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Jacobinism: The Armed Doctrine in Fiction
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16684 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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10 / 1989 |
5,308 Words |
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Russell Kirk
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The bicentenary of the French Revolution occurs in this year of 1989; and still the world is tormented by ghastly political upheavals and acts of terror that are inspired by what was said and done in Paris two centuries ago. English-speaking countries, nevertheless, have been relatively free of such convulsions. One reason for this relative immunity is the impression of the horror and futility of the French Revolution that has been generally held by literate people in Britain, the United States, and other countries with British cultural roots.
"The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain," Samuel Taylor Coleridge, paraphrasing Edmund Burke, wrote in 1798. "Slaves by their own compulsion!" Such became the judgment on the Jacobins and other French revolutionaries by the English and the American public from the late eighteenth century on. That judgment was confirmed, as the years passed, by certain eminent men of letters much read on either side of the Atlantic. I essay here to examine such comminatory fiction about the French Revolution, with particular attention to four men of letters, two who wrote in English and two who wrote in French.
People tend to be moved far more by images than by logic-chopping. The American view of the Russian Revolution has been much influenced over the past thirty years by the films Dr. Zhivago and Nicholas and Alexandra--productions that are both imaginative and truthful. And the more recent French film Danton creates a dreadfully sound impression of how revolutions devour their children. The impression great written fiction leaves on the imagination is not so immediately strong as that produced by films, but it ordinarily leaves a more enduring mark upon the convictions of those who have read such books attentively.
Although the novel attained perhaps its greatest influence during the nineteenth century, that form of literature still makes a powerful impression on the reason and the imagination of those men and women who are culturally literate. What important works of fiction worked a healthy reaction against the French Revolution in Britain and America, a reaction little diminished today?
The Armed Doctrine
Before answering that question, I must define my terms. "The armed doctrine," in the title of this essay, refers to that fanatic political movement called Jacobinism, the first ideology of our age of ideologies; it was British statesman Edmund Burke who denounced it as such. Britain was combating, Burke said, not merely the power of France, but a fanatic political creed, a kind of inverted religion, preached originally at Paris in a secularized Dominican monastery but within a few years disseminated throughout Europe and even in Britain. This ideology called Jacobinism--overthrowing state and church, proscribing and confiscating, trundling thousands to the guillotine--rose up in 1789; and its end is not yet.
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, somewhere in his Causeries du Lundi (Monday chats), tells of a Parisian playwright watching from his window a ferocious mob pouring through the street below. "See my pageant passing!" the dramatist exclaims. The imaginary happenings represented on the stage have indeed worked upon the fancy of a mercurial public already excited by social disruption; and so the pageant has taken on flesh in the streets, probably for great
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