GALVANIZING THE CITIZEN: ELECTRICITY AND REVOLUTIONARY ENERGY IN THE AGE OF DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTIONS A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Samantha Stinson Wesner August, 2022 © 2022 Samantha Stinson Wesner GALVANIZING THE CITIZEN: ELECTRICITY AND REVOLUTIONARY ENERGY IN THE AGE OF DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTIONS Samantha Stinson Wesner, Ph. D. Cornell University, 2022 This dissertation investigates the relationship between late-eighteenth-century electrical vitalism and the theories of political energy at the heart of the French Revolution and the revolutionary politics of the Francophone Atlantic world. Working from archival and published sources, it focuses on how electrical language was taken up into revolutionary politics, and what a close look at this intersection reveals about war, terror, and radical democracy in the 1790s. While historians of science have viewed electricity as having radical connotations, historians of the French Revolution have viewed its politics as “scientific” in some significant way. Bringing the two together, I argue, remedies the tendency in both historiographies to view the other as a kind of black box. In uncovering the scientific roots of revolutionary electricity, the project aims to reconstruct the vitalist history of a metaphor we use today to describe the experience of collective political sentiment. Ultimately, the project elucidates a rich historical moment of intersection between the development of electrical science and the development of democratic politics, and in so doing argues for a new way to relate energy in the material world to political energy. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Samantha Wesner is a cultural historian working at the intersection of the history of science and political history. While completing this dissertation she spent several years writing and researching in Paris, where she currently lives. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My first thanks go to my committee at Cornell, Paul Friedland, Suman Seth, and Rachel Weil, for their feedback, intrepid support, and unwavering encouragement of this project. Thanks are due to Claudia Verhoeven and Jessica Riskin for reading chapters of this draft at critical junctures. The attendees and co-coordinators of the Cornell Graduate History Colloquium offered a space for several of the present chapters to see the light of day as works-in-progress. At Yale’s French and Francophone Studies in 2018, an enthusiastic response to the first conception of this project sent me down the path to the present dissertation. I have since presented aspects of it at many conferences and am grateful for those spaces of exchange. I am grateful to everyone who read and offered their feedback. I especially thank Jill Campbell, Liz Chatterjee, Iwan Rhys Morus, Aaron Sachs, Paul Cohen, Ann Blair, and Patrice Higonnet for going above and beyond in their kindness and encouragement. In addition, I thank Jenny Mann, Neil Saccamano, Jason Frank, and Ray Craib for eye-opening graduate seminars which went a long way to shape the intellectual contribution of this dissertation. The Andrew J. Mellon Foundation funded a year of research as part of an interdisciplinary group of scholars at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. I am grateful to have had that refuge, in the beautiful A. D. White house, and in the generosity of the fellows who came together there, to share my work as it developed. Research for this dissertation was funded by the Lewis Research Grant in French Studies, the Michele Sicca Research Grant from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the v Brettschneider Oxford Exchange Fellowship at Cornell, in addition to grants from the history department and from the graduate school. Crucial thanks go to Sophie Wahnich, who from our very first conversation one cold evening in Ithaca helped me believe in the worth of my project and gave me my first attempt at explaining it in French. I am eternally grateful to her for securing an institutional home for me in France in 2020, a year in which research and travel seemed impossible. Thanks to her support, and that of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, I was able to immigrate despite international border closures. I could not have done it without her. I wrote much of this dissertation in Paris. Many hours passed in basement research rooms of the Bibliothèque François Mitterand, compiling sources. I wrote in a little studio overlooking the Canal Saint-Martin, then locked down in a one- kilometer radius in the 20th arrondissement, then finally at a little sun-soaked desk above rue du faubourg Saint-Antoine, the city’s revolutionary hotbed in the 1790s. Through endless walks up and down the canal, around Belleville, circling Place de la Nation, and jogging around the Lac Daumesnil, the ideas of this dissertation took shape. So, I thank the city for its infinite inspiration. Since 2019 when I first arrived, unsure of my French and knowing little, my world has been opened and enriched by so many who made me feel at home here. Thank you, Aminat Alieva, Bryan Arias, Raymond Basa, Poulami Bhattacharjee, Fedwa Bouzit, Aoife Boyle, Baptiste Bruneau, Mei Ling Shen, Kelly Christensen, Zoë Cope, Jeremy Frusco, Edward Gray, Marie Kondrat, Pedro Lippmann, Chiara Lodi, Meagan Mason, Tom Phan, the Podvin family, Trask Roberts, John Sigmier, Shiwon Song, Mathieu Stiehl, and Meredith Lombard. Pistaches girls and Snoopy Crew, you deserve vi double thanks for all the wine, the dinners, and the deep talks, lifelines in the final writing months. I am grateful beyond words for the life-sustaining friendship of my fellow grad students whom I met at Cornell, Kevin Bloomfield, Amanda Bosworth, Benedetta Carnaghi, Rukmini Chakraborty, Ani Chen, alexandra dalferro, Mary Jane Dempsey, Tiên-Dung Hà, Ryan Purcell, Helene Sorgner, Kelsey Utne, and Jake Walters, all of whom have worked (and not-worked) alongside me through the years in Ithaca and across great distances. I especially thank my diss-writing ladies, for our support of each other and our genuine happiness in each other’s successes. I thank Sylvie, who made the old apartment beautiful and bearable to return to after heartbreak. I thank Michelle, for keeping it real in the spring of 2020— “we may not have thrived, but we survived.” I thank those who have known me long before the PhD, whose friendship sustained me throughout it. Thanks especially to Zoë DeStories for all the cheese-and-wine nights, and cups of tea, and for always continuing the conversation like it was yesterday. Thanks to PK for champagne at Chat Bossu, for your sense of humor and your impeccable taste in weird tweets. If I have never felt alone in what can easily be a lonely endeavor, it is due to my excellent friends, whom I cherish more than they may know. Lastly, love and thanks to Raunaq Paul, to whom I owe the sense of stability and contentment in daily life that saw me through the final years of this project, and who has cared for me and let me care for him every day since we stood together under those umbrellas. I could not have wished for a better partner. Behind this project is the steadfast support of my family. Love to Kate and John Guyton, who hosted me many times and showed me the good life in Lyon, from the marché to the mères. Love to Lesley Bell, Tom Zuckerman, and Amy Zuckerman who vii taught me how to celebrate every occasion, and for the flood of zoom-defense tips in the eleventh hour. Love to my grandparents, Lyntha and Charles Wesner, Rose Stinson, and the late Evelyn Ebsworth. Love to Ben and Mook, who believe in me much more than I do. Finally, I dedicate this dissertation to my parents, who gave me life and love, and always wanted the best for me. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1: Revolutionary Electricity in 1790: Shock, Consensus, and the Birth of a Political Metaphor Chapter 2: “Great shock of Civil Electricity”: War and Electricity in 1792-1793 Chapter 3: “Masters of the Electricity of Souls”: The Jacobin Terror and Revolutionary Electrification Chapter 4: Electrification, Subversion, and Zombification in Saint Domingue Epilogue ix LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1. Instances of electr* in the Archives parlementaires by year and month Fig. 2. Still taken from an animation, paused in 1793, of geo-tagged electrical language drawn from the Archives parlementaires. Fig. 3. An image taken from Abbé Sans’s Guérison de la paralysie par l’électricité (1772), showing the paralyzed state of a patient’s hand. Fig. 4. Pages 34 and 35 in Abbé Sans’s Guérison de la paralysie par l’électricité (1772), with notes on the atmosphere along the margins. Fig. 5. An illustration of Stephen Grey’s “flying boy” experiment, from Abbé Nollet’s Essai sur l’électricité des corps (1749). Fig. 6. An image from Nollet’s Recherches sur les causes particulieres des phénoménes, électriques (1754). Fig. 7. A Leyden Jar made from a wine bottle, with gold leaf in the bottom. This jar is said to have belonged to Galvani. Fig. 8. Illustration of the brain and nerves, from Gautier d’Agoty’s Exposition anatomique (1775). Fig. 9. Illustration of the nerves, carriers of refined electric fluid, in the upper half of the body, from Gautier d’Agoty’s Exposition Anatomique (1775). Fig. 10. An anonymous drawing entitled “Magnetism unveiled.” The Commission banishes Mesmer through the force of their report, wielded by Benjamin Franklin on the left. Fig. 11. Colored print titled “National Confederation on the Champs de Mars in Paris, July 14th, 1790.” Fig. 12. In a 1794 print, a revolutionary generates “republican electricity,” overthrowing all the thrones in Europe. Fig. 13. “The people, king-eater. Colossal statue proposed by the journal Révolutions de Paris, to be placed at the most prominent locations at our borders.” Fig. 14. A 1798 print by British caricaturist James Gillray, depicting the French Colossus. Fig. 15. A 1793 print, in which the outlines of the Jacobin Mountain are just visible behind the smoke and lightning issuing from around the tablets, which read “rights of man” and “Constitution of 1793.” Fig. 16. One of Palloy’s Bastille stones, which reads, “This stone comes from the cells of the Bastille. Given to the District of _____ by Patriot Palloy on July 14th, 1790.” Fig. 17. “Discussions about free men of color.” Fig. 18. Illustrations of Galvani’s experiments, from his De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentaries (1791). Fig. 19. Lenin’s electrified silhouette. x xi xii INTRODUCTION ÉLECTRICITÉ, s. f. ÉLECTRIQUE, adj. Electricity, the property of bodies, which being rubbed, attract other bodies. Electric, that which has this property. “The electricity of the glass, of the amber.” “Electric body, electric virtue.” “The phenomena of electricity are as admirable as they are inexplicable.”1 Dictionnaire critique de la langue français, 1787. I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. … And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul? Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855. The Argument 1 Jean-François Féraud, Dictionnaire critique de la langue française (1787-1788). Accessed through the ARTFL project. 1 In the final decade of the eighteenth century, a new kind of electricity appeared on the scene: revolutionary electricity. At once metaphor and more than metaphor, this new electricity was rooted in a rich natural philosophical worldview based upon subtle fluids, active powers in matter, and analogical reasoning that developed over the course of the eighteenth century. Through the crucible of the French Revolution, revolutionary electricity emerged as a way to address the most urgent problems faced under the new regime. Through their appropriation of electricity, revolutionaries developed a theory of collective movement, unified will, and social cohesion. By 1793, electrification became a Jacobin shorthand for revolutionary transformation, a central part of a program the Thermidorians called terrorisme. French observers invented another, more dangerous electricity to describe the potential overthrow of a society built on slavery, while in Haiti, the parallel development of the “zombi” figure emerged as an expression of the conditions of colonization and enslavement. As it developed into a powerful figure of speech, electrical language incorporated theories of the physical universe— and the position of human beings within it—into theories of democratic politics, revolutionary war, and terror. A cultural history at the intersection between electricity and revolutionary politics, this dissertation addresses a moment of overlap that has not been fully investigated within French revolutionary historiography or the history of electricity. This dissertation builds on previous work, but it is the first large-scale project to focus directly on this intersection. Revolutionary historians have occasionally quoted electrical revolutionary language in passing, themselves leveraging the suggestive, 2 figurative power of electricity to explain how contemporaries thought about imagined revolutionary energy. Scholarly work on the science of electricity in the late eighteenth century, on the other hand, has tended to associate electrical science broadly with radical politics. The personal politics of “electricians” of the Anglophone world, especially Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley, give electricity a radical cast, while historians contrast their politics with those of more conservative or equivocal figures in the Francophone world such as Nollet and Coulomb.2 Cultural historians of science have argued that electricity entered the nineteenth century as “the science of atheists, materialists, political radicals and revolutionaries,” having “acquired a decidedly republican valence” through the crucible of the French Revolution.3 Because its focus is elsewhere, this nuanced and careful scholarship has a tendency to invoke the French Revolution as a black box, passing over the fact that the Revolution was a complex political event with a spectrum of political perspectives. Electricity’s purported political radicality calls for an analysis of electrical language within revolutionary politics on a more granular level. This dissertation thus situates specific instances of electrical language within the complicated landscape of revolutionary politics. Electricity meets revolution in scholarship that looks specifically at French revolutionary figures whose old regime careers brought them into contact with the phenomenon, in particular Jean-Paul Marat and Maximilien Robespierre. Jessica Riskin 2 Examples include: Patricia Fara, An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Iwan Rhys Morus, “Radicals, romantics and electrical showmen: placing galvanism at the end of the English enlightenment,” Notes and Records of The Royal Society, 63 (2009): 263–75; Simon Schaffer, “Priestley and the politics of spirit,” in Robert Anderson and Christopher Lawrence eds. Science, Medicine and Dissent: Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) (London: 1987), 39–53. 3 Iwan Rhys Morus, Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (Icon Books, 2004) 70; Stephanie O’Rourke, “Girodet’s galvanized bodies” Art History 5 (November 2018): 869. 3 looks at Robespierre’s successful defense of one M. de Vissery de Bois-Valé. De Vissery had installed a lightning rod on his house, against the wishes of a pious neighbor. This was one of the young lawyer’s first big cases, and during his defense, Robespierre became well acquainted with contemporary electrical science.4 Marat famously wrote many treatises on electricity before the revolution began. Keith Baker suggests that electricity and vitalism influenced Marat’s politics in ways yet to be examined.5 For the Marquis de Sade, literature provided another kind of experimental space for theories of a universal electric fluid, which appears to mediate relations between apathy and energy in his characters, and which scholars have identified as a particularly “Sade-ian electrobiology.”6 The politics of this literary concept of electricity remain ripe for investigation, while Sade’s personal politics have been more thoroughly examined. Likewise, in recent scholarly work on the Galvani-Volta controversy at the end of the eighteenth century, politics often appears in the form of political allegiances of the main actors, especially Napoleon’s endorsement of Volta’s position, and Galvani’s resistance of Napoleonic domination of Italy until his untimely death.7 Through the individual political views of well-known natural philosophers, 4 Jessica Riskin, “The lawyer and the lightning rod,” in Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 139-88. Riskin argues that Robespierre’s strategy was to invoke the simplicity of the facts of electricity rather than appealing to scientific experts. 5 Keith Michael Baker, “Was Marat a vitalist?” in Keith Michael Baker and Jenna M. Gibbs eds. Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 110-24. 6 Jean Deprun, “Sade et la philosophie biologique de son temps,” in De Descartes au romantisme: etudes historiques et thématiques (Paris: Vrin, 1987); Clara Carnicero de Castro, “Le fluid électrique chez Sade,” Société Française d’Etude du Dix-Huitième Siècle 1, no. 46 (2014): 561-77. 7 Marco Bresadola, Marco Piccolino, Shocking Frogs: Galvani, Volta, and the Electric Origins of Neuroscience, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Walter Bernardi, “La controverse sur l'électricité animale dans l’Italie du XVIIIe siècle: Galvani, Volta et...d’autres,” in Revue d’histoire des sciences 54, no. 1 (2001): 53-70. 4 writers, and politicians whose work made use of electrical images and concepts, scholars have constructed a politics of electricity derived from the politics of specific historical actors. But what about the politics or political affordances of electricity itself? Scholarship at the nexus of science and politics draws out the politics of scientific concepts such as electricity and magnetism, arguing that lay scientific enthusiasm in the decades before the revolution had a significant effect on radical politics. Simon Schaffer’s work on electrical natural philosophy and public spectacle, argues that popular electrical demonstrations were seen as challenges to social order in the mid- to late-eighteenth century.8 Robert Darnton’s work on mesmerism connects Mesmer’s mysterious therapeutic treatments to popular enthusiasm for both science and radical politics. Darnton argues that, rather than reading Rousseau’s Social Contract, most literate French people encountered revolutionary ideas through fashionable philosophies like Mesmerism. For devotees like Jacques-Pierre Brissot, mesmerism became a “camouflaged political theory.”9 In the French context, François Zanetti, and Michel Delon especially have written on how electricity and energy took on political meaning through revolution. Jessica Riskin writes about the resonance for mid-century physiocrats like Turgot of Benjamin Franklin’s new theory of electricity, in which shocks, Leyden jar discharges, and lightning bolts all sought equilibrium, and constantly worked toward remedying imbalances in electrical charge. Electricity’s tendency toward equilibrium became a model for physiocratic economic thought.10 Mary 8 Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science 21, no. 1 (Mar 1983): 1-43. 9 Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (New York: Schocken Books; Harvard University Press, 1968), 3. 10 Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility, 104-37. 5 Ashburn Miller finds this same Franklinist concept of restoring equilibrium at work behind the lightning metaphor of popular sovereignty during the period known as the “Terror,” in which lightning expressed the necessity of destruction as a precondition for regeneration. Mary Fairclough argues that eighteenth-century electrical science, often interpreted as a symbol of enlightenment, in fact stood for obscurity and incomprehensibility.11 Fairclough’s work on the Romantic crowd makes a case for sympathy as a key element in Romantic interpretations of sentimental “contagion,” emphasizing its disruptive social force.12 This dissertation, while building on this rich and excellent work, differs in that it focuses specifically on telling the story of how electricity became a political metaphor during the revolution. It does so in a way that brings contemporary theories of electricity, particularly electricity as it related to human bodies and minds, together with revolutionary political theories of popular sovereignty and democracy. It finds that electricity expressed a mechanism by which collective sentiment and thus, collective will, could be made manifest, irresistibly and instantaneously. Electrification thus expressed a fantasy of a kind of political energy, the kind of political energy that could be conducted by a skilled politician. Because feeling and life in the human body were thought to be electrical, and because of electricity’s situatedness in a system of fluids understood analogically to one another, there is a sense in which political electricity was 11 Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789-1794 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Mary Fairclough, Literature, Electricity, and Politics, 1740-1840: ‘Electrick Communication Every Where’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 12 Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 6 understood to operate literally, through atmospheric and animal electricity which worked through the bodies in a festival crowd or assembly audience. The resonances for contemporaries ran deeper than a strictly metaphorical relationship would suggest. To tell this story, I look at the electrical language captured in the parliamentary archives, national archives, and elsewhere, used by deputies, members of sociétés populaires, municipal and departmental authorities, petitioners, and festival planners. I analyze the electrical metaphors employed by Brissot, Marat, and Robespierre while contextualizing these instances within an aggregate of electrical language, in order to reconstruct how revolutionary electricity was employed in general. Recognizing that France was a slave-holding empire, I look at how theories of electricity crossed the Atlantic, and how they played a part in how metropolitan revolutionaries theorized the early uprisings in Saint Domingue which would lead to the Haitian Revolution. To understand how revolutionary electricity became such a powerful metaphor in the 1790s requires an understanding of contemporary electrical science. Revolutionary electricity points toward a set of research questions: What about electricity at the turn of the century made it resonate with revolutionary politics? What does an analysis of electrical language in context reveal about how revolutionaries thought about the physical world? How did revolutionaries understand how human thought, sentiment, and life functioned within that world, a crucial question in the context of a revolution that claimed to remake positive law along the lines of laws of nature? The purpose of this dissertation is to construct a history of revolutionary electricity that answers these questions. In the second half of this introduction, I lay out the broad contours of revolutionary electricity, the natural philosophy behind it, and the 7 urgent political problems it came to address in the revolution, bringing in relevant scholarship throughout. I then conclude with an outline of chapters to give a sense of how the parts of the dissertation work together. Figurative electricity as revolutionary invention Since Newton’s suggestions of a universal aether in the later queries of his Opticks, electricity had been thought to have had important cosmological significance. Robert Boyle, performing a set of experiments on amber and other “electrics,” wrote that all hypotheses to date agreed that “Electrical Attractions are not the Effects of a meer Quality, but of a Substantial Emanation from the attracting Body.” Electricity, then, was a material something, and a mysterious one at that. Boyle noted that it seemed to go through some substances and not others.13 Electricity entered the eighteenth century as a special, super-fine substance, one of many aethers and fluids. A century of natural philosophical inquiry analogized the electrical fluid to a host of phenomena— fire, heat, light, and gravity—in pursuit of a universal fluid, evidence of a kind of cosmic organizing principle, or, as Newton had it, the evidence of God’s hand in the world. In 1704, Newton’s former lab assistant Francis Hauksbee constructed an electrostatic generator. The son of a draper, Hauksbee had discovered that cloth rubbed against a fast-spinning glass air-pump generated static electricity. By mid-century, the mysterious electrical fluid could be stored and deployed by a skilled experimenter. Over the 1770s and 1780s, interest in both atmospheric and 13 Robert Boyle, Experiments and Notes about the Mechanical Origine or Production of Electricity (London: Printed by E. Flesher, 1675), 7. 8 medical applications for electricity grew, especially in France. By 1780, Luigi Galvani was completing his groundbreaking work on what was known to eighteenth-century science as “animal electricity.” The theory of animal electricity proposed that electricity ran throughout animal bodies as a vital fluid. Anatomists, physicists, and electro- medical practitioners alike believed it physiologically necessary for liveliness and movement, thought and sentiment, even life itself. These theories developed concurrently with the revolution. The first anniversary of the taking of the Bastille occurred just as Galvani put the finishing touches on his treatise on animal electricity, published in 1791 as De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius. The subsequent debate on the nature and generation of electricity between Galvani and Alessandro Volta would lead to Volta’s invention of the eponymous Voltaic battery in 1799, publishing his results in 1800. The battery created a non-stop current of electricity through the arrangement of zinc and copper in a saline solution. Some eighteenth-century electrical history has been written teleologically, as if inevitably headed toward Volta’s pile. In John L. Heilbron’s magisterial study of electricity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the pile is the final, “great” achievement of eighteenth-century electrical science. The sustained current of electricity enabled by the pile opened avenues of electrical study which “transformed our civilization.”14 After Volta’s battery, Christian Oersted’s discovery connecting electricity and magnetism led to André-Marie Ampère’s theory of the electrodynamic molecule. By the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell had taken Michael Faraday’s force lines 14 J.L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999), 494. 9 and theorized the dynamic, electromagnetic field which, not by coincidence, propagated at the speed of light. The way we read electricity in the eighteenth century is colored by what electricity became in the nineteenth century, not to mention the form it takes in our lives today. This dissertation focuses on electricity before the Voltaic pile, at a moment when electricity’s horizons looked different. It was at this galvanic moment, I argue, that a vitalist, bodily electricity was taken up into revolutionary, democratic politics. Investigating revolutionary electricity, then, provides a historically grounded window onto what electricity was and how it resonated politically, just before the current and the pile. Though it had already become a political metaphor in the context of the American Revolution, as James Delbourgo demonstrates, electricity took on a new and different meaning in the French Revolution, in part because of a shift in emphasis within electrical science between the American and French Revolutions. Delbourgo writes that American revolutionary political electricity, which brought republican politics together with electrical science peddled by traveling showmen, predated French revolutionary électrisation by a few decades.15 Political electricity arrived later in France, appearing later than its metaphorical counterparts in the Anglophone world. Perhaps because of stronger royal sponsorship of and control over scientific pursuits in France, especially on the part of the Royal Society of Medicine and its efforts to stamp out mesmerism and other forms of charlatanry, it took an earth-shattering revolution to reveal the metaphorical affordances of l’électricité. 15 See James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 10 To contemporaries of the French Revolution, electricity appeared as a brand- new figure of speech, one of many French revolutionary neologisms. Though there is little anglophone scholarship on this phenomenon, French scholars have studied the importance of metaphorical language drawn from nature in revolutionary politics. Olivier Ritz looks broadly at natural metaphors in literature during the revolutionary period as figures of speech that generate their own realities, breaking down old conceptual boundaries to form a new political imaginary.16 Michel Delon has studied the transformation of the concept of énergie in the eighteenth century from a philosophical perspective, how électriser came to have new meaning through the French Enlightenment and revolution.17 In the final chapter of his book on enlightenment medical electricity, François Zanetti tracks how electricity was politicized, becoming “charged with political and social hopes and deceptions” over the revolutionary period.18 This is the final chapter in Zanetti’s book, which is a thorough historical study of eighteenth century French medical electricity. Through these studies, electricity emerges as a concept of interest during the revolution—a concept in a process of transformation, whether parallel to the rise of medical electricity, to changing notions of energy, or to the rise of new metaphorical possibilities through revolutionary politics. That electrification took on special significance through the revolution is attested to by a 1795 dictionary which appeared in print in the Saxon city of Göttingen. 16 Olivier Ritz, Les métaphores naturelles dans le débat sur la Révolution (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016). Ritz focuses on literary metaphors between 1789 and 1815. 17 Michel Delon, L'idée d'énergie au tournant des Lumières (Paris: PUF, 1988); Michel Delon, “Electriser, un mot d’ordre au siècle des Lumières,” Revue des sciences humaines, no. 281 (Jan-Mar 2006): 39-51. 18 François Zanetti, “Evocations révolutionnaires,” in François Zanetti, L’électricité médicale dans la France des Lumières (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2017), 217-234; 234. 11 It was a dictionary of the French language, but not the kind that aimed at comprehensiveness. Nor was it concerned with hovering on a separate plane from political matters. It was rather, as its title explained, a “new dictionary containing expressions newly created by the French People,” with doubled emphasis on novelty, a supplement to the official Dictionnaire of the Académie Française “and all other Vocabularies.” The dictionary contained not only neologisms, but also words given entirely new meanings in the crucible of political upheaval. Alongside entries on revolution, guillotine, and sansculottide was a trio of terms lifted from one of the frontiers and obsessions of eighteenth-century natural philosophy: électrique, électriser, s’électriser. The word “electric” “which before referred only to electrifiable bodies,” explained the dictionary, “is also used to express movements and tremor of the soul.”19 With his entry on the new meaning of electricity, Leonard Snetlage, the dictionary’s author and compiler, made note of a transformation. Electricity had gone from being a term for physical description to a term that means something specific in revolutionary politics. Through the revolution, electricity had taken on new meaning as an expression of movements of the soul and the heart: the electricity of patriotic tremors, communicable from one to another, was the ultimate source of revolutionary energy and action. The many instances in which electrical language appears alongside énergie indicates a close conceptual association. Snetlage’s examples place électrisation in a military context, perhaps because this was the form the French Revolution took from 19 Leonard Snetlage, Nouveau Dictionnaire Français contenant les expressions de nouvelle Création du Peuple Français. Ouvrage additionnel au Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française et a tout autre Vocabulaire. Par Leonard Snetlage Docteur en Droits en l’Université de Gottingue, (Göttingen: Chez Jean Chretien Dieterich, 1795), 77. 12 the perspective of a scholar in Göttingen. Soldiers’ hearts are electrified; news of victory and the sight of veteran’s wounds electrify others. The 1795 Nouveau Dictionnaire Français contenant les expressions de nouvelle Création du Peuple Français draws our attention to how rhetorical invention might function as a point of intersection between politics and natural philosophy. As he compiled his dictionary, Snetlage observed that among a host of linguistic innovations a new electricity had appeared in the French language, no longer referring exclusively to “electrifiable bodies,” i.e. material objects to which electricity could be applied by contact with the stored charge of a Leyden Jar, but to the patriotic stirring of souls and hearts, expressed figuratively. Was Snetlage right in attributing the new electricity to the revolutionary French people? Giacomo Casanova, in a parodic commentary on Snetlage’s dictionary published in 1797, noted that he liked électriser more than enthousiasmer, but that the latter was “French, and is worthy of having been French for ages.” That was not true of the new verb “to electrify.” Casanova downplayed the need for the invention of a new kind of French enthusiasm when the old enthusiasm worked perfectly well.20 The criticism echoed Casanova’s critique of Snetlage’s compilation as a whole; what Snetlage had created was hardly a dictionary, Casanova complained, but rather an “enumeration of five or six dozen bizarre words, the list of which you give to the public, informing them of the definition and of the many baroque meanings which have been annexed to them.”21 Snetlage’s Nouveau Dictionnaire Français and its 20 Giacomo Casanova, À Léonard Snetlage ([Dresden]: 1797), 41. 21 Casanova, À Léonard Snetlage, 6. 