Creation of New Political Culture in French Revolution – French Revolution – Modern Europe – History DU Notes

CREATION OF A NEW ‘POLITICAL CULTURE’ IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Yes, a new political culture was created during the French Revolution. For Lynn Hunt, the origins of the Revolution, its course and legacy may all be explained in terms of the creation of a new political culture. The Revolution began with the rejection of the old political culture by the nobility, and this process was completed by the bourgeoisie who not only concurred with aristocratic opposition to the bankrupt monarch, but also rejected traditional noble privilege, which was the cornerstone of the Ancien Regime in France. Once the old political order had been displaced and a new one was being created, the new political class also realized the need to invest their order with legitimacy and sacrality. This goal could be achieved only through a transfer of the charisma and sacrality of the Ancien Regime to the new political order. Finally, says Hunt, what made the years 1789-99 revolutionary was their drastic transformation of political culture; contrary to the Marxists, Revisionists and the Tocquevillian schools then, she does not assess the Revolution in terms of a transition from one society to another, but in terms of its establishment of an enduring political culture that has survived in liberal democracies upto the present day.

The new political culture derived its ideological coherence from the Enlightenment. The Rousseau-ean ideal of kingship as a social contract and the ‘general will’ of the people were the bases for the construction of democratic republicanism. Yet, as mentioned above, this ideology needed a coherent, tangible form which it found in various places – the rhetoric of the revolution, the revolutionary festivals, manners of dress were all politicized in the period 1789-99. The politicization of everyday life is another feature of the new political culture that Lynn Hunt speaks of. She notes that the new political class was wary and mistrustful of politics. Leaders claimed to be ‘serving the nation’ rather than their partisan interests. In other words, universalist public action was equated with service, while public action for the benefit of a few was associated with politics. As a result of their reluctance to bestow political power in any limited group of people, the revolutionaries succeeded in making everyday political, and in multiplying the centres from where power might be exercised. In other words, mundane activities and phenomena assumed symbolic political importance in revolutionary France. Hunt illustrates her point by referring to the ‘poetics’ or the rhetoric of revolution. The nation, liberty, citizenship as well as counter-revolutionary all assume the nature of incantations. Mothers named their children after the heroes of classical antiquity; lawyers dropped fancy titles for the simple descriptive label ‘man of law’. Equality and national sovereignty were articulated through the language and actions of daily life.

Yet, Hunt has noted, one of the fall-outs of the politicization of all life was that since power could be exercised from anywhere (such as the donning of the revolutionary cockade), enemies too could be found anywhere. This created and strengthened the revolutionaries’ ‘siege mentality’ – conspiracy and the threat of counter revolutionaries was a persistent theme in revolutionary rhetoric.

If rhetoric and everyday life served to convey the Rousseau-ean sympathies of the new political class, then so did these tools reassert the patriarchy of the new order. As Joan Scott and Lynn Hunt have noted, the new order was based on the notion of universal citizenship. Yet this clearly reflected the contradictory nature of women’s position, for on the one hand they were being designated citizens, yet on the other, their status as political subjects was in doubt, for they were passive citizens, confined to the domestic sphere. This too has been traced back to Rousseau, for whom the decadence and corruption of the Ancien Regime was a product of women’s public role and the influence they wielded over public men. Thus, if the new political culture was universalist, it had also to be transparent and therefore exclusively masculine. The partisan nature of politics in the old regime and their consequent corruption were both attributed to the feminization of politics. To establish a universalist political order would thus involve the paradoxical task of barring women from entering the public sphere.

This new aspect of political culture – its masculinity – was once more conveyed through the rhetoric and symbols of the French Revolution. Hercules replaced Marianne as the symbol of the new republic, which was centralized, strong and virile rather than effeminate and weak. Moreover, the ‘Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen’ did not omit the mention of women by oversight; rather, this was a deliberate omission that conveyed a strong view of the new regime regarding the proper place of women.

An extension of the gendered nature of the new political culture is what Lynn Hunt has called the ‘family romance’ of the French Revolution. While in this module, which exerted a shaping influence upon the new political culture, women’s proper place lay within the home (and therefore the attacks on the virtue of public women like Marie Antoinette), another important change was taking place. The French nation, if conceived of as a family, had lost its ‘father’; positions of authority had now been taken up by the ‘band of brothers’. This story, says Hunt, performs two important tasks – it relocates political charisma within the body of the brothers (or the political fraternity) while also marking a new epoch in the life of the family/nation.

The two facets of this ‘family romance’ mentioned above were articulated in political rhetoric, and as Mona Ozouf notes, in revolutionary festivals as well. These festivals utilized the rituals of Catholicism as well as its paraphernalia of worship – like altars – along with Masonic and classical symbolism to transfer sacrality from the body of the king to that of the republic. Part of these festivals included oath taking, which reiterated the solidarity of the nation. Moreover, since these festivals utilized traditional symbols, Ozouf believes they were not revolutionary in content as much as they were in the manner in which they viewed the new political order. In other words, these festivals regarded the Revolution as a critical watershed between past and present, an assumption that was reflected in the naming of years with reference to 1789.

Hunt also noted that while the political culture of the revolution derived its coherence from ideas and symbols, it also focused its unity in the new political class. This class was fairly varied, and moreover its composition kept changing, which changes were then echoed in political culture. Yet, says Hunt, the very diversity of their backgrounds would have made the appeal of a uniform political culture even greater; furthermore, despite differences of backgrounds, these new political leaders shared certain cultural experiences, their youth, their political inexperience, and later, their political experience gave them a unity of vision and ideas.

If the arguments of neo-conservative historians like Francois Furet are to be accepted, the French Revolution marked the culmination of the centralizing propensities of the Ancien Regime. It was in this respect not a watershed as its participants believed. At the end of the Revolutionary decade, an Emperor was reinstated in France. Yet, as Lynn Hunt notes, the crucial difference between France of the old regime and France at the turn of the 19^th century was in terms of political culture. Thus, Napoleon was not King as Louix XVI had been, for he ruled in the name of the people. He was of humble origins, and had earned his political clout. Moreover, on assuming power, he claimed to eradicate partisanship, which had been a constant theme of the Revolution. Thus, says Hunt, the Revolution made it unthinkable to have a King without an assembly, and made Revolution in itself a continuous fact of public life. Finally, in terms of the place accorded to women in public life, the French Revolution was very different from the Ancien Regime, where, as Joan Landes notes, women occupied positions of public importance, though in a limited way.