P ASCAL F ISCHER The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’ Does the abstract concept of movement have a political component? If we simply look at the denotative sense as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, there is not much to be found in terms of politics: “the action or process of moving; change of position or posture; passage from place to place, or from one situation to another.” 1 That in reality ideologies cannot be reduced to this simple criterion has frequently been remarked. As far as conservatism - my principal interest here - is concerned, Kevin Gilmartin explains: “To assign conservative thought and action to a straightforward preservation campaign is to accept uncritically one of conservatism’s own legitimating mythologies.” Nevertheless, the concept is used for one of the most fundamental distinctions between political orientations, namely the contrast between progressivism and conservatism. However differently they may be defined in various contexts, these political persuasions are conceptualized with the imagery of movement and change: to progress after all means to ‘move forward in space’ and to conserve to ‘keep in a certain state’. Not only are movement and change closely connected, but movement is also very often the central metaphor for change. The attitudes towards change are, in turn, regarded as essential to these political worldviews. 2 From our perspective, it may not be easily understood that mobility can be very negatively connoted. But this was the case when conservatism came into being in England during the French Revolution. In the present study, I am going to show that a distrust and a denigration of movement were in fact important elements in the formation of conservatism and that this strongly affected the structure of conservative narrative literature. While there have been several attempts to define this ideology by enumerating its positions on governmental, social, cultural and religious questions, What is more, today’s proponents of different political camps have elevated personal mobility to the status of a cardinal virtue. Modern man likes to be seen as dynamic and flexible. The corporate interest requires mobility; politicians of all hues - conservatives no less than others - advocate it. 3 1 “movement, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, third edition; online version December, 2011. I propose to under- 2 Kevin Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 12. 3 Manfred G. Schmidt, Wörterbuch zur Politik (Stuttgart: Kröner, 3 2010), 424. P ASCAL F ISCHER 220 stand conservatism as a weltanschauung that is, at least partly, metaphorically conditioned. My theoretical framework is cognitive metaphor theory, which has directed our attention to the fact that our perception of reality is to a large extent based on metaphors. 4 Anti-Jacobins, as conservatives started calling themselves at that time, 5 After outlining the historical framework of early conservatism as well as the current state of research, I shall look at examples of individual images from several kinds of anti-Jacobin texts that are built upon the contrast between mobility and stability. Glancing at the other side of the political spectrum, I will then briefly demonstrate that the radicals of the lower classes ironically accepted ‘mobility’ as a self-designation. In a further step, I will examine how the dichotomy between ‘movement’ and ‘constancy’ is translated into the narrative make-up of the anti-Jacobin novel. drew heavily on the contrast between mobility and immobility to depict their own world-view and that of their political opponents. Embracing stability as a central constituent of their identity, conservatives regularly voice their aversion to movement and present mobility as a serious threat to everything the English nation treasures. Historical and political studies largely concur that conservatism as a coherent ideology did not emerge before the industrial and political “dual revolution,” as Eric Hobsbawm called the time around 1800. 6 According to John Western, “British conservatism, as a conscious political force, is a product of the French Revolution.” 7 Whereas older research identified Edmund Burke as the sole “founding father” 8 of conservatism and his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) as the principal reference point for all subsequent anti- Jacobin endeavors, 9 4 See e.g. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live by (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980); Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2 2010). more recent publications understand this ideology in its early phase as a mass movement supported by many writers from all layers 5 The term conservative was not used in the modern sense before the second decade of the nineteenth century; see James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative. Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 4-6. The first printed evidence of the use of anti-Jacobin stems from the year 1794: Alexander Watson, The anti- Jacobin. A Hudibrastic Poem in Twenty-one Cantos (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1794). 6 Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution. Europe 1789-1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1962), xv; 2; 3; passim. 