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COPYRIGHT 2005 Boston University
ROBESPIERRE. What! did th'assassin's dagger aim its point Vain, as a dream of murder, at my bosom?--Coleridge & Southey, The Fall of Robespierre i.ii.6-7 (1794)
THIS ARTICLE IS PART OF A LARGER STUDY OF THE RAPID AND TURBULENT metamorphosis of the dramatic imagination during the period of the French Revolution.* Within that study, this work explores one crucial moment in that transformation: the immediate impact of the Revolution upon the dramatic imagination of British romanticism.
Much very useful work has been done to understand that impact. Through the work of George Steiner, Ronald Paulson, Mary Jacobus, Jeffrey Cox, Julie Carlson, Terence Alan Hoagwood, Reeve Parker, Marjean Purinton, and William Jewett, for example, we have gained a much clearer sense of the broad trajectory and characteristic tenor of the British romantics' reactions to the Revolutionary experience: their initial enthusiasm for its cause; their sympathetic identification with its participants and their close imaginary participation in its events; their recoiling horror at the Revolution's subsequent violence, and the manner in which that psychological trauma prompted the romantics' characteristic abstraction and historical displacement of Revolutionary themes and concerns. (1)
These reactions are expressed, both directly and indirectly, throughout romantic drama: however, they are most powerfully expressed, without doubt, in tragedy, that genre most closely associated with both the political ideals and the violence of the radical Revolution. Indeed, for the central years of the 1790's, tragedy was inextricably set within the implicatory context of Jacobin rhetoric and ideology--and bound up, moreover (as Jacobus has made strikingly clear), with regicide. In consequence, and in a manner matched by no other literary form, tragedy was, for the romantics, a genre bound inextricably to revolutionary experience, to the degree that romantic writers' post-Revolutionary challenge was no longer to write--like the young Schiller--a revolutionary tragedy, but to compose a tragedy that might move beyond, and perhaps redeem, the form's own grim, complicit history, liberating it from the political violence with which it had been so intimately associated. It is for this reason that we find, in tragedy, the most sustained and attenuated expression of that peculiarly romantic displacement of history remarked upon by Jerome McGann: revolutionary experience, as an implicatory context, permeates romantic tragedy, dominating its action and concern to a degree unmatched in other genres, but the French Revolutionary experience, in its historical particularity and local immediacy, appears nowhere. In fact, such pressurized displacement is so pronounced in romantic tragedy that it has been described by Terence Hoagwood as "the central fact about romantic drama." (2)
However, in its investigation of romanticism's engagement with the Revolution, modern scholarship has tended to reiterate that act of displacement: for while it has reminded us of the locality and contingency of the romantics' imaginative responses to the Revolution, it has continued, until quite recently, to elide the locality and materiality of their Revolutionary experience. Indeed, this tendency was precisely that faulted by David Jordan in his review of Ronald Paulson's otherwise immensely useful Representations of Revolution: although Paulson offers a highly useful description of contemporary aesthetic responses to the revolution, he treats the revolution itself, Jordan points out, as "some vast, abstract, and amorphous upheaval," not a series of discrete events but a phantasmagoria, an undifferentiated nightmare calling forth "primal images of sex and generation and death and cruelty." (3) The problem is less pronounced, but no less evident, in the more recent work of Jacobus, Cox, Carlson, Hoagwood, and Jewett. There, the local negotiation of the romantics' responses to the Revolution, the complexities of those responses' imaginative and textual articulation, and their change and development within the Revolution have been more amply explored. In such work, the romantic experience of the Revolution has gained particularity and discreteness, but the assumption remains that this experience was, for the most part, unmediated: that the romantics (indeed, all revolutionary spectators) somehow possessed direct, comprehensive knowledge of events unfolding in France, that their meditations upon its philosophy respond directly to the articulation of those ideas in France, and that their nightmare visions of its violence and action were prompted by some direct view of its spectacle. Paulson's tendency to treat the Revolution as amorphous and undifferentiated has been overcome, but it remains here an abstract creation, displaced from the partiality and imperfection of material culture. (4)
At the same time, however, Jeremy Popkin, Jeremy Black, and other scholars of revolutionary print have made quite apparent the simple fact that the lived experience of the French Revolution was--for its participants as well as for its observers, and in a manner that was fundamental to its novelty--emphatically mediated, and that imaginative participation in its events took shape not in direct relation to revolutionary action but in and through a complex, materially distanced, highly local, and localized, process of reception, apprehension, and negotiation. (5) For they remind us that the vast majority of the Revolution's contemporaries learned of its events--experienced those events--in, and through the decade's specific, distinguishing print medium: an exploding international political news press, that enormous system of journalistic transmission and broadcast which arose directly with the onset of the French Revolution and which changed entirely, over the course of just a few years, the basic conditions and discursive contexts of historical action and political event. From the start, the events of the Revolution were not only conveyed by this expanding apparatus but shaped by it, and in fundamental fashion, for it was in the newspaper, more often than on the street, that such episodes were given initial narrative and dramatic coherence, assigned larger meaning and import, divvied out and made known to the world as report and story. This shift in the performative and receptive context of historical action was of enormous epistemological and ontological significance, altering basic notions of temporal and historical consciousness that had held force since antiquity. For it was in the rapid establishment of that paradigmatically modern cycle of the newsday, with its mere but inescapable seriality, that one finds the gradual formation of the Nietszchean nightmare of modern history, as historical action begins to be meted out, disenchanted and bounded by, the day-to-day particularity of the daily news. Certainly, such trends have a longer and earlier history, as even a glance toward Addison and Steele make plain. However, the rise of the international daily news press in the decade of the French Revolution expanded vastly--and with shocking quickness--the extent and depth of news journalism's suffusion of social life. As George Steiner noted some time ago, it was specifically the explosion of international news journalism during the Revolution, and not merely the discrete events of Revolutionary politics, epochal as they were, that "plunged ordinary men into the stream of history."
