Tag Archives: The Frankenstein of 1790 and other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France

Why the Revolution Matters to Me, by Julia Douthwaite

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One thing you should probably know:  I come from a political family.  My dad, “G.K. “Jeff” Douthwaite, was a state legislator (Democrat, Washington State, 43rd district) for three terms during my adolescence and I was deeply involved in all three campaigns.  I have fond and somewhat bizarre memories of the Soul Food dinners we attended in church basements and the Hell’s Angels types who occasionally filled our house to help stuff envelopes.  This was during the Civil Rights movement, the beginning of the Green movement, and a heady time was had by all.  (Interestingly, historian Lynn Hunt also comes from a political family; her mom was a long-time city councilwoman.  Also a Democrat.)  For me, then, the French revolution is not just a subject of study, it is a vocation.

I really enjoyed doing the research that went into this book and which lasted about a decade.  After tracking down and reading the 300-some fictions which constitute my final corpus, it took about 10 months to structure the material into a coherent book.  I had to leave out one chunk that exists in article form instead, on the Festival of the Federation, because it did not leave any traces in the afterlife of the Revolution.  My wilfully speculative Codas are an attempt to disprove Francois Furet’s oft-cited comment that the Revolution is over.  On the contrary, I seek to show that the revolution was not over on “Thermidor” year II (when the Terror supposedly ended with the execution of Robespierre). And that it was kept alive, ridiculed, admired, satirized, and otherwise memorialized in later years, from 1794 up to 1904. Ultimately, each generation keeps the memory of the Revolution alive, as Mary Shelley, Honoré de Balzac, and Helen-Maria Williams did for theirs.

The one thing that feels unfinished about my book, however, is the label that I gave my method in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek moment: “new positivism.”  This irreverential moniker unleashed a little flurry of objections at last year’s convention of the French Historical Society in Cambridge and has raised a question or two among the book’s reviewers too, so I’d like to take this opportunity to start clarifying what I mean.  (A longer article is in the works.)

New positivism is a neologism that joins two opposing concepts: novelty or innovation and one of the most old-fashioned and unpopular forms of scholarly study.  A targeted attack on positivism can be found in the masthead of the book series, “Flash Points,” which was founded and launched at the UCPress by a group of English professors in the California system.  As the editors declare in their mission statement:  “The series solicits books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, distinguished by their historical grounding and their theoretical and conceptual strength.  We seek studies that engage theory without losing touch with history, and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism.”[1]  The opposition posited there—between a theoretically-informed and engaged historicism, on the one hand, and an uncritical positivism on the other hand—should give us pause.  Positivism may be more fact-oriented and less philosophical than some might like, true.  But it is erroneous to assume that positivism was ever unconnected from the world of politics; indeed Auguste Comte invented positivism specifically to usher in what he hoped would be a broad-ranging, political platform intended to explain laws of human conduct and ultimately free people from prejudice and hatred.[2]

However, Comte is less an inspiration than his successor, Fustel de Coulanges, whose ‘positivism of the document’ had no such liberating claims, except in the realm of fact-producing.  In his History of the Political Institutions of Ancient France, Fustel de Coulanges argued:  “[if] one may hope to succeed in the matter, it can only be by a patient study of the writings and documents that each age has left of itself.” [3]  Coulanges’s model of a scientific kind of history-writing was close to that of a group of scholar-politicians whose desire to emulate the German example had been increased markedly by the shock of the 1870-1871 defeat,” writes Ernest Breisach, “They aimed at wresting dominance away from the amateurs or littérateurs who gave stirring lectures at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne.” Similarly, my model of a positivist literary history aims to wrest influence away from social sciences largely writ. I argue that literary documents—when triangulated with the press and historiography of a given time and place—can shed new light on socio-political developments and furthermore can engage with audiences in lively and inspiring ways.  This involves embracing Coulanges’ rigor but paired to a more playful attitude about the stories we tell and the reader’s engagement with them.

I am not the first person to embrace positivism in our time; indeed Foucault and Habermas both adopted some kind of positivism in their famous works.  Like Foucault in The Order of Things, I made this move because of disappointment with my field.  Literary studies in French have fallen into a self-induced irrelevance since the 1980s because of an over-investment in philosophy, and especially deconstruction.  This has produced some scholarship that may appear innovative on first sight but which fails the test of time.  The stakes are even higher in the revolutionary period, when words were invented and allegiances changed from month to month.  Literary scholars who have ventured into the revolutionary period without requisite knowledge of political history have committed some embarrassing errors.  Historians have also committed some lapses, by integrating literary documents into their explanations without considering the importance of genre or the author’s biography.

So I use the term positivism as shorthand for strict attention to the textual universe of a work’s time and site of origins.  I am trying to figure out what an imagined middle-of-the-road, politically moderate reader might have understood during the initial life of the books in question. I attain that goal by reading of newspapers, biographies, and book reviews, mainly, as well as other print materials—pamphlets, caricatures, artwork, some songs and speeches.  I admit that I am borrowing only certain tenets from the founder of positivism Auguste Comte and other proponents of the 19th century, but I prefer positivism over the term philology, for instance, because I like the distant echo of positivism’s utopian ethos and combative stance.  My next project will study how novelists of the 18th and 19th centuries created relevance for their stories by incorporating current events and human interest stories related in the press.

