Shelley's Wars, Burke's Revolutions

Over the past twenty years, the traditional picture of Romanticism as an age of revolution has been significantly complicated by discussions of the protracted military campaigns that took place in Europe between 1792 and 1815 and in the colonies for much longer. As Mary Favret has suggested, understanding the art and literature of this period requires that we acknowledge that "Romantic writers found it nearly impossible to imagine any space or time free from the pains . . . of warfare" (609). While earlier scholarship concentrated on the aesthetic ramifications of discrete political events, particularly the French Revolution, we now give equal consideration to the militarization of experience endemic to European capitalism and imperialism and the resulting collapse of the distinction between wartime and peacetime.

This reorientation of the critical focus has been extremely productive, allowing for important reassessments of canonical topics and texts. At the same time, this shift has occurred with little if any attention to how the Romantics themselves understood the relationship between war and revolution.¹ The goal of this essay is to elucidate this aspect of the Romantic legacy. The first section explores the volatility of the word "revolution" and the different models of theory and practice it underwrites. The second section examines the problems that arise when Percy Shelley attempts to situate the French Revolution within a broader political field in which language is seen as a militarized dynamic. The final section describes the influence of the Romantic conception of revolutionary language on 19^th- and 20^th-century political thought and considers a contemporary view of revolution that aims to supplant it.

If the French Revolution has traditionally dominated scholarship on Enlightenment and Romanticism aesthetics, this is because radical political change never takes place without some reflection on the language of change itself. Emblematic in this regard is a brief anecdote related by Hannah Arendt in her 1963 book On Revolution. Arendt is describing a shift from an earlier notion of revolution as a return to a prior point at which citizens enjoyed the rights and liberties that tyrants subsequently took from them to a modern notion of revolution as a radical change, a true newness that imposes itself ineluctably. "We know, or believe we know," she writes, "the exact date when the word 'revolution' was used for the first time with an exclusive emphasis on irresistibility and without any connotation of a backward revolving movement" (47). "On July 14, 1789," she elaborates, "Louis XVI returned from a day of hunting and was informed by a nobleman of the storming of the Bastille. 'C'est une révolte,' said the monarch. 'Non, Sire, c'est une révolution,' responded the duke" (47). While there is no good documentary evidence that this exchange actually occurred, there is no reason it could not have. Whatever the case, the story quickly became the talk of the town: "The famous anecdote of the duc de Liancourt disabusing the incredulous Louis XVI after the fall of the Bastille that they were no longer experiencing a 'revolt' but a 'revolution' may be apocryphal, but it spread rapidly among contemporaries, as it more broadly reflected the realization of many French about the events they lived through" (Pestel 57). Today, the anecdote continues to crop up with bizarre regularity in scholarly discussions, as if sharing it, along with the caveat that it is probably apocryphal, were somehow obligatory. If this story did not exist, someone would have had to make it up, which they probably did.

What work does the anecdote do? Superficially, Arendt cites it as evidence that the word "revolution" was finally shedding its astronomical meaning, but there is widespread scholarly consensus that by 1789 "revolution" had already been a term for a variety of different forms of political unrest and upheaval for decades, if not for centuries. In fact, Arendt does not relate this story in order to confirm that on a particular day a specific nobleman coined a term for the impending demise of his sovereign and of the monarchy in general. Her interest in what may well be a fairy tale lies in its suggestion...