13 critiques thus attest to electricity’s new, revolutionary meaning, whether this novelty was a good thing for the French language or not. Recent scholarship tracks the development of a specifically political language of electricity decades earlier in the Anglophone world. Joseph Priestley famously wrote in 1774 that “the English hierarchy (if there be anything unsound in its constitution) has every reason to tremble even at an air pump, or an electrical machine.”22 American revolutionaries developed a “unique language of electrical politics which compared the sudden onrush of republican feeling to ecstatic bodily experiences of electricity,” according to James Delbourgo23 In his 1791 poem The Economy of Vegetation, Erasmus Darwin imagined an electrical American Revolution, sparked by Benjamin Franklin who appears earlier in the poem. “The patriot-flame with quick contagion ran, / Hill lighted hill, and man electrized man.” The French colossus sleeps, his limbs trapped in the Bastille, when, “touched by the patriot-flame, he rent amazed, his flimsy bonds, and round and round him gazed.” 24 Celebrating the first anniversary of the taking of the Bastille, English poet Robert Merry composed an ode on with a similar theme: “And let the electric ruby pass/ From hand to hand, from soul to soul;/ Who shall the energy controul,/ Exalted, pure, refin’d,/ The Health of Human kind.”25 For Burke, the 22 Joseph Priestley, Experiments and observations on different kinds of air, 3rd edn. (London: 1781), xiv. First published 1774. 23 See especially Mary Fairclough, Literature, Electricity and Politics, 1740-1794; Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders; James Delbourgo, Electricity, Experiment and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century North America. PhD Diss. (New York: Columbia University, 2003), 2. 24 Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden. A Poem, in Two Parts. Part I. Containing The Economy of Vegetation. Part II. The Loves of the Plants. With Philosophical Notes (New York: T. & J. Swords, 1807), 60. 25 Robert Merry, “Ode for the Fourteenth of July, 1791, the Day consecrated to Freedom; being the Anniversary of the Revolution in France,” in extract of a letter from Danville, Kentucky, via Richmond, dated 22 August. PG, 21 September 1791. Quoted in Delbourgo, Electricity, Experiment and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century North America, 191. 14 “electrick communication” of the press made every government “in its spirit, Democratick” and fomented dangerous revolution everywhere.26 The Anglophone world of the eighteenth century had its own political electricity, connected to both republican energy in the American context, and expressions of either fear or wonderment at the electric communicability of French revolutionary energy in Britain. In the French context, a new language of revolutionary electricity came into being with the revolution, semantically linked to collective, revolutionary sentiment and the all-important, attendant notion of collective will. Tracking the frequency of electrical language in the national parliamentary archives illustrates the case; a search of digitized national parliamentary minutes between 1782 and 1804 gives a loose sense of the frequency with which electrical language can be found. The general contour of the frequency of electrical language in these archives shows scattered electrical language in the first several years of the Revolution. Electrical language is much more consistently used through 1793, associated closely with the movements and actions of the représentants en mission, who were deployed from the Jacobin center to the provinces and who were responsible for some of the infamous acts of “terror,” from the firing squad killings in Lyon to the mass drowning in Nantes.27 26 Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the prospect of a regicide peace, in a series of letters, (London: printed for J. Owen, 1796), Letter II, 128. Accessed through Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 27 See chapter 3 for more detailed discussion of the electricity that became associated with the représentants en mission. 15 Fig. 1. Instances of electr* in the Archives parlementaires by year and month.28 The following stills come from an animated map built from this data. The animation shows a distinctive shift in frequency of electrical language from northeast France to southwest France over the course of 1793, possibly corresponding to a shift in focus from the external war at the border with the Holy Roman Empire, to the internal dynamic between Jacobin emissaries and local resistance. 28 Search performed through the joint Bibliothèque nationale de France and Stanford University digitized archives parlementaires from 1782 to 1804. Given imperfect text recognition, this graph should be taken as approximate. The search term used is électri*. The volumes of the Archives parlementaires are not digitized past early 1794, which accounts for the steep drop we see in this figure. 16 Fig. 2. Still taken from the animation, paused in 1793, of geo-tagged electrical language drawn from the Archives parlementaires. With the possible exception of late 1793, it would be overstating the case to say that electricity and electrify were commonly used words. Searching for a set of terms gives the impression that they were used constantly, but this was not the case. It is also clear that electricity was a distinctly revolutionary rhetorical figure, which cropped up in parliamentary minutes only after 1789. Electricity blazes through the legislative minutes in a distinct pattern. Political matters were “electrical” and “electrifying” in the years before and especially during the Terror, but such language did not make its way onto the floors of the parlements of the old regime before 1789. After 1791, electrical language picks up, correlating with a “galvanic boom” during those years, when interest in Luigi Galvani’s “animal electricity” exploded.29 Electrical language then rose dramatically during the period known as the terror. 29 Walter Moser writes of a “boom galvaniste” around 1800. Walter Moser, “Le galvanisme: Joker au carrefour des discours et des savoirs autour de 1800.” In Olivier Asselin and Silvestra Mariniello and Andrea Oberhuber, eds. L’ère électrique / the electric age (Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2011): 61-84; 63. 17 A closer analysis of each of these instances reveals a shift in meaning from the first few years of the revolution to the period of the greatest frequency. The electrical language of 1793 is more metaphorical, flatter, and further removed from its origins in natural philosophy, compared with earlier electrical language. Jacobin representatives and supporters in local sociétés populaires wrote to each other of the work of “electrifying” the people, the armies, the countryside, making it clear that this was a word that stood for a specific kind of political work, easily understood by among adherents to the Jacobin political program. A few examples will illustrate this phenomenon. Representative Andre Dumont, sent on mission to quell the counterrevolution in the Somme, describes the electrical activities he expected of his colleague, sent to the same city before him: “Citizen colleagues, I guarded the city of Peronne till the end, believing that my colleague Debrel had electrified it, and that all its citizens were at the height of the Revolution. But alas! Such was my surprise to discover a second Coblentz.”30 An “electrified” city meant a city on board with revolution; an un-electrified city, such as the one Dumont found, remained counterrevolutionary. “After having electrified souls,” reads another such example, “the [Jacobin] emissaries will collect, on the part of the wealthy farmers and manufacturers, the tithe of their herds, their wines, their fodder, and their fabrics.”31 Electrisation is paired here with tax-collecting as part of the duty of Jacobin emissaries sent from Paris to, in this case, Carcassonne; it is self-explanatory, almost banal. More than a hundred 30 Archives parlementaires, Tome 76, p. 482 (13 October 1793). 31 Archives parlementaires, Tome 81, p. 346 (12 December 1793). 18 such examples indicate that électrisation had become, by 1793, an easy expression of revolutionary missionizing. L’électricité was thus only came into its own metaphorically through relatively frequent use during the period known as the terror. It emerged long after American political electricity of the kind Delbourgo traces, which gave expression to a “sudden onrush of republican feeling.”32 But this was not the only reason that electricity’s metaphorical dimension developed only after the start of the revolution in France. In the revolutionary context, electricity was enlisted to solve an urgent problem: the reorganization and revitalization of the body politic. Electricity in part answered the urgent problem of how the French nation could cohere socially under a regime without estates. This was particularly true after the overthrow of the king on August 10th, 1792. As Victor Hugo described it in Les Miserables a century later, “the Encyclopédie enlightens minds, and August 10th electrifies them.”33 Traditionally the center of the social body, the king left a symbolic void that democratic republicanism struggled to address. In Ernst Kantorowitcz’s famous theory of the “king’s two bodies,” the living king could die while his other body lived on. But what happened when the living king was executed, and monarchy itself ended, i.e. there was no immortal second body in which sovereignty was anchored? In his recent book, drawing on a long historiographical tradition, Kevin Duong points to the execution of the king as a form of redemptive violence within a new democratic order.34 This violence, Duong, 32 James Delbourgo, Electricity, Experiment and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century North America (PhD Diss. Columbia University, 2003), 2. 33 Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, Vol. IV, Book 3, Chapter 3: “L’extrême bord” (1862). 34 Kevin Duong, The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 19 presented itself as the antidote to social disintegration under democratic regimes. Electricity addressed anxieties over social cohesion after the undoing of a centuries-old, corporatist model of representation of which the king was the living center. If sovereignty was figured as a unified will, then electricity’s scientific connections to sentiment and human life could lend themselves to a new theory of how that collective will could be produced. Again and again, the vocabularies of electricity and electrification manifested the desire for a mechanism which would make the social body cohere without the king’s body at its center. Electricity thus theoretically produced a new social body, transforming the many into one. The conceptual intersection at the center of this dissertation illustrates how revolutionary political thought was grounded in a particular scientific understanding of human sentiment, life, and movement, and energy. Energy like electricity lays bare the overlaps between the fields of literature, science, religion, and politics. As Michel Delon has argued, French enlightenment understandings of vital energy in nature, in medicine, and in the make-up of people contributed to the emergence of an abstract notion of energy that paralleled the development of life sciences at the turn of the nineteenth century.35 Moral neologisms, Delon demonstrates, drew upon scientific vocabularies. As Saint Just put it in 1792, “the moral order is like the physical;” for the most radical revolutionaries, positive law in the new regime was to align with natural law.36 The Physiocrats before the revolution had advocated for “good positive laws” which 35 Delon, L'idée d'énergie au tournant des Lumières, 104. 36 Saint Just, Speech to the Convention (December 27, 1792), quoted in Michael Walzer, ed. Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, trans. Marian Rothstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 176. 20 “conform perfectly to the natural and essential order of societies.”37 Laws of nature governed electricity as (revolutionaries believed) they should govern society. Understanding that grounding reveals the intertwining of French revolutionary rhetoric with specifically medical, aethereal, and therapeutic electricity, which conditioned revolutionary political thought about energy and action.38 Electricity, neither the most frequently invoked nor the most prominent rhetorical figure in political speech of the early 1790s, is however especially revealing because of a set of unique political affordances of electrical science at the end of the eighteenth century. Before the invention of the Voltaic pile in 1800, and before electricity was harnessed by the forces of industrialization and state power, electricity entered political discourse as a subtle fluid, intimately related to and working powerfully on the human body, understood directly through the senses and pain of that body.39 Dissertation outline 37 Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de la Rivière, Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques, (1767; Paris: Edgar Depitre, 1910), 86. Quoted in Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, & the French Revolution (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 105. 38 This point follows the logic of the linguistic turn, that words have causal power in history, in that they define and set the limits for historical action. It should also be understood in the context of a scholarly tradition in the history of science that reads political and social arrangements as intimately related to conceptions of the natural world, how it is ordered and how it operates. See especially Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985; John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 39 For a characterization of early-nineteenth-century electricity as a newly-commodified “symbol of Victorian progress,” see Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein’s Children; James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonder. Delbourgo draws upon Simon Schaffer’s concept of “self-evidence” as an important epistemological notion for eighteenth-century natural philosophy. Simon Schaffer, “Self Evidence,” in James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian, eds., Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion Across the Disciplines, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 56-91. 21 The dissertation is divided into four chapters and an epilogue. Chapter one begins with a case study of revolutionary electricity, drawn from the electrical language used by royal architect Bernard Poyet as he laid out plans for the Fête de la Fédération, the first anniversary of the taking of the Bastille. Poyet wrote that during this important festival, “the sentiment of each becomes the sentiment of all, by a kind of electrification.” This was what set a public festival in revolutionary times apart from a festival in the old regime. The chapter focuses on this electrical conception of what the Fête de la Fédération would achieve, exploring Poyet’s background, the political moment, and the resonance of this image with electrical experiments of the eighteenth century as well as ideals of the revolutionary festival. This chapter reconstructs how Poyet would have encountered electricity before the revolution, exploring the cultural forms electricity would have taken. An architect seemingly without strong political convictions, who recycled plans for buildings under every kind of government through his long career, Poyet is a kind of educated every-man. Through the central role Poyet gave to “a kind of electrification” in the 1790 Fête de la Fédération, we can discern how electricity framed a certain ideal of the festival in this first revolutionary year. The chapter ultimately argues that the purported radicalism of electricity is counteracted by its use in the political context of the Fête de la Fédération, where it was invoked as much for its imperviousness to resistance as for its expression of a democratic, Rousseauian ideal of collective will. Chapter two investigates the role electricity and electrical language played in framing revolutionary warfare. Considered by many scholars to be the first “modern” or “total” war, French revolutionary warfare had a novel impetus as well as 22 unprecedented involvement by the public. Egged on by an aggressive pro-war party led by Jacques-Pierre Brissot, France declared war in April 1792 on the Holy Roman Empire, Prussia, and a year later, Great Britain. War was framed by proponents as a “shock” of “civic electricity” that would liberate all of Europe. The chapter explores how the new theoretical aspects of French revolutionary warfare—the concepts of “politics by other means,” la patrie en danger, and the August 1793 levée en masse— contributed to the new concept of war as salutary shock. It looks at how the idea of war as a healthy shock found its way into the debate over the king’s trial as well. Electrification emerged as a mechanism by which to merge citizen and soldier into one entity, the “citizen-soldier.” In the transition from old-regime professional warfare to modern warfare, electrification played a role in the reconceptualization of war. Electricity not only gave expression to its novel elements, but influenced the decision to go to war, and the analysis of theorists like Carl von Clausewitz in the aftermath. Chapter three examines revolutionary electricity from 1793 to 1794. It tracks a revolutionary electricity that had become increasingly metaphorical since the beginning of the revolution, and now appears as shorthand for dechristianization and revolutionary conviction. Recent revolutionary historiography has called into question the idea of a period of “Terror,” within the revolution, pointing to the fact that political violence was not confined to one year within the revolutionary period, and that the rhetorical invention of terrorisme was a Thermidorian political expedient. This same scholarship has highlighted the role of emotions, during year II, fear and terror but also, on the flip 23 side, a kind of revolutionary ecstasy, which dominated the emotional landscape. 40 But the recent critique of Terror as a revolutionary period leaves a kind conceptual void. If not political violence and terror, what distinguished this period? Year II is also the year when electrical language exploded across the parliamentary archives, becoming a shorthand for the new emotion of revolutionary ecstasy. It is the era when collective emotional conviction, to hold the new republic together expressed as electrification spreading from radical center to the provinces. Electrification demonstrates the importance of the physical presence of représentants en mission, in assemblies and at revolutionary sociétés across France. A close read of these archival instances of electricity reveals certain patterns, especially an emphasis on the necessity of physical presence and on revolutionary speech-making before a silent, “electrified” audience. The chapter explores how electrification in year II expressed the manifestation of a Rousseauian general will, and the dispossession of individual will, through a physical experience which stressed silence and physical presence. This chapter finds that examining the revolutionaries’ own electrical vocabulary for their project provides an alternative perspective on “the Terror.” Chapter four asks, what happened when revolutionary electricity crossed the Atlantic? From Moreau de Saint-Méry’s use of electrical language to describe the heightened state in vodou dances he observed and fretted over, to Brissot and others worrying over the electrically-charged state of a society built upon slavery in revolution, electrical language described revolutionary energies that French commentators 40 See Michel Biard and Marisa Linton. Terreur! La Révolution française face à ses démons (Paris: Armand Colin, 2020). 24 observed in Saint Domingue. Though it is harder to access Haitian revolutionaries’ own conceptions of energy through contemporary written archives, with the help of other methodological approaches this chapter investigates contemporary concepts of zombification and spirit possession in parallel to electrical notions, since the latter were always outsider descriptions of what was happening in Saint Domingue. The first part of the chapter thus explores how electrical language about the colonies revealed the ambivalences and hypocrisies within French revolutionary abolitionism. It then investigates how Haitian conceptions of zombification expressed conditions of enslavement—a laboring body forcefully deprived of will. While electrification created a collective will, requiring the alienation of individual will, zombification figured an alienation on an entirely different order. This chapter ventures to investigate Haitian revolutionary historiographies of the zombi alongside the metropolitan French notion of electrification. The epilogue to this dissertation asks what became of revolutionary electrification at the turn of the nineteenth century. It returns to how theories of what electricity was were undergoing a transformation during the same revolutionary decade in which politics in France were being transformed. Revolutionary electricity played into the Galvani-Volta debate which dominated electrical science at the turn of the century. I reconstruct the explosion of interest in galvanism in the later years of the revolution before Napoleon and its relationship with the revolution. I argue that revolutionary electricity which we saw develop over the course of the dissertation, shaped both electrical science and literary electricity in ways as yet unrecognized. The specific political import which electrical vocabularies acquired through the crucible of 25 revolution did not disappear but instead fed into the Galvani-Volta debate. It also carried over into revolutionary literature, remaining a powerful figuration of revolutionary politics as well as an expression of an ideal author-reader relationship. I argue that without understanding revolutionary electricity and its function within revolutionary war and radicalism, we cannot understand the import of romantic electricity nor the galvanic moment in electrical science in the years around 1800. The epilogue ends with a foray into the democratic and revolutionary legacies of revolutionary electricity, looking at Walt Whitman’s concept of a “body electric” and mid-nineteenth-century vitalist democratic theory, and Lenin’s concept of the role of electrification within the Russian Revolution. The epilogue thus ends with revolutionary electricity’s afterlives. This study elucidates revolutionary electricity as a neologism which brought natural philosophy and the physical make-up of people, as living beings, to bear on problems of political theory in the age of democratic revolutions. Following electrical language through legislative minutes and archives, it tells the story of how eighteenth- century atmospheric, animal, and medical electricity became political electricity— exemplifying the porousness of those disciplinary boundaries we might take to be natural or timeless. In the materially electrified world of the present, this thesis is also an invitation to bring our “dead” metaphor of political electricity back to life by reconnecting it to its revolutionary past. 26 CHAPTER 1 REVOLUTIONARY ELECTRICITY IN 1790: SHOCK, CONSENSUS, AND THE BIRTH OF A POLITICAL METAPHOR In the months before the 1790 Fête de la Fédération, Bernard Poyet, a royal city architect in Paris, wrote a pamphlet detailing his plans for the festival. It was scheduled for the one-year anniversary of the taking of the Bastille. Poyet complemented his more pragmatic suggestions with a theory of the special functioning of the festival in the new era of liberty: Remember that under the reign of despotism, men defied one another, having no common interest, hid themselves from one another, did not know one another, and gathered, so to speak, within their own families, the only rallying point…Despotic government…created that fatal egoism which separated and corrupted them. Public festivals motivated by great consideration for the common good have this particular feature in common: that the sentiment of each becomes the sentiment of all by a kind of electrification [électrisation], against which even the most perverse men cannot defend themselves.1 This chapter takes Poyet’s curious choice of the word “electrification” as a way to explain the central mechanism of the Fête de la Fédération. Why did it occur to the architect to imagine the revolutionary festival in general and the Fête de la Fédération in particular as affecting a “kind of electrification?” What did Poyet mobilize by his 1 Bernard Poyet, Idées générales presentées par le Sieur Poyet, Architecte du Roi et de la Ville, sur le projet de la Fête du 14 juillet, a l’occasion du Pacte-Federatif, entre les Gardes Nationales et le Troupes de Ligne de la France ; pour célébrer l’époque de la Révolution, (Paris: Ve. Delaguette, 1790), 5. 27 recourse to the scientific concept of électrisation? What light can the scientific meanings of “electrification” in 1790 bring to our understanding of the Fête de la Fédération, and how were those meanings transformed or preserved as electricity became a political metaphor in the early French Revolution? Poyet’s rhetorical appropriation of the language of electricity in planning the 1790 festival illustrates a specific, concrete intersection between electrical science and revolutionary politics. Revolutionary electricity needs to be historicized in terms of contemporary science; only then can Poyet’s “kind of electrification” become legible.2 A century of natural philosophical inquiry analogized the electrical fluid to a host of phenomena in pursuit of a universal fluid or aether, evidence of a kind of cosmic organizing principle. By mid-century, the mysterious electrical fluid or aether could be stored and deployed by a skilled experimenter. Poyet imagined the 1790 Fête de la Fédération in terms of électrisation at the same time as Luigi Galvani was putting the finishing touches on his groundbreaking commentary, which drew on experiences reanimating frog legs with electricity, which he performed throughout the 1780s.3 2 For instance, Mona Ozouf quotes Poyet in La fête révolutionnaire 1789-1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 67, when she writes: “c’est aussi que le simple fait du rassemblement paraît alors une prodigieuse conquête morale: la fête consacre le passage du privé au public, elle étend à tous le sentiment de chacun par une espèce d’électrisation.” The same phrase appears in the published proceedings of a 1974 colloquium on revolutionary festivals, in an article on festival architecture by Richard Etlin. See R.-A. Etlin, “L’architecture et la Fête de la Fédération. Paris, 1790,” in Ehrard, Jean, and Paul Viallaneix, eds. Les fêtes de la Révolution: Colloque de Clermont-Ferrand (juin 1974). Bibliothèque d’Histoire révolutionnaire 3e série, No. 17 (Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 1977), 131-54. [Reprinted in 2012]. For a more recent example, see Volker Sellin, Violence and Legitimacy: European Monarchy in the Age of Revolutions (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2018), 217. Sellin reproduces the quote in a footnote, citing Poyet to illustrate the principle of festivals as nation-building exercises: “architect Bernard Poyet wrote that the great public celebrations produced an electrifying effect on the participants and had the result that in the end they were all dominated by the same sensations.” In none of these cases is the idea of électrisation examined in connection with the contemporary science of electricity. 3 Galvani’s treatise De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius, or Commentary on the forces of electricity in relation to muscular motion was published in the annual publication of the 28 Poyet was not a well-known natural-philosopher, nor a particularly radical political actor, but rather an architect concerned with plying his trade. The politics of his “kind of electrification” were drawn not from his personal politics, but from the political moment of the Fête de la Fédération, and from the clash between the bottom- up theory of the revolutionary festival with the top-down control over the festival. These conflicting desires came from authorities keen to cement their power in the new order, under a constitutional monarchy, and keen to channel the memory of the taking of the Bastille into a consecration of their authority. The Fête de la Fédération thus represents a particular moment in the history of the revolutionary electrical metaphor. It was the height of the theory of animal electricity, which proposed that electricity circulated through animal bodies as a vital aether. Many thought electricity was physiologically necessary for liveliness and movement, even life itself. The theory confirmed suspicions some natural philosophers, mesmerists, and medico-electrical practitioners had harbored for the previous two decades. Animal electricity was also closely tied to atmospheric electricity. Human beings were imagined immersed in the electric fluid of the air, which affected everything from sickness and health to thought and feeling. When the revolution began, this temporally specific theory of animal electricity was taken up into political discourse, creating a novel meaning for electricity and a novel way to express the idealized function of the revolutionary festival. In 1790, revolutionary electricity was a proto- figurative language which still required explication to be comprehensible. As we will Bologna Institute of Arts and Sciences, De Bononiensi Scientiarum et Artium Instituto atque Academia Commentarii, in 1791. 29 see in chapters two and three, electrification developed as a metaphor as the revolution radicalized, eventually becoming an expression of revolutionary wars of liberation, of republican missionizing, and the threat of anti-slavery uprising in Saint Domingue. This chapter focuses on inchoate revolutionary électrisation at the moment of the 1790 July 14th anniversary. From a reconstruction of several pertinent aspects of eighteenth- century revolutionary science, we can answer the question: what did revolutionary électrisation mean at the moment when it was born as a revolutionary metaphor? When we imagine electricity, we might think of pylons, lightbulbs, and generators. What did someone in Paris in 1790 imagined when they used the word électrisation? Without an investigation of the contemporary scientific meaning of electricity, the idea of revolutionary electrification remains illegible to modern readers. The first part of this chapter investigates the natural philosophical context in which vital, atmospheric electricity was imagined. Through this investigation, I reconstruct how Poyet might have come across electricity prior to his use of the term in his proposal for the 1790 Fête de la Fédération. The last section of this chapter situates Poyet’s électrisation in the political context of the early French Revolution and the revolutionary festival. I argue that the purported political radicalism of electricity in the late eighteenth century is undercut by its rhetorical use at this crucial juncture of the revolution. For Poyet, the manipulability of electricity, the possibility of its deployment by a skilled operator of the Leyden jar or the lightning rod, for instance, coupled with its vogueish therapeutic uses and the nascent theory of animal electricity, made it a ready expression of the kind of top-down emotional transformation that appealed to the authorities in charge of the 1790 Paris Fête de la Fédération. Thus, while electricity may have been 30 associated with liberatory, radical politics in a broader sense, political electricity in the context of the early revolution was more concerned with order and authority than with liberty or popular sovereignty. In the context of the early French revolutionary moment, electricity, despite its radical associations, in fact indicated new possibilities for authority, for control, and for order. Poyet’s électrisation This is how every soul, moved, carried by an electrification [électrisation] against which the most perverse men can hardly defend themselves, brings back those profound memories that makes the exercise of duties—more precious than the enjoyment of rights—less arduous. This is how, at the great, touching reunion of 14 July 1790, thousands of citizens hurrying from every corner of the empire displayed only one sentiment, that of common love of country and of liberty.4 Bernard Poyet, 1792. When in the spring of 1790 he wrote that the distinguishing feature of a public festival was “that the sentiment of each becomes the sentiment of all by a kind of electrification,” Bernard Poyet was on a rhetorical cutting edge. Assuming Poyet himself furnished the word, how did he come by this language? In the following section, I investigate Poyet’s background, the rhetoric and framing of his other architectural 4 Bernard Poyet, Projet de Cirque National et de Fêtes annuelles, proposé par le sieur Poyet, Architecte de la Ville de Paris (Paris: De l’imprimerie de Migneret, 1792), 7-8. 