Entangled Histories of Revolution

We are very conscious today of living in a global world. Thanks to economic, cultural, and military ties our daily lives are deeply entangled with those of others in distant places, most of whom we will never meet, whether individuals like key politicians, groups such as workers in various industries, or international corporations. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the notion of Entangled History is currently popular. Entangled History adopts a trans-cultural perspective and explores the interconnectedness of societies. It starts from the assumption that nations, empires, and civilisations were not formed independently but rather through a process of interaction and global circulation. The revolutions of the late eighteenth century are particularly amenable to this approach. While the French Revolution took place within an existing nation state, its origins, the ideas on which it was grounded, the unfolding of events, and its legacy were all impacted by cross-cultural relationships and exchange. Other revolutions of the period - including the American Revolution - were even more deeply embedded in global networks.

One important mode of cross-cultural interaction during this period was translations - including of earlier radical texts or contemporary revolutionary documents as well as newspaper accounts of the unfolding events. The 'Entangled Histories of Revolution' workshop that took place at King's College London on 4-5 November 2022 sought to explore this mode of entanglement more deeply. The workshop forms part of the Radical Translations project led by Sanja Perovic, Erica Mannucci and Rosa Mucignat, which is exploring the transfer of revolutionary culture between Britain, France and Italy in the period between 1789 and 1815.

Sadly, a combination of threatened train strikes and family circumstances meant that in the end I could not travel down to London as planned, but had to be content with participating remotely on the Saturday alone. Given how stimulating the papers I heard were, I greatly regretted having missed the first day of the workshop. But, necessarily, my comments here focus only on the papers from 5th November.

These papers led me to think about three distinct, but related, themes. First, the idea raised explicitly by Sanja Perovic, of translation as a method of responding to cultural problems. Sanja noted that revolutions, by definition, involve taking new paths and therefore facing uncharted territory. In these circumstances, looking to other times and places could offer helpful models - or to continue the metaphor, maps - for revolutionaries to use; and translations were often the vehicle by which such maps were conveyed.

In my paper I quoted Pierre-François Henry, who translated James Harrington's works during the 1790s, voicing this idea explicitly:

The troubles of the French Revolution resemble so closely those of the English Revolution, that those who wish to determine causes from effects will not do much better than studying the latter to better understand the unfolding of the former. (Pierre-François Henry, ‘Preface’, to Oeuvres Politiques de James Harrington. Paris, L’an III).

Oeuvres Politiques de Jacques Harrington, ed. P.-F. Henry (Paris, L’an III). Image by Rachel Hammersley, reproduced with permission from the copy held at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

Similarly, in his paper, Richard Whatmore spoke of a widespread concern in the early nineteenth century to find an alternative to the British mercantile model, and here too the experiences of other countries as reflected through translations were seen as providing a useful source of inspiration and direction.

Translators were also well placed to become mapmakers themselves. In her paper on the French reception of the American Revolution, Carine Lounissi noted that the linguistic skills of French translators gave them privileged access to primary sources, putting them in a strong position to assess and write about the unfolding events in the Americas. More dramatically, several of the speakers provided examples of translators deliberately radicalising particular texts and authors. Sonja Lavaert described how Lucilio (Guilio Cesare) Vanini deliberately reversed the message of anti-Machiavellian texts that he translated, and she also suggested that we might usefully understand the radical clandestine text L'Esprit de Mr. de Spinosa as offering a radical reading of Thomas Hobbes through the lens of Spinoza and Vanini. Similarly, I showed in my paper how two different readings of Harrington - one centrist and one more democratic - were offered in the translations of the 1790s, and that both countered the more conservative reading of him that was typical in eighteenth-century France.

A second point that emerged from the papers was that translations are collaborative projects. Even single-authored works in a particular language are the work of a team comprising printers, booksellers, and editors who work alongside the author, each contributing directly to the text in different ways. Where translation is involved, the team has to be even wider. Every translation is effectively a co-authored work, with the original author and the translator both fundamental to the message that is conveyed. This is even more true of translation campaigns, such as those led by the Baron d'Holbach in the 1760s and 1770s, or that of the Comte de Mirabeau in the 1780s, which involved an even broader workshop of contributors.

A token advertising Thomas Spence’s periodical Pig’s Meat taken from https://www.marxists.org

Several of the papers spoke about works that were collaborative in a second sense - in that they comprised extracts from a variety of original texts. This was the case with L'Esprit de Mr. de Spinosa in the early eighteenth century and with radical periodicals like Pig's Meat that appeared in the 1790s. In both cases the drawing together of extracts created a work greater than the sum of its parts. Sonja Lavaert used the term 'combat manifesto' in relation to L'Esprit, a term that is equally applicable to the radical periodicals of the 1790s.

