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Revolutionary electricity in 1790: shock, consensus, and the birth of a political metaphor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2021
Abstract
The 1790 Fête de la fédération in the early French Revolution evoked the memory of the taking of the Bastille while tamping down on the simmering social forces that had erupted on 14 July 1789. How to do both? As an official architect put it, through the festival, ‘the sentiment of each becomes the sentiment of all by a kind of electrification, against which even the most perverse men cannot defend themselves’. This paper argues that a new language of revolutionary electricity came into being with the French Revolution. It argues that revolutionaries drew upon concepts of medical electricity developed in the 1780s to analogize the literal electricity of the ether to the revolutionary electricity of collective political sentiment. Though historians have associated electricity with radical politics, this paper argues that in the hands of bureaucrats and festival planners, electricity entered revolutionary discourse as a powerful mechanism for exercising authority and control over an unruly revolutionary public.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 257 - 275
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of British Society for the History of Science
References
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51 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre (trans. Allan Bloom), Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960, p. 126.
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56 Ronald Schechter, A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018; Miller, op. cit. (13).
57 Fairclough, op. cit. (13), p. 3.
58 This point follows the logic of the linguistic turn, that words have causal power in history, in that they define and set the limits for historical action. It should also be understood in the context of an important scholarly tradition in the history of science that reads political and social arrangements as intimately related to conceptions of the natural world, how it is ordered and how it operates. See especially Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985; John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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