beyond the allusions toWordsworth and Coleridge, an overmastering reference to Rousseau’sLa Nouvelle Heloïse informs and colours the whole. And the letter thatHazlitt refers to is the one in which Saint-Preux described his long-awaited return to the valley of the Pays de Vaud, after years of enforcedexile, spent travelling the world. In this section of the novel, Rousseau’sprotagonist approaches Clarens in the full knowledge that his belovedJulie has married Baron de Wolmar and that all his fondest hopes havebeen irrevocably dashed. And when he enters the mountains, heplunges into a state of deep reverie that is as much a yearning for thepast as an appreciation of the scene before him, as he suddenlybecomes subject to ‘a thousand delicious memories which reawaken allof the feelings I have ever tasted’.11 Clearly, the Llangollen scene in ‘OnGoing a Journey’ was sketched very much with this reverie in mind, forits dream of ‘L, G, L, V’, that ‘other prospect’which opens itself out before the author’s ‘inward sight’, is itself arecollection of the mental landscape of the early books of La NouvelleHeloïse.

As we saw in chapter four, Saint-Preux becomes reacquainted withJulie and her husband on his return to Switzerland, and is subsequentlyinvited to reside at Clarens. And Rousseau then proceeds to give adetailed encomium of this utopian collectivity while treating Saint-


Preux’s emotional recalcitrance with continuing sympathy. In this sense,the novel’s ending, in which the dying Julie tries to rechannel Saint-Preux’s desire for her into a love of the community as a whole, can beinterpreted as an attempt by the author to harmonise the twin poles ofhis own personality, to bring the solitary individual of the Confessions intothe legislative fold of the Contrat Social. It is significant, therefore, that inhis reflections upon La Nouvelle Heloïse Hazlitt never actually reachesClarens, preferring to dwell upon the prospect afforded to Saint-Preuxjust before his return.12 In order to preserve the novel as a locus of liberty,it seems, he had to repress the régime of Baron de Wolmar, as if he wereconscious that to return to Julie’s revolutionary festival, after so manyyears, would be to find it transformed into a Benthamite workhouse.Edward Thompson was one of the first to draw attention to the ‘curiousarrest’ and ‘stasis’ in Hazlitt’s many recollections of the glad dawn of theFrench Revolution.13 And this is especially true of the vision of freedomin the passage from ‘On Going a Journey’, which like the frieze on hisfriend John Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, both conjures up and thenhides the image of the republican city-state, creating a lacuna which isalso the open grave of ancient liberty, ‘and not a soul to tell/Why thouart desolate, can e’er return’.14

At first glance Rousseau’s cultivation of the unique claims of the selfin the Confessions might have seemed to sit oddly with his call for eachcitizen to identify his particular will with that of the general in the ContratSocial. However, as we saw in chapter two, Robespierre was to prove thatthere was no contradiction between Jean-Jacques’ political theory andhis autobiographical practice. He showed that they were the objectiveand subjective poles of the same political dialectic. According to thisview of things, Rousseauvian confession was seen to represent thegeneral will under siege, rendered individual and imperfect by social andpolitical circumstances: far from disconnecting the self from society, itwas a way of defining the aristocratic obstacle to a unified general will.And as has been noted, Robespierre was not a populist like Marat orHébert, he did not pander to popular taste in his political journalism.Rather he followed Rousseau in depicting himself as a transparentreceptacle of the desires of the people, insisting that all factions, parties,corporate bodies and private conspiracies that served to separate hisindividual will from that of the collective should be mercilessly destroyedin order that the unity of the republic could be achieved.

Thus far, we have seen how Hazlitt employed Rousseau’s confessionaldiscourse as a way of resisting the forces of reaction and reform,


cultivating the latter’s tone of incorrigibility, excessive sensibility andself-conscious isolation in order to generate a libertarian effect. But it hasalso become clear that he was no enthusiast for ‘public spirit’ either, andthat he remained highly aware of the extent to which Rousseau’s cult ofpersonality was always threatening to recall Robespierre’s coercive poli-tics of the will. So, then, his overriding task was to find a way of pre-serving his commitment to the revolutionary tradition without seemingto endorse the politics of revolutionary government, and he did this bycultivating Rousseau’s festival vision as a distant prospect displaced intothe past. In this way his private confessions continued to contain a publicresonance, but one that was inescapably retrospective and nostalgic,rather than prospective or reformist. Thus in Hazlitt’s hands,Rousseauvian autobiography became drained of the legislative poten-tial that it had possessed in Robespierre, and even residually inWollstonecraft and Wordsworth, transforming itself into a purelyoppositional technique. In that sense it can be seen as both a protestagainst, and a symptom of, the decline of middle-class republicanism inEngland.

Long before the Poor Law Amendment Act of utilitarian doctrineshad begun to influence the government of the British Empire. Mill’sHistory of British India () had earned him a place at India House. Sotoo Malthus was made the first professor of political economy in Britain,on the strength of his Essay on the Principle of Population of .15 And bythe s the legislative principles of the ageless Jeremy Bentham werealready beginning to influence administrative policy in the colonies andin newly independent Latin America. Of all Hazlitt’s variously disdain-ful and despairing responses to this meteoric rise, scattered throughouthis oeuvre, perhaps the most concerted critique was contained in a mag-azine article published in , a dialogue on utilitarianism entitled ‘Onthe New School of Reform’:

Where is the use of getting rid of the trammels of superstition and slavery, ifwe are immediately to be handed over to these new ferrets and inspectors of aPolice-Philosophy; who pay domiciliary visits to the human mind, catechise anexpression, impale a sentiment, put every enjoyment to the rack, leave you nota moment’s ease or repose, and imprison all the faculties in a round of cant-phrases – the Shibboleth of a party? (, )


Noticing that the Peel Government was already giving the utilitarians‘good œillades’ (, ), Hazlitt was highly suspicious of the comparativeease with which the new approach to reform had insinuated itself intothe existing political system. Despite its professed aim to rationalise anddemocratise society, the discourse of utility was showing itself to beincreasingly complicit with the interests of ‘Old Corruption’. And inorder to break up this new alliance, Hazlittt tried to discredit it in themind of his middle-class readership by linking the utilitarians with theJacobin tradition. He did this by insinuating that Bentham, Malthus,MacCulloch and Ricardo shared the same legislative zeal as the Frenchrevolutionaries of the s, they had merely changed its focus.

Are they not equally at war with the rich and the poor? And having failed (forthe present) in their project of cashiering kings, do they not give scope to theirtroublesome, overbearing humour, by taking upon them to snub and lecture thepoor gratis? (, )

In his reference to the ‘cashiering’ of kings, Hazlitt was self-con-sciously rehearsing a phrase from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on theRevolution in France (), as a means of linking the philosophical radicalswith the constitution-mongers of the revolutionary decade. Then hewent on to argue that the increasing influence of the utilitarians upon thegovernment and the press had served to ‘strip the cause of Reform ofeverything like a misalliance with elegance, taste, decency, common senseor polite literature’. And this explicit attack upon what he called the‘Jacobin jargon’ of the reformers was identifiably Burkean too, recallingthe appeal made in the Reflections on behalf of ‘all the super-added ideas,furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination’ which had been sorudely dismissed by the ‘sophisters, economists and calculators’ of theConstituent Assembly.16 In setting up this explicit opposition betweenJacobin politics and a civilised aesthetic, Hazlitt sought to discreditBentham and his followers by linking them with the rationalists who hadtried to reorganise the government of France on abstract principles.Resurrecting painful memories of the French Revolution, he endeav-oured to mobilise public opposition against the philosophical radicals byinsinuating that the disastrous mistakes of the past were in danger ofbeing repeated by the ‘state-doctors’ of the present.

However, to identify the utilitarians with the Jacobin tradition was arather paradoxical move for Hazlitt, especially when one thinks aboutthe general trend of his own politics. For in many respects he had alreadyoffered himself to his readers as the last of the old-style Jacobins.


Denouncing the political treachery of former republicans such asWordsworth, John Stoddart, Coleridge and Southey in the article ‘Onthe Connection between Toad-Eaters and Tyrants’ of he haddefined a ‘true Jacobin’ as ‘one who does not believe in the divine rightof kings, or in any other alias for it, which implies that they reign ‘in con-tempt of the will of the people,’ and he holds all such kings to be tyrants,and their subjects slaves’ (, ). To his mind, the ‘true’ Jacobins hadremained faithful to the libertarian and egalitarian ideals of the FrenchRevolution, refusing to succumb, as the Lake School had done, to thethreats and promises of arbitrary power. However, to do as he did in‘The New School of Reform’, and link the utilitarians with the Jacobincause, could only serve to confuse this crucial definition, for it was clearthat he himself did not wish to make common cause with Bentham andMalthus, nor did he consider them to fulfil the requirements of theJacobin spirit.

During the early years of the nineteenth century, the word ‘Jacobin’could mean any one of a variety of things. It could signify a sympathyfor the French nation and its revolutionary ideals, or simply a generalcommitment to democratic principles. It could refer to either or bothmiddle-class and working-class radicalism. References to ‘Jacobinism’always recalled the reign of Robespierre, and the popular excesses of–, but its specific meaning was often very dependent upon context.It might refer to a commitment to popular sovereignty, or to the practiceof systematic philosophy; it might encompass the Revolution as a whole,or simply its republican phase. As we have seen, in the counter-revolu-tionary pamphlets he wrote during the early s Edmund Burke hadrefused to differentiate between the various currents of French revolu-tionary thought. He would not distinguish, for example, between thebourgeois liberalism of the constitutional phase of the Revolution andthe Spartan civic humanism that rose to prominence during the FirstRepublic. For him, all aspects of the French experiment had been con-taminated by a misguided commitment to abstract philosophy. The taintof ‘Jacobinism’ had uniformly coloured the whole. And this refusal todiscriminate between the different strands of French politics was one ofthe characteristics of English conservative ideology, which increasinglycame to pride itself upon a complete rejection of ‘French principles’.

Many former fellow-travellers were gradually to succumb to the pres-sure of this discourse. Despite his ongoing awareness of the philosoph-ical diversity of the French Enlightenment, Samuel Taylor Coleridgewas to offer a theoretical justification of Burke’s notion of Jacobinism in


the edition of The Friend for October , arguing that one could seea despotic tendency in the theories of Rousseau and Turgot, and thatthis tendency had been realised in the political practice of Robespierreand Bonaparte.17 It is important to recognise, however, that this homo-genisation of the French Revolution was entirely under constructionduring the Regency period, it had not yet reached the status of ortho-doxy. Many reformers and republicans were still trying to save certainspecific strands of the revolutionary tradition from the general ignominy.It was not only the Girondin memorialists in France who endeavouredto differentiate between different forms of ‘Jacobinism’, liberals inEngland also sought to salvage something from the wreckage.18 And ina different way, apostates such as Robert Southey sought to excuse andexplain their movement from the radical to the conservative side of thepolitical spectrum by distinguishing the radical sentiments of the sfrom those of the s. Writing in the Quarterly Review in , Southeyargued that during the revolutionary decade Jacobinism had been a loftyenthusiasm of the ‘educated classes’ in England. Abandoned by them inthe wake of the Terror, it then ‘sunk down into the mob’. Once ardentand utopian, it had become surly and violent: ‘While the spirit ofJacobinism had thus evaporated from the top of the vessel,’ he wrote, ‘itsdregs were settling at the bottom’.19

In many ways, Hazlitt always strove to preserve the identity andcontinuity of the Jacobin tradition: ‘Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin’was a phrase with which he regularly taunted the apostate poets. Notonly did he refuse to acknowledge Southey’s excuses, he would notaccept the latter’s histrionic return to the principles of Church and State:‘A Jacobin . . . who has shaken off certain well-known prejudices withrespect to kings or priests or nobles, cannot so easily resume wheneverhis pleasure or his convenience may prompt him to attempt it’, heargued, ‘and it is because he cannot resume them again in good earnestthat he endeavours to make up for this want of sincerity by violence’ (,). For the most part, then, it is clear that Hazlitt considered‘Jacobinism’ to be a species of opposition to the forces of privilege, butin the essay ‘On the New School of Reform’ the word denoted a formof philosophical radicalism that was clearly complicit with those forces.Significantly, this confusion of terms and identities went some waytowards repeating the central confusions of French republicanism; itserved to recall the fact that these different forms of radicalism had oncebeen allied – during the early s to be precise – but only in order todramatise the fissure that had opened up between them. Once the


philosophical radicals had been committed to the cause of the people,Hazlitt suggested, now they were only interested in lecturing to them.His mistrust of Malthus and Bentham, like Robespierre’s mistrust ofCondorcet and Helvétius, was thus grounded upon a suspicion that theywere fundamentally complicit with the aristocratic order. He felt that thediscourse of reform was attempting to distance itself from the promisesit had made to the people in the early s. But the problem was thatthe way he chose to say this made the cost of his saying it clear, for whenhe stigmatised the ‘Jacobin jargon’ of the utilitarians, he called the pro-gressive force of his own form of Jacobinism radically into question.

