My book on Narrative Responses to the trauma of the French Revolution (Legenda, 2012)  aimed to widen the canon of French novels from the Revolutionary decade while offering a new theoretical and methodological approach to the reading of those texts. It was based on what I call the forgotten sentimental novels of the 1790s – best-selling texts which appear to retain the tropes and settings of the ancien régime but which, when read in context, reveal cracks in the narrative and a collective response to the trauma of the events of the Revolution. Re-incorporating these novels has thrown new light on our understanding of literary engagement during the period. Far from confirming Henri Coulet’s view that there is a refusal to respond to the political upheavals in the novels of the period,[1] this reassessment of fiction of the Revolution instead echoes Madame de Staël’s comment: ‘qui peut vivre, qui peut écrire en ce temps, et ne pas sentir et penser sur la révolution de France?’ [who can live, who can write in these times and not feel and think about the Revolution in France?][2]

One of the starting points for the monograph was the column space devoted to the notion of a post-9/11 novel in the British Press in 2005. While there can be no close comparison between the events of 11 September 2001 and the French Revolution, I was struck by the fact that British and American novelists tried to respond to the way in which a collective world view was turned upside down overnight by an attack on American soil. Some of the questions about the purpose of fiction at such a time carried echoes of debates around the novel during the Revolution. Initially novelists were anxious that ‘in the present circumstances, fiction was either irrelevant or incapable of offering a convincing representation of a new changed world’.[3] While V.S. Naipaul complained as late as 2005 that ‘no novels have yet engaged with the post-September 11 era in any meaningful way’,[4] writers such as Ian McEwan and Jay McInerney, who have spoken openly about writing fiction in the aftermath of 9/11, have suggested that it takes time for the effects to be interiorised and sublimated into fictional form, and that despite the time lag, people have come to realise that fiction is ‘uniquely suited to conveying certain kinds of emotional truth and metaphoric equivalents for our recent trauma’.[5] And yet at precisely the time that authors finally felt able to bear witness to a collective experience of seeing the 9/11 attacks unfold, there was also a reaction against political fiction growing amongst novelists. Howard Jacobson is just one writer who has complained that ‘if a novel isn’t politically au courant, if it isn’t ratified by events outside itself, we have trouble reminding ourselves what it’s for’.[6] The dismay at fiction’s delayed response to the tragedy and the rebellion against politicised fiction that we see in these debates from 2005, almost four years after 9/11, are reminiscent of the debates, both contemporary and modern, surrounding the fiction of the French Revolution’s apparent inability to engage with events. If in a cynical, post-modern, post-Freudian world it is still ‘stories, not facts […] we turn to when we want to make sense of chaos and complexity’,[7] then is it not also possible that those experiencing the upheaval of the Revolution might have had the same reflex?

The process of coming to terms with the upheaval of the French Revolution is, I believe, a gradual one, and there are consequently a number of stages in the literary responses to it.

The early phase 1790-92 is marked by an initial taking stock followed by an optimistic engagement with the changes that the Revolution was causing in society. This period is dominated by writers who want to provide models of behaviour for the new, regenerated France. The strong neoclassical tendency and a predominance of moderate standpoints are unsurprising given the nature of novel writing and publishing and may, in some cases, have been a deliberate strategy to get into print. Writing a novel and getting it published was a much less immediate way to respond to events than pamphlets, prints, or plays, and this discouraged radical posturing. The extent to which the novels of the initial, optimistic phase of the Revolution endorse the constitutional monarchy perhaps also reflects booksellers’ worries about the viability of texts espousing extremes. Carla Hesse’s work on the book trade confirms publishers’ needs to find texts that will sell as the literary market shrinks.[8] By falling back on ‘established’ names from the immediate pre-Revolutionary period, publishers in fact propagated a series of novels and tales reinforcing a sense of hierarchy and social order. These established writers, from across the political spectrum, were largely positive about the Revolution, though increasingly concerned by the direction it was taking. My work sheds new light, therefore, on Jacques Rancière’s view that a new concept of literature was developed by ‘les tenants de la troisième voie, entre la révolution jacobine et la contre-révolution aristocratique’ [those exponents of a third way, between the Jacobin revolution and the aristocratic counter-Revolution].[9]

It is but a small step for the novel to become a vehicle for the expression of loss and trauma as writers were overtaken by the speed of political change. The period 1792-94 is marked by the increasing rarity of moderate literary engagement with the Revolution. Increasingly, Republican writers come to the fore but we find that other writers feel compelled to write despite or because of the circumstances. There is, however, a significant shift in narrative production post-Thermidor. On the one hand, those who have kept silent during the early years of the Revolution resume their literary careers but the apparent continuity of Ancien Régime tropes, settings and characters is in fact an indication of their traumatised response to the Revolution. On the other hand, certain writers who had initially supported the Revolution now reveal their responses to the Terror. For many of the sentimental writers of the period, the narratives of trauma do not lead to resolution. Significantly, it is the writers who would go on to be the avant-garde of the Romantic movement in France who succeed in working through their responses to the Revolution, while lesser writers remain trapped in the repetitive cycle of reliving the trauma without fully acknowledging their memories.

Emigration acts as a key catalyst to artistic and aesthetic development. Judith Herman has shown how ‘creative energy is released when the barriers of denial and repression are lifted’;[10] this suggests that it is because Mme de Staël and Chateaubriand can find a way through writing to recover from the trauma of the Revolution and reconnect with ordinary life that they are able to spearhead a new French aesthetics. My work confirmed and extended Deborah Jenson’s view that ‘the origins of French Romanticism are linked to the traumatic memory of the Revolution’.[11] The process of coming to terms with the Revolution is, however, not complete by the end of the 1790s, and traces of trauma can be found well into the nineteenth century. Its impact on writers and the novel in France and on the development of Romanticism cannot be underestimated.

The reintegration of the sentimental novel into an understanding of the literary market and the collective psychology of the period has implications for other genres too. This session is called Revolutionary afterlives and takes us beyond 1799 into the Napoleonic period. The crossover between narrative fiction and theatre and their shared traumatic responses deserve further investigation. I’m currently looking at French theatre of the Napoleonic era thanks to funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and there is plenty to say about the development of melodrama as a response to the trauma of the Revolution, especially as the early successful melodramas were adaptations of novels which clearly bear the hallmark of post-Terror trauma. Pixerécourt’s reputation as a dramatist is made by adaptations of two Ducray Duminil novels, Coelina and Victor, ou l’enfant de la forêt, which are amongst the most important examples of trauma literature of the decade. Thinking of French theatre of the First Empire as exhibiting traces of trauma is potentially very fruitful and I wonder if there is also scope to take the notion of trauma and spectacle beyond the stage to events such as Madame Tussaud’s waxworks exhibition tours in Britain during the first part of the 19^th century.

I’d like to end with some points of convergence between my work and Julia’s: over the last decade we have both been chipping away at the large number of fictional texts of the revolutionary decade and the two monographs represent a significant broadening of our knowledge of texts of the period. We both also share a belief in the importance of contextualisation as crucial for an understanding of texts at a time of considerable political upheaval. We also concur in seeing the Terror as the turning point for novels of the decade.

So what are the implications of our two monographs for future research and teaching? – one of the most obvious aspects to come out of the comparison of our research is that a cross-disciplinary approach is key for unlocking the Revolutionary decade – pamphlets inspire prints which draw on theatrical references themselves taken from novels – those at the time wouldn’t have concentrated on just one source and neither should we! We have a responsibility to rain our students to excavate analogies that would have been evident to contemporaries.