Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

This book reopens the question of Rousseau’s influence on the French Revolution and on English Romanticism, by examining the relationship between his confessional writings and his political theory. Gregory Dart argues that by looking at the way in which Rousseau’s writings were mediated by the speeches and actions of the French Jacobin statesman Maximilien Robespierre, we can gain a clearer and more concrete sense of the legacy he left to English writers. He shows how the writings of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth and William Hazlitt rehearse and reflect upon the Jacobin tradition in the aftermath of the French revolutionary Terror. Gregory Dart is lecturer in English at the University of York. He studied at Cambridge and has published in Victorian Literature & Culture, The Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies and the bulletin of the British Association of Romantic Studies.

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                 

RO US S E AU, RO BE SPIE RRE AND E NG LISH RO MANTIC ISM

                Professor Marilyn Butler University of Oxford

General editors Professor James Chandler University of Chicago

Editorial board John Barrell, University of York Paul Hamilton, University of London Mary Jacobus, Cornell University Kenneth Johnston, Indiana University Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara Jerome McGann, University of Virginia David Simpson, University of California, Davis

This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fields within English literary studies. From the early s to the early s a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again by what Wordsworth called those ‘great national events’ that were ‘almost daily taking place’: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, industrialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the reform movement at home. This was an enormous ambition, even when it pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbett and Hazlitt; poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of response or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those notions 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 recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, this one will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere. For a complete list of titles published see end of book

Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism 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.’

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Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements

page x 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 Caleb Williams



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



 Strangling the infant Hercules: Malthus and the population controversy



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



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



Notes Bibliography Index

  

ix

Illustrations

. Sketch of Robespierre (), by Gérard, musée Carnavelet, 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 innocent victims have been caught up in its violent and erratic progress. Here is 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, a truly remarkable man, who has been an unfailing source of knowledge and inspiration to me over the past decade. And not far behind him come John Whale, John Barrell, Hugh Haughton, Jack Donovan, Harriet Guest, Ludmilla Jordanova, Stephen Copley, Howard ErskineHill, Alan Forrest and Norman Hampson, who have all offered constructive criticism of my work at one time or another, not to mention James Chandler and the anonymous readers at Cambridge University Press, 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 having been prepared to live with the fumes. Finally, I must express my gratitude to Josie Dixon at Cambridge University Press, for her considerable kindness and understanding during the preparation of the typescript.

xi

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Introduction

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

 Surprisingly, perhaps, given the mythic status he now enjoys as the archetype of the modern scientist, the protagonist of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus () has an approach to science that is decidedly anti-modern. In the early part of his confessional narrative Victor describes how his project to re-animate the dead was initially inspired by the study of writers such as Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, a group of mystics and alchemists considered by his tutor the ‘progressive’ Professor Krempe to be ‘as musty as they are ancient’. For Frankenstein, however, they display a holism that is noticeably lacking in the disciples of modern natural philosophy: It was very different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; 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 those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth. ()

Even after having been persuaded of the value of modern experimental techniques by the sympathetic Mr Waldman, Victor does not abandon his pursuit of the ancient ideal. Instead he chooses to put the former in the service of the latter, employing the latest analytical methods for his own overwhelmingly animistic ends, attempting to discover the vital unity that binds together the world of matter by synthesising a living human being from a collection of dead and disparate body parts. When seen in this light, Frankenstein’s ‘almost supernatural enthusiasm’ – the quasi religious fervour with which he approaches his 



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

research – can only serve to reinforce the impression that he is an intellectual ‘primitivist’ rather than a ‘progressive’. Since its first appearance in , Mary Shelley’s famous tale of overreaching idealism has often been read as a political allegory of the French Revolution. In this interpretation of things, Victor Frankenstein is seen as a revolutionary idealist whose attempt to create ‘a new man’ reproduces the utopian impulse of , and whose subsequent disappointment mirrors its historical failure. Not only the broad contour of the narrative, but also many of its incidental details serve to encourage this line of reasoning. Frankenstein is born in Geneva like that other ‘modern Prometheus’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a figure widely recognised in the early nineteenth century as one of the intellectual fathers of French republicanism.2 And he gives life to his creature at Ingolstadt in Bavaria, which became notorious in the counter-revolutionary historiography of the period as the birthplace of the secret society of the Illuminati, the alleged founders of revolutionary Jacobinism.3 Despite this, however, while demonstrating a full awareness of the symbolic geography of the novel, most ‘political’ readings of Frankenstein have not made much of its European setting, preferring to regard the novel in rather narrowly English terms, either as a specific attack on the utopian idealism of Shelley’s father William Godwin, or more generally as ‘a critique of the revolutionary optimism of the s’.4 This is unfortunate, especially as there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that recent European history is likely to have been very much in Mary 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 novels and memoirs of Rousseau around this time, while the latter was dipping liberally into Lacretelle’s Précis Historique de la Révolution Française.5 So much so, indeed, that it is tempting to think that, with the fall of Napoleon the previous year, and the bringing to a close of more than twenty years of European conflict, both Mary and Percy had been moved to undertake a reassessment of the long history of the French Revolution, and of the specific influence of Rousseau upon it.6 And all the signs are that, for Percy at least, this reappraisal led to a fundamental revision in his attitude to the ‘citizen of Geneva’. Where previously he had considered Rousseau to be in the mainstream of French rationalist thought, from this time onwards he began to make a distinction between Rousseau and the more sceptical tradition of the Enlightenment, contrasting the ‘cold and unimpassioned spirit of Gibbon’, with ‘the greater

Introduction



and more sacred name of Rousseau’, increasingly coming to regard the latter as ‘the greatest man the world [had] produced since Milton’, and his celebrated novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloïse, which he was then rereading, as ‘an overflowing . . . of sublime genius, and more than human sensibility’.7 Evidently, what excited Shelley most about Rousseau’s writing was his famously impassioned style, which in the minds of many readers of Julie was a fully Promethean force, transcending the bounds of eighteenthcentury sentimental narrative, breaking down the conventional barriers existing between writer and reader, to function as an overpoweringly direct and unmediated conduit of libertarian sentiment. It was this ‘enthousiasme’ which Germaine de Staël had offered as a model for the people 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, and it was this selfsame quality that she was still recommending just over ten years later, in her epoch-making treatise De la littérature (), this time as a healthy alternative to the destructive fanaticism which had swept the First Republic during the Terror. In her eyes the fact that the Jacobins had adopted Rousseau as their patron saint did not justify the widespread neglect his writings had fallen into on both sides of the channel after the fall of Robespierre. There was much in Jean-Jacques that was of enduring value, and clearly distinct from the cold, calculating spirit of the Terror.8 A highly sympathetic reader of de Staël, who was deeply indebted to her post-revolutionary cultural theory, Shelley himself seems to have concurred with this view, for in the years after , he repeatedly strove to redeem Rousseau from the tarnishing influence of the French 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 an allegory of the French Revolution that the central revolutionary hero of Mary Shelley’s novel, for all his deft employment of the sophisticated techniques of modern science, is fundamentally a Rousseauvian ‘enthusiast’ rather than a sceptical philosophe. Most recent accounts of the intellectual character of the French Revolution have tended to reproduce the English counter-revolutionary polemic of the period, which represented it purely in terms of a commitment to the systematic materialism of the French Enlightenment.9 But Mary Shelley’s rather more nuanced allegory exposes the inadequacy of this over-simplified model, inviting us to reassess the complex history of revolutionary Jacobinism. It recalls the fact that its leading mentor had been as profoundly opposed to the



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

iniquitous tendencies of modern commerce–capitalism and its cosmopolitan project of ‘enlightenment’ as he had been critical of the old and corrupt aristocratic order of eighteenth-century France. For as we shall see, Rousseau’s highly democratic inflection of neo-Spartan civic humanism was simultaneously both revolutionary and anti-progressive, so that for all the rather abstract nature of his political theory, he was in many ways as much of a defender of custom and tradition as the English conservative Edmund Burke. His intellectual legacy to the French Revolution was thus profoundly at odds with that supplied by the central philosophical tradition of the French Enlightenment, which was far more enthusiastically ‘modern’ in nature. And the contradictions inherent in this joint heritage were to contribute greatly to the deep ambivalence of revolutionary republicanism, for as Allan Bloom has recently remarked, ‘there were many opponents of Enlightenment and its political project – in the name of tradition or the ancestral, in the name of the kings and the nobles, even in the name of the ancient city and its virtue. But Rousseau was the first to make a schism within the party of what we may call the left’.10 Few critics of Frankenstein have been willing to acknowledge or discuss the different ideological formations that went into the construction of revolutionary politics. Here as in Romantic studies as a whole, the Revolution has too often been seen in remarkably monolithic terms, as a systematic and progressive experiment in government that eventually resulted in bloodshed and terror. It is the central argument of this introduction, and indeed of the book as a whole, that this unacceptably simplistic interpretation – a deliberate fabrication by the great architects of the English counter-revolution, Burke and Coleridge – has seriously hampered our understanding of the literature of the period. It is my contention that one cannot hope to fathom the truly paradoxical nature of some of the central texts of English Romanticism without reference to the tensions and contradictions of French republicanism, a movement that contained both systematically ‘progressive’ and radically ‘primitivist’ elements. In chapter one of Frankenstein Shelley describes how Waldman succeeds in removing Frankenstein’s prejudice against modern science by showing him the kinds of things that the new chemists have accomplished: ‘these philosophers’, he affirms, ‘whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding-places’ (–). Admiring

Introduction



Frankenstein’s holistic zeal, Waldman suggests that it might be possible for him to make use of the latest innovations in science without degenerating into what he calls a ‘petty experimentalist’ (). As in the French Revolution itself, so too in Mary Shelley’s novel, the visionary project to create ‘a new man’ is the product of a collaboration between the primitive aspiration towards unity and simplicity and the analytic method pioneered by the Western Enlightenment. In this way Frankenstein describes a dangerous ‘chemical reaction’ between the ancient and the modern. Extending the revolutionary analogy, Frankenstein’s construction of the creature can be seen as a metaphor for the politicisation of the Parisian sans-culottes by the revolutionary bourgeoisie. Both processes can be seen as the bringing-into-being of a new kind of subjectivity, the bestowal of legitimacy and agency upon a new class of people. In each case, however, the creator abandons his creation: historically, the property restrictions to citizenship contained in the French Constitution of  constituted a covert denial of the political demands of the urban working-class by the liberal bourgeois Assembly, and thus a clear betrayal of the latter’s former commitment to the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.11 And this historical betrayal was to find its literary counterpart in Mary Shelley’s novel, where Frankenstein responds to the burgeoning subjectivity of the creature by fleeing from his presence.12 In this way Frankenstein offers a telling vision of the displaced social tension at the heart of Romantic Manichaeanism, for when the creature comes in search of his creator in the latter half of the book, and commits a series of horrific crimes in order to gain his recognition, Victor’s response is simply to turn him into a monstrous counter-version of himself, which is just another way of denying him subjectivity: ‘I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind [. . .] nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me’ (). Moreover, it could be argued that it is precisely this capacity for egotistical projection that identifies Victor Frankenstein as a belated adherent of revolutionary Jacobinism, since (as we shall see in the next chapter) it so neatly mimics Robespierre’s historical displacement of revolutionary class tension between the sans-culottes and the political bourgeoisie onto the metaphysical monster of ‘counter-revolution’. As is well known, of course, in the second volume of Frankenstein this strategy of revolutionary displacement and denial is subjected to a powerful critique, as Mary Shelley breaks with all the literary traditions regarding the representation of revolutionary monstrosity by giving her



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

creature a voice.13 Having tracked Frankenstein down, and forced him to sit and listen to his life history, the monster begins to recount his solitary wanderings through the hinterlands of Germany. He recalls seeking shelter near to the cottage of the De Laceys, and of listening to the conversation of the various members of the family. Gradually, he begins to learn French (significantly, the very language of revolution, in the context of this period), and before long has taught himself to read, by poring over certain books that fall fortuitiously into his hands. And crucially, the little library that he develops offers a kind of introduction to the history of European republicanism: Plutarch’s Lives, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and Volney’s Ruins of Empires. This means that when the creature finally launches a critique of his creator’s revolutionary practice it is itself revolutionary – and republican – in origin. As he suggests to Frankenstein, it was not his creator’s principles that were at fault, but his failure to see them in private as well as public terms: ‘Believe me, Frankenstein: I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity: but am I not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow-creatures, who owe me nothing? they spurn and hate me’. But this does not prevent the creature from finally offering Frankenstein up to Walton and the reader 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 recalcitrant and vengeful offspring. And Victor’s last words do nothing to dispel the feeling of ambivalence that haunts the final pages of the novel, for in a dangerous supplement to his final confession he briefly suggests that some future enthusiast might actually be able to succeed where he has failed: ‘Seek happiness in tranquillity, and avoid ambition’, he tells Walton, ‘even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed’ (). Most critics have sought to align Mary Shelley with the former part of this statement rather than with the latter. Despite Percy Shelley’s comment, in the Preface to the first edition, that the novel was not intended to ‘prejudice any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind’, there has been a strong temptation to read it as a repudiation of the radical politics of the revolutionary decade. In an essay from the late s that still has considerable critical currency, Lee Sterrenburg was to read Frankenstein in terms of a retreat not merely from Jacobin principles, but from the discourse of politics as a whole, an appropriation of sites of historical importance – such as Geneva and Ingolstadt – into a

Introduction



narrative of purely private significance. Developing his thesis, Sterrenburg interpreted the confessional structure of the novel as an internalisation of the political debate on the nature and influence of the French Revolution, an attempt to ‘translate politics into psychology’. According to this view of things, Mary Shelley’s aim was to domesticate the revolutionary narrative, to transform it from a debate on the nature of public man into a vindication of the private affections, and, in so doing, to register an implicit critique of the radical principles of her parents, and even perhaps of those of her husband. Sterrenburg’s interpretation offers Frankenstein’s radical internalisation of revolutionary history as a form of Romantic denial, an overdetermined negation of the legacy of French Jacobinism that is fundamentally conservative in nature.14 In many ways, this reading forms part of an extensive critical tradition of the last twenty years which has been tempted to see many of the central texts of Romantic literature as just so many displacements and denials of history.15 According to this view of things the strategy of displacement was a means by which writers living in a disturbing age could seek to transcend the problems of social and historical reality and then subsequently re-occupy them at the level of consciousness. ‘In the case of Romantic poems’, as Jerome J. McGann argues, ‘we shall find that the works tend to develop different sorts of artistic means with which to occlude and disguise their own involvement in a certain nexus of historical relations’.16 In this introduction, and in this book as a whole, I would like to challenge the assumption, which is common to much contemporary criticism, that Romantic displacement tends to be either explicitly reactionary in nature or else a conservative retreat from the realm of politics, for in the case of a novel such as Frankenstein an examination of the revolutionary subtext forces us to rethink the political meaning of the text. In his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme of  the French émigré priest Antoine-Joseph Barruel gave an hysterically vivid account of an occult conspiracy against the institutions of royalty, religion and the law which was spreading its baleful influence all over Europe. This movement, which Barruel called Jacobinism, was seen to have originated in the secret sect of the Illuminati founded by Professor Adam Weishaupt in Ingolstadt in , a society substantially composed of philosophers and freethinkers holding fiercely deistic and republican beliefs. And from these small beginnings it was deemed to have quickly and smoothly expanded its underground influence, spreading its network into England and France as well as Germany, until it emerged



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

from the shadows during the crisis of , to terrifying and destructive effect. For reasons that must have been to a large extent playful and ironic, Barruel’s Mémoires was one of Percy Shelley’s favourite books. Throughout his adult life, he was continually returning to it; he even made a point of reading Mary the section relating to the history of the Illuminati during the period of their courtship in .17 Now, when seen in the light of the Shelleys’ continued interest in a text such as the Mémoires, the comparative absence of politics from the discursive surface of Frankenstein might be seen to take on a different character. For it is likely that what they enjoyed most about Barruel was his representation of revolutionary ‘enthusiasm’ as a kind of parasitic influence, disseminating itself through a series of mysterious relays and transactions, a libertarian spirit that went beyond the traditional bounds of politics, operating as a kind of radical contagion. In Frankenstein both the creature and his creator possess the kind of passionate enthusiasm that affords them extraordinary powers of eloquence. Perhaps the most notable example of this is when Victor exhorts Walton’s crew not to give up their heroic quest for the North Pole, where he assumes the role of a revolutionary statesman, a Danton or a Brissot: ‘Did you not call this a glorious expedition? and wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea but because it was full of dangers and terror; because, at every new incident your fortitude was to be called forth and your courage exhibited; because danger and death surrounded, and these dangers you were to brave and overcome’ (). Ultimately, of course, it must be admitted that Mary Shelley’s novel does adopt 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 ambivalent about revolutionary enthusiasm, it is less certain that the work as a whole represents a denial of revolutionary politics, precisely because the repression of the political is so clearly part of its subject. For not merely does the early mention of Geneva and Ingolstadt suggest that Victor’s story may have some degree of allegorical potential, it also highlights its curious, rather paradoxical status as a narrative that is at once pre- and post-revolutionary in nature, occupying the kind of political vacuum that was the shared experience of both Illuminists and post-revolutionaries alike. And this, in turn, may help to explain the finally rather indulgent attitude the novel adopts towards Frankenstein, its tendency to see his fundamentally secretive and solitary nature as the product of his adverse historical circumstances. Rousseau’s overdetermined absence from Frankenstein is significant

Introduction



and important in this respect, not however because Mary Shelley was seeking to deny the political history of the revolution, but because she was seeking to recapture some of the revolutionary potential of his writings without having to undertake an explicit critique of their historical influence, preferring to let the allegorical narrative suggest one. And this is where the novel’s emphasis upon first-person narrative is especially important, for as I hope to show, it can clearly be seen to draw upon a revolutionary tradition of confessional writing that had its roots in Rousseau. In much of the best recent critical writing Romantic autobiography has often been seen in terms of a self-conscious desire to escape from politics and history.18 But in the autobiographical writings of Rousseau – his Rêveries du promeneur solitaire and his Confessions – the cultivation of the language of isolation and self-martyrdom, the removal of the self from the hazards of historical circumstance possessed an explicitly political resonance. It was a form of polemical engagement masquerading as resignation and denial. By laying his soul bare in the Confessions, and openly exploring his former errors, Rousseau had effectively purified himself in print, using autobiography as a means of discovering that pure, primitive part of himself which remained resistant to the corrupting influences of modern life. Implicitly, he represented the autobiographical subject as an anticipation, in individual form, of the transparency and virtue which would be the defining feature of the ideal political community of the future, inviting his readers to break down the aristocratic obstacle to liberty and equality and enter the realm of transparency by engaging in a sympathetic reading of his work. And in works such as the Dialogues and the Rêveries he contined to develop a powerful confessional rhetoric in which the unmediated expression of personality became a powerful force for political change. Indeed as the profoundly unsympathetic counter-revolutionary polemicist Hannah More was forced to acknowledge, ‘there never was a net of such exquisite art and inextricable workmanship, spread to entangle innocence and ensnare experience as the writings of Rousseau’.19 And when seen in this light, the autobiographical ‘enthusiasm’ of the Confessions can be seen as the perfect complement to the more obviously legislative mode of the same author’s Du Contrat Social, simply an alternative means of pursuing the same republican ideal. In this way the ‘citizen of Geneva’ bequeathed a twofold legacy to the revolutionary generation: he offered a radically egalitarian version of the ancient political discourse of civic humanism, but he also developed a highly wrought rhetoric of confession that



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

enlisted ‘modern’ sensibility for the republican cause. The question is, however, whether a detailed examination of this element of Rousseau’s thought can modify our view of the intellectual and political roots of English Romanticism. During the next seven chapters I hope to show that a close analysis of the Rousseauvian influence upon revolutionary Jacobinism can shed new light on the confessional writings of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth and William Hazlitt, encouraging us to see them as works of transferred idealism rather than resignation and denial. For as I shall suggest, even in the aftermath of the failure of the Revolution, Rousseauvian confession continued to offer a radical consolation for the disappointments of practical politics, a version of the primitivist ideal that was at once deeply private and yet full of public resonance. The framing of the central story of Frankenstein by the narrative of Robert Walton significantly affects our attitude to its central protagonist. Overpowered by Frankenstein’s passionate openness towards him, and by the bewitching eloquence of his speech, Walton comes to regard him as a kind of persecuted philanthropist: ‘if any one performs an act of kindness towards him’, Walton tells his sister ‘or does him any the most trifling service, his whole countenance is lighted up, as it were, with a beam of benevolence and sweetness that I never saw equalled. But he is generally melancholy and despairing; and sometimes he gnashes his teeth, as if impatient of the weight of woes that oppresses him’ (). The explorer’s praise of the scientist is no less fulsome even after he has heard the full horrors of his story. Writing shortly after the latter’s demise he admits not knowing what comment to make ‘on the untimely extinction of 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 praise Frankenstein as ‘the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men’ (). This suggests that, contrary to the emphasis of most modern critical writing, the author’s own attitude to Frankenstein was deeply divided. Undeniably, Mary Shelley offers a strenuous critique of Frankenstein’s anti-social pursuit of self-fulfilment. Clearly we are to see his personal tragedy as a consequence of his neglect of the domestic affections; he himself suggests as much just before describing the birth of the monster (). But the emphasis supplied by Walton and the creature does give credence to the implication of Frankenstein’s last speech that his ideal was not unworthy, and that his mistake had been to seek it through modern methods; as if he should have seen that the project of revolutionary regeneration would be

Introduction



achieved not by mechanical but only by moral means. Like Rousseau in his Confessions, Frankenstein finally succeeds in absolving himself of most of his former sins and errors, casting off the grime of history to reveal his fundamental virtue. Seen in this light, Shelley’s novel looks less like a repudiation of radical politics than a record of their secret survival, with Victor’s last words offering encouragement to a whole new generation of Illuminati, inciting them to take up the revolutionary baton and bear it bravely into the future.  As a number of historians and literary critics have shown, English middle-class radicalism during the revolutionary decade was often very closely bound up with the tradition of radical dissent, a body of thought that was largely mechanistic, necessitarian and progressive in nature. It was a tradition that produced philosophers and polemicists such as Joseph Priestley, Tom Paine, Thomas Robert Malthus and Richard Price, but it also had a formative influence upon many of the major creative writers of the period, figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, William Wordsworth and William Blake. While in no way seeking to deny the historical importance of this body of thought, or its links with the ‘progressive’ current of the French Revolution, in this study I shall be seeking to identify an alternative tradition, a body of ideas distinct from both philosophical and popular radicalism, a form of radical politics developed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and mediated by Maximilien Robespierre, which was largely anti-scientific and antiprogressive in nature, and whose significant impact upon English Romantic writing has long been underestimated. In his recent book Radical Sensibility Chris Jones identified an English tradition of ‘radical sensibility’ that argued for ‘the autonomy of the individual, the priority of universal benevolence, and the capacity of men to act on an apprehension of social justice’. This current of thought, he argues, was clearly distinct from the line of philosophical dissent, ‘largely disowning the appeal to commerce and materialistic interests which were a feature of Painite and dissenting propaganda’.20 He indicates the importance of Rousseau to this tradition, but without exploring it in any detail, preferring to see its origins in the home-grown ‘benevolism’ of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson: ‘Most of the writers of radical sensibility were influenced by Rousseau’, he declares, ‘especially by his criticism of the artificialities and inequalities of high society. Yet most rejected his flight



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

from society and progress’ (). In many ways Jones has contributed greatly to our understanding of middle-class radicalism in the revolutionary decade, but to my mind one cannot examine radical inflections of the discourse of sensibility in the revolutionary decade without referring in more detail to the work of Rousseau, for almost single-handedly he helped both French and English Jacobins transform a rather diffuse concept of social sympathy into an attachment to ‘the people’ which was at once highly sentimental and yet also highly democratic. The language of ‘sensibility’ was so ubiquitous in the period that, as Jones himself suggests, its ideological polarity is impossible to pin down: ‘Sensibility was clearly not a uniform or unitary concept when it could be both championed and attacked from so many points of view, and I think modern scholarship has erred in trying to impose such a unitary interpretation upon it’ (). Evidently, what we are dealing with in the late eighteenth century is a culture of sensibility, a milieu in which the vocabulary of sentiment is being put to a wide variety of political ends. In order to narrow the focus of my discussion, therefore, I have chosen to concentrate on the way in which Rousseau put the ‘modern’ discourse of sensibility in the service of ‘ancient’ virtue, rechannelling Wertherian ‘enthusiasm’ into the pursuit of a Plutarchan life. This constituted a highly distinctive inflection of the language of sentiment, and one that was remarkably influential during the Revolutionary period. My task is to see how far it impacted itself upon some of the most celebrated examples of Romantic writing. In certain ways, it might seem that there is nothing more unnecessary than another discussion of Rousseau’s ‘influence’. In the many accounts that have appeared of the French Revolution and the Romantic movement, the importance of his writings has scarcely ever been denied. The problem is that it has become something of a platitude. Too often in English literary studies he has been rather casually treated as the baggy source of a whole series of contemporary ideas on culture and society, the enthusiasm for nature, for example, or the systematic approach to education, or the renewed interest in festivals. Perhaps this is not surprising: after all, from time to time, many of the leading figures of the late 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’s work, to re-establish his specific and local importance as a political thinker by re-inserting him into the polemical conflicts of his time. For in my opinion, one cannot hope to understand the nature of his influence upon the Romantic movement without looking at the way in

Introduction



which his ideas were mediated by the French Revolution, and more especially, by neo-Spartan Jacobinism. An analysis of the career of Maximilien Robespierre in particular can help to give a specific focus to Rousseau’s work, reinvesting discussions of ‘radical’ sentiment and sensibility with historical pressure and meaning. And it may also help to explain the paradoxical nature of Rousseau’s continuing impact upon English letters in the aftermath of the Revolutionary decade. As Edward Duffy has shown, Rousseau’s work enjoyed a favourable reception in England in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Works such as the Lettre à D’Alembert and his novel La Nouvelle Heloïse identified him as an enthusiastic disciple of primitive republicanism and a critic of the corruptions and sophistications of modern urban life. But after the French Revolutionaries had adopted Rousseau as their philosophical and political mentor – ‘their canon of holy writ’ as Edmund Burke put it – his reputation in England suffered a dramatic decline.21 So much so, that by the early s former radicals such as William Wordsworth, who had once been remarkably sympathetic to Rousseau’s ideas, were now grouping him with philosophes like Condillac and Holbach, considering his ‘paradoxical reveries’ to be part of the excessively rational and abstract tradition of French thought which was increasingly considered reponsible for the Revolution’s failure.22 But precisely because there was increasing pressure in the post-revolutionary period to repudiate France and the French national character, the discussion (or even nondiscussion) of the work of Rousseau and Robespierre by former fellowtravellers cannot be taken at face-value.23 Even after the Terror, the dream of virtue and transparency by which the French republicans had been driven was often to survive as a parasite in the work of the English Romantics, to the extent that in his conservative middle age Coleridge was moved to compare the enduring spirit of Jacobinism to the ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, considering that it was still ‘moving and mining in the underground chambers with an activity the more dangerous because less noisy’.24 In the years after  conservative pamphleteers and polemicists increasingly sought to convince their countrymen and women that the Revolution was a monolithic phenomenon. Most famously, Edmund Burke argued that the French revolutionaries were attempting to transform society into a machine. For him Jacobinism represented a philosophical conspiracy against the natural, organic society that still prevailed in England. In his representation of things, it was a product of the misguided rationalism of the French Enlightenment. Repudiating

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

continental theory and system, he told his readers to return to their hearths and homes, to cultivate their local and domestic attachments, and to revere the English Constitution as a product of the ‘stupendous wisdom’ of nature.25 Too often Burke’s view of the Revolution as a homogenous event has been uncritically accepted by twentieth-century literary historians. Critics have tended to accept his portrait of the revolutionaries as ‘sophisters, economists and calculators’ even when they have not agreed with his pejorative tone.26 But far from being a monolithic phenomenon, middle-class Jacobinism bequeathed to history both a liberal notion of freedom and its absolute denial. In this respect the neo-Spartan republicanism of  represented a paradoxical and contradictory form of resistance to the constitutionalism of , occupying an uncomfortably interstitial space between progressivism and conservatism. And as I hope to show, it is only through an analysis of the philosophical and political tensions existing within the French revolutionary bourgeoisie during the early s that one can begin to understand the ‘paradoxical’ influence of Robespierrist Jacobinism upon the English Romantics. With this in mind, the first two chapters of this thesis will seek to establish the close relation between political theory and autobiographical practice during the French Revolution, firstly by outlining the ideological underpinnings of Rousseauvian republicanism, and subsequently by examining its politics of confession. Then I shall endeavour to show how this can supply us with a new critical context for thinking about English Romanticism. The chapters that follow will look at the ways in which some of the leading writers of the period rehearsed and reflected upon the nature and effects of neo-Spartan Jacobinism, relating William Godwin’s philosophical anarchism to Robespierre’s innovations in ethics and jurisprudence, Mary Wollstonecraft’s polemical and personal writings to his theory of aesthetic education, and William Wordsworth’s revolutionary poetics to his political psychology of Terror. The fifth chapter will seek to justify discussion of an English ‘Jacobin’ tradition by showing how Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on Population of  drove a wedge between the ‘primitive’ and ‘progressive’ radicals of the period, effectively reproducing the fratricidal split which had riven French Jacobinism. Ironically, given Malthus’s stated aim of concluding the revolutionary debate once and for all, he actually served to perpetuate its terms well into the nineteenth century, such was the contentiousness of his radically reactionary thesis. No one held faster to the terms of this debate than William Hazlitt, whose belated republicanism is the subject

Introduction

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of my concluding chapter. In many ways Hazlitt brings this study to a fitting close, for in his self-consciously ‘sour’ emulation of the rhetorical strategies of Rousseau and Robespierre, he showed how Jacobin confession had degenerated since the turbulent s from an inverted expression of the revolutionary ideal into an incorrigible resistance to reform.

  

Despotism of liberty: Robespierre and the illusion of politics

Concerning the French, I wish Buonaparte had stayed in Egypt, and that Robespierre had guillotined Sieyès. These cursed complex governments are good for nothing, and will ever be in the hands of intriguers. The Jacobins were the men; and one house of representatives, lodging the executive in committees, the plain and common system of government. The cause of republicanism is over, and it is now only a struggle for dominion. There wanted a Lycurgus1 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 world must 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 sentiments which went directly against the grain of history. Not only did he distance himself from the counter-revolutionary consensus that was growing in England at this time, he also rejected the claims of Bonaparte and Emmanuel Sieyès that the French Constitution of  represented the final fulfilment of the revolutionary ideal.3 In his impatience with contemporary politics on either side of the Channel, Southey harked back to the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, the period lasting from  to  during which the First Republic had been governed according 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 of many thousands of people. By  fewer and fewer English radicals still looked to France as the land of liberty and promise, and an even smaller number were concerned to rehabilitate Robespierre’s reputation. How 

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

then do we explain Southey’s belated enthusiasm for neo-Spartan principles? To what extent was it shared by other radical writers of the period? And how significant is it to an understanding of English Romanticism in general? By the later s the leading propagandists of the English counterrevolution were committed to vilifying Robespierrist Jacobinism. Above and beyond that, however, they were also keen to collapse the differences between the various phases of the Revolution. In one of the first extended historical accounts of the period, a two-volume set of Biographical Memoirs of the French Revolution (), John Adolphus was to represent it as a uniformly disastrous phenomenon, rehearsing the charge that had been made earlier and even more forcefully by Edmund Burke in his Letters on the Regicide Peace of –. And as time went on not only staunch loyalists like Adolphus and Burke, but also former radicals like Samuel Taylor Coleridge came to endorse this version of events. Ten years after receiving the letter quoted above, Coleridge was striving to show the ideological unity of the French Revolution by arguing that philosophical radicalism, Robespierrist Jacobinism and Bonapartism were all products of the misguided rationalism of the French Enlightenment.4 Clearly, in order to reject French revolutionary principles wholesale, it was necessary to argue that they made a whole. Southey’s letter ought to remind us, however, not to accept the counterrevolutionary narrative unquestioningly. It alerts us to the fact that it was actually under construction during this period, and that there were still other versions of revolutionary history available during the early s. Southey describes Jacobinism in a way that clearly identifies it as a tradition of political primitivism, a ‘plain and common system of government’ to be contrasted with the ‘cursed complex’ constitution of the new Bonapartist regime. The would-be dictator Napoleon Bonaparte and the liberal constitutionalist Emmanuel Sieyès are both condemned for introducing a set of legislative arrangements designed to staunch individual freedom and stifle the exercise of virtue. The Jacobins, by contrast, are celebrated for their simplicity and austerity, their neo-Spartan enthusiasm for moral regeneration and their anti-modern mistrust of private property. In this way Southey establishes a distinction between primitive simplicity and modern complexity, both of which were championed at different times during the legislative history of the Revolution, but only one of which, in his eyes, was a proper expression of the revolutionary ideal. In wishing that there had been a ‘Lycurgus after Robespierre’ to bring

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

about a republic of true liberty and equality, Southey comes close to repeating the sentiments he had expressed five years earlier in a letter following hard upon news of the Thermidorean conspiracy, where he had described Robespierre as a ‘benefactor of mankind’ whose death was to be lamented as ‘the greatest misfortune Europe could have sustained’. Despite or perhaps even because of his ‘great bad actions’ he was seen as the modern incarnation of the ancient legislator, a man whose courageous pursuit of moral regeneration had been ‘sacrificed to the despair of fools and cowards’.5 Admittedly, Southey did not always sustain this attitude, briefly succumbing to the appeal of Thermidoreanism, which sought to demonise the Jacobin leader as a means of recuperating the Revolution’s ‘beau idéal’. Nevertheless, for all its fitfulness, the unexpected survival of Southey’s Robespierrism through years of political disappointment and disillusionment invites us to question modern assumptions about the decline of radical enthusiasm among the English radical intelligentsia in the later s. According to most commentators, figures such as Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge moved slowly but surely away from radical politics in the aftermath of the Terror, so that from  onwards they were taking gradual steps on the road to conservatism.6 But Southey’s letters suggest that this political trajectory may have been more eccentric and unstable than the orthodox account will allow, prone to curious revolutions of thought and sudden resurrections of feeling. It also suggests that the leading writers of the English Romantic movement may have had a deeper investment in the political psychology of revolutionary republicanism than has been generally recognised by literary history, much of which has interpreted the radicalism of figures such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey almost entirely in terms of English traditions of civic humanism and/or radical dissent.7 In drawing attention to the crisis of representation that was provoked by the revolution, to the contemporary struggle to give this violent and unpredictable phenomenon some kind of narrative form, Ronald Paulson’s Representations of Revolution was a significant contribution to the literary history of the s. But in drawing such a hard and fast distinction between French and English versions of the revolutionary ‘plot’, Paulson tends to neglect the interplay of mutual influence. He suggests that the French political class wanted to see the Revolution as a neo-classical drama, or a ‘primitivist’ romance, but that the unruliness of its progress often made such generic straitjackets woefully inadequate.

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Then he goes on to argue that the English, by contrast, tried to make sense of events in France by filtering them through the literary categories of sentimental fiction, gothic drama and grotesque farce.8 Since Paulson, a number of critics have sought to fill in the details of his highly suggestive but necessarily rather general account.9 But there has been no serious attempt to argue for the influence of French revolutionary forms and contexts upon English literary practice. This is not merely a question of showing that figures such as Wordsworth, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Hazlitt were well versed in the nice distinctions in French politics, but of arguing that the literary dynamics of their work can only be understood with reference to the complex patterns of plot and counter-plot, denunciation and confession that we find in French republicanism. 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  of The Prelude of , William Wordsworth admitted to retaining a ‘Creed which ten years have not annull’d’ that ‘the virtue of one paramount mind / Would have . . . clear’d a passage for just government, / And left a solid birthright to the State, / Redeem’d according to example given / By ancient Lawgivers’.10 In texts such as this the ideology of Jacobinism survived neither as an allegiance to the French nation as such, nor even as the literary remains of a legislative programme, but as a complex of representational strategies, a characteristic mode of apprehending the relationship between politics and society. Before addressing the influence of ‘Jacobinism’ upon English Romantic writing, however, it is necessary to obtain a clearer sense of what we mean by this term. It is important to differentiate ‘Jacobin primitivism’ from the other forms of Jacobinism to which the Revolution gave rise, forms such as the liberal theory of ‘complex government’ referred to by Southey. The first two chapters of this book will be centrally concerned to explore this phenomenon. For it is my contention that it is only by distinguishing between the two main bodies of political theory that went into the making of revolutionary ‘Jacobinism’,11 bourgeois liberalism on the one hand, and Rousseauvian civic humanism on the other – a theoretical distinction that Robespierre tried to transform into a practical difference between the Jacobins and the Gironde – that we can truly understand the political psychology of French middle-class republicanism, its fratricidal tensions, its metaphysic of morals, and its displacements of its own class bias.



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism 

In the late s the worsening financial crisis in the French government fuelled an increasingly widespread and vociferous enthusiasm for economic and political reform. As the crisis reached its height, Louis XVI agreed to reconvene the Estates General in order that a broad consensus could be reached on the economic and fiscal measures required to remedy the situation. Emmanuel Sieyès’s celebrated pamphlet Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? was prompted by the king’s pronouncement that the three Estates should meet and vote separately, as they had done in , and not as a unified body, as most reformers had hoped. Daringly, Sieyès proposed a single national government by the commoners of the Third Estate, considering that this was the only way to banish the feudalism and corporatism which had stifled French life. Drawing heavily on the writings of Turgot, Quesnay and the Enlightenment physiocrats, he argued for a system of representative government in which private persons would be able to gather together to assist in the formation of a truly public 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 liberal notions of political reform and the logic of laissez-faire capitalism. In his eyes, the individual had a ‘share’ in the general good, so it was in his own private interest to make a ‘useful alliance’ with it. According to Sieyès, the central impediment to the development of this enabling separation of public and private, was corporate privilege, the system of monopolies and exemptions which characterised eighteenth-century French society. Of all these corporate interests, the nobility was widely considered to be the largest and the most unjustified. Having been divested as a body of its former public role during the early modern period, by the mid-s the French aristocracy had become largely unrelated to the public authority of the state, preserving only the vestiges of its former ‘publicness’, the theatrical show of privileges, titles and trappings attacked by Rousseau in his Lettre à d’Alembert of . Once brought under public scrutiny, Sieyès believed that the exclusive principle of aristocracy could not hope to remain intact, for it was ‘alien’ to the nation, ‘first of all on principle, since its brief does not derive from the people, secondly on account of its purpose, since it consists in the defence not of the general but of the particular interest’.13

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

Significantly, as he developed his critique, Sieyès was not content merely to identify the nobility as an expensive and dysfunctional monopoly (–), he was also driven to depict it as an evil sickness gnawing away at the heart of a virtuous nation (). And in emphasising his opposition to feudal privilege, he regularly slipped from the vocabulary of interest employed by the physiocrats into the republican discourse 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 if corporate interest is egotism, the national interest is virtue. ()

Amid the excitement of  the principles of Rousseauvian civic humanism and bourgeois liberalism were frequently juxtaposed by the revolutionary bourgeoisie, with the result that a quintessentially metaphysical language of public virtue was often dovetailed and confused with a fundamentally commercial language of shared interest. However, as the Revolution progressed, the fundamental differences that existed between these two discourses began to manifest themselves, and this was instrumental in creating the fratricidal tension which came to characterise middle-class French Jacobinism. But in order to be able to understand the historical and political consequences of this ideological confusion, it is first of all necessary to analyse its nature. With this in mind, I shall now seek to contrast Rousseau’s politics of the will with the politics of interest that had been developed by the physiocrats.  In his Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts of , Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed his celebrated critique of the progress of civilisation. He considered that contemporary civilisation was corrupting the pursuit of knowledge; that the development of reason was being inhibited by the demands and constraints of patronage, salon culture and the literary market-place; and that philosophy was being turned into an aristocratic ornament, a kind of luxury commodity to be circulated and exchanged like the latest fashion. His proposed remedy was for the king himself to rescue the most enlightened of his subjects from the corruptions of the court by appointing them as his independent advisers.15 This gesture was very much a response to the circumstances arising from the radical separation of the French monarchical state from the private realm of civil society during the ancien régime. Debarred from a role in the

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

political realm of legislation and administration, philosophy had been left to shift for itself in the private realm of the market-place and aristocratic patronage. Only if philosophers could free themselves from the corrupting circumstances of economic dependence, Rousseau argued, could they return to the pursuit of virtue and reason. In this, his first extended analysis of the problems besetting modern societies, he was not far from the model of enlightened absolutism that was favoured by the physiocrats. In later works, however, Rousseau grew rather more sceptical of the project of Enlightenment, whether conducted from within the bourgeois public sphere in the private realm of letters, or through the machinery of the monarchical state. So much so, indeed, that he gradually came to consider the productions of former colleagues and friends such as Denis Diderot, Claude Helvétius and Baron Holbach as tending to naturalise the unjustices and prejudices of modern society rather than resist them. He became increasingly sceptical of the value of philosophical and literary debate as a vehicle for political change, and increasingly committed to the notion of an unreflective consensus as the sovereign principle of legislation. In the course of his examination of the characteristics of a legitimate state in the Contrat Social of , Rousseau developed a theory of civil liberty that would allow each individual to enjoy the security afforded by civil society without renouncing all claim to the liberty that was his natural birthright. He did this by introducing a form of citizenship in which the individual would identify himself with the general will of the whole community, renouncing all his natural rights in order to receive them back on a political basis. According to this view of things, each man would give himself to no one in giving himself to all. The general will would never be oppressive or unjust, in Rousseau’s analysis, since all the conditions would be the same for everyone, so that no single person would have any interest in making them burdensome for others.16 In his mind, the achievement of moral liberty through political activity was more important than the freedom to pursue one’s private interests: ‘the mere impulse of appetite is slavery’, he wrote, in what amounted to a paradoxical critique of Lockean liberalism, ‘while obedience to a law which 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 body of ministers to implement its laws, a body that would have to be periodically vetted by the sovereign, and replaced at regular intervals to prevent it from being corrupted by power. In favour of an elected executive,

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

Rousseau was nevertheless resistant to the notion of an elected legislature, and implacably opposed to the notion that the latter could ever possess sovereignty, for according to him sovereignty could only ever rest with 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 this sovereignty might express itself in a large state such as France, Rousseau escaped from this conceptual difficulty by throwing down a set of rhetorical challenges to his reader. He implied that the inability of the present generation to imagine how an entire people could be assembled to legislate in the national interest was itself a sign of the alienation of civilised man: ‘You sacrifice more for profit than for liberty’, he declared to his readers, ‘and fear slavery less than poverty.’19 The extent to which Rousseau did not offer a practical programme for the setting up of a republican state has often been noted. Many critics and political historians have found it extremely abstract in comparison with other seminal texts in the history of political theory. Yet it has not perhaps been sufficiently noticed that it is precisely at those moments when practical problems begin to crowd in, that Rousseau actively exploits the modern difficulty of imagining true citizenship. For in certain respects, the deliberately paradoxical style of the Contrat Social seems expressly designed to force each reader to discover for himself the extent of his own corruption: In a well-ordered city every man flies to the assemblies: under a bad government no one cares to stir a step to get to them, because no one is interested in what 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 asks What does it matter to me? the State may be given up for lost.20

In this startling example of negative thinking, Rousseau defines the public good almost exclusively in terms of the private obstacles to be surmounted in the course of its pursuit. Crucially, he imagined public opinion as a form of general sentiment anterior to critical debate, ‘more a consensus of hearts than of arguments’, as Jürgen Habermas has pointed out,21 inviting an entire generation of readers to rediscover within themselves an enthusiasm for civic virtue by goading them to disprove his pessimistic assessment of them. This stands in sharp contrast to the model of municipal government promulgated by the physiocrats. For example, in his Mémoire sur les municipalités of  Anne Robert Jacques Turgot had proposed a system in which village assemblies representing local property interests would



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

control their own affairs while at the same time sending delegates to county assemblies to address larger questions of policy. These county assemblies would, in their turn, elect deputies to represent them at regional and then at national level, thus building up a highly organised consultative network based on the balancing of interests. And by this means, a national network of political discussion would be established, involving propertied citizens at every level, out of which a truly public opinion would be formed. Now as is quite evident, this model differed greatly from Rousseau’s conception of the ideal form of political life, which drew heavily on the democratic tradition of the ancient republics of Greece. For he considered that full political rights should be accorded to all the men of a nation, irrespective of their wealth, and should express itself in the form of a direct participation in the process of legislation. In place of Turgot’s property principle, he introduced a strongly affective element into the discourse of politics, considering an enthusiasm for the public good the only necessary qualification for citizenship. Moreover, to his mind, the true general will of a nation was not an aggregate or critical synthesis of its individual wills – ‘a will of all’ as in Turgot – it was a metaphysical principle, a form of aspiration towards the public good that necessitated a complete transcendence of private interests. Thus it was that by locating political virtue in the hearts of men rather than in the ownership of property, Rousseau effectively succeeded in reworking ancient civic humanism into a politics of sensibility. In the English civic humanist tradition of the eighteenth century the independent landed aristocrat remained the type of the free citizen, his landed wealth supposedly providing him with a permanent interest in the wealth of his country as well as a moral bulwark against the corrupting influence of credit and commerce.22 In France, however, the perpetuation of feudal privileges and the declining public role of the nobility during the course of the s made it less easy for the pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie to regard the abstract figure of the aristocrat as the model of disinterested virtue. It was not surprising, therefore, that in his search for a prototype of the free and independent man Rousseau, like Montesquieu before him, was to look to distant models, celebrating the legislators of seventeenth-century Geneva and fifth-century Greece. Nor was it surprising that he should have found it necessary to fudge the crucial question of the relationship between land and civic virtue, continually invoking the patriotic zeal of the Spartans and Athenians, and emphasising their fervent local attachments, while consistently under-

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playing the extent to which they too had seen property as the absolute foundation of politics. Given its appeal beyond the borders of France in the revolutionary period, it is important to emphasise the truly paradoxical nature of Rousseau’s civic humanism. On the one hand the Contrat Social attached great importance to patriotism and local tradition as a means of cementing national unity, but it also presumed that it was possible to generate ‘primitive’ republican virtue ab initio from a purely theoretical model. In this respect it was both a product of, and a resistance to the ‘travelling theory’ of the French Enlightenment.23 Whereas the new social science of Turgot and Claude-Adrien Helvétius was truly cosmopolitan in nature, proposing a rational re-organisation of government and the law which was not subject to space or time, in much of Rousseau’s writing good government was always to be sensitive to local conditions, with the constitution of a country emerging from the autochthonous customs of its people.24 Oddly enough, therefore, the Contrat Social represented a curious blend of the ancient and modern traditions, offering a surprisingly cosmopolitan rendering of the ‘localist’ ideal. Within its pages its author supplied a theoretical model for the regeneration of a polis, but without suggesting how it might have to be adapted to fit specific contemporary circumstances.25 In this way, as Allan Bloom has recently reiterated, ‘Rousseau introduced the taste for the small, virtuous community into the modern movement towards freedom and equality’,26 effectively encouraging the revolutionary fantasy that it might be possible to reinvent a modern nation like France or England in the likeness of a city-state.  Given his solid grounding in physiocratic theory, why, then, did the Abbé Sieyès choose to supplement his fundamentally liberal theory of government with the dangerous rhetoric of Rousseauvian republicanism? According to Keith Michael Baker, he did so because it was the readiest means of forestalling the crisis of representation which was threatened by the proposed revolt of the Third Estate.27 Without a tradition of parliamentary government, the French monarchical state as it stood in  was peculiarly ill-equipped to make the transition from an absolute monarchy to a modern liberal democracy, primarily because its constitution recognised no sovereign principle apart from the king. Of course, there were occasional assemblies like the aristocratic parlements and the

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

Estates General, whose purpose was to petition the king on behalf of various sections of his people, but they did so purely as mandataires and not as representatives. For according to the neo-Hobbesian theory by which France was governed, the king was the sole sovereign principle of the nation, and thus he alone was capable of representing it. This is not to say that there were not theories of representative government in circulation during the late s. On the contrary, a current of thought running from Honoré Gabriel Riquet Mirabeau and Turgot through to François Quesnay and the physiocrats had succeeded in developing a number of different proposals for a system of national representation. The problem was that this body of theory had conceived of 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-ce que le tiers état? was almost certainly motivated by the realisation that Rousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty provided one of the only means of justifying the proposed rebellion of the Third Estate against the Estates General.28 In his celebrated treatise, Rousseau had made a point of insisting upon the absolute and inalienable sovereignty of the general will. A monarch might be employed as an executive minister of a nation, he acknowledged, but it was a dangerous mistake to imagine that he could ever possess sovereignty. Moreover, it was absolutely impossible, according to Rousseau, that a nation could ever be bound against its will to a particular constitution, because it was itself the primary legislative principle of the state, the origin and cause of all law and government. It is not surprising, therefore, that Sieyès should have been keen to employ this concept of popular sovereignty during the constitutional crisis of , for it allowed him to recommend the transformation of the Third Estate into a new national assembly as an example of the national will reaffirming its sovereign power over and above a series of unjust laws and antiquated conventions. The only sticking-point was that, while Rousseau was very useful to Sièyes on the question of sovereignty, he was less than helpful on the matter of representation. For there was, as we have seen, a profound mistrust of representative government at the heart of Rousseau’s political theory, and indeed of any principle of political deputation that went beyond the old monarchical principle of the ‘binding mandate’. Hence the virtuosic blending of two fundamentally incompatible political discourses – a politics based on property and interest, and one based on popular sovereignty – that Sieyès was forced to undertake, a blending which was,

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initially at least, highly successful, in the sense that it played a major part in actually bringing the constitutional revolution of  into being, but which was ultimately, however, quite radically unstable, in that it became a source of increasing political tension as time went on, and the conflict between representative government and civic virtue began to make itself felt. And so, as we have seen, the distinctive relationship that existed between the different ‘Estates’ in eighteenth-century France rendered it difficult for the bourgeois revolutionaries of  to develop their critique of the culture of corporatism and protectionism which had brought the nation to the very brink of bankruptcy without launching into an attack on the fundamental principle of aristocracy. And this, in turn, played a part in inhibiting the formation of an English-style coalition of the propertied élite during the constitutional period of the Revolution. Hence bourgeois revolutionaries like Sieyès and Mirabeau found themselves rapidly impelled to ally themselves with ‘the people’, employing the vocabulary of popular sovereignty which had been developed by Rousseau and his followers in an attempt to harness the insurrectionary energy of the sans-culottes in the service of their cause. Thus in many of the pamphlets of the constitutional period an essentially liberal commitment to property, law and freedom from state interference was dangerously 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 a political validity and significance they might not otherwise have possessed. Moreover, the leading members of the Constituent Assembly succeeded in politicising the urban sans-culottes without ever being prepared to placate them, promising liberty, equality and fraternity while really only being concerned to pursue a peculiarly modern, highly limited and inescapably bourgeois notion of freedom. They may have been keen to invoke the principle of popular sovereignty in –, but the Constitution they finally produced in  contained a property qualification which effectively barred huge swathes of the population from active citizenship.29 Having pandered to the economic and political aspirations of the working classes, and having allowed, and in many cases encouraged, the growth of a network of political clubs and pressure groups in the capital, ultimately they reneged on their political promises. Such hypocrisy was always likely to incite popular resentment and violence. And indeed it was in this way that the Frankenstein of bourgeois politics encouraged the wrath of its ‘creature’ the Paris mob.

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

In this context, tensions began to develop between those bourgeois revolutionaries who believed themselves to be genuinely committed to Rousseau’s democratic ideal, and those suspected of merely paying lipservice to its principles. In the years following , during which the Revolution was increasingly buffeted by acute financial crisis, foreign invasion and civil war, the Jacobins emerged as the faction seemingly most committed to the principle of popular sovereignty, striving to distinguish themselves from what they considered to be the hypocritical republicanism of the Girondins. In the autumn of  Maximilien Robespierre, one of the radical leaders of the Jacobin club and a deputy in the newly formed National Convention, was moved to criticise the room in the Tuileries that had been proposed as the site for the new national assembly on account of the diminutive size of the public gallery: The entire nation has the right to know of the conduct of its representatives. It would be desirable, if it were possible, that the representative assembly should deliberate in the presence of all Frenchmen. The meeting place of the legislative body should be a grand and majestic edifice, open to twelve thousand spectators. Under the eyes of such a huge number of witnesses, neither corruption nor intrigue nor treachery would dare to show themselves, the general will alone would be heeded, the voice of reason and the public interest would have sole audience.30

Siding with Rousseau against the physiocrats, Robespierre saw ‘public opinion’ in terms of a single ‘voice of reason’ expressing itself spontaneously and unreflectively; he did not represent it as a product of rational-critical debate. Sharing the former’s mistrust of the principle of representation, he wanted the new assembly hall of the republic to be a utopian realm of direct democracy, a room in which a large number of citizen-spectators could gather to supervise the workings of the legislative body, considering that no intrigue or faction could survive in such a powerful vessel of the ‘general will’. A product of the general enthusiasm for transparency which had been a leading characteristic of revolutionary politics since , there was nevertheless something almost pathological about Robespierre’s desire for openness, for increasingly after  it contained within it a paranoid suspicion of opacity, an irrational mistrust of any individual or corporate body resisting the searchlight of the state. Fuelled by the fantasy of reinventing France as an ancient democracy, he decided to dispense with what liberal thinkers such as Sieyès and Turgot had considered to be the enabling reciprocity of the public and the private sphere by seeking to render everything

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subject to public scrutiny. And finally this developed into an increasing tendency to see private gatherings of any kind as part of an active and malevolent ‘aristocratic’ conspiracy against the war-torn republic of France.31 It was entirely characteristic, then, that when he ultimately gained real power in  as a member of one of the executive committees of the National Convention, his commitment to popular sovereignty manifested itself in terms of a terrifying war of public authority upon the very principle of private life.  Over the last twenty years there has been an ongoing battle within the field of revolutionary historiography concerning the issue of whether the descent of the French Revolution into bloodshed and terror in – was a historical accident – the product of a chaotic confluence of historical circumstances – or whether it was the logical outcome of the political ideology developed by the revolutionaries themselves. Where revisionary historians such as François Furet and Simon Schama have argued that the widespread violence of the period was the inevitable consequence of the demand for bloodshed encoded within the ‘revolutionary catechism’, some commentators, such as the postmarxist historian Gwynne Lewis, have tried to argue that the Terror of – should be seen as an essentially reactionary measure, a desperate attempt to cope with the twin threat posed by the counter-revolution and popular politics.32 One could argue, however, that this is something of a false opposition, since these two different approaches are by no means incompatible, either theoretically or practically. Indeed, as Lewis points out, it is actually possible to see them as standing in some kind of dialectical relation to one another, the product of a continuing but by no means necessary opposition in the field of historical studies between social history and cultural history. In this study, therefore, I shall not be seeking to choose between these two explanatory models, but rather to acknowledge what is powerful and compelling in each, to highlight the adverse circumstances out of which the ideology of the Terror might have been seen to emerge, while also acknowledging the fatal principle at the heart of revolutionary discourse, its inescapable dynamic of fraternity and fratricide. Robespierre’s response to the subsistence crisis of – provides a good example of the way in which the ‘revolutionary catechism’ was to develop under the Jacobins. It came at a time when inflation had risen

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

. Sketch of Robespierre (), by Gérard, musée Carnavelet, Paris. The text underneath reads: ‘green eyes, pale complexion, green striped nankeen jacket, blue waistcoat with blue stripes, white cravate striped with red (sketch from the life at a sitting of the Convention)’.

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to such a height that suppliers of goods and services, such as farmers, merchants and grocers, became increasingly reluctant to part with their assets. This caused prices to rise still further, setting off violent popular agitation and widespread allegations of hoarding. In response to this situation, Girondins such as Jean Marie Roland de la Platière and Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet remained committed to the principle of free trade. But as the pressure brought to bear upon the National Convention by the popular movement increased, Robespierre was eventually moved to denounce the way in which the policy of laissez-faire was being exploited by the cupidité homicide of the commercial interest. In a move that was at once revolutionary and thoroughly antimodern, he subordinated the right of property to the right of subsistence: The food necessary to man is as sacred as life itself. Everything that is necessary to the subsistence of the community is common property that belongs to society as a whole. It is only the surplus which may become private property or be given over to traders. Any mercantile speculation that I make at the expense of my fellows is not trade, it is robbery and fratricide.33

In the network of associations that had been bequeathed him by Rousseau there were strong links in Robespierre’s mind between the evils of commerce, the defence of its principles by Encyclopédistes such as Turgot, the patronage of such philosophes by eminent nobles, and the selfish greed of the aristocracy as a whole.34 This led him to question the distinction that bourgeois economists had sought to make between modern laissez-faire capitalism and the protectionism of the ancien régime. For it seemed to him that in the new culture of free trade, corporate interests had not been eradicated, they had merely become less visible: aristocratic vices continued to lurk beneath the mask of public patriotism. Thus his allegation that ‘fratricidal’ sentiments were circulating within the class of négociants can be seen to have been based on the fear that the new culture of private enterprise merely perpetuated the corruption of the feudal state. And the fact that some of the leading Girondins did not seem to want to take action against hoarders only served to confirm his growing impression that they were in some way complicit with the defenders of the old order. Indeed as time went on he became progressively more convinced that they were in fact secretly hand-in-glove, both fuelled by selfish greed, and a desire to exploit the misfortunes of ‘the people’.