To some degree, Hazlitt was himself aware of this: he recognised theextent to which, in his hands, Jacobinism was not so much a positivecreed as a politics of opposition. As he described matters in an essay ‘OnModern Apostates’ which was later published in the Political Essays of: ‘to be a true Jacobin,’ he argued, ‘a man must be a good hater; butthis is the most difficult and the least amiable of all the virtues: the mosttrying and the most thankless of all tasks. The love of liberty consists inthe hatred of tyrants’. And significantly enough, it was in his capacity asa determined opponent of European despotism rather than as a legisla-tor that Robespierre drew Hazlitt’s most fulsome praise in his Life ofNapoleon:

[Robespierre gave] the political machine the utmost possible momentum andenergy of which it was capable; to stagger the presumption and pride of theCoalition by shewing on the opposite side an equally inveterate and intensedegree of determined hostility and ruthless vengeance; to out-face, to out-dare;to stand the brunt not only of all the violence but of all the cant, hypocrisy,obloquy and prejudice with which they were assailed . . . Few persons could befound to help her at this exigency so well as Robespierre. (, –)

In the atmosphere of intense political agitation that prevailed inEngland during the Peterloo period (–) Hazlitt regularly stigma-tised Whigs, Tories and modern radicals alike, representing himself as asolitary ‘Jacobin’ who owed allegiance to no party or persuasion. He res-urrected the political terminology of the revolutionary period as agesture of defiance against the repressive measures of the Liverpoolgovernment. By reminding his contemporaries of the debates andoppositions of the early s, he strove to identify and yet also to under-mine the rapprochement of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey andStoddart with the literary and political establishment, and to keep alivea sense of the middle-class revolutionary tradition. But in the calmerclimate of the s, his republicanism did not become more construc-


tive, it merely became more self-conscious. So that in choosing to accusethe Lake poets and the utilitarians of continuing Jacobinism he wasoften merely betraying the belatedness of his own republican senti-ments, the extent to which his political terminology was no longerappropriate to the changed situation of the early s.

In the essay ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’ first published in The PlainSpeaker in , Hazlitt speculated that there was a spirit of malignity atthe very heart of man. ‘Without something to hate’, he argued, ‘weshould lose the very springs of action.’ Initially this ‘pleasure of hating’was described as if it were a timeless aspect of human life. Gradually,however, was given an increasingly historical feel:

The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion,and turns it into rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse forcarrying fire, pestilence and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothingbut the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchful-ness over the actions and motives of others. (, )

In this formulation, the historical source of the spirit of hating is theFrench Jacobin Terror, with the suggestion that modern hating repre-sents nothing but the surreptitious survival of revolutionary public spiritin its negative private form. And in the reflective essays that he wrote inthe s for the London Magazine Hazlitt regularly represented his ownmisanthropic spirit as a form of ‘sour Jacobinism’, flaunting his politicaldisappointment by reproducing the rhetoric of self-martyrdom whichhad been developed by Rousseau and Robespierre:

As to my old opinions, I am heartily sick of them. I have reason, for they havedeceived me sadly. I was taught to think, and I was willing to believe, that geniuswas not a bawd – that virtue was not a mask – that liberty was not a name –that love had its seat in the human heart. Now I would care little if these wordswere struck out of the dictionary, or if I had never heard them. Instead of patri-ots and friends of freedom, I see nothing but the tyrant and the slave, the peoplelinked with kings to rivet on the chains of despotism and superstition. (, )

At the end of ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’, however, Hazlitt turnedthis jeremiad upon himself, ironising his belated republicanism even ashe continued to indulge it: ‘We hate old friends, we hate old books, wehate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves’. ‘Have I notreason to hate and despise myself ?’ he asks himself at last, ‘Indeed I do;and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough’ (,). And in this way, by adopting a deliberately detached stance towardshis own radical misanthropy, Hazlitt can be seen to have established a


new kind of relationship with his reading public. But what does it sayabout his changing attitude to the relationship between literature andpolitics that he should have been content to do this? In the final sectionof this chapter I want to spend some time addressing this issue, primar-ily by examining the ways in which Hazlitt’s development of a Jacobin‘persona’ can be seen to have been both a result of, and a resistance to,the changing nature of Regency politics, the development of massculture and the rise of the periodical press.

In her treatise De la Littérature Germaine de Staël had argued that, at itsbest, literature was fundamentally progressive in nature. In the course ofan argument which was to have a considerable influence upon workssuch as Shelley’s Defence of Poetry and his Philosophical View of Reform, sheargued that the arts were no different from the sciences in this respect,since, like them, they were a means of anticipating and even facilitatingthe improvements of the future. In an article entitled ‘Why the Arts AreNot Progressive’ for Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, Hazlitt was to take issue withde Staël’s argument, arguing that such a comparison was deeply flawed,since the arts were not subject to the same narrative of incrementalprogress that governed science. ‘What is mechanical, reducible to rule,or capable of demonstration,’ he suggested, ‘is progressive, and admitsof gradual improvement: what is not mechanical or definite, butdepends on genius, taste, and feeling, very soon becomes stationary, orretrograde, and loses more than it gains by transfusion’ (, ).According to this view of things, every art form is the product of aspecific set of historical conditions, and has a definite life-span.Dependent upon a fortuitous confluence of historical circumstances,every genre will show itself subject to inevitable decay as soon as historybegins to flow in a different direction.

Hazlitt’s theory was a response to what he perceived to be the slowdecline of certain of the older art forms in his life-time. He consideredthat in cultural terms he was living in a critical and prosaic age ratherthan a dramatic or poetic one. Often he was moved to lament thisdevelopment, seeing the decline of poetry as a deplorable index of thedegeneration of contemporary society. For example, in the first of hisLectures on the English Poets () he had been moved to assert that poetrywas not so much a form of writing as the vital principle of human exis-tence: ‘It is not a branch of authorship, it is the stuff of which our life is


made. The rest is mere oblivion, a dead letter: for all that is worthremembering is the poetry of it’ (, ). And in the early part of his lecturehe was not afraid to use poetry as the symbol of everything that theutilitarians were threatening to destroy, suggesting that their plan was totransform society into a ‘machine’ designed to carry everyone safely andinsipidly from one end of life to another ‘in a very comfortable prosestyle.’ But at the end of his lecture he did also seem willing to acknowl-edge that, as a species of writing, poetry was indeed a dying form, dis-tinguishing himself from ‘progressive’ critics such as Thomas LovePeacock only in his evident regret at its imminent demise: ‘As Homer isthe first vigour and lustihood, Ossian is the decay and old age of poetry’,he wrote, ‘he lives only in the recollection and regret of his past.’20

So in certain moods, he would regard the decline in the popularity ofpoetry as a symptom of the sickness of the age. But at other times,however, he equally capable of attacking poetry as an archaic and servileform that was complicit with arbitrary power, especially when he wasreflecting on the apostasy of the Lake poets, or on the self-aggrandise-ment of Byron. And on these occasions, he offered modern prose writing– as exemplified by the novel and the reflective essay – as a healthy alter-native, considering that it explored personal experience in a form moreappropriate to a democratic order.21

In many respects, Hazlitt’s ‘progressive’ enthusiasm for prose was adirect response to the transformation which literary culture had under-gone during the early years of the nineteenth century. On a number ofoccasions he was to assert that the rapid growth of the periodical presshad created a cultural climate in which the censorious influence of ‘OldCorruption’ had been seriously diminished.22 And in an article entitled‘Arguing in a Circle’ produced for The Liberal in July he celebratedthis new order of things by indulging in a playful parody of Burke’sReflections:While the affair is private and can be kept in a corner, personal fear and favourare the ruling principles, might prevails over right; but bring it before the worldand truth and justice stand some chance. The public is too large a body to bebribed or browbeat . . . ‘The age of chivalry is gone’ and that of constables, leg-islators and Grub-Street writers has succeeded, and the glory of heraldry isextinguished forever. (, )

Half-ironically Hazlitt lumps the writers of the new Grub Streettogether with Robert Peel’s police constables and Bentham’s philosophi-cal legislators as the dominant figures of the new age of ‘publicity’. Inthis versions of things, the technology of mass surveillance and


communication was made to seem unproblematically positive in itseffects. Similarly, in an anonymous article on ‘The Periodical Press’ pub-lished in the Edinburgh Review in May of the same year, Hazlitt warmlywelcomed the growth of a literary culture in which the influence ofprivilege and power had dwindled, while recognising that it had ren-dered the position of the writer far more precarious than ever before. Asa result of the new ‘rage’ for ‘conveying information in a easy and port-able form’, he argued, fewer books were being published. This meantthat ‘the only authors who, as a class, are not starving, are periodicalessayists, and almost the only writers who can keep their reputationabove water are anonymous critics’. Of the journals that earned hispraise, the newly founded London Magazine was especially prominent.And in listing the literary contributors that had helped to make theperiodical popular, he was not averse to giving himself honourablemention: ‘Are there not the quaint and grave subtleties of Elia, theextreme paradoxes of the author of Table-Talk, the Confessions of theOpium-Eater, the copious tales of traditional literature, all in onevolume?’ What this comment shows is that he was highly conscious ofthe extent to which his own popularity, like that of Lamb and DeQuincey and James Hogg ‘the Ettrick Shepherd’, was heavily basedupon his cultivation of a literary persona.23As Lamb himself pointed out,in an unpublished review of Hazlitt’s Table-Talk: ‘The Writer almosteverywhere adopts the style of a discontented man. This assumption ofa Character . . . is that which gives force and life to his writing.’24

Re-interpreting the oppositional manner of Hazlitt’s reflective essaysin the light of the fashion for literary ‘characters’ which had been gener-ated by the London Magazine, we can thus begin to see how it may havebeen part of a deliberate attempt to differentiate himself from the self-conscious gentility and refinement of De Quincey’s Opium Eater, andthe whimsical antiquarianism of Lamb’s Elia by deliberately dramatisingthe paradoxical and misanthropic tendencies of his own personality.And indeed it is worth noting, in this context, that when the contribu-tors to Blackwood’s Magazine depicted Hazlitt as an ill-educated and spite-ful Cockney vagabond, they were merely offering a malicious caricatureof several traits that he himself had actually cultivated in his writings.25

For in his opposition to aristocratic élitism and his scorn of literary pres-tige, Hazlitt had made a certain churlishness part of his literary appeal,turning the appearance of not playing the game into a new way ofplaying the game.

In ‘On the Aristocracy of Letters’, one of the essays collected in Table-


Talk (), Hazlitt depicted the freelance journalists of London as abody of urban beggars, a kind of revolutionary canaille. And during thecourse of this essay he identified closely with this ‘corporation ofMendicity’, dramatising his exclusion from the salons of literary power(, ). He celebrated an ideal realm of literary leisure and autonomy‘where want and sorrow never come’, while drawing attention to the‘harassing, precarious’ circumstances in which he himself was writing.When writing ‘On the Periodical Press’ for the eminently respectableEdinburgh Review, he had embraced the new literary culture in a highlypublic manner. ‘We are optimists in literature’, he had written breezily,‘we must no longer be churls of knowledge, ascetics in pretension. Wemust yield to the spirit of change (whether for the better of the worse)and to beguile the time look like the time’ (, ). But in the Table-Talks he wrote for the London and New Monthly magazines from onwards, he was to cultivate a character of himself as a disgruntled mis-anthrope, a ‘sour Jacobin’ disappointed in his artistic ambitions anddissatisfied with the vexations of essay-writing.26

As Jon Klancher has shown in his important work on English readingaudiences, with the rapid expansion of the reading public in theRomantic period, literary producers could no longer be certain of thecultural constituency their work was addressing. The public sphere ofrational critical debate which developed during the eighteenth centuryhad become increasingly splintered and fragmented along professionaland class lines by the beginning of the nineteenth, so that it was nolonger possible to believe in the unity and integrity of the nationalculture. Increasingly, therefore, editors and journalists took it uponthemselves to create the taste by which they were to be judged. In thecase of the bourgeois reviews of the period this led to a strategic attemptto forge an identifiably middle-class consciousness through the develop-ment of new forms of reading and writing. As Klancher has demon-strated, the leading reviewers and contributors of the polite papers canbe seen to have developed a characteristic mode of writing which servedto dramatise the process by which the mind abstracted knowledge fromthe world of matter. By this means middle-class consciousness was con-stituted not so much in terms of a coherent body of knowledge or beliefsbut as a characteristic cultural practice.27

Within this context, Hazlitt can be seen to emerge as a fundamentallymiddle-class writer addressing himself to a middle-class audience, withhis essays regularly displaying many of the elements which Klancherhas shown to be typical of contemporary bourgeois style. His style is


self-consciously analytical, it flaunts its own ability to abstract generalpatterns and principles from the raw material of everday experience,moreover it is full of historical and cultural references which would onlyhave been intelligible to the more educated readers of his time. In thatsense he can be seen to have selected his own readership. But what isseldom noticed is that there is also a self-consciously ‘low’ current inHazlitt’s prose. His writing shows him to have been deeply enamouredof metaphysical speculations and literary allusions, but it also displays afondness for common puns and proverbs, slang phrases and street-talk.In fact, in many of his reflective essays, he was to balance his belletris-tic effects with vulgar sallies. So much so, indeed, that in reading Hazlittone often has the sense that he imagined his reading public as a het-erogenous assortment of individuals rather than a particular class orconstituency, and that this plurality can be seen to be mirrored in hisprose, which is itself constructed out of an array of different voices,ranging from the polite to the plebian. Significantly enough, then, itemerges that, at precisely the same time as Coleridge was suggesting theneed for an intellectual élite or clerisy to move between the differentclasses of society and provide them with some form of commonculture,28 Hazlitt was trying to keep alive the notion of a truly pluralis-tic realm of public debate by simulating it in his prose. Interpreted inthis light, Hazlitt’s proletarianisation of himself in his reflective essayscan be seen to offer itself as a token form of resistance to the Malthusianseparation of mind from matter which was being effected by the middle-class reviews.