The third theme that spoke to me from the papers was the idea of knowledge itself as a revolutionary force; not least in the sense that keeping people ignorant is a way of keeping them down; whereas informing or educating them about politics provides them with the tools to combat oppression. This point was emphasised by Sonja Lavaert in her discussion of the radical Enlightenment. She quoted Jonathan Israel on d'Holbach's belief that it was impossible to improve human life without 'teaching men the truth'. Moreover, the suggestion was that this should extend to all: 'What greater insult to the human race can there be than to claim reason is reserved for some' while all the rest are not made for knowledge? (Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment. Oxford, 2012, p. 27).

This commitment to educating all people, and encouraging them to think, meant directing works explicitly at ordinary people rather than just at educated elites. Lavaert suggested that there is already some evidence of this with Henri de Boulainvilliers's version of L'Esprit de Mr. de Spinosa, which presented Spinoza's ideas in a less dry and more accessible language. But it was more pronounced by the 1790s when the Italian translation of that work was produced. This translation, Lavaert explained, was part of a deliberate pedagogical project.

I have demonstrated in a previous blogpost that the audiences at which the republican writings of the mid-seventeenth century were directed expanded during the course of the eighteenth century. As participants at the workshop made clear, this was part of a broader process which was reflected in several shifts during the course of that century.

In the first place there was a linguistic shift. This was not just about a move from Latin to the vernacular, but also from major to minor languages. Mary-Ann Constantine's paper, for example, noted the translation of radical texts into Welsh in the 1790s. As one commentator pointed out, this shift was symbolic as well as practical, indicating the capacity of the target language to receive new concepts and, by implication, a belief that Welsh speakers were capable of engaging with and understanding complex new ideas.

William Linton’s The National: A Library for the People. Frontispiece and contents page reproduced from http://www.hathitrust.org.

Secondly, expanding the audience for key political texts meant making those works and the ideas contained within them available in accessible formats. In part this meant the production of cheap and affordable editions. Equally important, however, was the dissemination of extracts from key texts in cheap periodicals - and even the presentation of key ideas in broadsheets, poems, and ballads. This innovation could also be combined with the first, as was the case with the Welsh-language periodicals produced by dissenting ministers - to which Mary-Ann referred - which were modelled on Thomas Spence's Pig's Meat and offered their audience a mix of educational material, religious fare, and extracts from radical political texts.

As Ian Haywood showed in the final paper of the day, these formats were further developed in the early nineteenth century. Editors like William Strange and William Linton were crucial in this regard, producing cheap publications that anthologised and excerpted relevant texts. In doing so they effectively created a radical canon of political texts; indeed, the subtitle to Linton's periodical The National was 'A Library for the People'.

They also worked to boil down the ideas to their very essence. As Ian noted, Linton's The National included various short extracts including a single sentence from The Ruins of Empire by the French author the Comte de Volney (a key text within the radical canon). Linton was quick to defend his brevity, promising that even the shortest extracts were not mere fillers 'but often the one line may contain as much wisdom as all the rest of the number'.

Volney’s Les Ruines, ou méditation sur les révolutions des empires (Paris, 1791). Reproduced from http://gallica.bnf.fr. This was a key text in the radical canon, extracts from which regularly appeared in cheap periodicals.

Of course, it was not only the radicals who were keen to 'educate' the masses. As Mary-Ann Constantine suggested, works like Hannah More's Village Politics which, was also translated into Welsh, was intended to serve as a kind of prophylactic against dangerous radical and revolutionary texts.

Translations, translators and even knowledge itself, then, could be revolutionary forces. Perhaps this offers hope in our own deeply entangled world.

Experiencing Political Texts: Workshop 1s

The week commencing 5th September 2022 was politically eventful in the UK, with a change between Monday and Friday not just of Prime Minister but also of monarch. In the midst of this political upheaval we held the first Experiencing Political Texts workshop, on the theme 'Genre and Form in Early Modern Political Thought'. Twelve rich and stimulating papers were delivered, disrupted only slightly by a gas leak just before our final panel which prompted an evacuation of the building.

In his paper on ceremonial writings from the civil war period, Niall Allsopp emphasised the importance of thinking about the key terms of the project and the complexity of their meanings. Inspired by this prompt, the reflections that follow are organised around the three words of our network's title, taken in reverse order.