31 proposals, the forms his pre-revolutionary encounters with electricity are likely to have taken, the contemporary natural-philosophical conception of electricity, and the political stakes of the 1790 festival. Poyet was not an architect of strong political convictions. But his changeable politics, as evidenced in his free adaptation of his proposed structures to correspond to prevailing political winds, makes him an ideal mirror for what électrisation signified in the broader political culture. In Poyet’s proposals, we see electricity leveraged in an eighteenth-century version of a sales pitch to the powers-that- be. Bernard Poyet was born in 1742 in Dijon and died in 1824 in Paris. As a young student of Charles de Wailly, he won second place in the prestigious prix de l’architecture (now known as the prix de Rome) in 1768 and traveled to Italy, a trip which had a profound influence on him, judging from the Roman architectural forms— columns, amphitheaters, and circuses—that loom large in his proposals from the 1770s until the end of his life. His best-known project is the colonnade of the Palais Bourbon, which now houses the Assemblée Nationale. The Bibliothèque Nationale, meanwhile, conserves Poyet’s printed proposals from the 56 years between Poyet’s trip to Rome and his death at the age of 82, plans for circuses, memorial columns, hospitals, and bridges, the majority of which were never built. Across decades of proposals, the political framings Poyet employs shift dramatically while the proposed structures themselves change little. Poyet has pet projects, architectural fixations, and habitual ways of thinking about people in space, of movement of air and sound, of aesthetic effects on crowds, audiences, and other large groups of people. These are a constant across the decades. Poyet lifts language directly from one proposal to another, plugging 32 identical wording into diametrically opposed political frameworks. The effect is striking. The structures themselves appear timeless and unchanging, not in spite but because of how easily they are framed and re-framed, toggling from revolutionary, to Napoleonic, to monarchical signification. In 1806, for example, Poyet proposed a 100-meter column situated by Pont Neuf at the western tip of the Ile de la Cité, to serve as a monument to the glory of Napoleon. Describing “my column,” Poyet wrote, “its height will give it the advantage of launching from its capital fireworks of a livelier effect than those which they launch from Saint Agnes in Rome. And,” he continued, “with the help of the openwork shields, one will be able to illuminate it all around in an instant.”5 Ten years later, Poyet proposed another column, 300 feet tall, on Montmartre, similar in every way to the one imagined for Napoleon—except that Napoleon was no longer in power. Instead the column would celebrate the return of Louis XVIII. “The statue of Saint Louis,” wrote Poyet, “would crown this column, the height of which would give it the advantage of launching from its capital, without danger to the public, fireworks of a richer effect than those which they launch from Saint Agnes in Rome.” He continued: “And, with the help of the openwork of the circular gallery, one will be able to illuminate it all around in an instant, during public festivities.”6 The images and tropes are nearly identical, the slight rhetorical restructuring and an exchange of adjectives—richer for livelier—make the similarity even starker. Both accounts end rapturously with descriptions of “this column of fire” (in 1816), “this fiery column, like a meteor” the reflection of its light reflected 5 Bernard Poyet, Prospectus du monument à élever par sous-scription, à la gloire de Napoleon-le- Grand (Paris, 1806), 3. 6 Bernard Poyet, Projet de Monument, présenté aux Deux Chambres (1816), 2. 33 in the river (in 1806). The effect on the people would be “unique, ravishing” (1806), or “marvelous” (1816).7 Why are we interested in Poyet’s recycled images? Because festive “electrification” is one of them. The word électrisation appears just twice in Poyet’s proposals, once in 1790, and again in 1792. Both times it appears with reference to the memory— a year old in 1790, three years old in 1792—of the taking of the Bastille. It is a flash in the pan in terms of Poyet’s (or again perhaps a secretary’s) rhetorical habits, appearing only within this two-year window. Électrisation is tied specifically to the Bastille, the federation, and the 14 July anniversary, and in decades of proposals which are otherwise highly repetitive, appears only in this context. Like Napoleon’s and Louis XVIII’s column, électrisation in 1790 and in 1792 have much in common. In both, électrisation has interior effects, on “sentiment” in 1790 and on “soul” in 1792. In both cases, it translates individual interiority to collective, shared interiority. Thus, by électrisation the sentiment of each becomes the sentiment of all (in 1790), and by électrisation each soul is “moved, carried” in the same direction (in 1792). Then there is the striking repeated image of “perverse men,” whose resistance electricity handily overcomes in both cases. The idea of electrical force against which no one can defend themselves is the most closely preserved from 1790 to 1792. These, then, are common elements—interiority, collective effect, and the overcoming of perverse resistance. What scientific conceptualization of electricity corresponds to such a function? To answer this question requires a precise historical reconstruction: in what 7 Poyet, Projet du monument à élever (1806), 3; Poyet, Projet du Monument présenté aux Deux Chambres (1816), 2. 34 form would Poyet have encountered électrisation in the pre-revolutionary world that would inform his use of the idea in his proposal? Electricity in late-eighteenth-century France The electricity Poyet would have encountered in the 1770s and 1780s Paris would have taken one of two forms: 1) showmanly electrification before a noble and bourgeois audience of amateurs, or 2) therapeutic electrification, by the late 1780s mostly practiced on the sick and the poor, often in hospitals.8 Poyet may well have encountered both. Much scholarship in the history of science over the past decades has emphasized how epistemologically important spectacle, entertainment, and an enlightened variety of wonder were within late-eighteenth-century scientific culture. Electrical shows are prime examples of this phenomenon, and there is no doubt that the emerging science of electricity reached a certain segment of the public by this means.9 The simultaneous edification and entertainment of the electrical demonstration would have found an echo in the revolutionary festival. There is also much evidence for electricity as primarily a medical technology in the popular imagination of late eighteenth-century France. François Zanetti writes that “by 1780, virtually every Parisian would have heard of the use of electricity to cure 8 For this argument on the transformation of medical electricity over the 1770s and 1780s in Paris, see François Zanetti, “Curing with Machines: Medical Electricity in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 54, No. (July 2013): 503-30. See also François Zanetti, L'Électricité médicale dans la France des Lumières (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2017). 9 See especially Patricia Fara, An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Iwan Rhys Morus shows that theatricality and exhibitionism continued to characterize electrical scientific experimentation in the early nineteenth century, culminating, he argues, with the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 35 nervous disorders such as paralysis.” Practitioners had received government sanction to advertise their techniques in the Journal de Paris.10 Christine Blondel writes of a strong French tradition of medical electrification revived in the 1780s and points out that Luigi Galvani took the term “animal electricity” from one of its French expositors, Abbé Pierre Bertholon.11 Sigaud de la Fond, an early medical practitioner, based his practice on the theory that “electricity is universally spread and distributed through all bodies.”12 This electricity had a salutary, life-giving function within the human body. Therefore, Sigaud reasoned, “electricity could be advantageously applied to the animal economy, especially in circumstances where it was a question of re-establishing feeling and movement in parts that lack it.”13 Others like Abbé Sans, a doctor at the University of Perpignan, Bertholon, and Jallabert in Geneva likewise performed electrical medicine in cases of paralysis and loss of feeling. Abbé Sans published the notes of the cures he had affected, often making note of the direction the wind was blowing at each session.14 10 Zanetti, “Curing with machines,” 514. 11 Christine Blondel, “Animal Electricity in Paris: From its initial support to its discredit and eventual rehabilitation,” in Marco Bresadola and Giuliano Pancadi, eds., Luigi Galvani International Workshop: Proceedings (Bologna: CIS, Dipartimento di Filosofia, Universita di Bologna, 1999), 199. 12 Joseph-Aignan Sigaud de la Fond, Précis historique et experimental des phénomènes électriques, depuis l’origine de cette découverte jusqu’a ce jour. 2nd edition (Paris: Rue et Hotel Serpent, 1785), 245. 13 Joseph-Aignan Sigaud de la Fond, Traité de l'électricité. Dans lequel on expose, & on démontre par expérience, toutes les découvertes électriques, faites jusqu'àu ce jour, pour servir de suite aux Leçons de Physique du même Auteur (Paris: Chez des Ventes de la Doué, 1771), 3. 14 Abbé Sans, Guérison de la paralysie par l’électricité (Paris: Cailleau 1772). 36 Fig. 3. An image taken from Abbé Sans’s Guérison de la paralysie par l’électricité (1772), showing the paralyzed state of a patient’s hand. 37 Fig 4. Pages 34 and 35 in Abbé Sans’s Guérison de la paralysie par l’électricité (1772), with notes on the direction of the wind and barometric readings along the margins. Sans details how, after electrification for an hour and a half every day, the “sick” arm regained movement after the treatment on some days, while other days it stayed the same. Sigaud described early resistance to medical electricity, being unable to find a willing patient until the mid 1750s, when he first established himself as an “electrifying Physician.”15 But by the 1780s, business was booming. In the epilogue to Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics, J. L. Heilbron tracks the 15 Sigaud de la Fond, Traité de l'électricité, 10. 38 rise in frequency of articles categorized as “Medical Electricity” by the end of the century, surpassing those he categorizes as “Traditional Electricity.” Between 1789 and 1797, there were seven times as many articles on medical electricity as there were on traditional electricity, i.e., what would today be classed as physics. Thus, Heilbron writes, “a major shift of interest occurred in the late 1780s and early 1790s in favor of animal and medical electricity, and electrochemistry.”16 Multiple theories of animal electricity coincided with this medico-electrical vogue, all of them based on a general theory that the human body was naturally electrical.17 At the same time, atmospheric electricity was subject to great interest in connection, not only with natural disasters like earthquakes, according to Bertholon, but also to new miasma theories which connected air composition to health. This connection between electro-medicine and atmospheric science led to political efforts at reform in hospital and prison design.18 It is possible that Poyet had seen electrical demonstrations aimed at an enlightened public; but it is perhaps even more likely that he had encountered electricity of a medical kind in the years leading up to the revolution. In 1785, Poyet released a proposal to replace Hôtel-Dieu, a Parisian hospital well known to be overcrowded, with a massive new circular building of his own design. Parisian hospitals were increasingly the theaters of therapeutic electrification in the 1780s and 1790s and served as the sites 16 J.L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999), 490. 17 Walter Bernardi argues that there was not one galvanism but three to five distinct theories of animal electricity in late-eighteenth-century Italy. See Bernardi, “La controverse sur l'électricité animale dans l’Italie du XVIIIe siècle: Galvani, Volta et...d’autres,” Revue d’histoire des sciences, tome 54, no. 1 (2001): 53-70. See also Marco Bresadola, “Early Galvanism as technique and medical practice,” in Paola Bertucci and Giuliano Pancaldi, eds., Electric Bodies. Episodes in the History of Medical Electricity (Bologna: CIS, Dipartimento di Filosofia, 2001): 157-79. 18 Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science 21, No. 1 (1 March 1983): 1-43. 39 of government-sponsored trials of electrotherapy. Poyet’s encounter with electrification may well have taken place in this specific context: practiced on the poor who ended up in the dreadful hospital conditions Poyet promised to alleviate. There they were conscripted as experimental populations by veteran electro-medical practitioners like Mauduyt de la Varenne, who over the course of the decade shifted his practice from his own private quarters to a hospital in Saint-Denis. By the 1780s, writes Zanetti, “collective electrical treatments were only used for the poor in hospitals or charitable institutions and were primarily conceived of as knowledge-gathering technologies.”19 The hospitalization of electro-medicine only strengthened the relationship between experimental electrical therapies and the French government. Electro-medical practitioner Masars de Cazeles paints a picture of mutually reinforcing governmental sponsorship. The Royal Society of Medicine had embraced Mauduyt de la Varenne’s description of “the many effects of this new agent,” and the government itself had ordered the publication of his work on electrical medicine. This, wrote Cazeles, “leaves no doubt that this phenomenon, which has commanded such interest and curiosity in experimental medicine, has the right to be included in the arts of healing.”20 It was with the sanction of the government and the royal academy that electrotherapy secured legitimacy as a healing technique, despite initial resistance. A committee from the Académie Royale des Sciences—including Lavoisier, Laplace, Coulomb, and Condorcet—rejected Poyet’s proposal in November 1786. 19 Zanetti, “Curing with Machines,” 515. 20 Masars de Cazeles, Mémoire sur l’électricité médicale, et histoire du traitement de vingt malades traités, et la plupart guéris par l'Électricité (Paris: Chez Mequignon; Toulouse: Chez Dupleix, Chez Sacarau & Moulas, Chez Laporte, 1780), 7-8. 40 Though a great improvement over the current Hôtel-Dieu, “the most uncomfortable and the least sanitary of all hospitals,” Poyet’s circular hospital, they wrote, “is too big and has the drawback of gathering too many sick people in the same place.”21 The verdict of the academy highlights several of Poyet’s preoccupations: great gatherings of people in one place, the circulation of the air, and circular buildings. The amphitheater imagined for 14 July shared with the Hôtel-Dieu project all these features. What Poyet proposed was an enormous circular building situated on the Champ de Mars, capable of accommodating “350,000, not counting the National Guards and the troupes de ligne” who would be present for the civil sermon. Concerns over order and surveillance run through Poyet’s proposal: In a festival of this kind, the most important thing is to gather the greatest number of people together, because there every spectator will become an actor in the most august scene; to avoid disorder and indecency, for silence and respectful contemplation, the spectators must be comfortably seated. It will also be necessary to construct an enclosure, easy to guard, for the maintenance of good order, which will never be observed by an enormous crowd unless precautions are taken.22 Electricity appears in the context of these preoccupations: that crowds be seated, silent, and respectful, avoiding any disorder. To this end, the festival had to be enclosed, 21 Extrait des registres de l’académie royale des sciences. Du 22 Novembre 1786. Rapport des Commissaires chargés, par l’Académie, de l’examen du Projet d’un nouvel Hôtel-Dieu (Paris: De l’Imprimerie Royale, 1786), 127. 22 Poyet, Idées générales présentées…sur le projet de la Fête de 14 juillet, 10. 41 indoors, so that the circulation of the electrical aether might bring about an unanimity of sentiments among the hundreds of thousands of attendees. If électrisation occurred to Poyet in connection with the Hôtel-Dieu project, this would suggest several things about its context: that the electricity in question was therapeutic, that it was administered collectively, and that it occurred indoors, in an environment designed to bring large groups of people to order. In this connection a parallel could be drawn between the experimental population of the hospital which would have been exclusively poor and sick, and the festival crowd gathered to commemorate the storming of the Bastille. Electrisation is thus not as we might assume a free-floating associative metaphor but should be understood with reference to the kind of controlled scientific process that would have taken place in the hospital trials of the 1780s. Medical electricity was one form in which Poyet might have encountered électrisation in the decades before the revolution, and the likelihood of this encounter is increased by the fact of his Hôtel Dieu project. But as a member of an educated class of Parisians, he was likely to have witnessed électrisation in the form of a scientific demonstration. Over the course of the eighteenth century, a repertory was developed to show the flashier properties of the mysterious electrical fluid—attraction, repulsion, emitting of light, and delivering shocks—to best advantage. These became so much a part of society that Rousseau’s “noble savage” rejected them: “a savage does not turn around to go see the workings of most beautiful machine, or all the wonders of 42 electricity,” Rousseau wrote in his educational tract Émile.23 Electrical prodigies abounded in the eighteenth century. Natural philosophers developed a repertoire of experiments to show off its properties. Stephen Grey was the first to systematically experiment with electricity and the first to use a human being (other than himself) as a tool for showmanly electrical display. In his “flying boy” demonstration of 1729, a young orphan from Charter House in London, where Grey lived, was recruited to be electrified. The boy was laid across a wooden swing suspended by silk ribbons. With a charged glass tube, Grey communicated the electrical fluid to him without ever touching the static to his body, a phenomenon we would now call electrical induction. The audience could see that electricity could flow through some materials (the boy), but not others (the silk). Gold leaf and feathers placed below the boy flew to his hand.24 23 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile ou de l’éducation, in Œuvres complètes de J. J. Rousseau, Vol. 5 (Paris: J. Bry Ainé, 1856), 152. 24 Stephen Grey, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 37 (1731-32). 43 Fig. 5. An illustration of Stephen Grey’s “flying boy” experiment, from Abbé Nollet’s Essai sur l’électricité des corps (1749). 44 Over the next century, the body became the primary tool for electrical experimentation. Of particular importance was the body of the audience member, whose senses and pain bore direct witness to the power of electricity and proved the reality of its effects. James Delbourgo describes how the electrical body underwent several reconceptualizations: in the 1740s an “opaque tool for displaying electrical effects,” by the 1780s the body was “transparently, inherently electrical.” Electrical knowledge was made using the body as an important scientific instrument. By century’s end, electricity was seen as part and parcel of bodies themselves.25 One of the most popular electrical demonstrations performed in late-eighteenth-century France, and the demonstration Poyet was most likely to have experienced or witnessed, was pioneered by Abbé Jean- Antoine Nollet around mid-century, shortly after the invention of the Leyden Jar. Nollet was the most prominent and established figure in electrical natural philosophy in France during the eighteenth century, having succeeded to the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1742. “In those days of the great vogue of electrical experiments” Grimm quipped in his Correspondance Litteraire of May 1770, “the abbé Nollet was a very popular man, and all the ladies wanted to be electrified by him.”26 Nollet’s electrical demonstrations played no small role in his success. He constructed his own electrical instruments, and personally traveled to London to meet Desaguliers and Musschenbroek in Leyden, before the latter had invented the Leyden Jar. “Thunder in the hands of nature,” Nollet wrote, “is like Electricity in our hands; the marvels we now produce at will are but small 25 James Delbourgo, “Electricity, Experiment, and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century North America,” 13-14. 26 Frederich Melchior, baron von Grimm, Correspondances Litteraires (May 15, 1770), 427. 45 imitations of the grand effects that scare us. All depends on the same mechanism.”27 Understanding that drama and bodily experience were crucial ingredients in eighteenth century science, “electricians” did not shy away from the aesthetic power or sublimity of electricity, and they made much of the awesome implications of mankind’s new ability to manipulate electricity at will. Nollet thought electricity was composed of a universal fluid, flowing in opposite directions, which he called effluence and affluence. Introducing a new edition of Recherches sur les causes particulières des phénoménes électriques, Nollet doubled down on what he had proposed, in both the address he had made at the public opening of the Académie des Sciences in 1745, and the electrical treatise he had published the following year. “As the general cause of electrical Phenomena,” Nollet proposed “the simultaneous effluence and affluence of a very subtle fluid substance, universally present.”28 This was a mechanical model, referred to as the “two-fluid” theory, a special pair of fluids that flowed in one direction and the other, together explaining how electricity appeared to work. 27 Jean-Antoine Nollet, Programme ou idée générale d’un cours de physique expérimentale (Paris, 1738), xviii. Quoted in Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle,” 12. 28 Jean-Antoine Nollet, Recherches sur les causes particulieres des phénoménes électriques, et sur les effets nuisibles ou avantageux qu’on peut en attendre. Nouvelle edition (Paris: Chez H. L. Guerin & L. F. Delatour, 1754), xi. 46 Fig. 6. An image from Abbé Nollet’s Recherches sur les causes particulieres des phénoménes, électriques (1754). The engraver has gone to great lengths to darken the backfround of these experiences, held indoors, so that electric fluid is visible. But Nollet’s mechanical interpretation could not explain the mystery of the Leyden Jar. Invented by accident in 1745 by von Kleist in Poland and almost at the same time by Musschenbroek in Leyden, the Leyden jar was born when an experimenter held the 47 bottom of a glass jar of water in which electricity had been collected with an electrostatic machine. He then touched the metal top of the jar and received a massive shock. The Leyden Jar enabled an experimenter to store and discharge electricity at will. This was a radical innovation. According to Nollet’s mechanistic theory, the electrical fluid collected in the glass should have seeped out through contact with the experimenter’s hand. It was clear that electricity had effects on the other side of the glass, so Nollet had concluded that the subtle electrical fluid actually moved through it. Benjamin Franklin, however, proposed an alternate explanation, involving one rather than two fluids. In the case of the Leyden jar, an excess of electricity collected in the water (positively charged), and caused a corresponding lack, forming a negatively charged electrical “atmosphere” on the outer surface of the glass. As critics pointed out, he was less clear on how exactly this happened. The “plus” and “minus” states of this singular electrical fluid on either side of the impermeable glass wanted to balance themselves out. When the experimenter connected them with his hands, the Leyden jar suddenly had a way to rectify its electrical imbalance, and it did so, delivering a powerful shock. 48 Fig. 7. A Leyden Jar made from a wine bottle, with gold leaf in the bottom. This particular jar supposedly belonged to Galvani.29 The demonstration Poyet likely saw built upon this capacity of the Leyden jar to deliver a powerful shock through any conducting material when positive inside and negative outside of the jar were connected. The most widespread electrical demonstration in the eighteenth-century repertoire involved passing a shock from a charged Leyden jar through a chain of people holding hands. The first and last person in the chain would complete a circuit by touching differently charged parts of the 29 Image courtesy of the Wellcome trust, accessed at the Science Museum Group website. 49 apparatus. Sigaud de la Fond described “making a chain composed of several persons who would hold each other by the hand to experience the shock.” The person on the one end “must touch the outer surface of the bottle,” while the last in the chain “touches the hook of the bottle.” The result: “At the same time, all the people who make up the chain feel the same impression, the same shock, the same commotion that one person feels when they do this experiment.”30 In the best-known instances of the demonstration, Nollet passed an electrical shock through 180 soldiers and 200 Carthusian monks for a royal audience. According to some reports, he later surpassed 600 people in one human chain.31 Sometimes the human chain failed. In 1785, Sigaud de la Fond set up the usual experiment; he charged his Leyden jar and arranged sixty people in a ring. But the shock stopped at the sixth person in line, a young man. The jar recharged, Sigaud retried the experiment with the same result. The orderly ring of sixty turned into an ad hoc tribunal. Pushing Sigaud aside, the crowd decided that the person in question was somehow constitutionally deficient, deprived naturally of “everything that constitutes the distinctive character of a man.”32 Sigaud reported that, despite his calm explanations, many convinced themselves that there must be a difference in susceptibility to electrification “between people mutilated by Art,” i.e. castrati, and those fully endowed. Sigaud describes his experiments to the contrary, as well as many more performances of this experiment, often composed of 60 people, demonstrating how widely and how 30 Joseph-Aignan Sigaud de la Fond, Précis historique et expérimental des phénomènes électriques (Paris: Rue et Hotel Serpent, 1785), 225. 31 Patricia Fara, An Entertainment for Angels, 56. 32 Sigaud de la Fond, Précis historique, 230-231. 50 frequently he performed it.33 Others like Sigaud also took this show on the road throughout France. It’s not inconceivable that, at some point, Poyet could have numbered among the participants. The mystery of the Leyden jar ultimately caused Nollet’s effluence and affluence to be replaced by Benjamin Franklin’s theory of positively and negatively charged atmospheres, analogous to a financial system of credit and debit. But even as the système Nollet was eclipsed, techniques of illustration like the electrified chain of people holding hands remained. It is quite possible that Poyet had been part of an electrified circle of the kind Nollet, Sigaud, and other electricians had been known for, and thus had felt the shock himself, as it passed instantaneously from hand to hand. Or if he did not directly experience it, Poyet and people in his milieu would likely have known of this kind of demonstration, what it looked like, what it involved, and what effects it produced. In either case, when they imagined a “kind of electrification” by which “the sentiment of each becomes the sentiment of all,” Poyet’s elite audience drew upon the pre- revolutionary cultural touchstone of the electrical human chain. Whether therapeutic or edifying, directly experienced, witnessed, or heard about, Poyet’s festival electricity was rooted in the specific forms in which electricity was widely encountered in the 1770s and 1780s in France. How did electrical theories relate to political theories? The analysis of “revolutionary electricity” requires a picture of what electricity was at the moment when it was taken up into revolutionary political discourse. And not just for “electricians,” as natural philosophers, wandering lecturers, and enthusiasts at work on electricity were called, but for an eighteenth-century person 33 Sigaud de la Fond, Précis historique, 232. 51 who simply knew the word and had an idea of what it meant. What would a hypothetical, educated person in France in 1788, say, have pictured when they heard the word “electricity”? What about electricity made it conceptually available as an expression of revolutionary energy? Animal electricity, medical electricity, and atmospheric electricity all formed the theoretically rich background upon which Poyet and others drew as they invented revolutionary electricity. All three were intimately connected, and in many cases interpreted as a single phenomenon. In the early eighteenth century, electricity could be thought of as “artificial” or “natural.” Artificial electricity could be generated manually and stored in a container known as a Leyden Jar. Natural electricity meant lightning or the electricity of living bodies. Franklin’s famous kite experiment around mid-century, in which he used lightning to charge a Leyden Jar, proved that “artificial” and “natural” electricity behaved in the same way, and were essentially the same substance. Meanwhile, medical electricity, the practice of gentle application of artificially generated electricity to treat various nervous ailments, developed into an elaborate and fashionable practice. Combining all of the elements of the ideal “audience-relation” of eighteenth-century science—the experimenter-controlled experience, the privileging of wonder, and dash of aesthetic sublimity—the electro-medical séance was perhaps the predominant form in which electrical natural philosophy was practiced, and as noted, was a likely model for Poyet’s imagining of the revolutionary festival.34 Medical electricity was distinct from animal electricity in that the former was a clinical practice of applying artificial electricity to patients, while the latter was a theory, based on 34 Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle,” 2. 52 experiment and conjecture, that animals and humans alike ran on electricity. But they were interconnected; few doctors who published their electrical experiments on patients held back from philosophizing about the relationship between electricity and the human body. Theories of animal electricity and medical electricity were powerfully brought together in the field of human anatomy. By the 1770s, anatomist Jacques-Fabien Gautier d’Agoty could describe an electrical version of the circulation of the blood, William Harvey’s famous discovery: Living and animated bodies are constantly electrified by the lungs, which are always in motion, and whose rest leads to death. The air brings electrical matter to the lungs, as this element [air] does to all other electricities, by stripping itself of the parts of fire which it contains. The arterial blood which comes from the lungs is the conductor of this electricity. The impulsion from the left ventricle of the heart carries it throughout the brain by the expansion of the arteries, where the electricity is retained as in the Leyden jar, and from there spreads to all the nerves.35 Anticipating Galvani’s comparison of muscles and nerves to a Leyden jar, Gautier d’Agoty produced a vivid version of blood circulation that was thoroughly electric, linking electricity to life itself. Drawn in from the air, electric matter, a subtle fluid, was stripped of its “fiery” part, and was taken to the brain by the arteries. There it accumulated as if in a Leyden jar, to be distributed through the system of nerves through 35 Jacques-Fabien Gautier d’Agoty, Exposition anatomique des organes des sens, jointe à la névrologie entière du corps humain, et conjectures sur l’électricité (Paris: Demonville, 1775), 9. 53 the body. As d’Agoty wrote, Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley were at work deconstructing the air and breaking it into its constituent parts. In a few years after d’Agoty’s anatomy, Lavoisier coined the word oxygen, “acid-former,” to describe Priestley’s “dephlogisticated air.” But for d’Agoty, fluid electricity was the key ingredient, harvested from the air by the lungs, brought to the nervous system via the arteries, and then disseminated to the rest of the body through the nerves. D’Agoty included lavishly detailed diagrams of these nerves and their connections to the brain. Fig. 8. Illustration of the brain and nerves, from Gautier d’Agoty’s Exposition anatomique (1775). 54 Fig. 9. Illustration of the nerves, carriers of refined electric fluid, in the upper half of the body, from Gautier d’Agoty’s Exposition Anatomique (1775). 55 All life was electrical, thus “the blood of the mother electrifies the fetus,” and animal life was “an electric ball that a physicist has set in motion, which motion is perpetuated in the generations of all species.”36 D’Agoty’s theory demonstrates the way anatomists gave electrical fluid a starring role in their description of how the human body and human life worked. D’Agoty jealously guarded his hypotheses on the cause of “the electric movement which makes us live.” In a letter appended to his Exposition anatomique, the anatomist accused the Comte de Tressan of stealing his electrical-lung theory and passing it off as the Count’s own work. As proof, d’Agoty cited the fact that “electricity applied to the nervous system” was nowhere to be found in the Comte’s addresses to the Académie des sciences of the 1740s and 50s, implying that the Comte had come across the idea after viewing d’Agoty’s work.37 Given the number of works in this vein around the time, however, for our purposes d’Agoty’s sleuthing seems to prove that notions of nervous electricity were being adopted relatively widely in the 1770s, such that the origin of those ideas were hard to trace. The Année littéraire of 1785 countered mesmerism with an electrical version of the body that sounded like d’Agoty’s. In living animals and humans, “the lungs are an electric machine, which, by their continual movement, separate air from fire; the latter insinuates itself in the blood and moves by this means to the brain, which distributes it, impels it and forms it into animal spirits, which circulate in the nerves [...].”38 A manuscript of the Comte de Tressan electrical treatise also speaks to this 36 Gautier d’Agoty, Exposition anatomique, 11; 16. 37 Jacques-Fabien Gautier d’Agoty, “Lettre au sujet de l’Électricité animale,” in Exposition anatomique, 44-45. 38 Année littéraire, I (1785), 279-280. Quoted in Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (New York: Schocken Books; Harvard University Press, 1968), 18. 