Some thoughts on Mungo Park

Please note that this post is not designed to provide you with direct help for the assignment. These are my thoughts on Mungo Park which you might find helpful as you grapple with the question.

Park and the Enlightenment
Mungo Park was very much a man of his time, full of the intellectual curiosity which we associate with the Enlightenment. He was sent to the Gambia by the African Association, a typical late-Enlightenment institution founded in 1788 to promote the exploration of the interior of Africa. He went some way to solving one of the mysteries of African geography when he reached the Niger and discovered that it flowed eastwards (Travels, pp. 178-9).

Park was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment in particular. It was Scottish intellectuals had who pioneered the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, describing how societies developed and how they functioned. When Park explored the origins of West African slavery (p. 290) and addressed those of his readers who wished to trace the progress of human beings 'from rudeness to refinement (p. 334)' he was very much in this tradition.

Slavery and the slave trade
Park arrived at Pisania on the River Gambia in July 1795 and was given hospitality by Dr John Laidley. Pisania existed solely to carry on the slave trade (Travels, p. 6), and Laidley, one of the only three white residents, was a slave trader. While at Pisania, Park contracted malaria and was nursed with great kindness by Laidley (p.8). This was Park’s introduction to the slave trade. He encounted it in the person of a kindly trader! He thought long and hard about this trade and devoted a chapter of his Travels (279-90) to it.

The trade was already in existence when the Europeans arrived, as Senegambia had long supplied slaves to the Arabs to the north. The inhabitants of Senegambia also had their own domestic slavery and Park estimated that three quarters of the population were ‘in a state of hopeless and hereditary slavery’ (pp. 19 and 279-80). With the coming of the Europeans there was a demand for even more slaves – this time for the Atlantic market. It was the Europeans who gave the slave trade its racial character.

Much to the disappointment of the abolitionists, Park refused to condemn slavery or the slave trade, believing that slavery was endemic to West African society and that the abolition of the Atlantic trade would make no difference to African slavery as such (p. 290). He seems to have been right. Richard Rathbone (CD discussion) notes that the choking of the slave trade after 1807 led to the high water mark of slavery on West Africa. Jonathan Ayuba comments that in the twentieth century slaves worked in Gabon and Nigeria; internal demand to maintain the economy allowed slavery to flourish.

How do we reconcile Park’s evident humanity with his acceptance of slavery and his friendships with slavers? In the late eighteenth century it was freedom rather than slavery that was exceptional throughout the world (not just West Africa). Park’s contemporary, Arthur Young, believed that nineteen out of twenty of the inhabitants of the planet were not free and lived in areas of bondage. Park would have no doubt preferred everyone to be free but he could not envisage a state of affairs in which this could be the case.

This was a disappointment to Wilberforce, who read the Travels while on holiday at Sandgate near Folkestone in 1812. He recorded in his Journal:

'Reading Parke's Journal for two hours tonight. Most wonderful man! What astonishing vigour of mind, but for what a cause, alas!' R. I. and S. Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce (London, 1838), vol. 1v, p. 52.

Nevertheless he provided the abolitionists with some useful ammunition. The Caribbean planters continually asserted that their slaves were of very low character. Wilberforce was able to point out that the Africans Park had encountered were virtuous – therefore, if their characters declined crossing the Atlantic, it must be because of the slave trade (Anthology I, p. 298).

Park was cited during the debate on the abolition of the slave trade on 16 March 1807:

‘Mr Henry Thornton [Wilberforce's second cousin and close friend] observed that it did not signify to the House what Leo Africanus or Mr Park might have thought of the slave trade as they themselves were more competent to decide upon the facts before them. In a communication which he had had with Mr Park, however, that Gentleman, though he studiously avoided giving any decisive opinion as the effects of the abolition of the slave trade, admitted that the justice of such a measure did not allow of an argument.’ Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates, 1807, p.133)

The coffle and the return to the coast
In September, Park was forced by sickness to stop at Kamalia, where he met a slave-trader, the Muslim Karfa Taura, who was collecting a coffle (caravan) of slaves to sell to the Europeans (pp. 234, 295 ff). This was a useful meeting as it gave him an escort back to the coast. Park says without irony,

‘Thus I was delivered by the friendly care of this benevolent Negro from a situation truly deplorable (p. 235).’

In April, when the rains were over, the coffle set off for the coast, picking up more slaves en route. Note that the slaves were prisoners of war (p. 296). The section that follows (pp. 300-10) is quite harrowing and the reader is left in no doubt of Park’s compassion for the slaves, especially the girl Nealee, who dies on the way after much suffering. When they reached Pisania in June, Park

‘could not part, for the last time, with my unfortunate fellow-travellers, doomed as I knew most of them to be, to a life of captivity and slavery in a foreign land, without great emotion (p. 330)'.

But Karfa is still ‘this worthy Negro (p.334)’. Park likes him (even though he's a Muslim!) and expects his readers to do the same.

Conclusion
Park died in 1806, probably from drowing, on his second expedition to the Niger. Rumours of his death reached Britain and he became a popular hero, particularly after an account of this expedition was published in 1815. His life was published in 1835 and a statue put up in his native Selkirk in 1859. At the bi-centenary of his birth in 1971 money was raised to install two memorial chairs in St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh. I think later generations were right to pay tribute to his heroic status and I'm a bit irritated by the patronizing comments of the academics (presumably sitting in a comfortable book-lined room!) on the CD. What do you think?

Cugoano's story

If you want to learn more about Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, you will find useful information on this brilliant website. There are loads of links to explore.

Through your student page you can access the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and find an account of Robert Wedderburn.

Update: This is from a brilliant and stimulating new book on abolitionism, Christopher Leslie Brown's (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

'Cugoano took an unusually broad view of the problem of slavery [describing] the exploitation of Africans as symptomatic of the larger crimes attending [297] European expansion … The committee [of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade] would never have endorsed [his] bold denunciations of the crown, the Church of England and Parliament for licensing oppression. Nor would the abolitionists have embraced his call for a ‘total abolition of slavery’. … He may have been the first of any colour to recommend that the Royal Navy patrol the Atlantic Ocean and intercept merchants trafficking in slaves. His Thoughts and Sentiments represented the most radical antislavery publication printed in Britain before 1788.'

Slave writings

[Above is an engraving of the freed slave Olaudah Equiano, who wrote the most famous of the British slave autobiographies.]

The slave autobiography is a distinct literary genre that has been much studied in both the United States and Britain. But within the genre there are variations according to the date written, whether the former slave was British or American, his or her life experiences and gender.
The three narrators on this course are
Ottobah Cugoano (1757-c.1800)
Robert Wedderburn 1762-c.1835)
Mary Prince 1758-c. 1834)

Quobna Cugoano was born free in what is now Ghana. He was kidnapped and transported to Grenada in the West Indies. He represents himself as
a Christian
a man of the Enlightenment
a black African, writing under his original rather than his European name

Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery was published in 1787, the year the London Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded. The genres he uses are political tract, sermon and straight autobiography.


He opens his disquisition with a sentence which is a paragraph long! This is the typical style of the educated eighteenth-century gentleman who had studied Latin at school and university. Did Cugoano write this entirely on his own, or did he have help? The second paragraph begins with the typical Enlightenment phrase, ‘the common rights of nature’ (Anthology I, p. 130) and ends with two biblical quotations. This combination of Enlightenment thought and Evangelical Christianity is typical of the abolitionist literature of this period, both white and black.

But Cugoano goes beyond the abolitionist texts of the period because he demands the total abolition of slavery (not just the slave trade). The British slave trade was abolished in 1807 but it was only from 1823 that a campaign began for the abolition of slavery itself. Cugoano was therefore a generation ahead of his time.

