From Society to Self-Realisation: The Development Of British Radical Responses To The French...

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

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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 –

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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!”


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

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