7 John R. Western, “The Volunteer Movement as an Anti-Revolutionary Force, 1793- 1801,” The English Historical Review 71.281 (1956): 603. 8 Frank O’Gorman, British Conservatism. Conservative Thought from Burke to Thatcher (London: Longman, 1986), 12. 9 The following quotation by Peter Viereck is typical of this older view: “Almost singlehanded, he [Burke] turned the intellectual tide from a rationalist contempt for the past to a traditionalist reverence for it.” Peter Viereck, Conservatism. From John Adams to Churchill (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1956 [Reprint 1978]), 25. The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’ 221 of society. 10 The reason why the French Revolution is such a decisive phase in the development of political orientations in England is that it triggered a broad discussion about elementary questions of the English political system. Alfred Cobban famously called the French Revolution Debate “the last real discussion of the fundamentals of politics in this country” What has still not been sufficiently considered, though, is the role of narrative literature in spawning and disseminating conservative ideas. My research is based on a large corpus of non-fictional, semi-fictional and fictional writing directed against the Revolution in France and radical ideas in Britain. 11 An intense controversy raged which produced one of the most voluminous and theoretically significant bodies of political literature, indeed the most important debate about democratic principles, in British history. and Gregory Claeys explained: 12 However, in the years after the fall of the Bastille, English anti-Jacobins avoided intricate questions like the possible reform of the franchise or the abolition of rotten boroughs. Instead, most authors depicted the constitutional system in a general manner by drawing on a set of metaphors that are indicative of the perception of the self and the other. In setting up an opposition between an idealized English constitution and a negative picture of revolutionary France, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France strongly relies on the imagery of stability here and mobility there, as the following example illustrates: “Standing on the firm ground of the British constitution, let us be satisfied to admire rather than attempt to follow in their desperate flights the aëronauts of France.” 13 10 Harry T. Dickinson, “Counter-revolution in Britain in the 1790s,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 102 (1989): 354-67; Harry T. Dickinson, “Popular Loyalism in Britain in the 1790s,” The Transformation of Political Culture. England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 503-33; Mark Philp, “Vulgar Conservatism, 1792-3,” The English Historical Review 110.435 (1995): 42-69. In this vignette, Burke and the compatriots he addresses are standing, while the French are moving in a balloon. By relating the immobility of the spectators to the firmness of the British constitution, the national character and the constitutional history of England are aligned. Constancy is depicted as a virtue of national identity. The verb admire must either be seen as ironic, or, in an older usage, as neutral in the sense of ‘to view with wonder or surprise; to wonder or marvel at’. For this meaning, the OED gives examples like “to admire the 11 Alfred Cobban, The Debate on the French Revolution, 1789-1800 (London: Kaye, 1950), 31. 12 Gregory Claeys, “Introduction,” Political Writings of the 1790s. Vol. 1: Radicalism and Reform: Responses to Burke 1790-1791, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Pickering, 1995), xviii. 13 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. A Critical Edition, ed. Jonathan C.D. Clark (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001 [ 1 1790]), 414. P ASCAL F ISCHER 222 stupidity” or to “admire the madness.” 14 The word desperate indicates the loss of control this means of transportation entails and points to the dangers of such a journey. Evidently, the risks of airborne locomotion were very real, and Burke’s readers will certainly have remembered the conflagration of the Irish town of Tullamore on 10 May 1785, which was caused by the emergency landing of a hot-air balloon and is deemed to be the first aeronautical catastrophe in history. 15 The association of what was then often called ‘French philosophy’ with ballooning was facilitated by the fact that almost all the pioneers of aerial navigation in the 1780s were French: the Montgolfier brothers, Jacques Alexandre César Charles, Jean-Pierre Blanchard and others. It is documented that Edmund Burke attended an ascension by Blanchard on 9 May 1785, the day before the Tullamore disaster. Despite standing on firm ground, Burke was not altogether safe: his purse and watch were stolen in the crowd. 16 A similar image is used by Arthur Young in his The Example of France, a Warning to Britain of 1793. In this pamphlet, Young deals with Thomas Paine’s criticism in the second part of the radical pamphlet Rights of Man (1792) that governments relying on the authority of earlier decisions “hobble along by the stilts and crutches of precedent”: 17 They fly at the objects of their rapine: while in a more humble course, governments, by precedent, hobble slowly, but surely, towards the great land-marks of individual happiness and national prosperity. - If stilts and crutches have brought us to that goal, we need not envy the aerial flight or inflammable wings of balloon philosophers. 