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The MURTHER took place at four o'clock this morning, and was conducted in the most private manner. The Guillotine was erected in ya court of the Temple--a hole was dug in it, into which the King's head fell, and his body precipitated afterward .... (This must be understood as the prevailing report of the moment. It is impossible to vouch for its absolute truth.) This scene of infernal assassination, which a base and cowardly faction have now degraded human nature by executing calls for a marked execration which it is not in the power of language to convey .... Almighty vengeance must be the portion of those who have thus step by step arrived at this damnable crisis. To that awful moment, when the great King of Kings shall sit in tremendous judgement of men and daemons, do we consign the diabolic spirits. It will come, and in thunders speak terrors to their hearts, now hardened in human iniquity.
THIS DESCRIPTION OF THE FRENCH REGICIDE FIRST APPEARED IN THE St. James' Chronicle on 24th January 1793, and was copied during the next few days in a number of other pro-ministerial newspapers. Its publication was a few days after the execution of Louis Capet, and clearly uses and elaborates upon a rumor to suit the political purposes of that newspaper; the French King, murdered at night, in private, the perpetrators using all the cunning of a villain in a Gothic novel to keep their crime secret. The Gothic tropes are built up so that, despite the partially-admitted dubiousness of the narrative being reported, a number of eschatological prophesies are made about the results. Today we would probably respond to this passage by claiming that it is bad journalism, as it draws conclusions from facts not yet established, and accepts rumor as fact simply because it suits a particular political agenda. Against this, I intend in the following pages to argue that the imagination of political action, in this case imagining the King's death, cannot be read as simply "bad journalism" in the early 1790s; that in fact the equivocal nature of political factuality and truth steins from the whole system of the representation of political events at this time, and that this act of creative imagining is one of the ways in which political activity could legitimately be construed during the 1790s.
"I hope you do not think me weak enough," wrote Burke in a letter of January 1790, "to form my opinion of what is doing here [i.e., in France] upon the representations of newspapers, much less upon those of a country in which the true spirit of the several transactions cannot be known." (1) The letter was probably intended for Thomas Paine, or at least reads very like a reply to a letter that Burke had received from him a few days before, in which Paine assumes of his addressee an over-reliance on the London press for knowledge of the situation in France. Paine had stated, "everything in the English papers is either untrue or misrepresented" (75). So the writers of the most famed political appropriations of the events of the French Revolution, upon which so much debate turned, did not think much of the reporting to be found in newspapers. Instead, they claimed more privileged access to information, Paine through his friendship with Lafayette and his late presence in France, Burke by a more general appeal to men of quality, or, "those who have a considerable share in the formation of public measures" (79).
"You really shouldn't believe everything you read in the papers"-hardly a surprising sentiment to find in the correspondence of two men of letters and active politicians such as Burke and Paine. It is perhaps statements such as these, and also the apparent disparities throughout the eighteenth century between government policy and "opinion" as expressed in the newspapers, that have led certain historians to claim that the influence of the press on political affairs at this time was strictly limited; that the newspapers were much more concerned with the commercial interests of their readers; that people in reality did not believe what they read, or that they did not form effective critical opinion based on what they read; and even if they did, the executive powers worked in a rarefied world that was not influenced by, or rather did not need to be particularly bothered with, the formation of opinion outside a relatively small circle attached to the court and the cabinet. As Marie Peters points out, the kind of political history of the period during the "Namier-era" of historical research would naturally favor such an interpretation of the publicity provided by the development of newspapers. Where this development is considered, it is most often in a narrative of the progress of the idea of a free press, which has an important landmark in 1771 when parliamentary reporting was allowed for the first time, but which did not triumph in any practical way until the provision of a press gallery in the new House of Commons in 1852. (2) The personalities and courtly influence which made up the world of eighteenth century politics according to this kind of history, had their own grapevine, private letters and private audiences that consistently evaded any informed opinion outside that world.
