Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 3. The Reaction in FranceBrandes, Georg
History
Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 3. The Reaction in France
Brandes, Georg
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Naturalism in literature; Romanticism
as one swallows an oyster." An influential paper which had a great
circulation among the Cordeliers was Loustalot's _Les Révolutions de
Paris_. One of its numbers, published during Lent 1792, contained the
following tirade, apropos of the shows at the fair: "In the days when
there was a ruling religion in France, the tonsured jugglers allowed
no competition during Holy Week. They alone might give performances.
Now there is free competition. When the ordinary conjurer shows himself
upon his stage he is attired in a cloak and strange headgear, by which
he is distinguished from the surrounding crowd; but as soon as the
performance is over he takes off his costume. The priest wears his
all day long, and performs his part off as well as on the stage....
When will they blush to play the rôle of the harlequins of humanity?"
Henceforward the revolutionary nickname of the priests is "theophagi."
In the month of April the same newspaper contains an article in which
it is proposed to apply to priests the regulations instituted by
Johanna of Naples for the control of women of ill-fame. "They ought to
be shut up in a house where they can preach and pray as much as they
choose for those who seek them there, but should be prohibited from
going abroad, so that they may not infect the population." The wine of
Voltaire has turned into vinegar, into poison.
A rival club of a very different type from the Cordeliers' was the
Jacobins'. Its intellectual tendency was more serious and more
pedantic. Its patron was Rousseau, as its rival's was Voltaire. The
original programme of the Jacobins--love of equality, hatred of all
established inequality--was derived purely from Rousseau; with it they
managed to combine ambition, a cold, calculating, revolutionary spirit
of persecution, and, underlying everything else, devotion to rule,
that is to say, to the regulation of society according to Rousseau's
principles.
To the student who observes historic phenomena from the literary point
of view, nothing in the history of the Revolution is more striking
than the distinct manner in which all its men of action and of words
acknowledge the literature of the eighteenth century to be the
mainspring of their actions and utterances. They seem to seek no other
honour than that of transforming ready-made principles into action.
At Mirabeau's grave it was told to his honour that he had said of the
philosophers: "They have produced light; I will produce movement." And
there is scarcely a paragraph in the _Contrat Social_ which did not,
during the course of the Revolution, reappear either in a law, or a
public declaration, or a newspaper article, or a speech in the National
Assembly, or in the very constitution of the Republic itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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