Britain and French Revolution

Just how prescient was Edmund Burke about the problems of modern democracy?  Written for the bicentenary of his death in 1797, this book argues that he had a remarkable grasp of the shortcomings of the ideas promoted by the French Revolution, which still dominate much of our political thinking.  "As for the rights of man, I did implore the Director General to leave them alone" -- T. S. Eliot to Mrs. J. J. Hawkes of UNESCO, 22 Oct 1947.

Trois textes sont regroupés ici, écrits entre 2005 et 2008 :
Une présentation de l’historiographie autour de la violence en Révolution, qui avait été initialement destiné à ouvrir Violence et Révolution, paru au Seuil en 2006.
Le bilan du colloque de 2004 à l’Université Paris 1, IHRF La Révolution à l'œuvre, (livre paru aux Presses universitaires de Rennes en 2005). L’article est paru : « Perspectives actuelles de la recherche à propos de la Révolution française », The Kwansei Gakuin Historical Review, vol 33, mars 2006, 109-129 (en japonais), Colloque Tokyo, université Shenshu, 2005.
Une proposition de synthèse sur les mutations survenues dans les années 1990-2005 paru « Réflexions sur les évolutions historiographiques depuis le bicentenaire de la Révolution française », French Historical Studies, 2009, vol. 32, n° 4, p. 689-696.

This review article discusses the nature of British radical reformers and their ideas in the revolutionary era in light of some recent scholarship. It assesses the relative impact of the American and French revolutions on British popular politics in the 1780s and 1790s.

The production of imagined geographies is widely understood as a tool of colonial power. This paper, analyzing the writings of pro-revolutionary Italian patriots in the 1790s, argues that imagined geographies can also be used to subvert existing hierarchies and to renegotiate the relationship between centers and peripheries. Throughout the eighteenth century, European identity had been defined in antithesis to what was regarded as the uncivilized other—the Orient, but also the European South. After the French army invaded Italy in 1796, Italian patriots, who advocated the creation of a democratic republic in the Peninsula, started to reconsider the role of Italy and the Mediterranean Basin in the revolutionary process. They argued that it was in the Mediterranean that the Revolution would fight its most important battle. This was, of course, the battle for the liberty of navigation and commerce—against the British monopoly of trade—but also the battle of the “peoples of the South” against the “peoples of the North.” Challenging a long-established hierarchy of civilization, Italian patriots argued for the superiority of the South over the North. The peoples of the South were described as the promoters of international cooperation, freedom, and peace, whereas the peoples of the North were characterized by aggressive and exploitative attitudes. Both South and North, for them, were not geographical but cultural definitions—in fact, the South spanned from the Ottoman Empire to the Netherlands, including Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. Producing such a new imagined geography, Italian patriots reconceptualized the Revolution as a worldwide event that would eventually produce the emergence of a new peaceful global order based on the “southern spirit.” The creation of a worldwide federation of nation-states—including an Italian republic—would naturally follow.

Provincial folk history has, by and large, been neglected in historical analyses so that the academic study of Irish history has bolstered a metropolitan perspective of the past, which is mostly ignorant of subaltern vernacular discourses. Local tellings of oral history facilitated a decentralized and democratic, albeit not necessarily egalitarian, people’s history, which complements and, at a deeper level, radically challenges mainstream academic historiography. The multi-layered sophistication of folklore, which encourages variation so that it can carry diverse meanings and serve various functions in different contexts, also calls into question facile assumptions about national collective memory that tend to disregard local agency and assume subservient local reception. By selecting one, particularly fascinating, example from the hundreds of distinct narratives in the folklore of 'The Year of the French' [the French invasion and the 1798 Rebellion in the West of Ireland] and examining how this particular story was told and retold, this article sets out to demonstrate the grass-roots dynamics of social memory in rural Ireland and to offer a reappraisal of the value of folk history as a vernacular historiography which covers a wide range of substantial issues. It demonstrates how provincial folk history accommodated a multi-dimensional social memory that offered regional communities an alternative to the machinations of national collective memory and the overbearing authority of official history, facilitating complex historical discourses that clearly challenge prevalent assumptions regarding homogeneity, simplicity or inconsequentiality of local folklore.