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

In the struggle between the Jacobins and the Girondins that took place between  and  Robespierre sought to associate Brissot35 and his associates with the aristocratic corruption of the ancien régime by interpreting their professed admiration of the social and political theories of the philosophes as indicative of a continuing connection with court culture. In his analysis, Jean D’Alembert, Denis Diderot, Helvétius and many of the other men of letters of the mid-century had all tried to pass themselves off as men of independence and virtue, but ultimately time had proved them to be mere flatterers of the nobility, salonniers fully conniving with the existing order. And what is more, they had made their servility apparent in their persecution of Rousseau, who had recounted their universal conspiracy against him in the pages of his posthumous Confessions: I could observe that the Revolution has made the great men of the ancien regime seem a lot smaller; that if the academicians and mathematicians which Monsieur Brissot offers to us as models did combat and ridicule priests,36 nevertheless they also courted the nobility, and worshipped kings, from which they gained much advantage, and everybody knows the ferocity with which they persecuted virtue and the spirit of liberty in the person of Jean-Jacques, whose sacred image I see before me, the one true philosopher of that period who merited those public honours which have since been offered only to charlatans and scoundrels.37

From  onwards Robespierre was to make much of this link between the Girondins and the philosophes. He was to deplore the fact that the Rolandins and Brissotins had abandoned the publicity of the Jacobin club in order to discuss politics in the resolutely private salons of the rich. This confirmed them, in his mind, as ‘ambitious courtiers, adroit in the art of deception, who, hiding behind the mask of patriotism, meet frequently with the massed ranks of the aristocracy in order to stifle my voice’.38 In public, he suggested, the Girondins might wear the mask of patriotism, but in private they were speculating on the possibility of improving their personal fortunes and furthering their political careers. Although they might invoke the principles of liberty and equality, and pay lip-service to the notion of public virtue, their private behaviour showed them to be thorough hypocrites. One of the foremost charges that the Montagnards brought against the Brissotins at their trial in the autumn of  was that they had been ‘speculators’. The insinuation was that not only politically but also financially these republican brothers had been ‘playing the Revolution like a casino’, as

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François Furet rather memorably described it. And spéculation was doubly reprehensible for Robespierre, in that, as in English, it referred not only to the corrupt practice of gambling in stocks and shares, but also, on a more explicitly political level, to the operations of a resolutely private imagination, thus reinforcing the connection that the Jacobins were fond of making between ‘progressive’ philosophy, bourgeois selfinterest and moral corruption. In his important study, Class, Ideology and the Rights of Nobles during the French Revolution, Patrice Higonnet gives a compelling account of the republican phase of the Revolution which does much to explain, and in many ways to support, Robespierre’s analysis of the political conduct of the Gironde. He considers that after the flight of the king to Varennes in , any possibility of a lasting entente between liberal nobles and the socially conservative bourgeoisie was effectively ruined. As constitutional monarchy became less of an option, the middle class was driven into an alliance with the people against the aristocracy. In – the Girondin faction saw war against Austria and Prussia as a way of binding the ‘plebs’ to the government and its constitution. In Higonnet’s analysis, Brissot and his colleagues constructed the phantom of an aristocratic counter-revolution both inside and outside France as a means of cementing national unity. He considers that their oratory against nobles during this period was ‘largely for show’, in other words that the nobility was merely a convenient scapegoat for the continuing economic crisis, a way of deflecting the attention of the sans-culottes from the problem of subsistence, and of distracting them from their own political agenda. He argues that the Girondins had no intention of acquiescing in the demands of the urban working class for a redistribution of property and for pension schemes for the poor, but they continued to indulge the rhetoric of popular sovereignty in public while courting conservative opinion in private.39 While it might be possible to argue that Higonnet seriously underestimates the nature and scale of the counter-revolution at this time, and thereby fails to grasp the very real grounds the Girondins might have had for indulging in anti-aristocratic hysteria, his account of their apparent duplicity is highly illuminating. He sees a gap between their public pronouncements and their private sentiments during this period, arguing that the very fact that their social and domestic movements were slightly less than transparent to the public gaze was enough in itself to arouse the suspicions of many of their former colleagues in the Jacobin club.40

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

What rendered Robespierre immune from such suspicions was that he was known by friends and enemies alike to have no private life. Not only that, but he was also known to have no private interests. There was no question of him ever having been guilty of any financial impropriety, as there was with his flamboyant fellow Jacobin Georges Danton, nor of him being intemperate or immoderate in any way. Similarly, there was no question of him having any personal allegiances to interfere with his repeatedly professed devotion to the public good. This was one of the main sources of his prolonged popularity, both in the Jacobin club and the Paris Commune, the mainstays of his power, and in the National Convention, where he remained for a long time a figure of unimpeachable virtue in the eyes of the vast majority of deputies, who remained convinced of his incorruptibility even after he had begun to emerge as a propagandist for terrorist principles. One of the most widely read authorities on the Revolution during the Romantic period, the loyalist historian Lacretelle jeune, offers a remarkably vivid, if predictably rather unsympathetic account of the appearance of complete integrity that Robespierre displayed: He was a man with a single thought, a single passion, a single will; his dark soul never disclosed itself even to his accomplices; as insensible to pleasure as he was to the affections which pass through the hearts of even the purest of men, nothing could distract him from his stubborn pursuit: invariable in his hypocrisy; it was always in the name of virtue that he would invite sedition or provoke a massacre.41

Despite his evident mistrust of Robespierre’s ultimate intentions, Lacretelle helps to show why he seemed to embody the discourse of public virtue more fully than any of his contemporaries. By adhering doggedly to the logic of the revolutionary catechism, by endlessly pursuing its core values, he was always able to suggest a certain half-heartedness in his opponents’ political practice, which is one of the reasons why a detailed study of his writings and speeches can offer such a powerful insight into the political psychology of the Revolution as a whole.42 As François Furet has most memorably put it: ‘Robespierre is an immortal figure not because he reigned supreme over the Revolution for a few months, but because he was the mouthpiece of its purest and most tragic discourse.’43

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 Having encouraged a high degree of political consciousness in the Paris sans-culottes during the first years of the Revolution, it was difficult for the National Convention to cope with the monster it had created. And by  the enragés in the Paris sections had become so militant that even the radical deputies of the Mountain were finding them hard to control. Jacques Roux one of the leaders of the popular movement, was to express his dissatisfaction with the ‘Jacobin’ Constitution of June  in these 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 you have yet to go to the limits of securing happiness for the People. Liberty is no more than a hollow mirage if one class freely can force another into starvation and continue unpunished. Equality is a vain mockery when the rich, through monopoly, can hold powers of literal life and death over their fellows.44

A political force of considerable power and autonomy, the sans-culottes had an agenda of their own, and it was one with which the bourgeois revolutionaries in the Jacobin club were only partly in sympathy.45 During the autumn of  Robespierre had attacked the Girondins for employing the language of popular sovereignty without a proper commitment to it. But he himself was always to remain implacably opposed to the systematic redistribution of landed property that was later demanded by some of the leaders of the Paris sections.46 Despite his apparently radical assertion of the right to subsistence, he was not, finally, a supporter of the loi agraire. But the history of the Revolution since  had shown that it was impossible for a bourgeois revolutionary to be seen to resist the will of ‘the people’, and so in order to disguise his class bias from both the Paris sections and himself, Robespierre was forced to displace his conflict with the sans-culottes onto a metaphysical plane. He did this by transforming the Revolution from a campaign to improve living standards into a war of public virtue against private corruption. Billed as a war of the general will against aristocratic conspiracy, the revolutionary Terror of – can thus also be seen as an unconscious attempt to flee from the seemingly insoluble conflict that was raging at that time between the relative claims of poverty and property. In a review in the Deutsch-franzöische Jahrbücher for , Karl Marx criticised the Jacobins’ neglect of the social and economic causes of

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inequality. According to this view of things, Robespierrist politics was an extreme manifestation of the Aristotelian notion of man as first and foremost a zoon politikon: Far from identifying the principle of the state as the source of social ills, the heroes of the French Revolution held social life to be the source of political problems. Thus Robespierre regarded great wealth and great poverty as an obstacle to pure democracy. He therefore wished to establish a universal system of Spartan frugality.47

Implemented in response to the increasingly violent demands of the Paris sections, Robespierre’s policy of the Maximum, which was instituted on  September , was a desperate attempt to guarantee a supply of food to the poor and to eradicate hoarding by fixing the prices of grocery and household items at no more than a third above their level in . It was in many ways the inevitable sequel to his affirmation of the right of subsistence in . However, as soon as the measure was announced, all of the products which it sought to fix were bought up extremely rapidly, creating an immediate shortage. Soon producers were refusing to supply new stock, which set off a fresh wave of accusations about hoarding. In the Maximum Marx saw, at one and the same time, the laudable expression of egalitarian values and a complete failure to understand the basic principles of political economy. In his eyes it identified Robespierre in particular as the epitome of the purely political intelligence, a man who existed entirely in the ‘imaginary’ realm of politics, interpreting economic inequality simply as a failure of the will. And whether one considers it an inept response to the economic problems of the period, or a courageous putting on, in the face of growing popular intimidation, of the harness of revolutionary necessity, this politics of the will was a characteristic of Robespierre’s political theory. Indeed it formed the absolute foundation of his justification of revolutionary government, which he was always keen to describe as the product of an active and voluntary policy, rather than a set of desperate and expedient measures. The first seeds of this new attitude to government were sown in the summer of , when the revolutionary state began to award itself extraordinary new powers designed to expedite not only the formulation and implementation of emergency legislation, but also to bring the apprehension and punishment of counter-revolutionary activists under central control. This process was already well underway by the time Robespierre joined the Committee of Public Safety, but it was left to him and his formidable lieutenant Saint-Just to attempt its theoretical and

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moral justification. Rocked by the royalist uprisings in north-western and southern France, and continually harassed by angry allegations from the leaders of the popular movement that the economic situation was being exploited by the speculative practices of the mercantile bourgeoisie, he was eventually driven to cut through the Gordian knot of the revolutionary crisis by representing it as a single battle of wills: One would say that the two opposing spirits that have been represented in the past as disputing the empire of nature are at this significant moment in human history 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 problems; and questions of social practice into issues of political conscience. In his hands, the state became less interested in the difficult job of eradicating social injustice in civil society, and much more concerned to pursue the revolutionary struggle in the ‘imaginary’ realm of politics. In his vision of things, everything that remained opaque to Jacobin political consciousness was re-imagined as a force that was fundamentally inimical to it. The paradoxical suggestion in the Contrat Social that those who broke the laws of the state ceased to be entitled to its protection was used to justify a purge of all those citoyens who were deemed to have acted in an unpatriotic fashion.49 As Saint-Just announced to the National Convention on the  October : It is not only the traitors whom you must punish, but also those who are indifferent; you must punish whoever is passive towards the Revolution and does nothing for it. For once the French people have expressed their will, everything that is opposed to it is outside the sovereign body; and everything that is outside the sovereign body is an enemy.50

With the infamous ‘Law of Suspects’ of September , which was passed in the same month as the Maximum, this approach was given legislative authority, for it contained a long list of the many ways in which a citizen might render him or herself ‘suspect’ in the eyes of the government, a list which conflated major crimes such as actively conspiring to overthrow the republic with such vague charges as failing to steadily manifest one’s devotion to the Revolution. The immediate consequences of this policy were harrowing, as the English poetess and travel writer Helen Maria Williams made clear, in the course of her vivid eye-witness account of life in Paris during the autumn of : The prisons became more and more crowded and increasing numbers were every day dragged to the scaffold. Suspect was the warrant of imprisonment, and

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

This distinctive use of the word ‘suspect’ is highly characteristic of the Jacobin period, primarily because it seems deliberately intended to provoke fear through its elision of the difference between what it might mean to be suspected of a crime and what it might mean to be guilty of it. 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 the possibility that one might occupy a passive position between the two. Robespierre was always to maintain that good citizens had no reason to be afraid of revolutionary government. As he said to the Convention in his infamous speech on political morality of  February : ‘The first maxim of your political creed must be to lead the people by reason and the enemies of the people by terror.’52 But in many ways his language of political terror actually seems to have been designed to call the civic virtue of each and every citizen into doubt, encouraging every man and woman into a potentially endless round of anxious self-questioning, precisely on account of the equation it made between fear and culpability. Transforming denunciation into a kind of revolutionary virtue, it demanded from everyone an active engagement in the cause of liberty, politicising every aspect of social life. But it was also concerned to preserve the execution of revolutionary government as the ultimate prerogative of the committees and tribunals, ensuring that the actual exercise of political terror remained the monopoly of the state.  In Representations of Revolution Ronald Paulson used psychoanalytic theory to shed light on the political culture of the French Revolution. He saw the execution of the king in January  as a revolutionary ‘killing of the father’ which brought about a collective regression in the French political class back to the stage of primary narcissism. In Paulson’s mind, this was linked with another kind of regression practised during the Jacobin period: the adaption of neo-classical models of dress and demeanour. More recently, Dorinda Outram has examined how the bourgeois revolutionaries tried to develop ‘stoical’ modes of behaviour

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in order to try and represent to themselves their newfound political agency. Developing these insights, it might be possible to see the Jacobin period 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 glimpses its own image in a mirror, and begins to develop a sense of its own subjectivity from the free-standing reflection there contained. The autonomy and agency that the still dependent infant sees in this reflection is entirely and completely imaginary, an unreachable ideal to which it will aspire in vain. Nevertheless, Lacan argues, it is only by identifying with this image that the child begins to construct the fiction of an independent self, without which he cannot function as an active human being.53 For the children of the French Revolution what was glimpsed in the mirror of political theory was the realm of pure politics; and the image contained within it was the figure of the public man, a conception at once at once inspiring and terrifying, inspiring in its ideal embodiment of freedom and autonomy, terrifying in its remorseless exposure of private weakness and personal dependency. For this reason the image of the public man with which the revolutionaries identified was to take on the ambivalence of the famous doppelgänger or ‘double’, eloquently described by Sigmund Freud in his much-quoted essay on ‘The Uncanny’. Anticipating Lacan, Freud interpreted this double, or mirrorimage of the self, as a product of the primary stage of narcissism, seeing it as a figure that could be seen to offer ‘an insurance against the destruction of the ego’, and thus a kind of ‘assurance of immortality’, but which was always capable of transforming itself, after that stage had been surmounted, into an uncanny ‘harbinger of death’. Thus despite its initial appearance as a guarantee of individual autonomy, the double, in Freud’s terms, always had the potential of becoming a terrifying figure of accusation and retribution.54 To some extent, this dynamic provides a model for thinking about the Jacobin illusion of politics, which it might be helpful to regard as a kind of ‘double’ of social reality, an alternative universe of transparent and voluntary action, acting as a kind of dangerous adjunct to the recalcitrant, reluctant realm of everyday civil society, at once its professed protector and its potential persecutor. But it might also be seen to elucidate Robespierre’s role within the frame of the revolutionary drama, most specifically as the figure in whom the terrifying ambivalence of the public man was most powerfully present, a statesman who was for many

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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 of this doubling and splitting in the very pages of the Contrat Social. In her eyes, it was Rousseau’s fundamentally dialectical definition of civic virtue that led the revolutionaries to set themselves on the path to selfdestruction. For he had suggested that in order to become a true citizen of the main body politic each particular man would have to rise against himself in his own particularity, thinking that it was only by this means that he would arouse in himself his own antagonist, the general will. Effectively, she reasoned, this meant that in the realm of his political theory, to partake in citizenship ‘each national must rise and remain in constant rebellion against himself ’.55 In the bitter struggle between the Jacobins and the Girondins which took place after the institution of the First Republic in , this tendency towards self-division at the heart of revolutionary discourse expressed itself in terms of recurrent rhetoric of paradox. During this period of republican in-fighting, both factions showed themselves to be assiduous practitioners of the ‘revolutionary catechism’, adopting diametrically opposed positions for identical reasons, which meant they found themselves employing a language that was often merely an echo of that of their antagonists. True patriotism was always being faced by its masked counterfeit, as Robespierre told the Girondins in November : Thus, you only speak of dictatorship in order to exercise it yourself without restraint, you only speak of proscriptions and tyranny in order to tyrannise and proscribe.56

Such formulations were to become a leading characteristic of the language of revolutionary government, which both feared and fed upon the possibility that there might be an intimate link between apparent opposites. History had taught the Jacobins that what had seemed a united front against counter-revolution was always capable of dividing against itself, as the revolutionary movement suffered a succession of supposed ‘betrayals’ from within its own ranks, firstly from the feuillants, then from the Brissotins, and then finally, in the early part of , from both the Dantonists and the so-called ultras. Betrayal was the recurrent nightmare of the First Republic, but it also became its energising principle. The suspicion that people and principles might be subject to uncanny reversals, and that patriotism might turn out to be its opposite, helped to fuel the

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policy of the Terror, but not without repeatedly calling the good faith of its own practitioners into question. Defending the Terror from the charge that it merely reproduced the repression of the ancien régime, Robespierre gave an extended speech on ‘political morality’ in February  in which he offered a striking formulation which sought to make an absolute distinction between the two: 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 mind when 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 the temptation for historians has always been to share his rather scornful view. But while it is of course important to acknowledge the deleterious historical consequences of this language of paradox, it is also worth recognising the way in which, like the vocabulary of suspicion mentioned above, it was a canny instrument of political terror. It was a powerful device because it forced its auditors into an active exploration of the distinction between revolutionary government and the absolutism of the ancien régime in a way that made any confusion between the two seem a culpable failure of political understanding, for as Robespierre argued: ‘Those who . . . call the revolutionary laws arbitrary or tyrannical are stupid sophists who seek to confuse total opposites.’58 Like Rousseau, he suggested that those readers who found such statements impossible were almost certainly thinking too much, and in the wrong kind 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 to establish 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 extended analysis of the nature of counter-revolutionary conspiracy which formed a central part of the ‘political morality’ speech, Robespierre went 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 republican movement, he argued, that no longer did anybody dare to broadcast aristocratic principles. Unfortunately, however, this did not mean that aristocracy had been totally eradicated; it simply meant that it had been forced to take up the mask of patriotism, mimicking republican discourse in an attempt to subvert it from within. Sometimes they had

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sought to dilute revolutionary zeal, as the Dantonists had done; sometimes, as in the case of the Hébertists, they had urged it to self-destructive excess. In each case true republicans had been temporarily seduced by the mere performance of patriotism, but they would know to be more watchful in future: In treacherous hands, all of the remedies to our ills will become poisons; everything that you are capable of doing, they will turn against you; even the truths that we have just put forward.59

Obsessed by counter-revolution, and yet increasingly unable to distinguish it from itself, in this formulation revolutionary discourse becomes prey to a form of self-distrust. Thus it became crucial for Robespierre to argue that the real difference between the despotism of liberty against tyranny and its absolute opposite lay in the inner intentions lying behind them, precisely because they were so identical in their effects. Hence he sought repose in the notion of the conscience as the only real proof of virtue, a deeply internal principle, existing anterior to both political language and political praxis, outside the realm of conventional representation. And this is why it is tempting to see his later speeches in terms of an identifiably Rousseauvian tradition of confession, for as he said on the day preceding the Thermidorean conspiracy against him: ‘Take my conscience away from me, and I would be the most unhappy of men’.60

  

The politics of confession in Rousseau and Robespierre

 On the  October  the leading Girondin deputy Jean-Baptiste Louvet rose before the National Convention to accuse Maximilien Robespierre of aspiring to the dictatorship of the new French Republic. In his review of the momentous events that had led up to the dissolution of the monarchy, Louvet sought to make a distinction between the ‘popular’ insurrection of  August and the spate of summary executions in the prisons of Paris in September. While the former had been a spontaneous uprising of the people against oppression, ‘the work of all’, the latter had been the perpetrated by a small band of ‘scoundrels’. ‘The people of Paris know how to fight’, he insisted, ‘but they do not know how to murder.’ Far from being ‘popular’, in fact, the September massacres had been a deliberate attempt by Robespierre to round up and despatch his political opponents: Then we saw this man urging firstly the Jacobins and then the electoral assembly to denounce certain philosophers, writers and patriotic orators; then we saw his deputy conspirators declaring Robespierre to be the only virtuous man in France, 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 he dubbed ‘the people of Paris’, then ‘the people’, and finally ‘the sovereign’ . . . and who, after having celebrated the power and sovereignty of the people, never forgot to add that he was one of the people himself, a tactic as crude as it is blameworthy, the kind of ruse which has always been useful to usurpers from Caesar to Cromwell.1

Despite publicly proclaiming themselves to be the defenders of the people, the Girondins had become privately unsympathetic to the political demands of the Parisian working class during the course of . And as this ambivalence began to make itself felt, they became markedly less ‘popular’ than their Jacobin counterparts. For while the Jacobins were willing to acknowledge the influence of the Paris sections, the Girondins began to favour a political programme based on a broader 

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and more truly national consensus. This was why Louvet sought to expose Robespierre’s attempted appropriation of the notion of ‘the people’ by questioning how he could treat the actions of the militant sectionnaires as if they were an unmediated expression of the general will of France. But he could not make his opposition to the plebeian politics of the capital too explicit without attracting the charge of federalism, for in the war-torn climate of  it was becoming increasingly more difficult to argue that more autonomy should be accorded to the provinces without being accused of seeking to divide the nation against itself. So in order not to jeopardise his own professed commitment to popular sovereignty, Louvet tried to characterise Robespierre as an ‘insolent demagogue’ publicly flattering the people while privately pandering 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 September Massacres. Where fellow Jacobins such as Danton, who had been far more closely involved with the events themselves, were notably subdued, he was steadfast and outspoken.2 Very deliberately, he placed the massacres in their context, first of all by describing the progress of the war during the month of August, then by reminding the Convention how the Duke of Brunswick’s manifesto, a virulently counter-revolutionary document threatening France with imminent invasion, had heightened popular tension in the capital. In the aftermath of the insurrection of  August, he argued, the people had seen many of its sworn enemies languish in gaol without being tried or punished, and it was this combination of circumstances that had led to the violence in the prisons: In the midst of this universal turmoil, the approach of foreign enemies awakes a feeling of indignation and of vengeance smouldering in all hearts against the traitors who had summoned them. Before abandoning their hearths, their wives, their children, the citizenry, which successfully stormed the Tuileries, demands the often-promised punishment of conspirators; it runs to the prisons.3

Significantly, there is no division of revolutionary labour in Robespierre’s account of the journées of : the people are depicted as acting unanimously, simultaneously and in unison throughout. The men who perpetrated the September executions are the same men who are about to leave for the eastern front to fight for their country; moreover they were all present at the storming of the Tuileries on  August. In this way, by depicting the people as a coherent and unified subjectivity,

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Robespierre effectively turned the allegations of factionalism back upon Louvet himself. In Robespierre’s eyes, the September massacres were produced by the people’s impatience for justice; thus they could be regretted but not condemned. In response to the suggestion that many innocent people had perished, he insisted that most of the victims were aristocrats complicit with the counter-revolutionary army pressing upon the borders of France. Once again he accused Louvet of being selective in his sympathies, of taking up the cause of aristocrats and conspirators rather than lamenting the demise of French soldiers fighting in the revolutionary war. Most spectacularly of all, he responded to Louvet’s charge that the executions had been ‘illegal’ by suggesting that he had completely failed to understand the nature of revolutionary action. Adeptly deploying Rousseau’s notion of the general will as a sovereign principle superior to all positive institutions and laws he declared that the massacres had only been as illegal as the rest of the Revolution, ‘as the fall of the throne and of the Bastille, as illegal as liberty itself ’.4 On matters such as this, he felt there was no room for hypocrisy: ‘Citoyens,’ he demanded, addressing the members of the Convention directly, ‘do you want a revolution without a revolution?’.5 Thus it was that by dealing sympathetically with the motives and desires of the septembriseurs, and binding himself rhetorically to the cause of the people, Robespierre was able to vindicate himself in the eyes of the majority of his colleagues in the National Convention. And at the same time, he was able to imply that Louvet and his supporters were hopelessly detached from the true springs of revolutionary action, misunderstanding its true meaning. For in refusing to denounce his antagonist, he made it seem that Louvet was narrowly preoccupied with the actions of individuals, while he himself was capable of rising above such limited concerns: I have given up the easy advantage to be gained by replying to the calumnies of my adversaries with more dreadful denunciations. I have sought to suppress the offensive part of my defence. I have refused the just vengeance that I should have had the right to pursue against such libellers. I demand nothing more than the return of peace and the triumph of liberty. Citizens, continue to follow, with a firm and rapid step, your splendid path, and, though it may cost me my life and even my reputation, may I work together with you for the greater glory and happiness of our common fatherland!6

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

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

detachment, somewhere outside of the realm of factional politics. And this capacity to play the grand legislator, it might be said, was one of the foremost reasons for his revolutionary longevity, for in assuming this rôle, he sometimes made it seem as if he alone was capable of commanding a general prospect of the Revolution, as if he alone could trace its true trajectory, and as if he alone had completely identified his interests with those of the people.7 In the eyes of his political enemies this detachment from the blood and strife of the main revolutionary struggles was indicative of a suspicious and cowardly nature. For his supporters, however, it bespoke an enabling detachment, a perspective which allowed him to see the Revolution with far greater clarity, and with a sympathy that was all the more pure. Within the pages of the Contrat Social Rousseau had spoken at length of the qualities requisite in the ideal revolutionary legislator, but he had also depicted him as an outsider from the community in question, whose very foreignness would enable him to maintain a certain disinterestedness of spirit. Without fulfilling that requirement, Robespierre nevertheless assumed a demeanour which was at once enthusiastic and austere, so that he came to be seen as ‘a man of the people’, after the fashion 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 manners of the sans-culottes, but by endlessly emphasising the transparent reciprocity between his individual will and that of the people, that Robespierre defined his political character. And by this means he turned revolutionary politics into a species of autobiography. Many contemporary commentators saw the confessional vein in Robespierre’s politics, his willingness to parade his political conscience in public, as a confirmation of his overweening personal ambition. In the eyes of John Adolphus, for example, his reply to Louvet was not so much a defence as ‘an eulogium on himself ’. And as the years passed, this perception of Robespierre as a man consumed by inordinate selflove 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 the French Revolution in the late s, it had already become something of a truism: ‘Vanity was Robespierre’s ruling passion,’ Scott wrote, ‘and though his countenance was the image of his mind, he was vain even of his personal appearance, and never adopted the external habits of a Sans-Culotte.’8 But whatever Robespierre’s concern for his reputation and demeanour, it is not necessary to assume that his self-absorption was indicative of a desire for dictatorship. He himself maintained that what-

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ever influence he possessed in the National Convention was due not to personal power but to ‘the natural empire of principles’.9 And in recent years François Furet has seen fit to concur with this view, arguing that his pre-eminence stemmed from his constant willingness to explain the significance of the central events of the Revolution and his ability to embody more fully and more continuously than any of his contemporaries its fundamental values.10 But if this was indeed the case, how then did his autobiographical impulse function as an expression of his revolutionary principles? What, in short, was the relation between politics and personality in the writings and speeches of Robespierre? For many members of the revolutionary generation the experience of being converted to the principles of liberty and equality was intimately linked to, and coeval with, a revolution in their concept of personal identity. In the case of many revolutionary republicans, figures such as Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Marie-Jeanne Roland and even Louvet himself, their concept of the self and its relation to society had been completely transformed by a reading of Rousseau.11 But it is in the political writings of Robespierre that we find the fullest, most dramatic and most completely self-conscious articulation of this phenomenon. In the Dédicace aux mânes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau penned shortly before arriving in Versailles in  as a representative of the newly summoned Estates General, he singled out Les Confessions for special praise. Other radical writers and pamphleteers of the period had tended to extol the wisdom and virtue of novels and treatises such as Emile and La Nouvelle Heloïse, but for Robespierre, it was Rousseau’s most recent and controversial work that deserved the highest praise.12 Your example is there before my eyes; your admirable confessions, that open and courageous emanation of the purest soul, which shall go forward into posterity less as a model of art than as a prodigy of virtue. I want to follow your venerable path, though I may leave nothing but a name of which centuries to come shall be wholly incurious. I shall be happy if, in the perilous course that an unprecedented revolution has just opened up before us, I remain constantly faithful to the inspiration that I have drawn from your writings!13

Why was Robespierre disposed to see the Confessions – that most apparently 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 theoretical critique of the liberal bourgeois Enlightenment insinuated itself into the political practice of revolutionary Jacobinism. Developing this argument, I now want to suggest that an exploration of the relationship

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between Rousseau’s autobiographical writings and his works of political theory can help to deepen our understanding of revolutionary republicanism, allowing us to see the close connection between Robespierre’s discourse 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 man in the state of nature as a creature of self-respect (amour de soi ) and natural compassion (pitié ), arguing that the invention of private property and the development of civil society had instituted conditions of economic inequality and mutual dependence which had served to alienate him from this state of primordial bliss. As social conditions began to reshape man’s sense of himself, his behaviour became oriented towards competing jealously with his fellow men, desiring to please his superiors and offering himself as something he was not. Selfishness (amour-propre) began to replace self-respect. And with this loss of integrity came a consequent loss of mutual transparency: men began to live externally rather than according to their own internal standard, and this externality was itself the play of mere appearance. This was a development of the argument which had first appeared in the Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts of , in which Rousseau had argued that as civilisation became ever more sophisticated and cultivated, men became progressively more opaque to one other: Human nature was not at bottom better then than now; but men found their security in the ease with which they could fathom one another, and this advantage, of which we no longer feel the value, prevented their having many vices.14

Though it may appear that the members of modern society communicate more elegantly and more intelligently than ever before, Rousseau argues, they actually understand each other less, for by insisting upon a propriety that is proper to nobody, civilised discourse has driven a wedge between public and private experience, serving to obscure people from one another in the process.15 And the importunate fantasies and impostures fostered by modern trade and commerce represented the final stage in the process of alienation in this respect, for they served to dramatise the final transformation of l’homme into le bourgeois. According to liberal reformists of the revolutionary period such as Antoine de Condorcet and Thomas Paine, the modern subject was

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never more free than when he was permitted to follow his own personal interests, secure from interference by the state. And throughout the eighteenth century a number of philosophers, most notably David Hume, had sought to argue the suitability of modern commercial society to the intellectual and emotional fabric of the individual self by depicting man as an animal naturally driven by fantastic desires and irrational speculations and hence fundamentally incapable of living according to the absolute demands of reason.16 For Rousseau, however, modern commercial man was distinctly inferior to the ancient citizens of Rome or Sparta, in whom liberty had been defined in terms of public virtue rather than private feeling. As we saw in chapter one, in the Contrat Social () he had tried to develop an alternative to the conditions of economic dependence and social bondage that characterised eighteenth-century society. And he did this by describing a different kind of alienation from that which had taken place in modern times, one in which l’homme would be transformed into le citoyen, renouncing his natural independence in order to receive it back on a political basis, for in identifying his particular will with that of the general, Rousseau argued, the individual would be able to preserve his moral liberty by pledging allegiance to a law that was entirely of his own making. One way of trying to understand the nature and effect of the changes brought about by the rise of trade and commerce during the eighteenth century was to construct narratives of the historical development of civil society, and it is in this light that we can understand the work of figures such as Adam Ferguson, Edward Gibbon and Lord Kames, and, of course, Rousseau himself. Another approach, intimately connected with the first, although often occupying an entirely different generic and literary register – that of novels and memoirs rather than formal histories – was to examine these questions through a close analysis of the development of the individual self. And it is in these terms that we may be able to understand the rise of life-writing in the early eighteenth century. In his book on the origins of the English novel, Michael McKeon has discussed the way in which seventeenth-century novels written in the first person tended to blend elements of two very different genres of writing about the self inherited from former times, namely the ‘spiritual autobiography’ and the ‘true history’. He has described how the confessional models found in St Augustine and the Lives of the Saints gradually became democratised during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the work of men such as John Bunyan and John Foxe. In this form of writing a dialectic was set up between the authorial self and the autobio-

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graphical subject, in which detailed reflection on past folly helped to define the nature of present grace. ‘True histories’, by contrast, were often tales of travel and adventure without such a rigid before-and-after structure. Digressive and desultory in character, they engaged much more with the empirical life of the subject, eschewing the drama of moral regeneration in favour of a series of picturesque descriptions and informative anecdotes. In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe () we can see both of these generic models struggling for dominance. Written in the form of a fictional autobiography, this novel is both a conversion narrative and a true history, constantly pulling its hero in two directions, vertically, into a contemplation of his spiritual trajectory, and horizontally, into new adventures and commercial speculations without form, shape or end.17 In many ways, Rousseau’s Confessions, which were published posthumously, in two parts, in  and  respectively, can be seen to have constituted a radical inflection of the tradition of spiritual autobiography. It redefined the traditional narrative of sin and salvation in entirely secular terms, describing the struggles of the self to combat the accretions of modern corruption. Within its pages, the citizen of Geneva engaged in a dialogue with his former self, the ingenuous JeanJacques, and in so doing attempted to heal the breach that bourgeois society had caused between them. By obsessively analysing, explaining and excusing the various forms of alienation that had been suffered by his youthful self, Rousseau tried to identify himself with the being in his past, re-establishing and re-confirming through the act of writing a notion of the self that was independent of history and its endless transformations.18 His autobiography developed into an extended analysis of the way in which the fetters, obstacles and patterns of dependence that characterise modern life serve to alienate and corrupt the natural man, forcing him to live externally, at one remove from self-possession and independent virtue. In this way the Confessions offered another version of the narrative of natural goodness corrupted by civil society that had been developed in the Discours sur l’inégalité. But whereas the latter had been abstract and theoretical, the former was engagingly personal, containing a series of vivid and often amusing anecdotes touching upon all aspects of eighteenth-century culture. True to the traditions of spiritual autobiography, however, Rousseau combined an understanding of the way in which social circumstances constructed and constricted human behaviour with a belief in the possibility that individuals and even whole societies might be able to cast off the trappings of their recent past and

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rediscover their former virtue entirely through an effort of will. And as we shall see, this notion of autobiography as a conscious denial of history was to have an important influence upon the Romantic generation. In the opening books of the Confessions, Rousseau re-interpreted the seminal moments of his childhood in the light of the philosophical discoveries of his later life. In Book I, for example, the discussion of the relation between being and seeming that had appeared in the second Discours was reworked in terms of the traumatic personal experience of being accused of stealing a comb. Although he is absolutely guiltless of Madame Lambercier’s charge, the young Jean-Jacques is horrified to realise the extent to which appearances testify against him. He and his cousin are devastated by the gap between their internal innocence and the external show, and this experience destroys the paradisal transparency 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, in reality it was a totally different manner of existence. Attachment, respect, intimacy and confidence no longer drew the pupils to their guides: we no longer regarded them as gods who were able to read into our hearts; we became less ashamed of doing wrong and more afraid of being accused; we began to dissemble, to be insubordinate, to lie.19

Learning that appearances can deceive leads Jean-Jacques and his cousin to learn to become deceptive. They come to the realisation that if they are to be punished for crimes they did not commit, they may as well commit them, especially as crime, if it remains undiscovered, seems to be no crime at all. In this way they seek to master their grief though repetition. And it is through a series of alienations and revolutions of this sort, Rousseau seems to suggest, that the natural man gradually becomes conversant with the mendacious nature of social reality. Apprenticed to a tyrant of an engraver in Geneva later in book  Jean-Jacques is forced into theft and deceit, and this gives Rousseau the opportunity to reflect upon the way in which despotism breeds a pact of complicity between master and slave, property owner and thief: ‘I found that stealing and a flogging went together, and constituted a sort of bargain, and that, if I performed my part, I could safely leave my master to carry out his own.’20 Built into the tyrannical behaviour of the master is an expectation and encouragement of the rebellion of the slave; that is how individuals communicate with one another in the realm of opacity. During the course of ten years Rousseau deposited all five of the

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children borne him by Thérèse Levasseur at the Enfants Trouvés in Paris. He returned to this episode on a number of occasions both in the Confessions and its sequel the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire ostensibly in order to repent but finally in order to justify his conduct. In book  of the Confessions he declared that he was persuaded by his friends in Commandeur de Graville’s rakish circle that giving his children away was the right thing for him to do. In book , however, he was to provide a different excuse, asking us to believe that giving his children up to the state was an act of public virtue. Since he had always felt himself to be inspired by an ‘innate benevolence’ for his fellows, and an ‘ardent love’ for the grand, the true, the beautiful and the just, Rousseau found it impossible to believe that he could have been deliberately wicked. So when he considered the malicious breach of faith on the subject of his children that was perpetrated by his former friends Madame D’Épinay, Denis Diderot and Melchior Grimm, he immediately swung from defence into attack: My fault is great, but it was due to error; I have neglected my duties, but the desire of doing an injury never entered my heart . . . but, to betray the confidence of friendship, to violate the most sacred of all agreements, to disclose secrets poured into our bosoms, deliberately to dishonour the friend whom one has deceived, these are not faults, they are acts of meanness and infamy.21

In this way, Rousseauvian confession is always in danger of transforming itself into a form of self-justification: ‘never, for a single moment in his life, could Jean-Jacques have been a man without feeling, without compassion, or an unnatural father’, he declares, before adding that: I shall content myself with saying that such was [my error] that, in delivering my children into the hands of public education because I could not bring them up myself, in intending them to become peasants and workers rather than adventurers and fortune-seekers, I believed myself to be acting both as a citizen and a true father, and looked upon myself as a member of Plato’s republic.22

Throughout the Confessions Rousseau is continually suggesting that modern society transforms his every good feeling into its opposite, by forging a radical separation between his intentions and their consequences. He even goes on to suggest that it is in the nature of truly virtuous impulses that they should be subject to an uncanny distortion as soon as they enter the corrupt world outside, that is why his own behaviour has been so consistently misconstrued.23 In this way he implies that within the confines of an unjust social order it is the fate of public virtue to become inexpressibly private, so that it can only be signified in terms

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of an absence: thus the best way of exercising one’s freedom in contemporary society, he finally concludes, is to have the courage to do nothing. Other episodes of Rousseau’s Confessions dramatised different aspects of his political theory. In book  an extended reflection on the relationship between theft and monetary purchase developed the arguments of the second Discours on the corrupting power of a commercial appetite. Rousseau described himself as a man fuelled by natural desires for the assuagement of hunger and for human contact and affection, desires that money cannot satisfy because it always poisons all pleasure. One never gets one’s money’s worth, in his analysis, because of the role of money in the exchange relationship which is always draining every transaction of value. As well as obstructing communication between men, it also represents an obstacle between the individual and the object of his desire: ‘Money tempts me less than things, because between money and the possession of the desired object there is always an intermediary, whereas between the thing itself and the enjoyment of it there is none.’24 Paradoxically, for Rousseau theft is more virtuous than the accumulation of monetary wealth because it arises from a spontaneous and unmediated desire for the object. In book  of the Confessions, Rousseau describes how while a footman in the house of the Comtesse de Vercellis, the young Jean-Jacques had publicly attributed to his fellow servant Marion the theft of a ribbon that he himself had stolen. And he excuses his behaviour by referring to the fundamental goodness of his conscience: ‘Wicked intent was never further from me than at that cruel moment’, he declared, ‘and when I accused this unfortunate girl, it is bizarre but true that my affection for her was the cause.’25 He then trawls through his guilty feelings about his ill-treatment of Marion, aware that his besmirching of her character must have had a devastating effect on her prospects for future employment, but ultimately he is able to console himself by retreating into the inner world of his intentions, a world in which he is autonomous and self-possessed, and no longer perturbed by the calculation of external consequences. And indeed, throughout the Confessions, however much Rousseau berates Jean-Jacques for being periodically seduced by bourgeois desires and appetites, he always concludes each confessional episode by stripping away the accumulated layers of acculturation to discover a pure will in his former self that continues to exist anterior to all action and beyond all representation. Neither a public person, nor an aristocrat, he shows himself struggling to attain independent virtue

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while simultaneously being mired in the occlusions, jealousies and instabilities of civil society. In this way the Confessions gives a private and particular version of the civic humanist critique of modern society contained in the second Discourse, reformulating the narrative of the development of civil society in terms of the individual trajectory of a man of the Third Estate. Although it was initially well received, the Confessions was soon seen by many as an utterly scandalous text. Rousseau’s detractors, of whom there were many, especially in England, were outraged at the personal weaknesses 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 still wish to be considered as good? How could a man who had left his five children 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 had set Rousseau up as their ‘canon of holy writ’, Edmund Burke was to embark upon a vitriolic ad hominem attack in his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly of , in which he sought to expose the latter’s concept of pitié or natural fellow-feeling as an entirely theoretical form of benevolence that masked a practical malignity: ‘Benevolence to the whole species and want of feeling for every individual with whom the professors come in contact’, he wrote, ‘form the character of the new philosophy.’27 In Burke’s view, the merest acquaintance with Rousseau’s ‘mad confession of his mad faults’ made abundantly clear the extent to which vanity had been the ruling passion of his life, both theoretically and practically. Firstly, it was the very foundation of his philosophical system, the defining element of which was nothing but an elaborate defence of individual selfishness against the claims of deference and duty. And secondly, it had been the central characteristic of his literary career, so that everything from his peculiar predilection for dressing in Armenian costume to his celebrated passion for paradoxes could finally be traced back to an overwhelming desire in him, so intense as to be almost a species of madness, to grab the attention of the public. Thus it was highly fortunate, Burke argued, given the specious attractions of Rousseau’s famously seductive prose, that the British reading public had been wise enough to resist his destructive theories, having a native mistrust of such ‘paradoxical morality’. Nor was Burke alone in seeking to assassinate Rousseau’s character.

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As the Revolution debate grew more heated, a number of loyalist pamphleteers were to follow his example, using the Confessions as a rough and ready means of criticising the general tendency of French Jacobinism as a whole. For example, in Charles Harrington Elliot’s The Republican Refuted, which was published in , the author sought to prove the anarchistic nature of revolutionary politics by referring his readers to the unconventional, itinerant life of the young Rousseau. And what is more, he endeavoured to sully the reputation of the most celebrated English republican of the day, Tom Paine, by tarring him with the same biographical brush: ‘That once generous and gallant nation’, Elliot wrote, unhappily sophisticated by the late-forged philosophy of ingenious, immoral vagabonds, such as Rousseau and Paine, as devoid of principles as of property, assumed the impenetrable breastplate of republicanism; smiled at the expiring convulsions of slaughtered innocence; and by unprecedented refinements in their new spectacles of human butchery, far outcrimsoned even the bloody treachery of Launay.28

For the defenders of Jean-Jacques, however, who included figures as diverse as Maximilien Robespierre, Madame de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Hazlitt, Rousseau’s character was to be considered primarily in terms of his good intentions rather than the curious errors of his life. Rarely choosing to defend his individual actions, enthusiasts nevertheless continued to speak of his ‘virtue’, since for them it was not what Rousseau had done that was important, what was more significant was the fact that through all of his actions he had managed to remain morally independent and fundamentally benevolent, evading the traps and pitfalls of a society that was forever conspiring to corrupt him either with cruelty or with kindness. As Germaine de Staël most warmly expressed it: Ah! Rousseau! defender of the weak, friend of the unfortunate, passionate lover of virtue, who has sketched all the movements of the soul, and sympathised with every form of misfortune, how worthy you are in your turn of that sentiment of compassion which your heart knew so well how to feel and express; may a voice worthy of you rise to defend you!29

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

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used the enthusiastic nature of his character as a proof of his philosophical veracity. Thus in his Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke of  the leading radical Capel Lloft was to take issue with the charge that vanity had been Rousseau’s defining characteristic. Far from simply emerging out of a desire for notoriety, Lloft argued, Rousseau’s so-called ‘paradoxes’ were the inevitable consequence of a serious attempt to break new ground in the field of political theory. Thus it was not surprising that they had taken people aback. And for this very reason, he continued, it was of great importance that his political theories should be treated as theories, and not thoughtlessly criticised for their lack of specificity. Rousseau himself had warned against the indiscriminate application of general principles; indeed he himself had seen the need, especially in relation to politics, for legislators to be sensitive to particular circumstances. Nor had he intended his blueprints for republican government to be imposed insensitively and without modification. But above and beyond his defence of Rousseau’s legacy to politics, and the allowance it made for local conditions, the mainstay of Lloft’s defence lay in his enthusiastic account of the effect of Rousseau’s character. For in a long footnote to his discussion of the Contrat Social, he suggested that the only way to make good Rousseau’s paradoxes was to partake of the same enthusiasm which had brought them into being: . . . But if the heart does not tell the reader of Rousseau that paradoxes like his flow from the warmth and force of the heart and are not studied sophisms invented at leisure and elaborately wrought in contradiction to the sentiment of their author – or at least without the vivid concurrence of that sentiment – that the world might admire him as a surprising inventor of strange things, – if the heart 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 to which the proof must apply.30

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

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gain anything from a reading of his work, it is necessary to bring to them the very same spirit of enthusiasm that they themselves were designed to teach. It is, to say the least, a rather circular, self-confirming argument. Precisely because it contained such a direct and powerful appeal to the notion of sensibility, it was often very tempting for radicals to invoke the principle of revolutionary enthusiasm in this way. In that sense, Lloft was by no means unusual. But it should also be recognised that it was especially tempting to do so when discussing Rousseau, because JeanJacques himself had done so much to encourage this kind of approach, with the Confessions serving as a kind of posthumous proof of the sincerity 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 contributed to the formation of a radical sensibility in two distinct but related ways: firstly, by politicising the language of sentimental reciprocity, raising private ‘sensibility’ to the level of public ‘enthusiasm’; and secondly by encouraging its readers to take an active and self-reflexive interest in the details of its author’s life. For in suggesting that only the truly virtuous would understand Jean-Jacques’s behaviour, Rousseau had effectively challenged his readers to bring their own lives to bear upon the reading experience, as a kind of parallel text, inviting them to examine their own consciences before deciding to condemn him. So much so, indeed, that in many of the radical reviews of Rousseau this sense of the barrier between writer and reader having been broken down is often quite explicit. For example, in the course of an anonymous review of the second part of the Confessions for the radical Analytical Review, Mary Wollstonecraft was moved to chafe against the formality of her 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 see that man to do a generous action who could ridicule Rousseau’s interesting account of his feelings and rêveries – who could, in all the pride of wisdom despise such a heart when naked before him.31

In this way Rousseau made a significant contribution to the literary culture 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 field of republican transparency.32 As we saw in chapter one, at a number of points in the Contrat Social Rousseau had insinuated that the inability of the modern reader to imagine the conditions under which the people of a particular nation

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might be able to assemble together and form a republic was to be seen as an index of his alienation. And in the Confessions he used the same rhetorical strategy in reverse when he made the tacit suggestion that to repeat the judgments of contemporary society upon the character of Jean-Jacques was simply another way of discovering one’s own corruption. Thus his autobiography constituted an extremely manipulative and playful reworking of his own political theory, for it proposed that in order for French society to be regenerated, the general will would have to rediscover itself by identifying with the individual, rather than the other way round. Thus it was that, on the eve of the French Revolution, as J. G. A. Pocock has suggested, by ‘paranoically proclaiming that the tensions between personality and society did have apocalyptic possibilities, [and] that the apocalypse had arrived in his own person’ Rousseau was able to offer an extremely idiosyncratic inflection of the civic humanist tradition.33 Even in the postumous Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (), in which Rousseau had sought to dramatise his renunciation of worldly concerns like literature and politics, there had been a continuing political resonance in his discourse of self-martyrdom, as he sought to excuse his withdrawal into solitary isolation by arguing that it had been forced upon him by the persecutions of his enemies. Everything external is henceforth foreign to me. I no longer have any neighbours, fellow-men or brothers in this world. To me the earth is like a strange planet I have fallen into.34

After despotism had deprived him of his rightful home, he said, the very remorselessness of oppression from without had helped him to discover spiritual consolation from within, affording him the private state of rêverie as a replacement for the public state of Geneva. In this way his private contemplations, for all their apparent unconcern with the world of politics, can still be seen to identify themselves as ways of rethinking the public. ‘This type of reverie can be enjoyed anywhere where 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 dungeon without a single object before my eyes, I should still have been able to dream pleasantly.’35 In this way Rousseau’s autobiographical writings had a powerful influence upon the minds of the Revolutionary generation precisely because they gave republican principles an unprecedented sensuous immediacy and invited the public to reflect upon the politics of aliena-

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tion in terms of their own personal experience. Thus it is likely that the English radical anarchist William Godwin had Rousseau in mind when he said of Catholic confession that it would be much better if ‘instead of a practice thus ambiguous, and which has been made so dangerous an engine of ecclesiastical despotism, every man would make the world his confessional, and the human species the keeper of his conscience’.36 In his idiosyncratic reinflection of the tradition of spiritual autobiography Rousseau had effectively realised this ideal, founding a new, and explicitly republican style of writing which offered a powerful means of locating the political in the personal and the personal in the political.  In her book The Body and the French Revolution Dorinda Outram has given a compelling account of the cult of neo-classical virtue developed by men of the political class during the French Revolution. ‘Given the breakdown of cultural sovereignty and the slow weakening of sovereignty in the political sphere’, she writes, ‘individuals were forced increasingly into self-cultivation in order to validate their claims to authority in public and private roles.’ In the absence of institutional and cultural models, the ‘stoical’ tradition of antiquity was profoundly useful to the French in that it provided a means of personifying political authority. According to Outram, the ideal political subject was to eschew both the anarchic activity characteristic of the Parisian sans-culottes and the type of sentimental effusion traditionally associated with women, so that virtue was defined in terms of an absolute self-control. Thus she argues that the revolutionary ideal of masculinity was ‘a struggle against sensibilité in all its forms, and in particular against the fusion of subject and object, reaction and occasion, which was its hall-mark, and which women, contemporaries felt, displayed in such a high degree’.37 While broadly concurring with Outram’s account of the gendering of revolutionary identity, I would contend that it is ultimately rather unnuanced. A detailed analysis of the political rhetoric of the republican period reveals that, on the contrary, the discourse of sensibility was not repudiated by the French Jacobins, but that it was actively redeployed to soften the aristocratic emphasis of the Plutarchan tradition of neoclassical virtue. It is true that expressions of sensibility directed towards individuals, factions or corporate bodies were often deemed unpatriotic and effeminate, but sentimental effusions directed at ‘the people’ as a whole actually fulfilled a valuable function, serving to democratise the

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discourse of civic humanism by putting the warmth of ‘natural’ feeling in the service of public virtue. In this way the language of sympathy was a crucial supplement to the discourse of neo-classical stoicism because it enabled the revolutionary bourgeoisie to build a rhetorical bridge between themselves and the sans-culottes, offering a potential solution to the ‘problem’ of popular politics. In the speech of  November  Robespierre attacked Louvet for what he considered to be the latter’s excessive sympathy for the victims of the September Massacres: ‘The sensibility which groans almost exclusively for the enemies of liberty’, he declared, ‘is to me, highly suspect.’38 For him there was something potentially aristocratic about the language of sentiment when it concentrated on specific groups and factions; it was only valid when its object was the nation. ‘Under a monarchy’, he declared in a speech on  May , ‘it is permitted to love one’s family but not the fatherland, it is honorable to defend one’s friends, but not the oppressed.’39 Thus in his defence of the September Massacres he argued that it was necessary for the representatives of the French Republic to seek to channel individual effusions of feeling into a broader current of general benevolence: We are assured that innocents have perished, the number may have been exaggerated, but even one is undoubtedly too much. Citizens, weep over this real 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, hidden from the vengeance of the law, who finally fell under the sword of popular justice; but let your sorrow have its season, like all human things. Let us reserve some tears for more touching calamities. Let us weep for the hundred thousand patriots 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 their mothers. Have you no brothers, children, spouses to avenge also? For French legislators such as yourselves, your family is the fatherland, it is the entire human race, except tyrants and their accomplices.40

As we saw in chapter one, the Constitution of  had been a source of profound disappointment to the Parisian sans-culottes. Unexpectedly limited in its franchise, it was one of a series of government measures that served to undermine popular faith in the notion of salvation through legislation. In times of economic or political emergency, as in September , the sectionnaires became so impatient with what they perceived to be the impotence of institutions that they decided to take the administraton of justice into their own hands. As Mary Wollstonecraft expressed it: ‘the only excuse that can be made for the

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ferocity of the Parisians is then simply to observe, that they had not any confidence in the laws, which they had always found to be cobwebs to catch small flies’.41 What endeared Robespierre to the sans-culotte leaders during these times of insurrection was precisely the fact that his sympathy for the popular cause went beyond the bounds of legality. As Hannah Arendt has suggested ‘of the men of the Revolution only those survived and rose to power who became the spokesmen [of the masses] and surrendered the artificial, man-made laws of a not yet constituted body politic to the “natural” laws which the masses obeyed’.42 The reciprocity of the authorial voice and autobiographical subject in Rousseau’s Confessions provided a valuable model for Robespierre in his dealings with the people. While seeking to give a retrospective coherence to the chaotic behaviour of Jean-Jacques, Rousseau had also sought to maintain that the virtue of the latter lay precisely in the fact that he was ‘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, justifying their actions as one would justify the actions of children, while at the same time arguing that it was precisely the spontaneous and unreflective quality of those actions that was an absolute guarantee of their virtue. He saw that, like the thefts of the youthful Jean-Jacques, the raiding of grocery shops by the people of Paris during the economic crisis of – represented a virtuous attempt to bypass the fantasy world of paper money and commercial speculation and engage in a more direct relation with the means of subsistence. As we shall see, Rousseau’s notion of the ‘conscience’ as selfishness pushed to the point of benevolence was profoundly useful here, for it provided Robespierre with a means of linking his own personal feelings with the unpredictable energies of the French people. Thus it was that Robespierre was frequently keen to celebrate what he called ‘the pure egotism of uncorrupted men who find a celestial pleasure in the serenity of a pure conscience and in the ravishing spectacle of the public good’.44 As we saw in chapter , despite their fondness for the rhetoric of popular soveriegnty, the Jacobins were ultimately no more willing to accede to the final demands of the sans-culottes than their Girondin predecessors. As since they could not agree to working-class proposals for the wholescale redistribution of food and land, they had to find a way of curtailing the power of the Paris sections without being seen to oppose them. Indeed the Terror of – can be seen as an attempt by the committees of the National Convention to establish a monopoly on

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revolutionary violence, to take it out of the hands of the enragés and septembriseurs and subject it to institutional control. It could also be interpreted as a desperate endeavour to heal the gap between revolutionary action and political reflection, to bring the destructive and regenerative impulse of the Revolution under the aegis of the state. Thus from the spring and summer of , right up until his execution on  July , Robespierre’s response to the spectacle of continuing popular unrest and increasing policy division among the political class of the French bourgeoisie was to seek to transform the Revolution into a war of virtue against corruption. To his mind, the continued absence of a unified general will suggested that counter-revolutionary sentiments must be more invisibly and deeply pervasive than anyone had previously suspected. In response to this, he considered that it was necessary to mobilise the machinery of the state in the war against treason, so that by  he was proposing a system of political terror that would enable the people to look deep into the hearts and minds of its enemies and bring them to summary justice. In this way Robespierre was to transform the politics of conscience from a rhetorical style into an institutional practice.  In  the busts of Claude Helvétius and Jean-Jacques Rousseau had been displayed alongside one another in the hall of the Jacobin club, an acknowledgement of the extent to which their writings had helped to provide the philosophical foundation of revolutionary politics. But on  December  Robespierre demanded that the bust of Helvétius be removed from its position of honour. As we noted in chapter , during the course of the Revolution he had become increasingly mistrustful of the current of ‘progressive’ thought represented by Helvétius, and ever more anxious to differentiate it from the ‘primitivist’ tradition with which it was so often confused. He found the philosophical rationalism of the leading philosophes and physiocrats profoundly incompatible with Rousseau’s voluntarist ideal. And rightly or wrongly, he identified the Girondins with this rationalist tradition, regularly accusing their intellectual mentor, the mathematician Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, of peddling a ‘treacherous hotchpotch of mercenary rhapsodies’ that had hindered the dissemination of true knowledge.45 In this context, a brief look at the epistemology of ethics developed by Helvétius and his followers can help to give us a deeper understanding of Rousseau’s philosophy

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of conscience, by highlighting the moral utilitarianism that it sought to negate. And this, in turn, will allow us to develop a clearer sense of the paradoxical impulse that lay behind Robespierre’s Terror, what we might think of as its doomed attempt to legalise the ‘illegal’ spirit of the French Revolution. Claude Helvétius’ De l’esprit (), which had grown out of the Cartestian rationalism of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was one of the ground-breaking texts in the history of utilitarian philosophy. During the course of this treatise, Helvétius suggested that in the sphere of practical ethics it was impossible to fathom the intentions of an individual, and that therefore one could only judge morality from actions and their consequences. According to this view of things, human intentions were always selfish on one level or another, for man was naturally a hedonistic animal, driven solely by the anticipation of pleasure or pain. Even individual probity, according to Helvétius, was nothing more than self-interest. And so man was not suited to living according to abstract standards of morality: ‘It is as impossible to love 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 one should accept it as the foundation upon which to build a system of social legislation: The continual declamations of moralists against the malignity of mankind are a proof of their knowing but little of human nature. Men are not cruel and perfidious, but carried away by their own interest. The cries of moral philosophers will certainly not change this mainspring of the moral universe.47

It was ultimately the task of the legislator, Helvétius argued, to harmonise each private interest with that of the nation, and to ensure that individual actions tended towards the public welfare, for it was in this way alone that good laws would form virtuous men. And the virtuous man, in Helvétius’s formulation, would not be someone who sacrificed his pleasure, habits and strongest passions to the public welfare, since it was impossible that such a man could exist; rather he would be someone whose prevailing passions were so conformable to the general interest, that he was almost constantly forced to be virtuous. The model developed by Jeremy Bentham in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation of , is perhaps one of the best examples of this ‘philosophical radicalism’ in its most extreme form.48 Written while Bentham was being employed as constitutional adviser to Mirabeau and the Abbé Sieyès, it constituted a complete theory of

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liberal government organised around the Helvétian notion of utility. The purpose of laws, in this version of things, was to organise the pursuit of private interests into a system that maximised the general good, or ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, as Bentham preferred to describe it. These laws were not designed to inspire and enable political commitment in the heart of the citizen but to inform the individual of the extent to which he was subject to a felicific calculus: ‘The business of government’, he remarked ‘is to promote the happiness of the society, by punishing or rewarding.’49 Social actions were to be graded and categorised according to the extent to which they contributed to, or detracted from, the principle of social utility, and individual crimes were to be punished according to a strict economy of deterrence. Thus there was no intrinsic meaning to human action, in Bentham’s ideology of legislation, it was always to be seen exclusively in extrinsic terms. Despite being fully mired in the self-love philosophy of Helvétius and Holbach, however, Bentham did not seek to deny the principle of individual benevolence, he merely insisted that it lay outside the legislator’s concern, since from his point of view the intention which prompted an action could never be as important as its social consequences. In The German Ideology () Karl Marx was to argue that the rise of the utilitarian philosophy was to be seen as part of a philosophical project on the part of the industrial bourgeoisie to naturalise and justify the emergence of modern commercial society. The secret meaning of the utility relation, according to Marx, was that one derived benefit for oneself only by doing harm to someone else. ‘For [the bourgeois]’, he remarked, ‘only one relation is valid on its own account – the relation of exploitation.’50 Thus for him utility theory was nothing more than a mystification of the logic of commerce–capitalism. In a society run on utilitarian lines, Marx predicted, the value of a particular relation would no longer be considered intrinsic to that relation, it would have to be referred to an external standard for its final assessment. So, for example, in economic matters, all forms of private exploitation might be justified as indirectly contributing to the public good. And similarly, by the same process of externalisation and objectification, the system of public legislation governing civil society would come to form the sole repository of moral value, leading to a radical separation between personal ethics and 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’s moral philosophy in terms which went some way towards anticipating

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the later ideas of Marx. In the person of the eponymous cleric, Rousseau described how he had laid aside traditional religion in favour of a faith based on revealed evidence, in which God was defined as the primal will of the universe – the creative force that brought everything into being – and human free will as an active portion of that force, residing in the individual mind. Having sketched out his beliefs in this way, the vicar then proceeded to launch into a critique of the sensationalism and necessitarianism of Helvétius and Holbach, demolishing the former’s dictum that perception was the same as judgement by arguing that ‘to perceive is to feel, to compare is to judge’, and that therefore to feel and to judge were not the same thing.51 As his argument developed, Rousseau was ultimately to repose upon a notion of the ‘conscience’ as the ultimate vehicle of free will and the vessel of moral truth. Not a judgment but a feeling, conscience was superior to reason because it offered a spontaneous and therefore selfless form of ethical perception.52 And yet its metaphysical status as an a priori faculty of insight also served to render it absolutely distinct from Helvetian ‘sensation’: Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide for a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free; infallible judge of good and evil, making man like to God!53

Thus Rousseau argued that the pangs of the heart were the surest test of truth or falsehood: ‘I have only to consult myself on what I want to do,’ the savoyard vicar declared, ‘everything that I feel to be good is good, everything that I feel to be evil is evil: the best of all casuists is the conscience’.54 In this formulation, the conscience was an ethical principle in the human mind that transcended rational calculation, a principle that went beyond the bounds of utility to identify itself with the absolute good. By defending the notion of a subjective moral sense, a morale sensitive, Rousseau sought to resist Helvétius’s objectification of social morality, to overturn his transformation of goodness into usefulness and to reverse his alienation of justice into law. However, in the very force of his negation of this ‘external’ system of ethics, Rousseau risked losing himself in his own ‘internal’ universe. And in his autobiographical writings this tendency was sometimes especially pronounced. For example, in the Sixth Promenade of the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire he briefly imagined what it would have been like to possess the mythical ring of Gyges, a magic ornament which was supposed to have rendered its bearer invisible. Suddenly he found himself indulging

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in a dream of sublime power in which it had become his prerogative to administer justice to mankind: Perhaps in my light-hearted moments I should have had the childish gaiety to work miracles, but being entirely disinterested, and obeying only my natural inclinations, I should have performed scores of merciful or equitable ones for every act of just severity.55

In Emile, Rousseau suggested that benevolence was merely selfishness pushed to the point of principle, an invisible will acting without fear of contradiction, and that in order to be properly disinterested one only had to follow one’s own inclinations, for as long as these inclinations were unmediated by rational reflection, they would inevitably exist in harmony with the ‘divine conscience’ which partakes of the general will of God. But it is worth noting that in this passage from the Rêveries the fundamental kindliness of the conscience did not preclude it from carrying out some acts of severe justice the moral foundation of which was as invisible as the spatial positioning of their perpetrator. This was what utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham found problematic about sentimental morality. For them, it mistook the symptom of moral action for its ground. Disclaiming the necessity of looking out for any extrinsic ground, the conscience was not so much a principle of moral action, in Bentham’s view, as the negation of all principle, and this was what rendered it dangerously unpredictable compared with the utilitarian calculus. Sometimes foolishly indulgent, it would more often be cruel and arbitrary, precisely because there was nothing to check it. Therefore despite all indications to the contrary, Bentham argued, ‘the principle of sympathy and antipathy is most apt to err on the side of severity’.56  As we saw in chapter , the French constitution-mongers of  had seen the foundation of liberty and equality almost entirely in terms of the declaration and preservation of rights. But in the atmosphere of national emergency that characterised the years after , Robespierre and his fellow Jacobins had begun to question this liberal ideology of legislation. For them, its complex forms and procedures were increasingly inappropriate to the revolutionary situation, for they obstructed the punishment of vice and interfered with the exercise of virtue. Not only did the law fail to acknowledge the value of ‘illegal’ actions such as popular insurrection, it also failed to recognise that it was in the very

The politics of confession in Rousseau and Robespierre



nature of political conspiracy to be incapable of proof. Thus from the trial of the king onwards, legal proceedings in cases of political importance were increasingly conducted on the principle that the conscience was superior to calculation, and that a strong conviction of the guilt of the accused could overturn any evidence for the defence. At the trial of the Girondins in the autumn of  the defendants complained that the public prosecutors were not conducting their indictment on a properly legal basis. However, as John Adolphus pointed out, only the previous year Brissot had himself declared that ‘in the case of conspiracies it is absurd to call for demonstrative facts and judicial proofs: that at no period have they ever been obtained not even in the conspiracies of Catiline; for conspirators are not so unguarded in their conduct. It is sufficient that there exist strong possibilities’.57 Like so many of the revolutionary generation, Brissot was hoist by his own petard, convicted on a set of principles that he had helped to found, a fact which was not lost on conservative historians such as Sir Walter Scott, who, when conducting his account of the Revolution almost thirty years later, made a point of reminding his readers of the hypocrisy of Brissot and his men: ‘it will be recorded’, he wrote, ‘to the disgrace of their pretensions to stern republican virtue, that the Girondists were willing to employ, for the accomplishment of their purpose, those base and guilty tools which afterwards effected their own destruction’.58 By  it was clear to Robespierre that the people, although fundamentally virtuous, were profoundly susceptible to counter-revolutionary flattery. Moroever, he increasingly came to consider that, far from being systematically opposed to one another, the Brissotin modérés and the popular enragés were all been part of the same – fundamentally aristocratic – conspiracy to seduce them: Brissot and the Girondins armed the rich against the people; the faction of Hébert protected the aristocracy by flattering the people in order to oppress them.59

And such was the extent of the counter-revolutionary conspiracy that even the clamour of the sections could no longer be considered the authentic voice of the people. ‘Of what importance is it that Brutus killed the tyrant?’ Robespierre asked despondently on  February , ‘Tyranny continues to live in all hearts, and Rome exists no longer, other than in Brutus.’60 Aristocracy had not been eradicated by the physical destruction of the king, it had become a metaphysical phenomenon, everywhere at large, threatening to corrupt the minds of the people.