This deeper shift in apprehension and in consciousness is apparent everywhere in the post-Revolutionary period--perhaps most concretely in the history-defying violence of Napoleonic aggression, but also in the period's almost definitive literary and philosophical concern with the possibilities of heroic action in a post-heroic age. (6) Our sense of the larger impact of this shift upon the dramatic imagination is also clear and unmistakable: as critics across the spectrum agree, that change in consciousness eliminated, and quite decisively, it seems, the ontological credibility of tragedy. In the theater, the audience now sat distracted by daily events, and in politics, historical action increasingly took on the continual rhythms of the everyday, and of the banal (Steiner 116).
If it is possible to see in the romantic tragedy's displacement of Revolutionary events a traumatic recoil away from the corporeal violence of Revolutionary action and the philosophical collapse of Revolutionary ideals, we must also recognize in such displacement an effort to flee--indeed, to deny, to elide, to escape--this deeper, apprehensive and ontological experience of historical disenchantment. And if we are to understand that experience, to gain some sense of the manner in which that fundamental apprehensive shift affected and found expression in romantic drama, we must look not only at the romantics' own images of revolution and their reflection of events in France, but at the hazy transformative space in between the two--at that emergent apparatus of journalistic representation through which those events were experienced by and made known to their international audience.
In this essay I explore one particularly significant moment in Britain's indirect experience of Revolutionary history: the fall of Robespierre, as it unfolded in the pages of the London Times in the spring and summer of 1794. My reasons for focusing on this moment in particular are twofold: first, the 9th of Thermidor, as the events surrounding Robespierre's fall are known, marked the sudden collapse of the Jacobin regime, and, with it, the decisive failure of the radical Revolution's tragic rhetoric of politics. (7) In short, it is with Thermidor that romanticism is faced with the problem of redeeming a poetics irrevocably bound up with a failure and inextricably tied to genocidal delusion.
The second reason to focus upon this moment is more particular, but no less significant: the events of Thermidor prompted the single effort by any major British romantic writer to dramatize, in direct form, the political events of the Revolution. This sole exception to romantic drama's otherwise complete displacement of revolutionary history is The Fall of Robespierre (1795) by Coleridge and Robert Southey, an aborted tragedy written in immediate response to the announcement, in the London Times, of Robespierre's fall. Although it has until recently received only passing critical attention, The Fall of Robespierre, as I'll show, not only records a critical moment in the formation of British romanticism's tragic imagination, but also reflects quite strongly the crucial mediation by the news press in shaping the British experience of revolutionary events.
My discussion begins with a look at the relation between the concept of imagination in British romanticism and the experience of the Revolution, focusing in particular on the way that relation is articulated by and developed through the drama of Coleridge. In the essay's second section I turn my attention to the London Times, examining both the nature of the Times' transmission and representation of news and the paper's particular coverage of events in France during the period leading up to and surrounding 9-10 Thermidor. Finally, I investigate the effect of that coverage on the shape and structure of Coleridge and Southey's The Fall of Robespierre and discuss, in closing, the implications of the play's unusual history for our understanding of the French Revolution's impact upon the dramatic imagination of British romanticism.
I. Imagination & British Romantic Tragedy
a. Spectatorship, Sympathy, and Guilt
MACBETH. Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee:-- I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling, as to sight? Or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw. Thou marshal'st me the way that I was going.
Shakespeare, Macbeth (II.i.36-39)
Even in 1795, after the horrific violence of the Terror, Kant could gesture toward the shared ideals of the French Revolution and note that, in terms at least of its tendency toward freedom, the Revolution "finds in the heart of all spectators ... a wishful participation bordering closely upon enthusiasm." (8) He was describing nothing new, for such "wishful participation" in the Revolution's aspirations had in fact been a marked phenomenon of foreign spectatorship from the very outset of political unrest in France. Indeed, for Wordsworth the extraordinary aims articulated in the early Revolution had not only prompted imaginary participation: they had also, in their sudden and apparent attempt to realize such abstract political ideals, raised the thought that perhaps the imagination itself had begun to emerge from the realm of mere fantasy to imprint its shape upon reality. In 1789 such a possibility seemed welcome, open, light, for "all those who had fed their childhood upon dreams," Wordsworth felt, might now realize those fantasies "[n]ot in Utopia ... [b]ut in the very world." (9)
As the Revolution turned toward violence, however, the very possibility of some connection between the dreamt and the real--between the imaginary, sympathetic participation of men of feeling and the horrific violence of actual events--became increasingly troubling to those watching the Revolution from afar. If the Revolution suggested the imagination's material power, had sympathetic participation somehow contributed to Revolutionary violence? Had it lent support to, or even pushed to extremes, a cause that might otherwise have stopped short of regicide, of the Terror? If the radical Revolutionaries were regicides in act, were not their foreign spectators accomplices in mind?
As Mary Jacobus has observed, it was in relation to fears of just such a connection that Macbeth became a highly-charged play during this period. Not only did the tragedy confront first-generation romantics with a disturbing, offstage regicide--a regicide thus "acted out" in the spectator's imagination: the play also raised, in Macbeth's troubled...
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