If the findings of this paper are to be considered of any mainstream interest, such a view clearly has to be challenged, or at least substantially rewritten. Reawakening of interest in eighteenth century newspapers during the past fifteen years, caused by the wider availability of the most substantial collections on microfilm, and also by the publication in English of Habermas' work on publicity, has generally told a story of the increasing influence of the opinion-forming newspapers on the political stage. The most substantial work of this sort has been undertaken in a series of articles and then in collected form by Jeremy Black. (3) This tends to follow the maxim that all civil government requires the manufacturing of opinionated consent of one form or another; and that even, or perhaps especially, where there are the loudest protestations to the contrary, such opinion often comes from the sources of information most readily at hand, that is, newspapers. To illustrate this, a few days after the letter cited above, Burke mentions that his supposedly exclusive sources are in fact the Courtier de Provence, the cahiers presented to the Estates General in June 1789, and the Proces-verbal of the National Assembly, all corresponding to the type of "publicity" which he explicitly eschewed.
I intend to take a rather different direction with this study which, as will be shown, challenges some conceptual problems with Habermas' historiography and the scholars influenced by him respecting a strangely uncritical use of the concept of "criticism," and also accounts for the apparent disregard for "opinion" displayed by the executive. I shall first establish empirically, by a wide-ranging survey of the political reporting of the first year of the French Revolution and comparisons with other political reporting in England, the existence of certain widespread generic characteristics in such reporting. And indeed, I will go further, arguing that these genres or topoi in political reporting impose themselves on, indeed constitute as archaeological necessities, the possible ways of construing "politics" or the "political arena," that is, the negotiations between different actors as they relate to each other in questions of authority and the execution of that authority. These archaeological necessities will be grouped as two opposing tendencies, forming more or less coherent "discourses" or language games played in order to represent the reality being aimed at. The generic characteristics of political reporting impose a form on knowledge, and it will then be shown how these discourses are picked up by the likes of Burke and Paine, who become their respective talismen. After suggesting the important respects in which these modes of political representation correspond to the discourses of sovereign and disciplinary power, I will finally suggest some of the ways in which the positions structurally inform reception of events in France during the following years.
Three brief historiographical and methodological points need to be made here before the exposition of the genres of political reporting can begin. The first concerns the sheer volume and variety of the material under discussion, and is designed to head off the objection that the inevitably tiny proportion selected for direct discussion will be incapable of proving conclusively the existence of any generic characteristics, and hence of any coherent discourse to underpin them. It is true that there was, in 1789, very little editorial policy or control in the selection of reports for inclusion, and the haphazard way in which information became available meant that the same titles often carried contradictory reports of major events, often in the same issue. But it is also true that there was a strictly limited number of sources, and indeed, a similarly limited number of accounts available. To give an example, one account of the Versailles Days in October 1789, which first ran in the London Gazette on 7th October, appeared in almost unaltered form in nine subsequent daily newspapers that I have read, and probably more that have not survived in the major collections; more such instances will become clear in the study that follows. The most comprehensive recent study of eighteenth century newspapers concludes "despite the limited use of correspondents during the French Revolution, the practice at the end of the century was still essentially the same as that at the beginning. Newspapers relied on other papers, a cheaper, more comprehensive and not necessarily less reliable method" (Black 99). Black may in fact be overstating his case; many newspapers did have correspondents employed on a semi-formal basis in Paris. They also took information (up until war started) from travelers, most of whom were merchants, and from "private letters" from gentlemen in France. But the most important sources were indeed the London Gazette (itself a distillation of official information from diplomats and foreign envoys), the French newspapers, and the French-language papers of the French-Protestant diaspora in the Austrian Netherlands and Holland. One could indeed construe the British papers of this period as a kind of post-structuralist paradise, intertextual, parasitic on each other, the scriptors to be seen not as originating authors but as compilers of cultural fragments, and with the referent always fading into the background. However, I hope that analysis will show not simply a pluralistic play of words but also a certain coherence in the way in which different groups of political actors played the linguistic game of politics at this specific historical moment. It should be clear that I am not intending a thorough examination of their "reliability" as historical sources, nor a detailed analysis of the channels through which information came, although in some cases the latter will be necessary. Rather, it is an attempt to reconstruct the way in which political actors construed the arena of the political, to list the ways in which it was possible to experience the French Revolution in Britain, and to show how representation of the Revolution helped to construct the terms of the ideological clash during the early 1790s. It is in this sense that the study is an "archaeology."