The biographical section of his narrative begins Anthology I, p. 132 with ‘I was born’. This is the usual beginning of a slave narrative. He also follows the convention of the genre by building up a picture of contrasts. See page 135 where he juxtaposes ‘innocence and freedom’ with ‘horror and slavery’.

Cugoano shows his intellectual debt to Adam Smith on page 156 where he argues that ‘the free and voluntary labour of many would soon yield to any government many greater advantages than any thing that slavery can produce’. So he doesn’t just rely on moral or human rights arguments.

Robert Wedderburn was never a slave but was born to a slave mother, who was sold by her master, his putative father, when she was five months pregnant. He came to Englandin 1778, worked as a tailor, was licensed as a Unitarian preacher, and mixed with working-class radicals, including the followers of Thomas Spence who wanted the common ownership of land (pp. 172-3). In 1819 he opened a new chapel in Soho, which immediately became a centre for insurrectionary activity. In May 1820 he was sentenced to two years imprisonment for blasphemous libel.

He represents himself as

an independent preacher
the unacknowledged illegitimate son
the product of sexual slavery
an angry working-class radical

His best known work was his autobiographical The Horrors of Slavery (1824) (Anthology, I, pp. 191-202). The genres he uses are the same as Cugoano’s – the sermon, the political tract and the autobiography. Note how he presents himself in his Dedication to Wilberforce as

‘an oppressed, insulted, and degraded African’.

The work is especially remarkable for his attack on his sexually predatory putative father, ‘a perfect parish bull’ (p. 193), ‘Solomon in his grand seraglio’ and ‘a bantam cock upon his own dunghill’ (p. 194)

Mary Prince was born into domestic slavery in Bermuda and is remarkable as the first woman to write a slave autobiography. She represents herself as
a former slave, who stands for all those who are still slaves (see especially p. 215)
a daughter who was sold away from her mother
a wife who was never allowed a proper married life
a woman
a devout Christian, who has been converted by Moravian missionaries

Her History was published in 1831, at a time when agitation for the abolition of slavery was mounting. (Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833; it took effect from 1834). Her genre is straight autobiography, with no pretensions to intellectual sophistication. Her narrative voice is mediated through her white amanuensis, Susannah Strickland, but occasionally her own words come through unmediated (see ‘their light words fell like cayenne on the fresh wounds of our hearts’, p. 206 and p. 227, n. 42). Her tone is colloquial, artless and very personal (traditionally feminine qualities), with frequent repetitions of phrases like ‘Oh no’ and Oh dear’. But her anger at slavery comes through clearly.

‘Slavery hardens white people’s hearts towards the blacks’ (p. 206).

Like Wedderburn she notes that female slaves were sexual property though her language is more restrained as there is clearly much left unsaid (p. 216). Whereas Cugoano and Wedderburn provide cogent intellectual arguments for the abolition of slavery, she states in simple monosyllables:

‘To be free is very sweet’ (p. 222).

That, of course, says it all.

Slavery in the modern world.

This article from the Australian newspaper, The Age, shows that slavery continues to exist in the modern world. Slavery today does not necessarily mean legal bondage but it exists where people are so trapped by poverty and exploitation that they cannot leave their work. Children, and women forced into prostitution, are among the victims.

Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect

Wilberforce and his friends are often known as the 'Clapham Sect' because so many of them had (rather grand) houses around Clapham Common. Wilberforce himself lived there from 1792 to 1808, when he moved to Kensington Gore (the site of the present Albert Hall) to be closer to London. The names of members of the 'Sect', such as Henry Thornton and Zachary Macaulay, are commemorated in many of the street names.

The Clapham Sect worshipped at Holy Trinity, Clapham, and I'm grateful to one of last year's students for sending me this photograph. The interior of the church has changed since Wilberforce's day, but there are many tablets on the walls commemorating the Clapham Sect and a window in the east end depicting the abolition of the slave trade. Well worth a visit.

Visit to Wilberforce House

A couple of years ago, I was in Hull visiting Wilberforce's birthplace. The house where he was born is on the High Street in the old museums quarter of Hull, and has been excellently renovated. It's a substantial merchant's house with a garden going down to the family's wharf on the River Humber. These private wharves (or staithes) were a special privilege enjoyed by the Hull mercantile community. The Wilberforces were one of a number of well-to-do mercantile houses with homes on the High Street, although they were unusual in not possessing country estates. Wilberforce was not a landed gentleman, and when he won the Yorkshire seat in the 1784 election, in the face of opposition from some aristocratic families, it was a remarkable achievement for a merchant's son. He never ceased to be proud of his origins in trade, though he educated his sons for the more genteel profession of clergyman.

There is a statue of Wilberforce and me in the garden.

Near the High Street is Holy Trinity Church, where he was baptised, and the old grammar school, which he started attending at the age of seven. In front of the school is a statue of a fellow old boy, the seventeenth-century poet, Andrew Marvell, who was also MP for Hull.

In 1831 Wilberforce sold the Hull house for £5000. His eldest son had run through the family fortune and he needed the cash.

William Wilberforce

I hope this post will provide a way into Wilberforce's  writings.

The three extracts from the philanthropist, Evangelical and member of Parliament, William Wilberforce (1759-1833) don't make particularly easy reading because, though Wilberforce was a very entertaining conversationalist (Napoleon's enemy, Madame de Staël, described him as the wittiest man in England), his writing style is often flat, repetitive and turgid. That's your hard luck!

The Practical View is concerned with Wilberforce’s project for the moral reformation of the nation through the adoption of ‘vital Christianity’. The other two focus on the slave trade (Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade) and on the institution of slavery itself following the abolition of the trade in 1807 (Appeal to the ... British Empire). (Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833.)

At the end of 1787, following his conversion, Wilberforce recorded in his diary:

'God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners'. Quoted R. I. and S. Wilberforce, Life of William Wilberforce (1838), vol. 1, p. 149.

Note the juxtaposition. We tend to think of the reformation of manners agenda as 'conservative' (anyone remember John Major's 'Back to Basics'?) and the abolitionist movement as 'progressive', but Wilberforce did not make that distinction. For him, both were part of the same agenda: reforming the nation so that it would not bring down on itself the judgement of a righteous God.

Though Wilberforce is often spoken of as a Tory (and William Hague is his latest biographer), he always refused party labels and tried to vote in the House of Commons according to his conscience. To our eyes his voting record can seem inconsistent: from 1813 he supported Catholic emancipation but in 1819 he voted for the repressive Six Acts that followed the Peterloo Massacre.

The main point to bear in mind is that he was above all an Evangelical Christian. He was converted through John Newton, though he was strongly opposed to Newton's Calvinist theology. He believed (unlike Rousseau) that human beings were born sinful and in need of God's salvation. But he didn't think of religion as a purely private matter, and he believed that the way he personally could best serve God was by being a member of Parliament. However, he was delighted when three of his four sons chose to be clergymen rather than follow him into politics!

If you have access to the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in your local reference library (or the British Library) then you might like to look up the entry on Wilberforce. It's written by one John Wolffe and at the risk of sounding a bit of a creep, I think it's very good.

'Homo monstrosus': the Enlightenment debate on the human race

[The quotations below are from P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind. British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London: J. Dent & Sons, 1982), chapter 8.]

