Introduction: The French Revolution in Culture: New Approaches and Perspectives

Author(s): Lynn Hunt

Source: Eighteenth-Century Studies , Spring, 1989, Vol. 22, No. 3, Special Issue: The
French Revolution in Culture (Spring, 1989), pp. 293-301
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sponsor: American Society for
Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS).

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 The French Revolution in Culture
New Approaches and Perspectives

Introduction

LYNN HUNT

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION has been described in some recent works by M

historians as a "cultural revolution," with all that the phrase connotes of efforts
to create a "new man" through the mobilization of a revolutionary culture.' Al-
though this view has proved illuminating in many respects, especially as a descrip-
tion of the cultural policies of the Jacobin government of 1792-94, the culture
in this cultural revolution is ambiguous, even paradoxical. The phrase "cultural
revolution" is based on analogies to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in which
culture was meant to be entirely subservient to politics. As Mao asserted at
a Red Guard rally in 1966, "You should put politics in command, go to the masses
and be one with them, and carry on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
even better.'2 In the Chinese view of cultural revolution, culture serves the in-
terests of the state; in a sense, it ceases being culture in the usual sense of the
term because it no longer represents a society's many (and usually independent)
ways of making sense of the world. Culture thus becomes another word for po-
litical re-education, or what the Jacobins called, regeneration.
Specialists in "high culture"-historians of art, literature, theater-never use
the term "cultural revolution" to refer the decade of the French Revolution. For
them, the French Revolution marked more of a cultural wasteland than a revo-
lution in style or content. It is generally agreed among art historians, for ex-
ample, that the Revolution did not fundamentally change painting styles, and
that these tumultuous years left no enduring architectural monuments.3 The
revolutionaries themselves expressed worries about the effects of revolutionary

I Serge Bianchi, La Revolution culturelle de lIn II: Elites etpeuple (1789-1799) (Paris:
Aubier Montaigne, 1982).
2 As quoted by Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, rev. ed.
(London: C. Nicholls, 1971), p. 369.
Quote from Antoine Schnapper, "Painting during the Revolution, 1789-1799," in
French Painting 1774-1830: The Age of Revolution (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press,
1975).

293

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 294 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

effervescence on the nation's cultural heritage. One of the revolutionary leaders

most interested in cultural affairs, Henri Gregoire, coined the term "vandalism"
to condemn the extremities to which some had gone in the destruction of all
the physical reminders of royalty, aristocracy, and feudalism.4 In the counter-
revolutionary imagination, and in the view of many contemporaries in other
countries, the Revolution was associated above all else with the defacement and
demolition of France's great artistic patrimony: knocking off the heads of kings
on the portals of Notre-Dame cathedral, selling the stones of Cluny monastery
to the highest bidder, and tearing down the statue of Louis XIV in the place
des Victoires in Paris were simply notorious examples of a widespread problem.

The essays presented here treat culture in a different fashion from either of
the two kinds of positions outlined above. They look for culture neither in the
official re-education programs of the revolutionary leadership nor in the more
conventional realms of literature or art. Rather, they look at culture in more
surprising places: in the informal institution of the salon, in learned treatises
on publishing, in farcical and facetious art criticism, in pseudo-rustic rose fes-
tivals, in inflammatory anti-ministerial diatribes, in revolutionary legislation
on publishing, in the royal entry ceremony into Paris after the fall of the Bastille,
and in pro-religious, anti-government riots during the Revolution itself. Taken
together, they offer a rich variety of new perspectives on the complex and often
unpredictable relationships between culture and the Revolution.
For all their differences in approach and subject matter, these articles share
an interest in the ways in which cultural practices can be politicized without
programmatic, governmental intervention or in a manner unintended and un-
foreseen by government officials. The inspiration for this kind of approach is
to be found in Alexis de Tocqueville's Old Regime and the French Revolution.
Because "the last traces of free public life had disappeared in France" by the
middle of the eighteenth century, he argued, "political ferment was canalized
into literature." The monarchy had displaced the nobility from its traditional
role in directing public opinion, leaving the field open to writers, who then im-
posed their "fondness for broad generalizations." The result, according to Tocque-
ville, was "nothing short of disastrous' as the revolutionaries subsequently tried
to impose their vision of "an imaginary ideal society in which all was simple,
uniform, coherent, equitable, and rational."5
Tocqueville's analysis provides an interesting link between the arguments about
"cultural revolution" and cultural devastation; for him, they are the two sides
of the same coin. The "cultural revolution" of the Jacobins -what Tocqueville
called the attempt to impose a vision of "an imaginary ideal society" had its
origins in the excessive political importance of cultural figures before the Revo-
lution. Cultural figures -Tocqueville's writers-enjoyed this political influence

4 Ferdinand Brunot, Histoire de la languefrancaise des origines a nosjours, 12 vols.,

(Paris: Armand Colin, 1966) 9 (La Revolution et l'Empire):857.
s The Old Regime and the French Revolution, tr. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday,
1955), pp. 142-47.