18 Travelling by balloon is again presented as highly precarious. The image of the “inflammable wings” evokes the moral fable of Icarus as a warning against human hubris. The attempt to fly, the implicit message goes, amounts to a violation of the natural order, which is subject to the dictates of gravity. For man, nothing but moving at a slow pace appears to be adequate. Young picks up Paine’s accusation of the lameness of the present constitution and tries to turn it into an asset. The example shows that in their dispute about the political system the opposing parties resorted to general categories of which movement was of eminent significance. On the one hand, Young’s 14 “admire, v.,” Oxford English Dictionary, third edition; online version, December 2011. 15 Michael Byrne, “The Tullamore Balloon Fire - First Air Disaster in History,” (Offaly Historical and Archaeological Society website, 2007). <http: / / www.offalyhistory.com/ articles/ 72/ 1/ The-Tullamore-Balloon-Fire---First-Air-Disaster-in-History/ Page1.html> 16 Michael R. Lynn, The Sublime Invention: Ballooning in Europe, 1783-1820 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010), 109. 17 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), 250. 18 Arthur Young, The Example of France, a Warning to Britain (London: W. Richardson, 4 1794 [ 1 1793]), 21. The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’ 223 metaphor allows for some - albeit very slow - advancement, on the other, he asserts that the English have reached their goal already and need not proceed any further. By and large, anti-Jacobin authors accept the enlightenment conceptualization of history as a linear, teleological progression that involves improvement. For many of them, however, the aim has already been achieved. This idea is clearly expressed by Hannah More in her anti-Jacobin dialogue Village Politics (1793). Here, the conservative figure Jack tries to convince his misguided friend Tom of the value of the established system with the metaphor of a race for liberty, in which the British have reached the finishing line, while the French have just set out from the starting post: “We’ve got it, man; we’ve no race to run. We’re there already.” 19 Instead of commenting on the defects of the new form of government in France, anti-Jacobin authors more often criticize that it was quickly set up. The English constitution on the other hand, is eulogized for the slowness with which it developed. According to the farmer in John Bowles’ Dialogues on the Rights of Britons, Between a Farmer, A Sailor, and a Manufacturer (1792), “the French pretended to do at once what the English were so long in performing; for the former have only verified the old saying, that what is hastily done is ill done. Great changes can only be made to advantage by very slow degrees.” 20 The farmer furthermore conveys this conviction with the help of an organic metaphor which is very characteristic of conservative discourse: “Ours [Our constitution], like the English Oak, has arrived by slow degrees at maturity, and, like the English Oak too, is useful and durable, forming the strength, while it secures the lasting happiness of the Nation.” 21 19 Hannah More, Village Politics. Addressed to all the Mechanics, Journeymen, and Day Labourers in Great Britain. By Will Chip, A Country Carpenter (1793), Political Writings of the 1790s. Vol. 8: Loyalism 1793-1800, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Pickering, 1995), 6. The slow growth of this endemic plant, which is supposed to epitomize English identity, can be linked to the accumulation of experience and wisdom, which take a long time to flower, too. The density and hardness of the tree, moreover, ensure its superior usefulness. Sluggishness and persistence can thus be depicted as prerequisites for solidity, and hence for quality. The common knowledge that slow-growing wood is harder and more robust than fastgrowing wood is elaborated on by the sailor in the conversation. In this case, the English constitution is contrasted with the American political system: “English Oak is, as you say, slow in growth, but then it excels all other timber. That of America grows much quicker, but the ships built of it go sooner 20 John Bowles, Dialogues on the Rights of Britons, Between a Farmer, A Sailor, and a Manufacturer (1792), in: Political Writings of the 1790s. Vol 7: Loyalism 1791-3, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Pickering, 1995), 251. 21 Bowles 249. P ASCAL F ISCHER 224 to decay.” 22 Connected with the praise of stability and constancy is the language of inclusion and containment. Whereas radical authors celebrate the developments in France with images of opened prison doors and broken fetters, anti- Jacobins emphasize the benefits of immuring and sealing. When Burke defends the institution of the prison as a response to the radicals’ idealization of the storming of the Bastille, he does not mention educational, moral or metaphysical reasons, but highlights the necessity of confinement, for instance, when he asks: “Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell? ” The image, which yokes the organic metaphor of the tree and the classical view of the state as a ship, does not foreclose change. It is the rapid pace that is to be distrusted. 