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

It was in this climate of paranoia and persecution that the principle of revolutionary justice was finally institutionalised by the law of the  Prairial, which was presented to the National Convention by the Robespierrist Georges Couthon in the summer of . This measure dispensed with any residual commitment to the role of the defence in criminal trials. A judiciary and jury composed of virtuous patriots, it was suggested, if left to itself, was quite capable of penetrating the veil of counter-revolutionary conspiracy, of bringing aristocratic darkness into the light of transparent day: The proof necessary to condemn the enemies of the people is, any sort of document, whether material or moral, verbal or written, that can naturally obtain the assent of every just and reasonable mind. The rule of judgement is the conscience of the jurors inspired by patriotism, their goal the triumph of the republic and the ruin of its enemies; the procedure, the simple methods which good sense indicates in order to come to an understanding of the truth in the way that the law has set it down. The law offers patriotic juries as a defence for libelled patriots. It accords no such defence to conspirators.61

Realising the Rousseauvian desire to substitute moral truth for the truth of facts, the law of the  Prairial considered that the guilt or innocence of the accused would be evident to the court without a defence being necessary, for a revolutionary jury would come to the right decision merely by following its own natural inclinations.62 Even the tendency to show fear was considered suspect. For as Robespierre himself said in the immediate aftermath of Danton and Hébert’s death, anxiety of this sort might be seen as a sign of inner corruption: ‘I say that whoever trembles at this moment is guilty; because innocence never fears public surveillance.’63 Primarily this was because, in his eyes, the Terror was directed towards the fostering of liberty and virtue, and therefore only counter-revolutionaries could wish to oppose it. Virtueas-sympathy for the plight of the people had been displaced into virtueas-terror: If the mainspring of popular government in peace time is virtue, its resource during a revolution is at one and the same time virtue and terror; virtue without which terror is merely terrible; terror, without which virtue is simply powerless.64

In an attempt to purify the Jacobin club of counter-revolutionary elements during the winter of , Merlin de Thionville had proposed that members should render themselves transparent to the general will by answering the following questions:

The politics of confession in Rousseau and Robespierre



What were you in ? What have you done till ? What was your fortune in ? 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 counterrevolutionary petition? If you are an administrator, journalist, or representative of the people, have you devoted your efforts only to the service of liberty?’65

Robespierre’s Terror, by contrast, was not centrally concerned with cross-questioning suspects on the nature of empirical evidence, but with scouring their hearts for signs of counter-revolutionary intention. It was the inner impulse that mattered to him, not the external behaviour, which was one of the reasons why he was to oppose the proscription of Danton and Desmoulins for so long, despite the irregularity and imprudence of their political conduct. Thus the law of the  Prairial that Robespierre and Couthon helped to produce at the height of the Grand Terror represented a clear reaction against the liberal theory of jurisprudence exemplified by the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen’ of  and a firm rejection of the felicific calculus that had been put forward by the utilitarians. In sentencing its subjects to either liberty or death, the Revolutionary Tribunal was to become a secular version of the Last Judgement, steadfastly refusing to engage in the painstaking calculation of crimes and punishments that absorbed Helvétius and Bentham. And this was the historical result of Robespierre’s stated desire to create a society in which liberty and equality would cease to exist externally in the form of a written body of legislation, having been transformed into a set of internal principles inscribed within the heart of each citizen: What is the goal to which we are travelling? The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of eternal justice, the laws of which having been engraved, not in marble or on stone, but in the hearts of men, even in those of the 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 the profound mistrust of language which that entailed. Just as Capel Lloft, in attempting to defend Rousseau’s paradoxes, had sought a proof for their veracity and sincerity outside the realm of language, a proof residing in the very principle of ‘enthusiasm’ itself, so too the judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal were being instructed to search between the lines of each charge of treason, for signs of a political passion which, if present, could heal all apparent contradictions into a harmonious whole, but whose absence could never be excused; a passion, moreover, whose

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defining characteristic was that it was quite literally beyond representation, so that, strictly speaking, it could not be identified by ‘signs’ at all. Not surprisingly, perhaps, for many subsequent commentators on the French Revolution, the law of the  Prairial was nothing more than a philosophical cloak to cover tyranny. As Germaine de Staël remarked in : ‘The law,’ said Couthon, in proposing that of  Prairial, ‘accords patriotic juries as a defence for the innocent, but no defence to conspirators’. Are there not in this maxim all the the elements of well-coordinated speech? At yet has it ever been possible to bring together in so few words so many atrocious absurdities? This net of language, which enslaves the most upright spirit and from which the most powerful mind knows not how to free itself, is one of the greatest evils of an imperfect metaphysics. Thus reason becomes the tool of stupidity and crime.67

In this formulation, de Staël shows how in the law of the  Prairial the very forms of reason and of law had been used to further an essentially irrational and illegal end. And it is true that its general purpose was to cut a path through the mechanistic system of Enlightenment rationality in order to expedite the execution of revolutionary justice. Nevertheless, what has tended to be neglected in this context, is that one of the subsidiary aims of the Prairial law, ironically enough, was to try and put a stop to the bloodthirsty terrorism of rabid Montagnards like Carrier and Tallien, who had been arbitrarily condemning thousands to the scaffold in the north-western and southern provinces of France during – in their role as réprésentants en mission to the Committee of Public Safety. And this was why Prairial sought to bring the administration of revolutionary justice back under central control, stipulating that in the future all suspects would have to come to Paris to be tried. But more than this, it could also be seen as an attempt to reinvigorate the moral dimension of the Terror because of its suggestion that the fundamental question when trying suspects was always to be whether they were good republicans at heart, and not whether they had always behaved impeccably. One should not over-emphasise this element, of course; fundamentally, the law was designed to make it easier to sentence and execute suspected traitors. But behind it all there did lie an attempt to purify the Terror by calling a halt to the petty and vindictive purges which had been taking place all over France, and bringing the nation’s mind back to the central question of political ‘enthusiasm’. In that sense it constituted a Terror within the Terror, in that one of its prime objects was to halt the excesses of the Terrorists themselves.

The politics of confession in Rousseau and Robespierre



The French cultural historian Marie-Hélène Huet effectively endorses this point when she makes a radical distinction between Robespierre’s Terror and the popular cult of the guillotine that was contemporaneous with it: ‘Robespierre denounced the false terrors and played a crucial role in putting an end to Carrier’s infamous drownings in Nantes’, she writes, before going on to argue that ‘Robespierre’s negative Terror’, was ‘precisely the reverse side of this monstrous theatricality that would endow death with a parodic ceremonial in the last two months of the Revolution.’ In this way Huet hints that Robespierre’s legislative theory of the Terror was actually an attempt to transcend its executive practice: Robespierre tried to define the Revolution as sublime, as an ideal that would transcend all representation and escape all misrepresentation, as a rhetorical purity that could only be expressed in a negative form.68

Of course, as is well known, the guillotine was an extremely recent invention in , very much a piece of modern technology, primarily designed to make the punishment of criminals both more efficient and humane. Indeed, as Daniel Arasse has shown, at bottom it was the product of an essentially rationalist project to maximise the speed and minimise the pain of death,69 and thus a prime example of the philosophical utilitarianism of the French Enlightenment. But as we have seen, unlike the guillotine, the policy of the Terror was not simply or straightforwardly a product of the new social science, as the propagandists of the counter-revolution have often sought to maintain. Rather, it stood in an ambiguous relation to the mechanisms of modernity. It was a pursuit of ancient Reason through the instruments of rationality, and hence a disastrous confusion, in de Stael’s terms, of ‘la morale’ with ‘le calcul’.70 From the very beginning of the Revolution, Robespierre had employed ‘progressive’ means to pursue an essentially ‘primitive’ ideal. Hence his attempt to conduct representative government in the spirit of direct democracy, and his desire to use legal procedures in order to transcend the law. And if we follow this line of argument, it does not take much to see, even at the heart of the Robespierrist Terror itself, a Romantic spirit of transcendence, a desperate attempt to employ enlightened means in order to get beyond the ethical vacuity of the Enlightenment. Whereas other revolutionaries were prepared to embrace the utility of the Terror, its circumstantial necessity, Robespierre always sought to supply it with a metaphysical sanction,

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

constantly seeking to distract himself from its physical consequences by referring to its overarching intention. His fantasy was that the Terror was an entirely internal phenomenon which had entirely internal effects: transforming the hearts and minds of slaves and tyrants, but not affecting their bodies. Ironically enough, however, he was to become synonymous with the guillotine through the very strenuousness of his efforts to deny its very existence.  As the fortunes of the French armies changed, and the subsistence crisis improved, a consensus began to grow in the National Convention during the spring and summer of  that it was no longer necessary or desirable for Terror to be the order of the day. This finally resulted in the proscription and execution of the men who had been its chief defenders on the Committee of Public Safety: Robespierre, and his supporters and acolytes Couthon, Le Bas and Saint-Just. Of course, it would be profoundly misguided to try and absolve the Robespierrists of their responsibility for this bloody phase of French history; but at the same time, it is also important to remember the political motives behind the Thermidorean conspiracy which brought about their downfall. When it began to dawn upon some of Robespierre’s most bloodthirsty colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety that they might soon be called to task for their role in the Terror, either by Robespierre himself, whom they suspected of aspiring to a position of dictatorship, or else by the members of the National Convention, who were reported to be growing tired of the endless butchery, they began to depict L’Incorruptible as a despot and a tyrant in order to distance themselves from political blame. To all intents and purposes, men such as Collot d’Herbois, Billaud Varennes, Tallien and Barère had been as fervently committed to revolutionary government as any during the terrible months of –, but because they had not shared Robespierre’s obsession to explain, to justify, to continually moralise the Terror, it was relatively easy for them to begin to persuade the conventionnels that he had been its sole contriver. Nevertheless, they were by no means political innocents. In the words of Robert Southey, who was to retain a curious fondness for Robespierre, even long after he had reneged and become a Tory: ‘The Fall of Robespierre was the triumph of fear rather than of justice, and the satisfaction with which it must be contemplated is incomplete because a few monsters even worse than himself were among the foremost in sending him to the scaffold.’71

The politics of confession in Rousseau and Robespierre

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That Robespierre himself was mindful of this can be seen from a speech he gave on  Thermidor, Year  ( July ), the day before Tallien’s coup was finally hatched against him, in which he protested to the National Convention that he was being transformed into a kind of scapegoat for the Terror. Increasingly he was being treated as if he had single-handedly managed every aspect of its existence, drafting every indictment, and supervising every execution: ‘There is perhaps not one individual arrested, not one citizen persecuted to whom it has not been said of me: He is the author of your ills; you would be happy and free, if he existed no more. How can I imagine or relate all of the lies that have been secretly insinuated in the National Convention and elsewhere to render me fearful and contemptible?’72 And so, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he continued to protest his political innocence in the months leading up to his downfall, as if he could still detach his ‘primitive’ ideal from the ‘progressive’ methods by which he had sought to bring it about. Desperately, he sought to reassert the transparent understanding between himself and the people which had been the bedrock of his political authority: Who is the tyrant protecting me? Which is the faction to which I belong? It is you. Which is the faction that has since the beginning of the Revolution overwhelmed 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 all crimes are leagued.73

But as the logic of exclusion fell upon him, he resisted becoming just another suspect, preferring to exchange the guise of the legislator for that of the solitary. So that as his political martyrdom approached, he continued to offer himself as a transparent reflection of the will of the people, while drawing fervently upon an identifiably Rousseauvian rhetoric of isolation and resignation. As we have seen, in the first ‘Promenade’ of his Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Rousseau had protested against the universal conspiracy that had been organised against him, primarily by his former friends the philosophes, but subsequently by the rest of the world: ‘So now I am alone in the world,’ he wrote, ‘with no brother, neighbour or friend, and no company left me but my own. The most sociable and loving of men has been unanimously proscribed by all the rest.’74 And similarly, in the last weeks of his life, Robespierre was to represent himself as a thwarted philanthropist whose very virtue had made him an object of scorn. ‘Who am I that they accuse?’ he declared on the day before his death:

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

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

In Rousseau’s political theory it was suggested that liberty and equality would finally be attained if the individual identified with the general will. In his autobiographical writings, however, this polarity was reversed: both the Confessions and the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire set up the possibility that the people might rediscover their capacity to assemble as a unified general will by identifying with the incorruptible conscience of a virtuous individual. And it was in emulation of this practice that in his final speech Robespierre offered himself as the utopian principle within a corrupt state: For myself, whose life seems to the enemies of my country an obstacle to their odious plans, I freely consent to sacrifice it, if their awful empire must continue to exist. Who could desire to witness any longer this horrible succession of traitors more or less deft at hiding their hideous hearts underneath a mask of virtue until the moment when their crimes reached fruition, leaving posterity the embarrassment of deciding which of the enemies of my country was the most cowardly and the most atrocious?76

According to Jacobin ideology, the guillotine restored the unanimity of the general will by removing the will of the recalcitrant individual, reasserting republican transparency by clearing away the aristocratic obstacle. Here, however, the polarity of the opposition between the individual and the general has been suddenly reversed. The ‘Incorruptible’ depicts himself as the only obstacle to the ‘animosité générale’ of the counter-revolution, offering to sacrifice himself in order that its universal progress might resume. Thus in Robespierre’s final speeches egotism becomes the paradoxical expression of a disappointed Jacobinism. Paradoxical, moreover, in both senses of the word, for it is revolutionary in its wilful resistance to the prevailing orthodoxy, but it is also fundamentally contradictory in its misanthropic expression of a vanishing civic ideal. As he had predicted, Robespierre became the prime site for the displacement of revolutionary guilt and disappointment in the years after Thermidor. Thus especially in the liberal histories of the period, he was regularly depicted as a tyrannical figure who had wrecked the Revolution through his hypocritical and bloodthirsty pursuit of an

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impractical model of virtue. Gradually, however, he was taken up by counter-revolutionary historians too, and though they were understandably far less interested in putting the sole blame for the Revolution upon him, they did nevertheless enjoy transforming him into a kind of political Tartuffe, beneath whose virtuous appearance the darkest ambitions had lain concealed. And it was this that encouraged historians like Walter Scott to dwell with fascination upon the ‘fiendish expression’ of his death-mask, as if it was only in death that his political disguise had been fully exposed. And indeed, it was precisely because of details like this that he became the historical source behind many of the masked and cowled hypocrites that were later to litter the poetry and fiction of the period, from Ann Radcliffe’s evil monk Schedoni to Thomas Moore’s Veiled Prophet of Khorassan.77 But aside from his status as one of the literary daemons of Romantic writing, however, there was another, less obvious side to Robespierre’s revolutionary legacy, which had a considerable influence upon the literary practice of the English Romantics: he provided a powerful paradigm of the politics of confession. For in his final speeches, he effectively went beyond Rousseau’s cultivation of autobiography as a consolation for private disappointment, transforming his rhetoric of self-martyrdom into a form of political discourse, and by this means he gave a dramatic demonstration to his contemporaries of how confession might offer, at one and the same time, a means of transcending the débâcle of revolutionary history, and also a method of incubating its utopian ideal.

  

Chivalry, justice and the law in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams

The mind is its own place; and is endowed with powers that might enable it to laugh at the tyrant’s vigilance. I passed and repassed these 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 master Ferdinando Falkland, the eponymous hero of William Godwin’s Things As They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams () discovers in his prison cell a revolutionary spirit of resistance. Like Rousseau on the road to the prison of Vincennes, suddenly overcome with an overpowering sense of the depravity of modern society, Caleb responds to the spectacle of despotism by undergoing a powerful revolution of mind; in a moment the last trappings of feudal deference have fallen from him, and he has resolved to defy the law and attempt his escape. In this way the double title of Godwin’s novel advertised its double nature: it was at once a biting critique of the English social order and a suspenseful gothic novel. Thirty years after the first appearance of Godwin’s first novel the republican journalist William Hazlitt could still remember its impact: ‘We conceive no one ever began Caleb Williams that did not read it through: no one who read it could possibly forget it, or speak of it after any length of time but with an impression as if the events and feelings had been personal to himself.’ Indeed Hazlitt felt certain that it deserved to occupy a central place in the national literature: ‘The novel is utterly unlike anything else that was ever written’, he wrote, ‘and is one of the most original as well as powerful productions in the English language.’2 Undoubtedly he was especially fond of Caleb Williams on account of its radical politics, for the novel contains an extended critique of Edmund Burke’s defence of the principle of aristocracy in the Reflections on the 

Chivalry, justice and the law in Caleb Williams

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Revolution in France (). And certainly, on a first reading, its primary force lies precisely in its exposure of the ‘poison of chivalry’ that Godwin had detected in Burke’s writing. But it was also far from complacent in its radicalism. It did more than merely catalogue the crimes of aristocracy, it also problematised many of the fundamental radical assumptions of the period, especially in its questioning of the value of legislative reform. And as I shall argue, in many ways it is precisely the paradoxical nature of this novel – its resistance not only to the ancient fiction of chivalry but also to the modern fiction of law – which identifies it as a truly ‘Jacobin’ text.  The first part of Caleb Williams, which is narrated to Caleb by his fellow servant the old retainer Mr Collins, deals with the youth of their master Ferdinando Falkland. Collins tells of the way in which Falkland grew up dazzled by the ideology of chivalry, by the notion of aristocracy as the rule of the best. This leads him to place upon himself strict standards of courtesy and conduct, but also to guard his own honour and reputation with paranoid fervour. A little way into the story, Godwin introduces us to another type of ruler, Barnabas Tyrrel, an arrogant and tyrannical country squire, who ruins a tenant on his estate, Hawkins, for resisting his wishes, and drives to the grave his niece Miss Melville for refusing to marry a man of his selection. In the course of these events Tyrrel comes into conflict with the chivalrous and cultivated Falkland who resists his petty tyranny by offering a model of benevolent patriarchy. After frequently colliding with Falkland on a number of issues, Tyrrel attacks and disgraces him in public, only to be found dead soon after. Initially, suspicion falls on Falkland, but it is gradually diverted to Hawkins and his son, who are, in the end, tried and executed for Tyrrel’s murder. Caleb Williams, the self-educated son of humble parents, enters the narrative when he is appointed as Falkland’s secretary some time after these events have taken place. By indulging his natural curiosity concerning his master’s increasingly eccentric and troubled behaviour, and by piecing together various items of anecdotal and written evidence, Caleb becomes convinced that it was in fact Falkland who had murdered Tyrrel. Obsessively driven to uncover the truth, Caleb remains at all times fully imbued with a sense of Falkland’s fundamental benevolence and virtue even after having discovered his secret, and shows no inclination to publicise his knowledge. Nevertheless, when Falkland becomes

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

aware that Williams has plucked out the heart of his mystery, he begins to persecute him systematically, despite Williams’s protestations of loyalty and confidence. Eventually Caleb is imprisoned on a false charge of robbing his employer. He escapes, hiding out in a forest with a band of anarchist outlaws, before moving to London in order to try and carve out a living for himself, disguised as a Jew. Finally, however, he is tracked down by Falkland’s agent Gines and brought to the bar. At his trial Caleb is forced to lay a charge of murder against Falkland, and although he has no proof to offer, his generosity and sincerity win from the murderer a confession of his guilt. Godwin’s first draft of the ending had been very different; it involved Falkland maintaining his innocence and Williams being driven to insanity. The revised ending is if anything more tragic. His golden reputation ruined, Falkland dies in despair before he can be taken to trial, and Caleb is left with the feeling that he has acted in a manner as bad if not worse than his master: ‘I have been a murderer’, he concludes, ‘a cool, deliberate, unfeeling murderer’ (, ). Throughout the novel, Falkland adheres to a particularly patrician brand of civic humanism, a cult of neo-classical virtue reminiscent of the writings of the late seventeenth-century moralist the Earl of Shaftesbury. For Falkland only a landed gentleman possesses the means and education necessary to the attainment of moral independence. In this respect he is both the embodiment of civilisation and the agent of its preservation. For him the cultivation of his aristocratic character is far more important than the reputation of commoners such as the Hawkinses or Caleb Williams. He makes this position clear in a conversation that he has with Caleb on Alexander the Great in the first chapter of volume two. Caleb suggests that one cannot think of Alexander as a hero, as he was personally responsible for the deaths of so many men. Immediately Falkland offers an energetic retort: The death of a hundred thousand men is at first sight very shocking; but what in reality are a hundred thousand such men more than a hundred thousand sheep? It is mind, Williams, the generation of knowledge and virtue that we ought to love. This was the project of Alexander; he set out in a great undertaking to civilise mankind; he delivered the vast continent of Asia from the stupidity and degradation of the Persian monarchy; and though he was cut off in 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 to expose in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. In a cele-

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brated passage of this book Burke had interpreted the storming of Versailles as the beginning of a new age of barbarism. Recollecting the beauty and grace of Marie-Antoinette when he had seen her in his youth, he registered his horror at her rough treatment by the Paris mob: But the age of chivalry is gone. – That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.3

For Burke ‘chivalry’ signified both a spirit of deference towards ancient institutions and hierarchies and a commitment to one’s own honour and self-respect. With the rise of commercial society, and its culture of competitive individualism, he felt that these values were in danger of being forgotten. In order to preserve the benefits of credit and commerce, it was necessary that there should always be a principle of social stability to counter-balance the frenzied fluctuations of the market. He considered that if the landed aristocracy was permitted to continue its traditional paternal role, the various classes and ranks of society might continue to be connected by a series of organic affiliations and not merely by the cold links of the cash-nexus. In order for this to happen, however, it was crucial that the British public be warned away from the dangerous ‘levelling’ tendencies of the French Revolution.4 In Part I of The Rights of Man () the radical pamphleteer Tom Paine endeavoured to show how Burke had concentrated on the short-lived apprehension of a member of the royal family and neglected the economic distress suffered by large numbers of the French people. A central element of Paine’s counter-argument was that aristocratic societies attached far too much importance to titles, badges and positions, and that not enough emphasis was placed upon intrinsic qualities of mind and spirit. ‘Mr, Burke should recollect that he is writing History and not Plays’, he wrote of the Reflections, adding that ‘he pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird’.5 In this way Paine argued that Burke’s sophistries were far too absurd to be really persuasive, suggesting that it was really rather a simple matter to shake off the shackles of deference and to see the iniquities of aristocracy for what they really were.6 As we shall see, in Caleb Williams Godwin took Burke rather more seriously, acknowledging the stubbornness of servility while seeking to explore the reasons for it.7 After confessing to Caleb that he was responsible for Tyrrel’s murder, Falkland becomes increasingly anxious that

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

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 the poor. Not only the Justice of the Peace but also the people in the audience are far more willing to side with Falkland. His affluence and education is seen as a guarantee of his disinterested virtue, his social pre-eminence the visible sign of his moral superiority. However, the audience is willing to attribute the meanest of motives to Caleb, for in its 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, as Jean-Jacques had done before him, to his master’s conscience: One thing more I must aver; Mr Falkland is not deceived: he perfectly knows that I am innocent. I had no sooner uttered these words than an involuntary cry of indignation burst from every person in the room. (, )

The slightest suggestion that there is a gap between Falkland’s public persona and his private feelings is seen as the most unnatural insubordination and treachery. This point is made even more dramatically a little later in the novel when Caleb, fleeing from the authorities, encounters by chance his old friend Mr Collins, whom he tries to convince of his innocence: ‘Will you hear my justification? I am as sure as I am of my existence that I can convince you of my purity’. ‘Certainly, if you wish it, I will hear you. But that must not be just now. I could have been glad to decline it wholly. At my age I am not fit for the storm, and I am not so sanguine as you in my expectation of the result. Of what would you convince 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 promising boy, whose character might turn to one side or the other as events should decide. I have known Mr Falkland in his maturer years, and have always admired him as the living model of liberality and goodness. If you could change all my ideas, and show me that there was no criterion by which vice might be prevented 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 hands of the hangman?’ ‘No. I will not hurt a hair of his head, unless compelled to it by a principle of defence. But surely you owe me justice?’ ‘What justice? The justice of proclaiming your innocence? You know what consequences are annexed to that. But I do not believe I shall find you innocent.’ (, )

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

In a notorious section of the Reflections Burke had given a reasoned defence of prejudice. Rather than resisting the pre-rational preferences that one has for one’s national institutions and customs, he argued, one should allow oneself to be guided by them, for it was safer for the individual to put his trust in the wisdom of his ancestors than to consult his own ‘private stock of reason’, which was necessarily rather meagre in comparision. In this way ‘prejudice’ fulfilled an important political function for Burke: it was the means by which a nation bound its subjects together and maintained its moral character.9 Mr Collins represents Burkean prejudice at its most stubborn. His moral sentiments cling so closely to the crevices and contours of the existing social order that he cannot separate them from an adherence to its orthodoxies without losing his ethical grip. He feels that if he were to discover that Mr Falkland is not a virtuous man, he would lose a sense of what virtue means, for Falkland is its physical embodiment. Hence he would rather carry on living in the world of pleasing illusions, with his prejudices intact, than unveil a truth that would disturb and subvert them. For these prejudices, he suggests, are what enable him to function and make moral decisions. Burke’s defence of prejudice attracted a great deal of scorn from radicals such as Paine, James Mackintosh and Mary Wollstonecraft, who considered it a scandalous defence of servility.10 In Caleb Williams Godwin showed the stubbornness and persistence of prejudice even as he deplored its survival, for in the context of the novel, Mr Collins’s line of argument is by no means absurd. Clearly, he recognises that if Caleb is right, and one of the most respected embodiments of aristocratic virtue is a fraud, then the question of whether it was proper for men such as Falkland to be justices of the peace would have to be addressed, which would problematise the exercise of provincial justice throughout England. And that is why he wants Caleb to realise that there is no such thing as justice without consequences. In the case of Mr Falkland, he seems to say, the consequences of his arrest are so fearful that it is safer to drop the charge. But if Caleb does not finally denounce his master, it is for a 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 of the judge, showing that his main aim is not the punishment of his persecutor, or a reform of the legal system, but the attainment of an entirely anti-institutional condition of justice. And as we shall see, this attitude to crime and punishment is remarkably similar to that which had been expressed by Godwin himself in his treatise on Political Justice of .



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism 

In the chapter entitled ‘Of law’ in Book  of the first edition of Political Justice Godwin attacked the discourse of custom that had provided the basis of English law for centuries. Judicial decisions should not be made according to precedent, he argued, for there is nothing to suggest that our ancestors were any wiser or more virtuous than ourselves: Law we sometimes call the wisdom of our ancestors. But this is a strange imposition. It was as frequently the dictate of their passion, of timidity, jealousy, a monopolising spirit, and a lust of power that knew no bounds. Are we not obliged perpetually to revise and remodel this misnamed wisdom of our ancestors? to correct it by a detection of their ignorance and a condemnation of their intolerance?11

From the electoral system to the game laws, the British legal system was designed to serve the ruling class, according to Godwin. It privileged the rich at the expense of the poor. To this extent, he was in full agreement with the mainstream radical position that was outlined in the two parts of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man. However, Godwin soon went beyond Paine’s brief: There is no maxim more clear than this, Every case is a rule to itself. No action of any man was ever the same as any other action, had ever the same degree of utility or injury. It should seem to be the business of justice, to distinguish the qualities of men, and not, which has hitherto been the practice, to confound them. (, )

During the latter half of the eighteenth century there was a growing movement in favour of reforming the theory and practice of the law. A number of writers began to suggest ways of rendering the legal system at once more coherent and more humane, eradicating its injustices and ironing out its anomalies. The Italian reformer Cesare Beccaria made one of the most significant contributions to this movement. His treatise Of Crimes and Punishments, which was translated into English in , sought to transform the way in which legislators thought about their laws. He argued that punishments were effective only when they were fitted to the misdemeanours they were intended to prevent. Measures should be chosen ‘in due proportion to the crime, so as to make the most efficacious and most lasting impression on the minds of men, and the least painful impressions on the body of the criminal’.12 He also suggested that ‘the disadvantage of the punishment should exceed the advantage anticipated from the crime’. No longer would petty theft be punishable by death, but it would always be disciplined and always in

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

exactly the same way, for uniform application was more of a deterrent than arbitrary severity. And in the fourth volume of his Commentaries the influential English legal theorist William Blackstone came to endorse Beccaria’s view, declaring that ‘crimes are more effectively prevented by the certainty than by the severity of punishment’, before going on to acknowledge the latter’s general insight that ‘it is absurd and impolitic to apply the same punishment to crimes of different malignity’.13 The principle of utility was central to Beccaria’s approach. Like Helvétius and Bentham, he was convinced that the regulation of social behaviour was more a matter of calculating consequences than of divining intentions.14 When determining punishment, only the effects of crime were relevant, not the motivation of the criminal. Godwin agreed with Beccaria that many of the existing laws of Europe were tyrannical and that it was rational and humane to seek to reform them. But he also thought that there were problems with Beccaria’s approach, considering that although a system of punishment based on a calculation of consequences would undoubtedly help prevent the punishment of minor crimes with excessive severity, it would also tend to confound criminals who were possessed of widely divergent intentions. Hence Godwin asked his readers whether a system that levelled these inequalities and confounded these difficulties could ever be ‘productive of good’. Surely, he reasoned, it was important to take into account motives as well as consequences: Shall we inflict on the man who, in endeavouring to save the life of a drowning fellow creature, oversets a boat, and occasions the death of a second, the same suffering, as on him who from gloomy and vicious habits is incited to the murder of his benefactor? In reality the injury sustained by the community is, by no means, the same in these two cases . . . (, )

Thus, in the course of Political Justice Godwin was to quarrel with liberal reformers as well as with reactionaries. After exposing the extent to which the legal system was complicit with the interests of the ruling order, he went on to denigrate the capacity of abstract laws to attend to individual circumstances. For him, legislation was a clumsy and inappropriate method of regulating human actions; it was, in effect, an external alienation of the internal principle of justice. So much so, in fact, that he repeatedly insisted that laws had no real authority over individuals, since government was nothing more than ‘regulated force’ (, –). And by the same token he also declared his opposition to written constitutions, arguing that ‘the true state of man, as has already



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

been demonstrated, is, not to have his opinions bound down in the fetters of an eternal quietism, but flexible and unrestrained to yield with facility to the impressions of increasing truth’ (, ). And so, in spite of his general support of the Revolutionary cause he, like Robespierre, was ultimately rather unimpressed by the system of ‘negative’ liberties promised by the Declaration of the Rights of Man. For in his analysis, positive institution did not lead the way to justice, it simply dictated the channels in which bourgeois self-interest was to be allowed to flow. And finally he considered that the exercise of private judgment was a far more reliable means of furthering social justice and general utility: Men are weak at present, because they have always been told they are weak, and must not be trusted with themselves . . . Tell them that the mountains of parchment in which they have been hitherto entrenched, are fit only to impose upon ages of superstition and ignorance; that henceforth we will have no dependence but upon their spontaneous justice; that, if their passions be gigantic, they must rise with gigantic energy to subdue them; that, if their decrees be iniquitous, the iniquity shall be all their own. The effect of this disposition of things will soon be visible; mind will rise to the level of the situation; juries and umpires will be penetrated with the magnitude of the trust reposed in them. (, )

In the work of the French physiocrats rational critical debate was designed to facilitate the formation of a truly ‘public’ authority.15 In Godwin, however, the bourgeois public sphere in the private realm was to be expanded to its furthest extent. It did not merely anticipate public authority, it effectively replaced it. In his anarchist vision the state was to dissolve entirely, leaving the realm of civil society to become a vast and unregulated forum for public discussion. Under such conditions, Godwin believed that the universal exercise of private judgment would eventually produce a rational consensus. If each was allowed to pursue the line of his or her own reasoning, all would eventually agree. A more thoroughly systematic thinker than Tom Paine, Joseph Priestley or James Mackintosh, Godwin was the most imposing intellectual figure among the English Jacobins, deeply versed in the philosophical writings of the French Enlightenment as well as his native tradition of radical dissent. Truly cosmopolitan in his approach, Godwin brought identifiably French categories and concerns to his discussion of English politics. And this was not lost on the conservative press, which attacked him as a disciple of Rousseau and Helvétius, the twin fathers of French Jacobinism.16 But despite his indebtedness to the French Enlightenment, Godwin was to distance himself in Political Justice from the ideology of legislation that had been developed by Helvétius and his followers.

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

As we saw in the last chapter, Claude Helvétius had considered that a good system of laws, by carefully regulating the life of the subject, by tactfully shaping his tastes and pleasures, was the best means by which private interest was to be aligned with public benefit. And this approach had found English expression in Jeremy Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation of . ‘Nature has placed mankind under 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 well as to determine what we shall do . . . The principle of utility recognises this subjection, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and 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 furthering the general good simply by following his own inclinations. For as Leslie Stephen was later to remark: ‘The indefinite modificability of character was the ground upon which the utilitarians placed their hopes of progress.’18 Godwin shared the utilitarian belief in the human capacity for self-improvement, but he did not believe that it could be brought about through positive institution. It was not necessary for legislation to harmonise the warring interests of society, because ultimately every individual’s interest was identical with that of his fellows, if he could only be persuaded to discover it. Most recent commentators have considered that the central core of Godwin’s moral and political philosophy is utilitarian in nature. Don Locke has argued that in Political Justice ‘Godwin reveals himself merely as a classical utilitarian, at one with Bentham and with Mill in considering an action by its consequences, in identifying goodness with happiness, 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, he consistently 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 consistently utilitarian with each revision that Godwin made.21 In many ways, I would suggest, this line of argument can lead to a serious misunderstanding of the historical and political character of Godwin’s thought. For despite his fondness for the discourse of utility, Godwin employed it in an entirely different spirit from Bentham and Helvétius. He stretched it out of recognition, and transformed it into something entirely new. And this is exemplified by the critique of the



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

division of labour that was contained in Book  of Political Justice. A leading tenet of utility theory was that the division and delegation of work contributed to the greatest happiness of the greatest number by maximising the production of goods and services. In Godwin’s mind, however, it was actually highly pernicious, since the moral cost of collaboration was always greater than its supposed material benefits. According to this view of things, co-operation compromised and degraded the workings of individual reason by undermining the principle of intellectual independence. Through this manoeuvre, bourgeois political economy was subjected to criticism by the very discourse of utility that it had helped to produce.22 The possibility of effecting a compendium of labour by this means will be greatly diminished, when men shall learn to deny themselves superfluities. The utility of such a saving of labour, where labour is so little, will scarcely balance against the evils of so extensive a cooperation. (, )

Perhaps even more controversial was Godwin’s assertion that even private property was not in the general interest, since it was not an efficient use of resources. The discourse of rights had attempted to naturalise the doctrine of self-interest, he argued, but it could not disguise the fact that no man was justified in hoarding or garnering anything that could be more usefully placed in the hands of others. ‘Few things have contributed more to undermine the energy and virtue of the human species’ he declared in the  edition of Political Justice, ‘than the supposition that we have a right, as it has been phrased, to do what we will with our own.’23 According to the law of reason, redistribution was a duty, and absolute equality of condition a desirable and attainable end: I have no right to dispose of [property] at my caprice; every shilling of it is appropriated by the laws of morality . . . (, )

True liberty and equality, in Godwin’s analysis, was not to be achieved by a programme of laissez-faire legislation facilitating the greater circulation of goods and commodities, but by a redistribution of property and a dissolution of government. He imagined a state in which men would be able to recapture the autonomy and transparency of Rousseau’s primitive society, while continuing to enjoy the benefits of philosophical and material progress.24 In his impressive study of Political Justice Mark Philp has argued that recent commentators have placed too much emphasis upon its debt to the philosophes. Philp admits that the initial project of the treatise was

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

inspired by the readings of Helvétius, Holbach and Rousseau that Godwin had made in the s, suggesting that one can see the influence of French rationalism especially in its opening books. But he then goes on to argue that Godwin came to question many aspects of Continental thought during the course of composition, and that increasingly he found himself returning to his roots in rational dissent. Throughout his discussion Philp finds it unproblematic to consider Rousseau a philosophe, grouping him together with Helvétius and Holbach as disciples of utilitarianism.25 He neglects the extent to which a text such as the ‘Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar’ offered a moral philosophy which was far more compatible with radical English protestantism than with the hedonistic materialism of the French tradition. Developing this line of reasoning, I would like to argue that Godwin’s Political Justice owes more to the metaphysic of morals that was developed in Emile than most commentators have been prepared to acknowledge. Godwin had agreed with Helvétius that the life of the individual was fully determined by his external circumstances, but he also insisted upon giving the utilitarian tradition a new inflection in the distinction he drew between the man who was merely a victim of circumstantial necessity, and the man who firmly embraced it. While the non-rational subject was involuntarily caught up in an endless cycle of causes and effects, the rational one pursued the course that contributed most to the general welfare by balancing the social benefits of an action against its disadvantages. But Godwinian reason was always more of an internal voice than an external computation of consequences: ‘We have in reality nothing that is strictly speaking our own’, he wrote in a chapter attacking the notion of individual rights, ‘we have nothing that has not a destination prescribed to it by the immutable voice of reason and justice, and respecting which, if we supersede that destination, we do not entail upon ourselves a certain portion of guilt.’ As we saw in the passage on the law quoted earlier, Godwinian reason aspired to be ‘penetrated’ by ‘spontaneous justice’. Despite its professed commitment to the felicific calculus, it possessed a metaphysical rather than a mathematical soul. In this respect it displayed its kinship with the faculty of ‘conscience’ that had been recommended in Emile: The less the object of our cares is our own selves, the less we have to fear from the illusion of our particular interest, the more one generalises that interest, the more it becomes equitable; and the love of the human race in us is nothing other than the love of justice.26

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

At one point in Political Justice Godwin referred to Rousseau as ‘one of the principal reservoirs of philosophical truth as yet existing in the world’, full of ‘eloquence’ even if his work was characterised by ‘a perpetual mixture of absurdity and mistake’: Having frequently quoted Rousseau in the course of this work, it may be allowable to say one word of his general merits as a moral and political writer. He has been subjected to continual ridicule for the extravagance of the proposition with which he began his literary career; that the savage state was the genuine and proper condition of man. It was however by a very slight mistake that he missed the opposite opinion which it is the business of the present inquiry to establish. He only substituted, as the topic of his eulogium, the period that preceded government and laws, instead of the period that may possibly follow upon their abolition27 . . . He was the first to teach that the imperfections of government were the only perennial source of the vices of mankind; and this principle was adopted from him by Helvétius and others. But he saw farther than this, that government, however formed, was little capable of affording solid benefit to mankind, which they did not. (, ; , )

Given his radical individualism, Godwin was bound to be unimpressed by the collectivist theory of legislation developed in the Contrat Social.28 But despite the evidence of his neo-Spartan political theory, Godwin considered that fundamentally Rousseau had been an anarchist like himself. Indeed his vision of the perfect free and equal society of the future in the latter part of Political Justice owes a lot to the description of primitive society contained in the second Discours: If superfluity were banished, the necessity for the greater part of the manual industry of mankind would be superseded; and the rest, being amicably shared among the active and vigorous members of the community, would be burthensome to none. Every man would have a frugal yet wholesome diet; every man would go forth to that moderate exercise of his corporal functions that would give hilarity to the spirits; none would be made torpid with fatigue, but all would have 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 libertarian and egalitarian, for his proposals for redistribution were more concrete and systematic than anything in the Contrat Social or the two Discours. Practically, however, in defining and determining his utopian end so rigorously, he effectively took away the means. For if Rousseau and Robespierre’s class bias lay in their frequent evasions of the property question, Godwin’s lay in his refusal – which became ever more absolute in subsequent editions of Political Justice – to sanction any form of political collaboration or association:

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

Instead of making each man an individual, which the interest of the whole requires, [party] resolves all understandings into one common mass, and subtracts from each the varieties that could alone distinguish him from a brute machine. (, )

The central problem with Political Justice for many of the radicals of the s, was that, although it had very successfully woven a blissful vision of the future, it had actually given very little practical advice as to how it was to be brought into being, other than recommending patient discussion and the universal exercise of private judgement. And given the inescapably turbid and theatrical nature of politics during the mids, it was not difficult to argue that Godwin’s rather excessively patient and philosophical approach was deeply out of tune with the times. So much so, indeed, that the English radical speaker and pamphleteer, John Thelwall, who had been a fervent Godwinian in the early days of Political Justice, gradually came to realise that a complete acceptance of Godwin’s strictures on co-operation would effectively destroy the popular radical movement in England. And since he believed that numbers were necessary to lend power and urgency to popular demands, and that it was only through collective action that the existing order would be transformed, he increasingly moved away from philosophical anarchism, having become convinced that without combination or mass demonstration, the fulfilment of radical aspirations would become subject to an indefinite deferral.29 So it was, then, that in the climate of political reaction that characterised Britain in the later s Political Justice was often considered by radicals and conservatives alike as a work of cold abstraction, a pernicious product of the systematising impulse of the French Enlightenment. And later critics have taken their cue from this, depicting Godwin’s later works as a recognition of the insufficiency of abstract reason and a belated acknowledgement of the power of moral sentiments. This is not, however, an accurate assessment of his work. It is true that Godwin’s revisions of Political Justice toned down some of the more stridently rationalist formulations from the first edition, but they did not represent a fundamental shift in approach. As we have seen, Godwinian reason was always the product of an ‘enthusiasm’ for justice. Even in  it constituted itself through a channelling of the passions rather than a repudiation of them. Despite this, however, the image of Godwin as an arch-rationalist continues to pervade discussions of his work. On a number of occasions, literary historians have been tempted to regard Caleb Williams as an inadvertent critique of the moral philosophy of



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

Political Justice simply on account of its exploration of the stubbornness and pervasiveness of the irrational. Adopting a different approach, I would like to look at the way in which the novel successfully developed the central theme of the treatise, expanding upon its general critique of positive institutions by exploring the effect of legal prejudice upon a particular set of circumstances.30  At the private trial in the middle of Godwin’s novel, Caleb remains silent about Tyrrel’s murder, unwilling to accuse Falkland in the context of the courtroom. He does not want Falkland to be punished, but for his deed to be known and understood, and for his blameworthy but explicable action to be judged on its own terms, and not according to the general and unthinking precedents of law. His concern would be to allow the unique nature of the case to be considered sympathetically by each member of the jury. In this sense, all the signs are that Caleb is a good Godwinian by instinct. Unwilling to accuse his accuser, Caleb can only persist in protesting that his master knows him to be blameless, to which the presiding justice of the peace, Mr Forester responds by requesting that he defend himself without appealing to Falkland. Forester sees the issue simply in terms of the relation of the individual to the law, a relationship which is to be ascertained by the sifting of empirical evidence. What he fails to understand, however, is that this legalistic approach, besides operating in fatal collusion with an unjust social order, fails to comprehend the circumstances of the case. By concentrating on the criminal charge, Forester effectively binds Caleb in chains, for the trial is essentially a matter of conscience between him and his master which transcends the machinery 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 that Williams’s prosecution is necessary to uphold the principle of deference: ‘By this unexampled villainy he makes it your duty to free the world of such 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 vile insinuations’ (, ). The law binds both the accuser and the accused, as it becomes clear to Falkland he must prosecute Caleb in order to uphold his reputation. However, Falkland continues to resist a public trial:

Chivalry, justice and the law in Caleb Williams



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

Here Godwin problematises the whole question of intentions. Is Falkland’s reply a calculated show of mercy towards Caleb designed to pre-empt any future revelation? Or is it a spirited defence of the principle of chivalry and a thinly veiled confession of murder? Is it the product of consummate hypocrisy or passionate sincerity? The suggestion is, perhaps, that it is both of these things, and that this duplicity has been forced upon Falkland by the legal context in which he speaks. Committed to following the proper procedures of the law, Forester grows 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 therefore simply insist as a magistrate, having taken the evidence in this felony, upon my right and duty of following the course of justice, and committing the accused to the county jail. (, )

Locked in an implacable enmity, Falkland and Caleb are also bound together by the recognition that true justice transcends the formal categories of jurisprudence. This is made clear later in the novel when Falkland persuades Caleb not to reveal that he is a murderer: Will a reasonable man sacrifice to barren truth, when benevolence, humanity and every consideration that is dear to the human heart require that it should be superseded? (, )

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



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

ings of institutional law, a mutual understanding that their pact of silence over the murder of Tyrrel has served to cement. During the course of the novel Caleb comes to recognise the flaws and contradictions in the ideology of chivalry. He sees that its notion of justice is skewed by a violent class bias and that its aspiration to virtue is undermined by an excessive concern for honour and reputation. But he remains committed to the ideal of moral freedom and independence that Falkland had once embodied. Conversely, mere appearance is not enough for Falkland either. He is too genuinely committed to the concept of ‘inborn dignity’ to live comfortably with hypocrisy. In his heart of hearts he shares Caleb’s scorn for exteriors, and that is why he is so endlessly tormented by the gap between his golden reputation and his secret crime. In this way Falkland’s relentless pursuit of Caleb can be seen as an attempt simultaneously to prevent and to encourage a neoJacobin critique of aristocracy. Throughout the period of their mutual enmity, Falkland remains Caleb’s ideal, and Caleb continues to act as Falkland’s conscience: they are bound together in a complex relationship of identification and repudiation, silently complicit with the values of the other. One way of understanding this narrative is to see it as an allegory of civil society. For the novel offers a fictional version of a historical trajectory that was very popular with eighteenth-century historians. This interpretation would tend to see Tyrrel as an embodiment of the primitive barbarism that was deemed to have prevailed before the rise of chivalry, a period during which might was supposed the only right. When Falkland enters the locality, he brings civilised values to the community, principles of honour and duty that go beyond mere physical force. In this sense he can be seen as an emblem of chivalry as a historical phenomenon.31 However, the novel does not fail to point out that even this new and better order has been brought about by an act of usurpation – in this case, a murder – which hints that this new phase of civilisation is merely a gilded version of its predecessor. In this way Godwin suggests that, even if, in certain respects, chivalry could be seen to represent an anticipation of true reason and benevolence, it is nevertheless riven with hypocrisy and injustice. He effectively subjects civic humanism to a dialectical critique at once ideological and utopian, exposing its limitations while not wholly dissociating himself from its metaphysic of morals. Germaine de Staël was to make a similar point in her account of the history of the relationship between literature and social institutions in De la littérature ():

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

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

The difference is, of course, that whereas de Staël envisaged a smooth transition from the ‘chivalric’ manners of the past to the ‘republican’ virtues of the future, Godwin expressed a certain anxiety about what that would entail. Would it usher in a democratisation of the principles of chivalry? Or would it represent an entirely new way of organising the forces within society, one entirely uncommitted to the principle of personal virtue, and completely drained of all ethical content? Indeed in this respect he was, like his own character Ferdinando Falkland, clearly concerned that ‘Reason’ should not be reduced to a merely legalistic rationality, possessing a profound anxiety about the nature of the new bourgeois order even as he was helping it into being.  As William Godwin was putting the finishing touches to Caleb Williams in England, Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Couthon were finally formalising the principles of revolutionary justice in France. In a paradoxical attempt to legalise the illegal spirit of the Revolution, they sought to transform law from a set of external statutes into an affair of the conscience. As we saw in the last chapter, the law of the  Prairial of  dispensed with legal defence in the case of criminal trials, so that justice became primarily a matter of ascertaining intentions rather than filtering through evidence. This was an attempt to moralise the conduct of public authority, moving beyond the ‘negative’ concept of liberty and legality that had been developed during the legislative phase of the Revolution. In this respect Robespierre’s mistrust of the law was not dissimilar to that of the English conservative Edmund Burke, who had attacked the French constitution-mongers of  in a famous passage of the Reflections: On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and is as void of solid wisdom, as it is destitute 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



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

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

In a society with no principle of civic unity to offset the strictures of cold legality, Burke argued, individual citizenship would come to consist of nothing more than learning to rein in one’s own private interests. The law would represent only the visible limits of one’s freedom, it would not provide a positive definition of liberty. In this way the modern subject would be invited to indulge freely in his own ‘speculations’ as long as he did not transgress its bounds. In this way the Declaration of the Rights of Man of  represented the legislative embodiment of the modern commercial spirit. As was mentioned before, Burke remained convinced that the destructive potential of capitalism could only be kept under control if society retained a commitment to ‘manners’. He conceived of ‘manners’ in terms of a modernisation of the finer principles of aristocratic chivalry and deference which served to soften the workings of commercial society, safeguarding its achievements by offsetting its pernicious tendencies. For him a respect for the aristocracy remained of central importance to the stability of society, as the independent nobility was the fullest embodiment of positive liberty. In deferring to this class of men, in acknowledging the moral superiority of land over and above credit, the middling and lower ranks would preserve a respect for the abstract principle of moral independence and the possibility of realising their full humanity. Not only civilised in itself, the aristocracy was thus the cause of civilisation in other men. It helped to gather the individual subjects of a nation around a set of common values, and counterbalance the demoralising effect of commerce.34 In France, however, social conditions were markedly different. By the end of the eighteenth century, the nobility had declined into a comparatively functionless and yet still rather exclusive caste. It was not possible for the French civic humanists to highlight the insufficiencies of negative liberty by reinventing and redeploying the language of chivalry. This was why Robespierre had been forced to locate political virtue not in property but in the secret passions of the human heart. Both Robespierre and Burke had been driven to employ the language of paradox in an attempt to develop a notion of liberty that differed from the ‘negative’ formulation supplied by bourgeois jurisprudence. Burke used oxymoron in order to suggest that politics was far more complicated than liberal bourgeois radicals such as Richard Price had been

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prepared to allow. In recommending ‘proud submission’, ‘dignified obedience’, and the ‘freedom’ of an ‘exalted servitude’ in the passage on Marie-Antoinette, he sought to argue that there was a self-respect to be had from submission that it might not be either pleasant or useful to renounce. He wanted his readers to consider the possibility that they should not judge a respect for appearances merely on appearances. But Burke’s curious compounds were not without their risks, for as his radical antagonists pointed out, they served to expose the duplicity at the heart of his ideology of chivalry even as they gestured towards its peculiar value.35 While Burke was recommending the freedom of servitude, Robespierre was trying to legalise the illegal spirit of the revolution. As we saw in these first two chapters, he had spoken regularly of ‘the despotism of liberty against tyranny’ in order to suggest that freedom could be an active moral force and not merely a set of legal entitlements. In the eyes of many contemporaries, however, his constant recourse to oxymoron only served to dramatise the complicity between revolutionary Jacobinism and the feudal tyrannies of the past. Godwin’s Caleb Williams offers a compelling commentary to the political history of the French Revolution precisely because it explores the secret complicity between ‘primitive’ Jacobinism and feudal despotism, between the metaphysic of conscience developed by Rousseau and Robespierre and the ideology of chivalry espoused by Burke and Shaftesbury. In the public trial at the end of Godwin’s novel Caleb prostrates himself before the jury, begging them to believe that he is innocent. In the published version of the ending, his disarming candour ultimately persuades Falkland to confess his murder of Tyrrel: ‘I see’, says Falkland, ‘that the artless and manly story you have told, has carried conviction to every hearer’ (, ). Throughout the novel, Caleb constantly employs this rhetoric: ‘I will never believe’, he says at one point ‘that a man’s conscience of innocence cannot make other men perceive that he has that thought.’ In this sense Caleb’s belief in the communicative power of individual sincerity reproduces a central argument of Political Justice: ‘If every man to-day would tell all the truth he knew’, Godwin wrote, ‘three years hence there would be scarcely a falsehood of any magnitude remaining in the civilised world.’36 But Caleb has no right to resort to this Rousseauvian language of sincerity, for after resolving not to divulge Falkland’s secret, he is neither innocent nor candid for the predominant part of the narrative.37 Only when he accuses his former master of murder in the closing chapters of the book does he

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

finally make the truth plain. Most of the time, his account of events does not add up. As Mr Forester points out to him: Is this the way to obtain the favour of a man of consequence and respectability? To pretend to make a confidence and then tell him a disjointed story that has not common sense in it! (, )

Of course, one of Godwin’s primary purposes in the novel is to bring to the reader’s attention the formidable power of social prejudice. It is made clear that if at any point in the novel Caleb were to tell the truth, nobody would believe him. Nevertheless, Godwin does also make us aware of the extent to which Caleb is guilty of mauraise foi. He appeals to the conscience of his auditors but he is unwilling to unburden his own. His prejudice in favour of his master is stronger than his commitment to the truth. Thus we can speak of a species of ‘bad conscience’ in Caleb that emerges from his refusal to divulge his secret sympathy with the aristocratic Falkland and his chivalric spirit. Allegorically this can be seen to expose the complicity of revolutionary Jacobinism with feudal despotism. In a chapter ‘On Revolutions’ which was rewritten for the second edition of Political Justice () Godwin drew attention to the way in which the Terror had merely reproduced the despotism of the ancien régime: ‘Revolution is instigated by a horror against tyranny’, he wrote, ‘yet its own tyranny is not without peculiar aggravations. There is no period more at war with the existence of liberty’ (, ). In its attempt to legislate virtue into existence the Terror had merely exacerbated the evils of positive institution: Thus, we propose to make men free; and the method we adopt, is to influence them more rigorously than ever, by the fear of punishment. We say that government has usurped too much, and we organise a government tenfold more encroaching in its principles and terrible in its proceedings. Is slavery the best project that can be devised for making men free? Is a display of terror the readiest mode for rendering [men] fearless, independent and enterprising? (, )

Extending the liberal critique of monarchical government and jurisprudence developed in  the Jacobins went on to question the very nature and value of legislation itself. And whereas Godwin’s critique of positive institutions resulted in a proposal for their dissolution, that of Robespierre merely led to the emergence of a new and more coercive form of public authority. The law of  Prairial revolutionised the courtroom, but it did not dispense with it as an institution. Conceived as a sublime internal principle, revolutionary justice became radically unjust as soon as it fell into the hands of individual judges. In theory the

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recourse to the conscience was impressively high-minded, in practice it merely facilitated a series of rapid and ruthless executions. For as John Adolphus was to describe: The only punishment they pronounced was death, and that was applied to such indefinite crimes as favouring the impunity of aristocracy; calumniating patriotism; seeking to vilify the revolutionary tribunal; to corrupt the public mind and conscience; and stopping the progress of revolutionary principles. The necessary proofs consisted of every description of document, whether material, verbal or written, which carries in itself self-evidence, and when there were material or moral proofs, no witnesses were to be heard. The rule of the sentence 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 through legislation. Curiously, the latter was not averse to the notion of a purgation of society, he simply considered that it could not be brought about by human agency. Death itself was not an evil, he suggested, unless it was the product of a deliberate action. Thus in the latter half of the chapter ‘On Revolutions’ Godwin briefly indulged his own fantasy of regeneration: The abuses which at present exist in all political societies are so enormous, the oppressions which are exercised so intolerable, the ignorance and vice they entail so dreadful, that possibly a dispassionate enquirer might decide that, if their annihilation could be purchased by an instant sweeping of every human being off the face of the earth, the purchase would not be too dear. (, )

Like Robespierre, Godwin looked forward to the creation of a new race of men, but he did not believe it could be brought about by legislative means. Hence he remained residually sympathetic to the purgative impulse of revolutionary Jacobinism while firmly withdrawing it from the realm of political praxis. In the years after the Terror, Godwin continued to reformulate and rearticulate his anarchist principles, but he abandoned the systematic mode of presentation that characterised Political Justice. As we shall see, he preferred the essay form as a medium which advertised the resolutely private nature of his essays in private judgment. It was almost as if he felt there had been too much of the legislative spirit in his systematic attack on legislation. This sense of complicity is already present in the final trial scene of Caleb Williams, where Caleb is finally forced to disclose the nature of Falkland’s crime. After confessing the truth to the jury he is immediately overcome by remorse:

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

I have told a plain and unadulterated tale. I came hither to curse, but I remain to bless. I came to accuse, but am compelled to applaud. I proclaim to all the world that Mr Falkland is a man worthy of affection and kindness, and that I am myself the worst of villains! Never will I forgive myself the iniquity of this day. The memory will always haunt me, and embitter every hour of my existence. (, )

Conditioned by the circumstances in which he finds himself, Caleb is forced to accuse his master in order to defend himself from accusation. All too aware of the consequences of this, he cannot help but think of it as an act of murder. The truth has been disnatured by its legal setting: 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 revenge against the institution of aristocracy. By a sudden metamorphosis, the Rousseauvian solitary has been transformed into a revolutionary terrorist. In this way Godwin’s novel both reflects consciously upon, and unconsciously repeats, some of the central impulses of ‘primitive’ Jacobinism, compellingly aware of its ambivalent status as a political ideology at once revolutionary and anti-modern, standing in a paradoxical relation to the emergent structures of bourgeois society, caught painfully between a democratic vision of the future and the feudal freedom of the past.