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 INTRODUCTION 295

because the monarchy had destroyed the normal political channels of expres-
sion in the parlements and other aristocratic political institutions. Given these
conditions, as Tocqueville asserted, "it is easy to understand why our authors
became a power in the land and ended up as its political leaders."6 High culture
made no strides forward during the Revolutionary decade because cultural figures
were either swept up into the political process as makers of "cultural revolution"-
the artist David and the philosopher Condorcet being the most striking
examples -or were washed away into the backwaters of obscurity, passivity, or
even death. High culture could hardly make headway during a revolution which
Tocqueville characterized as "carried out by [the] least educated and most un-
ruly elements," who adjusted "the writers' ideas to their lust for revenge."7
The authors of the essays on the pre-Revolutionary period in this special issue
take Tocqueville's insights as their point of departure, but they modify his views
in several important respects. The first two essays by Daniel Gordon and Dena
Goodman show that the modes and means of communicating in pre-Revolutionary
France were vital to the propagation of Enlightenment ideals. Salons, in partic-
ular, but also letters, newspapers, and the private circulation of manuscripts
all contributed to the formation of a new, more contestatory public opinion.
Tocqueville had used the term "public opinion" in a very broad, structural sense:
the nobles had lost their directing role in forming public opinion to "the writers."
Gordon and Goodman highlight the role of conversation and interchange in the
formation of public opinion rather than tha publications of the great Enlighten-
ment writers themselves. They do not depict this formation as part of a class
struggle between nobles and bourgeoisie or as a direct contest between the state
and embattled writers; instead, they show how increasingly dense networks of
conversation and publication encouraged the development of a notion of public
opinion that threatened to radically alter the framework of Old Regime monar-
chical politics.
Both Gordon and Goodman have been influenced by Keith Baker, who in
a series of articles has been tracing the rise of public opinion as an alternative
forum to the king.8 They place much greater emphasis on the salon, however,
as the central form of sociability in this development. Gordon offers a particu-
larly salient example of "the discovery of public opinion" in the works of one
author who was actively involved in salon culture, the abbe Morellet. Morellet
was not a great thinker himself, but he captured the importance of the new forms
of public opinion in various works. Morellet vaunted the advantages of conver-
sation (as well as of a free press) in the formation of public opinion, which
would provide essential information and consultation for the ministers of the
realm. Gordon places Morellet's views on conversation in a broad eighteenth-

6 The Old Regime and the French Revolution, p. 145.

7 The Old Regime and the French Revolution, p. 207.
8 See, especially, Keith Michael Baker, "Politics and Public Opinion Under the Old
Regime: Some Reflections;" in Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin, eds., Press and
Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), pp.
208-14.

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 296 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

century context, showing that the pleasure of conversation was viewed as a kind
of democracy and a locus of instruction in new ideas. With his analysis of the
theory of the art of conversation, Gordon revises Norbert Elias's work on the
civilizing process; he argues that by the end of the seventeenth century court-
inspired civility had lost its power to a new, more democratic ideal of manners
that had been fostered in the salons.9
Dena Goodman likewise emphasizes the new egalitarian values represented
in the salons, but she draws particular attention to the role of women in or-
ganizing them. She demonstrates how women apprenticed in an already estab-
lished salon before inaugurating their own. She defends the salonnieres against
Rousseau's well-known criticism that they were using their sexual charms to
corrupt and effeminize the would-be leaders of society; the salonnieres, Goodman
argues, redefined the meaning of the salon and made it into "a serious working
space" that was essential to the Republic of Letters.10 The salon hostesses also
helped maintain the correspondence networks that were critical to the wider
dissemination of the new ideals. Goodman thus underlines the gender dimen-
sion in what Jiirgen Habermas has described as the formation of a public space
in the eighteenth century.11
With the essays by Jeremy Popkin and Bernadette Fort, we move from the
world of the salons to the demi-monde of underground publishing, that "low
life of literature" made so vivid by Robert Darnton.12 Like Darnton, they show
that the canalization of political ferment into literature was not limited to the
authors of the High Enlightenment, or what Tocqueville referred to as the safe
cover of "the philosopher's cloak." Covert political criticism could be expressed
in intellectual forms that were far removed in tone and perhaps also audience
from the Encyclopedie or The Spirit of Laws. Parodic art criticism and porno-
graphic pamphlets against court figures, for instance, offered their political views
in forms shaped not by high literary style but by Grub Street techniques.
Popkin and Fort go beyond Darnton to develop their own distinctive views
of this underground literary culture. Popkin specifically takes aim at some of
Darnton's most influential arguments. He argues that the pamphlet journalists,
such as his central figure Pierre-Jacques Le Maitre, were not marginal and frus-
trated figures, but rather members of the "establishment," who had close ties
to elite patrons either in the court itself or in prosperous financial circles. In
line with recent work by Dale Van Kley and others, Popkin emphasizes the links
between the underground pamphleteers and the parlementary-Jansenist quarrels
that had agitated French politics since at least mid-century and that culminated

