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91 3 “I Wish to Be Necessary to You” Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville and his allies were in serious trouble by the end of May 1793. Neither eloquence nor equivocation could save them from the growing wrath of the Montagnards in the National Convention. Skeptical colleagues and distrustful Parisians transformed Brissot’s ambivalence about the execution of Louis XVI, his disastrous handling of the general war with Europe, his farcical efforts to incite unrest in French colonies , and his vague support for federalism into evidence of treason. Increasingly marginalized, Brissot fled the capital before a warrant was issued for his arrest on June 2. Several days later, he was captured in Moulins, returned to Paris, and imprisoned in the Concièrge, where he spent the next few months writing furiously in his own defense. The assassination of Jean-Paul Marat on July 13 and the desperate situation of the republic consolidated the power of the twelve-man Committee of Public Safety dominated by Maximilien Robespierre. The Committee supported an agenda that amounted to a rejection of local and familial obligations, seeking a civil society in which men and women were primarily, if not exclusively, citizens of the French republic. Under the September 17 Law of Suspects, the Revolutionary Tribunal controlled by Robespierre sent thousands of enemies of the state to the guillotine. In the meantime, the government revised the calendar, attacked religion, and made virtually all men between eighteen and twenty-five subject to the levée en masse, the conscription of a national army. Leaders, insisting that liberty and France were one and the same, prescribed and proscribed behavior. Revolution was producing loyalty to the state and interfering with the development 92 / “I WISH TO BE NECESSARY TO YOU” of natural connections among individuals. Coercion—or Terror—was the order of the day.1 Brissot’s American and British friends reacted to these events in different ways. An anxious Thomas Paine went for solitary evening strolls that summer to find “some relief” and “[to curse] with hearty good will” what Robespierre and his allies were doing to “the character of the Revolution [he] had been proud to defend.” The sweet oranges in the garden of the house offered only temporary respite from the turmoil in Paris and the danger to his friends’ bodies as well as their shared vision of revolution. Mary Wollstonecraft ’s personal happiness shaped her response to political events. Aware of the danger, she could still imagine living in France “should peace and order ever be established in this distracted Land.” To be sure, the “rapid changes, the violent, the base and nefarious assassinations . . . cannot fail to chill the sympathizing bosom, and palsy intellectual vigour.” But people must respond to the apparent failure of sociability with sociability. Wollstonecraft still believed that no man “chooses evil, because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” Problems arose, not from an essential character with which men and women were born, but from the culture in which they lived. And that could be changed. The answer was neither to restrain nor eliminate people but to cultivate their understanding through regular commerce. In Wollstonecraft’s world, no one—not Robespierre nor Imlay—ever lost the capacity to transform themselves, to become who they chose to be. The only question, really, was whether they would have the opportunity to exercise that power.2 No One Is “Naturally Inclined to Evil” In the summer of 1793, while making love with Gilbert Imlay,Wollstonecraft developed her perspective by narrating An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. Focusing mainly on the events of 1789, Wollstonecraft argued that the revolution was “the natural conse1 . See Stuart Woolf, “The Construction of a European World-View in the RevolutionaryNapoleonic Years,” Past and Present, no. 137 (November 1992), 72–101. 2. Thomas Paine, “Forgetfulness” (1794), in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 2 vols. (New York, 1945), II, 1124; Mary Wollstonecraft (MW) to Eliza Bishop, June 24, [1793], in Janet Todd, ed.,The Collected Letters of MaryWollstonecraft (NewYork, 2003), 227; MW, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution . . . (London, 1794), in Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, eds.,TheWorks of MaryWollstonecraft, 7 vols. (New York, 1989), VI, 6; MW, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke . . . , 2d ed. (London, 1790), ibid., V, 53. [3.139.62...

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