From the late 15th century Europeans had come into contact with a great variety of human beings, and as they did so assumptions about the unity of the human race, based on the Genesis account of creation, came to be questioned. The blackness of the African presented a huge problem, and by the 1730s some Enlightenment thinkers were arguing that white and black peoples must have descended from different ancestors. The great French naturalist Louis Buffon believed that 'mankind are not composed of species essentially different from each other', but he also argued that the temperate zones produced the best human beings. (This is an early example of climatic determinism.) The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomt, divided humankind into two species, Homo sapiens and Homo monstrosus. Guess where he placed Africans. In the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae (1758) Linnaeus classified Europeans and Africans thus:

European - white, sanguine, muscular; long blond hair; blue eyes; gentle, most intelligent; a discoverer. He covers himself with clothing suitable to the northern climate. He is ruled by religious custom.

African- black, phlegmatic, lax; black, curly hair; silky skin; apelike note, swollen lips; the bosoms of the women are distended; their breasts give milk copiously; crafty, slothful, careless, he smears himself with fat. He is ruled by authority.

David Hume's similar opinions are quoted in Block 3, p. 151.

For Evangelical and other attacks on these views, see Block 3, pp. 152-6. They had at least one advantage over the proponents of racial inferiority - the Genesis account of creation that claimed that all human beings were descended from Adam and Eve. In our own age, evolution and DNA have provided confirmation that humankind is a single species (monogenesis).

More light is thrown on this issue by a fascinating article in a recent issue of The Linnean (October, 2006) about John Hunter (1728-93), honorary surgeon to George III, who is rightly acclaimed as the founder of scientific surgery. Born in Scotland, he studied anatomy in London and gained a reputation as a skilled naturalist. His study of nature led him to propound ideas on the origin of life which anticipated Darwin. Just as remarkably, in 1788 he propounded the idea that

'our first parents, Adam and Eve, were indisputably black',

and since they were created in God's image, therefore God was black. This was two centuries ahead of proof that human beings originated in Africa.

The elephant in the room (Part 1)

The 24 March 2005 issue of Country Life had a fascinating article on the very welcome renovation of Danson House in Bexleyheath. The author, Chris Miele reports the following facts without comment:

'In 1753, the estate of John Styleman let the Danson property to John Boyd of Boyd and Company, a family business that had been founded on West Indies sugar plantations and subsequently acted as agents for other Leeward Islands plantation owners.

Boyd’s father Augustus was a resourceful man who left Northern Ireland to seek his fortune and found himself managing a sugar plantation on St Kitts.

He married into the local elite and became a planter.

Sugar was then unbelievably profitable – on an acre-for-acre basis, 20 times more valuable than arable land in the Home Counties.'

Miele doesn't explain how Augustus Boyd 'found himself' managing a sugar plantation! Nor does he think it necessary to explain why sugar was so profitable. To understand why it was such a profitable cash crop we need to look at another man with Kent and St Kitts connections, the Revd James Ramsay (1733-98).


Ramsay was a Scotsman, who went to London to train as a surgeon. In 1755 he entered the Royal Navy as assistant surgeon on the Arundel, commanded by his fellow Scotsman, Charles Middleton and stationed in the West Indies. In 1759 he went on board an infected slave ship. In 1762 he left the navy, returned to England and was ordained by the bishop of London.

He returned to St Kitts in charge of two livings, and what he saw there made him the bitter enemy of the planters. In 1781 he was finally forced from the island because of their hostility. He was presented to the livings of Teston and Nettlestead by Sir Charles Middleton, the local patron.

In 1784: at Lady Middleton’s urging, he wrote An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies, one of the first publications of what was to become the abolitionist movement.

The type of sights Ramsay would have witnessed are described in Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains (Macmillan, 2005). Chapter 4 is called 'King Sugar' and it makes very harrowing reading.

'Cultivating and harvesting the crop was brutal work. If you were a field hand, you planted cane shoots in holes or trenches you dug by hand, often in marshland where the air was dense with mosquitoes. At harvest time you carried huge heavy bundles of cane to the mill. You then fed each bundle twice through powerful vertical rollers that squeezed out the juice, which flowed into large copper vats in the boiling house, where it was simmered, strained, filtered, and allowed to crystallize into sugar. ... Slaves ... had to work in the mill or boiling house four to six hours on alternate nights in addition to a full day in the fields. Their clothes soaked with joice, they often lay down to sleep wherever they were, too exhausted to walk to their huts. ... At night flames from the boiling house fires were visible to ships at sea.'

I'll spare you the details of the accidents to slaves operating unguarded machinery.

The elephant in the room: part 2

Coming as I do from the Liverpool area, I was very interested to read Stephen Bayley's article, 'Imagine there's a heaven' in the Observer back in 2007, which was of course the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. At the beginning of the article he gives a brief but eloquent account of Liverpool's amazing history.

But guess what he leaves out?

The Merseyside Maritime Museum (above)  has a brilliant exhibition on Liverpool and slavery.

Have a look as well at the excellent Port Cities website. Just follow the links for Liverpool and Bristol.

Will this article make you think differently about 'Penny Lane'? You can find more about James Penny if you scroll down here.

A note on the Evangelical Revival

[Above is John Newton's City of London Church, St Mary Woolnoth.]

Sometimes people are bewildered about some aspects of the Evangelical revival. You need to think of it as an interdenominational and transatlantic Protestant religious movement that began in the 1730s and gained another lease of life in the 1790s when William Wilberforce and his friends in the 'Clapham sect' became influential voices in Parliament.

The revival is most often associated with the Methodists, John and Charles Wesley. Both were Anglican clergymen and the Methodists did not become a separate denomination until after the death of John Wesley in 1791.

John Newton was an Evangelical and an Anglican but he was not technically a Methodist though his enemies vaguely accused him of 'Methodistical' leanings. The difference between Newton and Methodists is that they (the Methodists) itinerated - that is they travelled the country preaching their message. Wesley famously said, 'The world is my parish'. This attititude posed problems for the Church of England which did not like the idea of outsiders intruding in parishes with which they had no particular connection. Newton didn't itinerate. His ministry was carried out in his two parishes, first Olney and then St Mary Woolnoth.

Newton gained these parishes because of good old eighteenth-century patronage. His patrons were first Lord Dartmouth and then the Evangelical philanthropist, John Thornton. Without the influence of these two powerful and wealthy men he would never have got ordained or acquired a parish living. He did not have a degree and his past in the merchant navy scarcely made him one of the elite.

Newton's Calvinism was not mainstream for the eighteenth-century Church of England, but it was one of a range of allowed opinions within a Church that has always encompassed a wide range of theologies.

Cowper and Newton

William Cowper the poet (pronounced 'Cooper', by the way) and John Newton [above], the slave trader turned Evangelical Anglican clergyman, are commemorated in the Buckinghamshire town of Olney, where Newton was appointed curate in charge in 1764. He remained there until he was appointed to St Mary Woolnoth, Lombard Street, London. Cowper settled at Olney to be near Newton in 1767. In 1784 he moved to the nearby village of Weston Underwood to live with his friends William and Mary Unwin. He and Mrs Unwin enjoyed an unconventional relationship, which became controversial after the death of Mr Unwin in 1786. She knitted his stockings and nursed him through his many fits of depression. As she succumbed to senile decay he wrote a poignant poem to 'My Mary'. In the middle of January 1794 he lapsed into a deep melancholia from which he never recovered. He died in Norfolk on 25 April 1800.

Newton went from strength to strength after his move to London. He became an unofficial spiritual director and his most notable converts included William Wilberforce and Hannah More.

So you thought you understood the Enlightenment?

[Above is William Cowper, portrayed wearing a cap, the traditional way in which a man of letters was depicted.]