The outbreak of the French Revolution marked the beginning of a new era of international relations. The legacy of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and the emergence of the new revolutionary principle of popular sovereignty forced politicians and intellectuals all across Europe to rethink the political order of the continent and its relations with the Mediterranean Basin. This paper deals with the Euro-Mediterranean visions of two leading figures of the Italian patriotic movement during the so-called republican triennium (1796-99), Matteo Galdi (1765-1821) and Enrico Michele L’Aurora (ca 1760-?). Galdi envisioned the creation of a worldwide federal “republic of mankind,” whereas L’Aurora strongly advocated the creation of a European federation and of a European Congress. Exploring their published and unpublished works, this paper shows how both Galdi and L’Aurora merged Enlightenment cosmopolitanism with the new principle of nationality. The way they tried to combine these two elements reveals how they understood the revolution and the idea of nation themselves.

"Political Toasting in the Age of Revolutions: Britain, America and France, 1765-1800)", in Liberty, Property and Popular Politics: England and Scotland, 1688-1815. Essays in Honour of H. T. Dickinson, ed. Gordon Pentland & Michael Davis (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp.73-86.

H.T. Dickinson's work has done much to demonstrate the vibrancy of 'out of door' opinion, outside the Court and Parliament, in eighteenth-century Britain. Drinking and toasting was integral to the expression of popular politics. Electoral campaigns involved an enormous amount of " treating " and voters fully expected candidates to ply them with wine and punch. 1 By the 1790s, the bibulous nature of British politics had become a rich source of inspiration for caricaturists, who loved to satirize the epicureanism of a Wilkes or a Fox, and to depict the seedy underworld of Jacobin taverns. Contemporaries and historians have used toast lists as precious, if rough, indexes of popular opinion, and, crucially in the 1790s, as evidence of sympathy for the French Revolution and transnational republicanism. Though perceived as a peculiarly English custom by foreign travellers, it was usual in the American colonies and the young Republic, and was adopted later in France. Following James Epstein's groundbreaking study of early nineteenth-century radical dining and toasting, historians have paid much attention to political drinking in Ireland and early America. This chapter will build on this rich historiography and try to broaden the perspective, expanding it beyond the British Atlantic to examine political toasting in revolutionary France. This chapter is concerned with toasting as a form of political expression during the " age of revolution " from the Stamp Act of 1765 to around 1800. Though periodization is difficult given the variety of local situations and dynamics, the end date is a turning point with some stabilization and abatement of the ideological conflicts of the 1790s and the consolidation of Napoleonic rule in France transforming the parameters of public expression.

Rémy Duthille, « Célébrer 1688 après 1789 : le discours de la Revolution Society et sa réception en France et en Angleterre », dans Lumières et histoire / Enlightenment and History, dir. Tristan Coignard, Peggy Davis et Alicia C. Montoya. Honoré Champion, 2010, pp.245-262.

The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that during the age of revolution (1760s–1840s) most sectors of the maritime industries experienced higher levels of unrest than is usually recognized. Ranging across global contexts including the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans as well as the Caribbean, Andaman, and South China Seas, and exploring the actions of sailors, laborers, convicts, and slaves, this collection offers a fresh, sea-centered way of seeing the confluence between space, agency, and political economy during this crucial period. In this introduction we contend that the radicalism of the age of revolution can best be viewed as a geographically connected process, and that the maritime world was central to its multiple eruptions and global character. Mutiny therefore can be seen as part of something bigger and broader: what we have chosen to call maritime radicalism, a term as well as a concept that has had virtually no presence in the literature on the revolutiona...

L’ouvrage analyse le discours de John Cartwright, de Richard Price et d’autres radicaux anglais qui justifient les réformes politiques par les droits de l’homme et par la constitution anglaise. Leur position à la fois patriote et cosmopolite est difficile à tenir pendant la Guerre d’Indépendance américaine.

Dr John Disney (1779-1857) was the benefactor of the first chair in archaeology at a British university. He also donated his major collection to the University of Cambridge. The sculptures continue to be displayed in the Fitzwilliam Museum.

The Disney family traced its origins back to the Norman invasion of England, and the family home was at Norton Disney in Lincolnshire. Disney’s father, the Reverend John Disney DD (1746-1816) left the Church of England to become a minister at the Unitarian Essex Street Chapel in London. A major sponsor of the chapel was Thomas Brand-Hollis of The Hyde, Essex, who bequeathed the house and his Grand Tour collection (formed with Thomas Hollis) on his death in 1804 to the Reverend Disney. Disney inherited part of the classical collection of his uncle and father-in-law Lewis Disney-Ffytche, owner of the 18th century pleasure gardens, Le Désert de Retz, outside Paris. Disney’s brother-in-law was Sir William Hillary, founder of the RNLI.

