The Romantic Period

The Intellectual & Cultural Context of English Literature 1789-1830

Robin Jarvis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317877424
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

The Romantic Period was one of the most exciting periods in English literary history. This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date account of the intellectual and cultural background to Romantic literature. It is accessibly written and avoids theoretical jargon, providing a solid foundation for students to make their own sense of the poetry, fiction and other creative writing that emerged as part of the Romantic literary tradition.

Chapte One The Political and Economic Scene

DOI: 10.4324/9781315838625-1

Revolution

An event described by one of the leading English Romantic poets as ‘the master-theme of the epoch in which we live’ has obvious claims to be put first in any contextual study of the period. It is inconvenient that the event Shelley refers to – the French Revolution – is one which has been the source of profound and lasting disagreement among historians, and the subject of a frightening estimated two thousand publications a year; inevitably, the version of the Revolution that literature students are served up is vastly simplified and possibly very partisan. To make matters worse, the other revolution that traditionally features in introductions to the period, the industrial revolution (discussed in a later section), is a historical battlefield of similar proportions. The student is therefore required to come to terms with a ‘dual revolution’¹ the causes, nature, consequences – even the very existence – of which are hotly contested; nevertheless, the obligation to offer some kind of route map of this disputed territory is clear.

Although frequently described as a ‘world-historical event’ of immense significance, the word ‘event’ is awkwardly applied to the French Revolution, which appears rather as a concatenation of events stretching over a number of years – a complex process, riddled with contingency, with no inevitable beginning and no predetermined outcome. Popular identification of the Revolution with a single day of action, the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, finds little support among historians, who tend rather to distinguish a ‘pre-Revolution’ from the Revolution itself, and to dissolve the unity of the latter into multiple overlapping phenomena: a ‘bourgeois revolution’ and a ‘popular revolution’; the revolution in Paris, the municipal revolution in provincial towns, the revolution in the countryside. What seems reasonably clear is that the events of 1789, which amounted to the collapse of an entire social and political system, were the product of accumulating tensions and discontents at all levels of society, exaggerated by accidents of nature and given expression in a new political vocabulary disseminated by Enlightenment thinkers. The aristocracy resisted attempts to make it bear the crippling cost of the country’s involvement in the American War of Independence; the bourgeoisie increasingly resented barriers to free trade, their exclusion from public office, and their lack of representation in government; the peasantry reacted angrily to measures taken by ‘improving’ landowners to raise productivity and the imposition of new feudal obligations; and they, in common with urban wage-earners and craftsmen, were hit hard by disastrous harvests in 1787–9 which pushed food prices up to starvation levels. There was, therefore, as George Rudé describes it, a ‘merging’ of quite separate movements that, by the middle of 1789, had produced a ‘common bond of interest’ between the urban and rural labouring classes and the more politically motivated bourgeoisie.² What began as an ‘aristocratic revolt’ against the royal government thus turned in 1789 into a revolt of the ‘Third Estate’ (basically everyone except the nobility and the clergy) against the privileged orders, a conflict that became a challenge to the very legitimacy of the state. The course of the Revolution was thenceforth determined at key points by just such unstable alliances between the propertied classes and the common people as occurred in Paris on 14 July, or again on 5 October when the men and women of Paris marched to Versailles and, through overwhelming force, secured the king’s acceptance of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

The development of the Revolution was rapid and bewildering, as illustrated by the fact that France went through three constitutions in five years, none of which lasted long enough to be fully implemented. It was variously exhilarating, empowering, disorientating, or terrifying, depending on one’s point of view and the fortunes of the moment. In the first phase of the Revolution, the self-declared National Assembly replaced absolute with constitutional monarchy and devised a Constitution (1791) which, building on the principles enshrined in the 1789 Declaration (liberty, equality, fraternity), established a limited form of representative government, refashioned the administrative and judicial systems from scratch, and drastically curtailed the wealth and status of the Church. The violent overthrow of the king in August 1792 and his execution early the following year took the Revolution in what would now be called a ‘far Left’ direction, masterminded by the more populist Jacobin faction within the new National Convention and its enigmatic leader, Maximilien Robespierre. The Jacobin constitution of 1793, which provided for full male suffrage, a right to work or welfare for all, freedom of worship and universal primary education, was the most radical the world had ever seen; it was quietly shelved under pressure of war and civil disorder, to be replaced by an authoritarian revolutionary government dispensing summary justice (the ‘Reign of Terror’) through the infamously titled Committee of Public Safety. When Robespierre fell victim to a renewed power struggle in July 1794, the Revolution fell into the hands of much more moderate and business-minded republicans, who produced their own Constitution (1795) that enshrined government by men of property and good education. However, the new regime proved unstable, with the Directory (as it was called) seesawing between Jacobin survivors on the left and a royalist revival on the right, and eventually republican diehards persuaded the rising military hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, to take control in a coup d’état in November 1799.