9 Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, vol. 1 of The Civilizing Process, English
trans., Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978).
10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and theArts: Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre,
tr. Allan Bloom (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960).
11 Jurgen Habermas, L'espace public: Archeologie de la publicite comme dimensio
constitutive de la socie't bourgeoise, tr. from the German by Marc B. de Launay (Paris
1986).
12 Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1982).

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 INTRODUCTION 297

in the ill-fated Maupeou "coup" of 1771 against the Parlements.'3 As part of the
ongoing effort to upgrade oppositional journalism from its association with hack-
writing and money-grubbing mudslinging, he compares the pamphlets of the
parlementary-Jansenist milieu to the newspapers of the Rockingham Whigs in
England under George III.
In her article Bernadette Fort shows that opposition could take forms quite
other than the explicitly political diatribe or the covertly yet nontheless obvi-
ously politically-motivated "private life." In a recent, influential book on Painters
and Public life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Thomas Crow showed the fruitful-
ness of careful reading of contemporary art criticism.'4 Fort uses the same kind
of sources, but she argues that most Salon criticism was not marked by the bitter
hostility or forthright political radicalism that Crow emphasizes. Most of it was
presented in some kind of comic mode ranging from burlesques to fantastic
narratives of every imaginable sort. Rather than dismissing them as lightweight
trifles, as most commentators have, Fort develops a different kind of analysis
emphasizing the subversion of authorial voice itself. The canonical claims of
aristocratic criticism were mocked in delightful fashion in such pamphlets as
Picque-nique convenable a' ceux quifrequentent le Salon par un aveugle. These
deliberately ephemeral publications increased their derisive bite by incorporating
figures, forms, and strategies from popular theater and from carnivalesque pro-
totypes, both ancient and contemporary. The yearly Salon was made to resemble
a Grand Guignol, and thus lost its cultural authority.
The culture of print and the culture of ritual overlap and intertwine in Sarah
Maza's analysis of the rose festivals of the late eighteenth century. The rose fes-
tival of Salency was "discovered" in 1766 by the aristocratic woman of letters,
the Comtesse de Genlis. In the 1770s and 1780s, it was imitated all over northern
France and memorialized in plays and pastorales. A legal battle between the
local lord and the villagers of the original home of the festival brought it to
the attention of the nation. Maza's analysis of this seemingly simple story un-
tangles many of the complicated strands of pre-Revolutionary social and polit-
ical life. Central to her story is the paradoxical position of the aristocracy as
both supporter of the festivals and the eventual target of critics trying to defend
the purity of the celebrations. She shows how the aristocracy appropriated the
rustic rituals to their own purposes of self-redefinition as virtuous and moral
by setting up the festivals as theatrical events. The legal briefs written for the
law case, on the other hand, included subtle and not so subtle criticism of seig-
neurial privilege and tyranny of any sort. The Salency of the legal me'moires
exemplified "the touching simplicity of country life," as one author proclaimed;
it represented a kind of ideal little republic, and its festivals were the prototype

13 For a recent statement of his position, see Dale Van Kley, "The Jansenist Constitu-
tional Legacy in the French Pre-Revolution," Historical Refiections/IRflexions historiques,
13 (1986): 393-453. See also, Nina Rattner Gelbart, Feminine and Opposition Jour-
nalism in Old Regime France: Le Journal des Dames (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1987), and Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin, eds., Press and Politics in
Pre-Revolutionary France (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987).
14 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985).