The 1777 print edition of the Traité des trois imposteurs. Taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Collectively, the speakers adopted a broad understanding of what we mean by the term 'text'. Many spoke about written sources (both manuscript and print) but a significant number incorporated into their discussion non-textual forms such as images, artefacts, and even landscapes. Martin Dzelzainis made an explicit case for images to be understood - and read - as texts. Noting that paintings were cited as a casus belli by the English in their conflict with the Dutch in the 1670s, Dzelzainis showed how the rhetorical technique of citing inartificial proofs could encompass visual as well as written sources, and highlighted the difficulties visual propaganda materials presented for those who were charged with refuting them in print.

The title page to the 1698 edition of Sidney’s Discourses, edited by John Toland and printed by John Darby. Note the description of Sidney which highlights his aristocratic credentials and royal connections.

Other papers addressed the malleability of texts and the fact that a single 'text' might change its identity over time. In her paper on clandestine literature, Delphine Doucet explained that the text of the Traité des trois imposteurs was not stable. New chapters were added over time so that different versions of the text vary in length and content. In addition, from 1719 when the first printed version of the text was published, print and manuscript versions circulated alongside each other. The other text discussed by Delphine, Jean Bodin's Colloquium heptapolomeres, was more stable, but here too paratextual additions (such as an index) influenced the way in which particular copies were read. I made a similar observation in my own paper about how the paratextual material added to editions of English republican texts produced by John Toland and Thomas Hollis shaped how those works were interpreted. For example, Toland's emphasis on the monarchical and aristocratic connections of the original authors served to make works published under the English commonwealth applicable to the circumstances of English society following the Glorious Revolution. It was not only full texts that were 'recycled' in later editions, but also extracts, anecdotes, and even jokes. It was interesting to note that Daniel Isaac Eaton, who has come to my attention because of his tendency to republish extracts from radical political texts in his periodical Politics for the People, is also known to Tim Somers as regards his reprinting of radical jokes.

Various papers highlighted the fluidity of boundaries between texts and the interplay between different kinds of text. Gaby Mahlberg presented John Toland's Anglia Libera as a patchwork sewn from a range of radical texts, thereby emphasising the importance of intertextuality within the republican canon. She argued that readers of the German translation will have read the work differently from their English counterparts owing to the fact that they will have been unaware of the sources on which Toland was drawing. Tim Somers's paper reminded us of the fluid nature of the boundary between textual and oral culture. Jest books not only recorded jokes that had been heard - thereby reflecting a move from the oral to the textual - but might also operate as collections of jokes to be retold - thereby facilitating a shift back from textual to oral form. In his paper on Thomas Spence, Tom Whitfield noted that Spence's first move as a political actor also involved a shift from the oral to the textual, with the lecture that he delivered to the Newcastle Philosophical Society in 1775 being printed for sale and circulation (a move that sparked condemnation). But Spence took this crossing of boundaries much further. The Land Plan he had set out in his lecture made the move from prose to verse, and was abstracted in slogans which he stamped onto tokens and chalked onto walls. The relationship between Spence's pamphlets and his tokens was particularly complex. The tokens were used to advertise his Land Plan and whet the appetite of readers for his printed works, but as Tom indicated as a form of coinage they could also be handed in at Spence's shop in exchange for a pamphlet.

An example of one of Thomas Spence’s tokens. This is a halfpenny token thought to be from 1790. Reproduced from https://onlinecoin.club The observes depicts an ass carrying a heavy burden with the slogans ‘RENTS’ and ‘TAXS’. The ass was commonly used to represent labouring people as in Sermons to Asses by Spence’s friend John Murray. On the reverse are listed the names of three Thomas’s: Spence; More; and Paine - all said to be advocates for the rights of man.

The focus of our project is primarily on early modern political texts, but some of the papers served to remind us that there is value in adopting a broad and flexible definition of the term 'political'. Two papers in particular focused on genres that we would not immediately think of in these terms: Tim's paper on jest books and Harriet Palin's paper on religious catechisms. Tim pointed out that, while we often think of political jokes as graphic or literary satire aimed at challenging authority, jest books are primarily concerned with mirth and diversion. Yet Tim made a strong case for them still having a political role to play, showing how jests were used by defeated royalists during the civil wars to identify themselves and solidify their position, and by eighteenth-century Whigs to ridicule what they saw as the immoral behaviour of their opponents. Meanwhile, Harriet showed how catechisms were aimed at persuasion and could be read as a calls to action. In this regard I was struck by the parallel between republican treatises that were designed to generate active citizens whose behaviour would strengthen the common good, and Protestant catechisms aimed at creating active believers whose actions would strengthen both their own faith and their religious communities. Moreover, in both cases there is a tension between giving agency to people and directing this towards specific ends.