The second concept that needs to be examined in a preliminary way is the sign under which we come to experience the events in France from 1789, that is, "Revolution"; how does one "think" a revolution? Many academic accounts of the contemporary experience of that Revolution start with the proposition, which was perhaps first theorized in Marx's pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that one cannot really imagine a revolution at all, at least not in the modern sense of a violent rupture with the past, and one can represent it only indirectly by the intertextual play of comparison, or a kind of incredulous affirmation that the events talked about go beyond the conventionally representable. This at any rate is the opinion of Ronald Paulson, who offers an analysis of the strategies employed by various artists and writers to construe revolution--crucially, by convenient historical analogies (with the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the '45 Rebellion, the Gordon Riots, the French Wars of Religion) and aesthetic categories (darkness and light, winter and spring, the sublime and the beautiful). (4) Paulson's art history provides a startling--and humbling--interpretation of political debate and the opinion-forming process as nothing more than the interaction of allusive or sensuous references, over which it is impossible to have much control, there not being available sufficient discursive resources to cope with an event as rapid or as vast as a revolution. But Paulson does not, perhaps, take seriously the ways in which politics of any particular cultural configuration sets itself apart from other discourses, and demarcates the conditions of its own propriety. If one is to say that the novelty of revolution makes such an event very hard to think and write about, one must be very clear about which events are so hard to experience and represent, for the reason that they break certain rules or conventions that had existed before that revolution. In building up an inventory of these conventions in England at the time of the French Revolution, it will become easier to discern which events in France confound such expectations, and which therefore are likely to be difficult to deal with, writers being less sure of the procedures, and having fewer discursive resources to call on when describing them.
One such category of happening conies immediately to mind, that is, the interventions of the sans-culottes, those acts of popular justice, insurrection against tyranny, and lawless violence which intermittently furthered and frustrated the aims of the bourgeois politicians. Foucault once argued that the practice of popular justice in pure form should
not, and indeed could never, take the form of a court or any other juridico-political procedure, because it is, precisely, the other of the juridico-political. (5) The form of the tribunal in modern societies consists of a table, and behind the table, separated from the litigants, "les tiers"--the third-party judges--all of which would be alien to popular justice. To illustrate his case, Foucault cites approvingly the most infamous episode (for the bourgeois historian) of the French Revolution, the September Massacres. During this event, so argues Foucault, the People identified their enemies by their experience of being oppressed, and expressed their rage in forms of justice that pre-dated those juridico-political procedures he was later to identify in his research that led up to Surveiller et punir. (6) The mob had the following practices, says Foucault nonchalantly and with some glee: dismantling and burning the houses of their enemies, disembowelling the occupants, and carrying their heads on spikes. After this first expression of popular justice, in which there were only the masses and their enemies, the table was set up, the tribunal reinstated, and state oppression in the name of "third party" justice was once again imposed. Now, the accuracy of his account of the Massacres may be questionable, as might be the make-shift genealogy of the procedures of popular justice. But the conceptual point he brings out very strongly is the foreignness of the juridico-political forms--with which we are all familiar but which do not, or should not, or in any case cannot, comprise a monopoly on the possibilities for "political" action--to certain actions of the Parisian "mob." When examining reports of events in Paris, it is noticeable that, almost without exception, the compilers of reports found such happenings the most prickly to deal with, and in their descriptions we find either great silences or reformulation in terms of preconceived models for political action. Although in what follows I will be more interested in what commentators were able to say than in what they were not, some consideration of the sense of frustration experienced, and consequent distortion of events, by writers whose expectations did not tessellate with reality will be given.
The final set of preliminary comments concerns Habermas' history and conceptualization of publicity in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. (7) In what follows it will become clear that I have appropriated and expanded upon some of the important concepts expounded in that work, which will be discussed in full later. In particular, Habermas' idea of "representative publicness" has been important in my construal of the characteristics of reporting associated with the Tory press, which is that form of political presentation in post-Renaissance Europe in which centralized power is embodied in the King, and his deputies represent "not 'for' the people, but 'before' the people," in a "staging of power" (8). However, as with other accounts of the "rise of the press" in the eighteenth...
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