ABSTRACT
The ever-increasing violence of the revolution produced such an honor of the destructive sword of the republicans that many who had thrilled to news of the Oath of the Tennis Court and the fall of the Bastille now turned away. Both from revolutionary and political violence, and from the other forms of violence which had been admired in the second half of the eighteenth century. By the end of the century, so wide a rejection of the different aspects of Shaftesbury's wildness has occurred that we may see it as a terminus for the first half of romanticism. After the Revolution, romanticism goes on and on. 'The wildness pleases', in the manner of Goethe/Walpole or Fuseli, or Denis Diderot, or Edmund Burke and Rousseau, in the years before 1789. Some of these people had died before the Revolution Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1778, Diderot in 1784 and we can only imagine what their reactions to the actual events might have been.