But above and beyond his playful use of the vernacular, Hazlitt didalso use other means to undermine and expose the ‘Aristocracy ofLetters’. Not the least of these was that in many of his specificallyreflective, autobiographical essays, he regularly presented himself as anoutsider, a parasite of the system, cultivating an image of himself as asolitary abandoned by the world, as if to highlight the contrast betweenhimself and aristocratic exiles like Byron.29 For example, in the essay‘On Living to One’s Self ’, which was written in , he set up anopposition between the vanity of the everyday world and what he called‘living to one’s self ’:

What I mean by living to one’s self is living in the world, as in it, not of it: it isas if no one knew there was such a person, and you wished no one to know it:it is to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things, not an object of atten-tion or curiosity in it; to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is passing inthe world, but not to feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it . . .


He who lives wisely to himself and to his own heart, looks at the busy worldthrough the loop-holes of retreat, and does not want to mingle with the fray.(, )

The topos is a familiar one; such inclinations had been a regularfeature of the latter part of Rousseau’s Confessions; and they also formedthe basis of the dream of the ring of Gyges in the Sixth Promenade ofthe Rêveries. On the latter occasion, especially, Rousseau had not beenable to keep his promise to live to himself; and before long he had begunto fantasise ways of using his invisibility to exert a moral influence uponthose around him, through little acts of ‘clemency’ or ‘severe justice’.30

And as in the Rêveries so too in Rousseauvian autobiography as a whole,it was always but a short step back from the position of the solitary tothat of the legislator. In ‘On Living to One’s Self ’, by contrast, Hazlittshowed little of this ‘lawgiving’ impulse. But he did rehearse the starkopposition, which had been such a feature of Rousseau’s second Discours,between the self-containment of man in his solitary state, and his tragicalienation in the appetitive, competitive and argumentative realm ofcivil society. And significantly, in elaborating this opposition, he was tomake a point of situating Rousseau on the side of self-forgetfulnessrather than egotistical ambition:

If ever there was a man who did not derive more pain than pleasure from hisvanity, that man, says Rousseau, was no other than a fool.

Gradually, as Hazlitt’s argument on professional vanity developed, theessay grew into another extended attack on ‘public opinion’, which wasrepresented as the most abject form of collective self-alienation and theabsolute antipodes of solitary independence: ‘There is not a more mean,stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal thanthe Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself. From itsunwieldy, overgrown dimensions, it dreads the least opposition to it, andshakes like isinglass at the touch of a finger. It starts at its own shadow,like the man in the Hartz mountains, and trembles at the mention of itsown name’. And as he grew more vociferous in his pursuit of this theme,he was forced to abandon the tone of reverie which had characterisedhis opening remarks, as if in order to demonstrate how impossible it wasfor those who made their living in the literary marketplace to really ‘liveto themselves’ by showing how they were forever being dragged back,against their will, into the atmosphere of dust and heat which character-ised contemporary Grub Street. He offered himself as an exemplaryfailure in this respect, contrasting himself with those writers in whom the


rhetoric of splendid isolation was nothing but a literary cover, disguisingan underlying abjection. And he cited the celebrated stanzas beginning‘I have not loved the world nor the world me’ from canto of ChildeHarolde as an example of this, arguing that it was only the assumedsuperiority of Byron’s poetic persona which gave the appearance ofdignity and distinterestedness to sentiments that were actually full ofbitterness and wounded pride:

Sweet verse embalms the spirit of sour misanthropy: but woe betide the ignobleprose writer who should thus dare to compare notes with the world, or tax itroundly with imposture. (, )

Here Hazlitt launches another attack upon the ‘Coriolanus’ principlein Byron’s verse. Firstly, he does this by demystifying his own role as amover and shaker of critical opinion, openly confessing the extent towhich he, like every other writer of the modern day, frequently findshimself at the mercy of ‘public’ taste. But at the same time he also hintsthat, whereas in his own writing this subjection is freely acknowledged,in Byron’s poetry it is precisely what is being repressed. Indeed he evengoes so far as to suggest a reading of the stanzas from Childe Harolde inwhich the grand disdain of the noble hero is to be interpreted as nothingmore than a sublimated version of the ‘ignoble’ misanthropy of thefraught professional writer. Taken as a whole, then, ‘On Living to One’sSelf ’ begins by celebrating the state of reverie as a genuine renunciationof worldy ambition, and ends up by exposing it as just another means ofattempting to master the public, an affectation of privacy and detach-ment which has as its deepest desire the approbation of the world. Andas we have seen, Hazlitt does not absolve himself from this charge ofhypocrisy, indeed he acknowledges the extent to which his own rhetoricof splendid isolation is also, to some degree, an unsustainable literarypose. In this way his reflective essays can be seen to rehearse many of thethemes and tropes of the Romantic poetry of the period, most especiallythat of Byron and Wordsworth, and yet at the same time to offer struc-tures which serve to interrogate many of its cultural and moral claims,placing its play of consciousness very much within the realm of the liter-ary marketplace, and materialising its fictions of independence.

In arguing for the transcendence of the the figurative faculty in theBiographia Literaria and the Poems of Coleridge and Wordsworth hadsought to supply it with the kind of critical authority that was deemedto have passed out of the realm of polemical debate with the rise of anew and highly contentious literary culture. But by self-consciously


reflecting upon the extent to which the workings of his own imaginationwere always to some degree defined and determined by his professionalcircumstances, Hazlitt showed that one could not take the disinterested-ness of ‘the Imagination’ entirely for granted, thereby encouraging amaterialist analysis of its ideological function in the Laker’s work.31 In‘On Going a Journey’ he was to describe how he preferred to travel alonewhen he was in the country because a friend could always be relied uponto disturb the abstraction of the scene before him by coming ungra-ciously between him and his ‘imaginary character’. But in many ways hewas a just such a fellow-traveller to the Romantic poets of his genera-tion, for if his reflective essays rehearsed many of the central preoccupa-tions of the poetry of the period, indulging what we have now come tothink of as the central elements of ‘Romantic’ experience, they alsoserved to demythologise and deconstruct it, to lay it open for criticalinspection.32 And even when he had no Lake poet to hand, he was happyto play Paine to his own Burke, translating philosophical speculationsinto street slang, subjecting romantic effusions to the examination ofcommon sense, cultivating a notion of ‘the poetry of life’ as a means ofattacking the philosophical materialism of the Benthamites, whilesimultaneously deploring his own exclusion from ‘the aristocracy ofletters’. Charles Lamb, a sympathetic reviewer of Table-Talk, attemptedto characterise the writer’s discontinuous style: ‘he all along acts as hisown interpreter, and is continually translating his thoughts out of theiroriginal metaphysical obscurity into the language of the senses’. And inmuch of his reflective writing, Hazlitt did indeed oscillate across a kindof Malthusian divide, unable to endorse Wordsworth and Coleridge’spoetic fictions of freedom, but also unwilling to make common causewith Bentham’s lowly creatures of necessity. In this way he can be seento have questioned the material basis of what Jerome McGann hascalled ‘the Romantic ideology’ even if he was not finally willing tocondemn it as a species of false consciousness.

Fundamentally, Hazlitt’s mistrust of the Romantic imagination was aproduct of his ambivalent attitude to the politics of egotism. On the onehand, as we have seen, he often saw egotism as a potentially Jacobinquality, a democratic universalisation of the self. On the other hand hesometimes considered it to be an authoritarian reflex which curiouslymirrored the despotism of the feudal order. This conflicting responseexpressed itself most clearly in his remarks on Wordsworth’s poetry.Often Hazlitt wrote appreciatively of the democratic nature of thework of his great contemporary. ‘His Muse . . . is a levelling one,’ he


commented in The Spirit of the Age () ‘it proceeds on a principle ofequality, and strives to reduce all things to the same standard’. At othertimes, however, he regarded it in a less positive light. Discussing thepolitical apostasy of the Lake poets in his Political Essays of , he sawthe ‘levelling’ tendency of Wordsworth’s poetry as the product of asublime will to power:

The spirit of Jacobinism is essentially at variance with the spirit of poetry: it has‘no figures nor no fantasies,’ which the prejudices of superstition or the worlddraw in the brains of men: ‘no trivial fond records’: it levels all distinctions ofart and nature: it has no pride, pomp, or circumstance, belonging to it; it con-verts the whole principle of admiration in the poet (which is the essence ofpoetry) into admiration of himself. The spirit of Jacobinism is rank egotism. Weknow an instance. It is of a person who founded a school of poetry on sheerhumanity, on idiot boys and mad mothers, and on Simon Lee, the old hunts-man. The secret of the Jacobin poetry and anti-jacobin politics of this writer isthe same. His lyrical poetry was a cant of humanity about the commonestpeople to level the great with the small; and his political poetry is a cant ofloyalty to level Bonaparte with kings and hereditary imbecility. (, )

‘The spirit of poetry’, it seems, is a chameleon spirit. It celebrates thevariegated life of nature, and indulges every custom and tradition. Inthat sense it is an implicitly aristocratic principle, a remnant of EdmundBurke’s ‘age of chivalry’. ‘The spirit of Jacobinism’, on the other hand,is brutally egalitarian, it flattens everything under its churlish foot. InHazlitt’s opinion, Wordsworth’s Jacobin muse stands in an antitheticalrelation to the true spirit of poetry. It offers itself as a celebration ofcommon humanity, but on closer inspection it proves merely to be anexploration of the poet’s own humanitarianism. And whereas inRousseau’s Confessions ‘mind’ had fuelled a political assault upon theinjustices of contemporary society, in Wordsworth it has subsumed poli-tics into itself. In the very extremity of his opposition to the Coriolanusprinciple, Wordsworth has turned into a kind of Coriolanus. Once thebattering ram of feudal privilege, Jacobin egotism has become a fortressof intellectual vanity.

Hazlitt was interested in Wordsworth’s trajectory precisely because itseemed to describe a general historical shift in the history of Jacobinism.After the revolutionary decade, it seemed, Jacobinism had begun totransform itself from a body of political opinions into a habit of mind.No longer committed to liberty and equality, it had become an unprin-cipled love of power. In part this insight was a response to the rise ofNapoleon, which was commonly considered as the final culmination of


the Jacobin tradition, for Hazlitt was aware of the extent to which hishero had betrayed the revolutionary ideal, although he was too much ofa Bonapartist to criticise the Corsican directly. In the passage quotedabove, for example, Wordsworth has become as a kind of poetic ‘cover’for the French Emperor. He is depicted as a master spirit whose levellinghas been more imperial than republican, to such an extent that finallyhis exploits cannot help but recall those of the great general. But thecomparison is never quite made. In spite of this, however, the final ten-dency of Hazlitt’s critique was clear enough, that whereas during thefirst formulation of the Jacobin ideal selfishness had been pushed to thepoint of benevolence and intense personal feeling had formed the basisof a universal sympathy, in the aftermath of the failure of the Revolutionthe self had been mobilised into an exclusive and tyrannical force: sothat egotism had become the paradoxical expression of a lost civic ideal.