Are you surprised by John Wolffe's assertion (Block 3, p. 15) that

' "Amazing grace" was in its way quite as much a product of the Enlightenment as Hume's "Of the immortality of the soul"'.

Do you agree with Wolffe? If not, why not? If you think he has a point, does this force us to consider the Enlightenment as something more than the straightforward attack on 'superstition' and on organized religion you dealt with in the first assignment? Was there a way in which Evangelical Christianity, with its belief in an ordered universe and its stress on religion as experience (empiricism) could co-exist with Enlightenment values?


It's worth noting that Cowper was not only the joint author of the Olney Hymns but also of The Task (1786) a long poem in praise of nature and the countryside, which is widely seen as one of the harbingers of romantic poetry. Cowper was one of Jane Austen's favourite poets and his proto-Romantic verses drove Jane Austen's Marianne Dashwood, of Sense and Sensibility, 'wild'. Before Wordsworth and Coleridge burst on the scene with Lyrical Ballads (1798) he was the poet of feeling, sensibility and love of nature.

Cowper's long mental illness, his psychotic conviction that he was one of those predestined to damnation, was the reason why he wrote so few of the Olney Hymns - something acknowledged by Newton in his preface. Contemporaries were fascinated by his madness. Some blamed it on Newton's Calvinism, others put it down to his hatred of hunting and thought that a few hours chasing the hounds would dispel his blues! Both the Enlightenment and Romanticism were preoccupied with madness, possibly for different reasons. For Enlightenment thinkers it called into question the idea that man was a wholly rational animal, for Romantics it could be seen as a way into deeper insights. This Romantic fascination with madness can be seen in the Swiss painter, Fuesli's illustration of 'Crazy Kate' for an edition of The Task. Cowper, the madman, spoke to the anxieties and preoccupations of his age.

For the ambivalent relationship of Evangelical Christianity and the Enlightenment, see also Block 3, page 65. William Wilberforce was too preoccupied with sin to adopt Rousseau's optimism about human nature. On the other hand, as will be shown, he was one of the patrons of the scientific society, the Royal Institution, and during the Christmas holidays he took his children to hear their lectures and observe their experiments. He believed in a universe that worked according to rational laws.

Was Wilberforce a proto-Romantic like Cowper? Evangelicalism was a 'religion of the heart', that stressed the importance of emotion. Wilberforce did not despise reason, but he thought it could only get us so far. 'Mere' knowledge on its own was not enough.

Wilberforce was also a great lover of the Lake District - a topic you will be studying when you come to Block 4.

He had to fail

[Above: Napoleon's tomb at Les Invalides, Paris.]

'Napoleon was bound to fail because his appetite for gloire was insatiable. Like the French Revolution, from whose culture he sprang, he never had any war aims beyond victory.'

From Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 (Penguin, 2008), p. 669.

Napoleon: the downfall

[The above picture is Goya's, The Second of May, 1808: The Charge of the Mamelukes, depicting the brutal suppression of the Spanish revolt.]

The first major test of Napoleon’s rule was the Spanish crisis of 1808. The military presence of the French in Madrid led to a popular revolt against French occupation on 2 May. Napoleon forced the abdication of Charles IV and his son Ferdinand and placed his brother Joseph on the throne. This triggered off the Spanish War of Independence, known in British history as the Peninsular War, a popular counter-revolution which was exploited by the British. In August British troops under Sir Arthur Wellesley landed in Portugal, and the ensuing war forced Napoleon to commit 300,000 troops to the country to fight the British and Portuguese armies and the Spanish insurgents.

Napoleon’s troubles in Spain inspired an Austrian invasion on French positions in Bavaria, the Tyrol, Venetia and the Adriatic in April 1809. But the French struck back, taking Pius VII prisoner and reaching Vienna in May 1809. After their defeat at Wagram on July, the Austrians signed the Treaty of Schönbrunn in October, and their new leader Prince Metternich pursued a policy of co-operation with France. The policy of conciliation was seen most starkly in the marriage of the Emperor's daughter, Marie-Louise, to Napoleon in March 1810.

Prussia pursued a different policy. Inspired by the reformers Karl von Stein and Carl August von Hardenberg, the country reorganized itself militarily and politically. In an edict of 1808 Stein abolished serfdom in Prussia. Hardenberg reformed secondary and university education and gave full civil rights to the Jews. Recognizing the force of nationalism in inspiring the French armies, writers and intellectuals espoused German nationalism. (You will revisit these themes in Block 6.)

Napoleon’s biggest mistake was his invasion of Russia in 1812, the result of Russia’s failure to enforce the Continental System against Britain. In the summer of 1812 the (by now multinational) Grande Armée of 650,000 men (an unprecedented size) marched into Russia. In September they occupied the evacuated and burned city of Moscow and in October Napoleon gave the order to retreat. By the time it reached the Prussian border, fewer than 100,000 soldiers were left. Napoleon abandoned his army and returned to France in December. At the end of the year the Russians advanced west and captured Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

On 2 February 1813 Johann Gottlieb Fichte ended his lecture at the University of Berlin with the words

‘This course will be suspended until the close of the campaign, when we will resume it in a free fatherland or reconquer our liberty by death’.

Young men from all over Germany flocked to join a Freikorps (a volunteer army) of at least 100,000, dedicated to the liberation of Germany. The weapons of the French Revolution were now turned against France in what the Prussians called the ‘War of Liberation’. At the ‘Battle of the Nations’ fought at Leipzig in October 1813 over half a million soldiers and 2,000 pieces of artillery were in action, the largest military engagement fought until the First World War. (On the left is the memorial to the battle.)

In 1814 the French, already defeated in Germany, were driven out of Spain. In March Russian, Prussian, and Austrian soldiers entered Paris, and Napoleon was forced by his generals to abdicate. The count of Provence became king of France as Louis XVIII, and Napoleon was sent to rule the island of Elba.


In March 1815 Napoleon escaped from Elba and returned to France for his ‘Hundred Days’. After his final defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 he was exiled to St Helena where he died in 1821.

Napoleon: rise and fall

As you work through Stendhal, you might wish to use this very schematic diagram, taken from my O Level text book, Denis Richards' An Illustrated History of Modern Europe (Longmans, 1950) to help you remember the main events of Napoleon's career. Click to enlarge.

Napoleon as administrator

Here are some thoughts about Napoleon's achievements in France.
Centralization: Napoleon created the agencies of centralized administration and the administrators to run them. These included the gendarmerie, the state-controlled paramilitary police force; the prefect, the head of departmental administration, appointed by the central government and accountable exclusively to it; a cadre of trained experts for the state, products of the École Polytechnique, founded in 1794; new state-run secondary schools, the lycées, whose curriculum centred on Latin and Mathematics.


Financial reform: In 1800 the Bank of France was founded and along with it the creation of a currency on the gold standard. A land register ensured that the propertied classes paid taxes and an efficient tax collecting system meant that the money actually reached the government.

The Church: Napoleon’s Concordat of 1801/1802 recognized the Catholic Church as ‘the religion of the great majority of French people’. The Church renounced its former privileges and property, but freedom of worship was restored. Pius VII was a (somewhat humiliated?) spectator at Napoleon’s coronation. Napoleon issued an amnesty to the émigrés (apart from the royal family) and many returned.

The law: The Code Napoléon codified the law of France. The civil code rationalized inheritance but entrenched masculine privilege. The Criminal Code did not take up the presumption of innocence or the right of habeas corpus as enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But torture was prohibited and jury trials remained in force.

