The Infinite Grotesque: Paper Money and Aesthetics in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France

In 1757, Edmund Burke theorized his famous model of the sublime, a powerful and ennobling aesthetic category marked by gigantic size, formlessness, obscurity, and infinity, among other traits.¹ Yet, in 1790, Burke encountered a new object that troubled his categories by embodying sublime traits while also symbolizing the French Revolution he opposed: the revolutionary paper currency of France, the assignats. Late eighteenth-century Europe witnessed not only the radical political event of the Revolution but also a new, experimental form of money, a compulsory paper currency based on the sale of church lands confiscated by the National Assembly. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France registers an anxious awareness that French paper money embodied the potential to be perceived as sublime. Produced in massive quantities that led to rapid inflation, the assignats created a gigantic, boundless economy—an infinite (perhaps even sublime) entity. The prospective sublimity of the assignats prompted Burke to appropriate a specific subtype of the grotesque, a category related to, though ultimately distinct from, the sublime: the infinite, parodic grotesque. While critics have shown that Burke in 1790 re-categorized the Revolution as grotesque rather than sublime, what merits further attention is how paper money in particular (and its infinity) prompted Burke to draw upon and popularize a specific subtype of grotesque.² This subtype became, in the 1790s, part of a discourse used by writers and caricaturists to engage with a larger transformation many commentators perceived in Romantic Europe: a fundamental shift, brought about by recent economic changes, in how value was grounded in material objects.

To locate a form of infinity distinct from that of the sublime, Burke turned to the infinite grotesque, grounded in bodily functions (consumption, vomiting, defecation) that process distinct objects into formless streams of organic matter. I begin this article by tracing the origins of this category in Paradise Lost, a foundational text for the infinite, parodic grotesque and a key source of examples used by Burke when laying out his aesthetic theory. Burke appropriated grotesque images that were not only infinite but also inversions of the life-generating aspects of the grotesque: while the regular grotesque thrived on growth, nourishment, and regeneration, the parodic version inverted these qualities into images of false nourishment, cannibalism, mutilation, and quackery. Finally, I trace the afterlife of Burke's economic appropriation of the grotesque in 1790s caricatures by James Gillray and Richard Newton.³ In addition to the assignats, later commentators witnessed England's Restriction Act (1797), which made paper money compulsory, as well as a second experimental paper currency created by the French government in 1796: the mandats.⁴ According to both later commentators and Burke, Romantic Europe was transitioning from an economy rooted in material objects, such as gold and property (perceived as intrinsically embodying their value), to an economy of paper, a symbolic marker. These commentators proposed that material objects—namely the aristocratic estate and the "solid" wealth of gold money—no longer functioned as anchors of culture and history.⁵ By implying that the economy had become progressively dematerialized, Burke and others endorsed a view of monetary history that has been discredited by recent historians, since abstract economies of private credit, rather than metal coins, in fact preceded paper money.⁶ Yet, though inaccurate, the history of the economy created by Burke and others deepens our understanding of how Romantic artists used aesthetics to grapple with economic and social change. These artists employed the infinite grotesque to engage with questions that the rise of paper currencies placed at the heart of the Romantic period. To what extent must an economy be made up of material things? Can systems of exchange consist solely of abstractions such as symbols, promises, or language? And more importantly, how does the presence or absence of material things in economies shape social relationships, particularly structures of class and hierarchy? The infinite grotesque served as a vehicle for representing the perceived transition from an economy of objects to one of symbolic paper. The fundamental power of this aesthetic category was to destroy...