That Hazlitt knew himself to be implicated in this process, as both thelast practitioner of Jacobin ‘egotism’ and the historian of its finaldecline, can be clearly inferred from a brief analysis of his Liber Amoris,or the New Pygmalion of , which is, in fact, a good place to concludethis study, not only because it is the closest Hazlitt came to writing a full-blown autobiography, but also because in many ways it can be seen tobring the English tradition of Rousseauvian ‘confession’ to a close. Inthis work, Hazlitt told the story of his disastrous infatuation with hislandlord’s daughter Sarah Walker in . The book opens with a seriesof domestic dialogues, tea-table tête-à-têtes in which a middle-aged,middle-class man of letters called ‘H’ tries to express his ardent love fora shy, enigmatic young girl called ‘S’, while she responds by resolutelyresisting his advances. As ‘H’ himself puts it: ‘As Rousseau said ofMadame Houptot, (forgive the allusion) my heart has found a tongue inspeaking to her, and I have talked to her the divine language of love. Yetshe says she is insensible to it.’33 And throughout this opening section theoverriding impression is of the powerlessness of ‘S’ in the face of ‘H’’scrazy crystallisations, of the extent to which he is both constructing andconstraining her through the unremitting force of his love. In its firstpart, then, Liber Amoris reads like a straightforward satire on theRomantic Imagination, on its egotistical refusal to respect the othernessof others, its impulse to appropriate things to itself. In Parts Two andThree, however, the dialogue form is dropped and we are presented


instead with a series of letters from ‘H’ to several of his male friends, inwhich he describes himself sinking deeper and deeper into the pit ofunrequited misery: ‘The hearing of your happiness had, I own, mademe thoughtful’, he writes to ‘P_’, in the last letter of Part Two, ‘It is justwhat I proposed to her to do – to have crossed the Alps with me, to havevisited Vevai and the rocks of Meillerie, and to have repeated to her onthe spot the story of Julia and Saint Preux, and to have shown her allthat my heart had stored up for her – but on my forehead alone is written– Rejected! ’ And with this change of form, there comes a correspondingchange of focus, as the emphasis changes from the dangers of ‘H’’sromanticism to the failure of ‘S’ to live up to his dream of Rousseauvianintimacy. So that finally, having gathered some supposedly damning‘proof ’ of her deeply duplicitous nature, the book ends with ‘H’renouncing ‘S’ forever, while remaining residually faithful to the idealthat she formerly represented: ‘Such is the creature on whom I hadthrown away my heart and soul – one who was incapable of feeling thecommonest emotions of human nature, as they regarded herself oranyone else.’

Like Rousseau’s Confessions, Liber Amoris is essentially concerned withthe failure of transparency. It begins by throwing up the possibility of atransparent understanding between ‘H’ and ‘S’, but then goes on topresent a series of incidents in which ‘H’’s attempts to pierce ‘S’’s mad-dening opacity are repeatedly disappointed. In the face of this frustra-tion, ‘H’ increasingly falls prey to the temptations of suspicion andparanoia, so that, by the end of the narrative, the only way that he canmake sense of ‘S’’s behaviour, is by imagining her as the absoluteepitome of studied and systematic ill-will. But what is intriguing aboutLiber Amoris is that it, initially at least, Hazlitt seems aware of the extentto which ‘H’ himself represents the real obstacle to true transparency,as the opening dialogues expose his thoroughly perverse commitment toreading ‘S’’s character and comments in accordance with his ownnarrow will. In the end, however, this emphasis is not sustained: thebook concludes on a much more Rousseauvian note, with the finalsection setting up a stark contrast between ‘H’’s ‘utopian’ desire and ‘S’’smalevolent duplicity. And such is the nature of this shift that, just as withso many of his reflective essays, Hazlitt’s ‘book of love’ finally registersitself as a symptom as well as a study of the disease it sets out toexplore.34

Like the Confessions, then, Liber Amoris begins as confession and endsas self-justification. The difference is that, unlike Rousseau, Hazlitt does


not hold out any hope, that the ‘confession’ of private suffering mighttransform itself, after having entered the public realm, into a rallyingpoint for social and political reform. Rather he makes a point ofemphasising that, in his own mind at least, the last remnants of publichope have been sunk in this private wreck. The metaphor for ‘H’’spublic hopes in Liber Amoris is the little statue of Bonaparte, which hegives to ‘S’ in the middle of the narrative. For her the image is onlyimportant insofar as it reminds her of a former beau. In his eyes,however, it is charged with huge significance. For when he gives her thelittle bust, the strong suggestion is that the last remnant of his politicalidealism is being entrusted to her. Not only entrusted to her, but alsoinvested in her, for as the narrative proceeds, and ‘H’ begins to use thestatue as a bargaining point with ‘S’, begging her to acquiesce in hiswishes ‘for the little image’s sake’, we are made aware of the extent towhich, for him at least, ‘Bonaparte’ has put a radical seal upon theirlove, identifying it as a belated private fulfilment of the democratic prin-ciples of the French Revolution, and thus a consolation in miniature forthe failure of its public ideal. But as time goes on, and ‘S’ continues tocool towards him, ‘H’ begins to change his attitude towards this particu-lar political perwinkle. So that finally, during one of the most violent oftheir disputes, he decides to dash it to the floor before ‘S’’s very eyes,having come to regard it simply ‘as one of the instruments of hermockery’. And such is the uncertainty of tone during this climacticoccasion, that the reader comes away from it with a complex sense thatit is at one and the same time a moment of deep personal tragedy, akind of private Waterloo, and a scene of high farce, in which theconjunction of high politics and domestic dispute has become ridicu-lous in the extreme.

In this way Liber Amoris plays an intriguing double game. To asignificant degree, it repeats many of the central impulses of Rousseau’sConfessions, having as its central narrator a character who is shamelesslyopen about his own weaknesses, and unapologetically personal in hisassociations, who experiences anything less than total transparency inothers as a form of malevolent conspiracy, and who encourages us tothink of private relationships in political terms, both as relationships ofpower, and as sites of utopian possibility. Indeed its entire conceptionof romantic experience is in identifiably Jacobin terms, as a realm ofhuman endeavour in which circumstances mean nothing and everythingis explicable in terms of the will. But the book does also carry within itthe elements of an auto-critique, most notably in the ironic stance it


takes towards ‘H’’s romantic solipsism, and in its hovering awareness ofthe stupidity of collapsing the political into the personal. Simultaneously,then, it functions as a powerful example of Jacobin confession, and as adetailed analysis of all the tradition’s worst tendencies; as a last desper-ate expression of radical ‘enthusiasm’ and as a damning piece of ‘self-satire’.


Notes

Frankenstein, the text, ed. by J. Paul Hunter (New York and London:Norton, ), p. . Further references are given after quotations in thetext.

There are a number of comparisons between Rousseau and Prometheus inthe Romantic writing of the period. For example, in the novel The Wrongs ofWoman which Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, left uncompleted at herdeath, Rousseau is described by the heroine Maria as ‘the true Prometheusof Sentiment’; Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, in Complete Works, vols., ed.by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: William Pickering, ), , .

The account that the Comte de Mirabeau gives of this society in his ‘Essayon the Sect of the Illuminati’ is highly reminiscent of Shelley’s descriptionof the creation of the monster in Frankenstein: ‘Formed in the recesses ofimpenetrable darkness, this society constitutes a new race of beings . . .Their oaths would realise the sanguinary fable of Atreus, and would coverthe whole face of the earth with a nation of assassins.’ This is cited in JohnAdolphus’s Biographical Memoirs of the French Revolution, vols. (London: ),, , which was read by both Percy and Mary Shelley between and.

See Lee Sterrenburg, ‘Mary Shelley’s Monster: Politics and Psyche inFrankenstein’, The Endurance of Frankenstein, ed. by George Levine and U. C.Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), pp. –;see also Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, – (London:Longman, ), p. .

See Mary Shelley, Journals, ed. by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), p. , . PercyBysshe Shelley, Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by F. L. Jones (Oxford:Clarendon Press, ), pp. –, and N. I. White, Shelley, vols. (London:Secker and Warburg, ), appendix : reading lists.

It was, of course, during the same ‘Swiss’ summer that the Shelleys’companion Lord Byron composed the third canto of Childe Harolde’sPilgrimage, which contains an account of Rousseau as a ‘self-torturingsophist’ who was ‘enamoured’ of an ‘ideal beauty’ that ‘breathed itself to

life’ in La Nouvelle Heloïse, his celebrated sentimental novel of . Havingpraised Rousseau’s passionate style, Byron goes on to suggest that ‘he wasfrenzied by disease or woe, / To that worst pitch of all, which wears a rea-soning show’: ‘For then he was inspired, and from him came, / As from thePythian’s mystic cave of yore, / Those oracles which set the world inflame, / Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more.’ George Gordon,Lord Byron, Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage, canto , stanza , in PoeticalWorks, ed. by Frederick Page, new edition revised by John Jump (Oxford:Oxford University Press, ).

See Shelley’s letters to T. L. Peacock, July , Letters, pp. –. Germaine de Staël, De la littérature, ed. Gérard Gengembre and Jean

Goldzink (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, ), discours préliminaire. See, for example, David Simpson’s Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt

against Theory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), pp. ff. Simpson’simpressive account of the Romantic revolt against French revolutionarytheory does nevertheless acknowledge the existence of an anti-theoreticaland anti-progressive current at the heart of French Jacobinism. It is thistradition and its influence that I shall be attempting to trace.

‘Rousseau’s Critique of Liberal Constitutionalism’, The Legacy of Rousseau,ed. by Clifford Orwin and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: Chicago UniversityPress, ), p. .

See Patrice Higonnet, Class, Ideology and the Rights of Nobles during the FrenchRevolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

On Frankenstein’s fear of other subjectivities see Francis Ferguson’s chapteron ‘The Gothicism of the Gothic Novel’, in Solitude and the Sublime (London:Routledge, ).

See Chris Baldick, ‘The Monster Speaks’, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth,Monstrosity and Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press,).

‘Mary Shelley’s Monster’, The Endurance of Frankenstein, pp. –. Seeabove.

Of which the most enduring and impressive examples are MarjorieLevinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, ), Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, ), Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A CriticalInvestigation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ) and David Simpson,Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, ).

The Romantic Ideology, p. . Mary Shelley’s Journal, ed. F. Jones (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,

), p. . One of the most virtuosic renderings of this argument is contained in Alan

Liu’s Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press,).

Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, first pub-lished (New York: Garland, ), p. .

Notes to pages –

Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the s (London:Routledge, ), p. . Further references are given after quotations in thetext.

Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England (Berkeley: University of California, ),chapters two and three.

William Wordsworth, ‘The Convention of Cintra’, Selected Prose, ed. by JohnO. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), p. . See also the linking ofTurgot, Robespierre and Bonaparte in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s TheFriend, first published –, , ed. by Barbara Rooke and KathleenCoburn, Collected Works (Princeton: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), no. (October ) and no. ( October ).

Seamus Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England –(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and WalterJackson Bate, Collected Works (London and Princeton: Routledge andPrinceton University Press, ), p. .

Reflections on the Revolution in France, first published , ed. by Conor CruiseO’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, ), p. .

Reflections, p. .

:

The celebrated Spartan Legislator, whose life and works were described byPlutarch in one of his Lives and in his Spartan Institutions.

New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. by Kenneth Curry (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, ), , .

For a discussion of the drawing up of this Constitution see J. M. Thompson,Napoleon Bonaparte, edn (Oxford: Blackwell, ), pp. –.

The Friend No. ( October ), first published –, ; ed. byBarbara Rooke and Kathleen Coburn, Collected Works of Samuel TaylorColeridge (Princeton: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), , –. For a dis-cussion of Coleridge’s analysis of the political theory of the FrenchRevolution see Seamus Deane, ‘Coleridge and Rousseau’, in The FrenchRevolution and Enlightenment in England – (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, ).

New Letters of Robert Southey, , . See, for example Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). For a recent account of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s relation to civic

humanism and radical dissent see Nigel Leask’s The Politics of Imagination inColeridge’s Critical Thought (London: Macmillan, ).

‘The View from England’, Representations of Revolution – (NewHaven and London: Yale, ).

David Denby and Lynn Hunt have both succeeded in showing the impor-tance of genres such as gothic and romance to French revolutionary

Notes to pages –

representation; See David J. Denby, Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order inFrance – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) and LynnHunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, ).

William Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, , –, ed. by Mark L.Reed, the Cornell Wordsworth, vols. (Ithaca and London: CornellUniversity Press) , . Unless otherwise stated, references to The Preludethroughout this thesis are to this edition.

In this way the very slipperiness of the word ‘Jacobin’ during the period canbe seen as a telling emblem of the fratricidal tension that lurked at the heartof revolutionary republicanism. Initially, at least, to be a Jacobin was to bea member of the Jacobin club. In this sense many of the Girondins andMontagnards were all Jacobins at one time or another, Brissot as well asRobespierre, Condorcet as well as Saint-Just. However, as their influencewith the clubs and sections waned from onwards, the Girondin leadersbegan to use the term ‘Jacobin’ to refer specifically to the Robespierristfaction and it is this definition that has been taken up by many historians.At the time of the Revolution itself, the counter-revolutionary press in bothFrance and England refused to allow for any distinction between Jacobinsand Girondins. In their opinion all of the French revolutionaries were‘Jacobins’ to a greater or lesser extent. In England even radicals and repub-licans of the period are rather loose in their use of the term. Often one canonly tell the meaning of the word by looking at its context. Suffice it to say,therefore, that while the word ‘Jacobinism’ always included the so-called‘reign of Robespierre’ (–) within its frame of reference, sometimes italso referred to the period of the Girondin ascendency (–) and some-times simply to the Revolutionary phenomenon as a whole.