The return of the old regime?
Napoleonic France became increasingly monarchical. ‘Equality meant the equal subjection of every citizen to the state power.’ In 1802 Napoleon proclaimed himself First Consul for life and he crowned himself emperor in Notre Dame in 1804. The creation of a ‘Legion of Honour’ was followed up by the re-establishment of nobility and an imperial court. Was the Revolution over?

The imperial regime brooked little opposition. The two-house legislature was powerless. Newspapers were censored and their numbers greatly reduced. Political clubs were banned. Under the direction of the minister of police Joseph Fouché (Duke of Otranto), potential opponents – both royalists and Jacobins - were closely surveyed.

However access to the new nobility was by merit not birth, and Protestants and Jews enjoyed equality under the law. This was part of the Enlightenment legacy.

Madame de Staël

Some time ago the Observer published this review of the life of Madame de Staël, the woman who defied Napoleon and who, as the review states, became 'a bridge between the French Enlightenment and German Romanticism'. She's a colourful and important character who makes her appearance in Blocks 2, 6 and 7. She infuriated Napoleon and his apologist Stendhal. She accused the Emperor of massive egotism:

'a man elected by the people, [he] sought to set up his gigantic Me in the place of humankind! ... Bonaparte rose superior to the age: not because he was superior in intelligence, but on the contrary because there was something barbarous and medieval about him. ... the only thing that he brought to France, the only thing he could bring - was misery!' Anthology I, 120-1.

However, her semi-autobiographical novel Corinne shows that Napoleon wasn't the only great egoist on the planet. Perhaps it takes one to know one!

In 1814, when it looked as if the war was over, she came to England and was an instant celebrity. She met William Wilberforce at a dinner party and caused him a sleepless night after a very stimulating evening in her company! I think it would have been fun to have met her.

There's a further review of the biography in the Telegraph.

And another in the Sunday Times.

Napoleon: for and against

In reading Stendhal's Life of Napoleon, you will probably have decided that he was hardly an unbiased witness - note for example his angry attacks on Madame de Staël, Napoleon's arch-enemy. But looking at his many attacks on Napoleon's 'crownomania', you might also conclude that his critical faculties haven't entirely deserted him. As a republican, Stendhal couldn't forgive Napoleon for his betrayal of the French Revolution. And yet - he could not help admiring him and defending him for aspects of his conduct, such as the massacre of the prisoners at Jaffa, that are really indefensible.

Later in the course you will come across Lord Byron's attitude to Napoleon, set out in Canto III of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, notably stanzas and following 36 (Anthology II, 272):

There sunk the greatest, nor the worst of men,
Whose spirit antithetically mixt
One moment with the mightiest, and again
On little objects with like firmness fixt
Extreme in all things! hadst thou been betwixt,
Thy throne had still been thine, or never been;
For daring made thy rise as fall: thou seek'st
Even now to re-assume the imperial mien.
And shake again the world, the Thunderer of the scene!

How does Byron's attitude to Napoleon compare with Stendhal's?

Spin doctoring à la française

If you would like more on how painters acted as Napoleon's propagandists, then you should find this site interesting.

The battle of Arcola, 17 November 1796: a case study in propaganda
This is what happened as described in Philip Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769-1799 (Bloomsbury, 2007), 1-3, 248-58.

Arcola is a village in northern Italy, 32 kilometres east of Verona. French and imperial forces confronted each other there, separated by the river Alpone and a small wooden bridge. The countryside around was marshy and crossed by dykes as a defence against flooding. Napoleon believed he had to cross this bridge in order to take Arcola.


Facing the French were two battalions of Croatians who had positioned their cannon so that they could fire on anyone approaching the bridge. The French troops took cover behind the dykes. When some of Bonaparte’s leading generals – Lannes, Bon, Verdier and Verne tried to advance towards the bridge, they were wounded. But General Augereau rushed through the ranks of frightened soldiers, tore the flag from the standard bearer, and advanced towards the enemy. A few of his men tried to follow him, but when five or six of their number were killed, they retreated. Augereau escaped without injury.

According to one eye-witness account, Bonaparte then attempted to repeat Augereau’s heroic gesture. He dismounted, drew his sword, took the flag and rushed onto the middle of the bridge, while the troops looked on, afraid to follow him. The officers who surrounded him were killed or wounded.

When the Austrians opened fire again, Bonaparte withdrew and his troops followed him in a headlong retreat, only stopping when they were out of range of the cannon. In the confusion that followed Bonaparte was pushed into a ditch full of water and nearly drowned, but he was dragged to safety by his men.

Two more days of fighting followed and the French failed to capture the bridge. On the third day Bonaparte sent the trusted and competent General Masséna to cross the Alpone further north and take Arcola in the rear. He was now very disillusioned with his troops and he complained about their ‘unpredictable’ behaviour in a letter to the French government. His comments were echoed by General Joubert: ‘Never have we fought so badly, never have the Austrians fought so well.’ Others made similar derogatory remarks. The army had performed below par.

This is how it was described
Bonaparte sent a doctored account that was printed in the Moniteur on 2 December in which he noted Augereau’s action in seizing the flag and carrying it onto the bridge, and his own action in imitation. Shortly after this, however, another account reached the Council of Five Hundred. This time Augereau was described as following Bonaparte’s lead and the prudent (or cowardly) refusal of the troops to follow him was not mentioned. Neither was it made at all clear that the crossing had failed.

However, Arcola had fallen and the imperial flag had been captured, and on the basis of these two facts a myth was created. In the first engravings of Arcola to appear, Bonaparte is accompanied by Augereau. Both are portrayed side by side, crossing the bridge that was never crossed, each carrying a flag with the inscription ‘The French People’. But over time the representations give way to those of Bonaparte crossing the bridge alone, and the myth of his heroic capture of the bridge became the accepted story, represented in numerous paintings and engravings, of which Antoine-Jean Gros’ Bonaparte at the Bridge of Acole is the most celebrated. But it is not the only one. Horace Vernet's Bridge of Arcole is another example.

Dwyer suggests,

‘It is just possible that Arcola represented a psychological turning point for Bonaparte…It was from this moment on that Bonaparte as an individual breaks away from the Army of Italy, which until then had always been portrayed collectively (p. 249-50).’

It is the start of Bonapartist propaganda.

Napoleon: the rise to power

The posts on Napoleon are intended as background to your reading of Stendhal. They are based on a wide range of reading. I have found Jonathan Sperber's Revolutionary Europe, 1780-1850 (Longman, 2000) especially helpful.

Napoleon institutionalized the changes brought about by the French Revolution and spread them throughout Europe. This makes him easily the most influential figure of the period. He was the heir both of the Revolution and the Enlightenment and the changes he brought about outlasted his military defeat.


He was undoubtedly a dictator, but he also issued constitutions and through plebiscites claimed to represent the will of the people. (The device of the plebiscite was of course copied by Mussolini and Hitler.)

How did he come to power?
Throughout the entire period of the war from 1792 to 1815 France faced two main enemies: the Austrians on land and the British at sea. The other two great powers, Prussia and Russia, came and went as did the smaller European powers.

The armies of the French Republic, created by the levée en masse of 1793, were composed of patriotic volunteers and newly drafted conscripts. Their numbers reached as high as 800,000, guaranteeing the French numerical superiority of almost 2:1 in important engagements. They did not fight in a line, but skirmished, breaking up into smaller groups to take advantage of the terrain and to fire, from cover, on the enemy, still standing neatly in rows. Following a new strategic doctrine, they abandoned the old regime armies’ slow pace of advance, and moved rapidly, living off the country – a convenient strategy for a bankrupt government!