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298 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

for the great revolutionary festivals that followed.

oric of legal pamphlets, the virginal virtue of the r
nation into a new kind of "public." In Maza's rend
nated in cultural form the most striking social an
Old Regime.
Every reader of this issue will notice that the essays on the waning years
of the Old Regime weigh heavily in this collection. In part, this is accidental,
since articles were not commissioned on a specific theme or period of time.
The pattern nonetheless reflects an important trend in work on the French Revo-
lution that has been developing for two decades at least. Interest, especially
among historians in the U.S.A., has shifted away from the revolutionary decade
itself back to the pre-Revolutionary period. There are two complementary reasons
for this shift: scholars of the Revolution have turned to studies of the Old Re-
gime in order to uncover the origins of the cataclysm of 1789; and younger
scholars wishing to avoid the ideological quagmires of debate about the Marxist
interpretation of the Revolution have focussed their research on the previously
neglected social history of the eighteenth century. In the 1960s and 1970s, these
interests resulted in the publication of many important studies on social groups:
army officers, intendants, lawyers, venal officeholders, rural nobility, and parish
clergy, to name only a few.15 The essays on the pre-Revolutionary decades in
this issue represent another shift in subject matter within the more general focus
on the origins of the Revolution; rather than concerning themselves with specific
social groups, they reconstruct the complex and multi-faceted history of cul-
tural trends and formations. These cultural formations are not linked to specific
social groups or classes, but rather are part of the development of a climate
of criticism of court, aristocracy, and habits of deference. Taken together, these
essays show that the Revolution was preceded (if not specifically caused) by
a widespread change in mentalites or collective cultural attitudes. In the de-
cades before 1789, French writers and critics were learning the propaganda tech-
niques that would eventually destroy the monarchy, aristocracy, and aristocratic
culture.
The essays that focus on the revolutionary period itself share many of the
preoccupations of the essays on the preceding decades; in a sense, they show
how the climate of criticism was worked into the revolutionary process. Pub-
lishing and the reworking of ritual appear again as the two central modes of
cultural activity under investigation. These are useful points of focus since the
Revolution was characterized by an explosion of printed matter of all kinds and
by the efflorescence of festive and ceremonial forms. In a pathbreaking work
on the latter subject, Mona Ozouf examined the official festivals of the new re-
gime(s), which she argued were the means by which "the new social bond was
to be made manifest, eternal, and untouchable." The festivals served to sacralize
the new regime by inaugurating new senses of time, space, and social hierarchy.'6

15 This literature is reviewed in William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Ox-
ford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980).
16 Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, tr. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), quote p. 9.

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 INTRODUCTION 299

Ozoufs study of festivals is one of several recent works that have highlighted
the workings of revolutionary political culture. The most influential statement
of the central significance of the new political culture is Francois Furet's wide-
ranging essay on revolutionary politics and ideology, Interpreting the French
Revolution.'7 Furet's very abstract and general argument about the operation
of democratic ideology has been supplemented in important ways by Ozoufs
fine-grained analysis and by Maurice Agulhon's survey of the female allegories
of the republic.'8 They showed that revolutionary ideology was not expressed
just in the usual verbal manifestations; the new politics implied a new culture
in the sense that it took a variety of cultural forms ranging from open-air fes-
tivals with their processions and music to monuments, paper currency, and coins.
The essays by Lawrence Bryant and Suzanne Desan have been inspired by
the new emphasis on revolutionary political culture, but they show in specific
cases how culture was certainly not limited to officially-sanctioned expressions.'9
In contexts as widely diverse as official and impromptu ceremonies in the cap-
ital and dramatic conflicts between villagers and their local officials in the
provinces, the actors in each situation developed their own logic, which was
dependent on ancient prototypes but also transformed by the new revolutionary
exigencies. For example, the royal entry ceremony, once the showpiece of the
king's official relationship with his subjects, was dramatically altered by the "war
of ceremony" that had been taking place since the opening of the Estates General
in May 1789. Bryant forcefully makes the critical point that "Ceremonial was
the dominant style of public representation of political events in 1789, and it
supplied the medium in which the orderly passage from an absolute style of
political conduct to a constitutional one was carried out."
The evidence for this assertion comes from a careful reading of accounts
of a series of ceremonial occasions, which were not necessarily officially directed,
but which all developed serious political meaning as they unfolded. Like Sarah
Maza, Bryant demonstrates the important role played by printed versions of
these events. It was not obvious who would have control either over the program
of the ceremonies or the appropriation of their significance. Indeed, the drama
of Bryant's account comes precisely from his depiction of the uncertain and
hesitant ways in which the participants tried to gain control over the events.
The culminating moment of months of ceremonial jockeying came when the
king found himself accepting the tricolor cockade from Bailly, the new mayor
of Paris. Bryant not only illuminates the political developments of the earliest
months of the Revolution; he also offers a new, more general understanding of
the role of ceremonial in fashioning what he calls "strategical scripts for polit-
ical performance."