Conclusion

Each of us who writes or teaches the French Revolution does so for different reasons, and those reasons are rooted in our own situation.  My 22 years of teaching at a wealthy Catholic institution situated in a poor, working-class city may have something to do with it, as well as my political views inherited from childhood.  Many scholars aspire to a dispassionate and even censorious attitude toward the revolutionary past.  This is unsurprising, especially as in the case of Astbury’s book or Marisa Linton’s latest work, Choosing Terror, which relates the deadly infighting amongst the Jacobins in Years I and II.  When describing a family in mourning or an imminent threat, an attitude of worried concern and disapproval make sense.  “Trauma ” may be a blunt instrument to describe it, but it is certain that events of 1793-94 caused widespread and negative emotional impact on some parts of the French citizenry.

But for me, it is the accomplishments of the Revolution that ultimately win out and merit our friendly concern.  When I think about the persona I’d like the reader to take away from The Frankenstein of 1790, it is that of a story-teller and long-distance sympathizer.  I’d like the reader to enjoy the great stories and larger-than-life characters of this period and be intrigued to look around and see what else carries on their legacy today.  That’s the “newness” of the positivistic approach I’m endorsing.

Hybrid and marked by their own provenance, as all books must be, my work could be considered as arising from the same spirit of Pierre-Francois Palloy, the man who excavated and then repurposed the stones of the Bastille into an entire industry of miniatures, toys, and souvenir items of political memory.  As described by Richard Taws in his new book The Politics of the Provisional, Palloy’s contributions need to be appreciated in two ways: 1) as deeply rooted in the original sources; and 2) as constantly involved in the process of making themselves anew.   Taws argues that Palloy’s work is important “for its troubling insistence on the persistence of the past in the revolutionary present; for complicating the straightforward division of objects, histories, and people into new and old; and for forcing reflection upon the paradoxical conditions of materiality in 1790s France.”[4]

May we all aspire to such a feat!

[1] Founded by Catherine Gallagher (English, UCBerkeley) and Judith Butler (Rhetoric, UC-Santa Cruz), the series now operates out of Northwestern UP.  The editorial board includes Ali Behdad, Edward Dimendberg, Jody Greene, Susan Gillman, and Richard Terdiman.

[2] For more on Comte’s intentions, see Larry Laudan, “Towards a Reassessment of Comte’s méthode positive,”

Philosophy of Science, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Mar., 1971): 35-53.

[3] Cited in Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 276.

[4] Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (University Park, PA:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 107.

Revolutionary Afterlives, by Mary McAlpin

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I’ll briefly address the two books under discussion today, then turn to the question of raised by the title of this panel: Why do we continue to care about the Revolution?

First to the books. Julia and Kate’s studies come together by virtue of a shared interest in “politically inflected” literary texts from the post-Revolutionary period. I have borrowed the term “politically inflected” from the introduction to The Frankenstein of 1790, because I find it so very useful in describing the texts at the heart of these two studies. As both Julia and Kate emphasize in their introductions, the fiction produced during and immediately after the Revolution has some claim to the status of “most neglected literary corpus in French history.” And yet, it is eminently reasonable to assume that this body of literature has something important to tell us about the Revolution; for how could an event of this magnitude, incorporating so many reversals, and so much violence, NOT be omnipresent in the cultural imagination of the time, and thus in the fiction of the period? And so both Kate and Julia argue for an “inflection” in these texts toward the Revolution, in the etymological sense of “bending toward,” with all this implies of a certain plant-like tropism, as if the Revolution were exerting an inexorable pull on the authorial imagination of the time.

The manner in which Kate and Julia argue for the revelatory power of this inflection makes these two studies very much deserving of the attention we are giving them at this panel. Nevertheless, to the extent that these works are problematic for me, these concerns grow out of the need that each author feels to convince her readers that the literature of this period has something, and something important, to say about the Revolution. I’ll start with Julia’s book, which I had the pleasure of reviewing.

One of the most striking aspects of Julia’s study is the variety of the material she addresses. Julia mentions in her introduction that in preparing to write this study, she examined some 300 works of fiction, and in a sense, the very volume of texts taken into consideration negates the question of their literary value—they act as a data set, rather than as individual works of art. But Julia of course does offer interpretations of some of these obscure works, using a theoretical framework she labels “new positivism.” This interpretive philosophy can be summarized as follows: One must posit a literal meaning for a text; but one must simultaneously accept that this “literal” meaning is subject to change over time.