Napoleon benefited from these changes. He distinguished himself in the war of the First Coalition (1792-7) by defeating the Austrians at Arcole and Rivoli in northern Italy in 1796-7. In the spring of 1797 he led his forces through north-eastern Italy into Austria, his vanguard coming within 74 miles of Vienna. Austria was forced to make peace and Italy was divided into French and Austrian spheres of influence. This campaign established Napoleon’s reputation as a liberator of peoples, but the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 1797) shows this claim to be spurious: France surrendered Venetia to Austria in return for Venice’s Adriatic Empire along the Dalmatian coast. These were useful stepping stones to the Levant.

For Wordsworth's lament over the extinction of the Venetian Republic see here.

In late 1797 the Directory endorsed a plan of Napoleon’s for a Mediterranean offensive against Britain. In May 1798 a French expeditionary force landed in Egypt, supposedly to threaten India (though a glance at the map might have shown that this was unlikely!). The French defeated the Turkish armies at the Battle of the Pyramids, but Nelson’s navy destroyed and sank the French fleet at Aboukir Bay, leaving the French army stranded in Egypt.

To forestall an Ottoman invasion, Napoleon invaded Syria, but, unable to take Acre in Palestine, his forces retreated on May 20, 1799. The French slaughter of the Turkish prisoners at Jaffa is a stain on Napoleon's reputation.

In November 1799 Napoleon deserted his army, took ship to France and overthrew the Directory in the coup d’état of 18-19 Brumaire in which he became First Consul. He consolidated his power by defeating the Austrians at Marengo in 1800. By the Treaty of Lunéville of 1801 the French annexation of Belgium, Luxembourg and the left bank of the Rhine was confirmed.
This involved a redrawing of the map of Germany. The number of petty states was drastically reduced and most of the free cities were abolished. The reduction of the number of imperial states from more than 300 to fewer than 100 severely diminished the authority of the Hapsburgs.

Napoleon as conqueror
Marengo ended the War of the Second Coalition and Napoleon was able to take advantage of Britain’s war weariness in the Peace of Amiens (1802). But the peace broke down in the following year, and Napoleon’s concentrated his energies on the invasion of Britain.

In 1804-5 Tsar Alexander I negotiated the Third Coalition: Austria, Prussia, Sweden and Britain.

The British victories of Cape Finisterre and Trafalgar in 1805 put an end to the attempt to invade England. However, in October Napoleon defeated the Austrians at Ulm in Bavaria and occupied Vienna. On 2 December he defeated a combined Austrian and Russian army at Austerlitz. The resulting Treaty of Pressburg (Bratislava) eliminated the Austrian position in Italy and turned most of Germany into a French protectorate. On 6 August 1806 Francis II bowed to the inevitable and resigned the title of Holy Roman Emperor which his ancestors had worn for almost four centuries. He retreated into being hereditary Emperor of Austria. A thousand years of history had come to an end.

Early in 1806 the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples was conquered and set up as a separate kingdom.
On 14 October 1806 the Prussians were defeated at Jena and Auerstädt. The French occupied Berlin and the royal family retreated to East Prussia. This was Napoleon’s sweet revenge for the Prussian defeat of the French at Rossbach in 1757. What were his feelings as he entered Frederick the Great’s city and viewed his tomb? Prussia’s old enemy Saxony allied with Napoleon and joined the Confederation of the Rhine. Napoleon created the Kingdom of Westphalia for his brother Jerome and pressurized all the German states except Austria to join the Confederation.

After several fierce battles in East Prussia in the first half of 1807 Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I signed the Treaty of Tilsit, marking the end of the War of the Third Coalition. It was an astonishing achievement. The Grande Armée had marched nearly 2,500 miles and fought five great battles. It had destroyed the armies of two Great Powers and defeated those of a third, a record of conquest not seen since the days of classical antiquity.

Britain was now left alone and in an attempt to defeat her by economic warfare, Napoleon (from Berlin) instigated his ‘Continental System’, an embargo on British goods in the entire European continent.

New biography of Napoleon

Here is a review of a major new life of Napoleon, taking the story up to 1799. Rather too early for Stendhal unfortunately!

The book is superb! I'm reading it at the moment and finding it illuminating in so many ways. It is especially good for the sceptical eye it casts over Napoleon's propaganda. I shall be posting on this shortly.

Napoleon on the web.

There's loads of material on Napoleon on the web.

Here, for example.

Napoleon: novelist

Did you know that Napoleon wrote a romantic novel a year before his successful Italian campaign? Here is the Times review of a new translation of Clisson and Eugénie. The reviewer thinks it's rather good. Perhaps he should have stuck to writing weepies???

Robespierre: not a nice man

Last year there was an excellent review of Ruth Scurr's Fatal Purity, a new biography of Robespierre, in the the London Review of Books.

There was another by Antonia Fraser in the Times.

Here are two more reviews. This is the Observer's. And this is from the Sunday Times. Here, Lucy Hughes Hallett has a particularly apposite comment:

'Gradually ... even through the cool intelligence of [Ruth Scurr's] narrative, the bloody mist begins to rise. By the time the Committee of Public Safety was established, not Robespierre alone but the revolutionary government en masse seemed infatuated with death, others’ and its own. “Strike here! I propose my own assassination,” yelled the painter David, ripping off his shirt on the floor of the Convention. “We will all die,” proclaimed Robespierre. “All! All!” thundered his fellow Jacobins. These heirs of the Enlightenment, these high-minded visionaries who had — many of them — arrived at political activism by way of a careful study of the classics, had reached a state of frenzy. Terror, wrote Robespierre, is an emanation of virtue. This thoughtful book makes sense of that paradox.'

Women and the French Revolution

You might like to look at this review in the Guardian on a book on women in the French Revolution that came out about a year ago. It's an interesting topic that has lately been the focus of much scholarly interest. The reviewer, Adam Thorpe, is kind to the book, but as he wrongly states that Madame de Staël died in exile (rather than in France where she returned after the Bourbon restoration), perhaps he didn't read with sufficient attention!

Guillotined ancestors

There's a fascinating article in a previous edition of the Times which links to a new site in which French people can discover whether any of their ancestors were guillotined between 1792 and 1795.

The creator of the site, Raymond Combes, a computer programmer and amateur genealogist, believes that his work will force historians to reappraise the period. According to the official figure 17,500 people were guillotined in this period but M. Combes already has more than 18,000 names on his site, which is based on lists compiled for the bicentenary of the Revolution in 1789 and from documents sent in by users. He says:

'A lot of these guillotined were never registered in official records. I'm adding names all the time. But I don't put anyone down unless they are accompanied by documentary evidence.'

Nor has he included the tens of thousands of people massacred during the Revolution.

'It was an important part of out history. But I'm not sure all that violence really served a purpose.'

Quite.

La Marseillaise on youtube

If you want to join in the singing of La Marseillaise (with translation provided) go here!

The French Revoltionary calendar

Here is all you will ever need - or want - to know about the French Revolutionary calendar  here. There's also a calculator which is fun!

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (or not)

If you studied the French Revolution for A103 then much of this material will be familiar to you. The Unit treats the complex events with exemplary clarity but even so you may find some of the details bewildering. You will never have to write an exam answer requiring a blow-by-blow account of the Revolution, but it's important nevertheless to have a grasp of the main events and their significance. The French Revolution was a cataclysmic event. In many ways it was the culmination of Enlightenment Rationalism, in others it heralded (to many contemporaries) a journey into a dark unknown. We are still living with its repercussions.

If you want to address the paradox, you might decide that the French Revolution involved two contradictory forces:

(a) the doctrine of human rights (droits de l'homme) brought to Europe from America, so that for the first time Protestants and Jews were granted civil equality and the slave trade was temporarily abolished.
(b) a self-righteous totalitarianism represented by the Reign of Terror and the attempt to create a pure citizenry. What happened to those who were impure?

'Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons'.
[Let the impure blood water our furrows]

The Marseillaise is here referring to the Prussian and Austrian enemy, but the language of purity could easily be applied to those French people who opposed the Revolution.

If you want to follow up the Revolution there's an excellent website here.

Was it worth it? The impact of the French Revolution

This post owes a great deal to William Doyle's The Old European Order, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1992) and also to a wide range of other works on the French Revolution.

What changed as a result of the French Revolution?

New ideologies
Following on from the American Revolution, the French provided a detailed programme for a new type of polity. The ideology of the French Revolution was spread by the revolutionary armies, who brought with them an agenda for the destruction of the old order. By 1800 Europe was ideologically divided in a way that had not been seen since the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.


Economic disruption
'Economically the Revolution was a disaster for France’ (Doyle, 362). The poor harvests were outside the control of the governments, but the crisis was worsened by government decisions. One was the decision to confiscate and sell church lands, which (Doyle argues) threw about a quarter of the land of France onto the open market. This land was bought by the bourgeoisie, who tied up their resources in landed property rather than in investment in industry.

The government depreciation of the paper currency, the assignat, caused inflation until the experiment was ended in 1797. The only real beneficiaries were the debtors who had been able to pay off their debts in depreciated currency. Public credit collapsed and precious metals were driven out of circulation.

The luxury and service sectors suffered from the Revolution. Urban unemployment soared and the population dropped.

However the unprecedented mobilization associated with the levée en masse (the unprecedented mobilization of the whole population for war; see Anthology I, pp. 90-1) provided a positive stimulus to the economy.

Overall, however, the Revolution did more economic harm than good, at a time when British productivity was soaring because of the Industrial Revolution. Was French industrialization delayed for a generation?

The people
The sans-culottes were ‘the first self-consciously political popular movement in history’ (Doyle, 366). In two important ways the ‘people’ benefited from the Revolution. Firstly, farmers and peasant proprietors were relieved of the burden of serfdom. Secondly, for a period ordinary men (and women?) had a voice in national decision-making. But this was a brief moment, permitted because of divisions within the Revolutionary governments, and by 1800 this power had been taken away from them. Political rights were still linked to property.

Only the richest peasants benefited from the transfer of land while the rural industries on which many depended were suppressed. Military conscription took a heavy toll of able-bodied farm hands. Unsurprisingly as many as a third of the émigrés were artisans or peasants.

Unemployment rose for the townspeople. The Le Chapelier law (14 June 1791) made unions of working men illegal. The break with the Church reduced the number of saints’ days and the working week was further extended by the (understandably unpopular!) introduction of the ten day revolutionary calendar in 1793.

The poor suffered most of all, as the Revolution destroyed the bulk of the revenue of hospitals and charitable institutions and dried up the stream of private charity. Women, children, the old and the sick suffered disproportionately.

Former nobles lost their privileges and the émigrés lost their lands. However, in spite of some spectacular and famous names, they were not the main victims of the Terror. Most did not emigrate but lived quietly in the country and emerged at the end of the 1790s with much of their prestige intact. During the Empire they enjoyed an Indian summer.

A quarter of the émigrés were clergy and 5,000 might have died during the Revolution. But the Catholic Church survived and the closing years of the 18th century saw a religious revival in France and throughout Europe papal authority revived. However the close link between Church and state had gone.

Historians have been unanimous that the French Revolution marked the triumph of the bourgeoisie, the former Third Estate (Doyle, 374-5). Thanks to their purchase of nationalized Church lands, their share of landed property increased dramatically. They gained more than any other group from the abolition of noble privileges and the career open to talents. The Revolution was a triumph for the property-owning classes.

What about women? This topic is ignored by Doyle and not given nearly enough prominence in the A207 course material. Overall, women lost out in the Revolution. After a brief period of feminist writings and of the formation of female revolutionary clubs, they were denied a public voice. The good citizeness was the exemplary wife and mother, rather than the political activist. Look at what happened to Olympe de Gouges (Anthology I, pp. 94-5). Women religious suffered intense economic hardship. Some feminist historians have seen the French Revolution as a profoundly misogynistic movement, with Marie Antoinette the most prominent victim of this misogyny.
Question: Why did French women not get the vote until 1944?

Balance sheet
The French Revolution caused thousands of deaths - though even more people died in Poland and Ireland during the 1790s. It has been estimated that 40,000 died at the height of the Terror; those who were not guillotined were shot (as in Lyons) or drowned (as in Nantes). This isn't counting those who died in battle or of malnutrition. The Terror can be explained by the threats to France, both from anti-revolutionaries inside the country and from invading armies. But it also revealed some very uncomfortable facts about human nature - a self-righteous moral certainty that expressed itself in vicious cruelty. Look at the language of Anthology I, pp. 86-7, 91-2, 93.

The other side of the sheet is the doctrine of human rights (droits d'homme). See Anthology I, pp. 77-9. The Declaration of the Rights of Man led eventually to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promulgated by the UN in 1948.

The total break between Church and state was enshrined in the law of 1905 which established the principle of laïcité. (This was of course the rationale for the banning of the hijab.)

Two views of the French Revolution

How did contemporaries view the French Revolution? As the crowning glory of the Enlightenment or as the herald of a new dark age? The answer is both.

Look at the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, promulgated in the late summer of 1789. Note the optimistic Enlightenment language of the Introduction:

'ignorance, neglect or contempt for the rights of man are the sole causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of governments'. Anthology, I, 77.

The answer to misfortune and corruption is to instruct a potentially virtuous citizenry in its rights.


Note as well how the language of the Declaration is an amalgam of Rousseau's Social Contract and the American Declaration of Independence [italics mine].

'Men are born and remain free (Rousseau) and equal (Thomas Jefferson) in respect of their rights. Ibid.

Whereas the great British jurist William Blackstone had declared that sovereignty resided in the King-in-Parliament, the French revolutionaries were in no doubt that

'the fundamental source of all sovereignty resides in the nation'.

A year later however, the Dublin born British politican Edmund Burke surprised everyone when he broke with his fellow-Whigs and published his famous attack on the Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Anthology, I, 80-1). Burke begins with some embarrassingly gushing praise of Marie-Antoinette, couched in the language of chivalry and proceeds to attack the Revolution as the product of

'cold hearts and muddy understandings'.

This was an attack on what he saw as Enlightenment rationalism taken to extremes:

'On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied ... in persons, so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.'

In harking back to the age of chivalry, Burke was arguing for an organic society which, in the manner of an ancient tree, had grown slowly and changed gradually. He believed that people needed institutions that were rooted in history. The French revolutionaries, he argued, were vandals, seeing the constitution as a mere machine that could be tampered with.

Burke's book was mocked by many and produced eloquent replies from sympathizers with the Revolution, notably Tom Paine (left) and Mary Wollstonecraft. (You will learn more about British sympathy for the Revolution when you come to study Wordsworth.) But when the Revolution turned into terror, he argued that he had been proved right and that his reference to regicide (p. 81) had been extremely prescient!

The point here is not whether Burke was right or wrong. He was heralding a new age - that of Romantic reaction to what some saw as the sterility of Enlightenment rationalism. That is why one book on Burke is entitled Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century.

There was no single Romantic 'take' on the French Revolution. Byron, a child of two at the time Burke's book came out, was the Romantic of Romantics - and he sympathized with the Revolution and admired Napoleon. There was radical Romanticism and conservative Romanticism.