  

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

 Pondering the failure of the Norwegian peasantry to follow her enlightened advice on child-rearing in the eighth of her Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark of , Mary Wollstonecraft was 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 legislators who established institutions for the good of the body under the pretext of serving heaven for the salvation of the soul. These might with strict propriety be termed pious frauds, and I admire the Peruvian pair for asserting that they came from the sun, when their conduct proved that they meant to enlighten a benighted country, whose obedience, or even attention, could only be secured by awe. Thus much for conquering the inertia of reason; but, when it is once in motion, fables, once held sacred, may be ridiculed; and sacred they were, when useful to mankind. – Prometheus alone stole fire to animate the first man; his posterity need not supernatural aid to preserve the species, though love is generally termed a flame, and it may not be necessary much longer to suppose men inspired by heaven to inculcate the duties which demand special grace, when reason convinces them that they are happiest who are most nobly employed.1

Ostensibly, Wollstonecraft considers the possibility of a persistent inertia of reason only in order finally to dismiss it; briefly contemplating the usefulness of ‘pious frauds’ before laying them aside. Western civilization will soon render such grand impostures a thing of the past, she suggests, once the progress of reason has gained sufficient momentum. Implicitly, however, she does admit that this time had not yet come to pass, half-acknowledging the existence of a disconcerting interregnum between superstition and enlightenment. What identifies Wollstonecraft’s reflections as characteristically postrevolutionary, in spite of the fact that they make no specific reference to recent French history, is their markedly utilitarian attitude to religion, in 

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

many ways a legacy of the Jacobin period. In May , at the height of the Terror, Robespierre had sought to counter the demoralising effect of the disestablishment of Roman Catholicism a couple of years before, by proposing a new national faith – the so-called ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’ – a form of deism strongly reminiscent of the ‘Profession de Foi d’un Vicaire Savoyard’ contained in Book  of Emile. Like Rousseau, Robespierre regarded a revolution in religious feeling as the necessary sequel to the ‘materialist’ revolution which had taken place during the Enlightenment: Everything has changed in the physical order; everything must change in the moral 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 to experience was more conducive to disinterested virtue than the rational critical debate favoured by the physiocrats, and he regarded religion as an appropriate way of encouraging this condition of mind: The master-work of society would be to create a rapid moral instinct in [the citizen] that will lead him to do good and to avoid evil without the slow assistance of reasoning, because the private reason of a man waylaid by his passions is often nothing but a sophist that pleads their case, and the moral authority of a 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 the last analysis, he recommended religious faith primarily as a means of cementing national unity and virtue rather than as a moral end-in-itself; indeed he was less interested in establishing the truth of faith than in exploring its social benefits. ‘In the eyes of the legislator,’ he told the Convention, somewhat loftily, ‘everything that is useful to the world and good in practice is true’.4 As is well known, Rousseau had put forward a similar series of arguments in favour of the principle of a civic religion in one of the most notorious chapters of the Contrat Social. Christianity was inappropriate for a republic, he had stated, essentially because it encouraged the privatisation of religious feeling, thereby failing to establish the necessary link between the transcendental order and the state. A national religion would be a much better option in this respect, because it would serve to bind the people more closely to their institutions.5 Throughout this chapter the emphasis was very much on the social usefulness of religion rather than its philosophical truth. And this too was

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Robespierre’s central concern in his presentation of the Cult, as he laid aside the expansive rhetoric of Emile in favour of the tersely Machiavellian style of the Contrat Social, defending the dissemination of useful 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 the truth with certain fictions, perhaps in order to appeal to the imagination of ignorant people, perhaps in order to attach them more strongly to their institutions.6

With this in mind, it is possible to argue that memories of the repressive context of the Cult of the Supreme Being, as well as its seeming bad faith, may well have been present in Wollstonecraft’s mind when she came to discuss ‘pious frauds’ in her Letters of . The fact remains, however, that a contemplation of the perceived inertia of reason did lead her to entertain – if only briefly – the notion of a careful manipulation of public opinion through civic religion, even if she did not, in the end, indulge it. In this way she did demonstrate a growing interest, highly characteristic of both French and English radicals during this period, in the concept of aesthetic education, the notion that a people might have to be seduced to follow virtue rather than simply forced to obey it, and that therefore a project of cultural rather than political regeneration might offer the best means of recuperating the tarnished revolutionary ideal. How and why such early essays in the field of post-revolutionary aesthetics should have sought to distinguish themselves from Robespierre’s own belated attempt to dissolve politics into culture at the Festival of the Supreme Being of  is one of the central concerns of this chapter; but so equally is the distinct but related question of how radical women in particular were to approach the question of politicsas-seduction, for it was bound to have a special piquancy for them, caught as they were between the strong desire to exert an influence upon the moral and political opinions of their age, and the equally powerful anxiety of losing the very principle of rational femininity in the process of 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 legislate virtue into existence: hence the prime historical lesson to be learnt from its ultimate failure was that it was disastrous to attempt the general dissemination of republican values through the medium of pure politics. What was required, it was argued, was a more stealthy, surreptitious

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

approach to the problem of moral regeneration, an approach that sought to re-educate people more indirectly, by appealing to them at the level of culture. Surprisingly, perhaps, in this context, especially given his reputation as the intellectual father of French Jacobinism, Rousseau – ‘the Prometheus of Sentiment’ as the character of Maria in Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman was later to describe him – remained an important figure for the leading cultural theorists of the revolutionary decade, primarily because of his extensive exploration of the relation of religion to politics and of politics to aesthetics. Of course, writers such as Friedrich Schiller and Germaine de Staël were highly aware that his political theory was widely deemed to have ‘caused’ the worst excesses of the Revolution, but that did not prevent them from continuing to admire his work, for in spite of its associations with the politics of Robespierre, it still seemed to offer a series of templates within which the ‘beau idéal’ of  could be re-imagined and re-articulated. Thus it was with constant reference to works such as the La Nouvelle Heloïse, a work which offered a very different version of the Rousseauvian vision of social transparency from that which was contained in the Contrat Social, that writers such as Schiller and de Staël tried to recuperate the educational project of revolutionary republicanism in the s. The first half of this chapter, then, will seek to locate the origin of this growing interest in aesthetic education in the educational debates of the French Revolution, in an attempt to demonstrate the points of contact between Rousseauvian aesthetics, Robespierrist politics and post-revolutionary cultural theory. And the second half will address the highly complex attitudes exhibited by a number of eminent women radicals of the period to Rousseau’s theories of aesthetic education. In its most doctrinal form, Rousseauvian Jacobinism was a highly misogynistic creed. Going against the grain of the French feminist tradition initiated by Helvétius and carried on by Condorcet, both the Contrat Social and Emile had advocated a high degree of separation between men and women, prescribing a public life on the classical model for the men of his republic, while consigning women to a life of privacy, domesticity and intellectual subservience. With this in mind, this section is devoted to exploring the relationship between Rousseau and some of his radical female commentators – eminent figures such as Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, de Staël and Madame Roland – attempting to square their often fervent interest in his fictional and confessional writings with their notably sceptical attitude to his political theory. Primarily, I shall seek to do this by comparing Wollstonecraft’s post-revolutionary writing

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with a number of French ‘radical’ texts of the late s, works by Condorcet, de Staël, Louvet and Roland, interpreting the English writer’s shift from political commentary to autobiography in the Letters of  very much in terms of a deliberate attempt – ‘self-conscious’ in the fullest, most Promethean sense – to wrest meaning and value from the unaccountable chaos of revolutionary history.  In recent times, a new wave of cultural historians – most notably Mona Ozouf, Lynn Hunt and Dorinda Outram – have contibuted greatly to our understanding of the Revolution by exploring the way in which the leading statesmen of the period tried to develop a unified political culture out of the popular traditions and neo-classical paradigms of the past.7 But their emphasis upon the Revolution as a coherent project of public education has often led them to neglect the philosophical and political divisions which fissured the revolutionary bourgeoisie. In this section, therefore, I want to restore a sense of ideological conflict to the discussion of revolutionary culture by comparing the ‘Girondin’ and ‘Jacobin’ attitudes to education. As many historians have pointed out, the project of education was central to the French Revolution: from the very beginning the political class recognised that in order for France to pass successfully from one régime into another, the French people would have to undergo a process of political instruction, so that they might come to understand their changed relationship to the state, government and the rule of law.8 And as we have seen, the political message that was given out by the new order was initially very confused, a curious blend of old and new political languages, a dangerous mixture of ci-devant monarchism, modern liberalism and ancient republicanism. Substantially, this did not really change much with time: the Revolution was to remain riven by competing principles and contradictory aims. On occasion, however, a political discourse would succeed in differentiating itself from its rivals, expressing itself in a relatively pure form. And the field of educational theory can furnish us with two very good examples of this, each implacably antagonistic to the other. Despite the Revolution’s professed interest in the broad concept of education, it was notably unsuccessful in its attempt to revolutionise practical schooling.9 Indeed it was not until after the fall of Robespierre that a bill was finally passed setting out the terms for the instruction of

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French citizens under the First Republic. Previous to this, however, a couple of abortive attempts had been made to provide a basis for school legislation – the liberal bourgeois programme of ‘instruction’ developed by Condorcet in  and the Rousseauvian model of public ‘education’ proposed by Robespierre in  – attempts which should be interesting to us precisely because they were at once both identifiably ‘revolutionary’ and yet systematically opposed. Subsequent bills, by incorporating some of the former’s proposals and blending them with those of the latter, gradually established a workable system which was to survive well into the twentieth century, but they did so by obscuring rather than resolving the fundamental tension between them. It is worthwhile, therefore, to give a brief outline of these two abandoned bills, in an attempt to show how and why an identifiably ‘progressive’ notion of state instruction gave birth to its ‘primitivist’ (although no less ‘modern’) negation. The eminent mathematician Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet was one of the foremost liberal thinkers of the late eighteenth century. During the 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 du progrès de l’esprit humain () was that the steady improvement of human knowledge would gradually help to solve all of the world’s major problems. An inspiration to nineteenth-century philosophical reformers, it provided the link between the intellectual traditions of the French enlightenment and the new social science, bridging the gap between philosophie, idéologie and English utilitarianism.10 Moreover, in his pamphlet On Public Instruction, which was published in , Condorcet was to make a major contribution to the revolutionary debate on education, rehearsing the physiocratic argument that the state had a duty to provide each citizen – young women as well as young men – with public instruction. Placing great emphasis upon early vocational training, he argued that if young people were encouraged to follow a trade at school, huge social advantages would inevitably ensue. For when the time came for them to enter the world of work, the various trades and professions would receive already trained apprentices, which would benefit trade and commerce by rendering it more efficient, while also depriving the guilds of their skills monopoly. Issues such as this were always more important, in Condorcet’s mind, than the question of whether early specialisation would tend to imprison children within the confines of their class, mainly because, for him as for Emmanuel Sieyès, the progress

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of freedom was always conceived in terms of the destruction of corporate privilege. According to Condorcet the role of public authority was to make existing forms of knowledge available to the people, not to tell them how to live: ‘public authority ought to limit itself to organising instruction,’ 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 against error, which is always a public evil. But it does not have the right to decide where truth or error is to be found’.11 The responsibility for moral and religious education was thus consigned to the private sphere, while the task of organising instruction was kept in the realm of the public; indeed the social benefit of public schooling was to rest upon its very refusal to decide what was beneficial, its self-conscious open-mindedness rendering it a powerful force for improvement. In this way instruction was made to seem as if it were ideologically and morally neutral, simply the dissemination of useful information. But of course Condorcet’s model of public instruction was not nearly as ideologically neutral as it would have liked to pretend. Ostensibly it seemed to have no preferences, but quietly it served to grease the wheels of commerce–capitalism by transforming the human subject into an individuated commodity ready to take his or her place in the adult labour market. To some degree, however, Condorcet did attempt to anticipate this objection, insisting that his programme of instruction was actually designed to offset the noxious side-effects of modern commercial society, rather than compound them. The best way, according to him, of minimising the damage caused by the division of labour in civil life was to make the individual aware of his place in the social machine. In this way one of the main purposes of his scheme of public education was to offer greater intellectual equality as a consolation for the lack of social equality (), considering that if the poorer members of society were to receive proper instruction they would become immune to both the dangerous provocations of sans-culottisme and the false consolations of religion. They would realise that society could only be improved by scientific progress, and this in turn would encourage them to contemplate 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 face of present adversity, offering both an impulse to political virtue and a secular vision of immortality:

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

If this indefinite improvement of our species is a general law of nature, as I believe, man must no longer consider himself as being bound to a fleeting and isolated existence, destined to vanish after an alternation of happiness and sorrow for himself, of good and evil for those whom chance has made his neighbours. He becomes an active part of a great whole, a co-worker in an eternal creation. In a momentary existence in a speck of space, he can by his efforts encompass all places, bind himself to all centuries, and still act long after his memories 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 of critical thought was seen by Condorcet as positive and enabling. His idea was that by contemplating his existence as a mere cog in the machine of human progress the individual would be able to draw enough intellectual satisfaction and spiritual sustenance to cope with the inevitable constraints upon his physical existence. As he argued in his posthumous treatise the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain of  ‘the whole system of human labour is like a wellmade machine, whose several parts have been systematically distinguished but nonetheless being intimately bound together, form a single whole and work toward a single end’.12 For a later generation of philosophers, who had lived through the first phase of mechanical progress, it was far more difficult to be so unequivocally enthusiastic about the effects of commerce and industry. Thomas Carlyle’s suspicion was that the endless pursuit of higher levels of production was radically devoid of any identifiable goal, that machinery had, in every sense of the word, no end.13 For Condorcet, however, the vision of society as a machine rendered everything significant and full of purpose, and that was why it was important for this vision to be disseminated as widely as possible. For significantly enough he feared that without a system of public instruction to inform men and women of its benefits, the progress of enlightenment might appear unequal and unjust. Indeed he even expressed an anxiety that without such general tuition, it might actually become so: The revolutions brought about by the general advance of the human race towards perfection must certainly lead to reason and happiness. But how many passing misfortunes would be necessary to pay for it, if general instruction did not draw men closer together? How far would that epoch recede if the progress of an enlightenment that was never equally distributed fed an eternal war of greed and treachery among nations, as among the various classes within them, rather than uniting them in that fraternal exchange of needs and services that is the foundation of common happiness.14

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Of course, for the ‘primitivists’ in the Jacobin movement, the project of enlightenment favoured by Condorcet did feed an eternal war of greed and treachery precisely because it was so closely tied to the development of commerce and industry. In their eyes, rationality was just another word for bourgeois self-interest. Occurrences such as the alleged food hoarding by bourgeois négociants during the subsistence crisis of  had convinced them that the modern system of commerce was not a fraternal exchange but a fratricidal struggle. Hence they mistrusted any model of public instruction which placed an emphasis upon political economy, considering it a form of counter-revolutionary sophistry designed to enslave rather than enlighten the people. In the speech on the Cult of the Supreme Being of  Robespierre was to argue that during the early years of the Revolution the common people of France had possessed a firm understanding of liberty and equality, until Condorcet had sought to deliver them back into the hands of the aristocracy with his obscurantist sophistries, and it is likely that he had the latter’s pamphlet Sur l’Instruction Publique as well as his constitutional writings 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 , stupidly defended the cause of kings in . Labourers were relaying the light of philosophy all over the countryside, when the academician Condorcet, formerly a great mathematician in the judgment of the literary, and a great belletrist in the judgment of mathematicians, later a timid conspirator, despised by both parties, was working ceaselessly to obscure it by the treacherous hotchpotch of his mercenary rhapsodies.15

In order to explore this antagonism further, and to relate it to the deep ideological fissure at the heart of French Jacobinism, I now want to argue that the model of public education that Robespierre developed in  can be seen as a deliberate attempt to oppose what he perceived as the alienating effect of Condorcet’s plan of liberal instruction. The educational plan of Louis le Peletier, which had been abandoned unfinished at the latter’s death in February , and then subsequently revised and presented to the National Convention by Robespierre in July of the same year, constituted an unashamedly Jacobin response to the instructional theories of Condorcet, much more evidently neo-Spartan in inspiration, and markedly less proto-feminist in emphasis. The purpose of a republican school system, in Robespierre’s eyes, was to condition and shape the moral character of the citizen: ‘I am convinced’, he remarked, when presenting the paper, ‘of the necessity of

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

carrying out a complete regeneration, and, if I may express myself thus, of creating a new people.’16 Where Condorcet had wanted to promote equality of opportunity, Robespierre offered equality of experience. Where the scheme of the former had been designed to encourage children to cultivate specific skills in preparation for their entry into a diversified labour market, that of the latter placed more of an emphasis upon physical and moral virtue. To regulate one’s life, to submit to the yoke of an exact discipline, these are two habits that are important to the happiness of social existence. They must commence in childhood; acquired at that age, they become a second nature.17

Le Peletier had argued that both girls and boys should be trained to work the land, explaining that ‘it is the first, it is the most necessary, it is the most widespread occupation of man, moreover, it gives us all our bread.’18 His plan encouraged various forms of collective activity, the idea being that the sharing of common experiences would lead the citizenry to develop common opinions, and that these opinions would inevitably be collectivist. In this way, republican values would be disseminated uniformly across every rank and region of society. There was another reason, however, for Le Peletier’s emphasis on physical work: in his eyes, it was also a way of keeping children out of trouble when they were not attending lessons. Instruction, he argued, although useful in many ways, did not however attend to the ‘moral being’ of the individual, and this meant that, once out of the classroom, children were always likely to relapse into bad habits: As for the moral being, some useful instruction, some study periods, this is the narrow circle within which the proposed plan is contained. It is the work of a few hours only; but the rest of the day is abandoned to the hazard of circumstances, and the child, when the lesson is over, soon finds himself returning back, perhaps to the softness of luxury, perhaps to the pride of vanity, perhaps to the uncouthness of poverty, perhaps to the indiscretions of boredom. Unhappy victim of vices, errors, misfortune, of curiosity regarding the things around him, he will be a little less ignorant than before, the schools will be a bit more numerous, the school-masters slightly better than today; but shall we really have formed men, citizens, republicans; in a word, shall the nation have been regenerated?19

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

Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and aesthetic education

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depravity. Not content that the education system should inculcate the traditional responsibilities of gender and profession, he demanded that it should completely control the individual’s moral environment.20 Thus he demanded the kind of perpetual vigilance from the state system that the précepteur had exerted upon the hapless Emile in Rousseau’s famous treatise. And so, in the acute ideological severity of this bill the deep structure of Rousseauvian Jacobinism can be seen to emerge: Robespierre’s fundamental attitude not only to the instruction of children, but to that of the citizenry as a whole, stands revealed, most notably his fear that nothing less than a total cultural training would effect the re-education of the French people. Of course, Robespierre was forced to recognise that while children could be subjected to constant supervision until such time as they could regulate themselves and each other, it was not possible for the state to exert such a constant system of surveillance upon the contemporary adult population – frustratingly enough, the very section of the community who most required reform. So he was increasingly driven to seek civic unity through the manipulation of aesthetic effects, to encourage forms of collective activity in which everyone might discover a sense of their new identity while learning to police the recalcitrant behaviour of everyone else. And this was one of the reasons why the concept of the festival became such an important part of his project to educate a new generation of French republicans: it was a way of forcing the people of France back to school. Thus it is not necessary to regard the Festival of the Supreme Being, as many commentators have tended to do, simply as a product of Robespierre’s vain ambition to become the high priest of the Revolution, but rather as a logical consequence of the political aesthetic bequeathed to him by Rousseau, which taught that virtue could neither be taught by a process of rational instruction, nor simply imposed by force. As Jürgen Habermas has pointed out, ‘since [the Rousseauvian legislator] could rely neither on force nor on public discussion . . . he had to take refuge in the authority of an indirect influence, “which can compel without violence and persuade without convincing”’. It was not surprising, therefore, that from  onwards Robespierre himself was increasingly drawn to the concept of aesthetic education, since even in the pages of the Contrat Social ‘Rousseau’s democracy of unpublic opinion ultimately postulated the manipulative exercise of power.’21

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism 

Plant a pole crowned with flowers in the middle of a square, assemble the people, and you will have a festival. Even better: put the spectators into the show; make them actors themselves; contrive it that everyone sees and adores themselves 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 his Lettre à d’Alembert of . His central argument in the treatise was that the theatre was a corrupt form of entertainment on account of the distinction it made between those who acted and those who watched, since in his opinion this perpetuated aristocratic notions of publicity, according a representative publicness to certain privileged persons, and consigning the rest of the population to private obscurity. As Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister put it: ‘On the boards a polished man appears in his splendour with personal accomplishments, just as he does in the upper classes of society’.23 For Rousseau the public aura of the aristocracy, like that of theatrical actors, was based on an imposture, so that to be enamoured of the theatre was, in a certain sense, to be in love with one’s own slavery, since the stage was merely a reproduction of the deceptions and divisions of feudal society. The festival, on the other hand, was a form of spectacle peculiarly appropriate to a republic, for it obliterated the pernicious obstacle at the heart of theatrical representation in rendering each participant simultaneously an actor and a spectator. At a festival, according to Rousseau, every man and woman ceased to be a private person and was encouraged to identify with the collective. By bridging the gap between being and seeing, it transcended the imposture at the heart of all representation, effecting the embodiment of a unified general will, or as Jean Starobinski has interpreted it, bringing about a situation in which ‘each individual is alienated by the gaze of others, and everyone is returned to themselves by a universal recognition’.24 Despite its popularity in the middle of the eighteenth century, few revolutionaries referred to the Lettre à d’Alembert in their discussion of republican festivals. More often they drew on the description of a Swiss wine harvest in Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Heloïse () in which many of the same arguments had been rehearsed in fictional form. In this festival the entire community of the Swiss village of Clarens, peasants and nobles alike, take part in the grape harvest, with all class differences temporarily laid aside. Significantly, Rousseau represents this event as a utopian moment out of time, an experience of pure transparency in which individual desire is sublimated into general benevolence.

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Moreover, it is also depicted as an event which is at one and the same time both useful and enjoyable, fruitful and yet frugal, and thus the model for a new kind of political economy – rationally organised and yet anti-capitalist – in which the distinction between work and leisure has effectively been dissolved. As the novel’s protagonist Saint-Preux reports to 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 is equal, and nobody forgets themselves . . . One dines with the peasants at their accustomed hour, just as one works with them . . . The sweet equality that reigns here re-establishes the order of nature, it forms an instruction for some and a consolation for others, and a link of friendship for all.25

However, all is not quite as idyllic – or as effortless – as it seems. For example, we are told early on that Baron de Wolmar, the benevolent dictator of Clarens, has made a great number of preparations in advance of the harvest, preparations designed to manipulate and police the activities of his band of workers. And he bears a close resemblance to the Rousseauvian legislator of the Contrat Social in this respect, combining a fervent commitment to strong government with an atheist’s belief in the social utility of a collective faith, as is evident from the way in which he uses his wife, the passionate and conscientious Julie, as a kind of beneficent 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 life a despotic empire of wisdom and beneficence: you are for the entire region a dear and sacred despot that everyone would wish to defend and preserve with their life, and you live more securely, and more honorably in the middle of an entire people whom you love, than kings who are surrounded with all their soldiers.26

One of the most popular works of fiction published during the eighteenth century, La Nouvelle Heloïse was rapidly translated into many different languages after its first appearance in . As Robert Darnton has shown, its highly direct and emotive style inspired countless readers to seek to emulate the sentiments of its central characters.27 But what is less often commented upon is the fact that it was also seen as a blueprint for the institution of a virtuous republic.28 For in the eyes of many the Clarens section of the novel offered a more attractive utopian vision than the Contrat Social, and what was more, it actually suggested ways in which such a vision might be brought into being, containing a number

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

of detailed descriptions of civic organisation and household and garden management, which helped to provide a cogent vision of the way in which a particular version of republicanism might work itself out in practice.  The Festival of the Supreme Being finally took place on  June , under the artistic direction of the fervently Robespierrist revolutionary painter and designer Jacques-Louis David. As befitted a nation at war, it contained a considerable element of military display. Nevertheless, that did not prevent it from possessing a decidedly pastoral tone in comparison 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 numerous agricultural implements, with a statue representing natural abundance enthroned at its head. At the Champ de Mars a tall tree spread its boughs over the summit of a huge, artificially constructed Mountain. On their arrival, the deputies of the National Convention sat down beneath 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. Strictly patriotic throughout, and full of references to the natural and political virtues of France, the iconography of the festival was nevertheless highly reminiscent of the Swiss fête in Rousseau’s Julie, not merely because of its emphasis upon harvest, but also because of its highly significant use of the symbolism of the Mountain, a broad reference to the grand tradition of Alpine simplicity as much as an explicit allusion to the political ‘Montagne’ which formed the radical wing of the National Convention.29 Conceived at a time of increasing political anxiety, when many revolutionaries wanted to see an end to the Terror but were unsure about how to bring it about, the Festival of the Supreme Being was in many ways the fullest and most desperate expression of Robespierre’s utopian imagination, his final attempt to define and disseminate his vision of the future. And the fact that it drew so slavishly on Rousseau’s work, and most especially on the Emile and La Nouvelle Heloïse, does much to explain not only its comparatively doctrinaire character, but also its conspicuously ‘sentimental’ appeal. So much so, indeed, that it has been sug-

Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and aesthetic education

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gested that the reason why Saint-Just chose not to attend was because the programme of the festival was not neo-classical enough for his tastes; whatever republican feeling it sought to evoke had been thoroughly filtered through Jean-Jacques Rousseau.30 One of the facets which may have rendered Rousseau’s description of the wine-harvest especially useful to Robespierre and David was its detailed account of the actual organisation of the fête at Clarens; its concern for the fine points of administrative detail. In his narration of the event to Lord Bomston, Saint-Preux spent a lot of time enthusing about the way in which the harvest harmonised the aristocracy and the peasantry, work and play, but he also could not help noticing the way in which the whole spectacle was carefully stage-managed by Julie’s husband, the atheist philosopher Baron de Wolmar. For example, he tells us that for the duration of the evening reception which succeeded the day’s work, the appearance of equality was very carefully arranged: ‘In order to prevent envy and regret’, he notes, ‘one endeavours not to put out before the eyes of these good people anything that they could not find in their own homes.’ But there were also other, and more insidious ways in which the festival constituted an extensive exercise in social manipulation, as he slowly began to discern. In the first place, throughout the day, Wolmar effectively operates a proto-Benthamite system of surveillance, policing proceedings and administering justice. He rewards the 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 preventing them from being easy and gay. If someone does happen to forget himself, one does not disturb the festival with reprimands; but he is discharged without fail the following day.31

Above and beyond this, however, the reader is increasingly made aware, through Saint-Preux’s hints and guesses, of the extent to which it is not merely drunkenness and bad behaviour that the administration at Clarens is seeking to root out, but private sentiments or reflections of any kind. The narrator himself almost falls victim to this purgative impulse when he falls into a drunken melancholy when gazing upon Julie at dinner, and yet even her frowns of disapproval cannot quite dispel his uncontrollable feelings of remorse: ‘Then, in letting my eyes rest upon her and recalling distant times, I am taken over by a sudden shudder, and an insupportable weight falls upon my heart, leaving me with a grievous impression that is only painfully effaced.’32

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

In passages such as this, the novel exhibits a deep sensitivity, far greater than anything in the Contrat Social, to the destructive effect of a war on private sentiments. In the Contrat Social the pursuit of civic virtue was always defined in terms of the individual’s internal struggle between his own national and personal allegiances. But in La Nouvelle Heloïse however, much greater stress was placed on the broader implications of this putative Kulturkampf – the process was always seen in an identifiably social context. And throughout the earlier work, Rousseau exhibited an irresolvably ambivalent attitude to this question. For even if in many ways his sketching of Wolmar’s Clarens does look eagerly forward to the utopian imaginings of the Lettre á d’Alembert and the Contrat Social, his continued sympathy for the character of Saint-Preux, who always stands in an uncomfortable relation to the utopian arrangements, can already be seen to anticipate the many heartfelt descriptions of exclusion and alienation that one finds in the Reveries and the Confessions. In his later political theory it is true that Rousseau became extremely keen to recommend the manipulative use of power by a ‘benevolent’ legislator; but in the pages of Julie he was by no means averse to exploring what it would feel like to be a victim of such manipulation. Of all the accounts of the Festival of the Supreme Being, perhaps the most influential, at least in Britain, was the one given by the English poet and Girondin sympathiser Helen Maria Williams in her Memoirs of the Reign of Robespierre of . Writing, like the Rousseau of Julie, in the persona of the sentimental letter-writer, Williams was to reproduce the central facets of Saint-Preux’s festival critique in her extensive attack upon the coerciveness and hidden cruelty of Robespierre’s utopian pageant. She made much of the rather mechanical nature of the ceremony, as if to highlight the extent to which Jacobin politics represented nothing but a kind of lifeless simulation of true republican feeling: ‘At this spot’, she wrote sarcastically, ‘by David’s command, the mothers are to 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 the old; upon this boulevard the people are to sing; upon that, they must dance; at noon they must listen in silence, and at sunset they must rend the air with acclamations.’33 Many modern commentators have tended to agree with the criticism implict in Williams’ analysis. Mona Ozouf, for example, in her influential book on the Revolutionary fêtes, was to make the general point that ‘utopian festivals always have that air of order and regulation that begins by discouraging fantasy and ends by punishing it’.34 For Williams, all of the charges which Rousseau had brought

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against the theatre applied with increased force to Robespierre’s festival, which offered itself as the very antithesis of hatred and bloodshed, but which had terrorist principles inscribed at its very heart. And it was the perfect symbol of the reign of Robespierre in this respect, in the sense that behind its rhetoric of transparency there lay concealed a despotic will to power: ‘the glowing festoons appeared tinged with blood’, she wrote, ‘and in the background of this festive scenery, the guillotine rose above the disturbed imagination’. At the centre of Williams’s account was the representation of Robespierre as a kind of political Tartuffe, a ‘foul fiend’ who was using the mask of political sanctity to disguise his base longings. Not content to be the Cato of the Revolution, he was aspiring to become its Savonarola: Upon a tribune in the centre of the theatre, Robespierre, as president of the Convention, appeared, and having for a few hours disencumbered the square of the Revolution of the guillotine, this high priest of Moloch, within view of that very spot where his daily sacrifice of human victims was offered up, covered with their own blood, invoked the Parent of universal nature, talked of the charms of virtue, and breathed the hope of immortality.

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

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

Prophet of Khorassan’ (a kind of displaced allegory of the Jacobinism of the s), in which the seemingly virtuous leader of a revolutionary Moslem sect is both literally and symbolically unmasked, at the very height of some wild festivities, as a mendacious and murderous fraud. In other representations, however, the central significance of the festival was interpreted in much broader terms, with its rather mechanical simulation of popular unity and fellow feelings being seen as the abolute death-knell of the revolutionary project of régéneration. In several accounts the apparent lack of vitality in Robespierre’s personal demeanour became a metonym for the lifelessness of French society under the Jacobins. Thus the great nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet, in the midst of an account of the Jacobin period that was in other respects not entirely unsympathetic to Robespierre’s tragic predicament, described David’s commemorative sketch of Robespierre at the festival as ‘like a cat drowned long ago, and reanimated by galvanism, or perhaps like a reptile which stiffens as it raises itself up, with an unspeakable look, of terrifying civility’.35 In Michelet’s mind, the festival dramatised not only Robespierre’s political mendacity but also the dreadful gap between his apparent commitment to a politics of freedom and the will and his actual enslavement to the forces of historical necessity: ‘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. The horror of his double role struck him more and more’.36 And of course, one way of thinking about this ‘double role’ – Robespierre’s status as both the avenging angel and the abject automaton of history – is to reemphasise the way in which it arose out of his own paradoxical attempt to pursue ‘primitive’ virtue by ‘progressive’ means, to employ the increasingly mechanistic structures of modern bourgeois society – representative democracy, the press, the law, the guillotine – in order to rediscover the principle of ancient freedom, a violent rejection of modernity that was at one and the same time hopelessly dependent upon its forms. And it was this that rendered him at once the Julie and the Wolmar of the fête, hence one should not think of the hastily constructed figure of the Mountain erected on the open plain of the Champ de Mars simply as a piece of political hypocrisy, a deliberate attempt to disguise the bare and unfeeling scaffolding of modern government, without equal consideration of the extent to which it was also an hysterical replacement of the guillotine, a form of violently overdetermined denial.

. ‘Festival of the Supreme Being on the Champ de Mars’ (), watercolour by Naudet. ‘At the Champ de Mars a tall tree spread its boughs over the summit of a huge, artificially constructed Mountain. On their arrival, the deputies of the National Convention sat down beneath 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.’

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism 

Over the last fifteen years, a significant amount of scholarly work has successfully shown that far from being the founding text of AngloAmerican feminism that it had long been considered, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman of  actually emerged out of a long tradition of eighteenth-century feminist writing, rehearsing arguments that had already been mooted much earlier by figures such as Mary Astell and Mary Wortley Montagu.37 Nevertheless, as has readily been acknowledged, what was distinctive about Wollstonecraft’s treatise was the extent to which it latched onto the terms of the political debate that was raging in England and France at the time of its initial composition. As a number of recent critical studies have shown, the early years of the Revolution had seen the development of an energetic campaign in favour of political rights for women. So much so, indeed, that until the Jacobin backlash of –, French feminists such as Olympe de Gouges had been able to give a considerable public profile to this cause.38 And their opinions had been shared by some of the more progressive male philosophers of the period, most notably Antoine-Nicholas de Condorcet, who had argued that since women were as capable as men of acquiring and employing the faculty of reason, they should undoubtedly possess the same civic rights.39 Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman was thus very much a product of the legislative moment of –, sharing much of the rational confidence of Condorcet and Tom Paine, despite the fact that the period of its composition coincided with the appearance of the French Constitution of , which effectively excluded all women from citizenship.40 Outspokenly progressive in her views, Wollstonecraft was extremely dismissive of the neo-Spartan current of revolutionary politics, and indignant at the attitude to women that it entailed. It was highly appropriate, therefore, that of all the male theorists of female education who came under attack in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Rousseau was the one who most excited her indignation.41 In the fifth book of his treatise Emile, ou l’éducation of  Rousseau had argued that young men should be trained for a life of independent action and public virtue, while young girls ought merely to be prepared for their future role as wives and mothers. In a notorious piece of double-dealing, he had insisted upon the absolute duty of women to defer to their fathers and husbands 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 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 numerous agricultural implements, with a statue representing natural abundance enthroned at its head.’

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

prevent them from getting their own way in much of their daily life if they made proper use of their ‘amiable weaknesses’. In the Vindication Wollstonecraft described this division of sexual labour as a ‘philosophy of lasciviousness’. She denied that women were less capable than men of following the dictates of reason and virtue, suggesting that it had merely come to seem that way because of the corrupt state of female education. Young girls were taught to cultivate their sensitivities in order to be more attractive to men, and this meant that many women reached adulthood suffused with a highly debilitating romantic sensibility. And contemporary novels, such as Rousseau’s own Julie had played an especially pernicious part in this process, by encouraging young women to envelop themselves in a tissue of deceitful dreams and fantasies, distracting themselves from their actual servitude. In order to remedy this, therefore, Wollstonecraft proposed a radical revolution in educational practice, suggesting that if boys and girls were treated more equally, women would be able to pursue the same robust occupations and cultivate the same virtuous aspirations as their male counterparts. One of the most curious aspects of Wollstonecraft’s position was that in the first years of the French Revolution she had been an enthusiastic admirer of Rousseau’s work. In the Analytical Review for  she had defended the Confessions from the charge of immorality by arguing that it was both rationally instructive and emotionally improving. Not only had Rousseau made a valuable contribution to the history of the human mind, she argued, but it was ultimately impossible, despite all of his errors, not to identify with the warm effusions of his heart.42 However, as we have seen, during the legislative moment of – Wollstonecraft became an increasingly enthusiastic devotee of the discourse of rational perfectibility, and this encouraged the self-consciously progressive reappraisal of Rousseau contained in the Vindication. Reworking her former emphasis, she depicted his character as an unstable compound of idealism and sensuality, a volatile mixture which it had been the task of his work both to offset and to justify, and which helped explain his constant alternation between visions of public virtue and celebrations of private appetite. According to this view of things, Jean-Jacques came to be seen as a prime example of the same corrupt femininity that Rousseau himself had attempted to segregate and control. The vision of social and political progress which was laid out in the Vindication had clear affinities with that put forward in Condorcet’s pamphlet On Public Instruction published the previous year. And it is highly likely that Wollstonecraft sought out its author when she was introduced

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to the leading members of the Girondin faction during her residence in France in –.43 But her acquaintance could only have lasted a few months, for in the summer of  the Jacobin party were to call for the arrest of twenty-two of the leading Girondins, and many of Wollstonecraft’s new friends were immediately imprisoned or sent into hiding. In response to this predicament, figures such as Jacques-Pierrre Brissot, Manon Roland, Jean-Baptiste Louvet and Helen Maria Williams set about writing Rousseauvian confessions to justify their political conduct. Of their number, Condorcet alone refused to adopt a merely personal perspective, embarking instead upon his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain in an attempt to reaffirm the revolutionary project of social perfectibility. In many ways, Condorcet’s resolutely ‘progressive’ influence can be seen to have had a palpable effect on Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution of , for in the course of this work, she too tried to take a broad view of revolutionary history, subsuming the birth pangs of the new nation into a broader narrative of historical progress: ‘It is perhaps difficult to bring ourselves to believe that out of this chaotic mass a fairer government is rising than has ever shed the sweets of social life upon the world,’ she declared, ‘but things must have time to find their own level’.44 Addressing the failure of the legislative phase of the French Revolution, she blamed the peculiar mixture of idealism and depravity in the French people, describing the national character as if it was merely that of Rousseau writ large: ‘unmindful of the dreadful effects beginning to flow from an unbounded licentiousness,’ she argued, ‘[the Constituent Assembly] continued to pursue a romantic sublimity of character, dangerous to all sublunary laws’ (, ). Instead of being patient and gradual in their emphasis, the French had been volatile and preremptory; instead of trusting to the gradual progress of reason, they had 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 and the physiocrats, who had taught ‘that the prosperity of a state depends on the freedom of industry; that talents should be permitted to find their level [and] that the unshackling of commerce is the only secret to render it flourishing, and answer more effectually the ends for which it is politically necessary’ (, ). In short, the revolution had been impeded by violence because the French had been too much like ill-educated women, full of a kind of revolutionary vanity and excitability inappropriate to the business of rational legislation. Thus it was excessive sensibility which had led to the atrocities: ‘so weak is the tenderness

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produced by sympathy, or polished manners, compared with the humanity of a cultivated understanding. Alas! it is morals, not feelings which distinguish men from beasts of prey!’ (, ). Looking back over the history of France, she considered that it was perhaps not surprising that the revolution had resulted in violence, for the corrupting influence of despotism had long deprived the people of all respect for justice and the law (, ). Ostensibly she believed that the French would continue to approach true reason and virtue, while occasionally expressing doubts about how this was going be achieved.45 In general terms she endorsed Condorcet’s notion of the civilising role of commerce, but that did not prevent her from acknowledging Adam Smith’s remarks on the brutalising effect of the division of labour (, ). And she was also driven to question his optimistic model of public education, while discussing the original debate over the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’. Several members argued that the declaration ought to conclude and not precede the constitution; insisting that it was dangerous to awaken a somnambulist on the brink of a precipice; or to take a man to the top of a mountain, to show him a vast country that belonged to him, but of which he could not immediately claim the possession. ‘It is a veil,’ said they, ‘that it would be imprudent to raise suddenly – it is a secret that it is necessary to conceal, till the effect of a good constitution puts them into a situation to hear it with safety’. (, )

The suggestion that the people might have to undergo a process of cultural re-education before receiving political instruction, that the inculcation of manners might have to precede the reception of laws runs through much of the Historical and Moral View. And this is just one of the ways in which Wollstonecraft moves beyond the ‘instructional’ model of political emancipation favoured by Condorcet to contemplate a more ‘educational’ approach, as if the failure of the legislative period of the Revolution had forced her to rethink the rationalist equation of knowledge and virtue. It is worth noting, moreover, that in the passage quoted above the ‘Declaration’ is both a prospect and a precipice: an indirect recognition on Wollstonecraft’s part of Edmund Burke’s insight that when compared with the positive concept of freedom expressed by the chivalric tradition, the revolutionary discourse of rights offered an entirely legalistic definition of liberty that was potentially quite demoralising in nature.46 Many republicans were to find it impossible to write progressive history in the aftermath of the Terror, since for a large number of fellowtravellers the spectacle of mass death, accompanied by increasing polit-

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ical disappointment, had begun to call the entire project into question. Symbolically, Rabaut St Etienne’s liberal Précis historique de la Revolution Française had stopped short at , only to be completed after its author’s death by the monarchist historian Lacretelle jeune. In this context, it is perhaps understandable that, when she returned to England in  Wollstonecraft was to abandon her Historical and Moral View in order to help her friend Joseph Johnson publish a handful of works recently penned by some of her former revolutionary acquaintances: JeanBaptiste Louvet’s Mémoires, which told of his harrowing experiences as a proscrit on the run from the Jacobin authorities during the reign of Robespierre, Madame Roland’s posthumous Appel à la posterité impartielle, a series of autobiographical and political writings written in prison during the autumn of , as well as Condorcet’s more formal and abstract Esquisse. What cannot have failed to strike Wollstonecraft, as she read through the memoirs of Roland, was the extraordinary power of her first-person narrative, the energy and persuasiveness of her plainspeaking style. Probably Louvet had much the same effect. But what must also have affected her was the explicit use which both these writers made of the tropes and techniques of Rousseau, his confessional rhetoric and his fictional topoi. For a writer who had sought to move beyond her early enthusiasm for Rousseau in the early s it must have been a singularly intriguing experience to find Jean-Jacques being invoked and imitated in this way, and to such powerful effect, by writers who were otherwise broadly sympathetic to her own ‘progressive’ position. So much so, indeed, that it may have encouraged her to rethink her attitude, not only to Rousseau’s Confessions and his Nouvelle Heloïse, but also to the relationship between femininity and sensibility, women and writing, for when she next came to reflect on recent European history, it was in the context of a deliberately confessional, more openly ‘appealing’ document, the Letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark of .  Set in a small community in the Swiss Alps, La Nouvelle Heloïse describes how a friendship develops between a humble tutor, Saint-Preux, and his pupil, Julie d’Etange, the daughter of a wealthy nobleman of the region. Saint-Preux’s affection for Julie soon flames into an importunate romantic desire deeply inappropriate to their difference in status. Their love is briefly consummated, but Julie subsequently repents her passion, and somewhat theatrically embraces a life of religious piety and domestic

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obedience, allowing herself to be married off to one of her father’s friends, the middle-aged rationalist and atheist Baron de Wolmar. Almost suicidal with despair, Saint-Preux leaves the little community to travel the world, and on his return Baron de Wolmar and Julie invite him to live with them on their estate at Clarens. Clarens boasts a smoothly regulated domestic economy that Rousseau clearly intends us to regard as a model of fairness and rationality. During his stay, Julie encourages Saint-Preux to sublimate and diffuse his desire for her, to rechannel his ardour into a broader network of social and domestic affections. Her influence gradually resocialises him, healing him back into the community as a whole. During the course of this section of the novel, we are made aware of the extent to which Julie has been transformed into an instrument of Wolmar’s benevolent dictatorship, nurturing and shaping the affections of the community at the wine-harvest while he discreetly monitors its moral economy from a distance. At the end of the novel she falls fatally ill, and as she dies she is moved to confess her continuing love for SaintPreux. Just before she expires she makes him promise to stay on at Clarens after her death to tutor her children. In this way the novel offers us an ambiguous ending that it is possible to read either in terms of the return of repressed ‘revolutionary’ desire, or as the final stage in the domestication and sublimation of Saint-Preux’s passion. Julie’s death itself can be read either as a form of republican martyrdom, or as an example of Christian renunciation: ‘No, I shall not leave you’, she writes to Saint-Preux in her last letter, ‘I shall wait for you. The virtue that separated us on earth will unite us in the eternal resting-place. I die with this sweet expectation: only too happy to purchase at the expense of my life the right to love you forever without crime, and to tell you that one more time!’47 Such was the popularity and influence of La Nouvelle Heloïse that Burke singled it out for special consideration in the extended attack on Rousseau in his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly of . For not only was it Rousseau’s best-known work, it was also the work in which his paradoxical theories had been given their most seductive form, hence it was especially needful of rebuke. In Burke’s eyes, it was a veritable source-book of revolutionary morality: its account of the love-affair between a humble tutor and the daughter of a wealthy Swiss aristocrat was full of ‘metaphysical speculations blended with coarse sensuality’.48 It was not surprising, therefore, that the French Revolutionaries had used it to propagate those principles by which every servant might think

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it if not his duty at least his privilege to betray his ‘master’, principles which tended ‘to destroy all the tranquillity and security of domestic life; turning the asylum of the house into a gloomy prison.’49 That this novel was not merely Burke’s bête-noire becomes evident when we look at the Anti-Jacobin pamphlets of the later s. In the early sections of her Strictures, for example, Hannah More expressed her concern that, with the decline of the English radical movement since , Jacobinism had not disappeared, it had merely gone underground. In this light, she saw the continued influence of Rousseau’s novel among writers and readers alike as a very dangerous sign, primarily because of the specious appeal of his celebrated prose style: Novels, which used chiefly to be dangerous in one respect, are now become mischievous in a thousand. They are continually shifting their ground, and enlarging their sphere, and are daily becoming vehicles of wider mischief. Sometimes they concentrate their force, and are at once employed to diffuse destructive politics, deplorable profligacy, and impudent infidelity. Rousseau was the first popular dispenser of this complicated drug, in which the deleterious infusion was strong, and the effect proportionably fatal. For he does not attempt to seduce the affections but through the medium of the principles. He does not paint an innocent woman ruined, repenting, and restored; but with a far more mischievous refinement, he annihilates the value of chastity, and with pernicious subtlety attempts to make his heroine appear almost more amiable without it.50

The explicit opposition of Burke and More only serves to suggest that the novel enjoyed continued favour in this period, and to indicate that its popularity was always potentially linked to its supposed political character. Again, as in the case of the Confessions, it was a case of the medium becoming the message. In her Lettres sur . . . Jean-Jacques Rousseau of  Germaine de Staël had been prepared to acknowledge that the skeleton of the narrative was not perhaps as edifying as it might have been, but she 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 noblest of sentiments even while relating the most troubling of stories. Most importantly of all, in her opinion, the novel exemplified the power of love as a force for improvement; functioning not as a tale of seduction, but as a treatise on the power of female aesthetic education, the reshaping of male sensuality into social virtue.51 The novel was quite unlike any of Rousseau’s other works in this respect. The neo-Spartan emphasis of the Contrat Social was not nearly so much in evidence, and nor was the chauvinism which characterised

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the last book of Emile. Indeed, in the early stages of the novel, there was a substantial critique of the tyrannical treatment of women by fathers and lovers alike, and in the second half, an extended analysis of the active role which ‘bourgeois’ women might play as moral leaders of the community. Admittedly, there was also much in the work that many eighteenth-century feminists would have found pernicious. As has been mentioned above, a substantial section of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman had been devoted to a critique of its romantic idealism. Nevertheless, for de Staël the novel still provided a kind of model for the ideal role of an enlightened woman in modern society, and it was on these terms that she continued to recommend it throughout her career. It can even be seen to have inspired one of her own novels Corinne, ou L’Italie (), which explores the character of another exceptional young woman who grows up to become the motivator, 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 was heavily influenced by the French salon culture of the mid-eighteenth century. In broad terms she acquiesced in the notion that women were primarily intended for domestic and maternal duties, but she did also believe that there ought to be exceptions to this general rule: most notably, talented women, by which she meant women of her own rather privileged social and educational background, should be free to pursue their own careers, become authors, and take a full part in public life. And Julie was a highly positive role model for de Staël in this respect, for she was in many ways a revolutionary version of the salon hostess, a woman whose muse-like qualities were put in the service of the entire community and not merely an exclusive clique. What is more, many contemporary commentators were to share de Staël’s enthusiastic appraisal of the novel as a fundamentally libertarian text, to the extent that it remained extremely popular in radical circles throughout the revolutionary period, not least among female readers, for whom it provided an empowering alternative to the notoriously misogynistic Emile. But for all its continued popularity, interpretations of it, and allusions to it, did undergo a significant change during the course of the s. In the early years of the Revolution, for example, it was most often seen in its political aspect, as a fully-blown essay, in fictional form, on the rehaping of private feeling into public virtue. Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man of – is a case in point. Although ostensibly a theoretical treatise on the educative capacity of

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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 if to draw attention to the fact that the abstract ménage à trois that Schiller was proposing between Sense, Reason and Aesthetic Education had its fictional counterpart in the educational arrangement between SaintPreux, Wolmar and Julie that was attempted at Clarens. Expressly written out of a desire to try and recuperate the revolutionary ideal after the failure of the first phase of constitutional legislation, Schiller’s treatise was directly contemporaneous with the Festival of the Supreme Being, and like Robespierre, its author can be seen to have been reflecting on the political lessons to be learned from Wolmar’s use of Julie to re-educate the modern populace. In order to improve the moral life of the individual, Schiller argued, culture would have to interpose itself between the subject in his capacity as a sensuous, living being, and the onerous demands of public virtue, acting as ‘a third character, which akin to both the others, might prepare a transition from the rule of mere force to the rule of law, and which, without in any way impeding the development of moral character, might on the contrary serve as a pledge in the sensible world of a morality as yet unseen’.52 And by choosing an epigraph from La Nouvelle Heloïse Schiller was able to use an extremely well-known novel in order to reinforce his point, since the figure of Julie was so obviously such a perfect personification of this ‘third character’. In the latter part of the decade, however, when La Nouvelle Heloïse was discussed or invoked, there was far less emphasis placed upon Clarens as a template of utopia. Instead, there were many more references to those sections of the novel, in which libertarian sentiment had expressed itself in a romantic rather than a legislative manner. In the memoirs of the proscribed Girondins, many of which were written either in prison or in exile during the fatal months of the Terror, we find La Nouvelle Heloïse being put to new uses. In the writings of Marie-Jeanne Roland, for example, the character of Julie actually provided the lens through which she interpreted her revolutionary experience, but in a manner very different from either Schiller or de Staël. Having been inspired at a very early age by the figure of Rousseau’s heroine, Roland spent much of her early epistolary life in emulation of her literary character. And after the outbreak of the Revolution itself, she began to carry out the role of Julie on a more political level, hosting one of the leading radical salons of the early s, at which she entertained many of the leading republicans of the age, including Robespierre himself, who was at one time a close friend and ally. And

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later, she was to become increasingly involved in the business of government itself, offering her husband, Jean-Marie Roland, the Minister of the Interior, an enormous amount of unofficial and undisclosed help with the propaganda work of the new Bureau de l’esprit public. Given her outstanding talents, and the considerable if largely covert influence she exerted upon ministerial politics during –, it was not perhaps surprising that when the Jacobins turned against women in public life between –, Marie-Jeanne was to fall foul of the virulent popular press, rapidly coming to be seen as a kind of Girondin version of that other female political intriguer Marie-Antoinette. After the proscription of the Gironde, and her own subsequent imprisonment, she began to feel increasingly betrayed by the Revolution in general and by Robespierre in particular, whom she had once considered to be an ‘honest man’. And she also grew increasingly frustrated by the licentiousness and barbarity of the French people as a whole; so much so, in fact, that she regularly punctuated her prison memoirs with heartfelt harangues: Liberty – She is for proud spirits who despise death and yet know how to administer it. She is not made for this corrupt nation which only leaves the bed of debauchery or the jaws of misery in order to brutalise itself in licentiousness, reddening as it wades through the endless streams of blood flowing from the scaffolds! She is not made for such feeble individuals who try to preserve their own lives while the fatherland laments, as civil wars ravage it, and destruction and fear are spreading everywhere. 53