This event conventionally marks the end of the Revolutionary decade: with Napoleon’s rapid rise from First Consul (within a triumvirate) in 1800 to Consul for life in 1802 to hereditary Emperor in 1804, military dictatorship extinguished the beleaguered experiment in democratic republicanism. It is, of course, as a military genius and imperial colossus that Napoleon is best known: having moved from defending the infant republic, to exporting revolution to sympathetic neighbour states, to unfettered imperial expansionism, by 1812 the territory under his command or influence stretched from Copenhagen in the north to Naples in the south, and from Cadiz in the west to Warsaw in the east. Nevertheless, social and political reform was consolidated or extended during Napoleon’s reign. The Civil Code, or Napoleonic Code, promulgated in 1804 was applied to all territories under direct French control and was an innovation of lasting international significance. It coupled the consolidation of the egalitarian principles of 1789, encompassing the destruction of feudalism, abolition of primogeniture, and religious toleration, with a reactionary authoritarianism on matters concerning the family and gender relations. Throughout the Empire, Napoleon promoted to varying degrees equality before the law, civil marriage, secular education, and individual property rights, though he also discarded unwelcome principles like popular sovereignty and representative government and reinstated slavery in French colonies. It is not hard to see why he is seen as having ‘fulfilled and distorted the legacy of the French Revolution’.³

That legacy was substantial and durable, despite the restitution of monarchical regimes in France and across Europe after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the establishment of a new conservative balance of power on the Continent. The monarchy, the aristocracy, and the Church all suffered permanent loss of status, privileges, and authority, and the resulting society was more open and fluid and reflected more clearly the interests of the middle classes. The orthodox ‘Marxist’ interpretation of the Revolution is therefore that it began the inevitable historical process of modernising society and paved the way for the development of industrial capitalism. More recently this interpretation has been criticised for its alleged overidentification with the perceptions of certain favoured participants within the revolutionary drama itself. Firmly rejecting a tradition of what he calls ‘commemorative’ historiography, François Furet has challenged both the assumption that the Revolution constituted a radical break with the past and the notion of its historical inevitability: the ‘occupational disease’ of historians, he observes, is ‘to reduce the potential outcomes of a situation to a single one, since it alone occurred’. For Furet, nothing can mitigate the sheer singularity of the revolutionary phenomenon, ‘a new type of historical action and consciousness’ that took shape within the power vacuum that developed in France in the late 1780s. Irreducible to socioeconomic causes, what emerged from a fortuitous convergence of events was something definitively political: a new belief in the capacity of human beings to determine their lives through collective action – democratic politics not as a set of institutions but as a ‘national ideology’. According to Furet, the ‘secret of the success of 1789, its message and its lasting influence lie in that invention, which was unprecedented and whose legacy was to be so widespread’.⁴

It is therefore only a particular kind of ‘radical break’ – one that assumes that ancien régime France was socially and economically moribund – that Furet and others would disallow. For innovation was indeed everywhere in the 1790s: the revolutionary vanguard set out to change everything, from the administrative map of France to the very organisation of time and space (the revolutionary calendar used between 1793 and 1805 created a week of ten days, while the metre and the gram applied the decimal principle to weights and measures). In a general retrospect written in the bicentenary year, Robert Darnton, disturbed though he is by the ‘mystery’ of revolutionary violence, remains overawed by the complementary ‘utopian energy’, the sense of ‘possibilism against the givenness of things’ that provides the most conspicuous face of the Revolution:

How can we grasp those moments of madness, of suspended disbelief, when anything looked possible and the world appeared as a tabula rasa, wiped clean by a surge of popular emotion and ready to be redesigned?⁵

