ABSTRACT
A biographical detour may draw attention to the difference between two concepts that inform some of the thinking behind this book: 'historical imagination' and 'historical imaginary'. The historical imagination refers to nineteenth-century historiography, and in particular, romantic historiography, as in the works of the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle and the French historian Jules Michelet. The historical imagination solves two related problems with regard to the writing of history generally and to the French Revolution in particular: to understand the kind of violence of social change that occurred during the Revolution, by embedding it in a metaphorical discourse. The French Revolution of 1789 seemed to the generation of 1848 a crisis of language — affecting the rational discourse of the eighteenth century no less than the 'organicist' discourse of Romanticism, which was itself a reaction to the rational discourse, though incapable of dealing with the emergent Industrial Revolution. Significantly enough, however, historians of the historical imagination, in confronting the French Revolution, had recourse to metaphors of material transformation, of productive relations, such as labour, travail, struggle — in other words, drawn precisely from the experience of industrialisation. They also relied on the vocabulary of the sublime and developed a new temporality of the instant, in order to focus on the historical process itself, but in terms at variance with an earlier historical consciousness, say that of Edward Gibbon, or even that of Edmund Burke. Second, historians of the historical imagination attempted to find a mode of representation appropriate to the new forms of agency emanating from the masses, and not sanctioned by divine power and authority. If the historical imagination takes account of the new history's different relation to violence, it often understands this violence as also part of a new performative mode (as expressed in the revolutionary journals of the time, with its theatrical aspects and its politicians—pamphleteers, such as Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins and St Just). The Jacobins' own forms of self-presentation, for instance, had a marked preference for a second level of reference, dressing their performativity in the rhetoric and gesture of a Cicero, Marcus Aurelius or Julius Cesar. 'Playing at being Republicans', they distinguished themselves from courtiers, by using language more in keeping with descriptions of the ancient Greek city states or the Roman Empire. Yet for the truly novel insight — the violence of revolutionary spectacle as the spectacle of revolutionary violence — historians of the historical imagination adapted (mainly from Walter Scott) narrative forms and modes of narration able to dramatise such crowd scenes as spectacles of seeing/seen. 1 The intense theatricality of the Revolution's early years is also very conspicuous in Michelet's attempt to present it as the French People's self-celebration, described as the apotheosis of historical time and out of time altogether, in the realm of myth, or rather, in the temporality of revolutionary time as messianic time. Finally, historians used images of the body, their body — drawn from its pathology and symptomatology. Especially remarkable are the metaphoric discourses of the pathological body (in Carlyle's case drawing heavily on his intimate and painful knowledge of his own digestive system). They transform an older language of the 'sick' body politic and the need for drastic 'purges' into a new medical imaginary of the blood stream and hypertension, of nervous disorders and bodily discomfort, which stands in contrast to the rhetoric of youth and vigour of the Revolution itself. 2