An account of the liberal theory of the physiocrats is given in JürgenHabermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into aCategory of Bourgeois Society, first published , trans. by Thomas Burgerand Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, ), pp. –.

Emmanuel Sièyes, Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? first published , ed. by JeanDenis Bredin (Paris: Flammarion, ), p. . Further references are givenafter quotations in the text. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are myown.

Keith Baker, ‘Sieyès’, in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed.François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthus Goldhammer (Harvard:Belknap Press, ).

Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts, in Oeuvres Complètes, ed. by Bernard Gagnebinand Marcel Raymond, vols. (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,–), , –. Hereafter cited as OC.

Du Contrat Social, OC , –. OC , . OC , . OC , . OC , .

Notes to pages –

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category ofBourgeois Society, p. –.

See Part of J. G. A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, ).

The phrase is taken from the title of an essay by Edward Said in The World,the Text and the Critic (London: Vintage, ).

See especially section of the Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, first pub-lished , ed. by Michel Launay (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, ).

On the relation between theory and practice in the political theory of theFrench Revolution see Norman Hampson, Will and Circumstance: Montesquieu,Rousseau and the French Revolution (London: Duckworth, ), pp. –.

‘Rousseau’s Critique of Liberal Constitutionalism’, The Legacy of Rousseau,ed. by Clifford Orwin and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: Chicago UniversityPress, ), p. .

See Baker, ‘Representation Redefined,’ in Inventing the Revolution(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –.

See William Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyès and ‘WhatIs The Third Estate?’ (Durham and London: Duke University Press, ), pp.–.

‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ Keith Michael Baker,The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Chicago, Chicago University Press:), p. .

Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. by Marc Bouloiseau, AlfredSoboul and Georges Lefebvre, vols (Paris: Presses Universitaires deFrance, ), , . Hereafter cited as ROC.

Viewed in this light, even Sieyès’ assertions that the nobility was ‘foreign tothe nation’, a sickness at the heart of the body politic that was devouring itsliving flesh, can be seen to represent a striking anticipation of theManichaean psychology of revolutionary Jacobinism.

See François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, ), Simon Schama, Citizens (Harmondsworth: Penguin,) and Gwynne Lewis, The French Revolution: Rethinking the Debate (London:Routledge, ).

ROC , . See Rousseau’s Discours sur l’Economie Politique, OC , –. Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the Jacobin journalist and statesman who was the

unofficial leader of the Girondin faction from until his execution in.

Gesturing vaguely but powerfully not merely towards Encyclopédistes such asDiderot, D’Alembert, Helvétius and Holbach, but also to more recentfigures such as the mathematician, academician and constitutionalistAntoine-Nicholas de Condorcet.

ROC , –. The ‘sacred image’ referred to here was that of the bustof Rousseau that adorned the wall of the Jacobin club in which this speechwas given.

ROC , .

Notes to pages –

See Patrice Higonnet, Class, Ideology and the Rights of Nobles during the FrenchRevolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), chapter .

Max Sydenham, The Girondins (London: ) pp. , . Charles Lacretelle, Précis Historique de la Révolution Française, vols., first

volume written by Rabaut St. Etienne (Paris, ), , . Patrice Gueniffey, ‘Robespierre’, in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution,

and David Jordan, The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre (NewYork: ), p. .

Interpreting the French Revolution, pp. –. Peter Vansittart, ed., Voices of the Revolution (London: Collins, ), p. . Alan Forrest, The French Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, ), pp. –; J. M.

Roberts, The French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp.–.

ROC , , ; , ; , –. Karl Marx, ‘Marginal Notes on “The King of Prussia and Social

Reform”’, Early Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, )pp. –.

ROC , . OC, , –. Louis Saint-Just, ‘Discours du Octobre ’, Discours et Rapports, ed.

Albert Soboul (Paris: Editions Sociales, ), p. . Helen Maria Williams, Memoirs of the Reign of Robespierre, first published

(London: John Hamilton, ), p. . ROC , . Jacques Laçan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, ), pp.

–. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, The Penguin Freud Library, ed. Albert

Dickson, trans. James Strachey, vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ),vol..

Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), pp. –. ROC , . ROC , . ROC , . ROC , . ROC , .

Gazette National ou Moniteur Universel (Paris, ), , . David Jordan, The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre (New York:

), p. . ROC , . ROC , . ROC , . ROC , –. On Robespierre’s assumption of the legislator’s role, see François Furet,

Notes to pages –

‘Rousseau and the French Revolution’, The Legacy of Rousseau, ed. by CliffordOrwin and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ).

Life of Napoleon, vols. (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, ), , . From Robespierre’s speech of November , ROC , .

François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, ), pp. –.

See Carol Blum Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue (Cornell: CornellUniversity Press, ) and Gita May, De Jean-Jacques à Madame Roland(Genève: Librairie Droz, ).

For a discussion of the revolutionary reception of Rousseau’s individualworks see Joan McDonald, Rousseau and the French Revolution (London:Athlone Press, ), p. .

ROC , –. OC, , . Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle (Paris:

Gallimard, ), pp. –. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, ), pp. –. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, – (Baltimore and

London: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), pp. –, –. Jean Starobinski, ‘The Style of Autobiography’, Autobiography: Essays

Theoretical and Critical, ed. by James Olney (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, ).

Confessions, OC , –. OC , –. OC , –. OC , . A notion upon which the Marquis de Sade was to inflict a reductio ad absur-

dam in his Justine, ou les infortunes de vertu (). OC , . OC , . See Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England (Berkeley: University of California

Press, ), especially chapters and , and Jean Roussel, Jean-JacquesRousseau en France après la Révolution – (Paris: ).

Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, first published ,ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock Press, ), p. .

The Republican Refuted (London: ), reproduced in Gregory Claeys, ed.,Political Writings of the s: Responses to Paine (London: William Pickering),, .

Germaine de Staël, Lettres sur les écrits et le caractère de J. J. Rousseau, first pub-lished (Paris: Dambray, ), p. .

Political Writings of the s: Responses to Burke, , . Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘Review of Rousseau’s Confessions’, Analytical Review,

vol. (), p. . For the evidence behind the attribution of this reviewsee Ralph M. Wardle, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Reviewer’, PMLA, (). pp.ff.

Notes to pages –

For an extended discussion of the sense of intimacy that Rousseau inspiredin eighteenth-century readers, see Robert Darnton, ‘Readers Respond toRousseau’, The Great Cat Massacre (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ).

The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ),p. .

Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Première Promenade, OC, , . OC , . William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, edition, volume

three of the Political and Philosophical Writings, ed. by Mark Philp (London:William Pickering, ) , .

‘A New Public Body’, The Body and the French Revolution (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, ).

ROC , . ROC , . ROC , –. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, first

published in , Complete Works, ed. by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler(London: Pickering, ), , .

On Revolution, first published (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), p. . Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Première Promenade, OC , . ROC , . Discours of May , ROC , . Claude Helvétius, De l’esprit, vols. (Paris: Durand, ), , . De l’esprit, , –n. Of all the names to call the loose constellation of French and English

materialist philosophers active in the late eighteenth century this seems thebest. The term is borrowed from Elie Halévy’s classic account of the birthof the utilitarian movement, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (London:Faber, ).

An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. by J. H. Burns andH. L. A Hart, Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, vols. (London: AthlonePress, University of London), , .

Selected Writings, trans. by David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press,), p. .

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, ou l’éducation, in OC, , . He had touched upon this issue in the Discours sur l’inégalité of when he

made the distinction between amour de soi, the natural and unreflective self-respect possessed by primitive man, and the jealous, competitive and over-thoughtful amour-propre that was characteristic of modern civil society.

OC , –. OC , . OC , . Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. By J. H. Burns and H. L. A Hart,

vols. (Londonn: Athlone Press, University of London, ), , . Biographical Memoirs of the French Revolution, vols. (London: ), , .

Notes to pages –

Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, vols. (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, ), , . ROC , . ROC , . Reproduced from Jean-Charles Lacretelle, Précis Historique de la Révolution

Française, first volume written by Rabaut St. Etienne, vols. (Paris: ), ,.

Like Rousseau in the Sixième Promenade of his Rêveries du promeneur soli-taire.

ROC , . ROC , . David Jordan, The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre, p. . ROC , . Germaine de Staël, ‘De la philosophie,’ De la littérature, first published ,

ed. by Gérard Gengembre and Jean Goldzink (Paris: Garnier Flammarion,), p. .

Marie-Hélène Huet, ‘Performing Arts: Theatricality and the Terror’,Representing the French Revolution, ed. by James A. Heffernan (Hanover:University Press of New England, ), p..

Daniel Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror, trans. by Christopher Miller(Harmondsworth: Penguin, ).

De la littérature, . Robert Southey, ‘Biographie Moderne, Lives of the Revolutionists’,

Quarterly Review, June , p. . ROC , . ROC , . OC , . ROC , . ROC , . In The Italian () and Lalla Rookh () respectively.

, ’ C A L E B

W I L L I A M S

William Godwin, Caleb Williams, version, ed. by Pamela Clemit,volume three of the Collected Novels and Memoirs, ed. by Mark Philp (London:William Pickering, ) , . Further references are given after quota-tions in the text.

William Hazlitt, ‘Mr Godwin’, in The Spirit of the Age, ‘On the ModernNovelists’, Lectures on the English Comic Writers, in Complete Works, ed. by P. P.Howe, vols. (London: Dent, ).

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, first published , ed.by Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, ), p. .

J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the FrenchRevolution’, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, ).

Notes to pages –

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, first published –, ed. Eric Foner(Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), pp. –.

For an impressive discussion of the rhetorical strategies of Paine and Burkesee Tom Furniss, ‘Rhetoric in Revolution: The Role of Language in Paine’sCritique of Burke’, Revolution and English Romanticism, ed. by Keith Hanleyand Raman Selden (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, ).

For an extended discussion of Godwin’s reflections on Burke, see MarilynButler, ‘Godwin, Burke and Caleb Williams’, Essays in Criticism, (),pp. –, and chapter three of the same author’s Jane Austen and the War ofIdeas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

I am indebted here to Frances Ferguson’s fascinating discussion of the rela-tionship between ‘character’, class and aesthetics in ‘The Gothicism of theGothic Novel’, Solitude and the Sublime (London: Routledge, ).

Reflections, pp. –. See Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy, ed. by Marilyn Butler

(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: ). William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, edition, volume

three of the Political and Philosophical Writings, ed. by Mark Philp (London:William Pickering, ), , . Further references are given after quota-tions in the text.

Cesare Beccaria, Of Crimes and Punishments, trans. by Jane Grigson (Oxford:Oxford University Press, ), pp. –.

William Blackstone, Commentaries, ed. by Edward Christian, th edition(London: ). , –.

Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (London: Faber, ), p. . Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry

into a Category of Bourgeois Society, first published , trans. by ThomasBurger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, ).

William Godwin, Political Justice, ed. by Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth:Penguin, ), Introduction, p. .

Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, in Collected Works of JeremyBentham, ed. by J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, vols. (London: AthlonePress, University of London, ) , .

The English Utilitarians, vols. (London: ), , . Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ),

pp. –. Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven: Connecticut, ), p. . John P. Clark, The Philosophical Anarchism of William Godwin (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, ), p. . Elie Halévy merely states that Godwin took the utilitarian doctrine to a

logical extreme, unwilling to see his philosophical anarchism as a subversionof the Benthamite calculus. The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (London:Faber, ), pp. –.

William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice: Variants, volume fourof the Political and Philosophical Writings, ed. Mark Philp (London: WilliamPickering, ), , .

Notes to pages –

‘It was one of the laws of Lycurgus, that no Spartan should be employed inmanual labour. For this purpose, under his system, it was necessary that theyshould be plentifully supplied with slaves devoted to drudgery. Matter, or, tospeak more accurately, the certain and unremitting laws of the universe, willbe the Helots of the period we are contemplating. We shall end in thisrespect, oh immortal legislator! at the point from which you began’ (, ).

Mark Philp, ‘Godwin and the philosophes’, William Godwin’s Political Justice(London: Duckworth, ), pp. –.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, ou l’éducation, in Oeuvres Complètes, ed. BernardGagnebin and Marcel Raymond, vols. (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque dela Pléiade, –), , .

This sentence was only introduced in the third edition of Political Justice, firstpublished in ; Political and Philosophical Writings, , .

For him it was absurd to treat a nation as if it were a moral individual, ,–.

See especially Gregory Claeys’ Introduction to The Politics of EnglishJacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania StateUniversity Press, ).

