ABSTRACT
No matter at what historical moment one opens the manifesto archive – in the late sixteenth-century France where the manifesto served as “a public writing in which one or more responsible politicians make known their views or explain their conduct” (Trésor de la langue français, quoted in Hjartarson 2007: 174), amongst the Diggers and Levellers in seventeenth-century England (Lyon 1999: 16–23), or as part of the theological polemics and the Swabian peasant riots of the Lutheran reformation (Puchner 2006: 13–15) – the critical consensus is that the manifesto began its history as a public, political document capable of heralding and producing formidable historical and social change. It is also axiomatic that the late eighteenth century marks a watershed moment in the history of the form. During the tumultuous period of the Enlightenment revolutions, especially the French, the manifesto came to embody the myth of modernity as a form of historical rupture. This embodiment consists of the following basic structure: a declaration of a break from history understood as a repetition of the same; a formation of a collectivity dedicated to leading society in a radically new direction; and an advancement of a program of change. This format reflects the shift in the manifesto from its authoritarian institutional location (the church, the state, the military) to its predominant Enlightenment-era position amongst literate common people in the streets and the coffee shops. Signaling le peuple as opposed to the bourgeois citoyen, the dissenting political manifesto declared a break from bourgeois history in order to claim a space within the public sphere so as to lead society in radically new directions.