23 While in Burke’s description of revolutionary France criminals and madmen are running around uninhibited, they are fortunately held back in Britain, as in the case of Lord Gordon, whose incarceration for libel Burke applauds: “We have Lord George Gordon fast in Newgate […] We have rebuilt Newgate, and tenanted the mansion. We have prisons almost as strong as the Bastile [sic].” 24 For Burke in particular, the social processes are always in danger of getting out of hand and must therefore be contained. Even the ideals he most highly cherishes might become a threat if unchecked. When in the following metaphor Burke uses a certain gas as source domain, he conforms to a common practice of conservative authors at that time. In the physical world, gas particles continually move and diffuse and can therefore easily be aligned to the revolutionary movement and its dangers: “When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work […] The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose.” Seclusion effects a healthy immobilization as a defence against turmoil and anarchy, which are related to movement. 25 22 Bowles 249. At first sight, liberty might here seem like steam that needs to be sealed in a kettle, if it is not to stream out wildly. In the next sentence, however, Burke uses the word “effervescence,” which rather evokes the image of bubbling fluid in a chemical experiment. The association of subversive politics and chemical analysis was well chosen, since one of the leaders of the radical movement in Britain was also an eminent scientist who studied gases: Joseph Priestley. Not only did he discover oxygen - the achievement he is best remembered for today - but he also studied carbon dioxide, which was then called “fixed air.” Carbonated water appears stable 23 Burke 151. 24 Burke 247. 25 Burke 152. The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’ 225 in a sealed container, but if you open the lid, it might gush out uncontrollably. In the Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke repeatedly depicts the radical ideology as a sudden, dynamic eruption. After cheering the English system and its “fixed form of a constitution” 26 Let them be their amusement in the schools. “Illa se jactet in aula - Æolus, et clauso ventorum carcere regnet.” But let them not break prison to burst like a Levanter, to sweep the earth with their hurricane, and to break up the fountains of the great deep to overwhelm us. for its solidity and slowly accumulated experience, he turns his attention to the radical philosophers. Feigning generosity, he first allows them to devote themselves to speculation in a room of their own: 27 With the exclamation “In that hall let Aeolus lord it and rule within the barred prison of the winds,” 28 The Archdeacon of Carlisle, William Paley, who is nowadays best known for his work on Natural Theology and for his abolitionist position, but who also possessed an authoritative voice within the anti-Jacobin camp, prefers less violent images. Yet, he shows the same appreciation for immobility. In his 1792 pamphlet Reasons for Contentment, Paley appeals to the common man to accept his humble lot and disregard the wealth of the higher ranks: Neptune chastises the rebellious god of the winds in Virgil’s Aeneid. In line with Burke’s commendation of prisons, the image of the contained winds captures his idea that the radical philosophy is only harmless as long as it is not applied to real politics. At the same time, the metaphor of the hurricane epitomizes the idea of movement as a hazard. Just like the agitated but ultimately vacuous radicals, a severe wind hardly possesses any substance, is almost pure movement, but nonetheless extremely dangerous. In this passage, one movement triggers the other in a kind of chain reaction: the storm causes the upsurge of a fountain, with equally disastrous consequences. He enjoys, therefore, ease in this respect, and ease resulting from the best cause, the power of keeping his imagination at home; of confining it to what belongs to himself, instead of sending forth to wander amongst speculations which have neither limits nor use, amidst views of unattainable grandeur, fancied happiness, of extolled, because unexperienced, privileges and delights. 29 26 Burke 217. 27 Burke 217. 28 P. Vergilius Maro, Aeneis I, 140-1. English translation according to Jonathan C.D. Clark’s critical edition of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, 217. 29 William Paley, Reasons for Contentment; Addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public (1792), in: Political Writings of the 1790s. Vol 7: Loyalism 1791-3, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Pickering, 1995), 219-20. P ASCAL F ISCHER 226 The difference between an exaggerated and a modest imagination is here expressed as the contrast between nearness and distance as well as stasis and movement. “Keeping [the] imagination at home” is not only a virtue but the prerequisite for a fulfilled, happy life. Although in this passage the opposition of ‘being at home’ and ‘wandering about’ is used metaphorically for mental activities, it also has a nonmetaphorical component. The lower classes were called upon to remain near their houses, where they could be watched, controlled and maybe morally reformed by their betters. 