See Godwin’s preference for examinations of ‘the influence that one humanbeing has on another’ over ‘the generalities of historical abstraction’, ‘OfRomance and History’, quoted by Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel– (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. .

For a fuller account of the historical allusions in Caleb Williams see GaryKelly, The English Jacobin Novel –, pp. ff.

Germaine de Staël, ‘De l’Invasion des Peuples du Nord’, De la Littérature,pp. –.

Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp.–. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French

Revolution’, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, ).

For a discussion of Burke’s aesthetic theory see Terry Eagleton, ‘The Lawof the Heart: Shaftesbury, Hume, Burke’, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford:Basil Blackwell, ).

Political and Philosophical Writings, , . On the Rousseauvian theme of failed sincerity in the novel, see Gary Kelly,

English Fiction of the Romantic Period, – (London: Longman, ),p. .

Biographical Memoirs of the French Revolution, , .

‘ ’ : ,

Letters . . ., ed. by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, vols. (London: WilliamPickering, ), , –. Further references are given after quotations inthe text.

ROC , .

Notes to pages –

ROC , . ROC , . Du Contrat Social, OC , –. ROC , . See, for example, Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution

(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), Politics, Culture and Class in theFrench Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), DorindaOutram, The Body and the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, ).

Emmet Kennedy, ‘Educating’, A Cultural History of the French Revolution (Yale:Yale University Press, ).

Gwynne Lewis, ‘The Creation of the Homme Nouveau’, The FrenchRevolution: Rethinking the Debate. (London: Routledge, 1993)

Keith Michael Baker’s Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ) is still the most extensive studyof his work.

Selected Writings, ed. by Keith Baker (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, ), p.. Further references are given after quotations in the text.

‘Sketch of a Historical Tableau of the Progress of the Human Mind’,Selected Writings, p. .

‘Signs of the Times’, Edinburgh Review, June . ‘On Public Instruction’, Selected Writings, p. . ROC , . Robespierre’s version of Le Peletier’s proposal is reprinted in Claude

Mazauric’s selection of Robespierre’s Ecrits (Paris: Messidor EditionsSociales, ), pp. –. This quotation is from p. .

Ecrits, p. . Ecrits, p. . Ecrits, p. . In his pamphlet on public instruction Condorcet had attacked the neo-

Spartan notion of public instruction that was gaining popularity at the time.He argued that the egalitarian system of education fostered by the Spartanswas an attempt to control ‘all political, moral and religious opinions’, in thatrespect it was doubly coercive: firstly, it did not respect the freedom of thewill, since ‘the individual who enters society with opinions inculcated by hiseducation is no longer a free man; he is the slave of his teachers. His chainsare all the more difficult to break because he himself does not feel them’;secondly, this enslavement of the spirit requires another form of slavery tosupport it, since ‘an absolute equality of education can only exist amongpeoples for whom the work of society is performed by slaves’. To enable theGreek citizenry to occupy the realm of politics, it had been necessary for therealm of civil society to be maintained entirely by a helot class: the freedomof the one was dependent upon the other. In a modern culture, however,‘the burdensome tasks of society are allotted to free men obliged to work inorder to satisfy their needs. These men are nevertheless the equals of those

Notes to pages –

to whom wealth has dispensed from such tasks, and they enjoy the samerights.’ What is more, he argued, the ‘indomitable love of liberty’ exhibitedby the Greeks ‘was not a generous passion for independence and equality,but the fever of ambition and pride’. To be free for them was simply to bepolitically active: they had no notion of the freedom from oppression whichhad been guaranteed by the modern discourse of rights.

As Jurgen Habermas puts it: ‘The general will was always right, the notori-ous passage stated, but the judgment that guided it was not always enlight-ened. It was therefore necessary to present matters as they were, sometimesas they were to appear’, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: anInquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, first published , trans. byThomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, ),pp. –.

J. J. Rousseau, Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, first published , ed. byMichel Launay (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, ), p. .

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. byThomas Carlyle (Boston: ), , v, iii, –.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Transparence et l’Obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, ),p. .

Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloïse, in OC , , . OC , . ‘Readers Respond to Rousseau’, The Great Cat Massacre (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, ). See, for example, Pierre Louise Ginguené’s discussion of the novel in the

idéologue journal La Décade Philosophique, April . Cf. Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

), p. –. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution Française, vols. (Paris: Bouquins,

Robert Laffont, ), , . OC , . OC , . Memoirs of the Reign of Robespierre, first published (London: John

Hamilton, ), pp. –. Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. by Alan Sheridan (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, ), p.. Histoire de la Révolution Française, , . Histoire de la Révolution Française, , . See, for example, Barbara Taylor, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Wild Wish

of Early Feminism’, History Workshop Journal, (), p. . Joan Wallach Scott, ‘French Feminists and the Rights of Man: Olympe de

Gouge’s Declarations’, History Workshop Journal (). p.. On the Jacobinreaction to feminist politics see Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the FrenchRevolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ) and DorindaOutram, The Body and the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, ).

Notes to pages –

Selected Writings, ed. by Keith Baker p. . According to Tom Furniss, this was one of the motivations behind the

attack on Rousseau in the Vindication, ‘Gender and Revolution: EdmundBurke and Mary Wollstonecraft,’ Revolution in Writing, ed. by Kelvin Everest(Buckingham, Open University Press: ), p. .

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, first published , volume five of TheWorks of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, vols.(London: William Pickering, ).

Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘Review of Rousseau’s Confessions’, Analytical Review,vol. ( January-April ).

Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (Harmondsworth:Penguin, ), p. –.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, in TheWorks of Mary Wollstonecraft, , . Further references are given after quota-tions in the text.

For a more detailed discussion of Wollstonecraft’s doubts, see HarrietDevine Jump, ‘The cool eye of observation’, in Revolution in Writing.

Burke’s critique of the revolutionary discourse of rights was discussed in thechapter on ‘Chivalry, Justice and the Law in William Godwin’s CalebWilliams’.

OC , . Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, ed. by Jonathan

Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock Press, ), p. . Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, p. . Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, first pub-

lished (New York: Garland, ), pp. –. Germaine de Staël, Lettres sur les écrits et le caractère de J. J. Rousseau. Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, first published

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), , v. ‘Dernières pensées’ from Mémoires de Madame Roland, first published in full in

, ed. Paul de Roux (Paris: Hachette, ), p. . Quoted in Gita May’s De Jean-Jacques à Madame Roland (Genève: Droz, ),

p. . Mémoires de Madame Roland, p. . Jean-Baptiste Louvet, Mémoires, first published , ed. Michel Vovelle

(Paris: Desjonquères, ). See Richard Holmes’s Introduction to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Short

Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and William Godwin’s Memoirs of theAuthor of ‘The Rights of Woman’ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ).

OC , . OC , –. As Claire Tomalin and Richard Holmes have suggested, the Rêveries du pro-

meneur solitaire was one of Wollstonecraft’s favourite books during this period. See Mary Poovey, ‘Love’s Skirmish and the Triumph of Ideology,’ in The

Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Ideology as Style in the Work of Mary

Notes to pages –

Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, ). On the tendency to ‘personalise’ when writing about womensee Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters(Cambridge University Press, ) , pp. ff.

Germaine de Staël, De la Littérature, p. . De la Littérature, –. See Holmes’s Introduction to A Short Residence in Sweden, Denmark and Norway

and Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’. David Simpson makes a slightly different emphasis from mine here, seeing

a self-consciously masculine Wollstonecraft accusing Imlay of having been‘feminised’ by commerce, ‘Engendering Method’, Romanticism, Nationalismand the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), p. .

For a further discussion of Wollstonecraft’s redefinition of sensibility seeChris Jones, ‘Towards Revolution’, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in thes (London: Routledge, ).

:

Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, edition,ed. by Anthony Flew (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), p. . This editionhas been preferred to more scholarly editions because it gives the moreaudacious and polemical text of , rather than the more statistical oneof . Further references are given after quotations in the text.

Tom Paine, Agrarian Justice in The Life and Major Writings of Tom Paine, ed. byPhilip S. Foner (New York: Citadel Press, ), pp. –.

Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement (London: Longman, ), pp. –. This was the reason he gave for his rejection of Paine and Condorcet’s

insurance plans. See Michael E. Rose, The English Poor Law – (Newton Abbot: David

and Charles, ), George Nichols, A History of the English Poor Law, vols.(London: ), Samuel Mencher, Poor Law to Poverty Program (Pittsburgh:).

See David Winch’s introduction to An Essay on the Principle of Population, firstpublished (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).

As he remarked in an appendix to the fifth edition of the Essay: ‘I have neveradverted to the check suggested by Condorcet without the most marked dis-approbation. Indeed I should always particularly reprobate any artificialand unnatural modes of checking population, both on account of theirimmorality and their tendency to remove a necessary stimulus to industry’.An Essay on the Principle of Population, text, ed. by David Winch CambridgeHistory of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ),pp. –.

Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (London: Faber, ), p..

Notes to pages –

William Paley, Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, ),Book , chapter .

An Essay on the Principle of Population, text (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, ), p. .

William Hazlitt, A Reply to Malthus, in Complete Works, ed. by P. P. Howe, vols. (London: Dent, ), , .

For more extended discussion of the population debate and Hazlitt’s rolewithin it, see William Albrecht, William Hazlitt and the Malthusian Controversy(Dallas: Texas, ) and Kenneth Smith, The Malthusian Controversy (NewYork: ).

See the excellent chapter on Malthus and Wordsworth in Frances Ferguson,Solitude and the Sublime (London: Routledge, ).

For an examination of the similarities between Malthusian and Thatcheritemodels of pauper management, see Anne Vinokur, ‘Malthusian Ideologyand the Crisis of the Welfare State’, in Michael Turner, ed., Malthus and hisTime (London: Macmillan, ).

On the influence of Population theory upon the Poor Law Amendment Actof see Anne Digby, ‘Malthus and the Reform of the English Poor Law’,in Malthus and his Time.

Pauper Management Improved (London: Lincoln’s Inn, ), p. . Further refer-ences are given after quotations in the text.

See Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’, in Discipline and Punish, trans. by AlanSheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ).

Indeed, the publication of the second edition () was neatly timed to rec-oncile the upper classes to the continuation of the war with France as auseful way of getting rid of the ‘surplus’.

‘On Beggars’, The Enquirer, ed. by Pamela Clemit, vol. of WilliamGodwin’s Political and Philosophical Writings, vols., ed. by Mark Philp(London: Pickering and Chatto, ), , .

Similarly Mark Philp regards Godwin’s rethinking of the role of theaffections in the second and third editions of Political Justice as a change ofemphasis rather than a change of direction, Godwin’s Political Justice(London: Duckworth, ), pp. –.

Political and Philosophical Writings, , . William Wordsworth, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, in Lyrical Ballads and

Other Poems, –, ed. by James Butler and Karen Green, The CornellWordsworth (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univeristy Press, ), p. n.

See David Simpson, ‘The politics of sympathy’, Wordsworth’s HistoricalImagination: The Poetry of Displacement (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, ), pp. –.

Kenneth Smith, The Malthusian Controversy (New York: ), p. . Samuel Whitbread, Substance of a Speech on the Poor Laws (London: John

Ridgway, ), p.. Francis Place, Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population, first published

, ed. by N. E. Himes (London: George Allen and Unwin, ).

Notes to pages –

Political Register, January . Daniel Green, Great Cobbett: The Noblest Agitator (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, ), p. –. Political Register, May . See also Herman Ausubel, ‘William Cobbett

on Malthusianism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, (), pp. –. Robert Southey, ‘Inquiry into the Poor Laws &c.’, Quarterly Review (),

p. . Indeed he considered that Cobbett was one of the most dangerous and

inflammatory demagogues in England, so much so that he even wrote tothe Prime Minister on March suggesting that he should bedeported. Stanley Jones, Hazlitt: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press,), p. .

The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, ), pp. , . Jack Simmonds, Robert Southey (London: Collins, ), p. . Hazlitt was to repeat the terms of this argument almost twenty years later

in an article ‘On the New School of Reform,’ as we shall see in the nextchapter. Complete Works, , –.

On the resolutely middle-class nature of Hazlitt’s politics see Thompson,The Making of the English Working Class, p. .

‘ ’ :

Selected Prose, ed. by John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), p.. Further references are given after quotations in the text.

In Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, ) Nicholas Roe acknowledges a Robespierrist tendency inWordsworth’s revolutionary politics, but treats him, for the most part, as aGirondin. In John Williams’s analysis, Wordsworth is a thorough moderatethroughout, Wordsworth: Romantic Poetry and Revolution Politics (Manchester:Manchester University Press, ).

William Pitt, Speech of February , Orations on the French War (London:Dent, ), pp.–.

Lesley Chard, Dissenting Republican (The Hague: ), Z.S. Fink,‘Wordsworth and the English Republican Tradition’, Journal of English andGermanic Philology, (), pp.ff.