56 change in his thinking. The original title read Essay on the subtle fluid known by the name of Electricity, and on different effects and phenomena which can be attributed to it. The second half of this title was crossed out and replaced with Electricity considered as universal agent.39 Proponents of animal electricity, until Galvani, did not spill a lot of ink trying to distinguish between the electricity in the body and the electricity in the atmosphere. This is evident in d’Agoty’s belief that the air was the source of the electricity circulating through the nerves. Just as Franklin had proved that lightning and the electric fluid in the Leyden Jar were one and the same, so too did anatomists, electro-physicians, and natural philosophers treat electricity in the air and electricity in the human body as identical and operating in connection with one another. Behind their insistence that fluid electricity was taken into human bodies from the air, was a theory that electricity operated everywhere, a universal fluid inside and outside the body. In the late 1770s, shortly after Mauduyt de la Varenne became a member of the Royal Society of Medicine, the king assigned him to an investigation of electricity and health, as part of the Society’s broader research on an etiology of illnesses according to meteorology, specifically atmospheric electricity.40 In 1780 Abbé Bertholon published a hefty tome entitled On the electricity of the human body. The body Bertholon described was electric in itself, but also immersed in 39 Louis-Elisabeth de La Vergne, Comte de Tressan, “Essay sur le fluid subtile conu sous le nom d'Électricité consideré comme agent universel” (manuscript, 1750-1765). This manuscript copy was privately auctioned for 10,400 euros in June 2020. Another manuscript held by the Bibliothèque national (Mss, Fr. 12280) conserves the first title. 40 Uri Zelbstein, “Mauduyt de la Varenne, un électrothérapeute au siècle des Lumières,” Bulletin d’histoire de l’électricité 4 (December 1984): 49-55; 50. 57 electrified air, which had serious effects on the functions of the body. “The electric fluid cannot be communicated, still less transmitted in greater or less quantity without influencing the living bodies which receive it,” he argued. “The human body, when the atmosphere is overloaded with electricity, is therefore immersed in electric fluid; it is then completely penetrated and surrounded by this fluid in the same way as when it is electrified by bath. This could not be the case if the electric fluid did not act through its properties and influence the animal economy.”41 Like a natural version of the electrico- medical “bath,” a popular electrical treatment at the time, living animal bodies swam constantly in electrical air, at varying levels of electrification. This had, Bertholon believed, a profound impact on the functions of those bodies. The next year, in his 1787 work On the Electricity of Meteors, Bertholon wrote that having demonstrated a “parallelism of corresponding effects,” he could not help but conclude “that there is a perfect identity between the electric fluid of the atmosphere and that which we generate with our machines.” There was even proof, he wrote, that lightning had performed electrical cures in human beings.42 Such theories linking atmospheric electricity to animal electricity were part of the context in which Poyet’s “kind of electrification” appeared. Indeed, around the same time, other commentators translated atmospheric electricity into a political metaphor. In August of 1790, the Mercure de France described the mass revolutionary process as an electrical tempest: “The multitude seizes 41 Pierre Bertholon, De l’électricité du corps humain: dans l’état de santé et de maladie; ouvrage couronne par l’Académie de Lyon; dans lequel on trait de l’électricité de l’atmosphere, de son influence & de ses effets sur l’économie animale [...] (Paris: Chez Croullbois; Lyon: Chez Bernuset, 1786), 34. 42 Pierre Bertholon, De l’électricité des méteores. Tome 1 (Paris, 1787), 88. 58 the clouds, it electrifies them, and creates a storm.”43 An electrical atmosphere like that of a storm, or say, a festival, by Bertholon’s logic, would have profound physiological impact on the living bodies immersed within it. Parallel to the development of vital fluid theories of electricity, another vital fluid theory developed which demonstrated that there was plenty of room for charlatanry at the intersection between eighteenth-century fluid theory, newfangled healing practices, and philosophical spectacle. This was the theory of “animal magnetism” developed by Franz-Anton Mesmer, who for six years set up shop in Paris, “mesmerizing” fashionable Parisian society in dramatic séances.44 Eventually mesmeric séances, in which participants fell into epileptic fits, trances, and somnambulist conditions, became too popular for the scientific establishment to ignore. In 1784, the king convened a royal commission to investigate mesmerist practice. Its members included Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, and Jean- Sylvain Bailly, astronomer and mayor of Paris early in the revolution. The commission concluded that Mesmer was a fraud; he was chased from Paris, while offshoot mesmerist circles took the practice underground. In his classic study of mesmerism, Robert Darnton detected a “current of radicalism” within these underground circles. For Darnton, Tim Fulford, and other scholars of mesmerism, the short-lived but influential movement epitomized the occult side of eighteenth-century science pre-revolution.45 43 Mercure de France, (August 7, 1790), 56. 44 For a more recent examination of the mesmerist movement and its politics, see Tim Fulford, “Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s,” Studies in Romanticism 43, no. 1 (2004): 57-78. 45 Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (New York: Schocken Books; Harvard University Press, 1968), 104. 59 For our purposes, the way both Mesmer and the Royal Commission leveraged electricity gives some insight into how electrical theories fed into more occult beliefs, and how they also helped scientific authorities police those beliefs. As electrical doctors reasoned that illness resulted from imbalance of electrical fluid in the body, so Mesmer reasoned that an imbalance of magnetic fluid in the body caused sickness. Rebalancing this fluid would thus cure said illness, and this was what was undertaken at his fashionable séances. Mesmer, defending his theory the royal commission, explained his theory in terms that could have been taken from a treatise on animal electricity. He began with Newton and Descartes: “There exists a universal fluid; it is perhaps better felt than described. Newton called it the etherial medium; Descartes the universal mover; the hermetic philosophers, the universal principle.” Mesmer then turned to what would prove the Achilles heel of mesmerism: “One cannot touch or smell, one cannot perceive this fluid: from this [it would seem as if] it has no existence! But is attraction, of which the effect is so constant, any better perceived, or the power of the magnet which is touched by the finger; or electricity of which use is made to avoid thunderbolts and even to bring about cures?” Was animal magnetism, Mesmer argued, really so different from animal electricity? Electricity, he continued, was “nothing but the universal fluid,” as it emerged from “the rubbing of bodies.”46 Mesmer tried to appeal to the legitimacy of animal electricity to shore up that of animal magnetism. 46 Anton Mesmer, “Theoretical-practical treatise on animal magnetism,” in The Reports of the Royal Commission of 1784 on Mesmer’s System of Animal Magnetism and other contemporary documents, ed. and trans. IML Donaldson (Edinburgh: Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 2014), 21. 60 But the commissioners were having none of this comparison. The animal magnetic fluid Mesmer described, they wrote, was “in no way luminous and visible as is electricity,” nor could it be felt or tasted. “If it exists in and around us,” wrote the commission, “it is thus in a manner that is absolutely insensible.”47 Mesmer had tried to hitch animal magnetism to better-established theories of electricity. But the Commission pointed to the obvious difference: electrical effects were observable and documented by countless experiments, while the only observable effect of mesmerist fluid was the collective hysteria of the seance. Electricity could be recruited by both positions. It could lean—toward the occult, through its status as an avatar of Newton’s universal fluid, or toward the scientific establishment, as it went about determining what proper science looked like. 47 “Report of the Commissioners charged by the King With the Examination of Animal Magnetism,” in The Reports of the Royal Commission of 1784 on Mesmer’s System of Animal Magnetism, ed. and trans. Donaldson, 44. 61 Fig. 10. An anonymous drawing entitled “Magnetism unveiled.” In this depiction, the Commission banishes Mesmer through the blinding light of their report, wielded by Benjamin Franklin on the left. A final element linking theories of electricity to political electricity has to do with the epistemological importance of analogy in within the world of eighteenth- century fluids of which electricity was a part. This importance can be demonstrated through a comparison of two innovations in electrical natural philosophy in the years just preceding the revolution. In 1785, Charles Coulomb proved that the electrical fluid, like gravity, followed an inverse square law in which force was inversely proportional to distance. In 1791, Luigi Galvani published De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu 62 Musculari Commentarius, which described a series of meticulous experiments on frogs in search of animal electricity. Though their immediate focuses and methodologies were quite different, Coulomb and Galvani had something in common: in both cases electrical science worked analogically. The theories of animal electricity and electricity that worked like gravity made sense only within the broader system of imponderable fluids by which the natural world was understood. Though their number varied, these fluids proliferated toward the century's end. Fire, magnetism, light, and radiant heat or caloric were usually among them. Electricity was typically understood as another such fluid, analogous to the others. The laws by which electricity operated, therefore, were potentially knowable via analogy to other such substances. J. L. Heilbron argues that the results achieved with Coulomb’s impossibly delicate torsion balance, expressed in suspiciously round numbers and through a notoriously difficult to replicate set of experiments, testify more to the expectation among French electricians that electricity would turn out to be analogous to gravity.48 Peter Heering confirms this idea, concluding, after meticulous reproduction of Coulomb’s experiments at the historical physics laboratory at the University of Oldenburg, that “Coulomb did not get the data he published in his memoir by measurement.”49 In fact, Heering argues, skepticism over Coulomb’s proof productively spurred nineteenth century physicists in their work on electricity and magnetism.50 48 Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries, xi. 49 Peter Heering, “On Coulomb’s Inverse Square Law,” American Journal of Physics 60 (1992): 991. 50 Peter Heering, “The Replication of the Torsion Balance Experiment: The Inverse Square Law and its Refutation by early 19th-Century German Physicists,” in Blondel and Dörries, eds. Restaging Coulomb (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1994), 47–66. 63 Coulomb’s torsion balance experiments on the inverse square law of the electrical fluid were less experimental proofs than a historical ones, which indicated that the analogy between electricity and gravity was suspected widely enough to need only the shakiest proof to become an accepted fact. As Simon Schaffer points out, a Newtonian framework in which experimental phenomena were supposed to evidence a deity at work in the world led to this system of analogies and identifications across the various “active powers.” Electricity’s identification with fire, phlogiston, light, and nervous fluid “formed part of a practice in which it was essential to connect powers with divine action and then produce them from matter.”51 In 1800, Volta worked within this methodology when he explained how the Voltaic pile worked through an analogy between electricity and caloric, an analogy he had evoked many times in his work through the 1780s and 90s.52 Understanding the system of imponderable fluids undergirding late-eighteenth- century natural philosophy and of the epistemological importance of analogy within this system is key to understanding what electricity meant when it entered French revolutionary political discourse. If Poyet’s électrisation is understood as more analogy than metaphor, and if analogy was an epistemologically privileged way of thinking about electricity, this brings political electricity closer to contemporary science. The theory of active matter strengthened and gave special purpose to analogical bridges between electricity and fire, heat, light, and gravity. New political languages of électricité and électrisation were thus grounded in a natural philosophy in which 51 Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle,” 4. 52 Giuliano Pancaldi, Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2003), 243-244. 64 analogous aethers were the source of action and movement. The structure of the material world, the laws by which its analogous aethers and material phenomena functioned, and the composition of its living beings had important implications for contemporary politics. What Poyet’s electrical language pinpoints is not so much a moment of transfer between two distinct discursive realms, but rather a moment of epistemological overlap. Within this area of overlap, by analogy, natural philosophical knowledge of how the electrical fluid functioned was tantamount to knowledge of how political electricity functioned. Returning to our examples, how does the context of a natural philosophical system of analogous aethers and fluids change how we understand the électrisation of the festivals of the early revolution? Therapeutic electricity and electricity in analogy to a panoply of other natural phenomena, even evidence of a kind of divine presence in the world, form the conceptual background against which Bernard Poyet’s curious new figure of speech must be read. Turning to the passage from the architect’s 1792 proposal, we can now read electricity as a Newtonian aether, working on analogy to radiant heat, light, and gravity: This is how every soul, moved, carried by an electrification [électrisation] against which the most perverse men can hardly defend themselves, brings back those profound memories that makes the exercise of duties—more precious than the enjoyment of rights—less arduous. This is how, at the great, touching reunion of 14 July 1790, thousands of citizens hurrying from every corner of the 65 empire displayed only one sentiment, that of common love of country and of liberty.53 As in 1790, électrisation homogenized sentiment, overcoming “perverse” resistance. The “exercise of duties,” though “arduous,” is made easier through électrisation, and through the return of memory it causes. Electrisation moves and carries the soul. On the one hand, we can think of this language of the movement of souls as metaphorical. But thinking in terms of mechanics and cognition rather than in terms of figurative language alone, Poyet’s electricity describes both the desired political meaning of the festival and the physical workings of collective sentiment. In other words, in the world of eighteenth-century natural philosophy, it was plausible that atmospheric electricity could affect political sentiment, because sentiment was literally electrical. The festival surroundings (especially the enormous arena Poyet hoped to build) would ideally be capable of generating and channeling the electrical sentiments of the assembled citizens. When Poyet described a “kind of electrification” happening at the Fête de la Fédération, therefore, there is a sense in which he meant this literally. Shock and Consensus 53 Poyet, Projet de Cirque National et de Fêtes annuelles, 7-8. 66 Fig. 11. Colored print, captioned “National Confederation on the Champs de Mars in Paris, July 14th, 1790.” The circular formation of the national guardsmen recalls the human chain of Abbé Nollet and Sigaud de la Fond’s Leyden jar demonstrations. The 1790 Fête de la Fédération in Paris culminated in a civic oath, to be taken at the very same moment everywhere across France. The festival drew so-called fédérés from every corner of the hexagon to the center, some making weeks-long journeys on foot. In Paris, a mass was held, a Te Deum played, and celebrants received at the ‘altar of the patrie’ on the Champ de Mars, after a long military procession, which included battalions of young children and old men. Proposals to include women confederates in the procession on the model of earlier provincial federative festivals were rejected. The festival culminated in what was meant to be a mise en scène of the unity of people, 67 National Assembly, and king, demonstrating a mutual commitment to the revolutionary project of national re-constitution and re-generation. Lafayette administered the oath to a reluctant king under stormy skies, in a wide amphitheater hastily constructed by the fédéres themselves when city contractors fell short. This festival consecrated the revolution’s foundational act of popular violence with an official stamp. Today the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille is celebrated officially with a military parade, but, in its first iteration, it took momentum from the many quasi-mythic, spontaneous federative festivals celebrated in provincial cities and villages from July 1789 into the spring of 1790, sometimes mixed with violence against the seigneurs who had owned land and extracted labor in the old regime. The Paris festival, however, did not suggest violence. It was also—unlike the provincial federations that had gone before—planned well in advance and orchestrated from above. In her study of French revolutionary festivals, Mona Ozouf writes that the issuing of a standard oath clinched the “conservative” character of the Paris festival: With this official oath, handed down throughout the kingdom by the municipality of Paris, which insisted that it be spoken “in concert and at the same moment by all the inhabitants and in every part of this empire,” the spirit of organization triumphed in the festival. Sometimes, indeed, the festival was seen as no more than an “oath taking”—in other words, as a return to order.54 54 Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 43. 68 In a sense, this hasty construction of the ampitheater by the fédérés, a reversal of the spontaneous demolition of the Bastille, was truer to the concept of the revolutionary festival than the federative pact.55 Order and organization over spontaneity, rainy skies, a bored and sleepy king: perhaps this combination explains the disappointment famously felt by Mirabeau and others attending the festival.56 For some attendees, however, the sensory effects of the festival made a powerful impression. One enthusiastic account attest to the striking effect the Te Deum had on the souls of all present. “Our hearts were squeezed, and our hair seemed to stand on end; the symbol or image of what we had experienced in 1789.” This Te Deum was conducted by a maestro who possessed “the intelligence, the precision, the force, the grace, the energy, the fire…above all that grand art of electrifying his company.”57 As Olivier Ritz notes, there is hardly an account of the fête that doesn’t make mention of the weather. In the gulf between “pre-established symbolism and lived reality,” Ritz argues, an interpretive space opened.58 Michelet, who writes on the spontaneous provincial federations in a state of literary ecstasy, writes of the Paris festival as if the moment of total national unity has passed, and uses it to foreshadow the divisive revolutionary events to come: 55 Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 49. 56 One festival-goer reported: “We were too small for the spectacle or the spectacle was too great for us. The due proportion between spectacle and spectators was broken.” Comte d’Escherny, Correspondance d’un habitant de Paris avec ses amis de Suisse et d’Angleterre sur les événements de 1789, 1790, et jusqu’au 4 avril 1791, Paris: Desenne, 1791. Quoted in Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 49. 57 Confédération nationale, du 14 Juillet 1790. Description fidèle de tout ce qui a précédé, accompagné & suivi cette auguste Cérémonie (Paris : Rue Haute-feuille, No. 5, 1790), 8-9. 58 Olivier Ritz, Les métaphores naturelles dans le débat sur la Révolution (Paris: Garnier, 2016), 26. Ritz argues that the gap between “pre-established symbolism and the lived reality of the festival opens up an interpretive space” for new metaphors of sun and rain. 69 Farewell to the period of expectation, aspiration, and desire, when everybody dreamed and longed for this day…Here it is at last! What do we desire more? Why all this uneasiness? …Alas! the experience of the world teaches us this sad fact…that union too often diminishes in unity.59 The official Parisian federation could only fall short of what it was meant to achieve— a sublime, simultaneous union of all hearts and minds, and the end of the revolution. In fact, a profound disunity of hearts and minds was already evident, and as we know the Revolution did not end there. Rousseau had directed whoever would try to instigate a true festival to “let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves,” with “nothing, if you please” as the festival’s object. “Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a square,” he wrote, “gather the people together there, and you will have a festival.” As to the audience, “make them actors themselves; do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others so that all will be better united.”60 Michelet echoed this Rousseauian vision of communion in his descriptions of the provincial festivals leading up to the Paris Fête de la Fédération: “no one was a mere spectator; all were actors, from the centenarian to the new-born infant; and the latter more so than any.”61 The designers of the Paris festival took this concept seriously, but they needed to have a way to orchestrate a spontaneous, 59 He continues, “The wish to unite was already the union of hearts, perhaps the very best unity.” Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution, trans. Charles Cocks, ed. Gordon Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 464. 60 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theater, trans. Allan Bloom (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1960),126. 61 Michelet, History of the French Revolution, 448. See also Jason Neidleman, “Rousseau and the Desire for Communion,” Eighteenth-century Studies 47, no. 1: 59, for the idea of Rousseau’s concept of festival communion. 70 regenerative festival from above. In the midst of these contradictory needs, electricity makes its entrance. In the same pamphlet in which he leaves the key action of the festival up to “a kind of electrification,” Bernard Poyet also wrote of plans to seat all 140,000 expected guests in chairs, the better to police them. The proposal focuses on a proposal to build a massive indoor arena for this purpose on the Champ de Mars. The passage we have been considering, in the context of the plan as a whole, is a rare theoretical musing. But situated within an otherwise dry and pragmatic proposal, the invocation of “a kind of electrification” does the work of expressing the crucial element: the miraculous action of federation. In many ways Poyet’s électrisation echoes the festival communion Rousseau describes. The idea of the “sentiment of each” becoming the “sentiment of all” echoes Rousseau’s “each sees and loves himself in the others.” Poyet and those who read his proposal were likely to have at some point stood in a circle with others, held hands, and felt the electrical shock, and when Poyet searched for a way to express the special function of the festival, he landed on a “kind of electrification.” Thus, electrical experiment and Rousseauian festival communion came together in a powerful analogy. How do we read the politics of électrisation in this context? In part this depends on the political meaning of the memory of the taking of the Bastille, and the use made of this foundational memory in subsequent attempts to turn the insurrectionary nature of the original event into something controlled enough to anchor a new order. The festival that could do this had to be both spontaneous and planned. It had to celebrate the popular coup of 14 July 1789 while foreclosing on the possibility of popular violence in 1790. Most importantly, as a precondition for everything else the Revolution might achieve, difference or “perversity” in sentiment had to be overcome, unanimity forged. 71 While the legislature made laws for the people, the festival, Ozouf suggests, made the people for the laws: “Men were individuals, in theory all identical, all equal, but solitary. It was now the task of the legislator to connect them, a task that all the utopias of the century took up with relish. The men of the revolution also took on the task of finding an efficacious form of association for beings whom they thought of as having returned to the isolation of nature.”62 The nation required regeneration, but also some power to counteract the forces of isolation, individuation, and disintegration.63 “The festival is therapeutic, a reconstruction, as in the utopias of the eighteenth century, of a social bond that has come undone.”64 If the revolutionary festival was therapeutic, the Fête de la Fédération was especially so. Here the task the festival planner took up was to take innumerable individuals, stripped to atoms with the destruction of estates and distinctions, and design a ceremony that would bind them together. A powerful reconstitutive therapy was required in order to recover a lost social bond, a mesmerist séance writ large, on the scale of the patrie itself. What better method of reconstruction than a natural philosophical force, a universal aether which coursed through the nerves of the animal bodies of each individual attendee, or as the marquis de Sade put it, “the only soul admitted by modern philosophers:” electricity?65 Keeping in mind the close conceptual relationship between medical therapy, healing, and electricity in the last decades of the eighteenth century, 62 Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 9. 63 For a thorough treatment of the threat of disintegration and the search for sources of social cohesion in modern France, see Kevin Duong, The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 64 Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 10. 65 Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, “Aline et Valcour,” in OEuvres, Tome 1, ed. Michel Delon, (Paris: Gallimard, 1990-98), 575. Quoted in de Castro, “Le fluide électrique chez Sade,” 562. 72 we can see how electricity might have suggested itself as a compelling encapsulation of this therapeutic function. Mesmerist séances, purporting to produce ecstatic, healing unity via an experimenter’s control over a universal fluid probably played a role in laying the groundwork for such a connection. The medical electric shock, applied to the body, had a violent and salutary effect, though its precise mechanism was a mystery. Likewise, in the planner’s imagination, the electric shock that propagated through the festival crowd might have the potency to heal and reorder a social body. If festive electricity was a kind of therapy, what disorder did it heal? Poyet contrasts the shared sentiment of the electrified festival with conditions “under the reign of despotism,” in which “men defied one another, having no common interest, hid themselves from one another, did not know one another, and gathered, so to speak, within their own families, the only rallying point…Despotic government…created that fatal egoism which separated and corrupted them.”66 Here a medical lens suggests that the language of “corruption” and “fatal egoism,” might apply to physical bodies and political bodies at once. The structure of the political body has real, potentially corrupting or “fatal” effects on the lives of the people living in it. The image is claustrophobic. The men of the old regime are hidden away in families, and their separation breeds corruption. Contrast this, Poyet suggests, with the instantaneous togetherness affected by the healthy électrisation of the festival. As Ronald Schechter has recently argued with respect to the idea of “terror” in the French Revolution, and as Miller argues in a chapter on lightning in her book A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary 66 Poyet, Idées générales…sur le projet de la Fête de 14 juillet, 5. 73 Imagination, the idea of a therapeutic destruction or a therapeutic terror informed the Jacobin narrative in 1793-4. Miller argues that the idea of the natural, necessary, regenerative shock of the lightning bolt justified the violence of the radical phase of the revolution.67 What did the idea of therapeutic électrisation justify? What did it illuminate and what did it obscure? Mary Fairclough argues that “electrical language rarely signals confidence in enlightenment or progress at this period [1740-1840]. Electrical imagery and ideas are not used to account for such phenomena but rather to signal mystery and opacity.”68 Poyet’s électrisation conveniently mystifies the exercise of top-down, bourgeois control at the center of the official, conservative commemoration of 1790. Tapping into what would have been shared cultural knowledge of both medical electricity, as practiced privately and on the poor in hospitals, and the edifying entertainment of itinerant electricians, festival électrisation calls to mind the controlled administration of a salutary electric shock to the body politic. In the case study at the center of this chapter, the conservative character of the Fête de la Fédération and the concerns of the architect complicate purportedly “radical” electricity. When Poyet invoked electricity in the context of federation, it was not as a metaphor, but as a metaphor in the making. Poyet’s electricity was quite literally an aethereal fluid, with mysterious power over body and mind. It ran through the bodies of 67 Ronald Schechter, A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789-1794 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 68 Mary Fairclough, Literature, Electricity, and Politics, 1740-1794 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 3. 74 human beings, through the vessels of the nerves, and through the fingertips, from one person to another. Within the parameters of the kind of analogical thinking which characterized natural philosophy at the time, it was reasonable to think of a real electricity at work in the atmosphere of Poyet’s amphitheater, an electricity borne of the physical assembly of so many electric bodies in one place. In the context of a festival which emphasized top-down order and consensus around a new sovereign power, électrisation occurred to Poyet, I argue, precisely because it offered a way to circumvent the individual will. Revolutionary électrisation tapped into the inexorable, natural forces of the body; “perversity” of mind irresistibly, instantaneously overcome, the sentiment of each becoming the sentiment of all, just as those holding hands when the Leyden jar was discharged all felt the same shock. 75 76 CHAPTER 2 “GREAT SHOCK OF CIVIL ELECTRICITY” WAR AND ELECTRICITY IN 1792-1793 ELECTRIC. Adj. This adjective, which before referred only to electrifiable bodies, is also used to express movements and tremors of the soul. (The electric fire, which sets the hearts of the Soldiers of liberty ablaze. In fighting for liberty, they say, they have fulfilled the duties of nature and reason.) TO ELECTRIFY. V. This verb is used in the same way as the adjective to express great movements of the soul and the tremors that they make others feel in animating the same fervor. (The news of the victories electrified all the hearts of the defenders of the country….The intrepid defenders of the country covered in honorable wounds need only to appear in public scenes to electrify them by their presence. Victory electrified the People. It was the necessity of mounting a defense that electrified the courage and the energy of the Roman People, multiplying its force a hundredfold, turning it into a Colossus.)1 The Nouveau Dictionnaire Français contenant les expressions de nouvelle Création du Peuple Français (Göttingen, 1795), composed at a remove from the French 1 Leonard Snetlage, Nouveau Dictionnaire Français contenant les expressions de nouvelle Création du Peuple Français. Ouvrage additionnel au Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française et a tout autre Vocabulaire. Par Leonard Snetlage Docteur en Droits en l’Université de Gottingue (Göttingen: Chez Jean Chretien Dieterich, 1795), 77. 