What is striking about Roland’s ‘Dernières Pensées’, which were written at the very end of her life, when she must have known her days were numbered, is that for all their explicit opposition to the Jacobin Terror, they are still strikingly close to Robespierre in their ideological character. Contrary to the example of many members of the Gironde, they do not condemn the French for their use of political violence, and nor do they criticise the revolutionary cult of public sacrifice, instead they constitute an appeal for a return to true republican values, such as virtue and restraint. And Robespierre himself was often to strike a similarly neo-Spartan note in his speeches at this time. Given this resemblance, it is interesting that, apart from listing its excesses, one of the primary means by which Roland differentiated herself from the Jacobin regime, was by rehearsing and recycling the romantic topos of La Nouvelle Heloïse. In the last months of her life she wrote many ardent letters to her lover, the proscribed Girondin François Buzot, letters which Mary Wollstonecraft herself may have helped to deliver. Primarily, of

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course, these were private letters. But there is also a great deal of internal and external evidence to suggest that they were also intended for posthumous publication, and that Jeanne-Marie considered them as a possible means of intervening upon the revolutionary debate, as well as a settling of her private accounts. And the likelihood of this increases when we observe the highly self-conscious way in which she recreates the dynamic between Julie and Saint-Preux in these last letters, creating a field of republican transparency between herself and her lover in order to dramatise the opacity of the political situation which continued to surround them. For example, in a particularly heart-rending letter written shortly before her execution, she undertook a direct pastiche of Julie’s final words: And you whom I dare not name! – You who will be better known one day when the world laments our common misfortune; whom the most terrible of passions had not prevented from respecting the barriers of virtue, will it afflict you to see me precede you to that place where nothing can prevent us from being united? – There dreadful prejudices, arbitrary exclusions, hateful passions, and manifold tyrannies will be no more [. . .] Adieu, no, I am not leaving you; to leave the world is for us to come together.54

In allusions such as this, it will be immediately evident that less emphasis was being placed upon Julie’s gradual training of Saint-Preux, and more on the stubborn survival of their youthful romantic longing, a longing 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 the public tyranny of the First Republic without threatening her credentials as a hard-line defender of republican values. As she herself said in one of her letters: ‘Unknown and ignored I can, in silence and retreat, distract myself from the horrors which are tearing apart the bosom of my country, and await, in the practice of private virtue, the conclusion to these evils’.55 Ultimately, of course, given her status as a married woman with a lover, Roland’s claim to private virtue was really rather problematic, and thus her publisher Bosc decided to suppress almost all of the references to Buzot in the first edition of the Mémoires, for fear that it might harm the Girondin cause. But even in the published version, Roland was still to able to offer her private affections as an emblem of public virtue under siege. A similar emphasis was evident in another one of the Girondin narratives of the period, Jean-Baptiste Louvet’s Mémoires, which were

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published shortly after his emergence from hiding in –. And in this case there was no need for the same degree of censorship. For throughout this harrowing tale of persecution and pursuit, Louvet was able to offer his love for his own absent wife Lodoiska as a kind of utopian longing, comparing it to the thwarted affection of the exiled Saint-Preux in the early part of Rousseau’s novel. Describing his exile in the Jura during –, he was not afraid to evoke the descriptions of Switzerland contained in ‘the sublime and virtuous Rousseau’, nor to identify himself closely with Rousseau’s protagonist, as he ranged among the savage rocks of Meillerie in anxious anticipation of a reconciliation with his beloved. And in this way he was able to give his enforced exile a republican pedigree, distracting attention from the fact that in moving backwards and forwards across the border with Switzerland, he had transformed himself, if only briefly, into an émigré.56 Thus for both Roland and Louvet the love of Julie and Saint-Preux was a model of republican martyrdom, a consolation for the failure of the revolution, and a promise of future liberty and equality. And selective allusion to the novel was crucial in helping to give their memoirs a properly public status, for it was only by drawing upon the novel’s representation of love as the germ of civic feeling that Louvet and Roland were able to use their own experiences of romantic estrangement to affirm that, in spite of the direful effects of persecution and suffering, public virtue was still alive and well in France, and no less hardy for having been temporarily incubated in a private form.  As is well known, Wollstonecraft’s Letters [from] Sweden, Norway and Denmark began life as a series of personal missives written to her estranged American lover Gilbert Imlay, a merchant and entrepreneur with whom she had lived during her time in France.57 Only later were they collated, augmented and revised into a full-scale travel book offering an extensive analysis of the social conditions then prevailing among the little-known countries of Scandinavia. Condorcet had praised travel writing in the Esquisse as a valuable contribution to historical progress, considering that a comparative study of the social customs and institutions of different nations would contribute greatly to the augmentation and advancement of knowledge. In this context, Wollstonecraft’s Letters could be seen as an attempt to move beyond political disappointment into a new realm of philosophical enquiry,

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incorporating elements of the emergent discourse of social science into the popular genre of travel literature. But simply to interpret the letters in this way would be to neglect their highly personal character, for the sociological observations and political reflections scattered throughout the text are always made subservient to the self-consciously confessional form of the whole. Nevertheless, it is my contention that this autobiographical element does not offer a repudiation or rejection of the project of social perfectibility, but a tactical manipulation of it. It is an indulgence in the personal as a means of intervening upon the political, and in this respect, like the Girondin memoirs, an intriguing return to, and renegotiation of, the sentimental writings of Rousseau. As befits the circumstances of their composition, Wollstonecraft’s Letters offer a series of ever-changing impressions of the societies she encountered in Scandinavia. Upon her first arrival in Norway, she praises the simplicity of its peasant life, feeling herself briefly transported back to the ‘golden age’. She then goes on to describe how her surroundings encourage her to forget the horrors she had witnessed during the French Revolution, rekindling her waning ‘enthusiasm’ for social improvement. And she also relates how the sentiments arising in her as a result of the contemplation of the beautiful forms of nature serve as a reminder of her affection for her fellow-beings, and in particular her loved ones, making her feel less like a ‘particle broken off from mankind’. As her trip develops, however, ‘primitivist’ effusions such as this are increasingly forced to compete with sentiments more straightforwardly ‘progressive’ in nature. Despite being intrigued by various details and practices of Scandinavian life, Wollstonecraft increasingly affirms the absolute superiority of modern civilization to rural simplicity, associating it with the refinement of enjoyment and the raising of moral consciousness. And as the Letters continue, this ‘progressive’ voice becomes more pronounced, as the author becomes more than ever convinced that the virtues of a nation bear ‘an exact relation’ to its scientific improvements. One curious feature of the Letters, however, and something which a number of previous critics have often commented upon, is the extent to which Wollstonecraft suppresses what many of her contemporaries saw as the necessary link between commercial development and social improvement. For many eighteenth-century commentators commerce was one of the most powerful motors of civilisation, fuelling travel and enquiry, encouraging different peoples from different lands to relate to one another in ever more peaceable, friendly and mutually beneficial

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ways. Others, by contrast, most notably Rousseau, considered commerce simply as the breeding-ground of luxury and selfishness. As for Wollstonecraft, it seems that during the s she grew progressively closer to the position adopted on this issue by her future partner William Godwin, who was at one and the same time a firm champion of rational improvement and a critic of the general effects of commercial exchange. The structural irony that haunts Wollstonecraft’s Letters, of course, is that while its author celebrates travel as a catalyst of enlightened enquiry and general social improvement, she neglects to mention that her trip to Scandinavia had been both prompted and facilitated by the principle of trade, for it was in essence a commercial errand for Imlay which had taken her to the Baltic states in the first place. Regardless of this, however, for Wollstonecraft as for Godwin, ‘enlightenment’ was a self-conscious project, not a mere side-effect of the general expansion of trade and industry. In the Letters this philosophic spirit is necessarily somewhat aloof from the world, but it is also oddly in tune with the sights and sounds of nature, the beauty and harmony of which, in Wollstonecraft’s mind, effectively anticipate the social improvements of the future, thus developing into a source of utopian sentiment at once powerful and painful. As in Godwin, therefore, Wollstonecraft’s ideal society is at one and the same 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 social order transparent not only to itself but also to nature. Unlike Political Justice, however, the Letters do not fully indulge their prophetic spirit, they do not, finally, attempt to legislate the future, and at no point does Wollstonecraft give in to the lawgiving impulse. But as we shall see, the concept of legislation, and the figure of the legislator, is nevertheless a crucial element in the text. From the very beginning, Wollstonecraft makes much of her solitariness, and the people that she meets are highly conscious of it too. Indeed she often has the impression that she is all the more interesting to the Scandinavians because of her unusual status, as a single woman travelling alone in a foreign country. Yet she does not merely explore her solitude, she also exploits it, and in a number of interesting ways. Partly she uses it to dramatise her own emotional isolation, her estrangement from the rest of mankind. But also, in a distinct but related move, she uses it to indulge a fantasy of herself as a Rousseauvian législateur. As we saw in chapter , in the Contrat Social the legislator was a fundamentally solitary figure, an outsider, a foreigner, whose very foreignness, indeed, was what

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gave him the capacity to function as a disinterested lawgiver. And in her various encounters in Scandinavia, Wollstonecraft actively seeks to identify herself, on a number of separate occasions, with this singular type, sympathising with the reforming instincts of Queen Matilda, for example, but also, and more significantly, implicitly comparing herself with the aforementioned ‘Peruvian pair’, having conspicuously dropped down, like them, as if from the sky, into the very heart of a primitive and alien society. Essentially this comparison is intended to point a contrast: that whereas the Peruvian pair effectively managed to improve the manners of a nation, Wollstonecraft’s attempts to improve Scandinavian domestic practice fall on decidedly deaf ears. Without the additional help of a ‘pious fraud’, it seems, reason alone is not yet powerful enough to counter the forces of custom and prejudice. There is a consolation for this, however, which is the discovery by Wollstonecraft of another kind of power, the power that solitude brings, its capacity to generate sympathy among her readers as well as her acquaintances, a discovery which has implications not only for her personal but also for her literary character. For increasingly in the Letters Wollstonecraft begins to adopt the persona of the solitary legislator, whose sentimental idealism comes to represent a kind of utopian principle in itself, as well as an index of the unregenerate nature of the society which surrounds her. As in the fifth of Rousseau’s Rêveries, the ‘state’ of nature is represented as the only place in which the solitary legislator feels at home; it alone constitutes a realm in harmony with his or her own internal ‘nature’. But the comparison with Rousseau does not end there, for in their very openness and directness, Wollstonecraft’s Letters, like the Confessions and La Nouvelle Heloïse, can be seen to function not merely as an expression of sensibility 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 ‘commercial spirit’ is, of course, directed as much to the reader as to her recalcitrant lover – a characteristically Rousseauvian manoeuvre, which undermines the traditional barrier between author and audience, and effectively offers an extremely powerful ‘negative’ version of the utopian spirit. Of course, the fact that the author of the Letters is writing to an actual interlocutor, and not, as in Rousseau’s Rêveries, simply ruminating in a self-created vacuum, makes a huge difference. One of the reasons why Wollstonecraft’s use of the letter-form is so powerful is that she employs it in such a way as to recall, but also differentiate herself from, several of

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its more celebrated former practitioners: Sterne’s Yorick, of course, but also Werther, and most of all, perhaps, the two lovers from La Nouvelle Heloïse. That the monologic structure of the Letters recalls the atmosphere of inner suffering depicted in Goethe’s novel was to some degree acknowledged 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 of Goethe’s hero – that he was an example of the fate of a noble spirit suffering under a bad social order – was also preeminently true of Wollstonecraft, and of the way in which she presented herself. But above and beyond this, there is a broader allusion in the Letters to one of the most celebrated sections of La Nouvelle Heloïse: that part of the novel when Saint-Preux is forced to leave Clarens because of the importunacy of his desires for Julie, temporarily retreating into exile at Meillerie, a site high up in the mountains on the other side of the lake, where he writes to her of the simple, virtuous life of the people of the Pays de Vaud, who have helped in various ways to soften his love-lorn anguish. And in reworking the topos of these famous letters, once again Wollstonecraft invokes Rousseau in order to distance herself from him, firstly by taking the man’s part in the sentimental narrative, the part of the active exile; secondly by refusing to idealise her ‘primitive’ retreat; and thirdly by providing only one half of the dialogue – emphasising her role as a passionate, energetic, inquiring woman, while also dramatising the culpable non-responsiveness of her correspondent. It is important, therefore, to read Wollstonecraft’s continued commitment to rational instruction over and above the temptations of ‘pious frauds’ in the context of the ongoing project of personal re-education undertaken by the Letters as a whole, for throughout her discussion of the social and cultural conditions prevailing in the Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and the means by which they might be improved, she makes a series of attempts to ‘improve’ her correspondent and former lover Gilbert Imlay by seeking to cajole him, tease him, even to seduce him to virtue. Eschewing Robespierrist ‘education’ on a public level, she remained seriously committed to it at the level of the private. And this becomes increasingly explicit in the closing letters, where Wollstonecraft describes her estrangement from her ‘demon lover’ as a direct result of his passion for commercial speculation. In the Historical and Moral View she had accused commerce of dividing the French people; in the Letters she charged it with dividing her lover from herself, reworking Rousseau’s classic opposition between artificial corruption and natural virtue:

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Ah! shall I whisper to you – that you – yourself, are strangely altered, since you have entered deeply into commerce – more than you are aware of – never allowing yourself to reflect, and keeping your mind, or rather passions, in a continual state of agitation – Nature has given you talents, which lie dormant, or are wasted in ignoble pursuits – You will rouse yourself, and shake off the vile dust 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 represented the historical decline of natural man in terms of the ancient statue of Glaucus, a monument ‘so disfigured by time, seas and tempests, that it looked more like a wild beast than a god’.58 Like Glaucus, Imlay has been disfigured by history, his natural virtue so obscured by commercial trafficking that he has become scarcely recognisable. And thus one can see that, despite her ostensible opposition to Rousseau’s political theory, Wollstonecraft was still prepared to redeploy his rhetoric of regeneration, reworking images from a public text such as the Discours in a resolutely private context, in order to give force and emphasis to her critique of Imlay. And in many ways this is quite characteristic of the way in which Rousseau’s criticism of contemporary society acquired the status of a regulative principle in the work of a number of English and French radicals after the Jacobin Terror, of the way in which his ideal of simplicity and transparency passed from public policy back into the realm of sentimental literature, no longer a viable alternative to modern commercial society, but still powerful as a form of cultural critique. Throughout the Letters Wollstonecraft cultivates the language of solitary sensibility as a means of cajoling and berating the conscience of her reader. So too in the Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire of  Rousseau had defended his retreat into solitary exile by declaring that society had forced him to live alone. In another and more transparent world, he argued, he would have been truly sociable; as things were he was fated to be a solitary. Then he proceeded to recount the rural pleasures that he would never have known had it not been for his enemies.59 In this way he suggested to his readers that at some future point they might be able to share in his meditative ecstasies, while insinuating that they would have to undergo a species of moral regeneration in order to do so. Rehearsing Rousseau’s rhetoric of self-martyrdom, Wollstonecraft opposed her own internal joys to the slings and arrows of an increasingly outrageous fortune. She too expressed her ambivalence concerning the paradoxical freedoms of exile: ‘I cannot immediately determine,’ she says at one point, in a phrase that recalled Rousseau’s characteristic

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phraseology, ‘whether I ought to rejoice at having turned over in this solitude a new page in the history of my own heart’ (, ).60 In this way she invites the reader to share the fruits of her newfound inwardness, while suggesting that they could only be shared by a conscience that was sympathetically open to hers. As many commentators have pointed out, ‘sensibility’ is seen more positively in the Letters than in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In her classic study of Wollstonecraft’s work, Mary Poovey has described this shift in terms of a movement away from the ultra-rationalist feminism of the early s towards a new formulation which acknowledged the improving power of feeling. Poovey interprets this in biographical terms, seeing Wollstonecraft’s growing acceptance of her own feminine susceptibility as a courageous response to the trials and tribulations of her relationship with Imlay.61 But it is also possible to see Wollstonecraft’s ‘brave new vulnerabillity’ in rather more polemical terms. In the case of the Letters from Sweden, the wounded persona adopted by the author can be interpreted as a self-conscious manipulation of the language of sensibility designed to make a tactical intervention in the revolutionary debate. As William Godwin put it in his Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman of : ‘If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book’. Godwin was remarkably astute in this respect, recognising that behind Wollstonecraft’s peculiar mixture of confident social observation and vulnerable personal reflection there lay a deliberate strategy of aesthetic education. As we have seen, in the months and years that followed the death of Robespierre, a number of republicans and fellow-travellers were drawn to reflect on the theory of aesthetic education as a means of teaching political virtue. In her treatise De la Littérature of  Germaine de Staël developed a thoroughly feminised conception of aesthetic education to contrast with that of Friedrich Schiller. She blamed the excesses of the Terror upon the exclusion of women from political and cultural life that had taken place during the Jacobin period. ‘since the Revolution,’ she argued, ‘men have thought it politically and morally worthwhile (utile) to reduce women to the most absurd mediocrity’.62 Without the mediating influence of women, the pursuit of Spartan simplicity had degenerated into mere brutality, hence she suggested that it was time for men to stop victimising women, and for women to stop victimising themselves, especially as it was clear that they had an important role to play in the cultural life of the republic, restraining the competitive, political instincts of

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men and promoting the aesthetic assimilation of republican values. A fervent follower of Rousseau, de Staël preferred the feminised model of public education which had been developed in La Nouvelle Heloïse to the one outlined in the Lettre à d’Alembert. In her ideal vision of things, literature was to be a ‘dear despot’ uniting the whole community, after the model supplied by Julie at the wine harvest of Clarens. And like Julie, the talented woman was to benefit from this arrangement by becoming a kind of nurse-maid of reason, acquiring a respected status in the community, no longer condemned to ‘[wander] through her solitary existence like an Indian pariah’, as she was under the Jacobins (–).63 Like de Staël’s talented woman, Wollstonecraft depicts her restless movement from social observation to introspective reflection, from the city to the mountains and back, as an unrequited love of the ideal. Choosing not to inform the reader of the commercial errand she was running in Scandinavia for Imlay, she invites him or her to imagine that her peregrinations are prompted not by business but by emotional necessity.64 Even in the published version of the Letters it is clear that the author has 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 my pillow, and close my eyes on a world where I was destined to wander alone’. Indeed it is the perennial condition of a woman of intelligence and 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 all the disappointments I am threatened with; but reason drags me back, whispering that the world is still the world, and man the same compound of weakness and folly, who must occasionally excite love and disgust, admiration and contempt. (, –)

In both sets of Girondin memoirs the Jacobin obstacle that separated Louvet and Roland from their respective lovers was what defined each relationship as the symbol of a distant vision of transparency, liberty and equality. Similarly in the Letters from Sweden, the author’s unrequited passion for her American lover is worked up into an emotion of political significance. The difference lies in the fact that in Wollstonecraft’s version Imlay was himself the obstacle. In this way this radical woman’s continuing attachment to, and increasing frustration with, the failed Revolution is figured metonymically in her relationship with her demon lover.65 Thus, while from the standpoint of the rational legislator Wollstonecraft could still affirm the principle of social perfectibility, when viewing things from the perspective of the solitary woman, it

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seemed as distant as ever. And it was this that led her to reflect ironically upon her daughter’s future, in one of the most celebrated passages of the Letters: You know that as a female I am particularly attached to her – I feel more than a woman’s fondness and anxiety, when I reflect on the dependent and oppressed state of her sex. With trembling hand I shall cultivate sensibility, and cherish delicacy of sentiment, lest, whilst I lend fresh blushes to the rose, I sharpen the thorns that will wound the breast I would fain guard – I dread to unfold her mind, lest it should render her unfit for the world she is to inhabit – Hapless woman! what a fate is thine! (, )

There was no point in educating her daughter to be intelligent and sensitive, Wollstonecraft suggested, for it would only turn her into an outcast like her mother. In passages like this, it is clear the extent to which feminine sensibility has been deliberately radicalised.66 It is no longer, as it was in the Vindication, a faculty complicit with the institutions of patriarchy, it is a utopian principle, an educative force, a symbol of the gap between the present state of society and one of true liberty and equality. In this way Wollstonecraft succeeds in reinflecting Rousseau’s language of solitary martyrdom, and supplying it with an entirely new meaning. Like Robespierre in his final speeches, she effectively reworks the former’s confessional rhetoric in order to develop a politics of disappointment. And so, despite the fact that it could no longer be offered as a microcosm of the general will, in texts like this the Rousseauvian self continued to survive as a political gadfly on the back of contemporary society, a means of privately incubating the revolutionary ideal at a time of retreat and retrenchment.

  

Strangling the infant Hercules: Malthus and the population controversy

 With his Essay on the Principle of Population of  Thomas Malthus made one of the most significant and lasting contributions to the counterrevolutionary cause in England, as important, in its way, as Burke’s Reflections of . Seeking to capitalise on the perceptible decline of the British Jacobin movement during the late s, and on the consequent waning of radical enthuasism among the English middle class, Malthus thought he saw an opportunity to settle the ongoing debate on the French Revolution forever, by subjecting its fundamental principles to a thoroughly mathematical – and therefore unanswerable – critique. Primarily, he sought to do this by exploding the radical assumption that institutions were the main cause of human happiness or misery: ‘in reality,’ he wrote, ‘they are mere feathers that float on the surface in comparison with those deeper seated causes of impurity that corrupt the springs and render turbid the whole stream of human life’.1 Taking issue wth the discourse of perfectibility that had been popularised by Godwin and Condorcet in the first half of the revolutionary decade, Malthus argued that man was above all things an animal driven by sexual instinct and the need for food, fatally incapable of gaining rational control of his bodily needs and passions. He stated his case with quasi-scientific precision: ‘Firstly, that food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.’ And by introducing his theory in the form of a ratio, he sought to pass it off as a statement of objective truth: ‘Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second . . . This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence’ (). Society would 

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never be able to free its inhabitants from want, he contested, in an argument that was as controversial as it was striking, because it was an absolute law of nature that population would always press upon the existing food supply. In his eyes, it was impossible for men to restrain their urge to reproduce; only vice and misery – by which he meant illness, disease and death – would ever be able to keep population at a stable level, for if any nation were to produce more food than its citizens required, more children would immediately appear to swallow up the surplus. This meant that there was at the very heart of the human condition an anti-utopian element deeply inimical to the cause of perfectibility. Even Godwin’s anarchist utopia, assuming it could ever be achieved, would not be immune from the cruel calculus of the population principle, since its régime of ease and plenty would inevitably lead to overpopulation, and this in turn would result in the eventual return of social inequality and the reinstitution of private property. The impact of Malthus’s Essay upon political debate in England cannot be over-emphasised. Indeed it struck many of the leading members of the English Jacobin movement with the force of a true counter-revolution. During the early s the philosophical radicalism of the French and Scottish Enlightenment had been considered to be eminently compatible with the utopianism of the French Revolution. In the work of figures such as Mackintosh and Priestley in England, as well as Condorcet in France, the new disciplines of political economy and social science had been put squarely in the service of the revolutionary ideal. However, almost single-handedly Malthus succeeded in changing all that, not merely by making counter-revolutionary use of discourses which had seemed wholly revolutionary only a few years before, but also by effectively appropriating them for the reactionary cause, so that it became very difficult, in the ensuing years, for old-style Jacobins to find any support for their egalitarian vision in the discourses and practices of modern political economy. For reasons that it will be important to explore, the rise of the population principle to popularity was nothing short of meteoric. By the early years of the nineteenth century Malthus’s theory had gained a large number of adherents, not least among the writers and editors of that hugely influential organ of Whig opinion, Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review. And this in turn led to a corresponding rise in the public profile of Jeremy Bentham’s equally counter-revolutionary policies, from his plans for the rationalisation of the legal system to his initiatives on pauper management. The effect of the rise of the new school of reform

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upon English middle-class radicalism was quite devastating. Not only did many old-style Jacobins become increasingly alienated from working-class politics during this period (partly as a result of the Pittite ‘Terror’ of the late s, which had forced the dissolution of most of the old political clubs and corresponding societies, and partly out of a growing fear of Parisian ‘sans-culottisme’), but they also became increasingly divided against themselves, with a split opening up between unrepentant ‘enthusiasts’ such as William Godwin, William Wordsworth, John Thelwall and William Hazlitt, who were to remain committed to the revolutionary ideals of , and new-style ‘progressive’ reformers, men such as Samuel Romilly and Francis Place who increasingly followed the teachings of Bentham and Malthus. One purpose of this chapter is to show how this fissure within English politics effectively reproduced the split at the heart of French middle-class Jacobinism, how it was shot through with the same feeling of fratricidal betrayal. The other is to begin to explore the peculiarly frustrated, fragmented and inward-looking nature of English Jacobinism in the immediate aftermath of Malthus’s Essay, which forms the background and context for Wordsworth and Hazlitt’s subsequent ‘politics of confession’.  In the years following  a wave of bad harvests, coupled with the effects of the Revolutionary war, exacerbated rural distress and urban discontent in Britain and Ireland. The crisis provoked an extended polemical controversy, which increasingly shifted the focus of the revolution debate from legal and political to economic and fiscal affairs. Tom Paine’s Agrarian Justice (), which was written in response to a sermon by the Bishop of Llandaff on ‘the wisdom of God in having made both rich and poor’, represented the leading republican contribution to the debate. Incensed at the bishop’s complacency, Paine denied that poverty was divinely ordained, declaring it to be merely a function of bad government. Placing the right of subsistence before the right of property, he argued that landowners should be made to pay a ground rent for the privilege of growing crops on land that nobody (strictly speaking) could own since it was ‘the free gift of the Creator common to the human race’. A national fund would be created through this ‘ground-rent’, which would enable a lump sum to be given to each citizen when he or she reached the age of majority. ‘The plan here proposed’, Paine

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insisted, ‘will benefit all without injuring any. It will consolidate the interest of the republic with that of the individual.’2 In response to proposals such as this, Malthus’s highly paradoxical and yet remarkably powerful reply was that a redistribution of wealth would not, ultimately, improve the lot of the poor, since it would not increase the amount of food in the system: ‘It may appear strange, but I believe it is true that I cannot by means of money raise a poor man and enable him to live much better than he did before, without proportionably depressing others in the same class’ (). And his response to the poor law policy of Pitt was equally uncompromising. After the bad harvest of , and the subsequent distress which it engendered, the magistrates of Speenhamland in Berkshire had decided to supplement the wages of the poor according to a given standard, a decision which Pitt had initially approved and offered as a model for other parishes to follow.3 For Malthus, however, such an extension of the existing system of poor relief actively undermined the principle of individual selfreliance. In his eyes, it was highly irresponsible for any parish to encourage any degree of security or comfort in the poor families under its charge, 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 would be to abolish the poor laws and to improve the workhouse system, since this would impel people to live more frugally, and to foster only as many children as they could themselves support. His intention was rather to transform radically both the temper and the terms within which reform was henceforth to be contemplated. For example, the primary purpose of his proposed system of national education was not to inspire the poorer classes with the spirit of ‘improvement’, but to inform them of the extent to which their lives were ruled by economic necessity. In his eyes, the absolute pervasiveness of the population principle rendered it imperative that each member of the labouring class ought to be made to understand the principles of political economy: ‘Hard as it may appear in individual instances, dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful’, he wrote, ‘a labourer who marries without being able to support a family may in some respects be considered as an enemy to all his fellow labourers’ (). In this way, he extended the vocational emphasis of Condorcet’s plan of public instruction, while dispensing with the latter’s commitment to social perfectibility:

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

One consequence of the division of intellectual labour which has been characteristic of western civilisation since the beginning of the nineteenth century has been that economists and social historians have always tended to regard the classic works of political economy simply in terms of their contribution to the development of economic thought. Thus, for example, Malthus’s Essay has regularly been treated as if it were simply a set of practical suggestions designed to facilitate the transition from an agrarian to a capitalist economy.5 Cultural historians have been somewhat wiser in this respect, recognising that it was also an extremely wide-ranging sermon on politics, theology and social morality, which sought to revolutionise contemporary attitudes to land, wealth and class, and transforming existing attitudes to the nature and value of human life.6 In  as well as in subsequent editions of this epochmaking treatise, Malthus advertised and introduced his work as if it were a disinterested scientific inquiry, as if the ‘melancholy hue’ of his vision were based on an impartial and objective sifting of the evidence; quite soon, however, this tone was dropped, and as commentators like Coleridge, Hazlitt and Cobbett were quick to recognise, the treatise transformed itself into a Mandevillian tirade. In the concluding chapters of the Essay this trend reaches its climax with the author’s outspoken assertion that ‘moral evil is absolutely necessary to the production of moral excellence’ (). The world would not have been populated, Malthus argued, but for the operation of the principle of population, which in every generation has necessitated an ongoing search for food, provoking activity, exertion and progress, endlessly facilitating human endeavour. On this principle, he actively opposed the plan of contraception offered by Condorcet (which otherwise might have been seen to negate completely the operation of the population principle), solely because it removed the element of moral struggle from the life of the subject, thus contravening God’s providential plan.7 In this way Malthus can be seen not only to have naturalised bourgeois competition, but also to have supplied it with a theological justification. From the influential eighteenth-century Anglican divine William Paley, Malthus had drawn the notion that Christian morality should

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manifest itself in terms of a proto-Benthamite calculation of consequences and not in mere effusions of the ‘conscience’.8 But he was to differ 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 perceive, 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 unhappy persons’, he remarked ruefully, ‘who in the great lottery of life have drawn a blank’ (). Nothing can appear more consonant to our reason than that those beings which come out of the creative process of the world in lovely and beautiful forms should 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 be necessary and inevitable did not lessen the extent to which he saw it as a 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 apt example: A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he do not work upon the compassion of some of her guests. If these guests get up and make room for him, other intruders immediately appear demanding the same favour. The report of a provision for all that come fills the hall with numerous claimants. The order and harmony of the feast is disturbed, the plenty that before reigned is changed into scarcity; and the happiness of the guests is destroyed 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 finding the provision which they had been taught to expect. The guests learn too late their error, in counteracting those strict orders to all intruders, issued by the great mistress of the feast, who wishing that all her guests should have plenty, and knowing that she could not provide for unlimited numbers, humanely refused to admit fresh comers when her table was already full.10

In a passage of striking rhetorical power and persuasiveness, Malthus gives his reader a seat at the mighty feast of human nature, only to show how charity can cause a single intruder to grow rapidly and without warning into a ravening, rapacious mass, transforming plenty into

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scarcity in the blinking of an eye. No longer a Christian act offsetting the inequality of fortunes, it has suddenly been transformed into an irresponsible gesture exacerbating the problem of poverty, a socially destructive action. In encouraging his readers to identify with the guests at the feast, Malthus strives to warn them of the disastrous consequences of thoughtless benevolence. And he does this by preying upon a double fear, both the fear of poverty, and the fear of being impoverished by the dependent poverty of others. At once, we can see how he might have been able to exert such a powerful effect upon his contemporaries, not only because his practical proposals possessed some validity – in many ways his analysis of the old poor law was remarkably acute – but also because he created a sublime fear of the mass in anybody who had anything to lose, setting the independent working classes against their weaker and more precariously situated brethren. Indeed here at a local level we can see why the population principle had such a devastating effect on the minds of a whole generation, converting, in the course of twenty years, not only huge swathes of the aristocracy and the new business class to his way of thinking, but also convincing many members of the lower ranks, such as independent farmers and artisans, that new systems of pauper management based on saving schemes and the workhouse would have to replace existing methods of poor relief, so that by the middle years of the nineteenth century Malthusian ideology had become a part of the Victorian social orthodoxy, much to the anger and despair of cultural commentators such as Dickens and Carlyle. In his Reply to Malthus of  – which was produced in response to the publication of the third edition of the Essay in the previous year – the ‘Jacobin’ essayist and critic William Hazlitt sought to counter the growing influence of the population theory by arguing that it was not the persuasiveness of Malthus’s mathematial proofs which had enabled him to gain such rapid acceptance with the reading public, but his manipulation of post-revolutionary class anxiety. Population, in Malthus’s hands, was made to resemble an ever-growing mob of sansculottes that was always threatening to wrest property and wealth from the respectable ranks of England, and it was this that had given him an Iagolike hold upon the public ear: By representing population so often as an evil, and by magnifying its increase in 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

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terrific giant brood, which you can only master by strangling it in its cradle.’ And Population was indeed ‘an infant Hercules’ in Malthus’s representation, an oppressed subjectivity always capable at any moment of mushrooming from one into many, a revolutionary mass reaffirming itself ever more powerfully after each rebuff. Taking this into account, Hazlitt considered that the only way to defuse the sublime anxiety which Malthus had instilled was to painstakingly point out the diseased nature of these catastrophic imaginings: ‘The gentleman seems greatly alarmed at his own predictions’, he observed, before going on to suggest that like Edgar leading Gloucester to an imaginary precipice in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Malthus was threatening to seduce an entire generation into a needless ‘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 the revolutionary 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 intervene upon the realm of public debate at a time of economic distress and radical agitation, as if to remind a forgetful generation of the futility of political idealism. But by the same token, it should also be pointed out that it did also inadvertently serve to link the crises of the s and s with the revolutionary struggles of the s, a fact which was not lost on essentially anti-Jacobin commentators such as the radical William Cobbett and the Tory Robert Southey, who both thought Malthus a profoundly dangerous figure because of his unwitting regeneration of revolutionary feeling. Paradoxically enough, therefore, especially given its profoundly counter-revolutionary bias, in many ways the Essay actually helped to perpetuate the revolutionary tradition in England in the early years of the nineteenth century, by supplying contemporary disturbances with a deep historical resonance. As in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, so too in Malthus’s Essay, every time the grotesque figure of revolutionary Jacobinism was condemned to mix again with its eternal clay, it always seemed to return to haunt its author, more powerfully and more vengefully than before. One of the things that inflamed many former Jacobins about Malthus’s description of the mighty feast, was that it made it seem as if poverty were just a vulgar intrusion upon the consciousnesses of the rich, an invasion of the order and harmony quite properly enjoyed by the propertied classes. In the first edition Malthus had defended this double standard by arguing that ‘God [was] constantly occupied in forming

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mind out of matter’ (). It was in the nature of things, according to him, that only a certain number of people in society could ever hope to live in order and harmony, possessing the financial independence to allow them to be truly free. Thus despite the supposedly universal applicability of the population principle, he finally came to suggest that it was entirely right that the middle and upper classes should be able to occupy a realm of ‘mind’ that was independent of the struggles of the world of ‘matter’, but that the lives of the poorer members of the community, by contrast, would always be ruled by material necessity. With this theoretical division, Malthus helped to reinforce that growing tendency in modern society to treat the respectable and the working classes as if they were entirely different species, a tendency that the French Revolution had temporarily succeeded in retarding, without finally being able to destroy.13 Despite his rhetoric, however, Malthus was not really recommending that people who were unable to feed themselves should be left alone to starve. Even in the first edition of the Essay, which was by far the most strident, there was an acceptance that it might not be either possible or desirable to abolish the poor laws immediately, and that there might well be occasions when the selective bestowal of charity could still be socially beneficial. More insidiously perhaps, he was arguing that individuals living in any kind of proximity to poverty gave up the right to be subjects, and that therefore the state should cease to consider them as such. Thus his plan of identifying and then relieving the deserving poor entailed an increasingly intrusive and interventionist model of pauper management which was nevertheless free of any moral responsibility towards the objects of its supervision.14 For Malthus’s antagonists, a series of heated questions were constantly presenting themselves: How could he argue that human life was fully determined by material circumstances only to conclude his essay by seeking to re-introduce the notion of moral freedom in a new and exclusive form? How could he declare that political institutions did not count in the question of vice and misery, while at the very same time arguing for the abolition of the Poor Laws and the institution of county workhouses? How could he deny the right of subsistence, when he had confirmed the right of property? But the more they sought unsuccessfully to draw attention to his contradictions, the more they were forced to recognise how difficult it was going to be to reverse the conceptual revolution he had effected, for as Hazlitt himself realised, the Essay on Population had almost single-handedly banished one notion of social

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improvement and replaced it with another; destroying the universal principle of revolution and replacing it with a new policy of ‘pauper management’ that was ‘preached only to the poor’.15 Even as early as the late s, on the eve of the Malthusian revolution, 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 envisaged reducing rural distress and lessening the parish rate by setting up a joint stock company to organise the maintenance and employment of the burdensome poor through a network of ‘industry houses’. A National Charity Company would be endowed with certain coercive powers ‘for apprehending all persons, able-bodied or otherwise, having neither visible nor assignable property, nor honest and sufficient means of livelihood, and detaining them and employing them till some responsible person will engage for a certain time to find them employment, and upon their quitting it, either to resurrender them, or give timely notice’. It was also to have ‘powers of apprehending non-adults of diverse descriptions, being without prospect of honest education, and causing them to be bound to the company in quality of apprentices’.16 Bentham’s proposal envisaged each industry house possessing the multiple function of a factory, hospital, bank and house of correction. It was to police the desires of the poor, rewarding virtue and frugality, punishing idleness and vice. In this way the industry house would instil in its inmates a set of associations, both pleasurable and painful, that would ultimately reinforce a respect for industry and good morals. And it would do this as much by cleansing and regulating the pauper’s environment as by appealing to his moral sense. Bentham showed how his Panopticon design was peculiarly suitable to the fulfilment of this function, for it helped 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 which there should be . Universal transparency. . Simultaneous inspectability at all times. . [sic] On the part of the inspectors, the faculty of being visible or invisible at pleasure. . On the part of the building, faculty of affording separation, as between class and class, to the extent of the demand, as detailed in the last chapter. . Means of safe custody, in relation to the dangerous and other disreputable classes. ()

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

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ture that surrounds it. And his ruthlessly efficient style reflects his ruthlessly efficient system: at all times, he was concerned that his industry houses should squeeze every possible drop of value out of their projected inmates. Perhaps most significantly of all, he recommended a rigid division and separation of labour, with every pauper working for and by himself, so that his performance could be monitored accordingly. Maximum value, it was supposed, would be gained from the spirit of competition that would prevail, with Bentham holding great store by what he called the principle of self-supply, the idea that the paupers in an industry house would easily be able to clothe and feed themselves if they were managed correctly. His vision was of a regime so efficient that it 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 hundred is absolutely incapable of all employment. Not the motion of a finger – not a step – not a wink – not a whisper – but might be turned to account, in the way of profit, in a system of such a magnitude. ()

The contrast between Bentham and Malthus’s proposals for pauper management and the utopian theories of the French Revolutionary period is very striking. Whereas in the early s it had seemed that the new social science would work to eradicate poverty and social inequality, after  it became increasingly clear to radicals such as Hazlitt and Godwin that this apparently progressive and libertarian body of thought was actually deeply complicit with the existing order. By taking the neoscientific methodology of Condorcet one stage further, Malthus and Bentham had transformed it out of all recognition. Far from merely attempting to improve the material conditions of the poorer classes, they were also seeking to police their everyday activities more assiduously than ever before. So much so, indeed, that it became increasingly clear to writers like Godwin and Hazlitt that the new discourse of philosophical radicalism, for all its apparent progressivism, was actually deeply in tune with the worst interests of the upper and upper-middle classes, especially on the issue of pauper management, where it justified the iniquities of society on scientific grounds, while removing the feudal responsibility of the rich to look after the poor.18 Malthus and Bentham had done more than merely defend privilege socio-scientifically, they had made it seem as if the discourse of social science was naturally and inevitably on the side of privilege, and that any form of systematic materalism was inextricably linked to the politics of reaction. Not surprisingly, therefore, this elicited a fratricidal split in the broad church

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of middle-class radicalism, driving a wedge between the growing band of philosophical radicals and the few surviving English Jacobins. It is the effect of this split upon their literary practice that I shall now seek to explore.  To give money to beggars, William Godwin argued at the beginning of his essay on the subject in The Enquirer of , was to encourage an unedifying form of human behaviour that some scoundrels and tricksters had turned into a profession. Every day one was accosted on the streets of London by beggars, and forced to yield up one’s money begrudgingly, often unconvinced that one was dispensing one’s charity in the proper fashion or to the proper person: A suspicion of duty joins itself with the desire to rid ourselves of a troublesome intrusion, and we yield to their demand. This is not, however, an action that we view with much complacency, and it inevitably communicates a sentiment of scepticism to the whole system.19

More than this, however, Godwin conjectured that even the indiscriminate relief of genuine paupers might be productive of ill consequences, primarily because, in the end, ‘men should be taught to depend upon their own exertions’. And as he warmed to his theme, Godwin rehearsed many of the arguments that Malthus was soon to make his own: ‘To contribute by our alms to retain a man a day longer in such a profession, instead of removing him out of it’, he argued, ‘is not an act we can regard with much complacence’ (, ). In the first edition of Political Justice () Godwin had insisted that it was an absolute moral duty for the individual to follow the course of action which contributed best to the general well-being of society as a whole. And in the first part of the essay ‘On Beggars’ he endeavoured to follow this principle, by arguing that, strictly speaking, one should always dispense one’s charity to institutions designed to reform the deserving poor rather than to individual street beggars. In the second half of his essay, however, he performed a dramatic volte-face, bringing the ethical implications of systematic benevolence radically into question. Despite having conceded that it might be more useful and hence more rational to refuse to relieve private beggars in favour of giving to public charities, he was finally forced to add that such difficulties and objections were ‘scarcely of such weight, as to induce a

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man of feeling and humanity uniformly to withold his interference’. Confronted with the signs of distress, was it either possible or indeed desirable for a man to remain impervious to the appeal being made upon his senses and sensibilities in favour of a utilitarian calculation? Ultimately, it was surely not beneficial to make moral decisions on the basis of such an abstract notion of philanthropy: A virtuous man will feel himself strongly prompted to do an action, even when there is only a probability that it may alleviate great misery, or produce exquisite enjoyment. Nothing is more suspicious than a system of conduct, which, forming itself inflexibly on general rules, refuses to take the impression, and yield to the dictates of circumstances as they arise. (, )

Many commentators have often interpreted the works that Godwin produced in the later s as moving away from the principle of abstract benevolence recommended in Political Justice towards a model of public virtue more closely grounded upon the domestic affections. And indeed there is a fair amount of evidence for this view. In the essay ‘On Beggars’, for example, Godwin was to comment that ‘the rule that ought to govern us in our treatment of mankind in general seems to be best understood in the case of kindred and relations. Here men are commonly sufficiently aware that, though it is possible to dispense assistance with too lavish a hand, yet assistance may be given, in proportion to my capacity to assist, with much advantage and little chance of injury’ (, ). Above and beyond this, however, it is possible to argue that this was not so much a retreat from the principle of abstract benevolence as a tactical shift in its mode of presentation, a change of emphasis prompted by the rise of Benthamite utilitarianism, and not by a fundamental change in ethical stance.20 As we saw in chapter three, even in the first edition of Political Justice Godwin had considered ‘reason’ as the controlled exercise, rather than the denial, of feeling. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, however, he was often considered by radicals and reactionaries alike to be a champion of cold rationality, and this seriously damaged his reputation across the political spectrum. Mindful of this, and evidently anxious to distinguish his notion of reason from that of Bentham and his followers, he saw The Enquirer as an opportunity to reformulate and in some sense to re-emphasise the conscientious aspect of his own moral philosophy. Thus in the course of the essay ‘On Beggars’, he employed the language of sentimental morality in order to denounce the wouldbe utilitarian legislator:

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Who art thou, that assumest to deck thy brows in frowns, and to drive away the sorrows of thy brother by imperious tones and stern rebuke? . . . the case of the man 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 himself from the enthusiasm for system-building which had characterised the early s, and of which his own Political Justice constituted an enduring product. He almost suggested as much in the Enquirer’s preface: While the principles of Gallican republicanism were yet in their infancy, the friends of innovation were somewhat too imperious in their tone. Their minds were in a state of exaltation and ferment. They were too impatient and impetuous. There was something in their sternness that savoured of barbarism. The barbarism of our adversaries was no adequate excuse for this.21

In the second edition of Political Justice () Godwin had argued that the central mistake of the Jacobins had been their attempt to impose public virtue by legislative means. Appropriately enough, therefore, when he came to write The Enquirer in  he sought to suppress any covert links between his writing and the tyrannical principles of the Terror by dropping the methodical, prescriptive, not to say ‘legislative’ style which had characterised Political Justice. His ostensible purpose in The Enquirer was still to ‘further the cause of political reform’, in that sense, at least, he was not recanting his revolutionary principles, but simply rehearsing his opinions more tentatively and sceptically than before, repeating many of the insights of Political Justice in a more deliberately piecemeal fashion: ‘The author has attempted only a short excursion at a time’, he wrote, ‘and then, dismissing that, has set out afresh upon a new pursuit’. The central purpose of Political Justice, of course, had been to encourage every reader to exercise his or her private judgment; but the treatise itself had delivered its own private judgments in such a resolutely authoritarian ‘public’ manner, that in the end it had developed into an extremely imposing and authoritative edifice. In The Enquirer, by contrast, Godwin attempted to match the medium more closely to the message, by showing the workings of reason, but not prescribing its ultimate end. Thus he made a point of presenting the essays contained in the volume ‘not as dicta, but as the materials of thinking’. In many ways, this shift was entirely characteristic of the radical writing of the later s, for in the aftermath of the failure of the legislative phase of the French Revolution, many republicans and radicals

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were to find themselves returning to the more inquiring spirit of rational critical debate which had characterised the bourgeois public sphere during the latter part of the eighteenth century. Increasingly former ‘Jacobins’ moved away from pamphlets and treatises and began to concentrate on more imaginative and occasional writing, cultivating an explicitly anti-systematic style which deliberately avoided any suggestion of legislative arrogance. In part this was an attempt to counter the antiJacobin charge that, like the ill-fated French, the England’s literary radicals were hopelessly addicted to extremes, endlessly given to despotic abstractions of thought and slavish excesses of feeling. In part, however, it was also a matter of choice, a conscious decision to differentiate themselves not only from the constitution-mongering of the early s, but also from the utilitarian writing of the later decade. In this respect Godwin’s Enquirer was very much of a piece with works like Wollstonecraft’s Letters of  and even with Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads of . This is not to say, however, that the works of these writers were not shot through with a perceptible and sometimes painful ambivalence towards the new school of reform. In the essay ‘On Beggars’ for example, Godwin was clearly deeply torn between two conflicting desires: the desire to place the exercise of social morality upon a rational and objective footing, and the desire for it to continue to be supple and subjective in its operation, in other words, a ‘morale sensitive’. What he liked about the discourse of utility was its fundamentally ‘rational’ nature; what he disliked was its rigidity and externality, its alienation from the realm of subjective moral action. Indeed in ‘On Beggars’ utility-theory is represented as being of so systematic a nature that far from facilitating mutual intercourse and understanding between individuals, it actually interposes itself between them, serving to render them opaque to one another, just like the first calculations of self-interest in Rousseau’s second Discours. And it was for this reason, perhaps, that Godwin ultimately preferred to repose upon the notion of ‘conscience’ at the end of the essay. The problem was, of course, that in this formulation there was little to distinguish conscience from private sentiment, that most whimsical and arbitrary form of social feeling. One way of according ‘conscience’ greater objective validity would have been to seek to raise it into a form of public duty, but this would immediately have risked repeating one of the characteristic mistakes of revolutionary Jacobinism, which had been to try and transform it into a principle of legislation. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the conclusion to ‘On

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Beggars’ is if anything rather conventional, a bland acquiescence in the principle of the conscience as the best guide. So much so, indeed, that it was only in his rehearsal and subsequent repudiation of the utilitarian calculus that Godwin was able to advertise his continued commitment to radical reform. Thus it was in the gap between the two halves of his essay that the writer’s disappointed Jacobinism found expression, with its bifurcated structure serving as a potent reminder of the extent to which, in the aftermath of the revolutionary Terror, a split had taken place 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 continuing desire for society to be transformed into a transparent community of feeling, while betraying an identifiably post-revolutionary anxiety about what would happen if one sought to legislate it into existence. In a different way, much of the poetry written by William Wordsworth during the late s displays the same sense of revolutionary ambivalence. In his blank-verse poem ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, which was composed in – and published in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth was to launch an explicit attack upon the ‘political economists [who] were about that time beginning their war upon mendicity in all its forms’.22 Like Godwin, he agreed that beggars should be indulged and relieved rather than incarcerated and reformed, but he was also concerned to defend the principle of charity from the onslaught of the new social science. And he did this by showing how an old beggar might play a useful role in a rural community: But deem not this man useless. – Statesmen! ye Who are so restless in your wisdom, ye Who have a broom still ready in your hands To rid the world of nuisances; ye proud, Heart-swoln, while in your pride ye contemplate Your talents, power and wisdom, deem him not A burthen of the earth. ’Tis Nature’s law That none, the meanest of created things, Of forms created the most vile and brute, The dullest or most noxious, should exist Divorced from good, a spirit and a pulse of good, A life and soul to every mode of being Inseparably link’d. (lines –)

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

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with a philosophy propounding the interconnectedness of all things, a creed that was implicitly democratic and egalitarian in its implications. He implicitly resisted Bentham’s effort to mechanise human society by recommending that it should organise itself in accordance with the harmonious natural order. And as he was to suggest in the Preface which he added in , poetry was one of the most appropriate ways of opposing the progress of the dissecting intellect, because it worked indirectly 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 which everything was made to seem ‘inseparably linked’, offered a striking counterweight to the truncated prose of Pauper Management Improved: Where’er the aged Beggar takes his rounds, The mild necessity of use compels To acts of love; and habit does the work Of reason; yet prepares that after-joy Which reason cherishes. And thus the soul, By that sweet taste of pleasure unpursu’d Doth find itself insensibly dispos’d To virtue and true goodness. (lines –)

Addressing the problem of vagrancy in a rural context, Wordsworth seeks to suggest that beggars are a valuable part of the village community, developing a notion of ‘use’ which is quite distinct from the principle of bourgeois exploitation outlined by Bentham. Over the years the old 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 its own ‘goodness’ and ‘virtue’ to itself, and it is in this sense that he is himself profoundly ‘useful’. In this way Wordsworth used the language of utility against the utilitarians, suggesting that the relief of beggars in a rural community did not necessarily lead its inhabitants to cultivate sentiments of social protest either for or against such figures, but often served to supply them with spiritual consolation for the material difficulties of their own lives. In many ways, therefore, the overall message of ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ was implicitly democratic. Its assertion that ‘we have all of us one human heart’ (line ) was clearly intended to carry an identifiably egalitarian weight and meaning. Nevertheless, the poem’s flirtation with the language of Christian resignation did place it in an ambivalent relation to the discourse of reform, for from the argument that beggars fulfilled an important role in society simply by being

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beggars it was, of course, but a short step back to the extremely traditional affirmation – made by both Burke and the Bishop of Llandaff in response to the famine of  – of the wisdom of God in having made rich and poor. In this way Wordsworth showed himself to be caught between a Benthamite interest in reform and a Burkean respect for custom and tradition. Like its eponymous hero ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ can thus be seen to wander without a home, unwilling to accept the administrations of either the workhouse or the church, ultimately destined to find its final resting place in a deathless but also rather inhuman realm of Nature: And let him, where and when he will, sit down Beneath the trees, or by the grassy bank Of high-way side, and with the little birds Share 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 pointed out, is that in transforming the beggar into a kind of living monument to the aesthetic education of the village, Wordsworth does tend to neglect the extent to which he is, or was, a suffering human being in his own right.23 He concentrates solely upon the effect the old man has upon other people, and not upon what he is in himself. So, as the means by which the community represents its own freedom to itself, the beggar enables Wordsworth to represent the village poor as subjects rather than as objects, and to resist the tendency of Benthamite pauper management. But as a figure in himself, he is curiously hollow, only in the final lines is there a kind of concession to his consciousness. But what is interesting is that the Beggar is a kind of parody of the revolutionary legislator in this respect, for like one of Rousseau’s favoured lawgivers, he is a stranger, who comes from outside the polis in order to raise its collective consciousness, even if unlike him, he has no programme of his own, acting merely as the occasion for moral and social improvement, its catalyst, as it were, rather than its active producer. And so, precisely because of his self-conscious use of the discourse of utility, it is difficult to believe that Wordsworth himself is not, in a certain specific sense, ‘using’ the beggar in the course of this poem, using him as a means of demonstrating a particular political effect – the spectacle of popular civic virtue – without having to locate or identify a political will existing prior to that effect. It is as if, like Rousseau’s Baron de

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Wolmar letting Julie rule the fête, Wordsworth has sought to withdraw himself from what was, in fact, a highly self-conscious experiment in the literary presentation of republican feeling, so that he can give it the appearance of customary virtue, and suppress its continuing links with the revolutionary tradition.  On  February  the Whig minister Samuel Whitbread, attempting to take advantage of a brief cessation of hostilities in Europe, brought before the House of Commons a bill to reform the Poor Laws. Striving to reduce the number of people claiming parish relief, he proposed a plan of national education, an overhaul of the workhouse system, and the institution of saving schemes to stimulate thrift among the labouring classes. Not only in its content but also in its overriding tone, the bill owed an acknowledged debt to the Essay on Population.24 Indeed in his prefatory remarks Whitbread made a point of endorsing Malthus’s antiutopian vision: ‘I believe man to be born to labour’, he argued, ‘that a certain portion of misery is inseparable from mortality and that all the plans for the lodging, clothing, feeding of all mankind with what may be called comfort, are quite impossible in practice.’25 Whitbread’s bill was thrown out by the Lords in August  after a motion by Lord Liverpool, an indication of continuing Tory suspicion towards the new social science. But the very fact that such a bill was presented to the House of Commons in the first place does tend to show the degree of respect with which the new theories of pauper management had already come to be regarded by influential sections of the British Establishment. And Malthus’s reputation did nothing but grow during the s and s. Initially his champions had been the Whigs; gradually, however, he made converts among the Tories. And whereas the leading reviews were prepared to dismiss the writings of the republican William Godwin as excessively rationalistic, in the far more systematic and neo-scientific work of Malthus they saw only the disinterested expression of truth. So respected did his Essay become, indeed, that when the working-class radical Francis Place published his pioneering plan of contraception in , he offered it as a supplement to the population principle, curiously enough, rather than a refutation of it.26 There were dissenting voices, however, which interrupted the general chorus of approval. During the s the journalist and pamphleteer William Cobbett had been an outspoken defender of the Tory cause,

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regularly defending the English Constitution against the accretion of French principles. And as an independent farmer, he was one of the very class of men whom Malthus’s proposal of poor law reform had sought to relieve from the heavy burden of local taxation. Indeed this may have been one of the reasons why he was initially so enthusiastic about the Essay on Population. ‘Before the rays of Malthus’s luminous principle’, he wrote in , ‘the mists of erroneous or hypocritical humanity instantly vanish, and leave the field clear for the operation of reason.’27 The presentation of Samuel Whitbread’s Poor Law Bill of , however, produced a violent reversal in Cobbett’s sympathies. Quite simply, he was appalled at the extent to which the Malthusian revolution had sanctioned 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 all surprised, if someone were to propose the selling of the poor, or the mortgaging of them to the fund-holders – Aye! You may wince; you may cry Jacobin and Leveller as long as you please. I wish to see the poor men England what the poor men of England were when I was born; &, from endeavouring to accomplish this wish, nothing but the want of the means shall make me desist.29

An increasingly energetic campaigner against the deterioration of living standards among the rural working classes during the early years of the nineteenth century, Cobbett soon began to develop a fervent desire to restore the independence and comparative prosperity that he imagined them to have enjoyed in the past. So much so, indeed, that during the course of his career, Cobbett developed an ever-growing sense of the terrible injustices being suffered by the contemporary labouring class, and this transformed his Toryism into a form of popular radicalism that was ostensibly opposed to the dying tradition of Frenchstyle Jacobinism while sharing some of its political instincts. In his ‘Letter to Parson Malthus’ in the Political Register of  May  he responded to Malthus’s denial of the right of subsistence by rehearsing Robespierre’s critique of the right of property, declaring that ‘the property in land can never be so complete and absolute as to give the proprietors the rights of withholding the means of existence, or of animal enjoyment, from any portion of the people; seeing that the very foundation of the compact was, the protection and benefit of the whole’. On this point the Tory paternalist Robert Southey agreed with Cobbett the popular radical. In the December issue of the Quarterly Review for  Southey published a review of Colquhoun’s Propositions for Ameliorating the Condition of the Poor in which he suggested that the ruling classes would be signing their own death-warrant if they abandoned

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their moral responsibility to the poor. Like Cobbett, he felt that the extremism of the Essay on Population was always in danger of expediting the very anarchy which it professed to forestall, inadvertently reanimating the lingering ghost of revolutionary Jacobinism rather than burying it 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 be there’, would very soon begin to ask the luckier guests what better title they themselves could produce, and resort to the right of the strongest. ‘You have had your turn at the table long enough, gentleman’, they would say, ‘and if those who 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 of working-class revolution, which he saw as a very real danger, but the insufficiency of the utilitarian response to it. Presented with the widespread abjection and misery of the new industrial working class, Malthus could only deny the people the right of subsistence, and offer a mathematical explanation for his denial. And this led many old-style Tories to make common cause with the popular radicals in their attacks on philosophical radicalism.31 Indeed as the nineteenth century progressed, it was not uncommon for figures as deeply opposed as Southey and Cobbett to be seen exchanging sparks of thought and feeling on this issue, for as Edward Thompson has pointed out, when it came to the workhouse ideology of Malthus and Bentham, ‘the starting point of traditionalist and Jacobin was the same’.32 As we saw in chapter one, during the s Southey had been a fervent republican, more outspoken in his radical sympathies than either of his friends Samuel Taylor Coleridge or William Wordsworth. During the early years of the nineteenth century, however, he became increasingly worried that the popular anarchy of the Jacobin period was going to be reproduced in England. Like the methodists and evangelicals, he began to look to religion as a means of tranquillising and controlling the working classes.33 Appropriately enough, therefore, he became resolutely opposed to secular programmes of instruction like Whitbread’s plan, campaigning instead for Dr Bell’s proposal for a national system of education organised under the aegis of the Anglican Church. So much so, indeed that by  he was regularly asserting that the only way of preventing revolution in England was to re-introduce the Christian faith to the cities and industrial areas of Britain, and to re-organise the dispensation of charity. Between the popular agitation of William Cobbett and the Christian

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Toryism of Southey, middle-class republicans like Hazlitt were very uneasily caught. He shared many of their misgivings about Malthus’s theory, but was unable to follow either of them to their final destination. In his Reply to Malthus of  he had responded to Whitbread’s educational initiative by insisting that poverty was the result of bad government and not a lack of formal schooling in the labouring classes: ‘we are creatures 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 produce good morals . . . this was merely for the purpose of preventing laziness and other vices, which more immediately tend to increase the poorrates’. Both Cobbett and Hazlitt agreed that Whitbread’s education plan was not designed to supply the poor with the knowledge that would make them free, it was merely to inform them of the extent to which their lives were ruled by necessity. ‘Enable them to eat and drink’, Cobbett insisted, ‘before you learn them to read and write’. And Hazlitt was to sum up his own attitude to pauper management in remarkably similar terms: For my part, I place my heart in the centre of my moral system. I do not look on the poor man as an animal, or a mere machine for philosophical or political or economic experiments. I know that the measure of his sufferings is not to be taken with a pair of compasses or a slip of parchment. I would rather be proscribed and hunted down with him than join in his proscription by those who made it their practice to attack the weak and cringe to the strong.34

Like Cobbett, Hazlitt refused to join in the proscription of the poor man, but unlike him he was unable to make common cause with him either. For despite professing a notional commitment to the classless ideal of the French Revolution, he found it increasingly difficult to transcend his own class bias. So that whereas Cobbett was to begin to oppose the new school of reform by developing a vigorously ‘reactionary’ agenda for the amelioration of the living conditions of the industrial and agrarian working classes, Hazlitt adopted a position that was at once defiant and defeatist.35 ‘What are we to do for [the poor]?’ he asked in the Reply to Malthus when considering the question of national education, before answering himself limply ‘the best answer would perhaps be, let them alone’ (, ). The problem was that, from Hazlitt’s point of view, modern initiatives seemed to fall into two categories: either they were programmes of instruction designed to prepare the individual for his entry into the labour market, or projects of rechristianisation intended to provide him with a prospective consolation for its injustice and uncer-

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tainty. Whichever model was chosen, education was no longer an essay in the cultural construction of the citizen, as it had been during the utopian moment of the French Revolution, but a blueprint for the production of a docile subject. And this left Jacobins like him in a very uncomfortable 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 abstract utility and general reasoning, had been exploded long since. If ever it was proper, it was proper on general subjects, on the nature of man and his prospects in general. But the spirit of abstraction driven out of the minds of philosophers has passed into the heads of members of parliament: banished from the heads of the studious, it has taken up its favourite abode in the House of Commons . . . It has dwindled down into petty projects, speculative details and dreams of practical, positive matter-of-fact improvement. (, )

Central to this passage is Hazlitt’s painful realisation that the discourse of improvement had been appropriated by a generation of political ‘trimmers’ uncommitted to the cause of liberty and equality, whose allegiances were not, like his, with the Jacobin ideal of the early s. With the rise of philosophical radicalism, he recognised, the rhetoric of revolution had given place to that of reform, and a Painite political agenda based on the natural rights of man had ceded place, under pressure from the population principle, to a Benthamite plan for regulating the wasteful and counter-productive appetites of the poor. And significantly, such was the baleful influence of the utilitarian revolution that it effectively undermined Hazlitt’s own belief in the continuing viability of the Revolutionary ideal, leaving him in the paradoxical position of being a self-styled ‘revolutionist’ who was at one and the same time 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 radicalism and the rechristianising programme of the Tories and Evangelicals that middle-class republicans loyal to the libertarian ideal of the French Revolution attempted to grapple with the rising influence of the philosophical radicals. William Godwin, William Hazlitt and the young William Wordsworth tried to oppose the utilitarianism of Malthus and Bentham without succumbing to the consolations of Christian Toryism or tumbling into the tumult of working-class politics. They attempted to maintain a reformist attitude despite the fact that to all intents and purposes the philosophical radicals had appropriated the discourse of reform. In their very belatedness, therefore, they dramatised the slow

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decline of middle-class republicanism in England. Nevertheless, as we shall see, the peculiar power and intensity of an entire current of Romantic writing can be seen to have emerged out of the very sense of ideological discomfort and displacement that was felt by such figures. Indeed many of the structural idiosyncrasies and thematic innovations which characterise their work were actually produced by their forced occupation of an uneasy, interstitial space between popular, progressive and conservative positions none of which they felt capable of embracing.