William Coxe, Sketches of the Natural, Civil and Political State of Swisserland, ndedn (London: ), p. .

William Wordsworth, Descriptive Sketches, text, ed. by Eric Birdsall andPaul M. Zall, The Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca and London: Cornell UniversityPress, ), , lines –.

David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .

Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (London:Macmillan, ), part .

Notes to pages –

William Wordsworth, The Prelude , from The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed.Mark L. Reed, vols., The Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca and London: CornellUniversity Press, ), , . Unless otherwise stated, further references toThe Prelude are to this edition.

Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination, p. . René de Chateaubriand, Essai sur les révolutions, le génie du christianisme, ed. by

Maurice Regard (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, ), p. . Essai sur les révolutions, p. . Antoine-Nicolas Condorcet, ‘On Public Instruction’, Selected Writings, ed. by

Keith Baker (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill: ). See chapter three for amore extended discussion of this text.

Essai sur les révolutions, p. . For a discussion of English and French versions of ‘revolutionary plot’ see

chapter one of Ronald Paulson’s Representations of Revolution – (NewHaven and London: Yale, ).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, The Fall of Robespierre(Cambridge: J. Flower, ). , –.

For a further analysis of the psychology of the Thermidorean period seeBronislaw Baczko, ‘The Terror before the Terror? Conditions of Possibility,Logic of Realisation’, in volume four of the The French Revolution and theCreation of Modern Political Culture, ed. by Keith Micheal Baker (London andNew York: Pergamon Press, ).

ROC , . Madame Roland, An Appeal to Impartial Posterity, first published , ed. by

Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock Press, ), pp. –. Jean-Baptiste Louvet, Mémoires, first published (Paris: Baudouin Frères,

), p. . S. T. Coleridge, Lectures , ed. by Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, Collected

Works, vols. ed. by Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Routledge and KeganPaul, ), p. .

John Thelwall, The Tribune, xi, May , reproduced in The Politics ofEnglish Jacobinism, ed. by Gregory Claeys (Pennsylvania: PennsylvaniaUniversity Press, ).

William Wordsworth, The Borderers, ed. by Richard Osborn, The CornellWordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –, , i. –.

The Borderers, p.. Further page references are given after quotations in thetext.

See Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ () in OnMetapsychology, ed. by Angela Richards, trans. by James Strachey, volumeeleven of the Penguin Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ).

See for example James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature (Chicago:Chicago University Press, ), pp. –.

The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse of Language, trans. by AlanSheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, ), p. .

Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ),p. . Further references are given after quotations in the text.

Notes to pages –

J. J. Rousseau en Angleterre à l’époque romantique (Paris: Didier, ), p. . W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Influence, Autobiography, and Literary History:

Rousseau’s Confessions and Wordsworth’s The Prelude’ (ELH, , ), pp.–.

See David Simpson, Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (London andAtlantic Highlands: ).

William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Poems of ’, Selected Prose. John Barrell, ‘The Uses of Dorothy’, Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, ). Selected Prose, p. . Wordsworth’s Second Nature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ). Selected Prose, p. . ‘History and Autobiography’, Representing the French Revolution. ed. by James

A. Heffernan (Hanover: University Press of New England, ). ROC , . John Adolphus, Biographical Memoirs of the French Revolution, vols. (London,

) , . Further references are given after quotations in the text. Memoirs of the Reign of Robespierre, p. . Helen Maria Williams’s lack of

success can be intimated from the unfavourable review of her Memoirs in theGentleman’s Magazine, (), p. . For a further discussion of the revolu-tion debate in the Thermidorean period see Brian Rigby, ‘RadicalSpectators of the Revolution: The Case of the Analytical Review’, TheFrench Revolution and British Culture, ed. by Small and Crossley (London:Oxford University Press, ).

See Marilyn Butler, ‘Revolving in deep time: the French Revolution as nar-rative’, in Revolution and English Romanticism, ed. by Keith Hanley and RamanSeldon (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, ).

See Mary Wollstonecraft’s Introduction to the Historical and Moral View of theFrench Revolution, volume six of the Complete Works (London: WilliamPickering, ).

William Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. by W. J. B. Owen, TheCornell Wordsworth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, ), ,–.

Memoirs of the Reign of Robespierre, . ROC , . Wordsworth’s Second Nature, p. . Chandler sees Rousseau as an idéologue and a systematiser, and thus

neglects his peculiarly paradoxical and interstitial status as anEnlightenment philosopher who wrote against the Enlightenment.

Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,), p. .

Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. by Alan Sheridan(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), Introduction.

Wordsworth: The Sense of History, p. . The Excursion, , –, in Volume of The Poems of William Wordsworth,

ed. by John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ).

Notes to pages –

Wordsworth’s ‘Essays on Epitaphs,’ Selected Prose, p. . See John Thelwall, The Tribune, xi, May , and William Hazlitt, Life of

Napoleon Bonaparte in The Complete Works, ed. by P. P. Howe, vols. (London:Dent, –) , –.

‘ ’ :

William Hazlitt, Complete Works, ed. by P. P. Howe, vols (London: Dent,), , . Further references to this edition are given after quotationsin the text.

See the excellent discussion of Hazlitt’s relation to the writers and editorsof his time in Stanley Jones, Hazlitt: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press,), especially pp. –.

David Bromwich, William Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, ) and Seamus Deane, ‘William Hazlitt and theFrench’, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England –(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ).

‘Prisons and Prison Discipline’, Essays on Government, Jurisprudence [Etc.,](London: J. Innes, ), reprinted in Political Writings, ed. by Terence Ball(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –.

‘Education’, Political Writings, pp. –. ‘Essay on Christianity’, Shelley’s Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (London: Fourth

Estate Limited, ). See Simon Bainbridge, ‘A Proud and Full Answer: Hazlitt’s Napoleonic

Riposte’, in Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, ).

See John Whale, ‘Hazlitt on Burke: The Ambivalent Position of a RadicalEssayist’, Studies in Romanticism, , (Winter ), pp. –.

Cf. ‘On Great and Little Things’ (, –). Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. by Marc Bouloiseau, Alfred

Soboul and Georges Lefebvre, vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires deFrance, ), , .

Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloïse, first published , in OC , . See, for example, , , , , , , , , . ‘Disenchantment and Default? A Lay Sermon’, Power and Consciousness, ed.

by C. C. and W. D. Vanech O’Brien (London and New York: ). Stanza of the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Poetical Works, ed. by H.W. Garrod

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). The college was designed to give a two-year course of general education

and language study to the servants of the East India Company before theyproceeded overseas.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, first published , ed.by Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, ), p. .

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, first published –, , ed. by

Notes to pages –

Barbara Rooke and Kathleen Coburn, Collected Works (Princeton: Routledgeand Kegan Paul, ), , –.

See Hedra Ben-Israel, English Historians on the French Revolution (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, ).

‘Inquiry into the Poor Laws &c.’, Quarterly Review (), p. . Thomas Love Peacock’s neo-utilitarian attack on poetry was contained in

his essay ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’, first published in Ollier’s LiteraryMagazine in .

See his lecture ‘On the English Novelists’ in his Lectures on the English ComicWriters (), v, –.

See Marilyn Butler, ‘Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review’, TheCambridge Companion to Romanticism, ed. by Stuart Curran (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –; Jon P. Klancher, The Makingof English Reading Audiences (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, ).

On Hazlitt’s use of persona see Marilyn Butler, ‘Satire and the Images ofthe Self in Liber Amoris’ Yearbook of English Studies ().

Reprinted as an appendix to Robert Ready’s Hazlitt at Table (East Brunswick:Associated University Presses, ).

On the Blackwood’s attack see Hazlitt: A Life, pp. –. In ‘On the Pleasure of Painting’, and ‘The Indian Jugglers’, , –,

–. Jon P. Klancher, ‘Reading the Social Text’, The Making of English Reading

Audiences (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, ). Most notably in his On the Constitution of Church and State of . For an extended but not very interesting discussion of Hazlitt’s similarities

with Rousseau, see Jacques Voisine, ‘William Hazlitt: un nouveau Jean-Jacques’, Jean-Jacques Rousseau en Angleterre (Paris: Didier, ).

See chapter two. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism from the Spectator to Post-Structuralism

(London: Verso, ), pp. –. See David Bromwich, William Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, ), especially the chapter on ‘The Politics of Allusion’. Liber Amoris, letter . For a slightly different version of Hazlitt’s relation to the persona of ‘H’ see

Marilyn Butler, ‘Satire and the Images of the Self in Liber Amoris’, Yearbookof English Studies (), and also Robert Ready, ‘The Logic of Passion:Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris’, Studies in Romanticism, ().

Notes to pages –

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Adolphus, JohnBiographical Memoirs of the French Revolution on Brissot , on Robespierre on Prairial

D’Alembert, Jean Alexander the Great, as a model of chivalry

–Analytical Review , Arasse, Daniel Arendt, Hannah , Athens (see also Geneva, Sparta, Rome)autobiography (see also confession) , ,

politics of confession –, –, , –as a denial of history –spiritual autobiography, seventeenth-

century tradition of

Bainbridge, Simon Baker, Keith Michael Barère, Bertrand Barrell, John Barruel, Antoine Joseph

Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire du Jacobinisme–

Beccaria, Cesare Dr Bell’s education system Bentham, Jeremy , , , , –,

(see also utility theory)Introduction to the Principles of Morals and

Legislation –, Pauper Management Improved –attacked by Hazlitt –, –ideology of legislation ,

Blackstone, William Blackwood’s Magazine Bloom, Allan Bonaparte, Napoleon , –, , , Brissot, Jacques-Pierre (Girondin leader), ,

attacked by Robespierre

belligerent rhetoric of influence of Rousseau political hypocrisy of ,

Bromwich, David Brutus, Marcus (the republican regicide) ,

Bunyan, John Burke, Edmund , , , , –, , –,

, , , , , , , ,, , ,

on moral paradoxes of the Jacobins, attack on Rousseau –concept of ‘chivalry’ concept of ‘manners’ defence of ‘prejudice’ –critique of revolutionary ideology of

legislation –and Wordsworth –similarities with Rousseau , supposed influence upon The Prelude Hazlitt’s literary admiration of Hazlitt’s imitation of

Buzot, François (Girondin martyr) –Byron, Lord George Gordon ,

Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage and ‘Coriolanus’ principle ,

Caesar, Julius , Carbonnières, Ramond de Carlyle, Thomas , Carrier, Joseph –Chandler, James –, , Chateaubriand, François René de

Essai sur les Révolutions –, chivalry, as a concept and an ideology

in Burke –in Caleb Williams –in de Staël parodied by Hazlitt ,

city state Clark, J.P.

Index

Cobbett, Williamchanging attitude to population principle

–opinions on education ‘Letter to Parson Malthus’ –

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor , –, , ,

and counter-revolutionary historiography

The Fall of Robespierre –, on Robespierre –on the political philosophy of French

Jacobinism , , –on the idea of a clerisy

Condorcet, Marquis de , , , –, ,, , ,

on education –as feminist propagandist on the Jacobins –as ‘progressive’ thinker , on the Spartan model of society – note

Sur L’Instruction Publique –, Esquisse , , , –

confession, Rousseauvian tradition of,and political theory –, –, –, ,

–in Frankenstein , –in the Confessions –in Julie in Robespierre , –, , –in Caleb Williams –in Madame Roland’s Appel –in Louvet’s Mémoires –in the Letters from Sweden... –in The Prelude – , –in Hazlitt’s essays , –, –,

–, –conscience, rhetoric of

in Caleb Williams in The Enquirer in Rousseau –in Robespierre , in Wordsworth’s Prelude

conspiracy theoryin Barruel in Brissot in Liber Amoris in political culture of Jacobinism in Robespierre –, , in The Borderers

cosmopolitanism (of French Enlightenmenttheory) –, , ,

Couthon, Georges (Robespierrist Jacobin)–,

Coxe, William Cromwell, Oliver

Danton, Georges Jacques , , , , , ,

David, Jacques Louis –, Deane, Seamus Defoe, Daniel

Robinson Crusoe De Quincey, Thomas

on French Revolution Desmoulins, Camille Dickens, Charles Diderot, Dénis ,

Edinburgh Review education –,

Jacobin and Girondin proposals on –Samuel Whitbread’s proposals on –

Elliott, Charles Harrington ‘enthusiasm’, revolutionary

in Frankenstein –in Capel Lloft’s defence of Rousseau –,

–D’Épinay, Madame in Godwin in Liber Amoris in Rousseau’s Confessions in Wordsworth ,

St. Etienne, Rabaut Examiner, The , ,

Ferguson, Adam festivals; festival ideal (see also ‘localism’)

at the Festival of the Supreme Being –in the Lettre à D’Alembert in Julie –inverted in Malthus in Rousseau’s political theory , in Wordsworth –,