77 border, north and east, deep in the patchwork of principalities, free cities, and territories of the Holy Roman Empire, made note of the appearance of a new electricity in the French language. We saw in the introduction how the definition of “electric” (électrique) separated the natural-philosophical meaning of electricity before the revolution from the expression that counted as a “new creation of the French people.” We have also seen how natural-philosophical electricity was, in the eighteenth century, a rather mysterious aethereal fluid with properties of attraction and repulsion, able to be stored in a Leyden jar from mid-century, and identified with lightning by Benjamin Franklin around the same time. Sometimes associated with Mesmerism, electricity was thought by Erasmus Darwin, Luigi Galvani, and many anatomists and medico-electrical practitioners to be a literal vital fluid powering human and animal bodies. In the 1780s, Galvani borrowed the idea of “animal electricity” from abbé Pierre Bertholon, a practicing physicien électrisant or “electrifying physician” since 1770. Through revolution, this electricity took on new meaning. As the dictionary attests, a novel expression appeared in the French language: an electricity that expressed the political stirrings of souls. It redefined the verb “electrify” (électriser) according to its communicability. To electrify now meant to “make others feel,” to animate one’s own fervor in them. While the definitions given by the Nouveau Dictionnaire refer to the electrification of souls in general, all the examples that follow frame the new electricity as a military phenomenon, one that maps a new relationship between the army and the people. In the first case, “electric” fire sets soldiers’ hearts ablaze; in the second, the direct objects of electrification are first the hearts of the defenders of the country, then 78 the public, upon seeing the wounds of those defenders, then the people, electrified by victory in battle, and finally the Roman people electrified by the necessity of defense and transfigured into a “Colossus”. Soldiers are the subjects and objects of the new electricity in the Nouveau Dictionnaire. Defense and victory are electrifying agents. That it is specifically soldiers’ defenders’ hearts that are electrified, and defenders’ wounds that then electrify the public, is not coincidental, but rather reveals a potent intersection between electricity in the late eighteenth century and the French revolutionary wars of the early 1790s. According to the Gottingen dictionary, the new electricity appeared on the scene in a martial aspect; the hearts and souls of soldiers in battle are electrified; and by electricity’s communicative function, electrification passes like a torch from the soldiers to the people (not, as we might expect, the other way around). In the dictionary, there is something electrifying about war; in each case, threat, defense, and victory are the ultimate sources of electricity. The view of revolutionary France from Göttingen was dominated by war and by soldiers, who, after all, were the most prominent, most numerous, and of course deadliest emissaries of revolution beyond French borders. France declared war on April 20, 1792, having issued an ultimatum to the electors of Trier and Mainz the previous fall, where troops were amassed, aided and abetted by the many wealthy émigrés who had fled France. Louis XVI issued another ultimatum to the Holy Roman Emperor in January 1792, who had threatened to go to war if France should follow up on their ultimatum to the Rhenish electors. In early February, Prussia entered a defensive alliance with the Holy Roman Empire. In March, the Emperor died, and was replaced by the young Francis II, who had yet to be elected when Louis XVI arrived at the 79 Legislative Assembly, surrounded by his ministers, to declare war. Days later, French troops marched into the Austrian Netherlands, and a war began that would last until Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. Though the fighting had stopped in 1795 and Prussia held the line of the Rhine, the old regime armies of the Holy Roman Empire and Prussia were quick to recognize themselves in a profoundly new kind of war. As Carl von Clausewitz put it, “Austria and Prussia tried to meet this with the diplomatic type of war,” soon discovering its fatal deficiency. “People at first expected to have to deal only with a seriously weakened French army; but in 1793 a force appeared that beggared all imagination. Suddenly war again became the business of the people—a people of thirty millions, all of whom considered themselves to be citizens.”2 This new war was “not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.”3 Clausewitz spoke from experience; he first saw action in 1793 at the age of thirteen. It was the early experience of French revolutionary war, according to historian Peter Paret, that set the future theorist on the path toward the argument that, in its true form, war was politics; that everything about war was, or ought to be, imbued with and conditioned by political impulse.4 Through the French Revolution, “war, first among the French and subsequently among their enemies, again became the concern of the people as a whole, took on an entirely different character, or rather closely approached its true character, its absolute perfection.”5 For Clausewitz the novel adversary of an entire people on the 2 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 591-592. 3 C. v. Clausewitz to C. v. Roeder, 22 December 1827, in Zwei Briefe des Generals von Clausewitz, special issue of the Militärwissenschaftliche Rundschau, 2 (March 1937), 6. Quoted in Peter Paret, “The Genesis of On War,” in Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 7. 4 Paret, “The Genesis of On War,” 6-7. 5 Clausewitz, On War, trans. Peter Paret, 592-593. 80 march characterized French revolutionary warfare, in particular after 1793 and unprecedented universal conscription. For Clausewitz, this quality “perfected” warfare; thus it is absolutely central to his concept of what war is in essence. Equally important was the physio-political language French revolutionaries invented to describe the kind of war they fought. In this chapter, I re-read the Clausewitzian identification of war as politics, conceived out of the experience of French revolutionary war, through the figure of electricity, which I find running through war rhetoric and conceptualization from the floor of successive French legislatures in the 1790s to observers in Britain, Austria, and Prussia, by 1793 all at war with revolutionary France. Electrical language at its intersection with war rhetoric yields, first, an important new dimension in our understanding of revolutionary languages of electricity. Second, electricity provides an illuminating index of what was conceptually novel about the new type of war. The French revolutionary wars and the subsequent Napoleonic wars represented, according to most accounts, a fundamental change in the nature of war. The period from the declaration of war in 1792 until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 is known to historiography as the first modern war and, more controversially, as the first “total” war, born in the crucible of the revolutionary crusade against the external representatives of the old regime. Electrical language, I argue, helps solve the problem of identifying the key conceptual transformation. It does so more precisely than either modifier— “modern” or “total”—allows. Thus, this chapter argues that the idea of electricity influenced how war was re-invented at the turn of the nineteenth century. Clausewitz subsequently drew upon this powerful electrical language of war to formulate his theory. 81 Electricity in the late eighteenth century was vitalist, biological, and politically ambivalent; able to stand for a leveling, equalizing politics as well as top-down coercion; shock, pain, danger, and death as well as therapy, equilibrium, and life. Electricity became a political metaphor, but at the same time it preserved an attachment to material reality, informed by contemporary natural-philosophical thinking of electricity as quite literally the aethereal matter of which thought, perhaps even life itself, was composed. What did it mean for sentimental, vitalistic electricity to become part of the vocabulary of war, at the moment when it erupted across the continent in a new form? I argue that because of its conceptual novelty, figures of electricity highlight those ingredients that distinguished pre-French-revolutionary war from post-French- revolutionary war for contemporaries. In the examples from the Nouveau Dictionnaire, electrical language articulated a new relationship between the army, war-making, and the now-sovereign people. It theorized the mass cognitive effects of military defense, danger, and victory on a population of soldiers and citizens. This chapter connects natural philosophy and metaphorics of power and energy to a new reading of the war fought by revolutionary France in the 1790s, which fed into the Napoleonic wars that dominated European geopolitics until 1815. These decades are widely seen as an important moment of inception in modern warfare. I focus on how a vitalist political vocabulary of electrification lent key concepts to the conceptual reinvention of war in revolutionary France. Transformed in new contexts, war-making was couched in electrical metaphor by its proponents. By framing war as “electrification,” Brissot and other war advocates brought together concepts that had not been brought together before, creating a wholly new idea at the intersection. Electrical 82 war rhetoric is found throughout the parliamentary archives from the revolutionary period, expressing everything from the energy soldiers and citizens required to defeat the enemy, to the mechanism of waging revolutionary war, to the justifications for declaring war. Everywhere, electricity provided compelling, exciting rhetorical images; coupled with revolution, itself a naturalistic metaphor, electricity disguised war’s violence and its artificial, man-made nature. The martial electricity created at this rhetorical crossroads not only expressed the novelty of French revolutionary war making but shaped it. I begin with a historiographical overview introducing a longstanding argument among scholars over whether the French Revolution led to a revolution in war. I then turn to the figure of electricity in the context of revolutionary war, analyzing examples of electrical military rhetoric between 1790 and 1794. I find that, initially, military electrification followed familiar, old-regime military hierarchies, and reflected inspiration and energy passing from commander to soldier. With the 1792 declaration of war and the reconfiguration of the French army, however, the power of martial electrification passed to the Legislative Assembly, and then to the Convention. Electricity no longer followed military hierarchy but rather flowed from the sovereign power of an elected legislature. It was at this moment that martial electricity began to refer to expansive notions of revolutionary France’s duty vis-à-vis the rest of the world, its new, liberatory mission imagined in the form of an enormous electric “shock.” I look at Jacques-Pierre Brissot’s electrical language as he advocated a declaration of war on Britain in 1793, then electrification and the levée en masse of August 1793. Finally, I return to Clausewitz to analyze the electrical resonances in his descriptions of war in 83 terms of “discharge”, “shock”, and “energy”. These terms he uses alongside other metaphors drawn from physical sciences, most famously, “friction.” Ultimately, I argue that by conceptualizing French revolutionary warmaking through figures of electricity and “shock,” revolutionaries made lasting changes to the theory of modern war— changes which we find reflected in Clausewitz’s highly influential description of war in its ideal form. The First Total War? Historians and political theorists have generally accorded the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars a prominent role in the development of modern warfare. Even those historians who downplay the magnitude of the “revolution in war” admit that, in the words of historian Roger Chickering, “it would be idle to argue that no fundamental change took place in European warfare in the 1790s.”6 But scholarly opinion on what the crucial transformation was spans a broad spectrum. There is disagreement about the relationship between political revolution and revolution in warfare: “Revolutionary warfare was not revolutionary,” T. C. W. Blanning put it bluntly in a 1996 book on the French revolutionary wars. Peter Paret identifies a long transformation in warfare beginning decades before 1789, arguing that, “the French Revolution coincided with a revolution in war that had been under way through the last decades of the monarchy. Soon the two meshed.”7 On the other side of the spectrum, 6 Roger Chickering, “Introduction: A Tale of Two Tales: Grand Narratives of War in the Age of Revolution,” in Chickering, Roger and Stig Förster, eds. War in an Age of Revolution, 1775-1815 (Washington, D.C.: The German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2010), 10. 7 T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars 1787-1802 (London, New York, Sydney, Aukland: Arnold, 1996; Peter Paret, “Napoleon and the Revolution in War,” in Makers of Modern 84 MacGregor Knox interprets revolution and revolutionary war as co-constitutive, both fully a break with the past: “The military revolution that emerged in and from the Revolution’s wars was a political-ideological revolution that remade warfare from top to bottom, from strategy, to operations and logistics, to tactics.” “The Revolution,” he writes “had transformed war; war also transformed the Revolution.”8 In what Roger Chickering critically calls a “grand narrative” of military history, the two decades of war beginning in 1792 and ending in 1815 have been represented as the “first total war” by David Bell among others. As Russel Weigley wrote in 1991, the French levée en masse of August 1793 forged “the thunderbolt of a new kind of war — the total war of nations pitting against each other all their resources and passion.”9 Bell argues, meanwhile, that the key transformation in war in the 1790s was the new view that war was outside the normal course of history, and therefore apocalyptic and extreme, but also romanticized as cleansing and sublime. The late eighteenth century, in his reading, gave rise to a kind of dialectical relationship between “the dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of total war,” which mutually reinforce each other and which together characterize modern thinking on war and peace.10 Echoing Clausewitz, Jean-Yves Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 124. 8 MacGregor Knox, “Mass Politics and nationalism as military revolution; The French Revolution and after” in MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray, eds. The dynamics of military revolution 1300-2050 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 58; 66. 9 Chickering, “Introduction,” in Chickering and Förster, eds. War in an Age of Revolution. 10 David Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007) 11-12; 3. 85 Guiomar categorizes total war as war that has fused with mass politics.11 And after 1815, “nobody,” writes MacGregor Knox, “could ‘disinvent’ mass politics or mass warfare.”12 With one side arguing for the inseparability of political revolution and revolution in war, and the other disassociating the two, a potential resolution might be found in an oblique approach to what David Bell calls the “culture of war.” Electricity, as the following sections will demonstrate, stood in part for war as a mechanism of political overhaul. Figurative electricity, then, can help us historicize the concept of war as politics, as well as bring into view its contemporary contours. Sidestepping the idea of the first “modern” war and the first “total” war (both concepts only available in retrospect), I argue that the French revolutionary war launched in 1792 was the first “electrical” war, i.e. the first time electricity was used as a metaphor for waging war. This designation allows us to illuminate the novelty of this war as historical actors thought of it. Electricity can be found throughout discussions of war on the floor of successive assemblies — the National Constituent Assembly in 1789, the Legislative Assembly beginning in October 1791 with the promulgation of the new constitution, and the National Convention after the overthrow of the king on August 10, 1792. The use of the term is all the more interesting because electricity was at this point not particularly useful to the army in a technical or literal sense, although as Mary Ashburn Miller writes, gunpowder was known as foudre, or lightning.13 Electricity in the eighteenth century did not power machinery or provide artificial light. It was thus pre- 11 Jean-Yves Guiomar, L’invention de la guerre totale: XVIIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Le Felin Kiron, 2004), 11-26; 300-305. 12 Knox, “Mass politics and nationalism as military revolution,” 72. 13 Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural history of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789-1794 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 94-103. 86 technological electricity that was taken up into the rhetoric of revolutionary war, an electricity that had more to do with living bodies and sentiment than with weapons. Before 1791, the language of military electricity testifies to the possibility of an un-revolutionized military electricity — an electricity that could stand for something closer to an old-regime esprit de corps than a revolutionary movement of soldiers’ hearts and souls. In the minds of aristocratic veteran officers, military electrification passed ideally from leader to troops. This kind of electricity was necessary for morale. “The soldier who is not electrified by his officer is even more discouraged,” wrote counter- revolutionary theorist Joseph de Maistre, who traced this discouragement from the lack of a king to follow into battle.14 Martial electrification respected military rank and hierarchy. No political bodies were involved; neither were regular troops ideologically electrified by concepts such as rights or liberty. Early examples show an electricity that follows army hierarchies inherited from the ancien régime. French officer Pierre-Joseph de Toulouse-Lautrec, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War argued in August 1790 that he new revolutionary army should have an elite, experienced corps (composed of men such as himself) “because their example electrifies the troops.”15 “His gaze electrifies his regiment,” reported a deputation from Saint Domingue the next month, singing the praises of Thomas-Antoine de Mauduit du Plessis, who had returned to the colony in July 1790 to lead troops in Port-au-Prince who would otherwise be tempted to desert.16 Electricity here moves from higher-up to lower-down in the ranking, a kind of 14 Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France. 2e édition. (London: 1797), 158. 15 Archives parlementaires, Tome 18, p. 142 (August 12, 1790). 16 Archives parlementaires, Tome 19, p. 329 (September 30, 1790). 87 disciplining of the rank and file. The ability to electrify the professional soldier is what is expected of a leader, a key ingredient for the proper functioning of the royal army. Perhaps this was especially important in Saint Domingue, where colonial society rested upon the extreme hierarchy between the enslaved and the free. By 1791, the aristocratic Toulouse-Lautrec had emigrated to Russia to serve in the army of Catherine the Great. Du Plessis, meanwhile, despite his purportedly electrifying gaze, had been killed by his own regiment in the revolution of the spring of 1791 in Saint Domingue. Around the same time, M. Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre took the floor of the assembly, arguing against the destruction of Louis XIV’s Hôtel des Invalides, attempting to invoke a historical electricity that obeyed old military hierarchies: “Recall, Messieurs, the truly French action of that grenadier who went to electrify his saber at the mausoleum of the Marechal de Saxe!”17 The Marechal de Saxe, the great professional general of the prior century, was a count from Saxony who served under essentially every European power at one time or another before ending his career in the French army. The example is telling. By framing this electrification ritual as a “truly French action,” Clermont-Tonnerre suggests that reverence for military rank over equality or even patriotism is “French,” since it is fidelity to a foreign general rather than to country that Clermont-Tonnerre views as praiseworthy here. With such evident sympathies for old hierarchies, it is little wonder that a few months after giving this speech, the aristocratic deputy would be arrested for support of Louis XVI, after the king’s flight to Varennes in June of 1791. Clermont-Tonnerre was released in 1792 only to be killed months later during the August 10th uprising. In each example, then, tracing 17 Archives parlementaires, Tome 24, p. 361 (March 24, 1791). 88 the fate of the aristocrats who spoke of electricity along the lines of military hierarchy leads to either emigration or to death through revolution. These examples are part of a broader story. The French army was going through an internal revolution of its own in 1789-1790. The royal army was not immune to the political changes of the society in which it was embedded. Soldiers were recast as citizen-soldiers. Insubordination and mutiny abounded. Troops rising against their higher-ups was an integral aspect of revolution itself. As the royalist Antoine de Rivarol put it, “The army’s defection was not one of the causes of the Revolution. It was the Revolution.”18 In an example that became a revolutionary rallying cry, the Swiss regiment of Châteauvieux, garrisoned alongside two French regiments in Nancy in August 1790, was inspired by one of the French regiments to arrest their own officers over mistreatment. The ensuing crackdown by the Swiss officers led to a simultaneous triple mutiny as each regiment, Swiss and French, rose up against their officers. The military revolution triggered a civilian uprising. It was only quelled when 4,500 regular troops, including German, Irish, and Liégois regiments, marched on Nancy.19 In the case of Châteauxvieux, an anti-hierarchical revolution within regiments inspired an uprising of the general public. Only armed intervention by new troops could reestablish military and civilian boundaries, broken by revolution. Efforts to nationalize the army had been ongoing since 1789. 1790 marked a year of federative festivals as well as a year of disintegration of the regular army, as 18 Quoted in Bell, The First Total War, 100. 19 Christopher J. Tozzi, Nationalizing France’s Army: Foreign, Black, and Jewish Troops in the French Military, 1715-1831 (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 58-9. 89 citizen-soldiers continued in the footsteps of the Châteauvieux regiment, demanding democratization in choosing officers and respect for citizens’ rights in treatment of soldiers. In 1791, the Legislative Assembly took steps toward nationalization. In March, enlistment became, for the first time, a contract between an individual and the state. For eight years, all men ages 18 to 40 could enlist, and all foreign regiments would wear the uniform of the French infantry and be subject to the same discipline.20 By May, a citizen writing to Marat’s L’Ami du people could describe the soldier of “today” “electrified by the signs of patriotism.”21 For the first time in June 1791, the National Guard, a bourgeois volunteer militia first organized for the protection of property in 1789, was sent to the border to prepare for possible military action alongside the regular army.22 While military electricity invoked by aristocratic veteran officers in 1790 operated very much along the grain of old-regime hierarchy, the reorganization of the army would lead to the birth of a military electrification of another, more revolutionary kind, the veterans themselves emigrated or met bloody ends, and as the French army changed shape. The amalgamation of regular army and National Guard over the course of 1791 meant that by 1792, when France went to war, most soldiers and national guardsmen had joined since the start of the revolution. Many had either volunteered or participated in the intra-army protests for rights of previous years.23 Thus, although initially electricity follows military hierarchy, by 1792, the army itself had been revolutionized; 20 Jean-Paul Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution: From Citizen-Soldiers to Instrument of Power trans. R. R. Palmer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 46-7. 21 Anonymous [“Un citoyen active de la section de Champs-Elisées”], in Jean-Paul Marat, L’Ami du Peuple, No. 457 (May 13, 1791) 4. 22 Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, 50. 23 Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, 63. 90 and military electricity took on wholly new meaning. “Great shock of Civil Electricity”: Declaring War on the Old Regime The decision to go to war in the spring of 1792 was both contentious and consequential. As David Bell points out, the National Constituent Assembly had in effect declared peace in 1790, renouncing foreign wars of conquest with an official decree. The ex-aristocrats of the old guard had dominated both sides of this debate.24 But by early 1792 much had changed. The king and his family had attempted to escape across the border into Austria in June 1791. A few months later, the Declaration of Pillnitz, in which the Austrian emperor Leopold II and the Prussian king Friedrich- Wilhelm III declared their support for Louis XVI against the Revolution, strengthened the idea that the king had sided with neighboring monarchies against the revolution. Lastly the Constituent Assembly became the Legislative Assembly. The transition stipulated that no deputy from the former could stay on in the latter. With credible fears of a traitorous king, and with a wholly new legislature, the debate that led to the declaration of war on Austria on April 20, 1792 was dominated by those who had been thought of as radicals in the two previous years. On the one hand, Condorcet, Brissot, the Girondins, including the Girondin advisors surrounding the king, and on the other, Robespierre, a lonely anti-war crusader among the Jacobins. At the crux of the issue was revolutionary France’s position vis-à-vis the world. The only major European country to have overthrown the old regime, France had world-historical responsibility toward the rest of “humanity”— a flexible, abstract entity composed (for the purposes 24 See Bell, “Declaring Peace, Declaring War,” in The First Total War. 91 of war-mongering) of the third estate of every European nation. Pro-war speeches pictured this humanity shrouded in darkness, trapped in metaphorical chains of tyranny, and bending under the yoke of old regime oppression. “Humanity” awaited its liberators. In this view, France had a great destiny to fulfill, and the liberatory mechanism was war. When war was framed in this way, it was often couched in figures of electrification and shock. Perhaps visions of electrification made a more compelling, vital argument for war than visions of death on the battlefield. Yet death and electrification stood in close proximity. In a letter dated February 6, 1792, a lieutenant colonel of the department of Var connected his own willingness to die to the great “shock” of war, which would invigorate the “machine” of the world. It was up to the French army to deliver this shock. Giving up his military pension of 95 livres, 17 sols, and 6 derniers (approximately 1,000 euros today), awarded to him in 1779, M. d’Héran explained that though the “modesty” of his fortune limited his financial contribution to the cause, I place no limit but death on my personal devotion to the defense of our sublime Constitution, for which the French burn to make their armies triumph, because it is reserved for them to give the great shock of civic electricity that must establish an equilibrium of happiness in the machine of the world.25 Here the lieutenant colonel sketches out in mechanistic terms the process by which the French will establish an équilibre de bonheur in the world. If the world is a machine, the action of the French armies is equivalent to the mechanical administration of a great 25 Archives parlementaires, Tome 38, p. 651 (February 9, 1792). 92 electrical shock. Channeling the eighteenth-century natural-philosophical understanding of the electrical shock after Franklin’s intervention, d’Héran imagines shock restoring an equilibrium. This implies a prior imbalance of charges, and the “shock” of war as the means to solve this imbalance. D’Héran explains his willingness to die defending the Constitution. But in the space of a phrase, death and defense become an outwardly propagating shock. Though it is up to the French army to administer this shock, its “electricity” is civic, and the Constitution is its source. In d’Héran’s pledge, the civil and the martial intertwine, just as death and rebalancing electrification intertwine. The electric shock stands in for a new equilibrating kind of war. That it finds expression in a veteran officer’s donation of his old-regime military pension to the national coffer signals the historical shift in the kind of warmaking for which M. d’Héran prepared, at the head of his battalion. As he explained it, the end goal of this war was abstract, mechanical, and sentimental all at once: the balancing out of happiness in the machine of the world, like so much electrical fluid returning to natural equilibrium due to the shock from a charged Leyden jar. In the months that followed Jean-Paul Marat, avid electrician before the revolution, and recently elected deputy to the National Convention updated the readers of the Journal de la République Française on the progress of the war. This Journal was the successor to Marat’s popular L’Ami du Peuple, releasing its first issue days after the beginning of the French Republic on the autumnal equinox of 1792. Marat had changed the name in honor of the Republic, and he could now sign its issues “Marat, friend of the people, deputy to the National Convention.” Painting the picture in short, note-like 93 phrases, Marat described the war with the enthusiasm of a man whose political dreams seemed to be coming true: Nature fighting for the French. The imperious force of circumstances inspiring patriotism in our generals…The French Republic electrifying all the peoples whom it calls to freedom. The holy epidemic of liberty is rapidly gaining ground, making an impregnable rampart against its neighbors. Inevitable fall of all thrones.26 Drawing on all available rhetorical resources, Marat envisions war as an epidemic, and as a process of electrification, and as nature itself in action. Given the inexorability of all three forces, Marat can predict the outcome: monarchy dissolved everywhere. This is “inevitable,” just as the ramparts are “impregnable.” Electricity plays the most ideological role among this set of images. It is not only a force of waging war, but also penetrates the minds of the public on the other side of the border, like an avant-garde that operates on the level of thought and sentiment. This, after all, was in keeping with the way Marat and other late eighteenth century electricians thought about electrical fluid. Perhaps for Marat it was not such a theoretical leap to image the extremely fast, incredibly subtle electrical fluid spreading over the lands France was aiming to conquer. A print from 1794 literalizes this theoretical leap, echoing Marat’s prophesy of French revolutionary electrification of the world, and the “inevitable fall” of every monarchy in Europe. 26 Jean-Paul Marat, Journal de la Republique Française, No. 11 (October 5, 1792). 94 Fig. 12. In a 1794 print, a revolutionary generates “republican electricity,” overthrowing all the thrones in Europe. A revolutionary generates “republican electricity” by spinning a glass labeled “Declaration of the Rights of Man” against a rolled-up copy of the Republican Constitution. Though this print was made a few years into the war, later than the other examples in this chapter, it depicts the same metaphor of electric shock, propagated out from France. The caption reads: “They all fall down: Thus the Electric Spark of Liberty overturns all the thrones of the Crowned Brigands.” Among them, “Mischievous Joseph,” “the Stadthouler” of the Netherlands, “Fat George” of England, “the Prussian Tyrant,” “the little Pope,” “the Spanish Despot,” “Fat Catherine” of Russia, and “the Player of Sardinia.” Republican electricity travels along a metal chain connected to the 95 electrostatic apparatus, in the form of revolutionary principles liberté, égalité, fraternité, unité, and indivisibilité. This print makes the metaphor more concrete by recasting it in the form of a pre-revolutionary electrical demonstration. There had, in fact, been electrified thrones and crowns in the wide repertoire of spectacular electrical experiences.27 Here they were chanelled into a metaphor of war against Europe as electrification. Electrical visions of war found their way into the long, fraught debates over France’s highest-profile internal enemy, its own king, Louis XVI. In the long, fraught aftermath of the king’s betrayals of the revolution, beginning from his attempted flight on June 21st, 1791, the legislature struggled with the problem at hand: the king increasingly appeared to be on the wrong side of revolutionary warfare; yet he was also a crucial element in the first French Constitution. By positive law, he was inviolable. Representatives spent long hours debating whether the king could or should be tried by the Convention, as they did so, consolidating their factional identities. In November 1792, as he delivered the decision of the Committee of Legislation on the question of the king’s trial, representative Jean-Baptiste Mailhe concluded with a vision of new era: We are perhaps not far away from the era when the precautions of free people will no longer be necessary. The overthrow of those thrones which seemed the strongest; the active and regenerative French republican army; the political 27 The electric throne was particularly associated with James Graham, electrician and therapist (and, some thought, a charlatan), whose electrical experiences enjoyed a popularity in late-eighteenth-century London parallel to mesmerism in Paris. See Mary Fairclough, “Chapter 3: Electrical Medicine, Feeling, and Eroticism” in Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740-1840: “Electrick Communication Every Where” (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 96 electricity which works over all humanity, all announce the coming fall of kings and the reestablishment of human society on its original foundations.28 Here we find an echo of officer d’Héran’s “great shock.” In Mailhe’s words, “political electricity” works in tandem with the “regenerative French republican army” bringing about a return to origins. With this concluding remark, Mailhe delivered the decree: Louis Capet, former King Louis XVI, would be put on trial. Mailhe, a lawyer from Toulouse, was treading a careful path within the context of a heated debate, the most portentous debate of the revolution from a political theory perspective.29 On the one hand, Girondins and constitutionalists like Condorcet, arguing from strict interpretation of the 1791 constitution and the notion of inviolability it enshrined, argued that either Louis could not be tried, or that he could be tried but not punished. The Jacobins argued that Louis should not be tried but that his execution should instead be treated as an act of war. Mailhe, neither a Jacobin nor particularly radical, nonetheless introduced a crucial notion to the debate, ultimately siding with the notion of the king’s trial. While according to the constitution, the Assembly could not judge the king under cases not anticipated by the constitution, “it did not follow that he could not be judged by the nation,” since this would be tantamount to saying that “by the constitutional Act, the king were superior to the nation, or independent of the nation.”30 Since this was not the case, Mailhe concluded, the nation could judge its king, though, as he explained, it was 28 Archives parlementaires, Tome 53, p. 281 (November 7, 1792). 