  

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

 Shortly after returning from France in the spring of , the young William Wordsworth wrote a pamphlet against Richard Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, for having betrayed the cause of liberty. Formerly a Foxite liberal sympathetic to the Jacobin cause, Watson had publicly renounced his support for the Revolution when he heard of the execution of Louis XVI in January . Suitably enough, therefore, when Wordsworth came to draft his reply, he responded to the bishop in a selfconsciously ‘republican spirit’, treating English politics as if it were a merely an extension of the French conflict: Conscious that an enemy lurking in our ranks is ten times more formidable than when drawn out against us, that the unblushing aristocracy of a Maury or a Cazalès is far less dangerous than the insidious mask of patriotism assumed by a La Fayette or a Mirabeau, we thank you for your desertion.1

During the constitutional period Lafayette and Mirabeau had appeared to be fervent supporters of the cause of freedom, but as the Revolution had progressed, their complicity with the old order had been unmasked. And it was this and other examples of political betrayal which inspired the belligerent Girondin Jacques-Pierre Brissot to call for the mass desertion of traitors during the war crisis of . It is noticeable, therefore, that in charging Llandaff with a similar kind of treachery as that exhibited by Lafayette and Mirabeau the young Wordsworth was not merely attaching himself to the republican cause, he was also showing himself to be highly conversant with the French version of ‘the revolutionary plot’, inhabiting the Manichaean psychology of Jacobinism, and reproducing its habits of mind. But what was the exact nature of Wordsworth’s youthful republicanism? How, if at all, was it different from the general enthusiasm of many young English radicals for the French Revolutionary cause? And how 

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important was it to his later writing? In seeking to answer these questions, it is my contention that a fresh questioning of the poet’s early politics, in the light of what we have uncovered about the paradoxical nature of revolutionary republicanism, can give a new perspective on his mature poetic practice. In the eyes of most commentators, Wordsworth was a supporter of the Girondin faction during his time in revolutionary France, untarnished by the political extremism of Robespierre and the Mountain.2 But as I hope to show, this is a tenuous argument, not only because much of it is highly conjectural and anecdotal, but also because it does not offer a convincing reading of the literary evidence. Admittedly, Wordsworth was not explicit about his revolutionary allegiances in the Letter to Llandaff, but there may have been a number of different reasons for this. It is possible that he did not see his political commitment in factional terms. But equally, even if he had done, he must also have known that, when addressing an English audience, the most politic approach would be to base his argument on principles rather than personalities. That said, however, the crucial point must surely be that on the issues that split the revolutionary factions, the Letter to Llandaff consistently 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 government consensus of the time. For the Prime Minister William Pitt the murder of the king was ‘the foulest and most atrocious deed which the history of the world has yet had occasion to attest’, an action which could be seen to ‘strike directly against the authority of all regular government, and the inviolable person of every lawful sovereign’, giving Great Britain no choice but to declare war.3 But it was not merely the Establishment that responded in this way. A considerable number of English radicals had also been troubled by the prospect of revolutionary regicide, most notably Tom Paine, who had used his position as a deputy of the French National Convention to beg for leniency towards ‘citizen Capet’. It is notable, therefore, that above and beyond its opposition to the war, the Letter to Llandaff should have sought actively and positively to justify the principle of political violence, an extremely radical position, even for a youthful enthusiast: ‘Alas!’, Wordsworth wrote, in a passage reminiscent of Robespierre’s reply to Louvet, ‘the obstinacy and perversion of men is such that [liberty] is often obliged to borrow the very arms of despotism in order to overthrow them, and in order to reign in peace must establish herself by violence. She deplores such stern necessity, but the safety of the people, her supreme law, is her consolation’ ().

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In the latter half of this century, there has been a current of critical thought which has endeavoured to link Wordsworth’s youthful radicalism exclusively with the English republican tradition of the seventeenth century stemming from James Harrington and the Earl of Shaftesbury.4 And the discovery of this pattern of influence has undoubtedly afforded important new insights into his poetry, most recently in the work of David Simpson and Nigel Leask. But somewhat surprisingly perhaps there has been a comparative neglect of the extent to which Wordsworth’s understanding of this tradition was mediated by the influence of Rousseau and Robespierre. Too seldom, for example, has it been recognised that the most fervent expressions of republican sentiment in the Letter to Llandaff are couched in identifiably Rousseauvian terms. For example, in response to Llandaff’s allegation that a republic was ‘a tyranny of equals’ Wordsworth cited a passage from the Contrat Social suggesting that the bishop had come to love his own slavery: ‘it is with indignation’, he wrote, ‘I perceive you “reprobate” a people for having imagined liberty and happiness more likely to flourish in the open field of a republic than under the shade of monarchy’ (). And he also gave a characteristically Jacobin retort to the latter’s defence of the British Constitution, repeating Jean-Jacques’s assertion that the English Parliament was merely the servant of a corrupt corporate interest. But Rousseau’s legacy to the young Wordsworth was not simply a series of second-hand shibboleths. It actually shaped his concept of citizenship. For Wordsworth, like Rousseau, saw the proper business of government as the expression and execution of a unified general will, rather than the balancing of competing interests, so that when he came to describe the nature and purpose of representative government, he did so in markedly anti-liberal terms, interpreting it as a necessary compromise between the ideal of direct democracy and the size and complexity of the modern nation state. Most significantly of all, perhaps, there was an identifiably Rousseauvian aesthetic behind the young radical’s revolutionary vision, as can be seen from the telling passage in which he swept aside Llandaff’s scepticism about the viability of popular sovereignty by referring his readers to the exemplary status of the inhabitants of Switzerland: . . . as governments formed on [democratic principles] proceed in a plain and open manner, their administration would require much less of what is usually called talents and experience, that is of disciplined treachery and hoary machiavelism; and at the same time, as it would no longer be their interest to keep the mass of the nation in ignorance, a moderate portion of useful knowledge would be universally disseminated. If your lordship has travelled in the

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

Both culturally and historically, there were many similarities between the mountain republics of Switzerland that had been celebrated by Rousseau and the English Lake District where Wordsworth had spent his early youth. In both regions there survived a tradition of ‘primitive’ virtue that could be contrasted with the corruption of modern commercial society. On his Alpine walking tour of  Wordsworth had taken with him Ramond de Carbonnières’ French translation of William Coxe’s Sketches of the Natural, Civil and Political State of Swisserland (), which drew heavily on Saint-Preux’s reflections on the simplicity and virtue of Alpine life in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloïse, representing the Swiss as a ‘happy people, the nature of whose country, and the constitution of whose government both equally oppose the strongest barriers against the baneful introduction of luxury’.5 And in his annotations to the translated text, Carbonnières had actually gone beyond the rather cautious Whiggism of his English source to offer a more thoroughly Rousseauvian vision of the democratic nature of Swiss life. It is significant, then, that when Wordsworth came to give a poetic account of his travels in the mountains in the Descriptive Sketches of , he chose to reproduce Carbonnières’s emphasis, praising the Swiss mountaineer for fiercely guarding the freedom and independence he had inherited from Rousseau’s ‘natural’ man: ‘The slave of none, of beasts alone the lord, / He marches with his flute, his book, and sword, / Well taught by that to feel his rights, prepared / With this “the blessings he enjoys to guard”’ (lines –). Throughout the time of the poem’s composition France had been desperately defending its eastern borders from foreign invasion, and this reflected itself in the highly militant tone of Wordsworth’s celebration of the Alps as a landscape of liberty: Even here Content has fix’d her smiling reign With 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

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Gradually this martial emphasis was to become more pronounced, as the poet referred to several battles which the Swiss in very small numbers had gained over their oppressor the house of Austria: where Freedom oft, with Victory and Death Hath seen in grim array amid their storms Mixed with auxiliar Rocks, three hundred forms; While twice ten thousand corselets at the view Dropped loud at once, Oppression shrieked and flew.

(lines –).

In this way Wordsworth’s celebration of Swiss republicanism advertised itself as a thinly disguised and displaced expression of Jacobin belligerence. And this revolutionary subtext was made all but explicit at the end of the poem when the poet broke off from his reveries to address himself directly to the current plight of the French Republic, expressing the confident hope that the ‘innocuous flames’ of the present conflict with the monarchies of Europe would result in the ‘lovely birth’ of ‘another earth’. Clearly, then, in the Descriptive Sketches Wordsworth was using Rousseau’s vocabulary of natural independence and mountain virtue to fuel a neo-Robespierrist zeal for ‘primitive’ regeneration. And so too in the Letter to Llandaff his enthusiasm for the ancient ideal could be felt in his virulent critique of modern life (‘the corruption of the public manners [and] the prostitution which miserably deluges our streets’) which displayed a distaste for urban dissimulation and depravity that was highly reminiscent of Rousseau’s second Discours and the Paris sections of La Nouvelle Heloïse. Just over ten years ago, in the course of his important study Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination David Simpson was to make the assertion that ‘implicit or explicit reference to an ideal of agrarian civic virtue is the major organisational energy that runs through a great deal of Wordsworth’s prose and poetry’, showing convincingly that the image of a community of Lakeland statesmen living a life of industry, domesticity and frugality had the status of a regulative principle in his work, underpinning all of his most important utterances, if only rarely finding full expression.7 So too in Nigel Leask’s The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Criticial Thought, published at about the same time, the agrarian model was seen as providing the most convincing and coherent explanation of Wordsworth’s politics, not only during the period of his first collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but also in relation to his subsequent apostasy from the cause of liberty and its effects upon his

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poetic practice. According to Leask’s perspective, Wordsworth parted company with the Revolution as soon as it became clear that its values were in conflict with the highly local and provincial version of the English commonwealth tradition upon which his agrarian politics had always been based.8 Coherent and compelling as these accounts still are, it is my contention that it would not have been easy for such an enthusiastic fellow-traveller as Wordsworth to come to such a lucid recognition, especially if we consider his early acquaintance with Rousseau. For as we saw in the first two chapters, by alternately extolling seventeenth-century Switzerland and fifth-century Sparta, the author of the Contrat Social had succeeded in blurring the distinction between civic and agrarian humanism, merging one imperceptibly into the other. He had also obscured the relationship between property and public virtue in his paradoxical suggestion that a large modern nation like France could be reinvented as if it were a mountain republic or an ancient city state. And whereas in the work of Encyclopédistes such as Helvétius and Holbach the modern state was to be founded upon rational laws rather than national customs, in Rousseau there had been a great stress upon the importance of local circumstances. In a very real sense, then, his universal template for political revolution was a truly ‘festival ideal’ in that its vision of the transformation of the ‘whole earth’ into a ‘favour’d spot’ always accorded a special metonymic status to the spectacle of ‘local’ freedom and transparency. 9 His ‘localist’ theory of legislation was very different, in this respect, from the ‘cosmopolitan’ theory that characterised the main current of the French Enlightenment. That said, however, it must also be recognised that his work did still contain what we might think of as a ‘cosmopolitan’ dimension, for regardless of the emphasis upon gradual change and local customs in the Lettre à d’Alembert and in the constitutional plans for Poland and Corsica, the blueprint for government that was offered in the Contrat Social was still highly abstract and highly prescriptive, giving the ground rules for a properly democratic state without detailing the practical means by which it might be brought into being. And so, by fudging the question of land and property, Rousseau had succeeded in developing a republican vision that was at one and the same time free from the aristocratic bias of the English tradition of civic humanism and yet also clearly different from the liberal bourgeois model of government favoured by the leading philosophes, a vision which helped supply the French revolutionaries with a radically egalitarian concept of public virtue, while also enabling English fellowtravellers like Wordsworth and Robert Southey to reinvent the

. ‘The Sanculotte rendering homage to the Supreme Being’ (); engraving by Aveline. A suggestively neo-Rousseauvian, quasi-Alpine inflection of the iconography of sans-culottism, designed to coincide with the inauguration of the Cult of the Supreme Being.

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commonwealth tradition of Harrington and Shaftesbury in uniquely democratic and universal terms. Of course, Simpson is right to argue that Wordsworth’s agrarian ideal was always more coherent as a negative critique of modern life than as a positive alternative, but we should not assume that the poet himself was always consciously aware of this.10 Rather, we can suggest that, throughout his poetic career, the impracticality, marginality and relative obsolescence of this ideal – what was in effect its radical belatedness – was often repressed, and that in texts like The Prelude as well as in early pieces like the Descriptive Sketches, it continues to express itself in terms of a poetics of mountain sublimity, the metaphor for an increasingly ‘unspeakable’ sign of desire. With this in mind, the following chapter will seek to offer a reappraisal of the influence of Rousseau’s paradoxical politics upon Wordsworth’s revolutionary poetics, an influence which was, as I hope to show, crucially mediated by the Jacobins of –, and most notably, by the figure of Maximilien Robespierre.  In the opening section of his Essai sur les Révolutions of – the former émigré François René de Chateaubriand made a set of comparisons between revolutions ancient and modern in order to place the disastrous trajectory of the French Revolution in a meaningful historical context. In one of a series of disconnected and desultory reflections, he linked the extreme egalitarianism of the Jacobins with that of the ancient Spartan legislator Lycurgus: The Jacobins, following him step by step in their violent reforms, intended to annihilate commerce, to eradicate literature . . . they mirrored him above all in their requisition of property, and their preparations for the promulgation of the agrarian law.11

Neither the Spartans nor the Jacobins had been satisfied with merely reforming the laws, Chateaubriand argued, they had sought to create a new kind of human being. In this respect ‘One cannot refuse the Jacobins 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 inequality of fortunes, its differences of opinion, it was absurd to dream of a democracy without a complete revolution in morals.’12 Fundamentally, he agreed with Condorcet that the Jacobins had seen their task as one

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of public education rather than public instruction.13 But whereas the latter had contrasted ancient and modern notions of liberty in order to provide a clearer definition of the liberal principles upon which he believed the progress of civilisation ought to be based, Chateaubriand took an entirely different tack, arguing that the recurrence of the ancient in the modern during the Jacobin period had effectively undermined the very possibility of social perfectibility. During the course of his treatise, he compared the French Revolution with the revolutions of Greece and Rome, and to a lesser extent, with the English Civil War of the seventeenth century, developing a theory of Western history as an endless series of repetitions, the detailed study of which would cure the post-revolutionary generation of the dangerous taste for innovation: One can pronounce that the majority of things that one might have wanted to consider as novel in the French Revolution was already to be found in the history of the Ancient Greeks. Now we possess this important truth: that man, feeble in his methods and his mental habits, does nothing but repeat himself endlessly, that he gyrates in a circle, which he tries in vain to escape.14

After the Thermidorean conspiracy of , the demise of the Jacobin régime and the subsequent end of the Grand Terror, many radicals on both sides of the channel were suddenly suffused with new hope for the future of the French Republic. But in order to bring the public round to their way of thinking, it was necessary to counter this conservative version of revolutionary history as a disastrous series of repetitions.15 In The Fall of Robespierre, which was written hastily in July of , Coleridge and Southey represented the recent events of the ninth of Thermidor as a classical tragedy out of which would emerge a fairer form of things. In according the history of Jacobinism this generic dignity, they were implicitly opposing the assertion of writers such as Burke and Chateaubriand that the ‘revolutionary plot’ was nothing but a grotesque farce. However, in choosing to rewrite Robespierre’s fall as a modern version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar they inadvertently betrayed the inability of traditional forms and narratives to represent the complex progress of the Revolution. During the course of the play, the character of ‘Tallien’ represented himself as another Brutus opposing the tyranny of the modern Caesar Robespierre, but the character of ‘Robespierre’ himself repeatedly called this analogy into question, by identifying himself as the true Brutus to Louis XVI’s Caesar. In the revolution itself, every new upheaval had overturned the existing struc-

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tures of signification, transforming heroes into villains and patriots into tyrants. In this respect The Fall of Robespierre, almost in spite of itself, offered a vivid demonstration of how difficult it was to develop a prospective vision of the Revolution in the aftermath of the Terror, for in seeking to repress at the level of plot the anti-progressive nature of the revolutionary narrative – what we might think of as its compulsive urge to repeat – Coleridge and Southey were forced to acknowledge it at the level of character, so that in sanctioning the endless swapping and stealing of neo-classical identities they filled the stage with Brutuses who all sounded identical, collapsing political difference by merging the Robespierrists with their Thermidorean successors, and effectively conceding Burke’s claim that there was absolutely no difference between them. Given the problems of narrative and agency generated by the Jacobin phenomenon, an exaggerated emphasis upon the personal tyranny of Robespierre was frequently deemed by republicans to be the only means of recapturing the revolutionary momentum. In The Fall of Robespierre this expressed itself in a speech at the beginning of act  in which the eponymous protagonist reflected upon his revolutionary career: Mouldering in the grave Sleeps Capet’s caitiff corse; my daring hand Levelled to earth his blood-cemented throne, My voice declared his guilt, and stirred up France To call for vengeance. I too dug the grave Where sleep the Girondists, detested band!16

After the summer of  Robespierre was regularly used as a political scapegoat by the French Thermidoreans and their English republican allies: indeed he became the prime site for the displacement of radical guilt and disappointment.17 And as we saw in chapter two, he himself recognised that he was being transformed into the lightning rod of revolutionary culpability, for as he declared on the day before his arrest: They are particularly determined to prove that the Revolutionary Tribunal was a tribunal of blood, created by me alone, over which I despotised in order to execute the virtuous as well as the vicious, because they desire to turn everyone against me.18

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

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of the ‘Incorruptible’. What could not be acknowledged by the Thermidoreans because of the demands of the ‘revolutionary catechism’ was that political life in France after  had been less like a neoclassical drama which respected individual agency and personal integrity and more of a grotesque popular carnival beyond the control of public authority. Seen in this light, the Thermidorean demonisation of Robespierre can be viewed as a means of recovering the bourgeois ideal of active citizenship albeit in a highly negative form. Paradoxically enough, 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 among radicals and republicans to argue that a resolutely private ambition had lurked behind Robespierre’s apparently disinterested intervention upon the public stage of the Revolution. Memoirs began to appear in which a number of the martyred Girondins, as well as some of their more fortunate colleagues, were to draw attention to the hypocrisy and cynicism of the so-called ‘Incorruptible’. In the Appeal to Impartial Posterity that Madame Roland had penned in prison in the months before her execution in the autumn of  there was a detailed account of the career of her former ally and latter-day tormentor. Roland admitted that during the early years of the Revolution Robespierre had appeared the absolute epitome of independent virtue, but then she went on to describe how the frightening extent of his personal ambition had become increasingly evident: ‘That Robespierre’, she wrote, ‘whom I once thought an honest man, is a very atrocious being. How he lies to his own conscience! How he delights in blood!’19 And similarly, for the former proscrit Jean-Baptiste Louvet, Robespierre and Marat had been ‘vile imposters and infamous royalists’ whose real purpose, in spite of all their democratic rhetoric, had been nothing less than the restoration of despotism.20 In English literary circles Helen Maria Williams was to provide the main conduit of this current of republican feeling, representing Robespierre to the British reading public as a ‘foul fiend’ whose performance at the Festival of the Supreme Being of  had been the most consummate feat of ‘impious mockery’. For other English radicals, however, the real enemy was the English Prime Minister William Pitt, whom they considered to have effectively brought the Terror into being through his zealous prosecution of the French war. Shifting his ground from the position he had adopted in the Fall of Robespierre, Coleridge was to give a broadly sympathetic account of Robespierre’s character in his Bristol lectures of , accepting the paradox that he had become a tyrant in order to

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destroy tyranny, while continuing to argue that his ends may not have been ignoble, even though he had certainly lost them in the means: ‘the ardor of undisciplined benevolence seduces us into malignity’, Coleridge wrote, ‘and wherever our hearts are warm, and our objects great and excellent, intolerance is the sin that does most easily beset us’.21 Pitt, on the other hand, was treated with unmitigated scorn. And John Thelwall struck a similar note in an article written for The Tribune in the same year when he made an extended comparison between the characters of Robespierre and the Prime Minister, differentiating between the ‘incorruptible’ public-mindedness of the former and the cruelty and servility of the latter, before concluding that ‘Robespierre had a mind too great to be debauched by anything but ambition.’22 It is in the context of this double vision of Robespierre – as hypocrite and enthusiast – that we should interpret Wordsworth’s attempt to represent the Revolution as tragedy in his gothic melodrama The Borderers of . This was Wordsworth’s first extended examination of the republican phase of the French Revolution after the Terror, and it showed its author to be deeply aware of the questions it raised concerning notions of narrative and agency. The two ‘revolutionary’ characters in the play, Rivers and Mortimer, are members of a band of medieval outlaws opposed to the injustices of the feudal order. Mortimer is in love with Matilda, but Matilda’s father Herbert has forbidden her to marry an outlaw. The play opens with the hypocritical misanthrope Rivers telling Mortimer that Herbert is not Matilda’s real father. He then suggests that Herbert and the aristocratic tyrant Clifford are conspiring to compromise her virtue, and proceeds to play upon Mortimer’s anxieties about this imagined plot by describing how Herbert has attempted to destroy his reputation with Matilda: . . . he coins himself the slander With which he taints her ear. – For a plain reason: He dreads the presence of a virtuous man Like you, he knows your eye would search his heart Your justice stamp upon his evil deeds The punishment they merit. – All is plain.23

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

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if he is to ascend to the realm of independence and reason, depicting justice as a way of seeing rather than a legal procedure, a summary judgment rather than a slow sifting of evidence. In this way Rivers effectively encourages 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 time And place – the where, the when, the how and all The dull particulars whose intrusion mars (, ii. –) The dignity of demonstration.

Like the perpetrators of the laws of Prairial, Rivers is convinced that the dull particulars of bourgeois jurisprudence should be abandoned in order that the truth can assert itself passionately and spontaneously. So with increasing fervour he urges Mortimer to execute Herbert, declaring that such an act would have ‘virtue for a thousand lives’. And he counters Mortimer’s misgivings by offering his own version of the Robespierrist equation of terror and virtue: Benevolence that has not the heart to use The wholesome ministry of pain and evil Is powerless and contemptible. (, I. –)

In parodying the language of revolutionary paradox, its confident confusion 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 universal purge, Mortimer responds bitterly to news that the king has agreed to a reform of the constitution: ‘The deeper malady is better hid –’, he tells his men, ‘The world is poisoned at the heart’ (, iii. –). Yet his attempts to commit himself to revolutionary regeneration are remarkably unsuccessful. In act  he abandons Herbert to God’s judgment, leaving him out on a wild heath at night, his resolution to administer justice having been broken by the stirrings of his ‘natural’ compassion. Anticipating Herbert’s imminent death, Rivers reveals his innocence to Mortimer, and makes a confession of his own former crimes. While on a sea voyage in his youth Rivers had been persuaded by his shipmates into abandoning their captain on a desert island, only becoming aware that the latter was innocent of the crimes attributed to him when it was too late to return and save his life. Thus, as he himself partly understands, it was to dispel his overwhelming sense of guilt that he threw himself into criminal activity. In the  preface to The Borderers

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

Wordsworth embarked upon a further explanation of this phenomenon, describing Rivers rather succinctly as a man who ‘commits new crimes to drive away the memory of the past’.24 In a striking anticipation of Sigmund Freud’s concept of ‘the urge to repeat’ he then went on to explain that ‘in every course of criminal conduct every step that we make appears a justification of the one that preceded it, it seems to bring back the moment of liberty and choice’ ().25 So by persuading Mortimer to murder an entirely innocent man, Rivers believes that he will 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 / A shadow of myself, made by myself ’ (, ii. –). In this way he considers that he will be able to make Mortimer and to have him, to rediscover his own identity by possessing his own copy, with Mortimer becoming the shadow against which he will define his newfound sense of freedom. And so, like the authorial self writing the life of the autobiographical subject, Rivers rehearses his former experiences in order to master them. He is unlike an autobiographer, of course, in that his replotting of his former crime represents not so much a creative revision as a simple replication of himself, with the result that his act of repetition serves only to reconfirm his enslavement to the past. At the very climax of the play, Mortimer does cause the death of Herbert, but only accidentally. He forgets to leave him his scrip of food when he abandons him on the heath. Like Rivers before him, there was no coherent intention behind his action. Momentarily sympathetic to Mortimer’s predicament, Rivers encourages him to see this experience as a rite of passage: ‘Enough is done to save you from the curse / Of living without knowledge that you live’ (, iii. –). In this phrase, revolution is depicted in terms of a fortunate fall from nature into selfconsciousness. It is as if it is only by murdering the Father that the revolutionary son can come to a fuller understanding of the true nature of agency and identity. Mortimer cannot bind himself to his deed, however, and nor can he believe that he is capable of redemption. After confessing the truth to Matilda, he resolves to wander the earth ‘till heaven in mercy strike me / With blank forgetfulness, that I may die’ (, iii. –). He exiles himself from civil society, considering himself to have committed an unforgivable crime against nature: ‘I am curst’, he announces before his departure, ‘All nature curses me and in my heart / Thy curse is fixed’ (, iii. –). In the past The Borderers has often been seen as a critique of the revolutionary subversion of the traditional hierarchies of society.26 According

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to this view of things, the old, blind and dispossessed aristocrat Herbert is the ailing embodiment of Burke’s ‘second nature’, exhibiting all of the piety, loyalty and family feeling that the latter thought the Jacobins had sought to destroy. But while the play does encourage us to think of Mortimer’s action as a crime against ‘nature’, it does not attempt to ‘naturalise’ the aristocratic order. Many of the anti-feudal sentiments in the play are given to the hypocritical Rivers, but the sections dealing with the tyranny of Clifford and the servility of Robert still represent a fervent critique of ancient despotism. In this sense Wordsworth’s ‘nature’ still has more in common with the festival vision of Rousseau than with the hierarchical concept developed by Edmund Burke. Contrary to the emphasis of most commentators, then, The Borderers is not unequivocally critical of Jacobin politics, for ultimately it offers us two contrasting figures of the Robespierrist revolutionary. In Rivers Wordsworth shows a Terrorist in whom private speculation lurks beneath the mask of public virtue. His fellow borderers come to realise that ‘Power is life to him / And breath and being; where he cannot govern / He will destroy’ (, iv. –). And indeed, behind his rhetoric of regeneration, he is driven only by self-seeking ambition. To this extent, he closely resembles the representations of Robespierre in the Girondin memoirs of the period. In Mortimer, however, Wordsworth describes with some sympathy the workings of a mind genuinely seduced by the ideology of the Terror in his resistance to an identifiably Gothic social order. He is another version of the Robespierrist revolutionary, a figure of radical sensibility rather than cold rationality, a misguided enthusiast rather than a selfish hypocrite. And what renders The Borderers a subtler exploration of the psychic structure of Jacobinism than The Fall of Robespierre is its awareness of this doubleness within revolutionary narrative, its complex dynamic of passive suffering and active repetition. Wordsworth does more than simply contrast the compulsive and misanthropic Rivers and the enthusiastic and benevolent Mortimer – Madame Roland’s Robespierre with that of Coleridge – he suggests that there is a profound kinship between them. In this way he makes 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 their grasp. Like the French Jacobins, Wordsworth’s protagonists pursue their ideal of political legitimacy by identifying with one another, by striving to situate themselves within a self-enclosing circle of fraternity, seeking identity in duplicity, and integrity in self-duplication. However, as they both come to recognise, revolutionary action leads not to the collective

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

achievement of self-presence, but to the isolating experience of alienation 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-vacancy We wonder at ourselves like men betray’d. Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark And has the nature of infinity. (, iv. –)

Thus in spite of Wordsworth’s continuing republican sympathies, the conclusion to The Borderers finally offers an essentially reactionary vision of revolution, depicting it as a fundamentally passive experience, a form of tragic repetition. And this must have been at least partly to do with the very constraints of the dramatic genre itself, which precisely because of its fundamentally classical conception of the nature and scope of human action was in many ways peculiarly unsuited to resolving the problem of duplicity and self-division at the heart of revolutionary experience. As I hope to show, in his autobiographical epic The Prelude of , Wordsworth was to find a narrative structure within which the revolution could be represented not successively but simultaneously as a disastrous crime against nature and a paradigim for the acquisition of freedom and self-consciousness, where revolutionary duplicity, in other words, took on a new and more positive character. For the autobiographical mode provided a means by which Wordsworth was able to have it both ways, ostensibly repudiating the revolutionary legacy while surreptitiously redeeming it, and it is in this specific sense, as I hope to demonstrate, that The Prelude can be seen as a fundamentally Jacobin poem against Jacobinism.  In his important study Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, Nicholas Roe has given an exhaustive account of Wordsworth’s political trajectory in the revolutionary decade, supplying his work with a richer historical context than ever before. There are problems, however, with his use of The Prelude of  as an index of the poet’s state of mind during the s. Firstly, such a strategy does not take into account the change in Wordsworth’s political opinions in the intervening years, the extent to which the rapid progress of the English counter-revolution had blighted his radical enthusiasm and driven it underground. Secondly, and perhaps just as importantly, it does not pay sufficient attention to the

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question of genre. For example, a distinction should really be drawn between the retrospective of the Jacobin period contained in book  of Wordsworth’s epic autobiography and the ‘revolutionary plot’ of a gothic melodrama such as The Borderers, and this is as much a question of form as of content, for while the latter remains constrained by the formal requirements of dramatic narrative, The Prelude dovetails the traditional quest motif of classical epic and romance with the generic model of confessional autobiography developed by Rousseau, effectively remaking the French Revolution by transforming it into a habit of mind. When investigating the political ideology of a literary work it is important to remember that we have try to account for it as well as to explain it. And in order to emphasise this difference, it is helpful to remind ourselves of Michel Foucault’s celebrated distinction between the history of thought and the historical study of discourse. Whereas the former attempts 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 correlations with other statements that may be connected with it, and show what other forms of statement it excludes.27

In the field of Romantic studies, Alan Liu’s virtuosic monograph Wordsworth: The Sense of History is one of the most successful applications of this theory of ‘emergence’ to have appeared in recent years. Drawing heavily on the work of Macherey, Liu argues that many of the leading literary texts of the romantic period emerge ‘precisely through a critical or second-order negation: the arbitrary but nevertheless determined differentiation by which they do not articulate historical contexts’, where the discursive breaks and generic instabilities within these texts, their characteristic forms of refusal, become an important component of their ultimate historical meaning. In Liu’s eyes, Wordsworth’s Prelude is one of the best examples of this phenomenon, precisely because it constitutes such a strong denial of the invasiveness of history that it cannot help but represent, in a dialectical sense, one of history’s deepest realisations.28 Thus he argues that Wordsworth’s refusal to give a properly referential account of the Jacobin period in The Prelude is so over-determined that it actually gives us a remarkable insight into the historical narrative that he is unwilling or unable to tell. In his analysis of The Prelude Liu is superbly attentive to the role of genre in determining what can and cannot be said at a particular time.

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The problem is, however, that in offering autobiography as the literary form most suited to the denial of history, he often neglects the extent to which particular genres like autobiography can become politicised in historically specific ways. Hence he tends to regard Wordsworth’s verse epic as a text existing always already well outside the terms of the revolution debate. And when he does gesture towards politics in relation to The Prelude, 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 point that ‘the influence behind such ideology was not only Burke’s philosophy of prejudice applied against a specific French philosophy but also a pre-philosophical exercise of denial – an effort by the Imagination to contain the phenomenal event that most seized Imagination at the time of its composition’ (). Now, to my mind at least, one of the difficulties with a reading such as this, which represents The Prelude as a ‘reactionary’ negation of revolutionary history, is that it fails to acknowledge the extent to which, in the wake of Rousseau’s Confessions, fully wrought autobiography was, at least during the early years of the nineteenth century, a dangerously radical form in both Britain and France, not least because of its continuing potential to challenge existing notions of the relationship between private reflection and public politics, the individual personality and history. Hence the rest of this chapter is designed to challenge the view that The Prelude of  constitutes a counter-revolutionary ‘denial’ of revolutionary Jacobinism, and that it represents an early anticipation, in confessional form, of the Burkean ideology of custom and tradition that was later put forward in The Excursion. On the contrary, I want to argue, a detailed analysis of Wordsworth’s manipulation 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 fostered by Rousseau and Robespierre. Of course, in order to argue for the continuing influence of Rousseau upon Wordsworth’s poetic maturity one has to negotiate at least one major difficulty, the fact that after the mid-s Wordsworth hardly ever refers to him, either in his literary work or in his private letters. As Jacques Voisine noted, the poet demonstrates ‘a surprising muteness’29 on the subject, especially when one considers his early enthusiasm for the ‘Citizen of Geneva’, and their shared interest in primitivist republicanism. Now there are, of course, a number of possible reasons for this

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curious silence. One is that Rousseau’s increasing notoriety after  naturally caused cautious radicals like Wordsworth to become wary of citing him as an influence. Another interpretation, more favourable to James Chandler’s thesis, is that by the late s the poet had effectively dismissed Rousseau as a false and deluded thinker, having already begun to move away from radical politics. But perhaps the most compelling explanation of all is the one put forward by W. J. T. Mitchell, who has argued that the over-determined absence of Rousseau from Wordsworth’s mature poetic practice is a matter of profound literary and political significance. In the case of a text like The Prelude, he suggests, the repression of Rousseau’s influence actually functions as an organising principle of the poetic narrative, with Wordsworth taking every possible opportunity to differentiate himself, both as a pioneering autobiographer and as an autobiographical subject, from Jean-Jacques’ example, precisely because of his growing anxiety about the underlying parallels – both philosophical and biographical – that might be seen to link him to the ‘father’ of the Revolution. In this interpretation of things, Mitchell imagines Wordsworth to have become gradually convinced, as time went on, by the terms and inferences of Burke’s attack on Rousseau’s ‘revolutionary’ vanity, but also to have become increasingly aware that there were certain elements in his own former life and work that were vulnerable to the same critique: after all, in looking back upon his early career, Wordsworth could not have failed to notice that, not only had he once been deeply sympathetic to Rousseau’s primitivist politics, but also that he too, like Jean-Jacques, had been a wanderer, a vagabond, and an absentee father. Thus one way of making sense of the poetic narrative of The Prelude, Mitchell suggests, is to see it as a piece of writing expressly designed to differ from the example of Rousseau, with this difference manifesting itself both thematically, in terms of a deliberate swerving away from The Confessions’ candid treatment of sexuality, and also formally, in terms of a deliberate eschewal of the latter’s famously familiar prose style.30 In many ways, of course, this conception of The Prelude as a self-consciously English negation of its French ‘Jacobin’ predecessor could be seen to provide a perfect supplement to Liu’s notion of the poem as a overdetermined ‘denial’ of recent history, where Rousseau’s Confessions becomes just another part of the revolutionary experience that Wordsworth wanted to repress. But there is more to it than that. For while there is undoubtedly much evidence to suggest the deliberate suppression of the influence and example of The Confessions in The

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Prelude, there are also a number of ways in which Wordsworth’s poem can be seen to draw surreptitiously upon the rhetorical model of its notorious predecessor, and upon the continuing radical potential of firstperson narrative itself. For above and beyond its repudiation of the tone and address of Rousseau’s autobiography, it is actually structured by the same oscillating dynamic of confession and self-exculpation, wherein the avowal of guilt is used over and over again as a means of affirming individual agency and identity. And so, just as in the episode of Marian and the ribbon in book  of The Confessions, where Rousseau begins by confessing everything and yet ends up by finding himself guilty of nothing, Wordsworth’s re-staging of his own revolutionary history in books – involves him first of all acknowledging his former political errors, then displacing them on to the scapegoat figure of Robespierre, before finally recuperating many of the central elements of Rousseauvian republicanism in a suitably subdued and repatriated form, as a kind of Jacobin ‘parasite’ inside an English ‘host’. There is thus a fundamental duplicity about The Prelude: at the level of polemic it launches a violent critique upon the Jacobin phenomenon, a critique which is, in the broadest sense at least, quite compatible with Burkean conservatism; but at the same time, in the profoundly ‘revolutionary’ conduct of its narrative, and also in its endlessly unstable patterns of identification, there is much to suggest a tacit renegotiation and relocation of the republican ideal. And the fact that, in the  version at least, Wordsworth never refers explicitly either to Rousseau or to Burke is very suggestive in this respect, for not only does it hint that he may have found it practically impossible to choose between these two figures at that moment in time, to define himself either for or against the revolution as a historical phenomenon, it also suggests that it might have been absolutely crucial to his autobiographical and political project that he should retain a certain indirectness of manner when tracing its course, not so much because he wanted to ‘deny’ history per se, but because he wanted to escape from the fixed terms of the revolution debate. Or, to put it another way, it may be possible to argue that it was precisely by exploring the experience of revolutionary duplicity, by adopting an attitude to the Revolution which was simultaneously one of affirmation and denial, that Wordsworth sought to rediscover some of the enviable energy of revolutionary republicanism, attempting to salvage the utopian impulse of the early s by actively re-inhabiting its Manichean division of mind.

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 In the prose introduction to his Poems of  Wordsworth was to describe the Imagination, the agent of all creative perception, as fundamentally figurative in nature. For him the human mind came to knowledge by a process of conferral and abstraction, constantly refiguring and reinventing its environment. And these figurings worked according to strict laws, with the natural world sustaining and legitimating certain identifications and generalisations, which could then provide the basis for a general consensus on the nature of things. With some of the social and economic developments of his time, however, most notably the onset of industrialisation and urbanisation, Wordsworth felt that ‘the healthful 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 was becoming increasingly rebellious and rootless, refiguring the world in ways 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 the only remedy to this situation, according to him, lay in a return to the traditional conditions of rural existence, for nature alone offered an environment 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 permanent forms of things.32 In many ways The Prelude of  can be seen as an anticipation of this theory of the imagination in autobiographical form. In its early books the poet describes the moral influence of the natural sublime upon his youthful self ‘purifying thus / The elements of feeling and of thought, / And sanctifying, by such discipline, / Both pain and fear until we recognise / A grandeur in the beatings of the heart’ (, –). In the celebrated boat-stealing passage from book , for example, he depicts the sudden appearance of a mountain out of the darkness of the lake as a form of admonition: . . . and after I had seen That spectacle, for many days, my brain Work’d with a dim and undetermin’d sense Of unknown modes of being . . . (, –)

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

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modes of being,’ the abstract intimations of early childhood that are also intimations of abstraction. According to the eighteenth-century psychologist David Hartley, it was through the gradual generalisation of sense perceptions that the human mind developed the capacity to figure abstract ideas. To borrow the explanatory terms employed by John Barrell, Hartley imagined the developing mind moving from a perception of such things as ‘lofty cliffs’ to the eventual entertainment of what might be termed ‘lofty thoughts’, which would later manifest itself in terms of a graduation from the language of sense to the language of morality and from the language of nature to the language of politics. As Barrell has shown, in a poem such as ‘Tintern Abbey’ Wordsworth can be 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 the world of abstract thought, while she is seen as remaining in the more infantile world of sense perceptions. In this way she fulfils a double function, simultaneously reminding him of his past self and also confirming his present superiority.33 The value of this grounding of abstract thought in the particularities of nature is addressed in the ‘London’ books of The Prelude, in which the poet reflects upon the perniciousness of modern commercial society in a way that is highly reminiscent of Rousseau. In the modern city, according to Wordsworth, personal integrity has been replaced by mere theatricality: 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 theatrical performance, an assemblage of external effects, so that the individual is forced to wander outside of the realm of his personality in order to distinguish himself from the crowd. But the problem is that every other member of the crowd is striving to make themselves noticed too, so that in the desperate desire to signify, each is forced into an endless competition against all. Signification escalates and multiplies into meaninglessness. Far from expressing personal character, this parade of ‘gesture, mien and dress’ merely obscures it. And ultimately this commodification of the self serves to create an atmosphere of mutual

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incomprehension and moral confusion, of which Bartholomew Fair is the absolute type: Oh, blank confusion! and a type not false Of what a mighty City is itself To 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 flow Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity, by differences That have no law, no meaning, and no end; Oppression, under which even highest minds Must labour, whence the strongest are not free! (, –)

Substantially this passage is a meditation on the corrupting influence of commerce, in which the word ‘objects’ can be seen to signify both the commodities that enslave and alienate human labour, and the human aims that identify themselves with those self-same commodities. It depicts a system in which the ‘slaves’ of a mighty city are doomed to pursue the commodity through a system of circulation that is without ‘end’. Moreover, this purposeless and ceaseless activity oppresses the middle-class poet as much as the urban worker ‘unrespited of low pursuits’, for as our eye moves from the end of one line to the beginning of another, we are surprised to find that in the city ‘even highest minds / Must labour’ under its noxious influence. Only the steadiest and most superior 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 looks In steadiness, who hath among least things An under sense of greatest; sees the parts As parts, but with a feeling of the whole. (, –)

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

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Prelude this steadying process is made explicit. Returning to the Lake District after the disappointments of London, he comes into his moral and political inheritance. He describes meeting a mountain shepherd whom he has known since his early youth, and then proceeds to offer this shepherd as the supreme embodiment of the agrarian humanist ideal, an emblem of independence and virtue and a bulwark against the accretions of modern corruption. Man free, man working for himself, with choice Of time, and place, and object; by his wants, His comforts, native occupations, cares, Conducted on to individual ends Or social, and still follow’d by a train Unwoo’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 Wordsworth penned 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 forever chasing his own tail in a whirling confusion of objects and objectives, the shepherd has a consistency of purpose that is commensurate with the fixity of the natural objects that surround him. And while making it clear that the shepherd’s virtue is grounded upon a specific set of conditions, Wordsworth clearly offers him for general emulation. Even as the poet celebrates his particularity, he cannot resist transforming him into a general ideal. In this respect he is presented in a remarkably similar way to 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 autobiographical subject of book  is nevertheless tempted by the possibility of universalising the local ideal, of regenerating the modern world according to the ancient civic model. And indeed in book  of The Prelude Wordsworth actually suggests it was the accumulated experiences of natural sublimity in his early childhood that served to predispose him to revolutionary enthusiasm, making free reference to the fact that long acquaintance with ‘Familiar presences of awful Power’ had served ‘to sanction the proud workings of the soul, / And mountain liberty’ (,

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–). And so, the sense of freedom eventually gave rise to the notion of Freedom, or to put it in another and slightly more disconcerting way, the final result of the episode of the mountain in book , we might suggest, was an enthusiasm for Montagnard politics. Taken as a whole, the revolutionary books of The Prelude depict the dreadful consequence of abstract enthusiasm sundering itself from the world of particulars. During the period of his first residence in France, the occupation of the realm of ‘lofty thoughts’ enabled the poet to develop a general commitment to liberty and equality, but ultimately this led him away into the vertiginous moral ‘despair’ of revolutionary Jacobinism. The poet then describes how, on returning to England after the débâcle of the Terror, his sister Dorothy’s childlike fascination with nature inspired him to reacquaint himself with its details. He tells how she supervised his slow convalescence from Jacobinism by reconnecting his abstract thoughts to the world of particular things, deconstructing ‘Freedom’ into the local freedoms that are specific to a particular time and place. In this way she helped him to palliate and repatriate his republican idealism, by tempering its former sublimity and by relocating it in an explicitly English context: ‘I too exclusively esteem’d that love, / And sought that beauty,’ he remarks, ‘which, as Milton sings, / Hath terror in it’ acknowledging to his sister that she was responsible for softening down this ‘over-sternness’ (, –, ). Appropriately, the paradigmatic landscape of liberty shifts from the terrifying and sublime spectacle of Switzerland which he had described in the Descriptive Sketches of , to the gentler and more beautiful mountain scenery of the Lake District that he was to celebrate in his Description of the Scenery of the Lakes of . Thus in books  and  of The Prelude, Wordsworth describes how Nature helped to restore the Imagination after the psychological and political crisis of the French Revolution, refocussing and redirecting his Jacobin universalism into a specifically English form of agrarian humanism. Beyond this narrative of public disappointment and private retreat, however, there is something disingenuous in Wordsworth’s treatment of the visionary faculty which advertises its enduringly radical nature. In the description of the ascent of Snowdon which forms the climax of The Prelude he describes how the nocturnal cloudscape that he witnessed in the mountains came to seem ‘the perfect image of a mighty Mind’, an emblem of the perfect fit between Nature and Imagination in the transcendental realm of absolute reality:



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism The Power which these Acknowledge when thus moved, which Nature thus Thrusts forth upon the senses, is the express Resemblance, in the fulness of its strength Made visible, a genuine Counterpart And Brother of that glorious faculty Which higher minds bear with them as their own. (XIII, –).

In the relative peace and liberty of the British landscape, the ‘glorious faculty’ of the Imagination has finally found its ‘Brother’ in Nature, a mirror image of itself which serves to confirm its power and sanction its poetic activity. And hard upon the heels of this triumphal moment there comes a passage on the Imagination which recapitulates the epic quest of the poem as a whole: This faculty hath been the moving soul Of our long labour: we have traced the stream From darkness, and the very place of birth In its blind cavern, whence is faintly heard The sound of waters; follow’d it to light And open day, accompanied its course Among the ways of Nature; afterwards Lost sight of it, bewilder’d and engulph’d, Then giving it greeting, as it rose once more With strength, reflecting in its solemn breast The works of man and face of human life, (, –).

During the revolutionary books the poet confessed that his moral confusion was caused by the active misuse of the figurative faculty. He admitted that it was a period during which ‘Imagination’ had itself become ‘false’ by overreaching its bounds and identifying itself with a destructive enthusiasm to renovate the world. In this passage from book  however, Wordsworth seems to suggest that during the Revolution Imagination was not so much a bloodthirsty activist as an innocent in hiding, so that like the ‘conscience’ in Rousseau’s Confessions, it effectively bides its time, waiting for the moment to re-emerge spotless and without taint from beneath the grime of history, its recent errors fortuitously forgotten and effaced. Just as we had come to think of Imagination as a mortified Mortimer, repenting former crimes, it reappears as a resurgent Rivers, seeking to banish past guilt. In this respect the river of the Imagination is more successful than the Rivers of Wordsworth’s early play, for its re-emergence on Mount Snowdon actually does seem to

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bring back the moment of liberty and choice. For in this passage it represents itself as a ‘legislative’ power which predates the executive errors of the Jacobin period, an enshrinement of the spirit of the past for future restoration. In his seminal study Wordsworth’s Second Nature James Chandler has seen The Prelude as a poem in which the Imagination is chastened and subdued by the débâcle in France into a recognition of the value of British customs and institutions, laying aside the primitive ‘nature’ of revolutionary ideology in favour of the traditionary principle of ‘second nature’ developed by Edmund Burke.35 And indeed Burke’s version of the Revolution, and of Rousseau’s role within it, did become increasingly influential in the post-revolutionary period. But Wordsworth himself was remarkably slow to accede to this trend. For many years he preferred to suffer in political isolation rather than identify himself with the growing counter-revolutionary consensus. The outbreak of the Peninsular War came as a veritable godsend in this respect, since in rising to defend the principle of Spanish independence he could at long last wholeheartedly align himself with the national crusade against Napoleon while continuing to remain true to his libertarian instincts. Nor did this necessitate a compromise of his fundamental political principles, since it was possible for him to argue that, in contrast with the situation prevailing in the revolutionary decade, the spirit of true republicanism was not now with the French, who had long since been corrupted by the cold, conquering, systematising influence of Napoleon, but with the Spanish patriots and their English allies, who better understood the inextricable relationship between political principles like liberty and public virtue and the autochthonous spirit of a particular nation or locality. Hence when in the Convention of Cintra he suggested that the Spanish rebels would do better to cultivate their own native spirit of liberty rather than dabble with the political philosophy of the French Revolution, he did so primarily because he considered that in order to cultivate true public virtue it was necessary to look to one’s local tradition, a principle which he might have drawn as easily from Rousseau as from Edmund Burke. At the same time, however, his rhetoric did suggest that he was increasingly coming to regard the ‘native’ productions of the French republican tradition as intrinsically problematic: ‘The Spaniards are a people with imagination’, he wrote, ‘and the paradoxical reveries of Rousseau and the flippancies of Voltaire, are plants which will not naturalise in the country of Calderón and Cervantes’.36 But for all that the Convention of Cintra might be seen to

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

mark a significant stage in the slow decline of Wordsworth’s youthful republicanism into Burkean conservatism, from an essentially secular and egalitarian ideal to a belief in Anglicanism and feudalism, it is not necessary to infer that The Prelude was part of the same stage in the process. For in the years during which he was engaged upon the poem, Wordsworth stood in a far more problematic relation to the growing counter-revolutionary consensus. He had not entirely rejected the revolutionary paradigm; he was still concerned to reclaim what he could from the wreckage of the s, seeking to translate the underlying principles 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, Wordsworth must have been aware of the extent to which, above and beyond all other genres, autobiography provided one of the best means of retrieving what was valuable in the past. And it is difficult not to believe that Rousseau would have been a powerful example in this respect, for one of the leading characteristics of his confessional discourse had been its ongoing dynamic of confession and self-justification, by which means the author had been able to reject former errors, and then subsequently redeem them, in a way that seemed both natural and persuasive, and not merely a rhetorical sleight-of-hand. So that when Wordsworth began to undertake a reassessment of his own past, this confessional dynamic must have been highly appealing, not least because it would allow him to have things both ways, simultaneously to register his absolute rejection of French Jacobinism, while continuing to put its legacy of ‘renovating virtue’ in the service of his ‘localist’ ideal.  In book  of The Prelude of  Wordsworth describes his residence in Paris during one of the most dramatic periods of the French Revolution. Arriving in the capital in October , just a few weeks after the insurrection of  August, the September Massacres and the institution of the First Republic, he is greeted by the sound of news hawkers announcing the accusation of Maximilien Robespierre by Jean-Baptiste Louvet. Immediately the poet goes on to describe the scene in the National 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 his charge in openness’. He describes Louvet’s subsequent attack, and the

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lack of support he gained from his ‘irresolute friends’, before commenting that it was the failure of those ‘whose aim / Seemed best’ which ultimately led to the débâcle of the Terror. But whose aim seemed best? It is likely, as most commentators have suggested, that Wordsworth is referring to the more moderate Girondins rather than the notoriously extreme Jacobins, but he is by no means explicit about his political trajectory. The potent vagueness of his confessional manner makes it difficult to situate him within the republican conflict. Ostensibly, the autobiographical voice of  defines itself in absolute opposition to the Terror. But even the poet’s retrospective Girondism is haunted by the memory of his former allegiance to the Mountain: Well might my wishes be intense, my thoughts Strong and perturb’d, not doubting at that time, Creed which ten shameful years have not annull’d, But that the virtue of one paramount mind Would have abash’d those impious crests, have quell’d Outrage and bloody power, and in despite Of what the People were through ignorance And immaturity, and, in the teeth Of 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 given (, –) By ancient Lawgivers.

As James Heffernan has pointed out, Wordsworth’s probable admiration for the political morality of ‘Girondin’ moderates such as Louvet’s ‘irresolute friends’ and his political mentor Michel Beaupuy was always accompanied 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 of virtue, and declared that terror was nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice.’37 As is well known, the party of the Mountain gained its name from the high wall of the left-wing of the National Convention where the radicals chose to sit. Robespierre himself had drawn on Rousseau’s celebration of Alpine republicanism in his description of this Mountain, depicting it as the ‘height of patriotism’ and defining a Montagnard or Mountaineer as ‘nothing other than a pure, reasonable and sublime patriot’.38 Thus in hankering for the virtue of ‘one paramount mind’ to abash ‘those impious crests’ Wordsworth’s antiRobespierrist tirade rehearses the very language of Alpine virtue coined

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

by Rousseau himself. The mature poet aligns himself with Louvet while simultaneously endorsing the cult of the ‘paramount’ legislator that Louvet’s ‘Denunciation’ of  had explicitly sought to expose. And in recollecting and resurrecting the desire for the State to be ‘redeem’d according to example given / By ancient Lawgivers’ the poet betrays the neo-Spartan roots of his former Jacobinism. It is as if, like Southey in his letter 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 the same 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  with some of the prose histories of the republican period which were published at this time. As we have seen, Adolphus had refused to make any distinction between the martyred Girondins and their Jacobin persecutors, arguing that ‘there is hardly an objection made by Brissot to the intrigues, the views and the crimes of the opposing party but applies with equal or greater force to his own’.39 He maintained that the opposition between the Brissotins and the Robespierrists had been merely circumstantial, that it had been produced by their competition for political power, and not by any fundamental moral or political difference between them. For him, they were all, in principle, Jacobin terrorists: their shared rhetoric pointed to their shared beliefs. ‘Danton . . . appears to have justly appreciated Brissot in this respect, when he declared that “a fraternity with either faction was the brotherhood of Cain, and that Brissot, like Robespierre, would have condemned him to the guillotine”’ (, ). And as we have seen, it was in a vain attempt to undermine this growing orthodoxy that English radicals such as Helen Maria Williams sought to distinguish the virtuous republicanism of Brissot and the Girondins from the tyrannical behaviour of Robespierre and his supporters in the Mountain.40 History will judge between Brissot and Robespierre . . . [It] will not confound these sanguinary and ambitious men who passed along the revolutionary horizon like baneful meteors, spreading destruction in their course, with those whose talents formed a radiant constellation in the zone of freedom and diffused benignant beams on the hemisphere till extinguished by storms and darkness.

