Textually transmitted revolutions: Revolutionary mimicry and print culture in nineteenth-century France.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ways in which the widespread transmission of print narratives of the French Revolution of 1789-94 influenced the representation and enactment of subsequent revolutions during the nineteenth-century in France. I argue that the negative discourse of revolutionary mimicry, by which revolutions and their participants were depicted as failed repetitions and degraded imitations of the past, contributed to the rejection of revolutionary action and actors as desirable models for political emulation or subjects for positive literary representation. Chapters one and two investigate the cultural, political, and material conditions that facilitated the revival, transformation, and transmission of revolutionary narratives leading up to the 1848 Revolution. I trace how official memories of the French Revolution were rehabilitated during the Bourbon Restoration by texts written by thinkers such as Adolphe Thiers and Germaine de Stael, then further radicalized, romanticized, and disseminated during the dramatic rise of print culture witnessed under the July Monarchy (1830-48). In chapter three, I analyze the topos of textually inspired revolutionary mimicry (and its corollary tropes of repetition, imitation, inauthenticity, and cliche) in the works of Charles Baudelaire, Jules Valles, and especially in Gustave Flaubert's novels <italic>L'Education sentimentale </italic> (1869) and <italic>Bouvard et Pecuchet</italic> (1881). I contend that these representations must be understood in the context of a crisis of modernity---one born from the combined experience of failed revolution and rapid exposure to mass print culture---that revealed a fear of being trapped within a fatalistic cycle of idealism, mimicry, and failure. In the final chapter, I present primary evidence that anxieties regarding the dangers of imitating past models exerted a direct influence upon the actions of the Paris Commune of 1871. I conclude my analysis of the discourse of revolutionary mimicry's political and literary effects by comparing the use of repetition, cliches, and imitation in Emile Zola and Jules Valles's post-Commune depictions of revolution. In Zola's work, these tropes are used to pathologize---and thereby de-legitimate---the notion of revolutionary action, while for Valles they serve to reaffirm its promise as a viable means of social change, and as a subject worthy of positive literary representation.