[Le bicentenaire des Considérations sur la Révolution française, publiées de manière posthume en 1818 par Germaine de Staël, invite à envisager aujourd’hui ce texte à l’aide de nouvelles perspectives scientifiques : non plus celle de la réception, mais de l’écriture de l’histoire, de la pensée anthropologique et du droit constitutionnel.]

Thomas Spence, a defender of women’s political and economic rights, was one of the very few pamphleteers who advocated women’s suffrage in his times. Nevertheless, he has been criticized by some historians for his patriarchal, even reactionary outlook. This article vindicates Spence’s record on women’s rights against those interpretations, by showing that his thought developed in the direction of gender equality. Spence, however, did not consider allowing women to access executive functions and he was no feminist by 21st-century standards.
Thomas Spence défendait les droits politiques et économiques des femmes. Il était l’un des très rares pamphlétaires de son époque à demander le vote des femmes. Certains historiens ont cependant décelé chez lui une vision patriarcale, voire rétrograde. Contre ces interprétations anachroniques, cet article s’emploie à dégager l’évolution de la position de Thomas Spence, de plus en plus favorable à l’égalité entre les sexes, tout en soulignant que Spence n’envisageait pas de confier aux femmes de fonctions exécutives et n’était pas féministe au sens où on peut l’entendre de nos jours.

«Une entreprise de médiatisation de littérature conservatrice en Grande-Bretagne : l’Association de la Couronne et de l’Ancre (1792-1793) », dans La Médiatisation du littéraire dans l'Europe des XVII et XVIIIe siècles, dir. Florence Boulerie. Tübingen: Narr Verlag, "Biblio 17", 2013, pp.157-169.
La Révolution française provoque en Grande-Bretagne la publication et la diffusion d’écrits politiques à une échelle inégalée jusqu’alors. Les Droits de l’homme de Thomas Paine (publiés en 2 vols, 1791 et 1792), critique subversive de l’ordre établi au regard des principes de la Révolution française, connaissent un tel succès auprès des masses que les autorités l’interdisent, et les élites encouragent la publication d’écrits dits « loyalistes » pour défendre le régime. En novembre 1792,  une « Association de protection de la liberté et de la propriété contre les républicains et les niveleurs » (APLP), née de l’initiative privée, se met en place à cet effet. Son action passe par la répression (tentative, par des moyens divers, d’empêcher la diffusion d’écrits jacobins et de traîner leurs auteurs et éditeurs en justice), mais aussi par une vaste entreprise de médiatisation d’écrits loyalistes rédigés dans une langue et des genres « populaires » variés (fables, poèmes, sermons, historiettes…). Cette littérature vise autant à inculquer le respect des hiérarchies établies qu’à détourner les masses de l’action politique révolutionnaire en leur offrant le dérivatif de la religion et de la morale.
L’APLP présente le cas intéressant d’une initiative privée, qui tient à son indépendance vis-à-vis du gouvernement, tout en en recevant le soutien. La médiatisation des écrits loyalistes passe par des canaux de diffusion et de promotion variés, faisant appel aux institutions et aux particuliers au niveau local ; le secrétaire de l’APLP se trouve vite au centre d’un réseau et reçoit des lettres de particuliers recommandant des moyens nouveaux de distribution, ou d’auteurs cherchant à faire connaître leur œuvre. Hannah More en particulier rédige de nombreux opuscules ("cheap tracts") vendus en librairie, colportés, et distribués en grand nombre par diverses institutions (Eglise, workhouses, hôpitaux...).
Le souci de large diffusion, la nécessité de créer une impression de proximité entre l’auteur et le lecteur, et la concurrence avec la propagande radicale qui vise aussi les masses, se reflètent dans la forme des ouvrages diffusés : jeux sur les titres, sur les pseudonymes et sur le format, adoption d’une voix narrative et d’un style « populaire », références croisées entres ouvrages d’une même série...

The construction and distribution of books containing large copperplate images was of great importance to practitioners of natural history during the eighteenth century. This article examines the case of the botanist and president of the Royal Society Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), who attempted to publish a series of images based on the botanical illustrations produced by Georg Forster (1754–94) on Cook’s second voyage of exploration (1772–5) during the 1790s. The analysis reveals how the French Revolution influenced approaches to constructing and distributing works of natural history in Britain, moving beyond commercial studies of book production to show how Banks’s political agenda shaped the taxonomic content and distribution of this publication. Matters were complicated by Forster’s association with radical politics and the revolutionary ideologies attached to materials collected in the Pacific by the 1790s. Banks’s response to the Revolution influenced the distribution of this great work, showing how British loyalist agendas interacted with scientific practice and shaped the diffusion of natural knowledge in the revolutionary age.

