Satire in the Age of the French Revolution

2019 ◽  
pp. 660-679
Author(s):  
Jon Mee
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
Jockey Club ◽  
The French Revolution

The idea of a British ‘debate’ on the French Revolution inadequately describes the culture wars of the 1790s, where satire remained a key weapon. Scurrilous works such as Charles Pigott’s Jockey Club (1792) harnessed libellous newspaper innuendo to republican politics. Many who agreed with its politics blanched at its method, but attacks on the royal family and William Pitt abounded, especially in the crisis year of 1795. Prosecutions for libel rose sharply in the decade, but it was an inefficient instrument of repression. Pensions were tried on Peter Pindar and James Gillray, but the policing of culture was also conducted in a series of verse satires that followed William Gifford’s Baviad (1791). Ideological agreement did not stop conservative satirists having their own squabbles about method, especially when it came to questions of ‘personality’. William Boscawen’s Progress of Satire (1798), for instance, suggested that satire in its rough Juvenalian mode might have become inappropriate to modern manners, but any downgrading of satire as a genre scarcely brought a diminution in practice.

Exile, Imprisonment, or Death

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Swann
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
Civil Strife ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Cultural Origins ◽  
The French Revolution

Between the assassination of Henri IV in 1610 and the French Revolution of 1789, thousands of French nobles, including members of the royal family, courtiers, bishops, generals, and judges suffered internal exile, imprisonment, or even death for having displeased their sovereign. For most that punishment was independent of the legal system and was the result of a simple royal command or a written order, known as a lettre de cachet. Yet rather than protest, the victims were willing to obey, spending months, even years in disgrace without any knowledge of when, or even if, their ordeal would end. Their punishment was for many a terrible personal blow, striking at the heart of their own identity and relationship to the king, and it threatened the future of their families, friends, and political allies. This book is the first in-depth study of political disgrace, which was intrinsic to the exercise of royal power, drawing on the mystique of monarchy and the ideologies of divine right, patriarchy, and justice that underpinned royal authority. It explores the rise and consolidation of a new model of disgrace amongst the nobility for which obedience to the king gradually replaced the rebellious attitudes fostered during the years of religious and civil strife. Yet for all the power of royal disgrace, it was always open to challenge and in the course of the eighteenth century it would come under a sustained attack that tells us much about the political and cultural origins of the French Revolution.

Class Struggle and Culture Wars in the Springtime of the French Revolution, Year II (1794)

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-235
Author(s):  
Sophie Wahnich ◽  
Alexander Dunlop ◽  
Sylvia Schafer
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Safety ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Political Community ◽  
French Society ◽  
The Future ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract In the spring of Year II (1794), the future of French society was uncertain. This article looks at the response to the uncertainty of three members of the Committee on Public Safety, who discussed the need to choose between a revolutionary political community and civil war, even as they disagreed about what form the future republic should take.

Gibbon's unfinished History: the French Revolution and English political vocabularies

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Womersley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
Textual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
The French Revolution

AbstractOn Gibbon's death his papers contained an incomplete and unpublished essay on the genealogy of the European dynasty of which the British royal family was a branch, entitled The antiquities of the house of Brunswick. This article explains why Gibbon began this work, and why he laid it aside. Beginning by describing the nature and purpose of literature on Hanoverian genealogy in the earlier eighteenth century, and proceeding to relate the content of the Antiquities to the politics of Blackstone and Hume, the article identifies the Antiquities as a distinctively ancien régime defence of British political life and institutions which was elicited from Gibbon by the early months of the French revolution. The abandonment of the Antiquities is then explained as part of Gibbon's shocked response to the deepening gravity of events in France after the September massacres. In the polarized political atmosphere which ensued, the literary finesse of the Antiquities ran the risk of being confused with disaffection. That risk was increased when Gibbon and The decline and fall began to be used by radicals as auxiliaries in their attack on England's ancien régime. The textual history of the Antiquities allows us to perceive the rapidity with which the connotations and ownership of certain political vocabularies in England changed during the early 1790s.

The Revolutionary Decade

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Mee
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ideological Conflict ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter examines the literature of the controversy over the French Revolution. It discusses the polemical texts that contributed directly to the controversy associated with Burke, Godwin, Paine, and Wollstonecraft, but also the culture wars that perpetuated it in terms of the novel, poetry, and the theatre. In the 1790s, some of the great names associated with Romanticism came to literary maturity, Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth among them. The chapter reminds readers that it was a golden age of satire as a consequence of the ideological conflict, but also a decade when the definitions of literature and culture entered a period of crisis and redefinition.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document