'Inexhaustible fertility': Contemporary Re-figurations of the French Revolution. (June 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hamilton, Paul
• Is Part Of: Comparative critical studies. Volume 15:Number 2(2018)
• Page Start: 153
• Page End: 168
• Publication Date: 2018-06
• Subjects: historicism -- Romanticism -- revolution -- philosophy -- Friedrich Schlegel -- William Hazlitt -- Giacomo Leopardi; Comparative literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; 809
• DOI: 10.3366/ccs.2018.0286
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1744-1854

Abstract

Abstract : As Coleridge recognized, the French Revolution was an event especially open to interpretation. The Revolutionary debate supported the increasing importance of hermeneutics as a leading philosophical methodology adequate to explain why the Revolution's meaning was not fixed but tendentious. This was due not only to the variety of its own political narrative, as it ran its course through Girondin, Montagnard, Terroristic, Directorial, and other stages. Commentators such as Friedrich Schlegel argued persuasively that the agenda of the French Revolution pervaded all aspects of life, there to be detected if one had but the wit to see it. Hegel criticized those who tried to arrest this self-historicization of the Revolution for wanting to arrest its natural historical course in initial Jacobin justifications owing too much to Kantian and Fichtean formalism. Following his example, we can find revisions of the significance of the Revolution at work in the thought of European thinkers ranging from Hazlitt to Leopardi, Wollstonecraft to Staël, Barbauld to Keats, Shelley to Constant. This essay examines the character and interactions of some of these typical re-figurings of the French Revolution.