Such euphoric ‘possibilism’ was, for a time, shared in Britain, where early responses to the Revolution were broadly favourable. The legal reformer, Samuel Romilly, declared that the Revolution should be especially welcome to Englishmen, who ‘have long known the value of liberty, and many of whom are descended from ancestors who had the honor of shedding their blood in its defence’. He also highlighted the advantages for Britain of what had happened on the Continent, naively asserting that hostilities with France, its oldest enemy, would now be a thing of the past, since France would require the consent of its people to go to war: ‘no force formidable to the liberties of this country can ever exist, while France is free.’⁶ This combination of self-regarding applause (seeing the French Revolution as a belated successor to England’s own ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, by which constitutional monarchy was established) and political pragmatism was typical of the early liberal or Whig reaction. Radicals, on the other hand, who were less enamoured of the virtues of the British constitution, were more likely to see the Revolution as an inspiration for social change both domestically and further afield. The radical peer, Charles Stanhope, compared new French legislation on religious toleration favourably with the English Test and Corporation Acts that barred Catholics and Protestant Dissenters from public office, and declared that the Revolution would ‘disseminate throughout Europe, liberality of sentiment, and a just regard for Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty’.⁷ It should also be noted that conservatives were by no means antagonistic to the Revolution at first: even William Pitt, the Prime Minister, thought that ‘The present convulsions of France must, sooner or later, terminate in general harmony and regular order’.⁸

This fragile, positive consensus across the political spectrum lasted at best until the middle of 1792. The dramatic raising of the revolutionary temperature, epitomised by the so-called ‘September Massacres’ of suspected traitors and plotters, and the execution of Louis XVI, rapidly polarised opinion in Britain. In Parliament, the unity of the Whig opposition, already strained after its muddled response to the Regency crisis of 1788–9, worsened into a formal party split: its leader, Charles James Fox, was left at the head of around fifty diehard radicals and reformers, while the remaining conservative Whigs entered an alliance with Pitt to form a powerful coalition in defence of property and the existing order. The authorities became increasingly preoccupied with the perceived threat of insurrection from ‘English Jacobins’, a catch-all term to denote anyone who persisted in the cause of reform or who sought the importation of ‘French principles’. The most notorious official outcomes of this backlash were the ‘Treason Trials’ of three leading radicals in 1794, by which the government hoped to deliver a crushing blow to dissidence, and the ‘Two Acts’ of 1795, which extended the law of treason to the spoken and written word and clamped down on public meetings. The trials resulted (sensationally) in acquittal, and the new legislation was in fact rarely deployed, but the combination of these legal measures with more covert machinery of repression (such as an elaborate spy network) and a systematic government-backed propaganda campaign succeeded in uniting the propertied classes behind King and Constitution, and the radical movement was effectively driven underground or relegated to clandestine plotting by the mid-1790s.

The Revolution and its aftermath had other, far-reaching consequences for the ‘state of the nation’. Great Britain had been created in 1707 by the Act of Union, joining the kingdoms of England and Scotland. The motive for Union had been to prevent the Scots choosing James Edward Stuart (the ‘Old Pretender’) as their next monarch, which would have raised the spectre of a Catholic dynasty on England’s doorstep. Support from Scottish Highlanders for the Jacobite rebellions in 1715 and 1745 meant that mutual suspicion and aggression between the English and the Scots remained strong for much of the century, but the concept of a British identity had begun slowly to take hold. This process was helped significantly by the large numbers of Scots who enlisted in the war against Revolutionary France, either in the regular army or in volunteer regiments, and who thus promoted the ideal of a British nation in arms. Wales was differently circumstanced: its connection to England was much older, yet in some respects (such as a separate language spoken by the majority of the population) it was still a foreign country. Mobilisation of Welshmen during the war helped to fray this internal border and further the process of integrating the ‘Celtic fringe’ within the nation as a whole.

However, it was on Britain’s relation to its troublesome colony, Ireland, that the Revolution had its greatest impact. In the eighteenth century Ireland consisted essentially of a Catholic peasantry exploited by absentee Protestant landlords and governed by a corrupt, pseudo-autonomous Parliament that chiefly minded British interests. Under the direct inspiration of the French Revolution, the United Irish Society was formed in 1791 as a moderate, cross-denominational reform movement, its early development hindered by tensions between Protestants (its leader, Wolfe Tone, was a Protestant) and Catholics. Suppressed in 1794, it re-emerged as a revolutionary society and looked to France to provide military assistance to the ‘friends of liberty’. A French invasion in December 1796 was in fact only derailed by a string of accidents. A brutal campaign of repression in 1797–8 then caused plans for a full-blown United Irish rebellion to be brought forward before the French – preoccupied in Egypt – were ready, and the result was a bloodbath in which twenty thousand people lost their lives. One consequence of the rebellion was a widening of the religious divide, or, in Marianne ...