Le sujet peut paraître ancien tant la Révolution française a donné lieu à des publications d'atlas et de cartes, notamment celle la série des Atlas de la Révolution française entreprise par les éditions de l'EHESS depuis 1989, sans oublier les travaux fondamentaux de Michel Vovelle sur la « découverte de la politique 1 ». La prise en compte des disparités de l'espace tant pour décrire les manifestations de la Révolution que pour en expliquer les causes ne s'est pourtant pas limitée au territoire de la France. Le programme de recherche souhaité par les auteurs du concept de « révolution atlantique », Jacques Godechot et Robert Palmer, impliquait bel et bien de s'intéresser aux structures sociales, économiques, institutionnelles des territoires qui avaient également vu éclater des révolutions pendant cette « ère des révolutions ». Dans cette perspective, la question du caractère exceptionnel de la Révolution française, ou de sa spécificité, a bien été posée et renouvelée par Annie Jourdan 2. Il fallait cependant attendre quelques décennies pour que des études comparatives récentes ou en cours fournissent des données de « terrain » permettant de répondre plus précisément à cette problématique 3 .

Following the execution of Louis XVI England was in the throes of the fear of revolution, and it became bad form or downright dangerous to laugh at the guillotine. The loyalists imposed a strict social ban on such behaviour, considering the sardonic grin of the French Jacobins as a sign of their inhumanity. They did not refrain, though, from occasionally poking fun at the guillotine in specific generic contexts such as satire or burlesque. Radical polemicists such as Richard ‘Citizen’ Lee or John Thelwall, on the other hand, used laughter as a weapon to destabilize social, political and generic hierarchies. But laughter may have been a way for them to elude serious argument about the regicide and revolutionary violence.

« 1688-1789. Au carrefour des révolutions : les célébrations de la révolution anglaise de 1688 en Grande-Bretagne après 1789 », dans Du Bon Usage des commémorations : histoire, mémoire, identité, XVIe – XVIIIe siècles, dir. Bernard Cottret et Lauric Henneton. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010, pp.107-120.

Karantina deneyimi, tarihe gömüldüğüne herkesin çoktan ikna edildiği hikâyeleri şehir mekânında yeniden bir bir sahneye koyuyor. Gözünü hiper-gerçek bir dünya inşa etme hırsı bürümüş bir iktidar dünyanın devinimini bir fabrikanın çarkını durdurur gibi (Charlie Chaplin) durdururken, yankısı yıllar önce sokaklardan silinmiş sesler yeniden hayal meyal işitilmeye başlıyor. [...]
Uzaktan geçen fırıncının sesine kulak verirken bir yandan da zihnimde çalkantı ve devrimler çağı ondokuzuncu yüzyılın ünlü bir şehir romanının sayfaları rüzgârda hızla çevrildi. Kitlelerin zehir gibi bir hayata akıl almaz bir biçimde boyun eğdiği, onu sırtladığı yüzyılın en karanlık şehirlerinden Londra’nın kömür dumanı ve zift lekesine batmış mahallelerinde tıpkı bizdeki simitçiler gibi kapı kapı dolaşarak poğaça satan çocukların hikâyesi, kanalın karşısında Fransa’da, Paris’te tahıl kıtlığının halkı ekmekten yoksun bırakması, ekmek fiyatını yükselten fırıncıların halkın hışmına uğradığı ayaklanmalar, ve ekmek kıtlığını hafife alan kraliçenin bu sözlerini canıyla ödemesi, sanki yakın bir geçmiş gibi, karantina günlerinin bizi yakınlaştırdığı bir geçmiş gibi, siyah beyaz değil, canlı renklerle zihnimde aydınlandı.

A richly detailed contextual introduction to Helen Maria William's Swiss tour in 1794, and to the travelogue that she published in 1798, with attention to the controversy surrounding her revolutionary activities and to the collaborative writing of the book, based on extensive archival research.

The revolutionary wave of the 1790s subverted long-standing balances of power and forced European intellectuals to rethink the geopolitical arrangement of the continent. Analyzing the geographical imagination of pro-revolutionary Italian patriots in the 1790s, this paper argues that these patriots produced new imagined geographies to subvert existing cultural and political hierarchies and to renegotiate the relationship between European centers and peripheries. Throughout the eighteenth century, European identity had been defined in antithesis to what was regarded as the uncivilized other—the Orient, but also the European South. Reconsidering the role of the Mediterranean Basin in the revolutionary process, Italian patriots argued that it was in the Mediterranean that the Revolution would fight its most important battle. This was, of course, the battle for the liberty of navigation and commerce against British monopoly of trade, but also the battle of the “peoples of the South” against the “peoples of the North.” The peoples of the South were described as the promoters of international cooperation, freedom, and peace, whereas the peoples of the North were characterized by aggressive and exploitative attitudes. Both South and North, thus, were not merely geographical but cultural definitions—in fact, the South spanned from the Ottoman Empire to the Netherlands, including Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. The production of such a new imagined geography was meant to upend long-established hierarchies of civilization and to imagine a new peaceful European order based on the “southern spirit” and on new forms of continental governance.