30 Like other anti-Jacobin writers, Paley commended the immobile domestic country-life, as it was not only supposed to further responsible behaviour towards one’s wife and children but also an apolitical, conformist attitude, far away from the corrosive influence of the ever-busy city. Some of the pamphlets, however, give voice to the concern that the rural idyll could be destroyed by travelling outsiders, who either operate as orators or as circulators of subversive writings. William Atkinson warns in his An Oblique View of the Grand Conspiracy Against Social Order: “It is a wellknown fact, that Hawkers and Pedlars of every description, have throughout Europe been employed to disseminate cheap Editions of Sedition.” 31 The conservatives’ frequent association of radicalism with movement was facilitated by the fact that a close cognitive connection between the disobedient and uncontrollable lower classes and mobility had already been established before the time of the French Revolution. The clearest evidence for that can be found in the English vocabulary itself. Not only did the word mob, which is an abbreviation of the Latin mobile vulgus - ‘the fickle crowd’ - experience a steep ascent in the eighteenth century, 32 When you look up ‘mobility’ in the OED, you will not only find the entry that indicates the meaning we frequently draw on today, but also a second entry, “mobility, n. 2 ,”which contains the commentary “now historical and rare.” The word was formed in analogy to nobility, but was, of course, used as an antonym to it, referring to the opposite on the social spectrum: “the mob, the rabble; the common people; the working-classes.” but there was also another term available: the word ‘mobility’ itself. The expression was used since the end of the seventeenth century as a synonym for the boisterous human rabble. It is probably due to the derogatory connotations of “mobility, n. 2 ” that it was not used directly by anti-Jacobin propagandists to denigrate their politi- 30 John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism. Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 213-14. 31 William Atkinson, An Oblique View of the Grand Conspiracy, against Social Order; or, A Candid Inquiry, Tending to Shew what Part The Analytical, the Monthly, the Critical Reviews, and The New Annual Register, Have Taken in that Conspiracy (London: J. Wright, 1798), 4. 32 “mob, n. 2 (and adv.),” Oxford English Dictionary, third edition; online version, December 2011. The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’ 227 cal enemies, as that would have compromised their position with the lower ranks they wanted to convince, even though Burke uses ‘mob’ with much relish in the Reflections. 33 The fact, however, that conservatives frequently linked radicalism with movement, did not go unnoticed by the radicals and gave new currency to the term. It was characteristic for popular radicals at that time to gleefully embrace the insults that were hurled at them as signs of identification. The expression “the swinish multitude,” 34 which Burke famously used in the Reflections to disparage the mob, was accepted by many as an ironic self-designation. 35 In the same manner ‘mobility’ can sometimes be found in radical writings to refer to the lower classes with self-confidence and pride. In The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson explains: “‘Mobility’ was a term proudly adopted by nineteenth-century Radicals and Chartists for their peaceable and well-conducted demonstrations.” 36 That this was already the case in the 1790s can, for instance, be illustrated by the satirical playbill by the radical bookseller Richard ‘Citizen’ Lee, entitled An Entire Change of Performances? (1795). 37 The broadside announces an exciting new spectacle to be performed on the streets of the metropolis by “the Swinish Multitude.” A euphemism for revolution, this ‘performance’ will not be palatable to the nobility, but to its perceived antipode, the ‘mobility.’ Where the proper theatre performances of the day boasted their orientation towards the nobility (particularly in the so-called ‘private theatricals’), 38 33 Burke draws on the term several times to describe the masses in the French Revolution as well as in the Gordon Riots of 1780. Referring to the fact that Gordon “raised a mob,” Burke explains to his French addressee Charles-Jean-François Depont: “excuse the term, it is still in use here” (Burke 247). this spectacle will “accommodate the Taste of the Mobility of this Country.” 34 Burke 242. 35 Examples include: James Parkinson, An Address, to the Hon. Edmund Burke. From the Swinish Multitude (London: J. Ridgway, 1793); Thomas Spence, One Pennyworth of Pig’s Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude (London: T. Spence, 1793). See Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791-1819 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 79-85; Darren Howard, “Necessary Fictions: The ‘Swinish Multitude’ and the Rights of Man,” Studies in Romanticism 47.2 (2008): 161. 36 Edward Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963), 73. 