It would be easy to dismiss this approach as an attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too—that is, to keep one’s postmodernist credentials intact, while simultaneously ignoring the greater claims to skepticism implied by postmodernism’s openness to undecidability. I however very much appreciate Julia’s willingness to make interpretive claims, based on textual evidence, within a particular historical context. As is always the case, the more unexpected the interpretive claims, the greater the satisfaction when the reader accepts their validity, and in this respect The Frankenstein of 1790 most certainly does not disappoint. In particular, Julia demonstrates a breathtaking openness to arguments of influence. She traces, that is to say, intertextual connections over time based on what might seem at first glance to be very tenuous similarities. I’m referring here to the coda to each chapter, in which Julia links the quite obscure texts she has discovered to later works. The most striking claim to parentage, at least in my eyes, comes in chapter three, in which Julia argues that Louis XVI morphs, over time, into le Père Goriot.

But what I like most about these codas is that, in accordance with the interpretive openness she values, Julia makes no attempt to erase or gloss over the occasional fragility of the connections she makes. And although I was in each case quite convinced by the links Julia made, I am nevertheless interested in her argument for the interpretive validity of her codas, beyond the test of reader response. I’m thinking in particular of the work she references in her title, François-Félix Nogaret’s Le Miroir des événements actuels. One of the characters in this text, an inventor of automatons named Wak-wik-vauk-on-son-frankénsteïn, is of course read in Julia’s coda as an ancestor of the famous scientist from Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818—but  Julia acknowledges that she has found no direct parentage between the two Frankensteins. And so my questions for Julia are the following: To what extent would the discovery that Shelley had read Nogaret reinforce the validity of her claims concerning the link between the two texts? And secondly, to what extent does the Frankenstein of 1790 deserve to be resuscitated, independently of Shelley’s masterpiece?

On to Kate, who begins with a methodological nod to Robert Darnton, who in the Forbidden Bestsellers of Revolutionary France advised critics interested in the relationship between Revolutionary life and literature to look for disparities, rather than continuities. This method proves quite fruitful for Kate, who notes that some of the works she considers achieved best-selling status in the post-Revolutionary period, and therefore MUST have been speaking, in some significant way, to the cultural consciousness of the day, despite what previous critics have argued. I especially like Kate defense of fiction as a privileged mode, even in, or rather especially in, periods of great political and cultural upheaval. Chaos compels us, she argues, to seek to make sense of our world-turned-upside-down and of our personal experiences with this reversal, or revolution. The often horrific experiences associated with the Revolution leads us into trauma theory, although Kate is interested not as much in individual trauma as she is in communal trauma—a fascinating concept in and of itself.

Kate observes evidence in the body of literary texts she has examined of a process of return and delay. Return, in the sense that, in the initial period of the Revolutionary aftermath, Ancien Régime tropes, settings, and characters dominate, to a surprising degree, in the works of both proponents and opponents of the Revolution. Kate interprets this return to the known—to stability—not as an absence, but rather as an active response to trauma. In this way, she pushes back the date at which literary treatments of the Revolution can be said to begin. But Kate also insists on the presence of a delay, namely in writing about personal experiences of Revolutionary events, as in the émigré novels that would be become so popular. This theory of coping with trauma by means of an initial sentimental return to the relatively stable past, followed by a subsequent movement toward a horror that is, by that time, already receding into the past, is fascinating. But my question for Kate involves esthetic value in relation to trauma theory : a difficult, perhaps impossible question, but on to which I returned several times in reading her study. My question is : Given the inflection of this body of literature toward the trauma of the Revolution, does this compulsion imply an esthetic wound as well as a psychic wound? Put more simply, are these works “bad” for the most interesting of reasons?

Finally, I’ll turn to the vast, somewhat frightening question posed by our panel’s title : Why do we continue to care about the Revolution? In answering this question, I decided to take the cowardly scholar’s way out, that is, to turn, once again, to etymology. The first entry in the OED for “care, noun,” is : Mental suffering, sorrow, grief, trouble. This obsolete sense of the word is certainly associated with the study of the French Revolution, but I imagine that the meaning intended by the organizers of this panel is rather number 3.a of the OED entry : Serious or grave mental attention; the charging of the mind with anything; concern; heed, heedfulness, attention, regard; caution, pains. Entry 4 also seems appropriate in this context: oversight with a view to protection, preservation, or guidance. Hence to have the care of , etc. to take care of : to look after.

One of the most admirable traits of the two studies under discussion today is that they do “care” very much—that is, take seriously, look after, seek to preserve—a much neglected body of literature, at a time when literary studies, like the humanities in general, is itself much neglected, or at least underappreciated. But it is important to note that for both Kate and Julia, what makes this literature of critical value is its relationship to the Revolution. It is the Revolution that returns these texts to readability—brings them back to life, if you will, à la Shelley’s monster. In a certain sense, then, one can argue that the Revolution takes care of us, with “us”—or rather the “we” of the panel’s title—understood to be scholars of eighteenth-century French literature. The Revolution gives a continuing relevance, a sense of analytical urgency, to our field, a relevance that might otherwise be difficult to evoke, especially in the eyes of our students. In any case—and I’ll end here—we have no choice but to “care” about the Revolution, if only in the diluted sense of “to take heed of.” We inflect toward this event, so to speak, to the extent that resisting the teleological pull of 1789 is one of the principal challenges of working on Ancien Régime France. We are in a state of mutual care and dependence with the Revolution, and we benefit greatly from this relationship, as these two excellent monographs demonstrate.­