Writing, Movement/Space, Democracy: On Jacques Ranciere's Literary History

At a certain moment in his argument in Vitesse et politique, Paul Virilio describes the French Revolution in a particularly idiosyncratic way as a circulatory flow of traffic, thus suggesting that one way of representing the events of the Revolution is to see them as a series of traffic jams and roadway accidents. The general conscription to which the Revolution gave rise in 1793, for example, did not simply enroll a large number of the new citizens of the republic into its military activities, it effectively sent those republican soldiers out onto the roads in defense of the principles of the Revolution:

The new organization of the flow of circulation that has been arbitrarily called the French Revolution . . . is but the rational organization of a social abduction. The "general conscription" [levée en masse] of 1793 is the kidnapping of the masses. . . . While [the bourgeoisie] stayed home and acquired new properties, new buildings and houses, . . . what that same bourgeoisie offered as land to these soldiers called up by decree of the Convention were the roads of Europe. "Wherever the feet go, there is the fatherland" (ubi pedes, ibi patria), as Roman law had already put it. With the French Revolution, all roads became national.¹

(29, Virilio's emphasis)

By recalling one of the tenets of citizenship in Roman law, "Wherever the feet go, there is the fatherland," Virilio insists on an important dimension of the Roman Empire, well known for its logistical expertise at sending large armies to far flung places with a speed and a road system that were the envy of the ancient world: Roman citizens carried their rights with them even when they were on the move.

Virilio is rather cynical about the political tactic he describes in this thumbnail portrait of the politics of the First Republic (which became the "first" only when declaring the Second Republic became a necessity a little more than fifty years later...). The conscription to which he refers, while clearly indispensable for a fledgling republic threatened on all sides by the monarchies of Europe and from within by its own unrepentant aristocracy, was simultaneously a political invention of genius. It was used to short-circuit the demands of a populace whose members thought they had arrived at their moment of liberation. On the one hand, the conscripted soldiers were indeed freed from their places of origin, and for the first time in large numbers, they traveled to parts of their country and Europe they would never have had a chance to visit under the confining social organization of the Ancien Régime. On the other hand, their absence from their homes, their very mobility, allowed a certain immobile group—the new bourgeoisie escaping the brunt of the conscription—to acquire property in their absence and to establish a base of power fundamental to the future social and economic successes of this newly emerging class.² Wherever the feet go, there is the fatherland, but, unfortunately, not for those who are doing the marching, in this case.

These developments were to have far-reaching implications. Napoleonic France and Europe were a direct outgrowth of the military and circulatory strategies devised and explored in large measure during the Revolution. No leader had ever thought more about roads and their importance than the first consul, soon-to-be emperor. The French peasantry and lower classes were destined to see the dust and mud of French and European roads with a great deal of regularity during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, a situation that was to give new meaning to the expression "vieux routier de la Révolution," an epithet one might well apply to Colonel Hulot in Balzac's Les Chouans. Balzac's early novel about the anti-revolutionary uprising of the Breton peasantry and aristocracy takes place almost entirely on the roads of Brittany and the term route appears over twice as many times...