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

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history transparent to one another. In her version of events the Jacobins and the Girondins were only apparently similar. Time would show that the 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 with Williams’s text, his retrospective Girondism should have been so comparatively 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’ being abashed by ‘the virtue of one paramount mind’ should be so curiously self-defeating, registering an absolute opposition to the actual policies of the Mountain, while at the same time fully endorsing its political aesthetic. In  it was still possible for moderate republicans like Williams to put their trust in History, to argue that as soon as the Revolution had been completed, the bewildering flux of the Terror would become subsumed into a progressive linear narrative.42 By , however, at the time when Wordsworth was composing The Prelude, Europe was embroiled in the second phase of the Napoleonic conflict and the memories of the republican period of the French Revolution were rapidly receding. In this climate, it was not easy for him to share Williams’s blithe confidence in the future, and nor was it especially useful to toe her Girondist line. So rather than rehearsing the Themidorean ‘plot’ she had adopted, he gave an entirely different version of recent history, one much more closely linked with the conservative historiography of the period, in which the revolution was seen as a series of repetitions and returns, a succession of legislative hopes and executive disappointments, from the journées of  to Napoleon’s coronation as Emperor in : When we see the dog returning to his vomit, when the sun That rose in slendour, was alive, and moved In exultation among living clouds Hath 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 is that far from putting this narrative technique to a reactionary end, as Burke and Chateaubriand had done, Wordsworth was to give it a decidedly radical spin, showing how in confessional autobiography, unlike history or drama, there was not merely an agony in repetition, but also ‘the return of liberty and choice’.

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

In book  of The Prelude which describes the first phase of Wordsworth’s residence in France, the poet relates how in passing ‘into a theatre of which the stage / Was busy with an action far advanced’ he became eager to give a ‘form and a body’ to the narrative into which he had entered, to accord the Revolution the generic status of comedy, tragedy or romance. Unable to affix it to a literary category, he is forced to veer from one extreme to the other, firstly by suggesting that the Revolution was so unprecedented that it broke all of the rules of narrative, that it was a ‘mockery of history, the past and that to come!’, then by arguing that it seemed ‘like nothing out of nature’s certain course’ and absolutely concordant with the general scheme of things. As the narrative moves on to the most violent and unpredictable phase of the Jacobin period, the Revolution is increasingly described in terms of a series of uncanny reversals. Describing the period immediately after England had declared war on France in February , Wordsworth writes of the sense of inner conflict created by his continued support for the First Republic. This phase was ‘not as hitherto, / A swallowing of lesser things in great; / But change of them into their opposites,’ a time in which differentiations of concept and character became radically unstable, in which liberty came to resemble tyranny and in which virtue was equated with terror, ‘and thus a way was open’d’, as Wordsworth later puts it, ‘for mistakes / And false conclusions of the intellect, / As gross in their degree and in their kind/Far, far more dangerous’ (, –). And with the onset of the revolutionary Terror he describes how he began to experience the revolution as a species of internal conflict: Through months, through years, long after the last beat Of these atrocities (I speak bare truth, As if to thee alone in private talk) I scarcely had one night of quiet sleep Such ghastly visions had I of despair And tyranny, and implements of death, And long orations which in dreams I pleaded Before unjust Tribunals, with a voice Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense, Of treachery and desertion in the place (, –) The holiest that I knew of, my own soul.

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

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currents of revolutionary culpability, for when the poet is hauled before the tribunal it is with a sense ‘of treachery and desertion’ that is much more difficult to locate, as if somewhere deep inside he felt himself to have failed the cause of liberty. Shortly afterwards, however, there is a violent reaction, in which he rises above these feelings of victimisation and culpability, rechannelling his guilt into a pursuit of the guilty, and, just like Rivers before him, rediscovering in repetition a resurgence of agency: But as the ancient Prophets were inflamed Nor wanted consolations of their own And majesty of mind, when they denounced On Towns and Cities, wallowing in the abyss Of their offences, punishment to come; Or saw, like other men, with bodily eyes, Before them in some desolated place The consummation of the wrath of Heaven, So did some portion of that spirit fall On me, to uphold me through those evil times, And in their rage and dog-day heat I found Something to glory in, as just and fit, And in the order of sublimest laws; And even if that were not, amid the awe Of unintelligible chastisement, I felt a kind of sympathy with power, Motions rais’d up within me, nevertheless Which had relationship to highest things.

(, –)

Such is the counter-revolutionary zeal of this section, its deep investment in the self-destructive recoil of the Terror, that it comes dangerously close to the very psychology of Terrorism itself. And Wordsworth must have noticed this when he came to revise the passage in his later years, or he would not have thought it necessary to ‘sanctify’ its sentiments in the way that he did. For example, whereas in the  version, the ancient Prophets the poet refers to are curiously both inside and outside the revolutionary abyss, passing lofty judgment upon offences to which they are themselves syntactically linked, in the  version these Prophets are far more morally detached from the revolutionary action, and the poet himself is animated with feelings of ‘devout humility’ and the ‘acquiescences of faith’ as well as ‘daring sympathies with power’. Ultimately, then, the poet sympathises much more wholeheartedly with the ‘wrath of heaven’ in the  version,

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

while continuing to identify with the objects of its wrath. And such is the duplicity of the language in this earlier rendering, its inescapably dual aspect, that it succeeds in being at once both Burkean and Robespierrist, a piece at once for and against the Terror, as if even in  Wordsworth still found it impossible to rehearse a set of unequivocally counter-revolutionary sentiments without unconsciously incubating within them a Jacobin ‘ghost’. In the concluding section of the Memoirs of the Reign of Robespierre Williams gave an account of the trial of the former head prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, the man who had administered the infamous Prairial laws: On May st  I was at the revolutionary tribunal when the charges against Fouquier-Tinville and his accomplices were re-read after all the witnesses had been 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 now the benches where they had sat were occupied by their murderers. There was scarcely any need for the jury to deliberate. It only remained to apply the law and pronounce the judgement. And as though all the circumstances of the trial had been arranged to show the punishment of heaven, the very words used were those with which the condemned had been wont to judge the innocent: the accusation being one of conspiracy against the safety of the French Republic, and the penalty being death.44

This scene might be seen to form an objective, historical counterpart to Wordsworth’s nightmarish tableau on his ‘sympathy with power’. It describes one of those uncanny moments when the providential history of the Revolution seemed to have come full circle, with the head prosecutor of the Jacobin regime standing in the dock hearing his own rhetoric used against him. The difference is, of course, that while Williams keeps an ironic detachment from the proceedings, Wordsworth, like Shakespeare’s Lear directing the storm, actively identifies with the principle of sublime justice, imagining it as a function of his will, while continuing to feel his continuing links with the base objects of its vengeance. In one sense, the rest of book  can be seen to continue this dynamic of repudiation-as-repetition, since the poet goes on to describe the rejuvenation of his revolutionary enthusiasm after the death of Robespierre, before subsequently confessing the extent to which it represented nothing but a repetition, in internal form, of the characteristic forms and practices of the Terror, ‘tempting region that’ he remarks, referring to the field of philosophical speculation, ‘for Zeal to enter and

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refresh herself, / Where passions had the privilege to work, / And never hear the sound of their own names’ (, –). Then he describes throwing himself into ‘the philosophy that promised to abstract the hopes of man / Out of his feelings’, which many critics have identified as the philosophical anarchism of William Godwin, seeking to demonstrate what happens when moral speculation is colonised by a species of ‘false imagination, placed beyond / The limits of experience and of truth’ (, –). I took the knife in hand And stopping not at parts less sensitive, Endeavour’d with my best of skill to probe The living body of society Even to the heart: I push’d without remorse My speculations forward; yea, set foot (, –) On Nature’s holiest places.

In a radical internalisation of the executive practice of the Terror, the poet’s mind has become transformed into a kind of court-room for the pursuit of philosophical truth. Soon time-honoured sentiments and prejudices are being brought to the bar, with the mind being forced to confess ‘her titles and her honours’ as if she were an aristocratic suspect at Fouquier-Tinville’s revolutionary tribunal: Thus I fared, Dragging all passions, notions, shapes of faith Like culprits to the bar, suspiciously Calling the mind to establish in plain day Her titles and her honours, now believing, Now disbelieving; endlessly perplexed With impulse, motive, right and wrong, the ground Of moral obligation, what the rule And what the sanction, till, demanding proof, And seeking it in everything, I lost All 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 considered an attack on revolutionary ‘rationalism’. But as we saw in the first four chapters, the philosophical and political theorists of the ‘rationalist’ school did not perplex themselves with ‘impulse, motive, right and wrong’. Theorists such as Bentham and Condorcet preferred to see moral and legal problems in utilitarian terms; they did not try to fathom

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

intentions, but to calculate consequences. It makes more sense, then, I would argue, to suggest that this section of book , like The Borderers, represents not so much an attack on rationalism as an attempt ‘to show the dangerous use which may be made of reason when a man has committed a great crime’, for as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein it is the use of reason rather than reason itself which is the main focus of the text, or to put it another way, its concern is to exhibit the danger of employing ‘progressive’ methods to pursue a ‘primitive’ ideal, as the poet attempts to pursue a highly internal notion of truth while using an analytic method that is the philosophical equivalent of the guillotine. In this way books  and  of The Prelude can be seen to represent a full-scale confession of revolutionary culpability, describing how the dynamic reversals of revolutionary history became reflexes of the mind, and how, by a complex process of repudiation and repetition, the youthful self of the narrator found himself putting on the mantle of Robespierre and rehearsing his public errors in the private tribunal of his mind. But they are also confessional in another sense, for while it is undoubtedly true that the autobiographical voice of  defines itself in explicit opposition to the Jacobin Terror, it does also continue to betray a continuing investment in Jacobin habits of mind, most notably its politics of the will and 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 The Prelude as a whole, is the revolutionary conduct of the narrative itself. Even in its early books, The Prelude is full of temporal digressions and asides, sudden prospects of the future and unexpected returns to the past. In book , however, this characteristic takes on a new aspect, as we are invited to recognise the revolutionary potential of a sudden resurrection of past ideals. Most notably, this is true of the passage beginning ‘O pleasant exercise of hope and joy’, which interrupts an account of the Thermidorean period with the famous invocation: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!’ (, –). A number of critics have spent a long time puzzling over this passage; for some it is an essentially ironic performance, detailing the naive idealism of  in the light of the deep disappointment of ; for others, however, it is a genuine commemoration of the millenarian atmosphere of the early s. To my mind at least, it is not necessary to choose between these two interpretations: the passage does hint that there was something flimsy and fantastical about the revolutionary enthusiasm of the early s, that it was ‘romantic’ in the fullest sense, but it does also suggest that the auto-

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biographical voice of  is still imbued with considerable retrospective fondness for that former vision: ‘Why should I not confess,’ Wordsworth writes, ‘that earth was then / To what an inheritance new-fallen / Seems when the the first time visited, to one / Who thither comes to find in it his home? (, –). In fact, what is really striking about the passage is that it stages such a striking interruption of the poetic narrative, bursting into the chronological continuum with all the force of a revolutionary moment. And this instantly serves to disturb that sense of the Revolution as a historical failure, an endless cycle of violent repetition, and reintroduces it into the body of the text as a still-nourishing ‘beau idéal’; a recollected state of being, a ‘spot of time’. To the French revolutionary mind, almost the only way of thinking about the republican tradition was in terms of the discontinuous history of a few small ‘spots of time’ – short-lived nations and city states like Sparta, Rome, Florence, Geneva – isolated from one another by innumerable generations. As Robespierre himself had confessed, in his speech on the Cult of the Supreme Being of  May : ‘Posterity honours the virtue of Brutus, but it only permits to exist in ancient history. 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 the immense darkness’.45 And in a certain sense, the passage quoted above from The Prelude could be seen as a poetic version of just such another spot of time – the utopian moment of , snatched briefly from the oblivion of the past. Ultimately, it could be argued, the overriding purpose of book  is to identify the emptily theatrical nature of what De Quincey called ‘the gorgeous festival era of the French Revolution’, the extent to which the sun of French liberty ultimately proved to be nothing but ‘a gewgaw, a machine [. . .] an opera phantom’, and also perhaps to identify the misguided ambition of the revolutionary project, whose end it was to regenerate ‘not favour’d spots alone’ (as in the republican history of the past), ‘but the whole earth’. But for all that, however, the repudiation of French republican forms by Wordsworth was far from total. Indeed the nature and shape of the revolutionary ‘romance’ was to remain an important element in his work, for as I hope to show, even in the later books of The Prelude, which represent the poet returning to England to embrace its native landscape and traditions, there is evidence to suggest the enduring influence of the republican tradition upon his conceptualisation of English liberty, with the festival moments of the Revolution continuing to insinuate themselves into his recollections of private virtue.

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism 

Wordsworth’s most authoritative account of the recovery of the past as an inspiration to the future occurs in the famous ‘spots of time’ passage from book  of The Prelude. ‘There are in our existence spots of time’, the poet writes, ‘Which with distinct preeminence retain / A renovating virtue’ 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 lurks Among those passages of life in which We have had deepest feeling that the mind Is lord and master, and the outward sense Is but the obedient servant of her will. (, –)

Through his private memories, the poet says, it was possible for him to recover the strength and goodness, the ‘vivifying virtue’ that he lost during the Jacobin period. In Wordsworth’s Second Nature James Chandler has argued that ‘the discipline represented by the spots [of time] is ultimately a psychological manifestation of a national character and a native tradition’.46 For him the poem is fundamentally Burkean in nature, a critique of the rationalist idealism of the French Revolution and a defence of English custom and prejudice. And he sees the ‘spots’ very much in terms of a renewed sense of the relationship between English landscape and English liberty. But what Chandler’s account tends to neglect is the fact that Wordsworth may have been prompted to reject the ‘rationalistic’ tendency of French Enlightenment thought without necessarily rejecting the principles of Rousseauvian republicanism. For as we saw in chapter one, works such as the Contrat Social and the Lettre à d’Alembert may have been somewhat systematic in their form, but they also possessed a strong emphasis upon custom and tradition. So much so, indeed, that on the question of ‘locality’ Rousseau shared a lot of common ground with Burke, while putting that ground to entirely different ends.47 It is not a foregone conclusion, therefore, that we should see the celebration of native tradition in Wordsworth as automatically Burkean in nature. And whereas in relation to The Excursion there is a compelling argument to suggest that Wordsworth’s poetic sensibility has taken on an identifiably Burkean cast, The Prelude is far more ambivalent. For contrary to Chandler’s thesis, many of the ‘spots of time’ in Wordsworth’s Prelude are not merely affirmations of local spirit and

Wordsworth and the politics of the Mountain

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tradition, but also memories of the first stirrings of preeminent ‘mountain’ virtue. And their very status as ‘spots’ serves to extract them from their surrounding context, as if they were private versions of the great republican moments of the past, ‘small islands in the midst of stormy waves’ (, ), 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, at once deeply rooted in a particular context, and yet potentially extensive in its ambition, a means of private ‘restoration’ which still retains the capacity to fuel a public ‘regeneration’. In the childhood reminiscence from book  that is used to exemplify the theory of the ‘spots’, Wordsworth describes coming upon a hollow in the midst of a ‘rough and stony Moor’ near his home, where a long time ago ‘a Murderer had been hung in iron chains’: The Gibbet mast was moulder’d down, the bones And iron case were gone; but on the turf, Hard by, soon after that fell deed was wrought Some unknown hand had carved the Murderer’s name. (, –)

When he reascended the bare Common Wordsworth saw a lone Girl by ‘a naked Pool’ carrying a Pitcher in the ‘blowing wind’, an image whose ‘visionary dreariness’ impressed itself deeply upon his mind. He continues by recalling the happy occasion when he returned to that spot with his wife Mary and his sister Dorothy, and how it became suffused with ‘the spirit of pleasure and youth’s golden gleam’, concluding that he cannot fail to have benefited from the divine radiance of these remembrances, ‘and from the power / They left behind’ (, –). According to Thomas Weiskel such ‘gestures of self-inquisition’ in The Prelude ‘become the mere feinting of a mind learning how knowledge is opposed to efficacious power’.48 In this interpretation, Wordsworth learns that he can recover a sense of freedom and choice from the essentially traumatic and terrifying experiences of the past by transforming them from historical events into natural phenomena, by ‘denying’ some of the more painful details of a tale or history in order that they can be reconfigured as a succession of sounds or images. As he said of Louvet’s confrontation with Robespierre in the National Convention, ‘these are things / Of which I speak, only as they were storm / Or sunshine to my individual mind, / No further’ (, –). Unlike Rousseau, Wordsworth does not believe that he can wholly recollect the past, or that it is espe-

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

cially helpful to do so. He is more concerned to retrieve the how rather than the what of history, to recover the structure but not the content of former desire. But this is not necessarily a reactionary tactic. For it could also be seen as the means by which the poet was actively seeking to soften and beautify the ‘harsh sublimity’ contained in the catastrophic moments of past history in order to recapture some of their ‘renovating virtue’. In her important book on the French Revolutionary festivals, Mona Ozouf has described how the Jacobins sought to use nature as a means of verifying the narrative fact of revolution. Indeed the calendar of revolutionary festivals can be seen as nothing less than a deliberate attempt to ‘naturalise’ History, to transform it into Time, a natural and harmonious cycle which would subsume and tranquillise all ‘historical’ violence.49 But for those who came after the Revolution, the relationship between nature and history was bound to be more fraught. As Alan Liu writes, ‘whereas the Revolutionary fêtes declared an ideology premised upon nature’s transparency to history, Wordsworth’s fêtes will argue an ideology requiring nature to be opaque to history’. After the shock of the high Terror and of the declaration of war between England and France, nature – the verification of Imagination intervening between history and ideology – became a blind or screen: a fact for its own sake.50

Thus according to Liu’s thesis Nature comes to mask History in Wordsworth’s Prelude and Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a denied narrative mode. ‘When revolutionary history vanishes,’ Liu continues, ‘what remains is lyric inscription whose zero degree story, like the bare name, span of dates, or short verse of an epitaph – points away from the buried narrative to an imagined, eternal history.’ This is as much as to say that like the Pastor in The Excursion the poet 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 ‘less imperiously’ of the past.51 According to this view of things, Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic operates like the ideal grave in his Essay on Epitaphs of – as ‘a tranquillising object’ from which ‘resignation in course of time springs up [. . .] as naturally as the wild flowers besprinkling the turf with which it may be covered, or gathering round the monument by which it is defended’.52 But what Liu neglects is that in The Prelude the masking of history does not constitute a resignation of the Jacobin ideal, but its tactical transferral. It is the means by

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which the poet resituates the paradigm of liberty in an identifiably English context. There is one passage in the poem in which this process is to some degree laid bare, the moment when Wordsworth describes the deep exultation he felt when first hearing of the death of Robespierre. And it is in a brief discussion of this section (, –) that I will seek to consolidate my argument, precisely because it seems so characteristic of the way that Wordsworth uses the ‘spots’ in The Prelude as a whole. The passage is preceded by a section in which the poet describes how, even during the ‘disastrous period’ of the Terror, he still found ‘bright spots’ of hope and joy. He tells how he could not help remembering ‘the glad time’ when he had been travelling through France for the first time with Robert Jones, recollecting the day ‘when through an arch that spann’d the street, / A rainbow made of garish ornaments, / Triumphal pomp for Liberty confirmed, / We walked, a pair of weary Travellers, / Along the town of Arras, place from which / Issued that Robespierre, who afterwards / Wielded the sceptre of the atheist crew’. And soon memories of the festival atmosphere of  inevitably lead the poet to meditate on the subsequent fate of Arras during the the Terror ‘groaning under the vengeance of her cruel Son’, and then to reflect on how the ‘blameless spectacle’ afforded by his first glimpse of the town returned to mock him ‘under such a strange reverse’. Immediately after this comes Wordsworth’s description of the moment when he first heard of Robespierre’s death, one of the happiest days of his life, as he describes it, and one which deserves, he says, ‘a separate chronicle’. Setting the scene, he describes how he was walking along the ‘smooth and level sands of Leven’, gazing at the hills and mountains of his birthplace in the distance, at the moment when he heard the news. Having already been told that this was the day on which Robespierre was finally ‘levell’d with the dust’, the reader is immediately encouraged to read the landscape of Leven as an anticipation of the smooth and level prospect that the death of the Incorruptible is about to open up. With this monstrous obstacle removed, the passage seems to suggest, the poet will finally be free to look toward the distant vision of hope and joy imaged in the play of light above the mountains of his birthplace, a ‘fulgent spectacle’ that is fundamentally steadfast and secure in nature, strongly contrasting with the artificial and flimsy spectacle that he had witnessed at Arras, and far more lasting than Helen Maria Williams’ radiant constellation of the Gironde. Then in a further digression, Wordsworth describes how he looked at this prospect with a

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

fancy ‘more alive’ for having just visited the grave of his old schoolmaster, the man who had encouraged him in his earliest essays in poetry, deeming him ‘not devoid of promise’. Throughout this passage, the poet repeatedly emphasises the gentleness and peace of the setting, the smooth and level nature of Leven Sands, with the tide having retreated to 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 the plain / Was spotted with a variegated crowd / Of coaches, Wains, and Travellers, 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 of The Prelude as a whole, in which the French Revolution is depicted as a distracting ideal which temporarily prevents the poet from discovering what turns out to be his true inheritance, the philosophic and poetic patrimony contained in the sites and scenes of his own childhood. However, as the poet learns of Robespierre’s death, the relationship between external nature and internal feeling become much more complicated, as the stresses and storms of internal feeling threaten to spill over into the landscape: Great was my glee of spirit, great my joy In vengeance, and eternal justice, thus Made manifest. ‘Come now ye golden times’, Said I, forth-breathing on these open Sands A Hymn of triumph, ‘as the morning comes Out of the bosom of the night, come Ye: Thus far our trust is verified: behold! They who with clumsy desperation brought Rivers of blood, and preached that nothing else Could cleanse the Augean stable, by the might Of their own helper have been swept away; Their madness is declared and visible, Elsewhere will safety now be sought, and Earth March firmly towards righteousness and peace.’ Then schemes I framed more calmly, when and how The madding Factions might be tranquillised, And, though through hardships manifold and long, The mighty renovation would proceed: Thus, interrupted by uneasy bursts Of exultation, I pursued my way Along that very shore which I had skimmed In former times, when, spurring from the Vale Of Nightshade, and St Mary’s mouldering fane,

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And the Stone Abbot, after circuit made in wantonness of heart, a joyous crew Of 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 a straightforward 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 dropped in the  version of the poem, as if Wordsworth was later moved to try and distance himself from an emotion which had increasingly come to be identified, by a whole series of writers on the Revolution from John Thelwall to William Hazlitt, as Robespierre’s fatal flaw.53 Nevertheless, in both versions of this passage, the poet’s faith in the Revolution dies with the dying, only to be born with the dead. Functioning as a kind of scapegoat, as in the Thermidorean representations of the previous decade, Robespierre’s demise releases not only new hope, but also Jacobin desire, as Wordsworth expresses a newfound zeal for renovation couched in the form of a scarcely veiled fantasy of political ambition. Suddenly he imagines himself as the new ‘public man’ as he dances on the grave of the old, ‘a Lycurgus after Robespierre’ capable of tranquillising the ‘madding Factions’ and helping the ‘mighty renovation’ to proceed. He experiences an ‘exultation’ that immediately links him to the formerly ‘exultant’ town of Arras, mentioned not long before, and which expresses itself in ‘uneasy bursts’ as if it were an incoming tide, or gathering wind, natural forces that would inevitably serve to threaten the peace 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 innocent joy the poet felt as a young boy horse-riding with his fellows along the 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 the last 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 disruption of the tranquil spirit of Furness Abbey and its environs, a desecration of which the young Wordsworth was himself partly aware. Thus while the passage in book  ostensibly seeks to establish a contrast

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

between the poet’s heartfelt and harmonious attachment to the place of his birth, and the vengeful attitude to Arras that was adopted by Robespierre, it also cannot help confessing the extent to which the ‘primitive’ zeal of Jacobinism was actually present in embyro in the poet’s own boyhood, as the smooth and level sands of Leven are disturbed and kicked about by his wanton, joyous spirit. Only a month before his death Robespierre had presided over the celebrated Festival of the Supreme Being, in which a dazzling display of light and colour had been arranged to illuminate an artificial mountain specially constructed on the Champ de Mars, and hymns had been sung to the future regeneration of the French Republic. Memories of this symbolic invocation to mountain virtue – which was at once a celebration of Rousseauvian Alpine virtue and the virtue of the Montagnard faction – cannot help but impinge upon the play of light Wordsworth describes hovering over the hills of his birthplace on the day of his death. And this is not merely a question of Wordsworth replacing the ‘bright spot’ of French liberty at Arras, a short-lived and fragile prospect, ‘a small island in the midst of stormy waves’ with the more ‘fulgent spectacle’ he sees over Hawkshead. It is also that the scene on Leven Sands is so clearly imagined as the realisation of its previous revolutionary model. Unlike Helen Maria Williams’s ‘radiant constellation’ of the Gironde, it improves on the spectacle of the Cult of the Supreme Being by rendering it real. A piece of corrupt urban theatre, a kind of political Bartholomew Fair, has been given a more thoroughly primitive, a more completely republican setting, surrounded by the permanent forms of nature. The false and bloody sublime of the Montagnards, which was, as it were, a kind of desperate gesturing towards an ethos of neo-Spartan virtue, has been replaced by the true and healthful sublime of the Lakeland mountains, which represents its softer and yet more lasting embodiment. In this way the poem returns the festival ideal of the French Revolution to its local setting. But as we have seen, such is the ‘renovating virtue’ of this landscape that it always carries within it the possibility of conquest and expansion, of generating ‘uneasy bursts’ of universal ambition that threaten to repeat the regenerative idealism of the Terror. Hence Wordsworth’s desire to displace this idealism into the past, to circumscribe and contain his revolutionary zeal by relocating it in the ‘spots of time’ of his own childhood, past moments which can be seen to provide a ‘fructifying virtue’ precisely because of the fact that, like the ancient ‘spots’ of Rome and Sparta, they stand at ‘a safe distance’ from the present, and can never return. And by this means the

. ‘The Triumph of the Republic’ (), anonymous colour engraving. At the centre of 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 being emitted, 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 the lake), 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 of happy sans-culottes and their children are dancing.

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

dangerous dynamic of repudiation-as-repetition that haunts the revolutionary books of The Prelude is replaced by the more positive one of repetition-as-redemption, in which the sublime experiences of childhood simultaneously rehearse and replace the Jacobin will to power, subjecting it to an endless deferral, transforming it into ‘something evermore about to be’.

  

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

When Rousseau stood behind the chair of the master of the château of –, and smiled to hear the company dispute about the meaning of the motto of the arms of the family, which he alone knew, and stumbled as he handed the glass of wine to his young mistress, and fancied she coloured at being waited upon by so learned a young footman – then was first kindled that spark which can never be quenched, then was formed the germ of that strong conviction of the disparity between the badge on his shoulder and the aspirations of his soul – the determination, in short, that external situation and advantages are but the mask, and that the mind is the man – armed with which, impenetrable, incorrigible, he went forth conquering and to conquer, and overthrew the monarchy of France and the hierarchies of the earth.1

 In the sixteenth of his Conversations with Northcote () William Hazlitt was to cite an episode from book  of the Confessions in an attempt to exemplify how its author had ‘stamped his own character and the image of his self-love on the public mind’. Like Robespierre before him, he believed that Rousseau’s autobiography had exerted an immense influence upon the French Revolution, far more significant, in its way, than his works of educational or political theory. For in his eyes the Confessions had succeeded in firing an entire generation with enthusiasm for the principles of liberty and equality through its extended account of its author’s heroic opposition to the ancien régime. Where many nineteenth-century commentators, especially in England, had found themselves concurring with Burke’s remarks upon Rousseau’s transgressive egotism, Hazlitt was to defend it as a Promethean force which, in its very excess, had served to counter aristocratic prejudice, and popularise the principle of meritocracy. 

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

Writing almost forty years after the storming of the Bastille during a period of profound political reaction, Hazlitt strongly identified with Rousseau’s incorrigibility. As a freelance journalist struggling for autonomy in a literary culture plagued by political censorship and editorial control, he too wished to remain unbowed by his ‘external situation’, continuing to profess his commitment to republican principles despite the apparent triumph of Legitimacy.2 It was hardly surprising, therefore, that he should have been inspired by Rousseau’s celebration of the intellectual superiority of the paid lackey. But what lay behind his determination to celebrate the Confessions at the expense of Rousseau’s other writings? And why was he so keen to represent Jacobinism as if it were primarily a question of personality rather than of policies or principles? In order to explore some of these issues, this chapter will undertake to place Hazlitt’s highly idiosyncratic conception of politics in the context of developments in the literary market during the early nineteenth century, interpreting it as a self-conscious response to historical changes in the mode of cultural production; for as I hope to show, not only was he aware of the extent to which his literary conditions were determined by social and economic circumstances, he actually made it part of his subject, using it as a means of dramatising his paradoxical and conflicted attitude to the splintering of the English Jacobin tradition. Anxious to prevent his position as a journalist from jeopardising his status as a critic, many writers on Hazlitt over the past twenty years have been keen to argue for the fundamental coherence of his philosophical, aesthetic and political opinions, often seeking to argue that, for all its apparently fragmented and occasional nature, there is an underlying unity and consistency to his work. Selecting their own canon of important essays from the extensive range of his writings, they have tended to represent him as if he was an independent man of letters, neglecting those elements which do not fit in with their particular model. In this chapter, while remaining deeply indebted to the insights of critics such as Seamus Deane and David Bromwich, I want to argue that Hazlitt’s writing is much more self-contradictory than even they have been prepared to allow, that it is riven with significant and interesting inconsistencies 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 was himself aware of this element in his writing, with many of the reflective essays he wrote in the s having been deliberately designed as sites of

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contradiction, spaces in which the tensions and oppositions of the postrevolutionary period are given dramatic representation.  As we saw in chapter five, like many unregenerate Jacobins, Hazlitt was implacably opposed to the reformist programme of the Benthamite movement, which he saw as a pale shadow of the legislative enthusiasm of the revolutionary decade, considering that the project to regenerate the human race had ‘dwindled down’ in the hands of the new school of reform ‘into petty projects, speculative details and dreams of practical, positive matter-of-fact improvement’ (, ). Foremost among his objections to the utilitarians was their conception of the human mind itself, which they considered to be fundamentally passive in nature, ultimately the product of its external circumstances, and therefore eminently capable of endless readjustment and re-training. One of the radical aspects of this circumstantial theory was that, since it saw moral ideas as the final result of a long process of mental associationism taking place within each individual in response to its immediate surroundings, it placed great importance upon the role of environmental factors in the formation of the self. Thus in an article on ‘Prisons and Prison Discipline’, which was published in , James Mills argued that the depravity of criminals should not be seen as the product of any intrinsic deficiency, but as a product of their environment, which led quite naturally to the notion that no individual, no matter how apparently vicious, should ever be considered entirely incapable of reform, since it was always possible that a controlled change of environment could bring about a change in his or her mental habits.4 And in the article on ‘Education’ which he produced for the  supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Mill was to place an even greater emphasis upon the idea that by completely regulating an individual’s environment, and by controlling the flow of sensations and impressions that he received, the state would be able actively to form and shape the development of his moral character: ‘thus much is ascertained,’ he wrote, ‘that the character of the human mind consists in the sequences of its ideas: that the object of education, therefore, is to provide for the constant production of certain sequences, rather than others’.5 For Hazlitt, however, as for many critics of the utilitarian movement, this approach to the education of the human subject was profoundly pernicious, not merely because it was based on a profound misunderstanding of the workings

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

of the mind, but also because of its fundamentally mechanical nature. In his article on education Mill had argued that one purpose of the utilitarian system of education would be to try and offset the damaging effects of the modern division of labour by supplying the labourers and mechanics of the future with a broad intellectual framework enabling them to transcend the narrow confines of their profession. But to Hazlitt’s mind, the prevailing tendency of the Benthamite school went quite the other way. For him, its proposals on law, on education, on prison discipline and on pauper management adopted a narrowly instrumental and therefore underlyingly exploitative attitude to the human subject. Far from resisting the fragmentation of modern society, it actually seemed deeply committed, as a body of thought, to the project of remodelling society in accordance with the rigid principles of political economy, to rendering society more rational and more efficient even at the cost of transforming every man and woman into a veritable automaton: ‘This is their idea of a perfect commonwealth’, as Hazlitt wrote, in an article for The Plain Speaker ‘where each member performs his part in the machine, taking care of himself, and no more concerned about his neighbours, than the iron and wood-work, the pegs and nails in a spinning-jenny’ (, ). Thus for Hazlitt it was distressing enough that the early s had seen the Benthamites successfully hijack the political discourse of reform, and refashion it in accordance with their own agenda. What made matters worse was that they were increasingly seeking to direct the principle of reform at individuals as well as institutions. Indeed, as we have seen, it was in many ways an inevitable tendency of the utilitarian philosophy that human beings should be regarded as just so much raw material waiting to be ‘improved’. Hazlitt’s problem was that, although he thought this tendency profoundly dangerous, he was forced to admit that it was also extremely dynamic. Arising from the ashes of the revolutionary project of regeneration, it had won an increasing number of converts in the ensuing years, and with the decline of the revolutionary ideal it soon found itself with no real rival, there having emerged no seriously viable radical alternative, within middle-class politics at least, to oppose to its philosophy of extreme individualism. Somewhat despairingly, then, Hazlitt was often moved to counter the claims of the circumstantial determinists by seeking to celebrate the very stubbornness and recalcitrance of ordinary human nature, its deep incorrigibility, which was an extremely paradoxical move for one whose political loyalties lay with the millenarians of . Thus in the essay ‘On

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Personal Character’ which appeared in the London Magazine in March , the innate criminality of Hogarth’s Idle Apprentice took on an oddly utopian aspect, simply because it had proved itself to be proof against all the forces of ‘improvement’: Look at the head of Hogarth’s Idle Apprentice in the boat, holding up his fingers as horns at Cuckold’s Point, and ask what penitentiary, what prison-discipline, would change the form of his forehead, ‘villainous low,’ or the conceptions lurking within it? (, )

Of course, as a guarantee of freedom, the principle of biological determinism was ultimately no more preferable than the utilitarian emphasis upon circumstance, as Hazlitt must have known. But that was not the point. For him, the important thing was that the notion of personality represented a form of conceptual resistance to the policephilosophy of the Benthamites on the one hand, and to the social inequalities of Regency society on the other. It was a way of opposing both reaction and reform. And if there was a slight element of flippancy in his celebration of the ‘incorrigibility’ of Hogarth’s Apprentice, his writings on Rousseau found him more steadily in earnest. For in the hero of the Confessions, as we have already seen, he could point to a character whose radical resistance to reform had been of profound political value, whose refusal to bend and bow with the times had helped to bring about a truly revolutionary moment. Potentially, of course, such a politics of personality was deeply anti-republican. The Jacobins themselves had been very much aware of this, and had been constantly on the lookout for would-be demagogues and dictators interested in developing a cult of hero-worship. And Hazlitt himself, in a number of his own critical writings, not least in the celebrated essay on ‘Coriolanus’, was fully capable of recognising that, inscribed within the very concept of personal heroism itself there might be a tendency to idolise the freedom of the privileged individual and to forget the libertarian claims of the mass. But to some degree this problem could be seen to have resolved itself in Rousseau, for he was, in effect, a new kind of hero, one in whom the free expression of personality had never been autocratic or despotic, but had always carried with it a deeply egalitarian resonance. That is not to say, however, that Hazlitt did not fully acknowledge the paradox of Rousseau’s revolutionary incorrigibility. He was, in this respect, a good deal more penetrating than many of his liberal contemporaries, who were often so desperate to defend Jean-Jacques from Burke’s charge of vanity that they ended up by bowdlerising his work.

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For example in his Essay on Christianity Shelley was to offer a remarkably unconvincing account of Rousseau’s character, which he compared to that of another celebrated revolutionary martyr, none another than Jesus Christ himself, not only on account of their both having been champions of the principles of benevolence and equality, but also, so Shelley argued, because of the great similarity in their habits of thought and feeling.6 Better known, however, and rather more convincing, was Germaine de Staël’s eulogium, which was first published in the Lettres sur . . . Jean-Jacques Rousseau of , in which Jean-Jacques had been excused his unfortunate errors on the principle that he was, first and foremost, 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 Examiner in , Hazlitt was to launch a critique of de Staël’s view, essentially because he saw it as a serious misjudgement both of Rousseau’s authorial personality and of the nature and tendency of the imagination. For Hazlitt the imagination was a fundamentally disinterested faculty, a form of intensified sympathy, and in that sense a principle that effectively transcended the bounds of the self. In Rousseau, however, he saw only excessive sensibility, an ‘acute or morbid feeling of all that related to his own impressions, to the objects of his life’, a faculty which had ‘tyrannised’ over both his imagination and his reason, insinuating itself into all of his works. Like Burke before him, Hazlitt was even tempted to see the celebrated Discourse on Inequality as a covert expression of this ‘excessive egotism’: Hence in part also his quarrel with the artificial institutions and distinctions of society, which opposed so many barriers to the unrestrained indulgence of his will, and allured his imagination to scenes of pastoral simplicity or of savage life, where the passions were either not excited or left to follow their own impulse, – where the petty vexations and irritating disappointments of common life have no place, – and where the tormenting pursuits of the arts and sciences were lost in pure animal enjoyment or indolent repose. (, )

But where Hazlitt differed from Burke was in the fact that, against all odds, he found a utopian element in all of this self-absorption. Paradoxically enough, it was precisely on account of his intense selfishness, Hazlitt thought, that Rousseau had exerted such a powerful effect on subsequent readers: Every feeling in his mind became a passion. His craving after excitement was an appetite and a disease. His interest in his own thoughts and feelings was always wound up to the highest pitch; and hence the enthusiasm which he

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excited in others. He owed the power which he exercised over the opinions of all Europe, by which he created numberless disciples, and overturned established systems, to the tyranny which his feelings, in the first instance, exercised over himself. The dazzling fire of his reputation was kindled by the same fire that 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, by his wit and penetration, had rendered superstition contemptible, and tyranny odious: but it was Rousseau who brought the feeling of irreconcilable enmity to ranks 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 the human heart. (, n)

The difficulty was that, for Hazlitt, this Promethean conception of Rousseau went directly against the grain of his own metaphysics. In his very first publication, the Essay on the Principles of Human Action of , he had been preoccupied with attempting to refute the self-love philosophy of Helvétius and Holbach as a means of undermining the intellectual basis of the discourse of utilitarianism. And he did this by circumventing the long-running philosophical argument about whether selfishness or benevolence was the natural disposition of man, and by undertaking to deconstruct the opposition between them. In order for someone to be behaving selfishly, Hazlitt reasoned, they would have to be acting in the interests of their future self, a self which had not, strictly speaking, yet come into being, whose conditions and circumstances were not yet known, and whose very existence was therefore, in a sense, quite imaginary. But if a man was able to sympathise with an imaginary future self, then surely he was also capable of sympathising with another present self, that is, another person, for such an effort of sympathy would involve exactly the same kind of self-projection. Thus it was impossible to argue that selfishness was inherent in the nature of man because it was itself grounded upon the very same principle of imaginative sympathy that provided the foundation of benevolence. And it was by this means that Hazlitt sought to unravel the methodology of Benthamism, which based its theory of social legislation upon the notion that society was composed of a mass of self-interested individuals, whose interests were all fundamentally opposed, and who therefore required governing institutions which did not bother to concern themselves with motives but only with effects. However, Hazlitt’s attempt to reinstate sympathy to its former role as

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a guiding principle of social and moral philosophy was singularly unsuccessful. Written in the same spirit of abstract inquiry that had characterised Godwin’s Political Justice, the Essay on the Principles of Human Action had fallen ‘still-born from the press’, largely, according to its author, because it had been written in a style that was too dry and metaphysical 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 mind when he reflected upon the continuing appeal of Rousseau’s Confessions in the mid-s. For here was a text which had positively demanded sympathy from its readers, had effectively torn it out of them, forcing them to discover within themselves the grounds and conditions of disinterested and virtuous action. The difficulty was, of course, that Rousseau was so conspicuously lacking in sympathy himself, having been so powerfully caught up in his own thoughts and feelings that he had tended to neglect those of others. And this, it could be argued, was probably one of the reasons why Hazlitt decided to represent him as a Promethean figure, a combination of Titanic legislator and holy scapegoat, who had, by indulging selfishness to excess, somehow succeeded in redeeming it, transforming it into its opposite. It is perhaps significant, therefore, that Hazlitt’s ‘On the Character of Rousseau’ should have been written just at the time when its author was beginning his career as a reflective essayist, as if it had suddenly become clear to him, through his re-interpretation of the Confessions, firstly that autobiography was a powerful means of dramatising the sympathetic process, and secondly that, precisely because of the principle of reciprocity that it encouraged between writer and reader, it was still, potentially at least, a radical form. And just over ten years later, with the experience of many autobiographical essays behind him, he was to offer an even more confident and complete account of the process by which Rousseau’s egotism had engendered universal sympathy, during a friendly 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 which gave such an effect to Rousseau’s writings, that he stamped his own character and the image of his self-love on the public mind – there it is and there it will remain in spite of everything. Had he possessed more comprehension of thought or feeling, it would only have diverted him from his object. But it was the excess of his egotism and his utter blindness to everything else, that found a corresponding sympathy in the conscious feelings of every human breast. (, )

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In this formulation, egotism emerges as a valuable conduit of sympathetic feeling, the best way for a writer to encourage in his readers a truly elastic response. Of course, in the Conversations Hazlitt does not have it all his own way, indeed it is one of the chief strengths of this book, and grist to its author’s mill, that the conversations contained within it should have offered such a vivid representation of the possibilities and problems of intellectual sympathy between strong personalities. For example, in the course of the conversation quoted above, ‘Northcote’ raises a question which had been conspicuous by its absence in the ‘Character of Rousseau’, the question of Rousseau’s influence upon the French Revolution itself, not merely as a political prophet but as a philosophical theorist whose ideas actually shaped its course. Having listened to Hazlitt’s eulogy, he responds by stating that the name of Rousseau would be forever associated in his mind with ‘all the gloomy humours of a mobgovernment, which attempted from their ignorance to banish truth and justice from the world’, to which the character of Hazlitt offers no real reply (, ). Ten years before, in the ‘Character’ of  Hazlitt had almost entirely suppressed the link, which many of the commentators of the s, most notably Wollstonecraft and Burke, had been so very keen to make, between Rousseau’s personality and his political theory. And it is interesting to reflect on why this might have been so: perhaps he considered that in order to recuperate Rousseauvian autobiography as a form of radical discourse it was necessary to repress the extent to which it was associated with the politics of the Contrat Social. The historical moment of Hazlitt’s essay may have been significant in this respect, for it was written during a period of great change in the field of European politics, with every nation readjusting itself to life after Napoleon. As Simon Bainbridge has shown, Bonaparte was a great hero for Hazlitt, so much so, in fact, that for a long time he considered him the last upholder of the fundamental principles of the Revolution, not primarily because of his role as a legislator, which it was difficult to reconcile with the ideals of , but because of what he was in himself, a man of genius who had exposed the double sham of monarchy and aristocracy by relying solely upon his talent to carry him to the top.7 As his biographers have shown, Waterloo was a great blow to Hazlitt; for him, it seemed to him that the fall of Napoleon signalled the final triumph of the principle of Legitimacy over liberty and equality. But it was also equally disappointing in another way, because of the way in which it showed another one of his idols to possess feet of clay. Up until the mid-s Wordsworth had been an important figure for him, a

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fundamentally democratic poet heroicially opposing a predominantly reactionary literary establishment. But with the publication of The Excursion in , and then the Thanksgiving Ode shortly after the victory at Waterloo, the extent of Wordsworth’s abandonment of the cause of liberty had become glaringly apparent. Having lost two such champions of the Jacobin cause, it was perhaps natural, then, that Hazlitt should have found himself returning to Rousseau in the years after Waterloo. Jean-Jacques was, after all, a writer in whom republican values had always found a steadfast champion. And yet even so, it is still quite significant that, just at the very beginning of his career as a reflective essayist, he should have been moved to ponder the citizen of Geneva’s politics of confession. Partly, he must have been assessing the viability of Rousseau as a revolutionary hero, examining whether his character and career might be seen to offer an alternative model to that of Wordsworth or Napoleon. And yet above and beyond this he must also have been keen to assess whether the reflective style of Rousseau’s autobiographical writing might not provide some kind of template for his own. What was especially valuable about the Confessions, it seems, for Hazlitt, was the democratic quality of Rousseau’s recollections, the extent to which, because of the very simplicity of his prevailing passions, every class of reader was able to read them with sympathy. As Hazlitt himself put it: ‘We are never tired of this work for it everywhere presents us with pictures which we can fancy to be counterparts of our own existence’ (, ). And it was this combination of democratic politics and aesthetic appeal that rendered Rousseau both rich and rare. For as John Whale has pointed out, there was a deep tension in much of Hazlitt’s work between politics and aesthetics, so that many of the qualities that he considered valuable in an aesthetic context – imaginative intensity, sensibility, suggestibility – he tended to consider as perniciously ‘aristocratic’ in political terms; while regarding a substantial number of the foremost virtues of political radicalism – rationality, common sense, a respect for hard facts – as rather deficient and deadening if they ever strayed into the realm of aesthetics.8 Thus it was that he found himself admiring Burke because he had produced the most imaginative prose ever to grace the world of politics, while criticising him, almost in the same breath, for having used his literary imagination to bedazzle the English public into an acceptance of aristocratic principles. And in his essay on ‘Coriolanus,’ Hazlitt had even gone so far as to raise the possibility that there might be an aristocratic tendency at the heart of

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poetry itself, that it might be dangerous for republicans to play on the see-saw of literary sublimity precisely because of the dialectic it set up between perceiving subject and sublime object, constructing aesthetic response in terms of an ongoing oscillation between the abject worship of power and its proud possession, an endlessly alternating current of strength and weakness, tyranny and servility. One obvious example of this was the Windsor Keep passage from Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord – a passage that Hazlitt himself could not help admiring – which represented a deliberate attempt to prop up the institution of the monarchy through the manipulation of a sublime effect. But for Hazlitt the ‘Coriolanus’ principle was also present in some supposedly radical works, Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage for instance, in which he considered that the fundamentally reactionary nature of Byron’s narrative persona almost completely undermined the apparent liberalism of the poem’s content. Indeed such was the nature of Harolde, Hazlitt argued, that in confronting the great natural and historical monuments of Europe, he was always seeking to bask in their reflected glow, offering himself up to the reader as a kind of sublime object, deserving of awestruck contemplation. With Rousseau, however, it had been a different matter, as he showed in an article ‘On Byron and Wordsworth’ which was first published in : When Rousseau called out – ‘Ah! voilà de la pervenche!’ in a transport of joy at sight of the periwinkle, because he had first seen this little blue flower in company with Madame Warens thirty years before, I cannot help thinking that any astonishment expressed at the sight of a palm-tree, or even of Pompey’s Pillar, is vulgar compared to this! (, )

Reversing expectations, Hazlitt finds the poetry of the noble lord Byron more ‘vulgar’ than that of the vagabond Rousseau, precisely because the former is so concerned to flaunt its nobility. When confronted with the sites of classical antiquity Hazlitt suggests, Byron expresses the feelings that any schoolboy would have been expected to have if presented with the same scene, and yet thinks all the better of himself for having had them. Whereas Rousseau, by contrast, even when he is indulging in a series of deeply personal recollections, does so in order 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 sections of the Confessions and the Rêveries in which Rousseau described the associative link by which the sight of a little periwinkle had reminded him of

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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 supplying an answer not only to Byron, but also to Burke, whose famous recollection of Marie-Antoinette in the Reflections provides an instructive contrast with the passage on the little blue flower. For what is distinctive about Rousseau’s act of recollection is that it is prompted by an object that is insignificant in itself, so that in reading the passage the reader is immediately made aware of the fact that its ‘sublime’ effect is entirely produced by a contemplation of the power – or ‘virtue’ – of the mind to resist the ravages of time. As in Wordsworth, therefore, one is shown that ‘sublimity’ is something which is generated not from without but from within. But to a greater extent even than Wordsworth, Rousseau creates a spirit of fellowship with his reader because of the relationship he sets up between the objective triviality of his memories and their deep subjective significance, for as Hazlitt himself was to describe it, when talking about the same passage in his ‘Character of Rousseau’: ‘Rousseau’s exclamation . . . comes more home to the mind than Mr Wordsworth’s discovery of a linnet’s nest’ because ‘prose is better adapted to express those local and personal feelings, which are inveterate habits of mind, than poetry, which embodies its imaginary creations’ (, ). In this mood, it was not so much the ‘political’ dimension of the Confessions which appealed to Hazlitt, but the fact that by engaging in a detailed examination of his own absolute uniqueness Rousseau had somehow succeeded in unveiling a general truth about the relationship between memory and identity, discovering a principle of democratic commonality in the very singularity of his own feelings. Thus it was the purpose of Rousseau, in Hazlitt’s reflective essays of the 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 aesthetic power. And this led him to return, again and again, to the various landscapes of liberty that were littered through Rousseau’s writings, visions which predated and outshone those of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron, and which could therefore serve as a reminder of the idealism of the revolutionary decade: We spent two whole years in reading these two works [The Confessions and La Nouvelle Heloïse] and (gentle reader, it was when we were young) in shedding tears over them. – ‘As fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinal gums.’

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They were the happiest years of our life. We may well say of them, sweet is the dew 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 of Hazlitt’s own past, so that the former’s way with memory filled the memory of the latter. And this was not simply a matter of praising Rousseau’s confessional mode, but of seeking to emulate it. Quite often the two went hand in hand, as in this passage from the essay ‘On Going A Journey’ in which Hazlitt used Rousseau in order to take a swipe at the Lake poets: It was on the tenth of April, , that I sat down to a volume of the New Heloïse, at the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken. The letter I chose was that in which St Preux describes his feelings as he first caught a glimpse from the heights of Jura of the Pays de Vaud, which I had brought with me as a bonne bouche to crown the evening with. It was my birthday, and I had for the first time come from a place in the neighbourhood to visit this delightful 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, which opens like an amphitheatre, broad, barren hills rising in majestic state on either side, with ‘green upland swells that echo the bleat of flocks’ below, and the river Dee 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 tender branches in the chiding stream. How proud, how glad I was to walk along the high road that commanded the delicious prospect, repeating the lines I have just quoted from Mr. Coleridge’s poems! But besides the prospect which opened beneath my feet, another also opened to my inward sight, a heavenly vision, on which were written, in letters large as Hope could make them, these four words, L, G, L, V; which have since faded into the light of common 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 would return 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. I was 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 then was new to me, has become old and incorrigible. Yet will I turn to thee in thought, O sylvan Dee, as Thou wert, in joy, in youth and gladness, and thou shalt always be to me the river of Paradise where I will drink of the waters of life freely! (, )

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

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the author to reflect upon the continuity of his own feelings, Hazlitt’s ‘Sylvan Dee’ fulfils the same purpose as Wordsworth’s ‘Sylvan Wye’ in the Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey of . And as in Resolution and Independence the work of memory helps him to counter the great fear of a descent from ‘youth and gladness’ into ‘despondency and madness’. In this way Hazlitt draws strength from some of the most powerful lines of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetry, while at the same time developing an ironic critique of them. For by parodying Wordsworth’s early expressions of steadfastness, he endeavours to suggest that, politically speaking, the poet has been anything but constant. And similarly, by citing snatches of Coleridge’s early poetry before breaking off to ask ‘Where is he now?’, he succeeds in recalling the radical promise of his early years, while also highlighting his subsequent decline. Significantly, during the course of his rewriting of Tintern Abbey, Hazlitt makes clear that he is unlike Wordsworth in that he has no Dorothy at his side to share his reflections, suggesting that what was once a collective commitment to the ideals of the French Revolution has long since dwindled into a solitary recollection. And in this way he can be seen to cultivate the figure of the Rousseauvian solitary, offering himself as the still point of a turning world, a utopian principle, resisting the desperate decline of history. For in Hazlitt as in Rousseau, memory serves to restore the present self to a sense of its real identity. It does not, as in Wordsworth’s dialectical autobiography, confront the authorial self with a ‘being’ in its past with whom it has but tentative and problematic links. And so, like Rousseau’s ‘natural man’, Hazlitt represents himself as a revolutionary idealist frozen in the past, continuing to endure beneath the grime of history, intact and essentially unchanged, an unshakeably incorrigible spirit, patiently biding his time.9 ‘What surprises me in looking back to the past’, he wrote, in his ‘Farewell to Essay Writing’ of March , ‘is to find myself so little changed in the time . . . the continuity of impressions is the only thing on which I pride myself.’ Steadfast in his continued commitment to the ideals of the French Revolution, he considered that ‘great principles and original works 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 time and circumstances served to alienate it from the outside world or from self-knowledge. In this way both writers can be seen to have developed a cult of personal character which was designed to resist the progress of ‘practical, positive matter-of-fact improvement’ (, ).

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 In a review of The Excursion published in The Examiner in , Hazlitt dismissed Wordsworth’s newfound Christian optimism with a dramatic flourish: . . . 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 complete. 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 as common as gross selfishness, till reason shall have acquired the obstinate blindness of prejudice, till the love of power and of change shall no longer goad man on to restless action, till passion and will, hope and fear, love and hatred, and the objects proper to excite them, that is, alternate good and evil, shall no longer sway the bosoms and businesses of men. (, )

In The Excursion Wordsworth had recommended a return to the national church as a means of consoling the disappointed ‘solitaries’ of his generation for the failure of the French Revolution. Religious unity and spiritual equality were offered as transcendental alternatives to the transparency and community of the Jacobin festival ideal. Hazlitt, however, refused to be consoled, reasserting his continuing commitment to the principles of ‘humanity and liberty’ while representing their ‘triumph’ as an impossible dream. Like Robespierre in the last speech before his death, Hazlitt’s pessimism was thus revolutionary rather than reformist, registering itself as a personal resistance to history. ‘What does it matter that Brutus has killed the tyrant,’ Robespierre had asked, in his celebrated speech on political morality, ‘Tyranny continues to live on in people’s hearts, and Rome exists nowhere but in Brutus.’10 Similarly, Hazlitt was increasingly to depict himself as the last of the Jacobins; a microcosm of the unified general will, ‘till the many become as united as the one’. Or so it sometimes seems, for although Hazlitt regularly emulated Rousseau’s rhetoric of confession, he was very guarded on the question of his civic ideal. In the essay ‘On Reason and Imagination’, for example, he described the Contrat Social as ‘– a work of great ability but extreme formality of structure,’ whose author had been ‘too ambitious of an exceedingly technical and scientific mode of reasoning, scarcely attainable in the mixed questions of human life’ (, ). This withholds more than it gives out, suggesting that behind Hazlitt’s purely stylistic critique he had a profound suspicion of Rousseau’s neo-Spartan politics.