Foucault, Michelon the historical study of discourse

Fouquier-Tinville, Antoine de –Fox, Charles James Foxe, John Freud, Sigmund , Furet, François , ,

general will, concept ofin Rousseau’s political theory –as a source of revolutionary manicheanism

in Robespierre’s confessional discourse in the Letter to Llandaff Hazlitt’s mistrust of –

Index

Geneva , , , –, , , Gibbon, Edward , Gironde, Girondins ,

and education –Girondin memoirs as hypocritical republicans , , –, ,

and Jacobins , –and philosophical radicalism , as ‘true’ republicans –and Wollstonecraft

Godwin, William , , , , , , , ,, , , , ,

on Burkean ‘prejudice’ –on freedom of the individual relation to French Enlightenment –on justice , –on law –on political combination on property concept of reason , on Rousseau –on the Terror –and utility theory –works cited:‘On Beggars’ –Caleb Williams –

as allegory of civil society The Enquirer Political Justice –, –, , , ,

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von , The Sorrows of Young Werther

Grimm, Melchior guillotine, the –

Habermas, Jürgen , Hamlet (Shakespeare) Harrington, James Hartley, David Hazlitt, William , , , ,

admiration for Burke –imitation of Burke on Caleb Williams and confession –, –, –and Jacobin egotism –and the Jacobin tradition –and the literary market , –on the Lake school –, , –on the progressive nature of the periodical

press –on the relationship between the ‘people’

and the ‘public’ –and plurality on Robespierre , on Rousseau’s ‘incorrigible’ egotism ,

–, –

on Rousseau’s Julie –on Rousseau and the French Revolution

, –Rousseau, Byron and Wordsworth

compared –attacks on utilitarianism –, , on Wordsworth and Bonaparte –works cited:‘An Essay on the Principles of Human

Action’ –‘A Farewell to Essay Writing’ ‘Arguing in a Circle’ ‘Coriolanus’ , Conversations of Northcote , –Lectures on the English Poets ‘Life of Napoleon’ –, Liber Amoris –‘On Byron and Wordsworth’ ‘On Going A Journey’ , , ‘On Living to One’s Self ’ –‘On Modern Apostates’ ‘On Personal Character’ , ‘On Poetry in General’ ‘On Reason and Imagination’ ‘On the Aristocracy of Letters’ ‘On the Character of Rousseau’ –,

, –‘On the Connection between Toad-Eaters

and Tyrants’ ‘On the New School of Reform’ , –,

‘On the Pleasure of Hating’ ‘The Periodical Press’ –Political Essays , , Reply to Malthus –, –The Plain Speaker The Spirit of the Age Table-Talk –, ‘Why the Arts are not Progressive’

Hébert, René , , –, Heffernan, James Helvétius, Claude , , , , ,

self-interest philosophy of De L’Esprit –utilitarian concept of law –

d’Herbois, Collot (Montagnard) Higonnet, Patrice Hogarth, William Holbach, Baron , , Huet, Marie Hélène Hume, David Hunt, Leigh Hunt, Lynn

Illuminati, the , –,

Jacobin, Jacobins, Jacobinism passim

Index

Barruel’s Histoire du Jacobinisme –Caleb Williams as a ‘Jacobin’ text as a contested term , , –,

note distinction between ‘primitive’ and

‘progressive’ Jacobinism –in English context , , , and feudal despotism , and Frankenstein –fratricidal tensions within and the guillotine Hazlitt’s ‘once a Jacobin always a Jacobin’

and ‘illusion of politics’ –, –influence upon English Romantics ‘Jacobin’ egotism –‘Jacobin ghost’ in Wordsworth ‘Jacobin jargon’ of English utilitarians Manichean psychology of and neo-classicism as neo-Spartan ideology –and the sans-culottes –The Borderers and Jacobin politics The Prelude, a Jacobin poem against

Jacobinism Wordsworth’s convalescence from

Jeffrey, Francis Johnson, Joseph Jones, Chris –

Kames, Lord Kant, Immanuel Keats, John King Lear (Shakespeare) , Klancher, Jon

Lacan, Jacques Lacretelle, Charles , , Lafayette, Marshall Lamb, Charles Leask, Nigel , –Lebas, Joseph legislator, figure of the

in the Contrat Social relating to Rousseau relating to Bonaparte in Robespierre’s speech on the Cult of the

Supreme Being in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ –in Wollstonecraft’s Letters –in The Prelude

Lewis, Gwynne Liberal, The Liu, Alan –, Liverpool, Robert Jenkinson, Lord Llandaff, Richard Watson, Bishop of ,

Lloft, Capel , ‘localism’ (see also festival ideal)

in Rousseau’s political theory , in Wordsworth’s Prelude , –,

Locke, Don loi agraire London Magazine , Louis XVI , , Louvet, Jean-Baptiste (Girondin) –, ,

denunciation of Robespierre –, –,

Mémoires –Lycurgus , , , , (see also Sparta)

Macherey Pierre Malthus, Thomas Robert , , –,

attack on revolutionary notions ofperfectibility –,

Essay on Population as a piece of politicalrhetoric

influence on Samuel Whitbread’s PoorLaw Bill

on ‘nature’s mighty feast’ –his objectification of the poor theory of population growth –reception of Essay –

Marat, Jean Paul , , Marx, Karl , McGann, Jerome , McKeon Michael Michelet, Jules Mill, James , Milton, John , Mirabeau, Comte de –, , Mitchell W.J.T. Montagne, Montagnards (left wing of the

National Convention –) , ,–, , –

Montesquieu, Charles-Louis More, Hannah ,

New Monthly Magazine

Outram, Dorinda –, –, Ozouf, Mona , ,

Paine, Tom , , , –, , , , Agrarian Justice

Paley, William –paradox, paradoxes

in the Confessions , in the Contrat Social in Hazlitt , in Burke’s Reflections –in Robespierre’s rhetoric of Terror , ,

, –

Index

Paulson, Ronald , Peel, Sir Robert Le Peletier, Louis

proposals on national system of education–

periodical press –Philp, Mark –‘pious frauds’ , Pitt, William (the younger) , , –Place, Francis , Plato Plutarch , , (see also Lycurgus, Sparta)Pocock, J.G.A. Poovey, Mary population theory of Malthus –

reception –Priestley, Joseph , , ‘primitivism’,

in Frankenstein –primitivist Jacobinism in Rousseau’s political theory –, , in Robespierrist Terrorism , and feudal despotism in Le Peletier’s education bill –at the Festival of the Supreme Being critiqued by Wollstonecraft , , in Wordsworth –, ,

Quarterly Review

Radcliffe, Ann radical dissent representation, as a political issue Revolution, French,

as repetition , , ‘revolutionary catechism’ revolutionary fratricide legislative moments and leading events:convening of the Estates General () ,

–, , Constitution of , , Constitution of Declaration of the Rights of Man and of

the Citizen () , , , Duke of Brunswick’s manifesto () execution of the king () , , Festival of the Supreme Being () ,

, –, , flight of the king to Varennes () ‘Law of Suspects’ () ‘Law of Prairial’ () –, , policy of the Maximum (–) September Massacres () –, –,

, storming of the Bastille ()

storming of the Tuileries palace () struggle between Jacobins and Girondins

(–) –, , , subsistence crisis (–) –, , Terror (–) , , –, –, , Thermidor () , , –, , war with Austria and Prussia () war with Great Britain ()

Revolutionary Tribunal () , , –Robespierre, Maximilien passim

and Burke attacks upon Brissot and the Girondins ,

attack on Condorcet Dédicace aux Mânes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau

and the Confessions , and confessional discourse –as demagogue demise of , –, , , and Godwin and the guillotine as hypocrite and the ‘illusion of politics’ –, on law –as Machiavellian legislator as paragon of public virtue portrait by Gérard ill. as political doppelgänger as political Tartuffe –political rhetoric of , –politics of self-martydom –posthumous reputation of , –and Sparta –, major speeches:

November (Reply to Louvet) –,–

May (On the Cult of the SupremeBeing) , –, ,

February (On Political Morality)–, ,

July (Final Speech) –, on religion –and the theory of the general will and the theory of the Terror , –, –,

–alleged vanity of –

Roe, Nicholas –Roland, Jean-Marie Roland, Marie Jeanne , ,

and Robespierre , and Rousseau’s Julie –

Rome (Classical) , , , Romilly, Samuel Rousseau, Jean-Jacques passim

Index

anti-progressive ideas of –chauvinism of –Confessions:

antecedents –episode of the comb abandoning his children accounts of theft Marion and the ribbon –and ‘virtue’

and Frankenstein –in Godwin’s assessment ‘incorrigible’ egotism of , –influence of –, –and paradox –, , , –politics of confession –and the notion of the ‘conscience’ –and radical sensibility on republican festivals –on state religion –and social transparency revelation on the road to Vincennes theories of political sovereignty –Works cited:

Confessions , , , –, –, , ,, , , , –, , –,, –

Contrat Social , –, , , , , ,–, , , , , , , ,, , , , , , , ,–

Discours sur L’Inégalité –, –, , ,, ,

Discours sur les Arts et les Sciences , , Emile, ou l’Education –, –, –,

, , –, , Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloïse , , , ,

, , , –, , , –, –, –, –, –

Lettre à D’Alembert , , , , , Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire , , ,

–, –, , , Roux, Jacques (sans-culotte leader)

Saint-Just, Nicolas de –, sans-culottes , , , , , –, , illSchama, Simon Schiller, Friedrich, ,

Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man –Scott, Sir Walter , , self-interest philosophy –sensibility , –Shaftesbury, Lord , Shelley, Mary –, , Shelley, Percy Sieyès, Emmanuel –, –, –, ,

Simpson, David , –Smith, Adam solitarism –, –, , , Southey, Robert

on Robespierre –, , on Malthus –, Fall of Robespierre –, ,

Sparta, Spartanism (see also Lycurgus) –,, , , , , , , ,, , –

‘spéculation’ –Staël, Germaine de , , , ,

on women and the revolution –Lettres sur les Ecrits et sur le Caractère de Jean-

Jacques Rousseau , , , De la Littérature , –,

Sterrenburg, Lee Stoddart, John Switzerland, as locus of liberty –, ,

ill., –

Tallien, , , , Thelwall, John ,

on Robespierre , Thionville, Merlin de (Jacobin) Thompson, E.P. transparency, concept of , , , –Turgot, Robert Jacques , –, ,

utility theory –, , –

Weiskel, Thomas Whitbread, Samuel –Williams, Helen Maria ,

Memoirs of the Reign of Robespierre , ,, –, –,

Wollstonecraft, Mary , , , , –, on commerce –on the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man of

the Citizen’ and exile –and fate of women in modern society –and the Girondin memorialists on ‘pious frauds’ –on primitivism –progressivism of on Rousseau’s chauvinism –on Rousseau’s Confessions on Scandinavian life Historical and Moral View of the French

Revolution –, Letters from Sweden... , , –, The Wrongs of Woman Vindication of the Rights of Woman –

Wordsworth, Dorothy ,

Index

Wordsworth, William , , , , , ,, ,

defence of September Massacres ‘denial’ of Rousseau –and Hartleyan associationism and history –on Louvet’s accusation of Robespierre

–and mountain liberty –on Napoleon and political psychology of Jacobinism

–, –and Rousseau’s Contrat Social on revolutionary duplicity –on Robespierre’s death –on Spanish War of Independence

on Switzerland –on the Terror –on ‘the urge to repeat’ –

works cited:Description of the Scenery of the Lakes Descriptive Sketches , –Essays on Epitaphs Letter to Charles James Fox Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff –Lyrical Ballads –Poems of , ‘Resolution and Independence’ The Borderers –, The Excursion , –, –, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ –The Prelude , ,

‘London’ books –‘Paris’ books –ascent of Snowdon –‘spots of time’ passage Leven Sands passage –on Robespierre’s death –

‘Tintern Abbey’ ,

Index

General editors , University of Oxford , University of Chicago

. Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction ofLetters

British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire

Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic IdeologyLanguage, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution

Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, –

. In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women

Keats, Narrative and Audience

Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre

Literature, Education, and RomanticismReading as Social Practice, –

Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England,–

Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the NaturalWorld

William Cobbett: The Politics of Style

. . The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, –

. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, –

Napoleon and English Romanticism

Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom

Wordsworth and the Geologists

. Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography

The Politics of SensibilityRace, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel

Reading Daughters’ Fictions, –Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth

. Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, –

Print PoliticsThe Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-CenturyEngland

. Reinventing Allegory

British Satire and the Politics of Style, –

. The Romantic ReformationReligious Politics in English Literature, –

De Quincey’s RomanticismCanonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission

Coleridge on DreamingRomanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination

Romantic Imperialism Universal Empire and the Culture ofModernity

. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake

Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author

Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition

. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney SchoolKeats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle


(cambridge studies in romanticism ) gregory dart-rousseau, robespierre and english romanticism...

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