37 Richard Lee [bookseller], An Entire Change of Performances? (London, 1795). 38 Gillian Russell, “Private theatricals,” The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730- 1830, ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 191-97. See also Allardyce Nicoll on the satiric reactions towards the fad of aristocratic “private performances” in the late 18 th century: “The aping by amateurs of the graces of professional actors, the aristocratic audiences and the servility of the newspapers, which gave special columns to this latest freak of fashion […] all come under the lash of the satirists.” Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660-1900. Vol. III: Late Eighteenth- Century Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1952), 21. John Barrell writes about satirical advertisements like An Entire Change of Performances? : “The mock-advertisements mobi- P ASCAL F ISCHER 228 Significantly, the term “swinish multitude” as well as the idea of the French Revolution as spectacle were borrowed from Burke, who had, for instance, referred to the upheavals across the Channel as a “monstrous tragicomic scene.” 39 The demonization of mobility brought about by countless metaphors in the pamphlet literature of the 1790s, as well as the concrete fear of insurgent vagabonds and violent uproars coalesced to give structure to the anti-Jacobin novel, which was mainly a product of the late 1790s and early 1800s. After literary scholars had for a long time regarded the political novel of that period as the exclusive domain of progressive authors, recent research has shown that many more novels were published on the conservative side of the political spectrum. While the term ‘mobility’ does not appear in his pamphlet, the association between the radical masses and movement is in keeping with the spirit of anti-Jacobin propaganda in general. 40 To speak of the anti-Jacobin novel as a literary subgenre appears to be justified inasmuch as many of these works share certain characteristics on the levels of story and narration. Typically, these novels centre on a villain figure that is bent on spreading subversive ideas and inciting rebellion. The majority of these agents provocateurs come from France to Britain in order to enlist the forces of discontent there, but some are Englishmen driven by a false ideology or simply by greed, lust and an inflated ego. What almost all of these radicals have in common is their amazing mobility. Their ramblings through England - or even through the world - drive the plots. Although few of the anti-Jacobin authors highlighted the nomadic existence of their characters as obviously as George Walker did with the title of his 1799 novel The Vagabond, several others quite consciously positioned themselves within the picaresque tradition. Charles Lucas’s title The Infernal Quixote (1801) is a nod toward Miguel de Cervantes; and Isaac D’Israeli mentions two landmark lise a language with which any reader of newspapers, anyone indeed walking the streets of London, would have been thoroughly familiar. […] Playbills were stuck up on every dead wall in London and in every major town in the country.” John Barrell, “Radicalism, Visual Culture, and Spectacle in the 1790s,” Romanticism on the Net 46 (2007). http: / / id.erudit.org/ iderudit/ 016131ar 39 Burke 155. Research has extensively commented on Burke’s theatrical imagery. See e.g. Julie Carlson, “Commanding Performances: Burke, Coleridge, and Schiller’s Dramatic Reflection on the Revolution in France,” Wordsworth Circle 23 (1992): 117-34; Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 138-63; Anne Mallory, “Burke, Boredom, and the Theatre of Counterrevolution,” PMLA 118.2 (2003): 224-38; Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution: 1789-1820 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983), 57-87. 40 Matthew O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel. British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), Gilmartin 150-206. The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’ 229 picaresque texts in the advertisement to his 1797 novel Vaurien, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas. 41 I want to argue that the conservatives’ polar perception of the world, which I illustrated with examples of individual metaphors, namely the high regard for stability and the concomitant depreciation of movement, is responsible for the choice of narrative form. By using the picaresque pattern, anti-Jacobin authors were not only able to demonstrate the particular dangers of itinerant political agitators, but could also, on a much more abstract level, point to the threat any kind of mobility and therefore change entails. Just as the villain serves as a personification of radicalism - commonly referred to as the ‘new philosophy’ by conservatives - his mobility represents the sway of the loathed ideas, which might intrude into every nook and cranny of the country. These novels create the impression that England is divided into a stable benevolent majority and a sinister, fickle minority, which poses, in spite of their small number, a great danger to society. Typically, the anti-Jacobin novel follows the conventional picaresque episodic structure. The reader watches the picaro, who is sometimes pitiable but mostly contemptible, roam the country to