ABSTRACT
George Steiner offers a wonderful description of the self-dramatization of Europeans during the French Revolution. ‘Wherever ordinary men and women looked across the garden hedge, they saw bayonets passing’, he remarks. With the vast mobilization of men during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the narration of their movements in terms of historical progress, history had become ‘everyman’s milieu’. ‘All human beings were as subject to general disaster or exploitation as they were to disease’, explains Steiner about the prehistory of the French Revolution. ‘But these swept over them with tidal mystery’, and did not fundamentally alter the way people thought about change. ‘It is the events of 1789 to 1815 that interpenetrate common, private existence with the perception of historical processes.’1 This suggests not only that individuals perceived change and did so in historical terms that dislodged them from what was now constituted static ‘tradition’, but also that they felt the impact of public events in their personal lives and as a result authorized themselves to participate in that eventfulness. In similar fashion, Reinhart Koselleck underscores the new sensibility in which non-élite subjects in the nineteenth century thought of themselves as ‘taking part’ in history or ‘making’ revolution.2 Journalists such as Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne wrote of Paris in the decades after the Revolution as the French place where the history that everyone would eventually share was being made.3 The world view of both the nineteenth-century liberal and the nineteenth-century Marxist are classic illustrations of how history came to define the life philosophies and didactic guides of individual people. A historical sensibility saturates Samuel Smiles’s Self Help, for example. An invigoration of subjective literary genres such as autobiography, diary and correspondence at the turn of the nineteenth century further indicates the ways in which new forms of political representation prompted explorations in self-expression. From William Wordsworth and Chateaubriand to the writer and journalist Ludwig Börne, who endeavored to escape at once the parochial boundaries of Frankfurt’s Jewish ghetto and Germany’s reactionary politics, individual subjects came to see their personal development through the lens of abstract, but forceful, historical developments.4 What defines the historical age in the dozen decades after 1789 is just this: the durability of narratives that see and make sense of change and the consequent authorization of political subjectivity so that private lives could be (re)constituted in remarkably large part by public eventfulness. The result was the quite novel recognition of the possibilities of throwing the Self into the turbulence of politics.
