The Body and the French Revolution

Sex, Class and Political Culture

Dorinda Outram

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032126388
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000534597
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book, first published in 1989, is an analysis of what changed in 1789 with the French Revolution and what contemporary life owes to the event. It was not simply a series of events with worldwide repercussions, but also represented the foundation of the middle-class domination of social, cultural and political space, which survives today and is the site of major crises of public culture. One such site is the body. In spite of its prominence in consumer culture as an object of adornment and beautification, the human body retains none of its historic dignity and authority. The argument of this book is that the French Revolution played a crucial part in this diminution of the body. It traces revolutionary models of behaviour around the body and public life, and explains how such myths as the division between public and private, male and female worlds, and such masculine values as 'objectivity' were an integral part of the new public world created by the revolutionary middle class.

1 The Problem of the Body in Political Culture

The patriots of France have discovered in good time that rank and dignity in society must take a new ground. The old one has fallen through.

Tom Paine, The Rights of Man¹

The physical body is at once our most intimate experience and our most inescapable public form. Because it is at once so inalienably private and so ineluctably public, it has also formed, in most western cultures, the most basic political resource. It has been used as an image of the order of state and society: the bearing, features and physical dignity – what the classical world labelled as gravitas – of rulers and great men has traditionally been the means, as it still is in the nations of the Third World, by which power is wielded and authority imposed. In the world of the twentieth century, the body as we experience it in western society faces us with many problems. What are our bodies for? Beyond the satisfaction of immediate biological needs for survival and of the production of pleasure, the experience of living in western societies today provides few answers to this question and none which involve the compulsive linkage to the public sphere, to structures of power, authority and order, which was commonplace in the pre-modern world. Least of all is there an awareness of any sort of sacralized picture of the body. Christianity itself was built around the transformation of the physical suffering of one particular body into the redemption of the world. Through that image, individuals were able to transform suffering, death and biological life events (the history of their own, intimately experienced body) into events of universal moral and spiritual significance. All these trends together – the conflict over the acceptance of the sacralized body, and the expulsion of the body as a symbol from the publicworld – mean that individuals are left with bodies whose experiences seem ineluctably private. So basic is this fact to the nature of modern political systems, that when the nature of this privacy is challenged, as for example by feminism, a new political movement is born.

Modern societies in the West are also heir to several other problems which intimately concern the body both as public symbol and as private experience. Most obviously, these societies have experienced the full force of totalitarian regimes whose political styles are characterized by an extreme focus on the public body, demeanour and physical projection of a charismatic leadership figure. Such regimes are also characterized by a very specific set of attitudes towards the human body itself, involving a total desacralization of the body; the ultimate expression of these attitudes was the concentration camp, but they were experienced also through the entire organization of mass politics, which used physical violence against opponents and massed presentation of individuals as testimony to a leader’s charisma and success. Such regimes might be thought, in spite of the deep scars they have left on the twentieth century, and in spite of the fact that regimes such as those still in existence today in the military states of Latin America emulate their most salient features, to have been aberrations from an assumed norm of the ‘liberal-democratic’ state which, it is often assumed, gradually emerged in Europe after the French Revolution and after industrialization. It is one of the arguments of this book that the French Revolution in fact unleashed changes in the public presentation and public significance of the bodies of individuals which were crucial in the formation of public space in the nineteenth century; and that this public space was ripe for a takeover of power along the lines of the totalitarian movements in the twentieth century.

This book focuses on the period of the Revolution in France, a period which lasts, in the acute form of political conflict and change, from approximately 1787 to 1799, when fighting between various factional groups among the middle-class successors of the monarchy for control of the shape of the new republic and the definition of public space was temporarily halted by the advent of Napoleon Bonaparte. The French Revolution was important because it led to the political and cultural victory of the middle class over the monarchy and aristocracy, and this became the main pattern of development of other Western European states. But such a triumph also faced the middle class, and especially its leading edge of individuals and groups engaged in the production of political forms, symbols and practices, with huge problems. It was not only that, on the level of practical politics, the monarchical organization of government had to be replaced at virtually every level; it was also that in order for that politics to be practicable the legitimacy of its practitioners also had to be construtted, validated, and made continually visible in a newly-defined public space.