A great website

The Course gives you an excellent overview of the French Revolution, but if you have a few spare minutes or want to learn a little more, then I can thoroughly recommend this website.

Hume and Rousseau - a brief comparison

Below is a very schematic outline of their differences but it should help you to see the difference between Hume's thoroughly Enlightenment way of looking at the world and Rousseau's proto-Romanticism.

Hume
Empiricism (see Glossary)
Scepticism (of both religion and the power of reason)
Preference for classical over Christian morality
Irony (more on this coming up in the post on Block 6)
Style: cool, detached, balanced sentences
Narrative persona: ironical (see above), self-effacing

Key quote:

‘One considerable advantage that arises from philosophy consists in the sovereign antidote which it affords to superstition and false religion.’ (Anth I, 24)

Rousseau
Reliance on intuition (the heart) rather than empiricism alone
Belief in natural religion which links with deism (see Glossary)
Nature a source of knowledge in its own right
No irony: earnestness and sincerity
Style: heightened, emotional
Narrative persona: upfront, a great deal of focus on the self.

Key quote:

‘Let us listen to our inner sentiment.’ (Anth I, 39)

Early signs of the transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism can therefore be seen in the writings of these two men, near contemporaries, but far apart intellectually (and emotionally).

The great quarrel
Some time ago the Guardian produced an absolutely riveting account of the quarrel between Hume and Rousseau which is a must-read, not just because it tells a fascinating personal story but because of the wonderful way in which it highlights the personal and intellectual differences between the two men. It couldn't be more relevant to this course. It also nuances my statement above that Hume was 'thoroughly Enlightenment'.

Money quote:

'Hume was a combination of reason, doubt and scepticism. Rousseau was a creature of feeling, alienation, imagination and certainty. While Hume's outlook was unadventurous and temperate, Rousseau was by instinct rebellious; Hume was an optimist, Rousseau a pessimist; Hume gregarious, Rousseau a loner. Hume was disposed to compromise, Rousseau to confrontation. In style, Rousseau revelled in paradox; Hume revered clarity. Rousseau's language was pyrotechnical and emotional, Hume's straightforward and dispassionate. JYT Greig wrote in his 1931 biography of Hume, "The annals of literature seldom furnish us with two contemporary writers of the first rank, both called philosophers, who cancel one another out with almost mathematical precision."

'While they may be described now as thinkers in "the Age of Enlightenment", how far "Enlightenment" covers a common national experience or meaning is a matter of vigorous dispute. A particular reading of French history tends to shape the general idea of "the Enlightenment" as, broadly, the French philosophes' belief that the application of critical reason to received traditions and structures would bring human advancement. The dominating Enlightenment narrative becomes a small and easily identifiable group of brilliant people, a central activity, the Encyclopédie; the sweetness of the salons balanced by the risk of imprisonment, the focus on reason, and the whole enterprise terminating in the guillotine.

'But neither Hume nor Rousseau fitted easily into that narrative and its intellectual consensus. Rousseau, in particular, inveighed against so-called "civilisation", taking aim at the Enlightenment's proud boast of progress (that there had been progress in the human condition, and that with the systematic application of rationality and information, improvements could be speeded up). "Nature has made everything in the best way possible; but we want to do better still, and we spoil everything," he wrote. In his emphasis, not just on reason but on feeling, on sensibilité, he would gain a posthumous reputation as the father of the Romantics.

'But Hume, too, is a problematic Enlightenment figure. He used reason to demonstrate the limits of reason and he injected his empiricism with a destructive revolutionary force. Taking empiricism to its logical conclusion, he showed how, if we rely on experience, then we can have no complete confidence in the existence of the external world; we can have no confidence in the laws of nature that we take for granted, such as gravity, and we must drastically rethink our notions of induction, necessity and personal identity. Nor could ethics have a rational foundation. Logic was an inappropriate tool for dissecting morality, like taking a carving knife to water. Reason was a slave to the passions.

'True, both Rousseau and Hume assailed the Church: it might seem that in this at least they were emblematic spirits of the Enlightenment. But in fact neither did so in a way that would satisfy the wits and cynics in the salons. Rousseau believed in God's existence, professed his love for God, and his faith in God's goodness ("everything is good, coming from God"), as well as his certainty that there was an afterlife and that the soul was immortal, which "all the subtleties of metaphysics will not make me doubt for a moment".
'As for Hume, though he had been damned in Scotland for having too little religion, in Paris, where he squirmed at the disdain directed at believers, his burden was that he had too much. True, he had demolished the arguments purporting to prove the existence of God, including the argument from design - the claim that only a supreme and benevolent being could explain the wonder and order in the world. This argument, Hume insisted, was untenable. How could it account for the suffering in the world? How can we infer that there is just one architect of the world, and not a co-operative of two or more?'

But read the whole.

How does Hume construct an argument?

Hume’s reasoning is uncompromisingly empiricist (Block 1, pp. 170-3). This leads him to scepticism about such key Christian doctrines as the immortality of the soul and the sinfulness of suicide.
In the argument of Of the Immortality of the Soul Hume does not openly question the existence of God, but he subtly undermines the arguments for his existence. He argues that the metaphysical, moral and physical arguments for the immortality of the soul are all inadequate and that ‘it is the gospel and the gospel alone that has brought life an immortality to light’ [Anthology I, p.17]. Then what are we meant to make of the validity of the gospel? This is an example of Hume's irony.

The moral argument for the immortality of the soul can be put in three premises, all of which are implied in Hume’s argument.

Premise 1: If there is no afterlife, then there is no ultimate justice.
Premise 2: If there is no ultimate justice then God is unjust (or not omnipotent)
Premise 3: God is just (and omnipotent)
Conclusion: There is an afterlife

Hume’s reply is three-fold.

1. It is dangerous to assume that God must always do ‘what seems to us best’[19:8]. The present world presents us with instances that seem to run counter to the idea of a just an omnipotent God (was he thinking of the Lisbon tsunami?).
2. Our minds do not seem equipped for an afterlife so if there is a future existence then God has perpetrated a ‘barbarous deceit’ [19:10]. But if there is no afterlife then women’s intellectual inequality is easily explained. (!)
3. We have to assess God’s justice by the lights of our own sentiments, because ‘we have no conception’ of any others [20:12] Eternal punishment is (according to our notions) disproportionate ‘for the temporary offences of so frail a creature as man [20:15]. Most men are not wholly good or bad and the stark alternatives of heaven and hell are therefore irrational. Half the human population die before they are capable of moral choices.

The great Enlightenment love affair

You might enjoy reading this review from the Telegraph about eighteen months ago of David Bodanis's Passionate Minds: the great Enlightenment love affair. The subject of this book is Emilie du Châtelet, Voltaire's mistress and (more importantly) a considerable scientist in her own right. And this is a different type of book altogether from Nancy Mitford's frothy Voltaire in Love which purports to deal with the same subject.

Du Châtelet's greatest achievement was to translate Newton's Principia into French. She also, as the review in the Economist (not on line) points out, 'exposed Newton's obscure geometric proofs using the more accessible language of calculus. And she teased out of his convoluted web of theorems the crucial implications for the study of gravity and energy. That laid the foundation for the next century's discoveries in theoretical physics.'

She died from a childbirth infection, aged 42.

The book raises important issues for October and February starters alike. Was there a role for passion as well as reason in the Enlightenment? Did women have an Enlightenment (a question I will pose when I come to my Jane Marcet post)? If so, why are the female philosophes and intellectuals so much less well known than the men? And why are there so few women in A207?

PS. The Guardian reviewer thought du Châtelet's achievements have been exaggerated.