29 See for example Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, & the French Revolution (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009); Kevin Duong The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Michael Walzer, Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, trans. Marian Rothstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 30 Archives parlementaires, Tome 53, p. 277 (November 7, 1792). 97 impossible to have Louis’s defense heard by every member of the nation. They would have to make do with the medium of a representative body, the Convention, embodying the nation for the purpose of the trial. Mailhe concluded reading the articles of the decree to applause: “Art 1: Louis will be judged. Art 2: He will be judged by the national Convention.” Several representatives ordered the printing and distribution of the degree to the departments and the army.31 Crucially for our purposes, Mailhe connected the trial of the king to the work of the French revolutionary army, and the “political electricity” that worked across humanity, rendering the need for legally sticky trials of kings unnecessary in the future. If kingship was itself a crime against nature, as Jacobins like Robespierre and his young protégé Saint-Just argued, war, crucially coupled with electricity, would preempt the crime of kingship by regenerating humanity according to its foundations—a social contract in which the nation was sovereign. It was in the context of these debates over the fate of the king that the accusation was launched, by Girondin Jean-Baptiste Louvet, that Maximilien Robespierre had assumed a kind of dictatorial power over the Convention through his influence at the Jacobin club. Robespierre’s response is well known for its memorable defense of radical revolution. In the course of his long reply to Louvet’s accusation, Robsepierre makes use of an electrical metaphor, which is unusual and possibly unique in his speeches at the Convention. “What idea have we formed of this latest revolution?” asks Robsepierre, referring to August 10, 1792, “Did the fall of the throne seem so easy before it happened? Was it just a question of lending a hand at the Tuileries? Was it not necessary to annihilate, throughout France, the party of tyrants, and communicate to all 31 Archives parlementaires, Tome 53, p. 282 (November 7, 1792). 98 departments the salutary shock which had electrified Paris?” How, in other words, could magistrates condemn revolutionary measures when they themselves had called for the storming of the Tuilieries in Paris? “Citizens, did you want a revolution without a revolution?...How can one judge the effects these great shocks [commotions] can entail?”32 Like those who developed a metaphor of electrical war, Robespierre developed a metaphor of revolution as “salutary shock.” That shock was the second revolution, during which the king had been chased from the Tuileries palace and forced to shelter from the crowd with his family in the legislative chamber. It was necessary, and healthy, Robespierre argued, for such a shock to then be distributed through the country. Who presumed to be able to judge the effects of such a tremendous and necessary overhaul? An electrifying shock could be necessary for health, just as revolution was necessary for revolution. Because of his first big case in which he defended one M. de Vissery’s right to install a lightning rod on his house, Robespierre had a good understanding of electricity.33 His speeches in defense of Vissery are filled with detail about the “electric fluid.” Robespierre gave special emphasis to how electricity “tended, by a natural propensity, toward equilibrium.”34 This “sublime idea” discovered by the “Immortal Franklin” was “no longer a mystery even for the most ignorant; it’s an elementary 32 Maximilien Robsepierre, Séance de 5 November 1792, Oeuvres complètes de Maximilien Robespierre, Tome IX, Discours (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957), 88-89. 33 For a more thorough discussion of Robespierre’s defense of Vissery, see Jessica Riskin “The Lawyer and the Lightning Rod,” Science in Context 12, no. 1 (1999): 61-99 and Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 34 Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres complètes de Maximilien Robespierre, Tome II, Les Oeuvres Judiciaires, ed. Ernst Leroux, (Paris: 1913), 148. 99 principle of which all electricians speak.”35 The lightning rod was easy for anyone (read: the judges of the case) to understand through this principal of equilibrium. The electric matter of this atmosphere, which sought to insinuate itself into the layers of air surrounding it, flows into the metal bar, which presents it with an infinitely easier exit, sending it to the center of the Earth…the portion of the electric fluid of the atmosphere, of the stormy cloud, which passes into the conductor, is replaced by an equal portion of the superabundant electricity contained in the cloud itself, always in consequence of the same law of equilibrium.36 It was all a very natural process, easily understood by everyone involved in the case. “Do we think,” asked Robespierre rhetorically, “that all the movements caused by the tendency of the electric fluid toward equilibrium are so many omens of the wrath of heaven, and that if lightning encounters our houses and buildings, that it received a special order from God to strike them?”37 Obviously, once electricity was demystified, “we” did not. Robespierre won the case and became the talk of Arras. But we are interested in this defense because of the way its logic re-emerged in Robespierre’s electrical metaphor. Perhaps reaching back into his pre-revolutionary electrical trial, Robespierre naturalized revolution by calling it a shock. Who was to judge a natural electric shock, or an oceanic wave, a metaphor Robespierre employs later in the speech? Who was to tell either when to stop? There was only the possibility of understanding the tendencies of natural forces and channeling them appropriately. This was the logic 35 Robespierre, Oeuvres, Tome II, ed. Leroux, 149; 159. 36 Robespierre, Oeuvres, Tome II, ed. Leroux, 177. 37 Robespierre, Oeuvres, Tome II, ed. Leroux, 174. 100 through which Robespierre explained his own relationship to the force of the People’s vengeance. As Mary Ashburn Miller describes, revolutionaries invoked lightning as a figure of that vengeance, naturalized and thus justified. “Lightning destroyed the material at hand,” Miller writes, “it embodied the rejection of the past and the embrace of an instantaneous justice, and an instantaneous regeneration.” The regenerative lightning bolt had to reduce the old regime to ashes, for the new regime to be born.38 Electricity was distinct from “lightning” of salpêtre—saltpeter or potassium nitrate, a key ingredient in gunpowder. A pamphlet advocating quick mining of salpêtre for the war effort makes this distinction clear: “Help [Liberty’s] birth: bring the machines to life, electrify lightning itself; exterminate the destructors of humanity. Citizens, in the name of the human race in revolution, whose happiness is lodged in salpêtre, we beseech you to demonstrate your patriotism by harvesting this precious material until its last atom.”39 Just as Mailhe imagined electricity working over humanity through the deadly emissary of the army, so the pamphlet imagined this martial electricity working over the very materials of warfare; thus, it was possible to “electrify lightning itself.” Where did this electricity come from, in theory? What generated the electricity needed for the great civil shock of war, or of revolution? A delegate addressed the assembly on April 21st 1792, the day after war had been declared: “Messieurs, reduced to declaring war on an importune neighbor who would change the laws we have sworn 38 Miller, A Natural History of Revolution, 92. 39 Louis-Pierre Dufourny, Département de Paris: Salpêtres, Adresse aux citoyens pour l’extraction de tout le Salpêtre (Paris: de l’impr. de Ballard, n.d. [18 frimaire, Year II (8 December 1793)]), 2-3. Quoted in Miller, A Natural History of Revolution, 95. 101 to maintain, your decree of yesterday, in electrifying souls, will cause a crowd of heroes to be born, who will teach tyrants that a free and enlightened people can never be subjugated.”40 Citizens, electrically reborn as ‘heroes’, would go to fight the enemy. The phrase that framed an offensive war in terms of perceived threat — la patrie en danger — had particularly electrifying power. “Declaring your sessions permanent, you have declared the country to be in danger [la patrie en danger]. What more is needed to electrify the Nantais?” wrote the Friends of the Constitution in Nantes in June of 1792, “The liberty they idolize has given them all that energy that they deployed so advantageously in 1789. Never was a session of the Friends of the Constitution more imposing than when your decree reached us.”41 On July 11, 1792, the day before new levies of more than 80,000 soldiers were announced, the Assembly published a declaration of emergency, including this same phrase: la patrie en danger.42 The electricity of the idea fed enrollments. “Legislators, we have solemnly published...your decree declaring the country to be in danger [la patrie en danger]; these two words have had the effect of lightning on the souls of our compatriots—lightning which electrifies all that surrounds it.”43 Here was proof that lightning could also be an electrifying agent, and that it functioned through the sheer power of “two words,” country and danger, and the effect these words had on citizens’ souls. In the same letter, the commune of Bar-le- Duc, in the department of the Meuse in northeastern France, reported the spontaneous enrollment of 300 volunteer soldiers, responding to the call to arms. Oddly, lightning in 40 Archives parlementaires, Tome 42, p. 221 (April 21, 1792). 41 Archives parlementaires, Tome 45, p. 55 (June 10, 1792). 42 Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, 67. 43 Archives parlementaires, Tome 48, p. 291 (August 16, 1792). 102 this analogy does not “illuminate” its surroundings but “electrifies” them— light, a visual analogy, swapped out for a more invisible, interior phenomenon. The electricity of danger jolted citizens into a state of readiness to be soldiers, whether in Nantes or in Bar-le-Duc. This at least was the flattering picture painted by provincial correspondents of the Legislative Assembly of the effects of the declaration of war and the subsequent call to arms. Martial electricity here does not pass from higher to lower military rank, but instead stems from a phrase—patrie en danger—promulgated by the civil representative body. Citizens mobilize, not according to the chain of command or by fiat, but by the cognitive effects of a phrase. Jacques-Pierre Brissot was the most prominent advocate for war in the Legislative assembly. A pro-war party assembled around him, the eponymous Brissotins. An internationalist from the start and a founding member of the anti-slavery Société des Amis des Noirs, he joined the Legislative Assemby in the fall of 1791 and from there drove the war lobby. With France already at war with Austria and Prussia by early 1793, Brissot pushed for war with England. On February 1st, 1793, eleven days after the execution of Louis XVI, Brissot brought an additional declaration drafted by the defense committee before the legislature at large. The declaration deserves a close look for our purposes, because in it Brissot frames war as an electrical phenomenon several times over. The declaration casts pre-emptive war as necessary defense. The notion of la patrie en danger as we have seen, was electrifying because of its cognitive effects, neighboring terror and sublimity, vivifying and salubrious. In framing a war against England in the idiom of imminent threat, Brissot tapped into the mobilizing force of terror. England had in effect, he argued, already declared war on France when, 103 reacting to the execution of Louis Capet on January 21st, 1793, the English king gave the French ambassador eight days to leave the country. Reports came from the channel that England, like Austria a year before, was amassing troops. That England had not declared war openly, Brissot argued, was only a “refined machiavellianism” on the part of King George: “he wants to avoid the appearance of aggression; he wants to be able to accuse us of aggression before the English nation; he wants, in a word, to nationalize this war.”44 Brissot frames going to war against England as a fait accompli. The English king, though the real aggressor, manipulates public opinion instead of declaring war openly. As the speech continues, Brissot merges revolutionary politics with war, rhetorically severing the English people from their monarch, and casting the French people as liberators of their brethren across the channel. If the English people could shake the control of their king, they would ask him, Brissot argued, what right he had to wage war on France. For, after all, the French were brothers, though under different regimes. “This is without a doubt the opinion of the large part of the English people, as they witness the hostile actions of their king,” Brissot claimed, “an opinion which would come into the open if not for the terror of bayonets, since Reason is cultivated among all classes in that country, and wherever Reason is cultivated, the French Republic cannot long stay a popular anathema.” This was why, he continued, despite the resources and intrigues dedicated to turning it into a popular cause, the idea remained an object of horror. Here war is not the elite, rule-bound dueling of eighteenth-century monarchs, but rather a thing merged with popular politics. He continued, 44 Archives parlementaires, Tome 58, p. 113 (February 1, 1793). 104 They deserve to be revealed here, those who have provoked this fratricidal war, those who seek to overthrow in French liberty the liberty of all peoples. Never was there a more horrible crime; it is a crime against humanity. This idea should electrify your souls, citizens, it’s not for yourselves alone that you go to battle, it’s for all the nations of Europe.45 According to Brissot, France fought for all of Europe; French liberty was humanity’s liberty. George III’s opposition to the revolution and to Louis XVI’s execution was a crime against humanity. Each expansive phrase rewrote the revolution in terms of foreign war. The universal gravity of the stakes should, Brissot argues, “electrify” the citizen souls of his hearers, fellow representatives in the Convention. Electricity results from the rejection of a revolution contained within borders for an externalized revolution. A revolution which ultimately and ideally will encompass Europe. Brissot invokes these categories in his speech as if they were interchangeable, a testament to the level of abstraction from which he argued for war. The sense of political purpose, projected outward, electrifies, and electrified souls are capable of such bold actions as a declaration of war. Brissot presents the war France embarks upon as “this extraordinary war”. “It is only by supernatural efforts,” he argues, addressing the French people through the Convention, “that you can hope to vanquish this English Colossus, more imposing than terrible, that stands as the last support of the crowned coalition.”46 “If, destined to fight the league of tyrants, you had only a king at your head, your loss would be guaranteed; 45 Archives parlementaires, Tome 58, p. 113 (February 1, 1793). 46 Archives parlementaires, Tome 58, p. 113-114 (February 1, 1793). 105 but liberty commands you, liberty alone works miracles, and you will triumph.” Nature may not have given everything, but she had given the French people all they needed to succeed in “this holy crusade against kings.” But, continued Brissot, in order for this miracle to work, the spirit of liberty must electrify all souls, extinguish private passions, or rather found them on one alone, the passion of liberty; all spirits should rally around the same altar; this altar is here. The Convention is the arch saint of France: whoever holds her in contempt or dissolves her is the enemy of the human race; because the salvation of the human race is here.47 If previously the souls of the members of the Convention should be electrified by the thought of France’s universal mission, here all souls need electrification by the “spirit of liberty”, if they are to muster the supernatural power required to win this “extraordinary war.” It is a “holy crusade”, Brissot says, and requires miracles. In an echo of Poyet’s festival electrification, the electrification of all souls here forges one single, public passion (again, an abstract “liberty”) out of individuated, private passions. And the centrifugal force at the center of this national passion is the Convention. For Brissot, the souls of the fellow members of the Convention should be electrified by the idea of the lofty destiny to which France is called, battling against warmongering tyrants for the sake of all humanity. The souls of the population, meanwhile, must be electrified such that they share a singular passion, which anchors them to the Convention. In this second instance, Brissot invokes electrification as a mechanism for producing instantaneous political consensus. From this magical or 47 Archives parlementaires, Tome 58, p. 114 (February 1, 1793). 106 mechanical consensus, electrification as a means by which to secure popular obedience to the Convention and its laws. Electrification of this kind moved predictably from top down, as the old military electrification had. Although the electrifying agent was abstract “Liberty,” Brissot makes a special point of the inviolability of the Convention around which electrified spirits rally, and by which electrified souls will be sent to war. The Convention, a political body ungoverned at this point by a constitution, is owed total allegiance; the electricity of “liberty” remakes France into a single-willed body. Brissot was not only the most prominent proponent of war in the Legislative Assembly. He was also perhaps the most prominent purveyor of the new electrical metaphor in 1791-2. Before the peak of revolutionary electricity in 1793, Brissot worked electrical language into two of his speeches from the spring of 1791 about the uprising in Saint Domingue that would eventually lead to the abolition of slavery and an independent Haiti.48 In 1792 and 1793, he used electrical language in speeches related to war. Where did Brissot encounter electricity pre-revolution? What connotations and meanings would it have had for him? The thirteenth son of a provincial innkeeper, and an aspiring philosophe in the 1780s and 1790s, Brissot tried to make a name for himself in the public sphere and simultaneously embark upon a legal career by writing a treatise on criminal law, Théorie des lois criminelles. Though the work was poorly received, Brissot’s memorable defense of stealing earned him his first eponym: brissoter or brissotiner, which meant to pickpocket or steal. Snetlage’s dictionary of 1795 preserved this earlier meaning, “brissotiner: to empty with dexterity the pocket or the purse of 48 See chapter 4 for more on Brissot’s electrical rhetoric and his gradual abolitionism with respect to Saint Domingue. 107 others in the manner of Brissot.”49 Disappointed in his literary and legal career, Brissot became an “idolater” of science, deciding that the quickest way to glory lay in that direction, as he puts it in his memoirs. Brissot’s memoires make it clear that he held Benjamin Franklin in particularly high regard: “Franklin, in the midst of the vast stage in which he played such a brilliant role, thought constantly of the future, his eyes always fixed on the sky, a much bigger theater, the only vantage point that could sustain mankind, make mankind selfless [déintéresser] and grander on the earth.”50 Franklin was a hero to many, and Brissot recalls being moved by Mirabeau’s eulogy for the American in June of 1790. By all accounts a friendly man, he became the soon-to-be Ami du Peuple’s only friend in the 1770s and 1780s. “The experiments reported by Marat on light and fire piqued my curiosity; I went to see him, and his pride of character, which has since become so infamous, displayed before me, made me seek out his acquaintance. We became close friends.”51 Marat’s great ambition, reports Brissot, was to take down the great natural philosophers, especially Newton and Helvétius. In particular, Marat wanted to argue, against Newton, that light, heat, fire, and electricity were all invisible fluids at work.52 Marat also spilled much ink arguing for the existence of a soul, and its relation to the material body, writing in his Philosophical Essay on Man that “the 49 Snetlage, Nouveau Dictionnaire Français, 29-31. The dictionary defines “brissotiner” as “To empty with dexterity the pocket or the purse of others in the matter of Brissot.” 50 Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Mémoires de Brissot, membre de l’Assemblée Législative et de la Convention nationale, sur ses contemporains, et la Révolution française. Publiés par son fils; avec des notes et des éclaircissements historiques, par M. F. de Montrol, (Paris: Maison Ladvocat, 1830), Vol. 1, 232. 51 Brissot, Mémoires, 336. 52 See Jean-Paul Marat, Découvertes de M. Marat sur le feu, l’électricité, et la lumière (Paris: 1779). 108 nervous fluid is the band which unites the soul and the body.”53 A young author from the provinces, anxious like Brissot to break into natural-philosophical circles, Marat campaigned to make a name for himself in physics, mailing his works on physics to aristocrats close to the king.54 At first credulous of Marat’s electrical work, Brissot began to distrust his friend, especially after an incident in which Marat spotted a scab on Brissot’s hand and sent him a bottle of what looked like “clear water.” Brissot, asking the price, paid twelve pounds and never used Marat’s liquid.55 Brissot, writing from jail in 1793 after the purge of the Girondins from the Convention, wrote of his friendship with Marat with regret. By that time, the feeling was mutual. In issue 664 of L’Ami du Peuple, Marat declared “it is now time to completely demask Mr. Brissot….no one has seen the depths of his soul like I have; I expose him, because the dangers to which his clique exposes public safety forces my hand.” Marat tells the beginning of the story much like Brissot would in 1793: “curious to see my new experiments on fire, light, and electricity, Brissot came to see me several times.” The latter was an unknown entity, except that he had written a treatise on criminal law. “It did not take me long to see,” writes Marat, “that Brissot was just a schoolboy who had supercharged his memory with phrases taken from some famous philanthropists. But he seemed to want to do good, and that was enough for me to encourage him.”56 We might imagine that the idea of electrification was one 53 Jean-Paul Marat, Philosophical Essay on Man (1773) volume I, 63. Quoted in Keith Baker, “Was Marat a Vitalist?” in Keith Michael Baker and Jenna M. Gibbs, eds. Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2016), 110-124; quotation at 117. 54 Jean-Paul Marat, “Letter to Monsieur le Baron” Kroch Rare and Manuscript Library, Lavoisier 4712 Bd. Ms. 56 +++. In this letter from 1786 Marat calls the unnamed Baron the “Maecenas of men of arts and letters.” 55 Brissot, Mémoires, 338. 56 Jean-Paul Marat, L’Ami du Peuple, No. 664 (June 4, 1792). 109 of those phrases, however Marat too used electricity as a figure for war, in examples we have seen already as well as after the war had begun with England, when he described “a French army electrified by the disembarking of the English” in the modern-day Netherlands.57 While immersed in electrical science, through Marat’s erstwhile friendship and his admiration for Franklin, Brissot embraced the quackish side of late-eighteenth- century science. Robert Darnton writes that Brissot developed a “camouflaged political theory” through mesmerism, the faddish theory of “animal magnetism” peddled by Anton Mesmer, debunked in 1784 by a national commission of which Franklin himself was a part.58 Even more than his close ties with Marat, Brissot’s commitment to the theory of “animal magnetism” and his membership in a group of mesmerist radicals which met at the house of a high-profile mesmerist, Kornmann. Brissot became an ardent defender of mesmerism, reading political implications into both mesmerism and its censure by the scientific establishment. An anonymously published pamphlet, Un mot à l’oreille des académiciens de Paris, the author accuses the Academy of Sciences: “you have sought to inflame the Government against the partisans of magnetism; you have kindled lightning on the heads of their leaders.”59 Mesmerism for Brissot was going to be not only a medical panacea but also a cure for social stratification: “Don’t you see, for example, that mesmerism is a way to bring social classes closer together, to make the rich more humane, to make them into real fathers of the poor? Wouldn’t you 57 Jean-Paul Marat, Observations a mes commettans, No. 155 (March 29, 1793). 58 Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 3. 59 Anonymous [Jacques-Pierre Brissot], Un mot à l’oreille des académiciens de Paris ([Paris?]: [1784?]), 15. 110 be edified at the sight of the most eminent men…spending hours at a time mesmerizing [their servants]?”60 Brissot accused anti-mesmerists of corrupting their souls through their participation in morally bankrupt, despotic politics of science: “I’m afraid that the habit of despotism has ossified your souls.” It was thus despotic to suppress mesmerism. Brissot’s involvement and defense of mesmerism in the 1780s is also an important context for his liberal use of electrical language during the revolution. “Animal magnetism” might have been debunked by 1789, but animal electricity certainly had not. Writing his memoirs years later, Brissot described his mesmerist idol, Nicolas Bergasse, as engaged in revolutionary politics in the guise of mesmerist physics: “Bergasse did not hide from the fact that in raising an altar to mesmerism, he intended only to raise one to liberty. ‘The time has now come,’ he used to say to me, ‘for the revolution that France needs. But to attempt to produce one openly is to doom it to failure; to succeed it is necessary to wrap oneself in mystery, it is necessary to unite men under the pretext of experiments in physics, but, in reality, for the overthrow of despotism.’”61 Bergasse led a movement that moved mesmerist thought away from its founder; and mesmerist splinter communities, especially the Bergassian one of which Brissot was an enthusiastic member, advocated against conventional authority and for revolution.62 60 Anon. [Brissot], Un mot à l’oreille, 20. 61 Brissot, Mémoires, Vol. 2, 53. 62 As Tim Fulford puts it, “mesmerism had, without its founder, become part of a proto-revolutionary liberalization of thought aimed at supplanting conventional authorities.” Tim Fulford, “Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s,” Studies in Romanticism 43, no. 1 (2004): 57-78; 66. 111 Brissot’s involvement in contemporary science was highly suggestible, ever- changing, and for the most part connected to specific scientists whom he befriended or admired. Upon reading about Antoine-François Fourcroy’s experiments in the chemical decomposition of bodies, Brissot became enthused by the idea of pursuing chemistry. But “deprived of the instruments and the financial means to repeat [Fourcroy’s] experiments,” Brissot was, in his words, “always limited to theory, and what use is theory in physics?”63 Brissot’s wife Félicité inspired him further through her interest in medicine, and in giving their children proper instruction in natural philosophy. Joining her, Brissot tried hard to overcome his disgust of corpses in order to study anatomy, with the ultimate aim of discovering the “principles and elements of life.”64 Brissot’s memoires paint a picture of a dilettante who knew he was a dilettante. Never publishing on scientific matters, Brissot nonetheless seemed to have considered his interest in science a kind of moral, self-improving pursuit, something that one should cultivate an interest in, if one had ambitions within the public sphere. Brissot embodied a certain kind of amateur scientist of the pre-revolutionary decades. As a report on a museum opening described, “ever since a predilection for science began to spread among us, we have seen the public occupied successively with physics, natural history, and chemistry; seen it not only concerned with their progress, but actually devoted to their study; the public swarms into courses where they are taught, it rushes to read books about them, and it welcomes avidly everything that brings them to mind; there are but few rich persons in whose homes one cannot find the instruments suitable for these useful 63 Brissot, Mémoires, 319. Brissot uses the term “physique,” which the 1762 dictionary of the Académie française defined as “Science qui a pour objet les choses naturelles.” 64 Brissot, Mémoires, 319-20. 112 sciences.”65 Brissot’s memoires attest that he was precisely one of these amateur enthusiasts, moving from physics, to chemistry, to natural history, though frustrated by the fact that the necessary instruments were not within his means. What did this background mean for Brissot’s use of electrical language in the revolution? Brissot believed, that theory was of no use in physics, thus we should not be surprised if his electrical metaphors strayed further from pre-revolutionary theories of electricity than Poyet’s did, for example. Brissot by every account including his own memoirs was not a theorist but someone who wanted to do good, though in his frenemy Marat’s estimation, he and his faction ended up doing harm instead. Theory aside, Brissot’s enthusiasms pre-revolution burrowed deep into his political theory, coming to the surface through the electrical metaphors he chose to advocate for war. Electrification, in the hands of Brissot, Mailhe, and others, thus obliquely points to the novelty of a war that has become, not only politics by other means, but mass politics by other means, a war waged by a nation in which the people are sovereign. At the same time, it illuminates the slippage this representation invites. Ideological electrification translates ultimately to a religious fidelity to the Convention, in other words, to obedience. Was the popular, political electricity behind this war a figment of Brissot’s imagination? Was it a rhetorical means of persuasion without an anchor in reality? Was le Peuple really “electrified”? Or was martial electricity really a rhetorical weapon designed to make war seem consensual, months ahead of the levée en masse? If electrification referred to an internal condition, it also, in the form of lightning or 65 Nouvelles de la République des lettres, October 12, 1785. Quoted in Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, 26. 113 shock, dealt instant death. But while the lightning strike implied deadly force, “electrification” and “shock” refigured the dominant image of the battlefield from one of death to one of life. Bringing electricity into war rhetoric remade war, in a sense supplanting death with liveliness and energy: the shock of war was animated not by bloodlust or anger, nor by the machinations of kings and nobles with professional armies, but by the people’s electrification. Levée en masse: the citizen-soldier electric The figure of the citizen-soldier made French revolutionary warfare fundamentally different from what historians have called the “tamed Bellona” of the earlier eighteenth century. The amalgamated volunteer and professional citizen army launched against Austria and Prussia in 1792, and against Britain and the Netherlands in 1793 was different in kind from the professional armies of absolutist France and revolutionary France’s adversaries, as even scholars who disagree with the first “total war” thesis acknowledge.66 As historian Christopher Tozzi argues, from its earliest days the Revolution included a push for a “nationalization” of the French army—a term often used by legislators in discussions of army reconfiguration. Whereas before 1789, foreign regiments and foreign commanders were commonplace, especially Swiss, German, Liégois, and Irish in the case of the French army, the nationalization push identified French soldiering closely with French citizenship. As early as December 66 Ute Planert, “Innovation or Evolution? The French Wars in Military History”, in Chickering and Forster, eds., War in an Age of Revolution 1775-1815 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 71-2; Jean- Paul Bertraud, Valmy, la démocratie en armes (Paris, 1989); Thomas Hippler, “Service militaire et intégration nationale pendant la Révolution française,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 3 (2002): 1-16. 114 1789, Constituent Assembly deputy and former aristocrat Edmond-Louis-Alexis Dubois de Crancé described the identification as a revolutionary fundamental: “I take it as a basic principle that in France every citizen must be a soldier, and every soldier a citizen.”67 He had in mind a military reorganization with the National Guard as model: the spontaneous citizen militia created in 1789 to protect the nascent revolution against a counterrevolutionary military incursion.68 Women were left out of both categories. In Dubois de Crancé’s formula, we can hear an echo of Rousseau’s injunction in the Social Contract: “Every citizen should be a soldier by duty, none by trade. If a foreign war comes, the citizens march off calmly to combat; none thinks of flight; they do their duty, but without passion for victory. They know better how to die than how to become conquerors.”69 The Rousseauian citizen fought for the country, out of duty. A professional, imperial army, soldiering as a trade set apart from civilian life, thus contradicted this Rousseauian link between citizenship and dutiful, patriotic war- making. But where the revolutionary soldier-citizen different from the Rousseauian soldier-citizen was the point of “passion” — if the Rousseauian soldier was dispassionate, the revolutionary soldier had to be positively electrified, and the energy for war drawn from the wellspring of his soul. The citizen-soldier and the nation-in-arms have been recognized as important legacies of the French revolutionary wars of the 1790s. As historian Alan Forrest argues, they are twin “legends,” with their origins in the 1792 rallying cry of patrie en danger. 