In the event, the Revolution failed to construct a ‘modern state’, however that is defined. Rather, what occurred was a series of transformation scenes, in which forms of government and ruling factions succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity and in which public space itself became increasingly crucial and increasingly ambiguous, as the introduction of mass political participation put new stresses on the ability to retain power. It was perhaps this very introduction of mass participation into French political life during the Revolution which has made the state forms produced by it look deceptively modern. Twentieth-century western states are, after all, distinguished by this very feature. But in fact the French Revolution failed to create coherent, stable, effective, widely accepted organs of government. It also failed to create organs of government which were easily distinguishable from the individuals and clienteles to whom their operation was entrusted. ‘Objective’, in the Weberian sense, the French state was not. The great retardation of industrialization in France also meant that the government of France was for most even of the nineteenth century deprived of the possibility of extracting a significant surplus from the national economy; and without that surplus, the expansive and extensive mechanism of a modern state was impossible to create. This meant, in turn, that the construction of public value systems did not transform itself as the century proceeded. The dependence of all French political groups on the rhetoric, mythology and political roles produced by the Revolution was noted by Karl Marx forty years afterwards, in 1848, and continued for many years after.

The Revolution did not create a state: rather it created a new and sensitive public space. In this public space competing discourses were produced, usually by fractions of the middle class, which attempted to legitimize one version of the new forms of government over the other. No one discourse ever obtained a decisive victory. It is this fact which is a pre-condition for the weakness and disunion of French political culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and for the consequent later take-over of civil society in France by corporative fractions of the state apparatus. The collapsing into one another of state and civil society is one of the most distinctive pre-conditions for the appearance of a mass politics along the lines of twentieth-century Fascist states, and of this process the French state is, if not the most extreme example, the laboratory experiment for the rest of Europe.

Why should we be approaching this argument through a history of the body in the public sphere? One of the answers to this question is simple: that one of the most important of the tasks facing the middle class of the French Revolution was the re-creation of a public sphere which for centuries had been dominated and defined by two key concepts: by images of the body politic and of the king’s body. As many historians have pointed out, much of the political culture produced by the Revolution was aimed, whether successfully or not, at redistributing various attributes of the king’s body throughout the new body politic. The public space of France before 1789 had also focused on an image of heroic public dignity almost exclusively applied to monarchy and aristocracy: it was such images that the middle class had to re-create. The new public bodies which they created and filled with attributes of heroic dignity were in turn inconceivable without, and were created for, the audiences that mass politics made possible. They possessed the power, which the competing linguistic discourses obviously did not, to focus dignity and legitimacy in incontestable, because non-verbal, ways on the bodies of known individuals who acted as personifications of value systems. In creating audiences for bodies of heroic dignity, the middle class were also creating the audiences without which their own actions, in public space, and hence public space itself, would have been inconceivable. So from the beginning, the creation of a public body was possibly the most important project in that still hotly debated area, which is the meaning of middle-class political dominance of the state.

It is also the case that the history of the body allows us to explore and to challenge some of the most powerful paradigms which dominate the analysis of history and of society today: in other words, some of the most persuasive attempts made to tell us who we in the West actually are – or are not. Both Marxism and ‘liberalism’, the two most available ideologies of identity for the political class, have come under severe challenge in post-war thinking in Western Europe. Increasingly, philosophers such as Michel Foucault have challenged, firstly, the key liberal idea that history is about the actions and reactions of ‘subjects’ – separately acting individuals searching for identities based on personal autonomy. After proclaiming the famous ‘death of the subject’, Foucault and others have also gone on to contest the Marxist idea of a hierarchy of different levels of historical causality among different levels of the economy and society. Following Foucault’s lead, it is currently fashionable to treat the way we explain our social predicaments in terms of an ‘ecology’ of causes, whereby it becomes difficult to privilege any one area of explanation over any other.

But there are great problems with this account. Firstly, it produces a counter-intuitive history from which individuals and their subjectivity have been peremptorily removed; while yet each one of us still experiences him or herself as irreducibly individual. Such a history, while performing the service of reminding us that history cannot be totally constructed out of the histories of individuals, also colludes with the mass politics of the twentieth century, with its devaluation of the individual historical actor and its remorseless devaluation of the human body, rather than showing any way forward to mount a challenge to it. Foucault’s analysis of the authority relationships built into the control of the body in the modern world is itself as authoritarian and as dismissive of individuals as the political system it aspires to criticize. A history, to be non-collusive with current political/social trends, on the other hand, should and must focus on the body, in a quite different way from that adopted by Foucault, because the body is the only space in which intentionality can be restored to the historical subject and, at the same time, come together with that subject’s connection with, transformation of, and manifestation of, current cultural paradigms.

Like a prism, the body has a unique capacity to concentrate together in the same space different rays from the surrounding world, and to re-emit light re-charged and differentiated. Intentionality and episteme come together, and subjective experience can be assessed as something other than simply a personalized anarchy. We can thus escape from the false dichotomies between forms of history from which individuals have been banished, and forms in which they are the only subject matter, and enter a history of inter-subjectivity, in which the structural forms of interlocking private experiences become the text. Such a viewpoint also enables us, finally, to assess ways of making bodies again important in modern civil society: bodies are important because the only experiences which cannot be co-opted by political systems are the inevitably personal bodily experiences of individuals. They are thus also one of the few resources through which genuinely new political systems might be created.