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And this can be further glimpsed in some of his scattered reflections on the notion of a public spirit, all of which suggest how aware he was of the extent to which such a concept had been manipulated, by both the political left and right. In the conclusion to the essay ‘On Personal Character,’ for instance, he asked: Suppose public spirit to become the general principle of action in the community – how would it shew itself ? Would it not then become the fashion, like loyalty, and have its apes and parrots, like loyalty? The man of principle would no longer be distinguished from the crowd, the servum pecus imitatorum. There is a cant of democracy as well as of aristocracy; and we have seen both triumphant in our day. The Jacobin of  was the Anti-Jacobin of . The loudest chaunters of the Paeans of liberty were the loudest applauders of the restored doctrine of divine right. (, )

According to Hazlitt’s analysis, Robespierre’s Festival of the Supreme Being, and the celebration of Wellington’s victory were but two sides of the same pernicious coin. Thus he was prepared to acknowledge the counter-revolutionary version of the Jacobin period as a time during which an artificially contrived public opinion had outlawed the exercise of private judgment, while insisting that exactly the same could be said of the atmosphere in England at the time of Waterloo. And in this way he showed something of his dissenting, neo-Godwinian roots, for fundamentally, he was too much of an individualist not to be profoundly suspicious of the Revolution’s collectivist phase. In his mature journalism this commitment to the value of private judgment over and above that of public opinion expressed itself in an unconscious distinction he frequently made between the people and the public. In the modern period, as he saw it, public opinion was no longer the consensus of the judgments of private people engaged in public debate, nor was it the spontaneous reflection of common sentiment. It had 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 pretender who chooses to fill it with noisy assertions, or false surmises, or secret whispers’ ‘– so that we may safely say the public is the dupe of public opinion, not its parent’ (, ). When Hazlitt invoked ‘the people’, however, he was referring to a spontaneous popular principle which he could still admire: Mobs, in fact, then, are almost always right in their feelings, and often in their judgments, on this very account – that being utterly unknown to and disconnected with each other, they have no point of union or principle of co-oper-

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ation between them, but the natural sense of justice recognised by all persons in common. (, )

Significantly, he was was only prepared to align himself with ‘the people’ against the private interests of corporate bodies if he could consider them as a collection of individuals independently following a common purpose. He remained remarkably faithful, in this respect, to the Rousseauvian concept of a spontaneous, unreflective general will. But as soon as the popular interest began to form itself into anything resembling a corporate body he grew highly mistrustful, for perhaps even more than Robespierre himself, he was profoundly suspicious of the politics of faction. In many ways, this was the individualism of Political Justice in its residual form, and as with Godwin, it can be seen as an unconscious form of resistance to the growing challenge of workingclass combination. Paradoxically enough, therefore, by invoking the moral economy of the eighteenth-century English mob, Hazlitt betrayed the limits of his own bourgeois radicalism, because in so doing he effectively confessed the extent to which he was opposed to radical combination of any kind. Thus despite the fact that he had been quick to expose the class hypocrisy of the utilitarians in his Reply to Malthus, he was to remain hampered, all the same, by a class bias of his own. For even though he continued to express his commitment, throughout his career, to the principle of popular sovereignty, that did not prevent him from remaining opposed to the principle of popular politics. In part this was a response to the French Revolution itself. Theoretically supportive of Rousseau’s political theory, he was also mindful of the way in which it had been employed by popular pressure groups and revolutionary factions, and of the way in which the peculiarly abstract nature of the principle of the general will had rendered it fatally prone to misappropriation and impersonation. When ‘the cant of public spirit’ had become the fashion, he argued, politics had been transformed into mere parrotry. And in his Life of Napoleon of  he was to depict Robespierre as the absolute embodiment of this form of political ‘dandyism’. [Robespierre’s] refinements in theory, his cruelties in practice might come under the denomination of political dandyism, or were the height of fashion, the opinion of the day carried to excess and outrage, because he had no feelings of his own to oppose to a cant-phrase or party-Shibboleth, or to qualify a verbal dogma. (, –n)

On occasions like this, there is little to separate Hazlitt from conservative historians such as his contemporary Sir Walter Scott, who also

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depicted Robespierre as a contemptible political automaton in the revolutionary section of his own Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Elsewhere in the Life, however, Hazlitt was to represent the Incorruptible as if he had been a true idealist, recalling the emphasis made in the mid-s by Coleridge and Thelwall: ‘I do not conceive it impossible’, he remarked, ‘that he thought of [the Social Contract and the Profession of Faith of A Savoyard Vicar] when the mob were dancing round him at his own door’. And thus, without making explicit comment on the appropriateness of Robespierre’s reading of Rousseau, he was able to acknowledge that it had probably served to harden his political resolve: ‘Evil is strong enough in itself ’, he commented, ‘when it has good for its end it is conscience proof ’ (, ). Given Hazlitt’s long-standing resistance to the Jacobin cant of public spirit, then, it is not perhaps surprising that his revolutionary longings, when they came to be expressed in his reflective essays, tended to articulate themselves in terms of a series of extremely private prospects of past liberty, rather than open meditations upon its festival ideal. For example, if we return to the passage from ‘On Going A Journey’ which was quoted earlier, we can see that, above and beyond the allusions to Wordsworth and Coleridge, an overmastering reference to Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloïse informs and colours the whole. And the letter that Hazlitt refers to is the one in which Saint-Preux described his longawaited return to the valley of the Pays de Vaud, after years of enforced exile, spent travelling the world. In this section of the novel, Rousseau’s protagonist approaches Clarens in the full knowledge that his beloved Julie has married Baron de Wolmar and that all his fondest hopes have been irrevocably dashed. And when he enters the mountains, he plunges into a state of deep reverie that is as much a yearning for the past as an appreciation of the scene before him, as he suddenly becomes subject to ‘a thousand delicious memories which reawaken all of the feelings I have ever tasted’.11 Clearly, the Llangollen scene in ‘On Going a Journey’ was sketched very much with this reverie in mind, for its dream of ‘L, G, L, V’, that ‘other prospect’ which opens itself out before the author’s ‘inward sight’, is itself a recollection of the mental landscape of the early books of La Nouvelle Heloïse. As we saw in chapter four, Saint-Preux becomes reacquainted with Julie and her husband on his return to Switzerland, and is subsequently invited to reside at Clarens. And Rousseau then proceeds to give a detailed encomium of this utopian collectivity while treating Saint-

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Preux’s emotional recalcitrance with continuing sympathy. In this sense, the novel’s ending, in which the dying Julie tries to rechannel SaintPreux’s desire for her into a love of the community as a whole, can be interpreted as an attempt by the author to harmonise the twin poles of his own personality, to bring the solitary individual of the Confessions into the legislative fold of the Contrat Social. It is significant, therefore, that in his reflections upon La Nouvelle Heloïse Hazlitt never actually reaches Clarens, preferring to dwell upon the prospect afforded to Saint-Preux just 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 were conscious that to return to Julie’s revolutionary festival, after so many years, would be to find it transformed into a Benthamite workhouse. Edward Thompson was one of the first to draw attention to the ‘curious arrest’ and ‘stasis’ in Hazlitt’s many recollections of the glad dawn of the French Revolution.13 And this is especially true of the vision of freedom in the passage from ‘On Going a Journey’, which like the frieze on his friend John Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, both conjures up and then hides the image of the republican city-state, creating a lacuna which is also the open grave of ancient liberty, ‘and not a soul to tell/Why thou art desolate, can e’er return’.14 At first glance Rousseau’s cultivation of the unique claims of the self in the Confessions might have seemed to sit oddly with his call for each citizen to identify his particular will with that of the general in the Contrat Social. However, as we saw in chapter two, Robespierre was to prove that there was no contradiction between Jean-Jacques’ political theory and his autobiographical practice. He showed that they were the objective and subjective poles of the same political dialectic. According to this view of things, Rousseauvian confession was seen to represent the general will under siege, rendered individual and imperfect by social and political circumstances: far from disconnecting the self from society, it was a way of defining the aristocratic obstacle to a unified general will. And as has been noted, Robespierre was not a populist like Marat or Hébert, he did not pander to popular taste in his political journalism. Rather he followed Rousseau in depicting himself as a transparent receptacle of the desires of the people, insisting that all factions, parties, corporate bodies and private conspiracies that served to separate his individual will from that of the collective should be mercilessly destroyed in order that the unity of the republic could be achieved. Thus far, we have seen how Hazlitt employed Rousseau’s confessional discourse as a way of resisting the forces of reaction and reform,

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

cultivating the latter’s tone of incorrigibility, excessive sensibility and self-conscious isolation in order to generate a libertarian effect. But it has also become clear that he was no enthusiast for ‘public spirit’ either, and that he remained highly aware of the extent to which Rousseau’s cult of personality was always threatening to recall Robespierre’s coercive politics of the will. So, then, his overriding task was to find a way of preserving his commitment to the revolutionary tradition without seeming to endorse the politics of revolutionary government, and he did this by cultivating Rousseau’s festival vision as a distant prospect displaced into the past. In this way his private confessions continued to contain a public resonance, 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 potential that it had possessed in Robespierre, and even residually in Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth, transforming itself into a purely oppositional technique. In that sense it can be seen as both a protest against, and a symptom of, the decline of middle-class republicanism in England.  Long before the Poor Law Amendment Act of  utilitarian doctrines had begun to influence the government of the British Empire. Mill’s History of British India () had earned him a place at India House. So too 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 by the s the legislative principles of the ageless Jeremy Bentham were already beginning to influence administrative policy in the colonies and in newly independent Latin America. Of all Hazlitt’s variously disdainful and despairing responses to this meteoric rise, scattered throughout his oeuvre, perhaps the most concerted critique was contained in a magazine article published in , a dialogue on utilitarianism entitled ‘On the New School of Reform’: Where is the use of getting rid of the trammels of superstition and slavery, if we are immediately to be handed over to these new ferrets and inspectors of a Police-Philosophy; who pay domiciliary visits to the human mind, catechise an expression, impale a sentiment, put every enjoyment to the rack, leave you not a moment’s ease or repose, and imprison all the faculties in a round of cantphrases – the Shibboleth of a party? (, )

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Noticing that the Peel Government was already giving the utilitarians ‘good œillades’ (, ), Hazlitt was highly suspicious of the comparative ease with which the new approach to reform had insinuated itself into the existing political system. Despite its professed aim to rationalise and democratise society, the discourse of utility was showing itself to be increasingly complicit with the interests of ‘Old Corruption’. And in order to break up this new alliance, Hazlittt tried to discredit it in the mind of his middle-class readership by linking the utilitarians with the Jacobin tradition. He did this by insinuating that Bentham, Malthus, MacCulloch and Ricardo shared the same legislative zeal as the French revolutionaries of the s, they had merely changed its focus. Are they not equally at war with the rich and the poor? And having failed (for the present) in their project of cashiering kings, do they not give scope to their troublesome, overbearing humour, by taking upon them to snub and lecture the poor gratis? (, )

In his reference to the ‘cashiering’ of kings, Hazlitt was self-consciously rehearsing a phrase from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (), as a means of linking the philosophical radicals with the constitution-mongers of the revolutionary decade. Then he went on to argue that the increasing influence of the utilitarians upon the government and the press had served to ‘strip the cause of Reform of everything like a misalliance with elegance, taste, decency, common sense or polite literature’. And this explicit attack upon what he called the ‘Jacobin jargon’ of the reformers was identifiably Burkean too, recalling the appeal made in the Reflections on behalf of ‘all the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination’ which had been so rudely dismissed by the ‘sophisters, economists and calculators’ of the Constituent Assembly.16 In setting up this explicit opposition between Jacobin politics and a civilised aesthetic, Hazlitt sought to discredit Bentham and his followers by linking them with the rationalists who had tried to reorganise the government of France on abstract principles. Resurrecting painful memories of the French Revolution, he endeavoured to mobilise public opposition against the philosophical radicals by insinuating that the disastrous mistakes of the past were in danger of being repeated by the ‘state-doctors’ of the present. However, to identify the utilitarians with the Jacobin tradition was a rather paradoxical move for Hazlitt, especially when one thinks about the general trend of his own politics. For in many respects he had already offered himself to his readers as the last of the old-style Jacobins.

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

Denouncing the political treachery of former republicans such as Wordsworth, John Stoddart, Coleridge and Southey in the article ‘On the Connection between Toad-Eaters and Tyrants’ of  he had defined a ‘true Jacobin’ as ‘one who does not believe in the divine right of kings, or in any other alias for it, which implies that they reign ‘in contempt 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 had remained faithful to the libertarian and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, refusing to succumb, as the Lake School had done, to the threats and promises of arbitrary power. However, to do as he did in ‘The New School of Reform’, and link the utilitarians with the Jacobin cause, could only serve to confuse this crucial definition, for it was clear that he himself did not wish to make common cause with Bentham and Malthus, nor did he consider them to fulfil the requirements of the Jacobin 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 sympathy for the French nation and its revolutionary ideals, or simply a general commitment to democratic principles. It could refer to either or both middle-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 practice of systematic philosophy; it might encompass the Revolution as a whole, or simply its republican phase. As we have seen, in the counter-revolutionary pamphlets he wrote during the early s Edmund Burke had refused to differentiate between the various currents of French revolutionary thought. He would not distinguish, for example, between the bourgeois liberalism of the constitutional phase of the Revolution and the Spartan civic humanism that rose to prominence during the First Republic. For him, all aspects of the French experiment had been contaminated by a misguided commitment to abstract philosophy. The taint of ‘Jacobinism’ had uniformly coloured the whole. And this refusal to discriminate between the different strands of French politics was one of the characteristics of English conservative ideology, which increasingly came to pride itself upon a complete rejection of ‘French principles’. Many former fellow-travellers were gradually to succumb to the pressure of this discourse. Despite his ongoing awareness of the philosophical diversity of the French Enlightenment, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was to offer a theoretical justification of Burke’s notion of Jacobinism in

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the edition of The Friend for  October , arguing that one could see a despotic tendency in the theories of Rousseau and Turgot, and that this tendency had been realised in the political practice of Robespierre and Bonaparte.17 It is important to recognise, however, that this homogenisation of the French Revolution was entirely under construction during the Regency period, it had not yet reached the status of orthodoxy. Many reformers and republicans were still trying to save certain specific strands of the revolutionary tradition from the general ignominy. It was not only the Girondin memorialists in France who endeavoured to differentiate between different forms of ‘Jacobinism’, liberals in England also sought to salvage something from the wreckage.18 And in a different way, apostates such as Robert Southey sought to excuse and explain their movement from the radical to the conservative side of the political spectrum by distinguishing the radical sentiments of the s from those of the s. Writing in the Quarterly Review in , Southey argued that during the revolutionary decade Jacobinism had been a lofty enthusiasm of the ‘educated classes’ in England. Abandoned by them in the wake of the Terror, it then ‘sunk down into the mob’. Once ardent and utopian, it had become surly and violent: ‘While the spirit of Jacobinism had thus evaporated from the top of the vessel,’ he wrote, ‘its dregs were settling at the bottom’.19 In many ways, Hazlitt always strove to preserve the identity and continuity of the Jacobin tradition: ‘Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin’ was a phrase with which he regularly taunted the apostate poets. Not only did he refuse to acknowledge Southey’s excuses, he would not accept the latter’s histrionic return to the principles of Church and State: ‘A Jacobin . . . who has shaken off certain well-known prejudices with respect to kings or priests or nobles, cannot so easily resume whenever his pleasure or his convenience may prompt him to attempt it’, he argued, ‘and it is because he cannot resume them again in good earnest that 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, but in the essay ‘On the New School of Reform’ the word denoted a form of philosophical radicalism that was clearly complicit with those forces. Significantly, this confusion of terms and identities went some way towards repeating the central confusions of French republicanism; it served to recall the fact that these different forms of radicalism had once been allied – during the early s to be precise – but only in order to dramatise the fissure that had opened up between them. Once the

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

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 of Condorcet and Helvétius, was thus grounded upon a suspicion that they were fundamentally complicit with the aristocratic order. He felt that the discourse of reform was attempting to distance itself from the promises it had made to the people in the early s. But the problem was that the way he chose to say this made the cost of his saying it clear, for when he stigmatised the ‘Jacobin jargon’ of the utilitarians, he called the progressive force of his own form of Jacobinism radically into question. To some degree, Hazlitt was himself aware of this: he recognised the extent to which, in his hands, Jacobinism was not so much a positive creed as a politics of opposition. As he described matters in an essay ‘On Modern Apostates’ which was later published in the Political Essays of : ‘to be a true Jacobin,’ he argued, ‘a man must be a good hater; but this is the most difficult and the least amiable of all the virtues: the most trying and the most thankless of all tasks. The love of liberty consists in the hatred of tyrants’. And significantly enough, it was in his capacity as a determined opponent of European despotism rather than as a legislator that Robespierre drew Hazlitt’s most fulsome praise in his Life of Napoleon: [Robespierre gave] the political machine the utmost possible momentum and energy of which it was capable; to stagger the presumption and pride of the Coalition by shewing on the opposite side an equally inveterate and intense degree 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 be found to help her at this exigency so well as Robespierre. (, –)

In the atmosphere of intense political agitation that prevailed in England during the Peterloo period (–) Hazlitt regularly stigmatised Whigs, Tories and modern radicals alike, representing himself as a solitary ‘Jacobin’ who owed allegiance to no party or persuasion. He resurrected the political terminology of the revolutionary period as a gesture of defiance against the repressive measures of the Liverpool government. By reminding his contemporaries of the debates and oppositions of the early s, he strove to identify and yet also to undermine the rapprochement of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Stoddart with the literary and political establishment, and to keep alive a sense of the middle-class revolutionary tradition. But in the calmer climate of the s, his republicanism did not become more construc-

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tive, it merely became more self-conscious. So that in choosing to accuse the Lake poets and the utilitarians of continuing Jacobinism he was often merely betraying the belatedness of his own republican sentiments, the extent to which his political terminology was no longer appropriate to the changed situation of the early s. In the essay ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’ first published in The Plain Speaker in , Hazlitt speculated that there was a spirit of malignity at the very heart of man. ‘Without something to hate’, he argued, ‘we should 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 for carrying fire, pestilence and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others. (, )

In this formulation, the historical source of the spirit of hating is the French Jacobin Terror, with the suggestion that modern hating represents nothing but the surreptitious survival of revolutionary public spirit in its negative private form. And in the reflective essays that he wrote in the s for the London Magazine Hazlitt regularly represented his own misanthropic spirit as a form of ‘sour Jacobinism’, flaunting his political disappointment by reproducing the rhetoric of self-martyrdom which had been developed by Rousseau and Robespierre: As to my old opinions, I am heartily sick of them. I have reason, for they have deceived me sadly. I was taught to think, and I was willing to believe, that genius was 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 words were struck out of the dictionary, or if I had never heard them. Instead of patriots and friends of freedom, I see nothing but the tyrant and the slave, the people linked with kings to rivet on the chains of despotism and superstition. (, )

At the end of ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’, however, Hazlitt turned this jeremiad upon himself, ironising his belated republicanism even as he continued to indulge it: ‘We hate old friends, we hate old books, we hate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves’. ‘Have I not reason 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 towards his own radical misanthropy, Hazlitt can be seen to have established a

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

new kind of relationship with his reading public. But what does it say about his changing attitude to the relationship between literature and politics that he should have been content to do this? In the final section of this chapter I want to spend some time addressing this issue, primarily 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 mass culture and the rise of the periodical press.  In her treatise De la Littérature Germaine de Staël had argued that, at its best, literature was fundamentally progressive in nature. In the course of an argument which was to have a considerable influence upon works such as Shelley’s Defence of Poetry and his Philosophical View of Reform, she argued that the arts were no different from the sciences in this respect, since, like them, they were a means of anticipating and even facilitating the improvements of the future. In an article entitled ‘Why the Arts Are Not Progressive’ for Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, Hazlitt was to take issue with de Staël’s argument, arguing that such a comparison was deeply flawed, since the arts were not subject to the same narrative of incremental progress that governed science. ‘What is mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration,’ he suggested, ‘is progressive, and admits of gradual improvement: what is not mechanical or definite, but depends on genius, taste, and feeling, very soon becomes stationary, or retrograde, and loses more than it gains by transfusion’ (, ). According to this view of things, every art form is the product of a specific 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 history begins to flow in a different direction. Hazlitt’s theory was a response to what he perceived to be the slow decline of certain of the older art forms in his life-time. He considered that in cultural terms he was living in a critical and prosaic age rather than a dramatic or poetic one. Often he was moved to lament this development, seeing the decline of poetry as a deplorable index of the degeneration of contemporary society. For example, in the first of his Lectures on the English Poets () he had been moved to assert that poetry was not so much a form of writing as the vital principle of human existence: ‘It is not a branch of authorship, it is the stuff of which our life is

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made. The rest is mere oblivion, a dead letter: for all that is worth remembering is the poetry of it’ (, ). And in the early part of his lecture he was not afraid to use poetry as the symbol of everything that the utilitarians were threatening to destroy, suggesting that their plan was to transform society into a ‘machine’ designed to carry everyone safely and insipidly from one end of life to another ‘in a very comfortable prose style.’ But at the end of his lecture he did also seem willing to acknowledge that, as a species of writing, poetry was indeed a dying form, distinguishing himself from ‘progressive’ critics such as Thomas Love Peacock only in his evident regret at its imminent demise: ‘As Homer is the 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 of poetry as a symptom of the sickness of the age. But at other times, however, he equally capable of attacking poetry as an archaic and servile form that was complicit with arbitrary power, especially when he was reflecting on the apostasy of the Lake poets, or on the self-aggrandisement of Byron. And on these occasions, he offered modern prose writing – as exemplified by the novel and the reflective essay – as a healthy alternative, considering that it explored personal experience in a form more appropriate to a democratic order.21 In many respects, Hazlitt’s ‘progressive’ enthusiasm for prose was a direct response to the transformation which literary culture had undergone during the early years of the nineteenth century. On a number of occasions he was to assert that the rapid growth of the periodical press had created a cultural climate in which the censorious influence of ‘Old Corruption’ had been seriously diminished.22 And in an article entitled ‘Arguing in a Circle’ produced for The Liberal in July  he celebrated this new order of things by indulging in a playful parody of Burke’s Reflections: While the affair is private and can be kept in a corner, personal fear and favour are the ruling principles, might prevails over right; but bring it before the world and truth and justice stand some chance. The public is too large a body to be bribed or browbeat . . . ‘The age of chivalry is gone’ and that of constables, legislators and Grub-Street writers has succeeded, and the glory of heraldry is extinguished forever. (, )

Half-ironically Hazlitt lumps the writers of the new Grub Street together with Robert Peel’s police constables and Bentham’s philosophical legislators as the dominant figures of the new age of ‘publicity’. In this versions of things, the technology of mass surveillance and

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

communication was made to seem unproblematically positive in its effects. Similarly, in an anonymous article on ‘The Periodical Press’ published in the Edinburgh Review in May of the same year, Hazlitt warmly welcomed the growth of a literary culture in which the influence of privilege and power had dwindled, while recognising that it had rendered the position of the writer far more precarious than ever before. As a result of the new ‘rage’ for ‘conveying information in a easy and portable form’, he argued, fewer books were being published. This meant that ‘the only authors who, as a class, are not starving, are periodical essayists, and almost the only writers who can keep their reputation above water are anonymous critics’. Of the journals that earned his praise, the newly founded London Magazine was especially prominent. And in listing the literary contributors that had helped to make the periodical popular, he was not averse to giving himself honourable mention: ‘Are there not the quaint and grave subtleties of Elia, the extreme paradoxes of the author of Table-Talk, the Confessions of the Opium-Eater, the copious tales of traditional literature, all in one volume?’ What this comment shows is that he was highly conscious of the extent to which his own popularity, like that of Lamb and De Quincey and James Hogg ‘the Ettrick Shepherd’, was heavily based upon his cultivation of a literary persona.23As Lamb himself pointed out, in an unpublished review of Hazlitt’s Table-Talk: ‘The Writer almost everywhere adopts the style of a discontented man. This assumption of a Character . . . is that which gives force and life to his writing.’24 Re-interpreting the oppositional manner of Hazlitt’s reflective essays in the light of the fashion for literary ‘characters’ which had been generated by the London Magazine, we can thus begin to see how it may have been part of a deliberate attempt to differentiate himself from the selfconscious gentility and refinement of De Quincey’s Opium Eater, and the whimsical antiquarianism of Lamb’s Elia by deliberately dramatising the paradoxical and misanthropic tendencies of his own personality. And indeed it is worth noting, in this context, that when the contributors to Blackwood’s Magazine depicted Hazlitt as an ill-educated and spiteful Cockney vagabond, they were merely offering a malicious caricature of several traits that he himself had actually cultivated in his writings.25 For in his opposition to aristocratic élitism and his scorn of literary prestige, Hazlitt had made a certain churlishness part of his literary appeal, turning the appearance of not playing the game into a new way of playing the game. In ‘On the Aristocracy of Letters’, one of the essays collected in Table-

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Talk (), Hazlitt depicted the freelance journalists of London as a body of urban beggars, a kind of revolutionary canaille. And during the course of this essay he identified closely with this ‘corporation of Mendicity’, 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 respectable Edinburgh Review, he had embraced the new literary culture in a highly public manner. ‘We are optimists in literature’, he had written breezily, ‘we must no longer be churls of knowledge, ascetics in pretension. We must 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 TableTalks he wrote for the London and New Monthly magazines from  onwards, he was to cultivate a character of himself as a disgruntled misanthrope, a ‘sour Jacobin’ disappointed in his artistic ambitions and dissatisfied with the vexations of essay-writing.26 As Jon Klancher has shown in his important work on English reading audiences, with the rapid expansion of the reading public in the Romantic period, literary producers could no longer be certain of the cultural constituency their work was addressing. The public sphere of rational critical debate which developed during the eighteenth century had become increasingly splintered and fragmented along professional and class lines by the beginning of the nineteenth, so that it was no longer possible to believe in the unity and integrity of the national culture. Increasingly, therefore, editors and journalists took it upon themselves to create the taste by which they were to be judged. In the case of the bourgeois reviews of the period this led to a strategic attempt to forge an identifiably middle-class consciousness through the development of new forms of reading and writing. As Klancher has demonstrated, the leading reviewers and contributors of the polite papers can be seen to have developed a characteristic mode of writing which served to dramatise the process by which the mind abstracted knowledge from the world of matter. By this means middle-class consciousness was constituted not so much in terms of a coherent body of knowledge or beliefs but as a characteristic cultural practice.27 Within this context, Hazlitt can be seen to emerge as a fundamentally middle-class writer addressing himself to a middle-class audience, with his essays regularly displaying many of the elements which Klancher has shown to be typical of contemporary bourgeois style. His style is

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self-consciously analytical, it flaunts its own ability to abstract general patterns and principles from the raw material of everday experience, moreover it is full of historical and cultural references which would only have been intelligible to the more educated readers of his time. In that sense he can be seen to have selected his own readership. But what is seldom noticed is that there is also a self-consciously ‘low’ current in Hazlitt’s prose. His writing shows him to have been deeply enamoured of metaphysical speculations and literary allusions, but it also displays a fondness for common puns and proverbs, slang phrases and street-talk. In fact, in many of his reflective essays, he was to balance his belletristic effects with vulgar sallies. So much so, indeed, that in reading Hazlitt one often has the sense that he imagined his reading public as a heterogenous assortment of individuals rather than a particular class or constituency, and that this plurality can be seen to be mirrored in his prose, which is itself constructed out of an array of different voices, ranging from the polite to the plebian. Significantly enough, then, it emerges that, at precisely the same time as Coleridge was suggesting the need for an intellectual élite or clerisy to move between the different classes of society and provide them with some form of common culture,28 Hazlitt was trying to keep alive the notion of a truly pluralistic realm of public debate by simulating it in his prose. Interpreted in this light, Hazlitt’s proletarianisation of himself in his reflective essays can be seen to offer itself as a token form of resistance to the Malthusian separation of mind from matter which was being effected by the middleclass reviews. But above and beyond his playful use of the vernacular, Hazlitt did also use other means to undermine and expose the ‘Aristocracy of Letters’. Not the least of these was that in many of his specifically reflective, autobiographical essays, he regularly presented himself as an outsider, a parasite of the system, cultivating an image of himself as a solitary abandoned by the world, as if to highlight the contrast between himself and aristocratic exiles like Byron.29 For example, in the essay ‘On Living to One’s Self ’, which was written in , he set up an opposition 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 is as 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 attention or curiosity in it; to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is passing in the world, but not to feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it . . .

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He who lives wisely to himself and to his own heart, looks at the busy world through 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 regular feature of the latter part of Rousseau’s Confessions; and they also formed the basis of the dream of the ring of Gyges in the Sixth Promenade of the Rêveries. On the latter occasion, especially, Rousseau had not been able to keep his promise to live to himself; and before long he had begun to fantasise ways of using his invisibility to exert a moral influence upon those 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 to that of the legislator. In ‘On Living to One’s Self ’, by contrast, Hazlitt showed little of this ‘lawgiving’ impulse. But he did rehearse the stark opposition, which had been such a feature of Rousseau’s second Discours, between the self-containment of man in his solitary state, and his tragic alienation in the appetitive, competitive and argumentative realm of civil society. And significantly, in elaborating this opposition, he was to make a point of situating Rousseau on the side of self-forgetfulness rather than egotistical ambition: If ever there was a man who did not derive more pain than pleasure from his vanity, that man, says Rousseau, was no other than a fool.

Gradually, as Hazlitt’s argument on professional vanity developed, the essay grew into another extended attack on ‘public opinion’, which was represented as the most abject form of collective self-alienation and the absolute antipodes of solitary independence: ‘There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself. From its unwieldy, overgrown dimensions, it dreads the least opposition to it, and shakes 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 its own name’. And as he grew more vociferous in his pursuit of this theme, he was forced to abandon the tone of reverie which had characterised his opening remarks, as if in order to demonstrate how impossible it was for those who made their living in the literary marketplace to really ‘live to themselves’ by showing how they were forever being dragged back, against their will, into the atmosphere of dust and heat which characterised contemporary Grub Street. He offered himself as an exemplary failure in this respect, contrasting himself with those writers in whom the



Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

rhetoric of splendid isolation was nothing but a literary cover, disguising an underlying abjection. And he cited the celebrated stanzas beginning ‘I have not loved the world nor the world me’ from canto  of Childe Harolde as an example of this, arguing that it was only the assumed superiority of Byron’s poetic persona which gave the appearance of dignity and distinterestedness to sentiments that were actually full of bitterness and wounded pride: Sweet verse embalms the spirit of sour misanthropy: but woe betide the ignoble prose writer who should thus dare to compare notes with the world, or tax it roundly with imposture. (, )

Here Hazlitt launches another attack upon the ‘Coriolanus’ principle in Byron’s verse. Firstly, he does this by demystifying his own role as a mover and shaker of critical opinion, openly confessing the extent to which he, like every other writer of the modern day, frequently finds himself at the mercy of ‘public’ taste. But at the same time he also hints that, whereas in his own writing this subjection is freely acknowledged, in Byron’s poetry it is precisely what is being repressed. Indeed he even goes so far as to suggest a reading of the stanzas from Childe Harolde in which the grand disdain of the noble hero is to be interpreted as nothing more than a sublimated version of the ‘ignoble’ misanthropy of the fraught professional writer. Taken as a whole, then, ‘On Living to One’s Self ’ begins by celebrating the state of reverie as a genuine renunciation of worldy ambition, and ends up by exposing it as just another means of attempting to master the public, an affectation of privacy and detachment which has as its deepest desire the approbation of the world. And as we have seen, Hazlitt does not absolve himself from this charge of hypocrisy, indeed he acknowledges the extent to which his own rhetoric of splendid isolation is also, to some degree, an unsustainable literary pose. In this way his reflective essays can be seen to rehearse many of the themes and tropes of the Romantic poetry of the period, most especially that of Byron and Wordsworth, and yet at the same time to offer structures which serve to interrogate many of its cultural and moral claims, placing its play of consciousness very much within the realm of the literary marketplace, and materialising its fictions of independence. In arguing for the transcendence of the the figurative faculty in the Biographia Literaria and the Poems of  Coleridge and Wordsworth had sought to supply it with the kind of critical authority that was deemed to have passed out of the realm of polemical debate with the rise of a new and highly contentious literary culture. But by self-consciously

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



reflecting upon the extent to which the workings of his own imagination were always to some degree defined and determined by his professional circumstances, Hazlitt showed that one could not take the disinterestedness of ‘the Imagination’ entirely for granted, thereby encouraging a materialist 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 alone when he was in the country because a friend could always be relied upon to disturb the abstraction of the scene before him by coming ungraciously between him and his ‘imaginary character’. But in many ways he was a just such a fellow-traveller to the Romantic poets of his generation, for if his reflective essays rehearsed many of the central preoccupations of the poetry of the period, indulging what we have now come to think of as the central elements of ‘Romantic’ experience, they also served to demythologise and deconstruct it, to lay it open for critical inspection.32 And even when he had no Lake poet to hand, he was happy to play Paine to his own Burke, translating philosophical speculations into street slang, subjecting romantic effusions to the examination of common sense, cultivating a notion of ‘the poetry of life’ as a means of attacking the philosophical materialism of the Benthamites, while simultaneously deploring his own exclusion from ‘the aristocracy of letters’. Charles Lamb, a sympathetic reviewer of Table-Talk, attempted to characterise the writer’s discontinuous style: ‘he all along acts as his own interpreter, and is continually translating his thoughts out of their original metaphysical obscurity into the language of the senses’. And in much of his reflective writing, Hazlitt did indeed oscillate across a kind of Malthusian divide, unable to endorse Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetic fictions of freedom, but also unwilling to make common cause with Bentham’s lowly creatures of necessity. In this way he can be seen to have questioned the material basis of what Jerome McGann has called ‘the Romantic ideology’ even if he was not finally willing to condemn it as a species of false consciousness. Fundamentally, Hazlitt’s mistrust of the Romantic imagination was a product of his ambivalent attitude to the politics of egotism. On the one hand, as we have seen, he often saw egotism as a potentially Jacobin quality, a democratic universalisation of the self. On the other hand he sometimes considered it to be an authoritarian reflex which curiously mirrored the despotism of the feudal order. This conflicting response expressed itself most clearly in his remarks on Wordsworth’s poetry. Often Hazlitt wrote appreciatively of the democratic nature of the work of his great contemporary. ‘His Muse . . . is a levelling one,’ he

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

commented in The Spirit of the Age () ‘it proceeds on a principle of equality, and strives to reduce all things to the same standard’. At other times, however, he regarded it in a less positive light. Discussing the political apostasy of the Lake poets in his Political Essays of , he saw the ‘levelling’ tendency of Wordsworth’s poetry as the product of a sublime 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 world draw in the brains of men: ‘no trivial fond records’: it levels all distinctions of art and nature: it has no pride, pomp, or circumstance, belonging to it; it converts the whole principle of admiration in the poet (which is the essence of poetry) into admiration of himself. The spirit of Jacobinism is rank egotism. We know an instance. It is of a person who founded a school of poetry on sheer humanity, on idiot boys and mad mothers, and on Simon Lee, the old huntsman. The secret of the Jacobin poetry and anti-jacobin politics of this writer is the same. His lyrical poetry was a cant of humanity about the commonest people to level the great with the small; and his political poetry is a cant of loyalty to level Bonaparte with kings and hereditary imbecility. (, )

‘The spirit of poetry’, it seems, is a chameleon spirit. It celebrates the variegated life of nature, and indulges every custom and tradition. In that sense it is an implicitly aristocratic principle, a remnant of Edmund Burke’s ‘age of chivalry’. ‘The spirit of Jacobinism’, on the other hand, is brutally egalitarian, it flattens everything under its churlish foot. In Hazlitt’s opinion, Wordsworth’s Jacobin muse stands in an antithetical relation to the true spirit of poetry. It offers itself as a celebration of common humanity, but on closer inspection it proves merely to be an exploration of the poet’s own humanitarianism. And whereas in Rousseau’s Confessions ‘mind’ had fuelled a political assault upon the injustices of contemporary society, in Wordsworth it has subsumed politics into itself. In the very extremity of his opposition to the Coriolanus principle, Wordsworth has turned into a kind of Coriolanus. Once the battering ram of feudal privilege, Jacobin egotism has become a fortress of intellectual vanity. Hazlitt was interested in Wordsworth’s trajectory precisely because it seemed to describe a general historical shift in the history of Jacobinism. After the revolutionary decade, it seemed, Jacobinism had begun to transform itself from a body of political opinions into a habit of mind. No longer committed to liberty and equality, it had become an unprincipled love of power. In part this insight was a response to the rise of Napoleon, which was commonly considered as the final culmination of

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



the Jacobin tradition, for Hazlitt was aware of the extent to which his hero had betrayed the revolutionary ideal, although he was too much of a Bonapartist to criticise the Corsican directly. In the passage quoted above, for example, Wordsworth has become as a kind of poetic ‘cover’ for the French Emperor. He is depicted as a master spirit whose levelling has been more imperial than republican, to such an extent that finally his exploits cannot help but recall those of the great general. But the comparison is never quite made. In spite of this, however, the final tendency of Hazlitt’s critique was clear enough, that whereas during the first formulation of the Jacobin ideal selfishness had been pushed to the point of benevolence and intense personal feeling had formed the basis of a universal sympathy, in the aftermath of the failure of the Revolution the self had been mobilised into an exclusive and tyrannical force: so that egotism had become the paradoxical expression of a lost civic ideal.  That Hazlitt knew himself to be implicated in this process, as both the last practitioner of Jacobin ‘egotism’ and the historian of its final decline, 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 conclude this study, not only because it is the closest Hazlitt came to writing a fullblown autobiography, but also because in many ways it can be seen to bring the English tradition of Rousseauvian ‘confession’ to a close. In this work, Hazlitt told the story of his disastrous infatuation with his landlord’s daughter Sarah Walker in . The book opens with a series of 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 for a shy, enigmatic young girl called ‘S’, while she responds by resolutely resisting his advances. As ‘H’ himself puts it: ‘As Rousseau said of Madame Houptot, (forgive the allusion) my heart has found a tongue in speaking to her, and I have talked to her the divine language of love. Yet she says she is insensible to it.’33 And throughout this opening section the overriding impression is of the powerlessness of ‘S’ in the face of ‘H’’s crazy crystallisations, of the extent to which he is both constructing and constraining her through the unremitting force of his love. In its first part, then, Liber Amoris reads like a straightforward satire on the Romantic Imagination, on its egotistical refusal to respect the otherness of others, its impulse to appropriate things to itself. In Parts Two and Three, however, the dialogue form is dropped and we are presented

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

instead with a series of letters from ‘H’ to several of his male friends, in which he describes himself sinking deeper and deeper into the pit of unrequited misery: ‘The hearing of your happiness had, I own, made me thoughtful’, he writes to ‘P_’, in the last letter of Part Two, ‘It is just what I proposed to her to do – to have crossed the Alps with me, to have visited Vevai and the rocks of Meillerie, and to have repeated to her on the spot the story of Julia and Saint Preux, and to have shown her all that my heart had stored up for her – but on my forehead alone is written – Rejected!’ And with this change of form, there comes a corresponding change of focus, as the emphasis changes from the dangers of ‘H’’s romanticism to the failure of ‘S’ to live up to his dream of Rousseauvian intimacy. 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 ideal that she formerly represented: ‘Such is the creature on whom I had thrown away my heart and soul – one who was incapable of feeling the commonest emotions of human nature, as they regarded herself or anyone else.’ Like Rousseau’s Confessions, Liber Amoris is essentially concerned with the failure of transparency. It begins by throwing up the possibility of a transparent understanding between ‘H’ and ‘S’, but then goes on to present a series of incidents in which ‘H’’s attempts to pierce ‘S’’s maddening opacity are repeatedly disappointed. In the face of this frustration, ‘H’ increasingly falls prey to the temptations of suspicion and paranoia, so that, by the end of the narrative, the only way that he can make sense of ‘S’’s behaviour, is by imagining her as the absolute epitome of studied and systematic ill-will. But what is intriguing about Liber Amoris is that it, initially at least, Hazlitt seems aware of the extent to which ‘H’ himself represents the real obstacle to true transparency, as the opening dialogues expose his thoroughly perverse commitment to reading ‘S’’s character and comments in accordance with his own narrow will. In the end, however, this emphasis is not sustained: the book concludes on a much more Rousseauvian note, with the final section setting up a stark contrast between ‘H’’s ‘utopian’ desire and ‘S’’s malevolent duplicity. And such is the nature of this shift that, just as with so many of his reflective essays, Hazlitt’s ‘book of love’ finally registers itself as a symptom as well as a study of the disease it sets out to explore.34 Like the Confessions, then, Liber Amoris begins as confession and ends as self-justification. The difference is that, unlike Rousseau, Hazlitt does

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

not hold out any hope, that the ‘confession’ of private suffering might transform itself, after having entered the public realm, into a rallying point for social and political reform. Rather he makes a point of emphasising that, in his own mind at least, the last remnants of public hope have been sunk in this private wreck. The metaphor for ‘H’’s public hopes in Liber Amoris is the little statue of Bonaparte, which he gives to ‘S’ in the middle of the narrative. For her the image is only important insofar as it reminds her of a former beau. In his eyes, however, it is charged with huge significance. For when he gives her the little bust, the strong suggestion is that the last remnant of his political idealism is being entrusted to her. Not only entrusted to her, but also invested in her, for as the narrative proceeds, and ‘H’ begins to use the statue as a bargaining point with ‘S’, begging her to acquiesce in his wishes ‘for the little image’s sake’, we are made aware of the extent to which, for him at least, ‘Bonaparte’ has put a radical seal upon their love, identifying it as a belated private fulfilment of the democratic principles of the French Revolution, and thus a consolation in miniature for the failure of its public ideal. But as time goes on, and ‘S’ continues to cool towards him, ‘H’ begins to change his attitude towards this particular political perwinkle. So that finally, during one of the most violent of their 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 her mockery’. And such is the uncertainty of tone during this climactic occasion, that the reader comes away from it with a complex sense that it is at one and the same time a moment of deep personal tragedy, a kind of private Waterloo, and a scene of high farce, in which the conjunction of high politics and domestic dispute has become ridiculous in the extreme. In this way Liber Amoris plays an intriguing double game. To a significant degree, it repeats many of the central impulses of Rousseau’s Confessions, having as its central narrator a character who is shamelessly open about his own weaknesses, and unapologetically personal in his associations, who experiences anything less than total transparency in others as a form of malevolent conspiracy, and who encourages us to think of private relationships in political terms, both as relationships of power, and as sites of utopian possibility. Indeed its entire conception of romantic experience is in identifiably Jacobin terms, as a realm of human endeavour in which circumstances mean nothing and everything is explicable in terms of the will. But the book does also carry within it the elements of an auto-critique, most notably in the ironic stance it

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Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

takes towards ‘H’’s romantic solipsism, and in its hovering awareness of the stupidity of collapsing the political into the personal. Simultaneously, then, it functions as a powerful example of Jacobin confession, and as a detailed analysis of all the tradition’s worst tendencies; as a last desperate expression of radical ‘enthusiasm’ and as a damning piece of ‘selfsatire’.

Notes

         Frankenstein, the  text, ed. by J. Paul Hunter (New York and London: Norton, ), p. . Further references are given after quotations in the text.  There are a number of comparisons between Rousseau and Prometheus in the Romantic writing of the period. For example, in the novel The Wrongs of Woman which Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, left uncompleted at her death, Rousseau is described by the heroine Maria as ‘the true Prometheus of 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 ‘Essay on the Sect of the Illuminati’ is highly reminiscent of Shelley’s description of the creation of the monster in Frankenstein: ‘Formed in the recesses of impenetrable darkness, this society constitutes a new race of beings . . . Their oaths would realise the sanguinary fable of Atreus, and would cover the whole face of the earth with a nation of assassins.’ This is cited in John Adolphus’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 in Frankenstein’, 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 ScottKilvert (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), p. , . Percy Bysshe 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’s Pilgrimage, which contains an account of Rousseau as a ‘self-torturing sophist’ who was ‘enamoured’ of an ‘ideal beauty’ that ‘breathed itself to 



  

     

   

Notes to pages –

life’ in La Nouvelle Heloïse, his celebrated sentimental novel of . Having praised Rousseau’s passionate style, Byron goes on to suggest that ‘he was frenzied by disease or woe, / To that worst pitch of all, which wears a reasoning show’: ‘For then he was inspired, and from him came, / As from the Pythian’s mystic cave of yore, / Those oracles which set the world in flame, / Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more.’ George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage, canto , stanza , in Poetical Works, 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’s impressive account of the Romantic revolt against French revolutionary theory does nevertheless acknowledge the existence of an anti-theoretical and anti-progressive current at the heart of French Jacobinism. It is this tradition 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 University Press, ), p. . See Patrice Higonnet, Class, Ideology and the Rights of Nobles during the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). On Frankenstein’s fear of other subjectivities see Francis Ferguson’s chapter on ‘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. –. See above. Of which the most enduring and impressive examples are Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (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 published  (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 the text.  Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England (Berkeley: University of California, ), chapters two and three.  William Wordsworth, ‘The Convention of Cintra’, Selected Prose, ed. by John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), p. . See also the linking of Turgot, Robespierre and Bonaparte in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Friend, first published –, , ed. by Barbara Rooke and Kathleen Coburn, 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 Walter Jackson Bate, Collected Works (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, ), p. .  Reflections on the Revolution in France, first published , ed. by Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, ), p. .  Reflections, p. .        :                    The celebrated Spartan Legislator, whose life and works were described by Plutarch in one of his Lives and in his Spartan Institutions.  New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. by Kenneth Curry (New York: Columbia University 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. by Barbara Rooke and Kathleen Coburn, Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), , –. For a discussion of Coleridge’s analysis of the political theory of the French Revolution see Seamus Deane, ‘Coleridge and Rousseau’, in The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England – (Cambridge: Harvard University 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 in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (London: Macmillan, ).  ‘The View from England’, Representations of Revolution – (New Haven and London: Yale, ).  David Denby and Lynn Hunt have both succeeded in showing the importance of genres such as gothic and romance to French revolutionary











      

Notes to pages –

representation; See David J. Denby, Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) and Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). William Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, , –, ed. by Mark L. Reed, the Cornell Wordsworth,  vols. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press) , . Unless otherwise stated, references to The Prelude throughout this thesis are to this edition. In this way the very slipperiness of the word ‘Jacobin’ during the period can be seen as a telling emblem of the fratricidal tension that lurked at the heart of revolutionary republicanism. Initially, at least, to be a Jacobin was to be a member of the Jacobin club. In this sense many of the Girondins and Montagnards were all Jacobins at one time or another, Brissot as well as Robespierre, Condorcet as well as Saint-Just. However, as their influence with the clubs and sections waned from  onwards, the Girondin leaders began to use the term ‘Jacobin’ to refer specifically to the Robespierrist faction 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 both France and England refused to allow for any distinction between Jacobins and Girondins. In their opinion all of the French revolutionaries were ‘Jacobins’ to a greater or lesser extent. In England even radicals and republicans of the period are rather loose in their use of the term. Often one can only 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 it also referred to the period of the Girondin ascendency (–) and sometimes simply to the Revolutionary phenomenon as a whole. An account of the liberal theory of the physiocrats is given in Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, first published , trans. by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, ), pp. –. Emmanuel Sièyes, Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? first published , ed. by Jean Denis Bredin (Paris: Flammarion, ), p. . Further references are given after quotations in the text. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 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 Gagnebin and 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 of Bourgeois Society, p. –.  See Part  of J. G. A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University 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 published , ed. by Michel Launay (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, ).  On the relation between theory and practice in the political theory of the French 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 University Press, ), 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 ‘What Is 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, Alfred Soboul and Georges Lefebvre,  vols (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), , . Hereafter cited as ROC.  Viewed in this light, even Sieyès’ assertions that the nobility was ‘foreign to the nation’, a sickness at the heart of the body politic that was devouring its living flesh, can be seen to represent a striking anticipation of the Manichaean psychology of revolutionary Jacobinism.  See François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University 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 as Diderot, D’Alembert, Helvétius and Holbach, but also to more recent figures such as the mathematician, academician and constitutionalist Antoine-Nicholas de Condorcet.  ROC , –. The ‘sacred image’ referred to here was that of the bust of Rousseau that adorned the wall of the Jacobin club in which this speech was given.  ROC , .



Notes to pages –

 See Patrice Higonnet, Class, Ideology and the Rights of Nobles during the French Revolution (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 (New York: ), 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 Clifford Orwin 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: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –. See Carol Blum Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue (Cornell: Cornell University Press, ) and Gita May, De Jean-Jacques à Madame Roland (Genève: Librairie Droz, ). For a discussion of the revolutionary reception of Rousseau’s individual works 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 University Press, ). Confessions, OC , –. OC , –. OC , –. OC , . A notion upon which the Marquis de Sade was to inflict a reductio ad absurdam 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-Jacques Rousseau 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 published  (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 review see Ralph M. Wardle, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Reviewer’, PMLA,  (). pp.ff.



Notes to pages –

 For an extended discussion of the sense of intimacy that Rousseau inspired in eighteenth-century readers, see Robert Darnton, ‘Readers Respond to Rousseau’, 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: Yale University 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 the best. The term is borrowed from Elie Halévy’s classic account of the birth of the utilitarian movement, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (London: Faber, ).  An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. by J. H. Burns and H. L. A Hart, Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham,  vols. (London: Athlone Press, 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 selfrespect possessed by primitive man, and the jealous, competitive and overthoughtful 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 solitaire. 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.

 ,                   ’ 

CALEB

WILLIAMS

 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 quotations in the text.  William Hazlitt, ‘Mr Godwin’, in The Spirit of the Age, ‘On the Modern Novelists’, 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 French Revolution’, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).



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 Burke see Tom Furniss, ‘Rhetoric in Revolution: The Role of Language in Paine’s Critique of Burke’, Revolution and English Romanticism, ed. by Keith Hanley and Raman Selden (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, ).  For an extended discussion of Godwin’s reflections on Burke, see Marilyn Butler, ‘Godwin, Burke and Caleb Williams’, Essays in Criticism,  (), pp. –, and chapter three of the same author’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).  I am indebted here to Frances Ferguson’s fascinating discussion of the relationship between ‘character’, class and aesthetics in ‘The Gothicism of the Gothic 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 quotations 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 Thomas Burger 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 Jeremy Bentham, ed. by J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart,  vols. (London: Athlone Press, 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 subversion of the Benthamite calculus. The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (London: Faber, ), pp. –.  William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice: Variants, volume four of the Political and Philosophical Writings, ed. Mark Philp (London: William Pickering, ), , .

Notes to pages –



 ‘It was one of the laws of Lycurgus, that no Spartan should be employed in manual labour. For this purpose, under his system, it was necessary that they should be plentifully supplied with slaves devoted to drudgery. Matter, or, to speak more accurately, the certain and unremitting laws of the universe, will be the Helots of the period we are contemplating. We shall end in this respect, 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. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond,  vols. (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, –), , .  This sentence was only introduced in the third edition of Political Justice, first published 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 English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, ).  See Godwin’s preference for examinations of ‘the influence that one human being has on another’ over ‘the generalities of historical abstraction’, ‘Of Romance 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 Gary Kelly, 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 University Press, ).  For a discussion of Burke’s aesthetic theory see Terry Eagleton, ‘The Law of 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: William Pickering, ), , –. Further references are given after quotations in the 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 the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). Emmet Kennedy, ‘Educating’, A Cultural History of the French Revolution (Yale: Yale University Press, ). Gwynne Lewis, ‘The Creation of the Homme Nouveau’, The French Revolution: 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 study of 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 Editions Sociales, ), pp. –. This quotation is from p. . Ecrits, p. . Ecrits, p. . Ecrits, p. . In his pamphlet on public instruction Condorcet had attacked the neoSpartan notion of public instruction that was gaining popularity at the time. He argued that the egalitarian system of education fostered by the Spartans was an attempt to control ‘all political, moral and religious opinions’, in that respect it was doubly coercive: firstly, it did not respect the freedom of the will, since ‘the individual who enters society with opinions inculcated by his education is no longer a free man; he is the slave of his teachers. His chains are all the more difficult to break because he himself does not feel them’; secondly, this enslavement of the spirit requires another form of slavery to support it, since ‘an absolute equality of education can only exist among peoples for whom the work of society is performed by slaves’. To enable the Greek citizenry to occupy the realm of politics, it had been necessary for the realm of civil society to be maintained entirely by a helot class: the freedom of 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 in order 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 same rights.’ What is more, he argued, the ‘indomitable love of liberty’ exhibited by 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 be politically active: they had no notion of the freedom from oppression which had been guaranteed by the modern discourse of rights. As Jurgen Habermas puts it: ‘The general will was always right, the notorious passage stated, but the judgment that guided it was not always enlightened. It was therefore necessary to present matters as they were, sometimes as they were to appear’, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, first published , trans. by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, ), pp. –. J. J. Rousseau, Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, first published , ed. by Michel Launay (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, ), p. . Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. by Thomas 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 Jacobin reaction to feminist politics see Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ) and Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, ).



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: Edmund Burke 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 The Works 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 The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, , . Further references are given after quotations in the text.  For a more detailed discussion of Wollstonecraft’s doubts, see Harriet Devine Jump, ‘The cool eye of observation’, in Revolution in Writing.  Burke’s critique of the revolutionary discourse of rights was discussed in the chapter on ‘Chivalry, Justice and the Law in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams’.  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 published  (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 the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ).  OC , .  OC , –.  As Claire Tomalin and Richard Holmes have suggested, the Rêveries du promeneur 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 Chicago Press, ). On the tendency to ‘personalise’ when writing about women see 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, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), p. . For a further discussion of Wollstonecraft’s redefinition of sensibility see Chris Jones, ‘Towards Revolution’, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the s (London: Routledge, ).              :                       

 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population,  edition, ed. by Anthony Flew (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), p. . This edition has been preferred to more scholarly editions because it gives the more audacious and polemical text of , rather than the more statistical one of . Further references are given after quotations in the text.  Tom Paine, Agrarian Justice in The Life and Major Writings of Tom Paine, ed. by Philip 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, first published  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).  As he remarked in an appendix to the fifth edition of the Essay: ‘I have never adverted to the check suggested by Condorcet without the most marked disapprobation. Indeed I should always particularly reprobate any artificial and unnatural modes of checking population, both on account of their immorality and their tendency to remove a necessary stimulus to industry’. An Essay on the Principle of Population,  text, ed. by David Winch Cambridge History 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: Cambridge University 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 role within it, see William Albrecht, William Hazlitt and the Malthusian Controversy (Dallas: Texas, ) and Kenneth Smith, The Malthusian Controversy (New York: ).  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 Thatcherite models of pauper management, see Anne Vinokur, ‘Malthusian Ideology and the Crisis of the Welfare State’, in Michael Turner, ed., Malthus and his Time (London: Macmillan, ).  On the influence of Population theory upon the Poor Law Amendment Act of  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 references are given after quotations in the text.  See Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’, in Discipline and Punish, trans. by Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ).  Indeed, the publication of the second edition () was neatly timed to reconcile the upper classes to the continuation of the war with France as a useful way of getting rid of the ‘surplus’.  ‘On Beggars’, The Enquirer, ed. by Pamela Clemit, vol.  of William Godwin’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 the affections in the second and third editions of Political Justice as a change of emphasis 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 Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univeristy Press, ), p. n.  See David Simpson, ‘The politics of sympathy’, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), 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 to the Prime Minister on  March  suggesting that he should be deported. 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 next chapter. 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 University Press, ) Nicholas Roe acknowledges a Robespierrist tendency in Wordsworth’s revolutionary politics, but treats him, for the most part, as a Girondin. In John Williams’s analysis, Wordsworth is a thorough moderate throughout, 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 and Germanic Philology,  (), pp.ff.  William Coxe, Sketches of the Natural, Civil and Political State of Swisserland, nd edn (London: ), p. .  William Wordsworth, Descriptive Sketches,  text, ed. by Eric Birdsall and Paul M. Zall, The Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, ), , 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: Cornell University Press, ), , . Unless otherwise stated, further references to The 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 a more 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 – (New Haven 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 see Bronislaw Baczko, ‘The Terror before the Terror? Conditions of Possibility, Logic of Realisation’, in volume four of the The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. by Keith Micheal Baker (London and New 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 Kegan Paul, ), p. .  John Thelwall, The Tribune, xi,  May , reproduced in The Politics of English Jacobinism, ed. by Gregory Claeys (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, ).  William Wordsworth, The Borderers, ed. by Richard Osborn, The Cornell Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –, , i. –.  The Borderers, p.. Further page references are given after quotations in the text.  See Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ () in On Metapsychology, ed. by Angela Richards, trans. by James Strachey, volume eleven 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 Alan Sheridan (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 and Atlantic 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 the Gentleman’s Magazine,  (), p. . For a further discussion of the revolution debate in the Thermidorean period see Brian Rigby, ‘Radical Spectators of the Revolution: The Case of the Analytical Review’, The French Revolution and British Culture, ed. by Small and Crossley (London: Oxford University Press, ).  See Marilyn Butler, ‘Revolving in deep time: the French Revolution as narrative’, in Revolution and English Romanticism, ed. by Keith Hanley and Raman Seldon (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, ).  See Mary Wollstonecraft’s Introduction to the Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, volume six of the Complete Works (London: William Pickering, ).  William Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. by W. J. B. Owen, The Cornell 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 an Enlightenment 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 quotations in the text.  See the excellent discussion of Hazlitt’s relation to the writers and editors of his time in Stanley Jones, Hazlitt: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), especially pp. –.  David Bromwich, William Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) and Seamus Deane, ‘William Hazlitt and the French’, 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: Cambridge University Press, ).  See John Whale, ‘Hazlitt on Burke: The Ambivalent Position of a Radical Essayist’, 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 de France, ), , .  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 they proceeded 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: Routledge and 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 Literary Magazine in . See his lecture ‘On the English Novelists’ in his Lectures on the English Comic Writers (), v, –. See Marilyn Butler, ‘Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review’, The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism, ed. by Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –; Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, ). On Hazlitt’s use of persona see Marilyn Butler, ‘Satire and the Images of the 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 JeanJacques’, 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’, Yearbook of English Studies (), and also Robert Ready, ‘The Logic of Passion: Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris’, Studies in Romanticism,  ().

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Tysdahl, B. J., William Godwin as Novelist (London: Athlone Press, ). Uphaus, Robert W., and Gretchen M. Foster, eds., The ‘Other’ Eighteenth Century: English Women of Letters – (East Lansing: Colleagues’ Press, ). Vansittart, Peter, ed. Voices of the Revolution (London: Collins, ). Veeser, H. Aram, ed., The New Historicism (London: Routledge, ). Voisine, Jacques, Jean-Jacques Rousseau en Angleterre (Paris: Didier, ). Wardle, Ralph M., ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Reviewer’, PMLA, LXII,  (). Weiskel, Thomas, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, ). Wellek, René, Kant in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Whitbread, Samuel, Substance of a Speech on the Poor Laws (London: Ridgway, John, ). White, N. I., Shelley,  vols. (London: Secker and Warburg, ). White, R. J., The Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, ). Williams, Huntingdon, Rousseau and Romantic Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Williams, John, Wordsworth: Romantic Poetry and Revolution Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ). Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth Press, ). Culture and Society,  ed. (London: Hogarth Press, ). Writing in Society (London: Verso, ).

Index

Adolphus, John Biographical 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, seventeenthcentury 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, William changing 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 theory in Barruel  in Brissot  in Liber Amoris  in political culture of Jacobinism  in Robespierre –, ,  in The Borderers  cosmopolitanism (of French Enlightenment theory) –, , ,  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, Michel on the historical study of discourse  Fouquier-Tinville, Antoine de – Fox, Charles James  Foxe, John  Freud, Sigmund ,  Furet, François , ,  general will, concept of in 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 of perfectibility –,  Essay on Population as a piece of political rhetoric  influence on Samuel Whitbread’s  Poor Law 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 Supreme Being) , –, ,   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 , , , , , –, ,  ill Schama, 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 JeanJacques 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 , 

 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’ –

Index 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’ , 

      General editors        , University of Oxford      , University of Chicago

  .  Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters         British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire        Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology Language, 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 Romanticism Reading as Social Practice, –    Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, –            Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World          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 Sensibility Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel         Reading Daughters’ Fictions, – Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth     .      Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, –        Print Politics The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England        .  Reinventing Allegory      British Satire and the Politics of Style, –      .  The Romantic Reformation Religious Politics in English Literature, –      De Quincey’s Romanticism Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission           Coleridge on Dreaming Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination         Romantic Imperialism Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity      .    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 School Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle    Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism