from society to self-realisation: the development of british radical responses to the french...
DESCRIPTION
Examine some of the effects of the French Revolution in the Writing of the Romantic Period.TRANSCRIPT
The Romantic Period 1780-1840
Name David Jones
Module Tutor Anne McDermot
Question Examine some of the effects of the French Revolution in the Writing of this Period
Title From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Responses to the French Revolution
MHRA Citation
David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”
January/February 2003
From Society to Self-RealisationThe Development of British Radical Responses to the French Revolution
Behold the light you have struck out, after setting America free, reflected to France and there kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes, and warms and illuminates Europe.(Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country in Wu ed. 2000, 3)
“Where silent zephyrs sported with the dustOf the Bastille I sat in the open sun,And from the rubbish gathered up a stone
And pocketed the relic in the guiseOf an enthusiast”(Wordsworth “Thirteen Book Prelude Book IX”, ll.63-67)
In response to the French Revolution, British radicals produced
impassioned rhetoric and socially-conscious verse that marked an
unprecedented interrelationship between poetry and political
discourse. Coleridge described ‘Fears in Solitude’ as “perhaps not
poetry but rather a sort of middle thing between poetry and oratory
– sermoni propriora” (Wu 2000, 468 n.2). The first of the above
passages, from a political pamphlet, actually contains more
conventionally ‘poetic’ language than the poem it precedes. It
extends the conventional metaphor of the Revolution as ‘light’ to
stir up Revolutionary fervour on emotive rather than rational
grounds. Wordsworth, by contrast, is hardly more rational but
writes in far more measured tones. He rejects poetic ‘finery’ such
as rhyme, metaphor, or assonance. In these lines the emotive
element, his disappointment, is directly connected to the political
element, the failure of the Revolution to change society for the
better.
In this context of interlinked poetry and politics the
Revolution’s ‘failure’ (culminating in the Terror of 1794 and war
2
David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”
against Britain) significantly shaped future poetic practice.
Extending the theory of M.H. Abrams, this essay contends that the
French Revolution played a pivotal role in a shift in British poetry
at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, from focus on the analogue
of the Mirror to focus on the analogue of the Lamp (1953, Preface
ii)1. It will first investigate two poems about the Fall of the Bastille
that are characteristic of early radical enthusiasm, Helen Maria
Williams’ ‘The Bastille, A Vision’ (a character discourse in her novel
Julia) and Coleridge’s ‘Destruction of the Bastille’. It will
demonstrate the way in which they purport to be mimetic but serve
a pragmatic function. The essay will then examine the way in which
later responses to the French Revolution, after the turnaround in
radical opinion, moved away from the ‘political’ world to serve an
expressive, more introspective and self-reflexive function.
Poems written in the months following the Fall of the Bastille
focus on the external political world, and propagate ideology
through various strategies of symbolic construction. ‘The Bastille, A
Vision’ and ‘The Destruction of the Bastille’ are mimetic; they
imitate this momentous historical event in order to comment upon
it. Williams reports the actual fall of the tower using the powerful
immediacy of the narrative present: “It falls – the guilty fabric
falls!” (l.56). Rather than directly examining the poets’ internal
response to the event, both poems efface their own textuality in
favour of characterisation in, and personifications of, the external
world. Williams is in fact doubly effaced, as her poem is framed
inside a novel, and is narrated by “a friend lately arrived from
France, and who, for some supposed offence against the state, had
been immured several years in the Bastille” (2000, 147 n.1). The
convict’s immediacy to the events he describes is emphasised by
the repetition of ‘I’ at the head of three consecutive lines in verse
III.I:
I lose the sense of care!I feel the vital air –
3
David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”
I see, I see the light of day!(ll.50-52)
The reader is closely orientated to this speaker as he sees his
prison crumble, imitating the idiomatic repetition of his emotional
voice. The liberated mood is heightened by a shift from the
structured abbacdcd scheme of previous stanzas to a more
emphatic flurry of couplets in aabbccdd. First-person narration
adds authenticity to a report of an event that Williams herself
would only have experienced from reports. But bizarrely, as
Williams’ novel is set before the Fall of the Bastille yet she is
writing after it, the prisoner’s report is cast as a ‘prophetic dream’
(2000, 147 n.1). Totally unpacked, ‘The Bastille, a Vision’ is a
fictional report of an unreal event in a fictional world that
anticipates a real event in the real world. This narrative framework
could hardly convey Williams’ internal response to the Revolution
in a more indirect manner.
Coleridge’s poem is equally complex. It does not report the
actual ‘destruction’ of the Bastille, but does present the oppression
of the French people: “In sighs their sickly breath was spent; each
gleam/Of Hope had ceas’d the long long day to cheer” (ll.11-12).
Moreover it has been suggested that the missing stanzas II and III
described conditions in the Bastille, so focus is undoubtedly on the
exterior political world. Yet there is also some impression of the
poet, of this entity to which Coleridge’s later verse primarily
turned. At this point, however, he constructs himself merely as
focaliser: “I see, I see! Glad Liberty succeed”. The Fall of the
Bastille is not glorious inside his subjectivity, it is incontestably
glorious, simply perceived and reported by him. He sees it as a
“universal cry” whose principles should be universally extended to
“every land from pole to pole” (l.37).
Despite this mimetic dimension, neither poem constitutes a
straightforward report. For Abrams they are ‘pragmatic’ (Abrams
1953, 15) though Belsey’s definition of imperative texts is more
4
David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”
precise (see 2002, 84). They are imperative as they aim to inspire
the reader to adopt a position of struggle in the extra-textual world,
aligning them with the Revolutionary discourses and practices of
Godwin and Paine, in opposition to ancien régime structures and
Burke’s neo-Conservativism. Both poems make recourse to what
Abrams defines as a ‘transcendental’ theory of poetry. This
specifies “the proper objects of art to be Ideas or Forms which are
perhaps approachable by the world of sense, but are ultimately
trans-empirical, maintaining an independent existence in their own
idea space, and available only to the eye of the mind” (1953, 36).
The ideals adopted are those laid down by Thomas Paine’s Rights of
Man: freedom, equality, liberty, property, security, resistance to
oppression and ‘the nation’ (in Wu 2000, 16).
Coleridge’s ‘Destruction of the Bastille’ takes the propagation
of these ideals as an explicit political function, following Price’s
enthusiasm for “catching and spreading” (2000, 2) Revolutionary
ideas to Britain. As P.M.S. Dawson notes “poets work in language,
the same medium in which concepts and demands are formulated,
contested and negotiated” (1993, 48). Coleridge is thus responsible
for constructing the ideals that he spreads in this poem.
Unsurprisingly, since he was pro-active as a political journalist, he
makes little distinction between poetry and oratory. Coleridge
rhetorically invokes a British Revolution, declaring “Shall France
alone a Despot spurn? Shall she alone, O Freedom boast thy care?”
(l.31). Revolutionary expansion is portrayed through a particularly
energetic image: “Thro Power’s blood-stain’d streamers fire the
air/And wider yet thy influence spread” (ll.34-35). The Revolution
promises a new world order, yet a closing couplet appeals to
nationalism to spur Revolutionary action:
wider yet thy influence spread,Not e’er recline thy weary head,Till every land from pole to poleShall boast one independent soul!And still, as erst, let favour’d Britain be
5
David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”
First ever of the first and freest of the free(ll.35-40)
Williams establishes Paine’s ideals using several similar
strategies. Ancien régime France is differentiated against Britain,
establishing France as the other that must be expurged. The
prisoner’s captivity, “stretched helpless in this living tomb” (l.9) is
a metaphor for general oppression. Though the “clanging fetter” is
referred to in a literal sense, it also refers intertextually to the
widespread use of the image as a symbol of oppression2. If ancien
régime France’s ‘unconscious gloom’ (l.12) is one of captivity, then
this is emphasised through the conventional figure of Britain as
‘land of the free’. Williams strongly propagates ideals of ‘the
nation’, verging on jingoism:
Britain, thy exiled son no moreThy blissful vales shall see;Why did I leave thy hallowed shore,Distinguished land, where all are free?(ll.13-16)
Where France is confined inside the artificial, man-made structure
of the prison cell “whose lonely bounds/Unvisited by light/Chill
silence dwells with night” (ll.1-3), Britain is a natural expanse of
“blissful vales” and “hallowed shores”. Williams’ uses superlative
modality: blissful, hallowed, distinguished. A generic sentence casts
Britain as universally emancipated: “Distinguished land, where all
are free” Herein lies an obvious contradiction. Britain is land of the
free, yet the French Revolution which entirely opposed Britain’s
fundamental precepts, is equally emancipatory.
Williams’ attempt to align the reader with Revolutionary
ideals continues on an even more figurative level. She ties the
Revolution into the pattern of the most established of all narrative
oppositions, a heaven and hell dichotomy. Tortured howls tie the
interior of the Bastille to hell, “thy hideous pile/Which stains of
6
David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”
blood defile” (16), as does its superlative hopelessness, an “Abyss
where mercy never came!” (l.6). As “this living tomb” (9), the
Bastille bears hellish traces of perpetual torment. This is
strengthened by recourse to a Gothic mode, in the cathartic call to
“shroud me in unconscious gloom” (l.12). Equally, religious
imagery authorises the Fall of the Bastille as a “consecrated act”
(77) and reifies the Revolution as “freedom’s sacred temple” (63).
This is Williams’ second major contradiction. Traditional, ‘mystical’
narrative structures are used to validate a Revolution that is
supposedly based solely upon reason, which supposedly uses its
light to make “those troubled phantoms melt away’ (l.50).
Here the Fall of the Bastille is entirely symbolic, detached
from the material event. It is not portrayed as a mob action caused
by complex socio-economic factors, which built upon an aristocratic
revolt, the Reveillon riots and troop desertions of preceding
months. Instead the sans culottes are puppets at the hand of
nature, described as homogonous ‘patriot bands’ (l.66). Agentive or
medium-initiator roles are performed not by human beings but by
several of Paine’s revolutionary principles. The Bastille is torn
down by “nature’s execrations” (l.62) and “eternal powers!” (l.53).
Events are unfolded by ‘the book of fate’ (l.59). This is
naturalisation ideology (defined by Thompson in Knowles 1996, 59),
enforcing the idea that the Revolution marks a return to the
‘correct’ order of things, as the ancient régime had ‘violated’
nature’s ‘laws’ (l.68). As with Colerdige, the purpose of this
symbolic construction is made explicit, that this emancipation will
be emulated by the world: ‘charm an emulating world!’ (64). There
are strong undertones that the Revolution will spread, taking over
as the ‘loved theme of future time? . . . Age shall the growing tale
repeat” (ll.74-75, 79).
The ideology propagated in ‘The Bastille, A Vision’ appears to
have interpellated Williams’ own later writings. In her Letters
Written in France in The Summer of 1790 she has grown drunk on
7
the implications of her earlier narrative, and reports what was
previously ‘poetic license’ (the Bastille myth) or encased inside
other discourses, as historical fact. She reports a state of mind, the
‘air of triumph’ (2000, 150) encountered rather than her own
experiences. The extended metaphor of the ancien régime as
darkness and the Bastille myth perpetuate, raising its symbolic
importance: “We drove under that porch which so many wretches
have entered to repass” (2000, 50). Williams could hardly have
been party to contemporary historical evidence that, at the time it
was taken, the Bastille contained only seven prisoners who were in
far better conditions than the majority of captives. But that such
luminaries as Voltaire had been in and out of the prison twice,
however, indicates that Williams was rather too caught up in the
imagery of despotic letres de cachet, unimaginable torture and
1Notes
? The mirror and the lamp are “two common and antithetic metaphors of mind, one comparing the mind to a reflector of external objects, the other to a radiant projector which makes a contribution to the objects it perceives . . . the second typifies the prevailing romantic conception of the poetic mind” (1953, Preface ii). So initially poetry strongly ‘reflected’ the supposedly glorious opening actions of the Revolution, such as the establishment of the Estate General and especially the Fall of the Bastille. As the ideas of the Constitution of 1792 gradually became corrupted however, there is a general trend of poets’ turning inwards to examine their own emotional responses, and the emotional states behind their initial ‘faulty’ enthusiasm.2
? In A Discourse on the Love of our Country Richard Price declared: “Behold kingdoms admonished by you, starting from sleep, breaking their fetters, and claiming justice from their oppressors!” (in Wu 2000, 3). James Mackintosh uses the image when referencing a parliamentary response to the Revolution: “they will break their chains on the heads of their oppressors” (in Wu 2000, 174). Coleridge uses the image twice in ‘Destruction of the Bastille’: “Freedom rous’d by fierce Disdain/Has wildly broke thy triple chain . . . No fetter vile the mind shal know/And Eloquence shall fearless glow” (ll.7-8, 36-37).
inevitable death to consider the ‘real world’ nature of the
Revolution.
Poetic conjecture obscures everything that Williams
encounters in this letter. The Bastille spiritually opposes the ‘light’
of Enlightenment: “a noxious vapour . . . more than once
extinguished the candle” (150). The full horror of the place is
created in her imagination, though she attributes it to the outside
world: “Good God! – and to these regions of horror were human
creatures dragged at the caprice of despotic power . . . There
appears to be a greater number of these dungeons than one could
have imagined the hard heart of tyranny itself could contrive”
(150). She takes every report at face value, as they perpetuate her
earlier poem, and make the letter a kind of validating paratext to it:
“Some skeletons were found in these recesses with irons still
fastened on their decaying bones” (50). The image of the fetter
introduced in ‘The Bastille, A Vision’ perpetuates, now not merely
metaphor but also fact.
Williams’ dramatised account of the ‘old man’ (150) derives
from a popular story (“of whom you have no doubt heard”) and
describes an event utterly similar to that encountered by the
speaker in ‘The Bastille, A Vision’. Both are reactions to being
emancipated into the light of day. Williams presents his speech
with a huge amount of conjectural modality: “he staggered, shook
his white beard and cried faintly” (150). This is a unilateral
account, the folklore description of “unanimous” refusal of liquor
by the perpetrators obscuring the street-butcherings of the
Marquis de Launay, Jacques de Flesselles, Bertier de Sauvigny and
several others, which marked the beginning of the bloodshed of the
Revolution. So the emphasis on imitating the events of the external
world, the analogue of the lamp, in early responses to the
Revolution, was prone to a particularly partisan objectivity.
As the opinion of early radicals towards the Revolution
shifted to disappointment and regret, bringing with it a focus on
the ‘internally generating’ analogue of the Lamp, the partisan
nature of earlier texts is addressed. Helen Maria Williams’ later
letters admit their own textuality, and express the subjective
nature of the writer who is generating them. Seeing the gallows at
La Maison de Ville she comments “at that moment, for the first
time, I lamented the revolution” (151). Having done this she is able
to establish that there is a flipside to her earlier view, that those
being executed are still human beings despite “the imprudence or
the guilt of those unfortunate men” (151). She indirectly reports
her thought, rather than dramatising events as ‘fact’ as she has
done earlier: “I painted in my imagination the agonies of their
families and friends, nor could I for a considerable time chase these
gloomy images from my thoughts” (151). At this stage, however,
she is able to dismiss these events as ‘a few shocking instances of
public vengeance” (151). They are a necessary evil, but one which
highlights for her that history is generated as much from an
author’s discourse as from external events: “Where do the records
of history point out a revolution unstained by some actions of
barbarity?” (151).
Later, with the full implementation of the Terror, Williams
develops a new discourse. The previous imagery of the Revolution
as light is inverted: “every street is blackened with a gallows . . .
the land which these mighty musicians have suddenly covered with
darkness” (151). The liberation of the Revolution suddenly has a
very similar tone, of “the shriek of despair and the agony of
torture” to the oppression that it first railed against (151). Williams
is still prone to universalise, as the negative generics “every street”
and “every highway” demonstrate, but here they serve an inward
function, demonstrating her regret as strongly as previous modality
demonstrated her enthusiasm. Interior feelings are now explicitly
discussed: “Are these the images of that universal joy which called
tears into my eyes and made my heart throb with sympathy?” (151).
She acknowledges that she has always had an emotional rather
than objective response. She repeats that this text is only her
response: “To me, . . . to me, this land of desolation appeared
dressed in additional beauty beneath the genial smile of liberty.
The woods seemed to cast a more refreshing shade” (151). Her
next description of an emotional event, the death of Madam Roland,
is based upon an emotional response to a real woman that she has
really met (“I visited her in the prison of St Pelagie” 152) rather
than recourse to folklore or urban myth.
Coleridge’s rapture also turned sour, with an even more
marked turn inwards. His ‘France: An Ode’ in ‘Fears and Solitude’
was initially titled ‘The Recantation: An Ode’, demonstrating his
commitment to taking back his earlier ideas. Here he turns away
from institutional politics and towards nature, taking up Rousseau’s
idea of the ‘noble savage’, who was corrupted by descent away
from nature and into civilisation. The poem demonstrates nature’s
vast expanse in an opening that sweeps in on man through “clouds,
that far above me float and pause” (l.1) and oceans, and rapidly
sweeps out again with “oh ye clouds, that far above me
soared!/Thou rising sun! Thou blue rejoicing sky!” (ll.16-17). In this
context man is changing where nature is eternal: “Ye ocean waves
that, wheresoe’er ye roll,/Yield homage only to eternal laws!” (ll.3-
4). Laws should be imposed by nature rather than man. By
instigating the Revolution man tried to command the natural order
which “no mortal may control!” (l.2) Here the ideals Coleridge
previously located in the Revolution can only be found in nature:
“With what deep worship I have still adored/The spirit of divinest
liberty!” (l.20). On the edge of a cliff he declares “Oh Liberty, my
spirit felt thee there!” (l.105).
At this point, the focus remains on the external world, a
Mirror of nature. It gradually transpires, however, that nature is
not important as an external force but in that it fires the poets’
imagination, the analogue of the Lamp, which is inwardly
generated but touches the world. The external political world
generates only false discourses, embodied most strongly by
“France, her front deep-scarred and gory,/Concealed with
clust’ring wreaths of glory” (ll.51-52). Ideology is revealed to be
just that, a false construct through which treachery may be
enacted: “Shall France compel the nations to be free . . . and wear
the name/Of freedom graven on a heavier chain!” (l.62). Later in
‘Fear and Solitude’ Coleridge produces his most vitriolic attack
upon political discourse, when calling for Britons to defend
themselves:
Stand forth! Be men! Repel an impious foeImpious and false, a light yet cruel raceThat laugh away all virtue, mingling mirthWith deeds of murder; and still promsingFreedom, themselves too sensual to be free,Poison life’s amities, and cheat the heartOf faith and quiet hope(ll.136-142)
To this extent Coleridge’s later poems are self-reflexive,
questioning the function of language to corrupt (“Poison life’s
amities”), trick (“impious and false”) and impose the oxymoronic
(“mingling mirth/With deeds of murder”). Coleridge (incorrectly)
locates the numinous3 - even jouissance (defined in Leader and
Groves 1995, 59) - outside language in nature. The closing six lines
of ‘France: An Ode’ demonstrate a powerful internal response to
landscape, but do not attempt to articulate this “intensest love”
(l.104) beyond stating the terms that inspired it: “I stood and
gazed, my temples bare/And shot my being through earth, sea and
air” (l.104-5).
By the time Coleridge wrote ‘Fears in Solitude. Written April
1798, During the Alarms of an Invasion’ (in Wu 2000, 468) the
3
? Numinous. C.G. Jung defines the numinous as "inexpressible, mysterious, terrifying, directly experienced and pertaining only to the divinity" (Jung, page 416). It is a sense of profound familiarity, not dissimilar to déjà vu, and spiritual awakening.
Revolution had become a direct threat to ‘the nation’ of Britain
itself, and Coleridge’s introspection becomes more intense. The
abstract rhetoric of ‘Destruction of the Bastille’ has been replaced
with the facts of war: “the certain death/Of thousands and ten
thousands!” (ll.101-102). He recants the very idea of political
rhetoric, turning his back on a younger self who “Knew just so
much of folly” (l.15) by declaring with alliterative sententiousness
that “We have been too long/Dupes of a deep delusion” (ll.156-7).
Though he has never been more than a commentator, he now
attacks the abstraction of war as “a thing to talk of - / Spectators
and not combatants” (ll.92-93). Most powerfully, Coleridge attacks
the inadequacy of words, the failure of the signifier to fully
connotate the signified in polite discourse, in a satirical portrait:
Boys and girls,And women that would groan to see a childPull off an insect’s leg – all read of war,The best amusement for our morning meal!. . .all our dainty terms for fratricideTerms which we trundle smoothly o’er our tonguesLike mere abstractions, empty sounds to whichWe join no feeling and attach no form(ll.101-104, 110-113)
War is turned into a form of “amusement”; it is distorted by “dainty
terms”. Words have failed him – the political discourse he had
hoped would inspire practical action in readers has transpired to be
“mere abstractions, empty sounds to which / We join no feeling an
attach no form”. The admission that he has been wrong is vital in
validating his continuing attack upon British corruption: “never can
courage dwell with them/Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare
not look/At their own vices” (471). His response to this crisis is to
turn his back upon institutional authority, and to generate a desire
to participate in society through an isolated pantheism: “he with
many feelings, many thoughts,/Made up a meditative joy, and found
religious meanings in the forms of nature!” (ll.22-24).
Ultimately then, the French Revolution certainly had a notable effect on a shift
in British radical poetry, from reflecting the external political world to an examination
of the poet’s inner nature, which illuminates verse. Early responses to the Revolution
mark radical enthusiasm for the potential of politics, so much so in the case of Helen
Maria Williams that she gets caught up in her own ideology-propagation. The poems
are clearly imperative; they aim to inspire the reader to Revolutionary action. As the
Revolution slid into Terror and War, however, texts became more self-reflexive. In
doing so they examine the nature of the poets’ own internal responses, and the way in
which they generate texts. In Coleridge’s case, this introspective shift is accompanied
by a withdrawal into isolated pantheism.
However it is impossible to convincingly demonstrate so broad a trend in so
few words. Constraints of space may obscure the subtleties of this argument. No poets
ever withdrew from the external political world completely; indeed Coleridge’s later
poems still serve a political function, but now against both the British state and the
French Revolution. Equally crucially, these poems must be seen in the context of a
dialogue against the prevailing Conservative discourse, and later an identification
with it when Wordsworth surprisingly declared, “Genius of Burke!”
David Jones Romantics 1780-1840 Essay: “From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development of British Radical Response to the French Revolution”
Sources Cited
Abrams, M.H. 1953. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, USA: Oxford Univ. Press
Belsey, Catherine 2002 Critical Practice (2nd ed) Routledge: Cornwall
Dawson, P.M.S. “Poetry in an Age of Revolution” in Curran, Stuart, ed. 1993 The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism Cambridge Univ. Press: Cambridge
Jaffé, Aniela trans. Winston, Richard and Clara 1995 C.G. Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections Great Britain: Fontana Press
Knowles, G.M. & Malmkjaer, M.K. (1996) Language & Control in Children's Literature London: Routeledge
Leader, Darian and Groves 1995 Judy Introducing Lacan Cambridge: Icon
Simpson, David “Romanticism, Criticism and Theory” in Curran, Stuart, ed. 1993 The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism Cambridge Univ. Press: Cambridge
Wu, Duncan, ed 2000 Romanticism: An Anthology with CD-ROM 2nd edn, Cornwall: Blackwell
15