Crossing the guillotine: Symbolic violence and religious fury in the age of the French Revolution.

Abstract

Using the French Revolution's moral crusade and political inquisition as the centerpoint of its analysis, this study examines the importation of religious ideas and passions into secular affairs, beginning with the moralistes of the Enlightenment and ending with the early Romantics. Transforming politics into a sacred cause, France's New Regime aimed to establish an Edenic Republic of Virtue, but created, instead, a hellish reign of Terror and sacrificial violence. My readings of violence in literary and historical texts draw on current theories of myth and on recent, revisionist historiography on the period. Figures covered include Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre, Wordsworth, Kleist, and Chateaubriand. Part I examines how the philosophes rejected the virulence of dogmatic religious belief, yet attempted, nonetheless, to formulate Enlightened counterparts to the basic elements of Christian teaching, including a new myth of the origin of evil, a new doctrine of human nature, and a new eschatology. Unfortunately, the Enlightened campaign often was driven less by its utopian vision than by resentment toward its rival and object of hatred. Part II outlines how revolutionist political oratory transformed the Enlightenment's eschatology into an immediate imperative and its symbolic violence into a bloody policy to cripple the French Catholic Church, a policy pursued with the very fanaticism and religious fury that rationalist moralism had hoped to evade. Part III brings this traumatic cultural context to bear on three specific literary works: Wordsworth's Prelude, Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas, and Chateaubriand's Martyrs. These works use religious imagery to represent both the Revolution's lost sacred promise and its diabolical betrayal. They are among the earliest attempts to come to terms with modernity's post-theistic forms of the sacred, with the old maladies of virulent belief and sacrificial violence in their new and characteristically modern shapes. Appalled and shaken by the Revolution's descent into Terror, many Romantics still embraced its ideals. The ambivalent religious symbolism of their literary works marks the tension of their stance. It also marks the difficulty of their task--the task of morally coming to terms with the Revolution, transcending its failure, and crossing the guillotine.