Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Despotism of liberty: Robespierre and the illusion of politics
- Chapter 2 The politics of confession in Rousseau and Robespierre
- Chapter 3 Chivalry, justice and the law in William Godwin's Caleb Williams
- Chapter 4 ‘The Prometheus of Sentiment’: Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and aesthetic education
- Chapter 5 Strangling the infant Hercules: Malthus and the population controversy
- Chapter 6 ‘The virtue of one paramount mind’: Wordsworth and the politics of the Mountain
- Chapter 7 ‘Sour Jacobinism’: William Hazlitt and the resistance to reform
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Chapter 6 - ‘The virtue of one paramount mind’: Wordsworth and the politics of the Mountain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Despotism of liberty: Robespierre and the illusion of politics
- Chapter 2 The politics of confession in Rousseau and Robespierre
- Chapter 3 Chivalry, justice and the law in William Godwin's Caleb Williams
- Chapter 4 ‘The Prometheus of Sentiment’: Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and aesthetic education
- Chapter 5 Strangling the infant Hercules: Malthus and the population controversy
- Chapter 6 ‘The virtue of one paramount mind’: Wordsworth and the politics of the Mountain
- Chapter 7 ‘Sour Jacobinism’: William Hazlitt and the resistance to reform
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Summary
Shortly after returning from France in the spring of 1793, the young William Wordsworth wrote a pamphlet against Richard Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, for having betrayed the cause of liberty. Formerly a Foxite liberal sympathetic to the Jacobin cause, Watson had publicly renounced his support for the Revolution when he heard of the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793. Suitably enough, therefore, when Wordsworth came to draft his reply, he responded to the bishop in a selfconsciously ‘republican spirit’, treating English politics as if it were a merely an extension of the French conflict:
Conscious that an enemy lurking in our ranks is ten times more formidable than when drawn out against us, that the unblushing aristocracy of a Maury or a Cazalès is far less dangerous than the insidious mask of patriotism assumed by a La Fayette or a Mirabeau, we thank you for your desertion.
During the constitutional period Lafayette and Mirabeau had appeared to be fervent supporters of the cause of freedom, but as the Revolution had progressed, their complicity with the old order had been unmasked. And it was this and other examples of political betrayal which inspired the belligerent Girondin Jacques-Pierre Brissot to call for the mass desertion of traitors during the war crisis of 1792.
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- Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism , pp. 163 - 208Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999