engage in his malicious activities. While the direct motivation for his adventures varies from novel to novel and from one episode to the next, they are all rendered possible by the lack of social rootedness. Having imbibed William Godwin’s teachings, Frederick Fenton, the central character in Walker’s Vagabond, dissolves all bonds of family and friendship and then goes on a long journey. The immediate reason for leaving is that he has to escape being hanged for arson and possibly murder. Thus, his movement is linked to crime from the very beginning. Most of the time, however, Frederick is driven on by his intention to spread the radical doctrine: “I rambled over great parts of the country under different professions […]. Wherever I went I disseminated the new doctrine of universal emancipation.” 42 But England is not enough for Frederick. Together with a bunch of other radicals he embarks on a voyage to America to found a colony there, which Walker modelled on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and Robert Southey’s scheme for a Pantisocracy. But even in the New World, the revolutionaries are not prepared to settle. Refusing to cultivate the land, one of them suggests: “To be perfectly free, […] we should become like the roaming Indians.” 43 41 Isaac D’Israeli, Vaurien: or, Sketches of the Times (1797), ed. Nicola Trott. Vol. 8. Anti- Jacobin Novels, ed. W.M. Verhoeven (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), 11. Their ensuing meanderings are not only supposed to show the alleged fidgety disposition of these would-be philosophers but also their complete disorientation, for instance when we learn that “[o]ur troop of 42 George Walker, The Vagabond. A Novel (1799), ed. W.M. Verhoeven (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004), 178. 43 Walker 201. P ASCAL F ISCHER 230 philosophical vagabonds set out, they knew not wither,” 44 or: “They had continued their journey, merely from the restless spirit of rambling.” 45 Similarly in The Democrat (1796), a novel by the then Poet Laureate Henry James Pye, the French anti-hero Le Noir starts travelling when his criminal behaviour isn’t countenanced in his hometown anymore. In the course of only five pages we are tracing his itinerary from France to Boston as part of a revolutionary regiment, then back to France, and finally to England, where his campaign to sow the seeds of discontent is only just beginning. Le Noir is always on the move, be it on foot, on horseback or by coach. It would be wrong to conclude, on the basis of the examples given so far, that movement in the anti-Jacobin novel is mainly associated with the lowerclass existence of tramps and vagrant misfits - in spite of the semantics of “mobility, n. 2 .” The attacks mounted by some anti-Jacobin novels on the itinerant life-style of the nobility do not only prove that a definition of late eighteenth-century conservatism as an aristocratic doctrine is untenable, 46 but also that it was movement itself that was condemned, not only when it concerned the lower orders. Charles Lucas’s The Infernal Quixote is constructed around the contrast between the honest son of a carpenter called Wilson, who hardly leaves his village, and the mischievous Lord Marauder, whose name points to his iniquity as well as his mobility. In this novel, it is the peripatetic manner of the aristocracy that fosters the intrusion of radical ideas into England. A descendant of the eighteenth-century literary type of the libertine or rake, Marauder, aged fifteen, makes a pass at the wife of a relative, and is consequently sent to the Continent. 47 On his travels through Italy and France he encounters all kinds of pernicious ideas circulating in the higher ranks of society, which lead him to a complete disregard of conventions in sexual or religious matters and finally to embracing radicalism as a means to his licentious ends. It is significant that Marauder’s assaults on the virtue of the young Emily are successful when they are both travelling in a coach. The movement of that vehicle is clearly connected to the loss of sexual control, even though the narrator first expresses himself cautiously: “Whether the rumbling of a four-wheeled carriage inspires the tender passion, I am not casuist enough to determine.” 48 44 Walker 211. But then it turns out that the speed of the coach corresponds closely to Emily’s amorous excitement: 45 Walker 212. 46 Pascal Fischer, Literarische Entwürfe des Konservatismus in England 1790 bis 1805 (München, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2010), 133-74. 47 Charles Lucas, The Infernal Quixote. A Tale of the Day (1801), ed. Matthew O. Grenby (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004), 55. 