67 Archives parlementaires, Tome 12, pp. 521-23 (December 1789). Quoted in Tozzi, Nationalizing France’s Army, 3. 68 Wolfgang Kruse, “Revolutionary France and the Meanings of Levée en Masse,” in Chickering and Forster, eds., War in an Age of Revolution 1775-1815 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 299-312. 69 Quoted in Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, trans. R. R. Palmer, 40. 115 Conscription and universal service have been tenets of French republicanism ever since.70 Only in 1996 under President Jacques Chirac did France finally relinquish its hold on the principle of universal conscription, when during the Gulf War it became clear that France’s new conscripts did not have the expertise required to man the highly technologized weapons that late twentieth-century warfare demanded.71 The French revolutionary wars of the 1790s involved a new, imagined citizen-soldier whose will to fight came from patriotic spirit rather than from professionalism and pay. In this transformation, we again find electrical language. Ten days after Brissot brought the new declaration of war with Britain before the Convention, Jacques Garnier de Saintes spoke before the Convention. Garnier was known for his long, vitriolic, sometimes incoherent speeches; eventually his colleagues sent him to the Vendée where he enthusiastically fought domestic resistance to the revolution. A few months before departing as a représentant en mission, Garnier described his vision of the transformation from citizen to soldier. At issue was a bill presented by the Committee of War, which proposed to democratize and homogenize the army, bringing the amalgam of volunteers and troops of the line under the same discipline, and allowing for the election of officers across the board. Garnier argued that while this wholesale restructuring was good in principle, necessity dictated that it be postponed until the campaign was over. Little did he know that the fighting would continue for two decades. Over the course of his argument, Garnier presented a future vision: 70 See Alan Forrest, The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: The Nation-in-Arms in French Republican Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2009). 71 Forrest, The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars, 2. 116 When each individual is called to the honor of defending his country by all the energy that heats the sentiments, electrifies the courage, and creates those great passions that are given to heroes, and organizes invincible armies, there will not be a man among us who does not aspire to the honor of being a soldier, and who does not think it a shame not to have a cartridge to leave his children and the memory of his exploits to tell them: these are the noble titles that the French will aspire towards.72 In the future, Garnier predicts, to have been a citizen-soldier will be the only title worth aspiring toward, a new order of nobility. This future citizen-soldier, energized by the idea of defense of his nation, undergoes a quasi-mechanical transformation of the passions. Sentiments are heated; courage is electrified. Heat and electricity, both aethereal fluids to eighteenth-century science, were thought to work analogously to one another in nature and in metaphor. In this case, they enact the passage from individual to citizen-soldier. Upon close inspection, the transformation is a physiological rather than ideological one. Energy, heat, and electricity forge the new hero, and organize “invincible armies.” In another instance, a near-identical triad of forces—energy, fire, electricity—explains the mechanism behind volunteers and conscripts marching off to war: We have seen virtuous women encourage their husbands to take up arms, to lay low foreign armies. Establish the reign of mores, inspire the love of the common good and republican energy, and rest assured that you will see the sacred fire of 72 Archives parlementaires, Tome 58, p. 452 (February 11, 1793). 117 liberty electrify the people throughout the country, and make them march as one to go to battle the enemies.73 As in Brissot’s declaration of war and Garnier’s vision of the citizen-soldier, electrification turns many into one. The telling mark of the transformation: women send their husbands to battle, a larger ‘family’ taking priority. In this case, moral regeneration and republican energy prepare the ground for the fiery electrification of the countryside, the quasi-magical, instantaneous process which compels the people to march to battle. Electricity’s instantaneity and irresistibility made it an attractive metaphor for top-down control at the 1790 Fête de la Fédération. Here, electricity similarly solves the contradiction between ideological liberty and military control. The march to battle is a physiological effect of energy, heat, sacred fire, and electricity, activated through passion and body, circumventing reflection on the part of the individual. Liberty recast as elemental fire, obedience recast as electricity — the march to war is thus described in natural-philosophical terms that foreclose on the possibility of particularity or resistance. In reports in the spring of 1793, electricity appears as a shorthand for the miraculous mainspring that, legislators hoped and imagined, would make possible the unprecedented levies the French government had ordered. Electrification would furnish the requisite energy, in spirit and more literally in terms of food and supplies, to jolt untrained peasants, villagers, and townspeople, citizen-soldiers of all stripes, into battle against Europe’s professional armies. On February 24, the Convention voted a new requisition of 300,000, a prelude to universal conscription later that year. Compared to 73 Archives parlementaires, Tome 61, p. 125 (April 3, 1793). 118 the volunteers who had spontaneously responded to the phrase “la patrie en danger” in the summer of 1792, these soldiers tended to be peasants and workers, and the levy made slow progress, slowed further by the federalist civil wars which broke out in the Vendée and elsewhere.74 But agents sent to recruit returned with reports of the electrifying effects of their presence, and of what martial electricity had achieved. Two commissioners, Pocholle and Saladin, reported cheerily from the north of France: Before entering the Somme, we stopped at Neufchâtel and Aumale. The first of these cities offered us the most touching spectacle; the population is hardly numerous, but we witnessed the most ardent and generous civic mindedness in the greater part of the inhabitants. They exceeded their quota. Our speeches again electrified the spirits, and more enrolments were made in our presence; patriotic donations multiplied with an enthusiasm worthy of all your elegies; what flattered us most was that many donations were in kind and consisted in clothing and equipment for our brave defenders.75 Also in the north, in the departments of the Haut- and Bas-Rhin, representatives sent as liaisons between the Convention and the army of the Rhine were likewise busy electrifying the countryside, thereby increasing patriotic donations in kind: We have traveled through the strong places of the Haut and Bas-Rhin; one of us was assigned to go through the countryside to electrify the virtuous but often lost souls of the laborers. Some towns offered us surplus grain in a patriotic donation and to march against the enemy who menaces their homes.76 74 Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, 90-95. 75 Archives parlementaires, Tome 60, p. 686 (March 29, 1793). 76 Archives parlementaires, Tome 72, p. 640 (August 19, 1793). 119 As it appears here, electrification could be a form of correction, administered to unwilling (or “lost”) souls, a mechanism of enforcement of desperate measures which bled the countryside of able-bodied workers as well as food and supplies, and cannot have been universally popular. How might reluctance be overcome? This was a job for electricity. Summarizing the actions of the French army along the southern border, Bertrand Barère, a prominent, politically ambiguous member of the Convention, couched the actions of the French population along the Pyrenees in glowing, electrical terms. “The incursion of the Spaniards electrified all souls,” he reported on May 3rd 1793, “we are assured that the fiery courage of the citizens of the Midi, which waits for no generals’ orders, nor for the slow organization of the army, has dissipated a large part of these fanatical brigands.”77 In Barère’s description, citizens anticipated soldiers in warding off a possible Spanish attack, fiery courage and electrified souls turning them into a kind of shock troop citizen militia. Barère’s rhetorical flair drew upon reports sent to the Convention from the department in question: of civilian ‘electricity’ surrounding and anticipating the regular army along the Pyrenees. Four days after Barère’s speech, a letter reached the Convention from Dartigoeyte, a representative sent to the southwestern department of Landes across the border from Bilbao. Dartigoeyte raved that “everywhere a truly civic enthusiasm electrified souls” and thus, “the Spaniards met with an invincible resistance.” In this case, the highly charged state of the people of Landes would be put to good military use: “this evening I will be at the capital of the department to take some urgent measures there and I will turn these circumstances to 77 Archives parlementaires, Tome 64, p. 37 (May 3, 1793). 120 profit to complete recruitment. Aristocracy together with fanaticism, has worked hard to create difficulties and multiply the obstacles; but the people want liberty.”78 At the Spanish border, ahead of the levée en masse, the line was blurring between civilian and soldier, and electricity was crucial to this transformation. Whomever did not respond to the electrifying notion of patrie en danger by taking up arms excluded themselves from society altogether. “Those who are not electrified by the needs of the country,” asked Barère, speaking on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety in August 1793, “do they want a society of wild animals? Do they desire the shameful division of France, its devastation by cannibals in uniform and kings that need to be dethroned?”79 It followed that the entire population of citizens should become soldiers; the total identification of citizen with soldier should be written into law. This was, in fact, what Barère proposed. The Convention assented. On August 23, 1793, revolutionary France became the first nation in the world to attempt universal conscription when all bachelors between ages eighteen and twenty-five were mandated to join the army in a levée en masse. Barère wrote the decree, which read: “From now until the moment when all enemies are expelled from the territory of the Republic, all French people are in permanent requisition for the service of the armies.”80 Another round of levy agents was duly sent out to effect universal conscription. Predictably, the levée en masse met with resistance from peasant communities who needed able-bodied laborers, many of whom had already volunteered or been taken 78 Archives parlementaires, Tome 64, p. 264 (May 7, 1793). 79 Archives parlementaires, Tome 72, p. 157 (August 14, 1793). 80 Quoted in Alan Forrest, “L’armée de l’an II : la levée en masse et la création d’un mythe républicain,” Annales historiques de la Révolution Française 335 (janvier-mars 2004): 111-130. 121 up in prior waves of requisitions. The levy triggered a wave of hasty marriages, as married men were exempted. And it was not evenly applied, being subject to various alterations made by the agents charged with its execution.81 For some scholars, the uneven execution of the levée en masse supports an argument against simultaneous revolution in politics and warfare.82 But even if reality did not match up to the letter of the law, the levée en masse represented a forcible amalgamation of nation and army, citizen and soldier. It also catapulted commissaries and special emissaries from the Convention, the représentants en mission, even further into their roles as “electrifiers” of the countryside. One national commissar sent to quell federalist revolts in the Rhone- Alps region received praise for “vigorous and wise” conduct: “he completely electrified the parts he passed through. All the people rose en masse at his voice, and with two canon pieces...he marched on the rebels.”83 Commissaires in the department of the Somme in the north wrote to the Convention, “Our courageous soldiers breathe only vengeance… their comrades await only the cry of the patrie to rise and fly to share their glory. Speak and they will follow. We go to incline and electrify their spirits.”84 The soldiers and their soon-to-be comrades sound almost docile in these examples. Soldiers, soon-to-be soldiers, and the public await only the magic words to go to war. Rhetorically, electrification made compliance with the levy indistinguishable from the new soldiers’ spontaneous will. 81 Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution, 106-9. 82 See for example Ute Planert, “Innovation or Evolution?” in Chickering and Forster, eds. War in an Age of Revolution, 1775-1815 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 72. 83 Archives parlementaires, Tome 74, p. 94 (September 14, 1793). 84 Archives parlementaires, Tome 74, p. 561 (September 21, 1793). 122 The Convention was itself a source of military electricity, as the Legislative Assembly had been before it. “Electrify our armies,” a group of self-styled republican volunteers from a battalion at Hazebrouck asked the Convention, “help the ardor of the soldier in destroying the idleness in which our armies stagnate by the too frequent changing of generals. Examine with the greatest care the subjects to whom you give the command of our armies, do not confer it except to men known for their civic- mindedness and by their devotion without limit to the common weal, incapable of giving us to our enemies, and you will continue to be most worthy of our gratitude.”85 Since the outbreak of war, the counterrevolutionary defection of ex-aristocratic generals, especially Dumouriez in April 1793, had posed a real threat to French forces. These representatives of the battalion appealed to the highest civilian authority, the Convention, to demand careful selection of their own generals and thus retain tight ideological control over the army. Generals must be devoted to the civic, revolutionary cause. If they were, the volunteers implied, the soldier’s ardor and the army’s electrification would be assured. Here electricity worked rhetorically as a reminder to the Convention of its role vis-a-vis the military, that by careful ordering of the army, by ensuring thorough ideological commitment at every level, the legislature would electrify the machine of war and ensure its proper functioning. The Convention may have been the electrifier of the army, but it electrified at a distance, through emissaries, representatives on mission, and official decrees. The new Jacobin Constitution, ratified on June 24, 1793, reached one battalion of the Isère in the 85 Archives parlementaires, Tome 73, p. 376 (September 4, 1793). 123 midst of battle. Its officers and sub-officers described the reception of the document in exalted terms: It was at the sound of the canon, in the presence of the enemy that we received the Constitutional Act, this chef-d’oeuvre of republicanism; to read it with enthusiasm, and to accept it with transport, these were the first movements of our hearts. Already, for a long time, the majestic idea of a Republic one and indivisible ignited our warrior souls. But at the sight of the triumph of liberty, a still greater sentiment electrified them.86 The 1793 Constitution, ratified though never put into effect, was composed by the radicals in the Convention and supported by the sans-culottes. Written to replace the constitution of 1791 after the overthrow of the king in August 1792, it ratified French republicanism. The intertwining of the arrival of this constitutional act and the backdrop of war—manifesting in canon fire and the closeness of the enemy—makes for a stirring scene, which is no doubt the author’s intention. Electricity enters the picture alongside enthusiasm and spiritual fire. “Warrior souls” on the battlefield, “ignited” by the thought of an indivisible republic, are further “electrified” by the very “sight” of the Constitution. This arrival of this document signals, in a quasi-militaristic metaphor, “the triumph of liberty.” In a description of the “rising en masse” of the citizens of Langogne in Occitane from December 1793, another “sight” electrifies the souls of the army: “Fears seized the spirits, but patriotism taking over, the sight of danger electrified the souls so suddenly that all the fighters burned with desire and swore to exterminate the 86 Archives parlementaires, Tome 73, p. 72 (August 27, 1793). 124 common enemy.”87 In these examples, whether in the form of Convention of Constitution, legislative power electrifies the army, surpassing generals in authority. Far from the orderly and contained path along which it traveled before the revolution, martial electricity now stems from words, documents, and the presence of political emissaries; in theory holding sway over the soldiers’ souls, political electrification purportedly drives the French war effort. The new scientific vocabulary of electricity entered martial discourse as an expression of the special activating power that could make French power plausible in the face of all of Europe’s professional armies. Without some extra element, volunteers and peasants that had been requisitioned in waves by a distant central government seemed unlikely to hold out. But France’s revolutionary armies were composed of a new kind of soldier, and the electrification that this soldier experienced, which made him march to battle, adhered in the speeches of commissaries and representatives on mission, in the decrees of the Convention, in the phrase patrie en danger, and in the material fire, heat, and spirit of liberty, with all its physiological effects. Electrification plus universal conscription was supposed to make the new citizen army into a single-willed entity. In some cases, this concept came alive in the image of an enormous living Colossus, brought to “life” by electrification. In Snetlage’s dictionary, electricity creates a Colossus out of the People: “It was the necessity of mounting a defense that electrified the courage and the energy of the Roman People, multiplying its force a hundredfold, turning it into a Colossus.”88 In ancient Greece, 87 Archives parlementaires, Tome 81, p. 11 (December 6, 1793). 88 Snetlage, Nouveau Dictionnaire Français, 77. 125 Colossus meant either gigantic being or gigantic statue, as in the Colossus of Nero or the Colossus of Rhodes. In the same fashion, the Revolutions de Paris proposed a statue of a French Colossus, to be placed in threatening view of enemy camps. This statue features a sans-culottes embodiment of the people, roasting a much-smaller king over the flames, wielding a Herculean club.89 Fig. 13. “The People, king-eater. Colossal statue proposed by the journal Révolutions de Paris, to be placed at the most prominent locations at our borders.” 89 Lynn Hunt tracks the rise and decline of Hercules as a symbol of the revolutionary force of the sans- culottes. See Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, 20th Anniversary Edition (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984; 2004). 126 War rhetoric involved enemy Colossi. As we have seen, in his speech advocating war with Great Britain, Brissot painted a picture of an “English Colossus, more imposing than terrible,” as the last obstacle standing between France and the liberation of all of Europe.”90 In Erasmus Darwin’s epic poem, “The Economy of Vegetation,” the French Revolution is allegorized by the figure of a Colossus, awakened from centuries of feudal slumber. Just after the section on the American revolution in which “man electrized man,” Darwin narrates the spread of the electrifying “flame” as it reaches France: Long had the Giant-form on GALLIA’S plains Inglorious slept, unconscious of his chains; Round his large limbs were wound a thousand strings By the weak hands of Confessors and Kings; O'er his closed eyes a triple veil was bound, And steely rivets lock’d him to the ground; While stern Bastile with iron cage inthralls His folded limbs, and hems in marble walls. Touch’d by the patriot-flame, he rent amazed The flimsy bonds, and round and round him gazed; Starts up from earth, above the admiring throng Lifts his Colossal form, and towers along; High o’er his foes his hundred arms He rears, Plowshares his swords, and pruning hooks his spears; Calls to the Good and Brave with voice, that rolls 90 Archives parlementaires, Tome 58, p. 113-114 (February 1, 1793). 127 Like Heaven's own thunder round the echoing poles; Gives to the winds his banner broad unfurl’d, And gathers in its shade the living world!91 This “Colossal” “Giant-form” allegorizes the new social body of France at war, composed of the third estate only, with its symbolic “plowshares” and “pruning hooks,” now fashioned into weapons. The “patriot flame” here recalls the same flame that touched off the American Revolution a few lines earlier, through which “man electrized man.” This electrifying “flame” set the French Colossus on the march. The Colossus could be mobilized against enemies both internal or external. Describing the purge of the Girondins from the Convention, Joseph Fouché described the sections of Paris rising up, “transformed into an army. This formidable colossus is standing, he marches, he advances…traversing the Republic to exterminate this ferocious crusade that swore death to the people.”92 Here as elsewhere, electricity and allegorical Colossi distanced talk of war from the fact of the living bodies of citizen-soldiers, who bled and died in great numbers. As is well known, the famous Marseillaise contains the refrain, “may impure blood water our furrows.” But it was not only the impure blood of the enemy blood being shed in war. Sometimes, this mutual bloodletting was acknowledged. In a festival procession on February 18, 1794, in the town of Chatillon just south of Paris, a carriage went by carrying soldiers who had been wounded in a now two-year long war and stitched up 91 Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden. A Poem, in Two Parts. Part I. Containing The Economy of Vegetation. Part II. The Loves of the Plants, 60. 92 Joesph Fouché, Troyes, dept de l’Aube, June 29, 1794. Quoted in Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 101. 128 by surgeons. Across the front was a placard with the words, “Our blood will never cease to flow for la patrie.”93 The citizen-soldiers, electrified into a Colossus, were also human bodies which made a great sacrifice in fighting, a sacrifice which they had no choice but to make. War framed as salutary shock distanced and sanitized the bloody reality of war, making decisions resulting in the sacrifice of life all the easier. 93 Archives nationales, DXXXVIII3, “Extrait du procès verbal de la fête de l’inauguration du Temple de la Raison. Du 30 pluviose, an deux de la République.” 129 Fig. 14. A 1798 print by British caricaturist James Gillray calls the bluff the bluff of the French Colossus, whose limbs are hollow, a statue rather than a moving living being. In imitation of the Colossus of Rhodes, this Colossus stands astride the Mediterranean, blood-soaked toes on the Egyptian Pyramids, in reference to Napoleon’s conquest there. The disembodied British navy, not the Colossus, wields electricity from the clouds, delivering a shock which breaks the hollow statue apart at its joints. 130 Clausewitz and the Physics of War Engaged in war against revolutionary France and a French prisoner of war along with Prince August from 1806-1807, Carl von Clausewitz experienced French revolutionary warfare from the opposing side. Putting pen to paper years later between 1816 and 1818, after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, he drew upon elaborate metaphorical language borrowed from physics, mechanics and electromagnetism, to explain how war in theory translated into war in practice. The metaphor of discharge first appears early in On War, when Clausewitz introduces his thesis, that “war is an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of that force.” This thesis required elaboration: “War however, is not the action of a living force upon a lifeless mass (total nonresistance would be no war at all) but always the collision of two living forces.”94 War-as-force develops into a more complicated metaphorical physics involving not only inertia and friction, but also explosion, pulsation, energy and discharge: Its violence is not of the kind that explodes in a single discharge, but is the effect of forces that do not always develop in exactly the same manner or to the same degree. At times they will expand sufficiently to overcome the resistance of inertia or friction; at others they are too weak to have any effect. War is a pulsation of violence, variable in strength and therefore variable in the speed with which it explodes and discharges its energy.95 94 Clausewitz, On War, 77. 95 Clausewitz, On War, 87. 131 Clausewitz further develops this electrical metaphor of discharge in a chapter called “Absolute and Real War.” The chapter addresses the gap between the “pure concept of war” and the “concrete form” it assumes in the world. Most wars are like a flaring-up of mutual rage, when each party takes up arms in order to defend itself, to overawe its opponent, and occasionally deal him an actual blow. Generally it is not a case, in which two mutually destructive elements collide, but one of tension between two elements, separate for the time being, which discharge energy in discontinuous, minor shocks. But what exactly is this nonconducting medium, this barrier that prevents a full discharge? Why is it that the theoretical concept is not fulfilled in practice? The barrier in question is the vast array of factors, forces and conditions in national affairs that are affected by war…Logic comes to a stop in this labyrinth.96 Adopting a language of electrical metaphor, Clausewitz imagines war as a state of tension, discharged in small shocks. Another tension runs through the passage, that of resolving the question of how theoretical war—imagined as a once-and-for-all discharge of electricity—looks so different from actual war on the ground—imagined as a series of minor, discontinuous shocks. Logic also has a metaphorical counterpart in electrical shock, since logic “comes to a stop” in the nonconducting medium that Clausewitz is keen to describe in this chapter. Clausewitz makes it clear what he thinks of this in his concluding remark: “those men who habitually act, both in great and minor affairs, on particular dominating impressions of feelings rather than according to strict logic, are hardly aware of the confused, inconsistent, and ambiguous situation in which 96 Clausewitz, On War, 579. 132 they find themselves.”97 The theorist himself seeks to remedy the confusion created by this nonconducting medium. If war in theory is as clean and logical as an electric shock, a release of tension between two opposite charges, war in practice takes place immersed in a medium that prevents the shock from discharging. The physics of electricity, invoked analogically, helps Clausewitz conceptualize this difference. In creating this figure of speech, Clausewitz returns to a central theme in On War, the gap between ideal and reality. As a whole, On War emphasizes the “friction” of battle conditions that impede clarity and contribute to war’s “uncertainty.” Introducing this idea, he writes, “Friction is the only concept that corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper.”98 The complicated phrasing highlights that “friction” is a metaphorical shorthand for a composite medium, which scholars have called the “fog of war,” though Clausewitz himself did not use the exact phrase. In another extended metaphor, Clausewitz likens waging war to trying to move through “a resistant medium”; thus “a genuine theorist is like a swimming teacher.”99 Concluding the chapter on the “nature of war,” Clausewitz summarizes a theory of “general friction”, composed of “elements that coalesce to form the atmosphere of war, and turn it into a medium that impedes activity.”100 Thus the idea of the major, idealized shock versus the minor, actual shock, plays an important role in a broader, metaphorical ‘physics’ Clausewitz constructs, which is central to his conception of war. 97 Clausewitz, On War, 579. 98 Clausewitz, On War, 119. 99 Clausewitz, On War, 120. 100 Clausewitz, On War, 122. 133 For Clausewitz, complex conditions prevented a great shock, making warfare instead a series of small, incomplete shocks. But what did he draw upon for the idea that war was ideally a great shock? We can locate the origin of this electrical image, I argue, in French revolutionary electrical discourse. Brissot and other proponents of war as they argued for war against much of Europe in 1792-3. French revolutionaries’ favorite metaphor for what war would be like in the new, modern era found its way into Clausewitz’s theorizing. They imagined, as we have seen, a “great shock” required to discharge the highly charged state of an unjust, unequal, and unfree world. This concept of martial, revolutionary electricity found its way into how war was reconceptualized around the turn of the nineteenth century. As they called into being a new kind of war, revolutionaries constructed an ideal of electrified warfare. But this electrical concept of warfare, as Clausewitz was keen to point out, hardly matched reality on the battlefield. The medium of war in all its complexity, after all, was not an ideal conductor. Electricity powerfully shaped the way the French revolutionaries imagined the war they launched in Europe, a war which would last for decades, cost countless lives, and transform the continent. This reconceptualization in turn found its way into the figurative language Carl von Clausewitz drew upon to develop his theory of modern war. I argue that we can trace a direct line between French revolutionary metaphors of electrification and shock, and the metaphors adopted by Clausewitz, as well as the compiler of the Gottingen dictionary, as they described the novel aspects of French revolutionary warfare. Early on, electricity followed traditional hierarchies, passing from generals and officer corps to soldiers. But electricity was soon conscripted into 134 expansive notions of France’s liberatory destiny vis-à-vis the rest of the world. To wage war was to deliver a “shock” to the machine of the world, a metaphor which, in the hands of Brissot, encouraged a pre-emptive war against Austria, Prussia, and Great Britain. The “shock” idea spread through revolutionary politics, appearing at crucial moments, including that of the decision to try and execute the king. As commissaires from the center traversed France requisitioning troops and goods, they reported their actions in terms of electricity. To electrify was to transform citizens into soldiers. From its generative source in the Legislative Assembly, the Convention, and even the 1793 Constitution, military electricity flowed through the representatives of the people, to the people themselves, transforming them in to a Colossus of an army. Electricity represented the new kind of energy an army required, especially an army composed, for the first time, of every eligible citizen after the levée en masse of August 1793. It also shifted the focus, through a figure of speech rooted in health and life, from the deadliness of war. Rhetorically, electricity forged the citizen-soldier, empowered représentants en mission as they requisitioned troops and goods, and delivered, as the veteran officer d’Heran had it, that “great shock of civic electricity” which humanity’s happiness required. 135 136 CHAPTER 3 “MASTERS OF THE ELECTRICITY OF SOULS”: THE JACOBIN TERROR AND REVOLUTIONARY ELECTRIFICATION August 10, 1793. A year to the day after a Parisian crowd of sans-culottes had stormed the Tuileries palace, chasing the royal family to take refuge in the legislative assembly building next door, where the king cowered under a bench to save himself. On that day, the constitutional monarchy put in place by the revolutionary constitution of 1791 was overthrown. By the next month, a Republic had been born. By January the king had been tried and executed as citizen Louis Capet. Through the spring and summer of 1793 successive purges radicalized the Convention, the governing body set up in the constitutional lacuna left in the wake of August 10th. A year later, France had no king, and the Jacobins had taken the reins of the central government. And a year after this so- called second revolution, the anniversary of the insurrection was a festival day across France, celebrating this radical counterpart to the taking of the Bastille. In Paris, August 10, 1793, had been set as the date of the promulgation of a new Constitution, along with a declaration of rights far longer than the 1789 declaration, including social, economic, and subsistence rights. Replacing the 1791 constitutional monarchy with a Republic, the 1793 Jacobin constitution was the first in the modern world to include the election of a legislature by universal manhood suffrage. On August 10th, though it would never be enacted, the Constitution was duly unveiled, placed ceremoniously in a cedar ark, suspended above the Convention. An enormous procession wended its way through 137 Paris, and each of the eighty-three departments of France had sent a young patriot with a pike to the capital, in an echo of the 1790 fédérés. Eighty-three pikes were bound together in fasces, a symbol of unity and sans-culotte strength.1 Accounts of the Festival of Reunion, as it was officially called, crackle with rhetorical electricity. At Janville, south of Paris the August 10th ceremony “electrified our souls and overwhelmed our existence,” as the mayoral prosecutor wrote to the Convention.2 In Auxerre, the speech which crowned the ceremony was “shot through with blazing patriotism, and the energy with which it was given electrified all hearts.”3 And in the department of Maine-et-Loire, “the Marseillais hymn was sung with great republican energy. The divine couplet, ‘sacred love of the country,’ electrified the coldest souls, bellicose ardor was painted on every face, and the most intimate sentiments of fraternity, of the most perfect union, ended this unforgettable festival in the pomp of a free people.”4 One account, written by one Citizen Sirgant of Saint- Martin, tied the Festival of Reunion directly to the Festival of Federation celebrated in 1792: “This federation that we celebrated last year on July 14th, was confirmed on the unforgettable day of August 10; the explosion that took place in Paris, such as the day we breathe, electrified the spirit and the courage of the brave and loyal inhabitants of that great city.”5 1 The eighty-three-pike fasces of August 10th, 1793 is often opens histories of the Terror. See for example David Andress, The Terror: Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 194. See also William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 246. 