« Célébrer 1688 après 1789 : le discours de la Revolution Society et sa réception en France et en Angleterre », dans Lumières et histoire / Enlightenment and History, dir. Tristan Coignard, Peggy Davis et Alicia C. Montoya. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010, pp.245-262.

Rémy Duthille, « 1688-1789. Au carrefour des révolutions : les célébrations de la révolution anglaise de 1688 en Grande-Bretagne après 1789 », dans Du Bon Usage des commémorations : histoire, mémoire, identité, XVIe – XVIIIe siècles, dir. Bernard Cottret et Lauric Henneton. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010, pp.107-120.

« Célébrer 1688 après 1789 : le discours de la Revolution Society et sa réception en France et en Angleterre », dans Lumières et histoire / Enlightenment and History, dir. Tristan Coignard, Peggy Davis et Alicia C. Montoya. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010, pp.245-262.

This paper considers the work of Jacob Heinrich Meister,  a Swiss protestant exile, director of a high-end literary periodical in Paris, and author of numerous political treatises between 1770 and 1820.  His position brought him into contact with figures such as Denis Diderot and Jacques Necker, and into a lifelong correspondence with Madame de Staël, associations which make him a referent in many discussions of late eighteenth century French culture, but never a primary focus.  Meister’s literary output was considerable, tackling a variety of philosophical and moral subjects.  This paper considers his work during the 1790s, in response to the French Revolution.

Meister’s work is particularly important to my current research project, which considers representations of radicalism, particularly Jacobinism, in England and France during the 1790s.  As a stranger in both countries, he offers a unique insight into the progress and effects of the French Revolution, producing travel accounts, reflections and pamphlets.  Central to this paper is the 1791 pamphlet, Conversations Patriotiques d’un Jacobin et d’un Anglais, a satirised conversation on the revolution between stereotyped characters of each nation.  A copy of this pamphlet held in the Leeds Brotherton Library reopens the debate, being literally covered with the annotations of a furious Jacobin hand.  Meister initiates a conversation which this new disputant decisively finishes, exemplifying the revolutionary fervour and spirit of impassioned debate which characterised early French Jacobinism.

My paper attempts contextualise this pamphlet and its annotator, as a unique example of the radical debate in the early 1790s, and as a fascinating subversion of the standard dialogue pamphlet format.  It also offers an evaluation of the Leeds pamphlet in the context of a larger body of French Revolutionary pamphlets.

There is a tendency among literary scholars to confine presentations of armed women offered in British literature between 1793 and 1801 to a restrictive binary; the women are political, non-sentimental and condemned, or apolitical, excessively sentimental, and excused. This dissertation seeks to both explore, and repudiate, this binary, by revealing the existence of an idiosyncratic military heroine presented within literature of the age, who is political, rational, and heroic.
Chapter one focuses on portrayals of public and political military women within two anti-Jacobin novels published in 1795 and 1801 respectively. It identifies the way in which the late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century novel, thoroughly devoted to domestic ideology, depicts women who favour the political and military sphere to the domestic, familial sphere, as monstrous and reprehensible. Chapter two analyses female warrior-ballads and historical narratives, and illuminates the way in which armed women exhibited in these genres are excused for their violence on account of their apolitical motives and sentimentalised portrayals, whilst arguing concurrently that the authors maintain a dissuasion of female militarism by delineating women as essentially unsuited to military activity, on account of the very characteristic which renders them virtuous; their delicacy. Chapter three, offering an analysis of literature produced by three radical authors, in 1799, 1796, and 1800, seeks to infer that, though indeed in the minority, anomalous depictions of armed women offered between 1793 and 1801, which conform to neither the political, monstrous, and condemned, nor the apolitical, sentimental and excused portrayal, did in fact exist. I reveal throughout this chapter the way in which the discussed radical authors grant their non-romanticised military women a heroic status, by intimating that it is the spirited armed woman, as opposed to the delicate, defenceless women, who is most capable of meliorating the nation.