17 Tr. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981).

18 Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789-1800,
tr. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981). See also, Lynn Hunt, Poli-
tics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1984).
19 Ozouf also discusses improvised and unofficial festive actions, some of which verged
on riots, in her chapter on "Mockery and Revolution, 1793-1794," Festivals, pp. 83-105.

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300 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

Suzanne Desan uncovers another kind of script f

her analysis of religious riots during the years be
and the rise of Napoleon. Religious riots took many forms, ranging from the
defense of priests to the forcible reopening of churches for worship. The women
who were so prominent in these clashes already had a tradition in bread and
grain riots of taking collective action to defend the interests of their families
and communities, but under the pressure of revolution, they also learned to use
the rhetoric of popular sovereignty. They were simply defending their right to
freedom of opinion and religious liberty, some claimed. Desan's investigation
shows us another face of the revolution in culture; while in Paris male officials
passed legislation aimed at installing new, secular rituals and ceremonies, in
the provinces, especially, women banded together to defend the public manifesta-
tions of their traditional cherished beliefs. Denied access as women to conven-
tional areas of political power, these women took power into their own hands
in a more informal, often illegal fashion. Their beliefs may have been tradi-
tional, but they were willing to stretch their practices in new directions in order
to defend them. In the process, women established new cultural patterns that
endure to this day: women remained attached to the public practices of their
religion, whereas many men withdrew from them. Public religious practice was
feminized.
The gender differences in revolutionary culture are also central to Carla Hesse's
essay. She takes the topic of female authorship from the last decades of the Old
Regime right up into the nineteenth century in order to determine the impact
of new revolutionary legislation on property in printed works. The legal status
of male and female authors was very different. The law of 19 July 1793 ac-
knowledged authors' claims on their texts as property rights for the first time,
but this law did not effectively apply to married women authors, since they had
no legal control over property. Unmarried adult women may have enjoyed some
autonomy, but married women could not publish without the authorization of
their husbands. Her analysis of the legal situation leads Hesse to reexamine the
meaning of pseudonymous publication; pseudonymity for women authors was
not a last vestige of feminine modesty but rather the only way to gain some
control over the publication of their works. Only in 1965 did French married
women gain the right to publish a work without the consent of their husbands.
Thus, at least in this one important respect, the "cultural revolution" was hardly
revolutionary for women authors. Hesse's focus on this particular gender dimen-
sion of cultural change forcefully reminds us that the "new man" of revolutionary
ideology was often just that, a man and not universal humankind. Print could
be an important medium for the diffusion of new values, but access to print
was not always open to everyone.
The essays presented here do not add up to one coherent interpretation of
the French Revolution in culture. It would be hard to meld eight different voices
into one, even if they had worked together and all knew each other (which they
didn't and don't). Yet there are remarkable resonances between the essays be-
cause they all focus on culture understood in its political construction and con-
nection. The culture in these essays is not perhaps culture as it is usually defined

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 INTRODUCTION 301

in terms of the fine arts or official programs of schooling. It is, nevertheless,

culture that is at once both revolutionary and collective: biting, critical, con-
testatory, public, and developed in the heat of the moment's struggles.
These essays broaden out our perspective on revolutionary political culture,
showing both that it evolved over several decades at the end of the Old Regime,
rather than all at once after 1789, and that it offered as much room for contin-
uing conflict and difference as it did for new forms of social consensus. In that
sense, these essays confirm that the revolution in culture was democratic, though
not because the state succeeded in installing a new ideology of democracy (limited
only to men), as Tocqueville and after him Furet have maintained. The revolu-
tion in culture was democratic in that it was never firmly in anyone's control,
and it continued to offer new avenues of confrontation, whether over the role
of the Academy in art or over the wearing of costumes in political processions.
Thus, from their very different vantage points, all the authors included here
argue for the deeply creative possibilities of action by people as different as
salon hostesses, hack writers, and shopkeepers' wives. What better way to cele-
brate the enduring significance of the French Revolution!

University of Pennsylvania

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