48 Lucas 90. The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’ 231 The drivers came to the brow of a steep hill, and dashed down it with such a spirit, that they seemed to fly over the soil. Poor Emily believed herself a little deity; and was ready, with a complete stock of modern philosophy, to be the victim of any vice the sophistry of her lover might point to. 49 Although Marauder, whose life is described as “a bustle of political intrigue,” 50 and who has a “restless and enterprising mind,” 51 In Jane West’s anti-Jacobin novel A Tale of the Times (1799) the mobility of the aristocratic ‘new philosopher’ determines the narrative structure as well. Even more than Lucas, West distinguishes her fictional characters according to the personality traits composure and restlessness, particularly when the author contrasts two types of nobility. From the very beginning, the anti- Jacobin role model Sir William Powerscourt, who is always prepared to defend conventional gender roles, patriarchal morality and established religion, is presented as totally averse to moving. Conversely, those fashionable aristocrats in the novel who are negligent of their social and moral duties cannot endure to stay anywhere very long. It is this unsteady, voguish society that permits the entrance of all kinds of ‘French ideas,’ from sexual permissiveness to revolutionary thought. While Sir Powerscourt shows a “strong attachment to the seat of his ancestors,” resembles the lower-class villains of other anti-Jacobin novels with regard to his agitation, his actions are much more deliberate, for instance when he goes to Ireland to spearhead the rebellion of 1798. 52 his nagging wife always wants to travel, first to Bath, then to the metropolis, since “[t]he itinerary world, at whose idol shrine she had resolved to sacrifice, had now transferred its scene of empire to London.” 53 To this flippant lot Powerscourt “formed as direct a contrast […] as the sturdy oak does to the bending ease of the pliant willow,” 54 In order to trace the cognitive structure of an ideology, it is, nonetheless, insufficient to merely point to a few individual images like the oak, as has often been done. according to the narrator with the telling name of Prudentia Homespun. The metaphor of the oak, which we have encountered before, reminds us that the conservative conceptualization of the world shows considerable coherence. 55 49 Lucas 92. What is much more significant is the underlying 50 Lucas 94. 51 Lucas 148. 52 Jane West, A Tale of the Times (1799), ed. Amanda Gilroy. Vol. 7. Anti-Jacobin Novels, ed. W.M. Verhoeven (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), 14. 53 West 20. 54 West 20. 55 See e.g. William Ruddick, “Liberty Trees and Royal Oaks: Emblematic Presences in some English Poems of the French Revolutionary Period,” Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism, ed. Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest (London: Routledge, 1993), P ASCAL F ISCHER 232 systematicity of certain properties of the metaphors. As I have shown, the binary opposition between constancy and movement is of such centrality to the conservative world-view that it considerably affected the narrative form of early conservative novels. If we accept Matthew Grenby’s thesis that the anti-Jacobin campaign “endowed the novel with a respectability which it had not enjoyed since the days of Richardson and Fielding” 56 and thus prepared its enormous success in the nineteenth century, the insight into the connection between metaphoric conceptualization and narrative form contributes to the elucidation of a segment of the literary history of that time. But these findings can also be interpreted with regard to literary theory. My observations, for instance, corroborate Jurij Lotman’s emphasis on the spatial structure of narrative literature. 57 Hans Ulrich Seeber has argued that the concepts of Geschwindigkeit - ‘speed’ - and Langsamkeit - ‘slowness’ - became highly charged at the end of the eighteenth century. In his book Mobilität und Moderne he writes: “In the intellectual culture of modernity these terms lose their innocence.” But whereas his semiotic model is largely premised on the existence of at least two distinct topographical spaces charged with semantic value and on a transgression of the barriers between them, anti-Jacobin writing of the 1790s and early 1800s shows that movement itself must be taken as an important category in its own right, independent of the question of barriers. The fact that the protagonist is in motion does not automatically convey either a revolutionary or a restitutive message (to use Lotman’s terminology). The degree to which anti-Jacobin authors emphasize their distrust of movement, is, however, unusual and must be understood in its particular historical context. 58 This clearly also applies to the category of movement in general. But whereas Seeber cautiously suggests some subversive potential in slowness and even calls it “a critical counter-image to the civilization of speed,” 59 59-67; Paul Goetsch, “The English Oak: The Changing Fortunes of a Political Icon,” Symbolism 8 (2008): 279-321. I hope to have shown that in the conservative propaganda of the 1790s and early 1800s ‘slowness’ was first and foremost associated with the forces of preservation. 56 Grenby 208. 57 Jurij M. Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text. Translated from the Russian by Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1977). 58 Hans Ulrich Seeber, Mobilität und Moderne. Studien zur englischen Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006), 21: “In der Reflexionskultur der Moderne verlieren diese Begriffe ihre Unschuld.” 59 Seeber 22: “ein kritisches Gegenbild zur Geschwindigkeitszivilisation.” The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’ 233 Works Cited Atkinson, William. 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