ABSTRACT
This chapter presents more original attitudes to trees, developing in the French Revolutionary and early Napoleonic periods. It considers how the politicizing of certain types of trees in Radical iconography failed to stir the imagination of the majority of English poets of the time, and how a counter-revolutionary view of the tree can be discovered in a number of notable poems of the period. The historic sense leads into moral reflections on the capacity of the trees to contain, as well as suggest, thoughts of time and human mutability. In France the vogue for trees of liberty seems to have waned rapidly with Robespierre's death. The oak disproves Burke's assertion that a society and its constitution develop slowly but surely towards ideal excellence through time. He directly links the trees with the kingdom, but asserts that Change is the diet, on which all subsist, created changeable, and change at lastDestroys them.