Sir Richard Fanshawe by William Faithorne, 1667. National Portrait Gallery NPG D22736. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

The question of what we mean by 'political' texts was approached from a different angle in Max Skönsberg's paper, in which he introduced the Subscription Library project that he has been working on alongside Mark Towsey and others. Max's analysis of borrowing records has revealed that theoretical works of politics like Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and John Locke's Two Treatises were not particularly popular with the members of subscription libraries. Nor were parliamentary documents and debates borrowed frequently by readers. Yet, we should not assume from this that the members of these libraries were uninterested in politics. Among the works borrowed most frequently were histories, including David Hume's History of England (borrowed from Bristol's Library 180 times between 1773 and 1784) and William Robertson's History of Charles V (borrowed 131 times in the same period). While adopting the historical form, these works were overtly political and Mark's paper on readers' manuscript adaptations of Hume's History made clear that readers read them for their own political purposes. This idea of history as an explicitly political genre was reiterated in Tiago Sousa Garcia's paper on Richard Fanshawe's translation of the Portuguese classic the Lusiad. Tiago introduced us to the seventeenth-century debate about whether works like Lucan's Civil Wars and the Lusiad should be viewed as epic poetry or history and highlighted the different connotations associated with each genre.

The title page of the French translation of Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government produced by P. A. Samson. Source http://gallica.bnf.fr Bibliothèque national de France.

Finally, there is the question of what we mean by 'experiencing' political texts? By using this word we are indicating an interest not simply in passive reading, but rather in more active engagement. The question of how this is achieved was the subject of several papers, with speakers reflecting on how humour, rhetoric, the blending of fact and fiction, and other literary devices were used to engage readers. Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq's paper on eighteenth-century French translations of English republican texts highlighted a further strategy: the deployment of emotion. She described how the French translator of Algernon Sidney's Discourses concerning Government added to the translation a letter Sidney had written to a friend in which he explained why he had decided to remain in exile rather than returning to England. The letter drew an emotional connection between Sidney's experience of exile and that of the translator himself (a Huguenot refugee then living in the Dutch Republic) and via him to his Huguenot readers. By reminding his readers that they shared the emotional experience of exile with Sidney, the translator provided an incentive for them to engage with his work, and directed their approach to it. Of course, engaging emotions was not always viewed positively. Part of the objection to epic poetry, in the seventeenth-century debate described by Tiago, was precisely its tendency to do this.

The experience of reading a particular text might also vary depending on its format. As I noted in my paper, the editions of Sidney's Discourses published by John Toland, Thomas Hollis, and Daniel Eaton were very different from each other. They were directed at different audiences, had different purposes, and created distinct reading experiences. Similarly as Gaby and Myriam-Isabelle demonstrated, the experience of reading a text in translation is often different from reading the original. In the case of Toland's Anglia Libera, the title of the German version was truncated and the dedication cut. The papers by Max and Mark revealed that the reading experience might also be different when accessing a library copy of a work as opposed to reading one's own copy. Library members could not always control when they were able to access a particular book and might even have to read a multi-volume work in reverse order. While we know that readers added annotations to library copies, they might nevertheless have felt more inhibited about doing so. They were, therefore, more likely to produce their own separate notes on a work (of the kind Mark presented to us) rather than scribbling in the margins. Even the same physical text might be experienced differently by different audiences, as Tom made clear in his discussion of Spence's tokens. Tom argued that Spence adjusted the price depending on the purchaser: selling them at a high price to collectors, but throwing them into the street to be picked up by poor Londoners for free. For some, the tokens were therefore a collectible item to be catalogued, stored, and cherished, but for London's poor they were an abstract of Spence's radical programme and an invitation to discover more.

Finally, Niall raised the interesting point about the relationship between readers and spectators. The ceremonial works Niall is studying were designed to make readers feel like spectators and to create an imagined community. Drawing on Stephen Shapin's notion of virtual witnessing as applied to scientific experiments, Niall argued that ceremonial writings could therefore be used to affirm the authority of the magistrate(s) involved. This idea remains relevant today. Over the last few weeks those of us living in the UK have found ourselves drawn (willingly or unwillingly) into virtual witnessing in the ceremonials associated with a royal funeral.

We will pick up many of these issues at our next workshop in York in late February 2023. I only hope that the political situation that week will be less eventful.