By assessing the success and failures of the French revolutionaries in a similar project, we learn much about the potentialities of our own political future. It will be the argument of this book that it was precisely the failure of the Revolution, in spite of many attempts, to produce enduring and practical models for the dignified public body which led ultimately to the paradoxes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics: that individuals deprived of public worth or visibility for their physicality, came increasingly to focus on the manifest public bodies of individual charismatic leaders; and that this allowed such leaders, playing on the frailty of the public roles of the majority of individuals, to construct a political ideology based on the construction of super-heroes who would destroy mysterious others, possessed of different bodies, such as Jews or gypsies, who threatened the frail public body itself.

2 Modern Histories of the Body

Children like to touch clothes and other things that please them with their hands. This urge must be corrected and they must be taught to touch all that they see only with their eyes.

J. de La Salle, Civilité¹

In a famous catch-phrase, Barthes observes that it is the nature of myth to turn historical event into natural object.² It should thus follow that histories of the body cannot be mythological. But in fact, historians of the body have perpetrated as many myths as any inhabitant of the Tristes tropiques or editor of Marie-Claire. Current historical focus on ‘the history of the body’ has itself to be critically examined if we are to gain understanding of what is involved in writing about the body in a historical way, and if we are to be able to define freshly the scope of a book which dares to integrate two such extensively – and very differently – invested areas as the history of the French Revolution and the history of the body.

Since the reception of Michel Foucault’s work in the Anglo-Saxon intellectual world, the ‘history of the body’ has achieved widespread acceptance as a distinct area of historical interest.³ In fact, so much has it, in spite of the initially highly critical reaction to Foucault in many quarters, become a tolerated part of the intellectual landscape that it also seems to have become curiously exempt – as all good Barthean myths are – from enquiries into its origins and into its political implications and directions. But the attempt to situate historiographically these current histories of the body cannot be avoided if they are truly to become part of a generally applicable repertoire of explanatory tools for large historical developments, rather than remaining, as they are now, an accepted, but none the less isolated part of historical practice. To demonstrate that ‘histories of the body’ and ‘big history’ can be integrated is one of the purposes of this book.

Foucault, of course, is not the only contributor to this field. Very different, and important, histories have been constructed in the twentieth century by individuals such as Norbert Elias.⁴ At the same time, for example, feminist historians have, in spite of their differences, also produced a specific history of the (female) body, as have the medical historians and, by implication, the family historians likewise,⁵ to set against the gender-blind histories of Elias and Foucault. All these accounts have in common, at least in the Anglo-Saxon historical world, their association with fractional history, ‘history of...’, rather than general history. Though well known and prestigious, they are not absorbed and integrated. Standard histories of the ‘classical age’, or of the growth of state power, manage their accounts with no more than token nods in the directions of Foucault or Elias; in other words, history of the body is associated with the fractionalization of history, rather than its integration. Few indeed are the attempts made to integrate histories of the body with histoire événementielle. These ‘histories’ also of course themselves fractionalize far older genres in the history of the body, genres which were far more closely integrated into a general historical outlook: this would go for both classical and Christian histories.⁶

Part of the problem lies in the fact that histories of the body are not neutral, ideologically, in the way that some, though not all, general history, claims to be. It is not only that they all involve specific claims about the nature of power, but also that their historical analyses of the body are made in relation to specific philosophies and specific external ideological predicaments which are often not explicitly acknowledged. To gain a real understanding of the ways these different histories of the body are presented, and to re-fashion them, we have to find out where they come from. To do anything else is to treat them either as accidents or as Barthean myths.

Modern histories of the body originated during the same era as the high point of European Fascism. The 1930s and 1940s saw an intense focus in many of the social sciences which fed into historical enquiry on the social functions of the human body.⁷ In anthropology, studies by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson tackled the problem of the relationship between cultures and physical expression; social psychologists began to map the gestures of aggression and inferiority; the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents as well as other works produced a shift of attention to ideas that might integrate physical control and physical self-image with prevailing ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Problem of the Body in Political Culture
• 2 Modern Histories of the Body
• 3 Deconstructing the French Revolution
• 4 The Eighteenth-Century Medical Revolution: Bodies, Souls and the Social Classes
• 5 A New Public Body: Stoicism, Suffering and the Middle Class in the French Revolution
• 6 Heroic Suicide: The End of the Body and the Beginning of History
• 7 The Guillotine, the Soul and the Audience for Death
• 8 Words and Flesh: Mme Roland, the Female Body and the Search for Power
• 9 The French Revolution, Modernity and the Body Politic
• Notes
• Index