2 Archives parlementaires, Tome 76, p. 391 (October 12, 1793). 3 Archives parlementaires, Tome 75, p. 278 (September 28, 1793). 4 Archives parlementaires, Tome 73, p. 345 (September 3, 1793). 5 Archives parlementaires, Tome 78, p. 576 (November 8, 1793). 138 In these examples of the “electrified” spirits and courage of Parisians we can see how far electrical language in 1793 had come from the “kind of electrification” Poyet imagined might take place, given the right architectural conditions, at the 1790 Fête de la Fédération. The verb électriser gained new meaning as the revolution radicalized. By August 1793, “to electrify” had become so readily understandable that it required no further clarification of the kind Poyet engaged in. As the account of Citizen Sirgant makes clear, however, the festive electrification of the Festival of Reunion is nonetheless conceptually consistent with the festive electrification of the Festival of Federation. Sirgant’s account binds a new, more straightforwardly figurative electrification to the original idea of federation, including familiar imagery of knots and chains. As we saw in earlier chapters, the most common electrical demonstration of the late-eighteenth century featured a circle of people, linked through clasped hands. A shock from a charged Leyden jar would be sent when the first and last members of the chain touched the top and bottom of the jar apparatus. Sirgant’s account recalls such experiments, and in an echo of Poyet, describes federation as the process of formation of one family, powerfully united in sentiment. “Federation,” writes Sirgant, is the knot that binds the moral with the physical, sentiment with strength; my brothers, make this knot indissoluble; form a fabric, a chain of minds, hearts, bodies, strengths, and courage; tie these relations; that mutual love, frankness, sincerity unite you sincerely! May 25 million individuals who form the French Republic make but one family, unified by the same interests and the same voices. What a bulwark, my brothers, to oppose your enemies. You will be invincible.6 6 Archives parlementaires, Tome 78, p. 576 (November 8, 1793). 139 This chapter analyzes the vocabulary of revolutionary electrification during the Jacobin Terror. Electricity, as the previous two chapters have established, was a novel political concept that worked on analogy to late-eighteenth century aethereal fluids. Political electrification was understood as a bodily experience by which political resistance and “perversity” of thought and sentiment might be overcome, as in the 1790 example that anchors the first chapter’s claims. The second chapter examines the rise of electrification as a way to conceptualize the new kind of war being waged by revolutionaries against the arrayed forces of the old regime. In this context, electrical language steps into a gulf between eighteenth-century ways of waging war and the novelty of the French revolutionary wars of the 1790s, which Carl von Clausewitz theorized as a “perfected” kind of war: the inception of an all-out people’s war. This new war required a new language, and it was furnished by the eighteenth century’s mysterious new science. In this chapter, I ask what the science of electricity in the late eighteenth century can illuminate about how political electricity and terror intertwine. Now often evoked, electricity in the fall of 1793 came easily to the pens of Jacobins in the metropole, radical curés in the provinces, soldiers stationed on every border, and représentants en mission alike. “Electrify our armies,” enjoin the volunteers of a battalion stationed in the department du Nord, writing to the Convention in September.7 “Patriotism,” proclaimed a Jacobin curé that same month, “will electrify all hearts.”8 Another report describes 7 Archives parlementaires, Tome 73, p. 376 (September 4, 1793). 8 Archives parlementaires, Tome 74, p. 88 (September 14, 1793). 140 Jacobin troops “electrified by that fire that animates the republican.”9 Around a hundred instances made their way into the minutes of the Convention between August 10th, 1793, the anniversary of the overthrow of the monarchy, and December of that year.10 Revolutionary electrification found an urgent, specific use in late summer and fall of 1793, as the uptick in frequency of electrical language indicates. The language of electrification described the process by which forces emanating from the radical Parisian center would ideally bring the rebels, the federalists, the refractory priests, and the recalcitrant conscripts of France’s eighty-three departments into line, by an inexorable, aethereal force of nature which acted upon souls and hearts. The federalist revolt reached a climax in July 1793, with cities including Nantes, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Lyon, and Toulon, as well as the entire region of the devout Vendee, erupting in open revolt against Parisian Jacobin control. Despite the eighty-three-pike fasces bound in Paris on August 10th, 1793, France did not seem “one and indivisible.” It is at this point in the revolution, I argue, that revolutionary “electricity” comes into its own as a figure of speech. In the process, it gained political urgency while losing its conceptual rootedness in natural philosophy. Electricity underwent a kind of conceptual flattening, becoming, strictly speaking, a metaphor. In the mouths of Jacobins speaking to other Jacobins, electrification translates inner revolutionary experience at a moment in which the truth and purity of one’s sentiments are paramount. Because of the onus placed on political speech as indicator of one’s sympathies during the period of the terror, the moment called particularly for language that could express the novelty and sincerity of 9 Archives parlementaires, Tome 74, p. 286 (September 4, 1793). 10 This is according to a search performed using the text files of the Archives parlementaires, Tomes 72- 82, generously provided by the Stanford / BnF digitization project team. 141 revolutionary feeling. And importantly, electrification fulfilled the Jacobins’ conceptual need for a force capable of ending the revolution’s civil war; a natural force with the power to circumvent resistant wills, and a force with which to bind the periphery to the radical center. The idea of electricity provided such a force, and the figure of electricity was instrumentalized countless times over the fall of 1793 to that end. The following chapter analyzes the electrical language of the period known as the Jacobin terror in terms that give a sense of electricity’s role in the pivotal revolutionary year of 1793-4. I argue that electrical language in the terror serves three main functions. Firstly, much of the electrical language of the terror directly describes the activities of the representants en mission, particularly those sent by decree in August of 1793 to quell a raging federalist revolt and enforce the levée en masse. These missions were meant essentially to convert the country to the revolutionary cause, and it was through the metaphor of electrification that provincial administrations assured the central government that the process was underway. Secondly and relatedly, electrical language in the Terror intervenes in fraught negotiations over religion, civic cults, and so-called dechristianization. The Jacobins of the Convention were famously torn between an atheistic Cult of Reason favored by Fouché and others, and Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being which retained a monotheistic God. Electrical language, the archival examples make clear, stepped into a conceptual void to express feeling and experience akin to religious experience. But religious experience was no longer expressible in the same terms. Moreover, it had been secularized, redirected toward the revolution, its tenets, emissaries, and representative bodies as sacred objects. The precipitous decline and near-disappearance of religio-electrical language in the spring 142 of 1794 may reflect a shift in Robespierre’s favor on the question of religion. If this is true, it indicates how deeply electricity intertwined with the Cult of Reason, republican atheism, and radical dechristianization. In its religious sense, electricity illuminates a changing notion of the relationship between inward sentiment and sacred object, at a moment when the contours of this relationship were being negotiated. Stones taken from the Bastille were in this context endowed with electrical power. Lastly, in its transformation from specialized natural-philosophical phenomenon to figure of speech, electricity also became about speech, and about silence. Electricity pointed to a particular aesthetic dimension of speech, i.e., the bodily cognition of revolutionary communication. While according to eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, written and spoken language operated in part through the rational capacity of its hearers or readers, electrifying speech hinged on physical presence and operated through the senses. Parallel to sublimity and terror, electrical speech pointed to an element of communication antecedent to reason. Electrification was also a silent process, hinging on assembly in the same physical space. It strikingly parallels some of the stranger aspects of Rousseau’s theory of the nondeliberative exercise of popular sovereignty. This final section analyzes electrifying speech and electrified silence, locating revolutionary electrification at the intersection between eighteenth century aethereal physics and eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. Terrorism 143 “There is no revolution without violence and terror,” wrote Arno Mayer in his comparative history of the French and Russian revolutions.11 The necessity of “terror” to revolutionary change has long been a point of contention which extends well beyond the confines of revolutionary scholarship. Borrowed from the language of the revolutionaries themselves, particularly Robespierre’s famous defense of revolutionary terror when combined with virtue: “virtue without which terror is murderous; terror without which virtue is powerless.”12 Marxian readings of the French Revolution in the twentieth century pointed to war and the precariousness of revolutionary gains to explain why the Jacobins made “terror” the “order of the day”, as the Convention declared on September 5th, 1793. At the Bicentennial of the Revolution in 1989, François Furet and others launched an influential reinterpretation of the Terror colored by their disillusionment with Soviet-style communism. Furet’s Penser la Révolution française interpreted the logic of the Revolution as a whole as leading inexorably to the Terror. The Terror in Furet’s reading had little to do with external pressures or the circumstances of revolutionary war against most of the monarchies of Europe.13 In the past decades, scholars have reconceptualized the terror and its function within the Revolution. In her 2003 book La Liberté ou la mort: Essai sur la Terreur et le terrorisme, Sophie Wahnich argued against prevailing Furetian condemnations of the Terror and of the Jacobin project. She stressed the necessity of the Terror for the 11 Arno J Mayer, The Furies: violence and terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4. 12 Maximilien Robespierre, “Discours sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention,” February 5, 1794, in Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres completes de Maximilien Robespierre, ed. Ernest Leroux (Paris: 1910). 13 François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). Published in English as Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 144 safeguarding of the revolutionary project of liberty and equality in the face of an entrenched legal feudalism long outpaced by social realities. The Jacobin Terror put a brake on popular violence; as Danton put it, “let us be terrible so the people don’t have to be.”14 Wahnich argues that the Jacobin inventors of terror were caught up in the logic of war, in which internal and external enemies could hardly be distinguished as threats to the revolutionary project. A series of popular uprisings that meted out a spontaneous, vengeful justice, above all the so-called September massacres in which crowds stormed prisons in Paris and killed the occupants, necessitated an authorized pressure valve of sorts, legitimizing this violence and preventing a dissolution of governance altogether. Ronald Schechter’s book, A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France, complements Wahnich’s reading. Schechter points out through close linguistic history in the mode of Reinhart Koselleck that in its eighteenth-century sense, the word “terror” had positive connotations and was thought of as salutary and purifying.15 When the Convention declared terror to be the “order of the day”, Schechter writes, they were “honoring a set of dangerous innovations with a venerable and reassuring name.”16 It was only after the fall of the Jacobins with the death of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, late July 1794, that terror took on its negative connotations. Post 9/11, terrorism has been racially othered and its Western genealogy repressed.17 14 Sophie Wahnich, La Liberté ou la mort: Essai sur la Terreur et le terrorisme (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003). Published in English translation as In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution, trans. David Fernbach (London and New York: Verso, 2012). 15 Ronald Schechter, A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 16 Schechter, A Genealogy of Terror, 196. 17 Schechter, A Genealogy of Terror, 5. 145 Recent scholarship calls the idea of “the Terror” as a distinct revolutionary period into question. In Terreur! La Révolution Française face à ses démons, Michel Biard and Marisa Linton argue against a capital-T Terror with identifiable beginning- and end-dates. Terror is, instead, a “phenomenon.” Drawing on the work of Tackett, Vovelle, and others, this scholarship traces a multi-causal emergence of a culture of political violence over the early years of the revolution. This political violence, however, was not restricted to the period of the Terror alone, which calls revolutionary periodization itself into question. The legal exceptionalism and repression that characterize the “Terror” began well before the creation of the revolutionary tribunal on March 10th, 1793 and extended beyond the death of Robespierre in 1794. It was, moreover, politically convenient to the Thermidorians to characterize the period of Jacobin control as a time of a particularly atrocious brand of political violence, for which they invented the word terrorisme as a distancing mechanism. With the aim of releasing the French Revolution from the ideologically weighted debates over this the state violence of 1793-4, the authors synthesize recent empirical studies to counter the idea that systematic terror was baked into the logic of the revolution from the beginning, instead emphasizing context and new perspectives. Drawing on Brown and Wahnich among others, this recent work historicizes and debunks the Thermidorian narrative of the period. Biard and Linton argue that terror was neither a sudden “thunderclap out of serene skies” nor the invention of one man, Robespierre, conveniently dead by late July 1794 and able to serve as scapegoat.18 Terror as emotion, this new analysis argues, in 18 Michel Biard and Marisa Linton, Terreur! La Révolution Française face à ses démons (Paris: Armand Colin, 2020), 84. Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015); Howard Brown, Ending the French Revolution: 146 fact fueled the Thermidorian narrative, as former “terrorists” scrambled to reframe themselves in a new, terrifying political atmosphere. Rather than diminishing terror in the revolutionary narrative, this new work of deconstructing “the Terror” in fact gives terror-as-emotion greater causal power and wider chronological range. Terror, the authors propose, is another face of fear. On the other side of terror is a kind of revolutionary exhilaration, a feeling of being “intensely alive,” which receives special emphasis in the authors’ characterization of the emotional palette of 1793-4.19 In the revolution, Wahnich argues, mortal fear stoked especially by the assassination of Marat translated into a desire for vengeance which threatened to overwhelm the revolutionary project. The Jacobins of the Convention attempted to channel popular vengeance through the legal and legislative apparatuses of the state. In other words, they pursued necessary vengeance, so the people didn’t have to. The following chapter reads political electrification alongside terror in 1793-4, tracking the language of electricity and electrification and pinpointing its function vis- a-vis a set of governmental tactics which historiography tells us were organized around the feeling of terror. What made electrification an attractive rhetorical device in this context? Electricity, like Schechter’s “terror,” was, according to late-eighteenth-century therapeutics, a salutary force, in the sense that shock—whether derived from terror, electricity, or both—was to some extent healthy. In a regime which tried to recreate society in the image of nature, what was good for the human body was also good for the social body. Particularly in France in the eighteenth century, knowledge of nature was Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). 19 Biard and Linton, Terreur! La Révolution Française face à ses démons, 54. 147 seen to be inextricably linked to morally inflected ideas about the social and the political; this logic influenced revolutionary elisions of bodily and political electrification.20 But electricity, unlike terror, was not, as Schechter puts it, “a venerable and reassuring name” at the time of the revolution. It was a neologism. Thus, more aptly than “terror,” electrification encapsulates what was distinctive about 1793-4. Terror may have been the “order of the day,” but the metaphor of electrification was an invention of this pivotal year of Jacobin power. Electrification represents an emotional experience with physical dimensions, in parallel to the threat of violence that fundamentally defines terror. If terror worked by killing few, but striking fear into the hearts of many, so electrification expressed a reverberating shock. In both cases, the possibility of violence becomes in itself a kind of violence. This terror induced by threat of violence has, in the context of the broader history of terrorism, has proven an effective “weapon of the weak.” This is true both for late eighteenth-century Jacobins, at the helm of a revolutionary state whose apparatuses of forceful control were strained to the breaking point by external and internal war, and for terrorists of the twenty-first century, who cannot hope to challenge the nuclear- equipped armies of Western powers in terms of military power, but nonetheless can effectively weaponize terror. Like electricity, terror is aesthetic in the sense that it is 20 For the overlapping logic of social and bodily economies, see Emma Spary, “Political, natural, and bodily economies,” in Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 178-196. 148 rooted in sensory, bodily cognition. Like electricity, and sublimity, terror stuns and silences, but also produces new consciousness.21 The scholarly deconstruction of the idea of “the Terror”, and the expanded chronology of the tactics of terrorism before and beyond the Jacobins leaves a lacuna in French revolutionary scholarship. It necessitates a new way of characterizing the Jacobin regime and the revolutionary period 1793-4, which was indisputably pivotal even if it is no longer clearly defined as “the Terror.” Electrification helps us out of this problem of a now nameless and unbounded but nonetheless crucial revolutionary moment. If a neat, chronologically bounded period called “the Terror” was indeed a Thermidorian myth, we need new ways to think about how the Convention governed in the crucial period from 1793 to 1794. Looking at contemporary language of “electrification” serves as a corrective for a historiographical overemphasis on the notion of “terror,” which has dominated interpretations of 1793-4 since 1795. Revolutionary electrification came into its own as a metaphor with distinct political meaning during precisely this period, as parliamentary archives attest. A new meaning of electricity crystalized over the summer and fall of 1793, such that it became almost a cliché, having migrated far from electrical science into political shorthand. I argue that Jacobin “electrification” came to express a specific transformation which was both internal and collective, and that this transformation was a major objective of the montagnards of the Convention, a means by which an embattled revolution could 21 See Claudia Verhoeven, “Epilogue: Shock and Awe, Terrorism and Theory,” in Carole Deitze and Claudia Verhoeven, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 149 survive. “Electrification” expressed for Jacobins what Thermidorians retrospectively called terrorisme. Electrification in 1793-4 ultimately expressed a fantasy of political power. In the absence of internal mechanisms of control beyond genuine patriotic conviction on the one hand and terror on the other, the fantasy of electrification imagines eliminating the “enemy within” by sending a revolutionary charge throughout the nation. Analogous to the electric fluid permeating the aether, this charge circumvents the will and compels on a physical, biological level. Retaining the original idea of the federative electrical chain, electrification in the terror passes between people, and at the same time expresses a highly interior conversion of the soul. Like terror, electricity regenerates and disciplines. As opposed to the finality of the guillotine, the language of political electrification imagines its subjects as mutable, susceptible to the “electric flame” of patriotism. As such it becomes a shorthand for a particular ideal of revolutionary transformation, at once interior and collective. Représentants en mission One feature of electrical language associated with the political violence of 1793- 4 is that electricity develops its transitive property, requiring a different subject to administer the electricity and an “electrified” object. In other words, unless it takes a reflexive grammatical form—s’electriser, or to electrify oneself—electrification is done to something or someone by something or someone. Souls, hearts, and people are the most commonly “electrified” objects. But who are the agents of electrification? In many cases, they are représentants en mission, Jacobin emissaries sent on “missions” from 150 center to periphery. During the first half of “year II”, through the summer and fall of 1793, representatives on mission were given free rein to revolutionize the countryside, and to carry out decrees from the Convention such as the levée en masse which drafted men into the revolutionary armies, and the General Maximum which set price limits on agricultural goods. The decentralized, anarchic, idiosyncratic local governance of these representatives characterizes what historiography has known as the Terror, before the Committee of Public Safety took firm control of proceedings on December 4, 1793, with the law of 14 frimaire. Known to historiography as “symbols of terror”, the representatives sent on mission in August of 1793 were verifiably Jacobins, or members of the “mountain”, the radical section of the Convention, whose ranks had been purged of more moderate Girondins that spring.22 These include the infamous emissaries responsible for the gruesome firing-squad executions at Lyon (Collot d’Herbois and Fouché, replacing Couthon, who couldn’t stomach the killings), and the mass drownings at Nantes (Carrier) from which the period gained its repressive and bloody reputation. In total, 425 représentants en mission were sent from 1793 to 1795.23 Under the pressure of a regime of terror, under the watchful eyes of the representatives themselves, local administrators wrote reports of the electrifying effects of the representatives on mission. Such reports, letters, and minutes flooded the Convention in the summer and fall of 1793. In these documents, Jacobin electrification appears in reverent tones as a kind of internal transformation undergone by locals, 22 Michel Biard, “Les pouvoirs des représentants en mission (1793-1795)”, Annales historiques de la Révolution française No. 113 (Janvier-mars 1998), 3. 23 Michel Biard, Missionnaires de la République. Les représentants du peuple en mission (1793-1795) (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 2002). Annexe no. 1. 151 whether caused by the speeches, actions, or mere presence of a representative from the Mountain. Local administrators were at pains to portray Jacobin emissaries as successful in their missions. Many reports invite the Convention to prolong a mission, or to let a representative stay “at his post” to continue his work. One report from Bordeaux reads: “Stay at your post...do not abandon us until the Revolution is finished at Bordeaux. Know that your presence is absolutely necessary to us; continue to electrify our souls, bring us to the height of circumstances, and render us if possible worthy of the brave Parisians.”24 Whether or not reports sent to the Convention during this time could reasonably have invited the Convention to remove a representative or not, the interest of the chapter lies in the electrical language they chose to capture what the Jacobins sent from Paris were meant to be doing. Within the highly constrained genre in which we find it, electricity has become easily comprehensible as a signal of Jacobin effectiveness. Representant on mission Jacques Garnier de Saintes, sent on September 17, 1793, with another representative, Le Charpentier, to the western coastal region of La Manche to enact the levée en masse, was in the town of Cherbourg on the day of a festival of reunion given by the Société Populaire de Cherbourg. Festival minutes describe Garnier’s impromptu speechmaking: Garnier, representative of the people, having announced by an imposing gesture that he also wanted to speak to the people, calm was reestablished; then taking the hands of the mayor of Cherbourg and of the old man from the countryside, and placing them one in the other, he himself felt the sensation that the 24 Archives parlementaires, Tome 81, p. 110 (December 8, 1793). 152 movement had produced in the assembly, and taking the tone of a legislator, he described in fiery terms the blackness of the enemies of the country and of humanity… Oh! Who could retrace here all the sublimity of his discourse: those of you who weren’t there, it is lost for you, it is only written in your heart. But those of you who experienced it, those of you who heard it, those of you whom he electrified, I saw you cry with tenderness.25 By this description, the electrifying effect of Garnier’s speech starts not with his words but with his action, taking the hand of the mayor and of an old man from the countryside and bringing them together. This joining of hands—recalling the Leyden Jar demonstration—produces a “sensation,” which Garnier himself also feels, and which prompts him to speak, taking the “tone of a legislator.” The report concludes by contrasting those who were there and who felt the same sensation as Garnier, and those who were not there and cannot access the experience. The former were “electrified”, the latter not, though the discourse may be “written on [their] hearts.” For those who were not there, the report declares, “it is lost for you.” Garnier’s electrification, achieved through a literal joining of hands of representatives of city and country, could only be experienced in person. In this example, the natural philosophical apparatus with which we are familiar from earlier years of the revolution remains intact, complete with hand- holding, collective sensation, and the significance of being in the same physical space. Electricity, or the idea that those present were “electrified,” meanwhile, requires no additional explanation. The notion of a subtle aether literally circulating in the room, the source of powerful sensations in the bodies of those joining hands and hearing the 25 Archives parlementaires, Tome 76, p. 231 (October 8, 1793). 153 discourse still links literal electricity to revolutionary electrification—otherwise, why wouldn’t someone who merely read the discourse be “electrified” too? When Garnier’s colleague, Montagnard deputy Jean-Baptiste Le Carpentier arrived in the town of Valognes in the department of la Manche on October 6, 1793, a civic festival was held in his honor. For Le Carpentier, it was a triumphant return to the department he represented: “The pure principles of Citizen Le Carpentier, before his nomination for the Convention, secured the confidence of his fellow citizens,” read the minutes, “but the part he took in the glorious work there brought it to the next level, and everyone was electrified by patriotic fire to hear him speak in the name of the people and for the people.”26 Le Carpentier’s electrifying presence is again mentioned in the same minutes: “The representative of the people, returning to Valognes, electrified the citizens gathered in great numbers in the church of this city, where, the day before, friends of the Constitution had met. A proposed renewal of the union between city and country was done as soon as it had been agreed upon: the execution was adjourned no later than the following day.”27 Here we see a concrete result of Le Carpentier’s mastery of the so-called electricity of souls. Directly following on his return to Valognes and his gathering of the people together, local authorities renewed the link between their town and the country at large. This process might have been described in any number of ways. But in October 1793 there was a new vocabulary for precisely this, encompassing its specific, Jacobin connotations—he had “electrified” the people; and they were “electrified by patriotic fire.” That the minutes repeat the electrical image twice testifies 26 Archives parlementaires, Tome 76, p. 620 (October 16, 1793). 27 Archives parlementaires, Tome 76, p. 620 (October 16, 1793). 154 to the specificity of what Le Carpentier had done. That both Garnier and Le Carpentier were described in such terms perhaps indicates that the term was particularly familiar in la Manche, where both representatives on mission had been sent. “Electrification” expressed what missions from the Mountain to the provinces were meant to achieve cognitively and on the level of sentiment. Electrification by way of eloquence and virtue: this was the signal by which correspondence from the provinces indicated that a représentant en mission had done his work. The popular society of Dourdan, a town close to Paris, wrote to invite the Convention in November “to prolong the mission of representative Coutrier, so that he can electrify those towns he has not yet had time to travel through.”28 But at the same time, missions also had more practical war-related aims of requisitioning goods and subsistence for the army, as well as enforcing the levée en masse of August 23, 1793, which conscripted able-bodied men ages 18 to 25 to fight in France’s revolutionary wars. Reports attest to the intertwined nature of the two; revolutionary sentiment alongside military requisitioning of goods and people. Being able to harness the “electricity of souls,” as one letter put it, was behind the more practical accomplishment of stripping the small town of Gannet, near Lyon, of all its precious metals. “As your colleague the brave Fouché of Nantes ordered,” wrote the surveillance committee of the town of Gannat in the central Rhone- Alps region, near Lyon, “there will soon be neither gold nor silver left, everyone rushes to make their offerings to the patrie...if we do not send you the gold and silver we’ve found in the churches, it’s so as not to multiply shipments. We will send them to the central committee of the department, which will add them to the wagons which your 28 Archives parlementaires, Tome 79, p. 540 (November 20, 1793). 155 colleague Fouché, this great master of the electricity of souls, has ordered.”29 Joseph Fouché, famous for his role in the suppression of Lyon’s rebellion, here gives the orders, dispatching a mission to take from Gannat whatever could be of use to the patrie. But he does so, in the framing of the report, based on his authority, not as a representative, but as a “master of the electricity of souls.” “After having electrified souls,” reads another report from Carcassonne, “the emissaries will collect, on the part of the wealthy farmers and manufacturers, the tithe of their herds, their wines, their fodder, and their fabrics.”30 In both examples, representatives compelled through the particular medium of souls’ electricity, and through this powerful means, achieved the practical measures for which they had been sent. Electrification often precedes revolutionary transformation. Not only does a representative achieve practical aims through his mastery of electricity; electrification changes souls beyond recognition, welding them to the revolutionary project. According to an ecstatic report written to the Convention from the Popular Society of Provins, a town near Paris, found itself so electrified by contact with the city and the speeches of its representative, that it was utterly transformed, and might be mistaken for a Parisian section: O Fathers of the Patrie, if only you were witness to our happiness! With what shudders of joy you would contemplate your creation! The blazing discourses of the representative and of all good Parisians, whom we want to hold tight in our arms forever, have electrified souls to the point where Provins is no longer 29 Archives parlementaires, Tome 80, p. 97 (November 25, 1793). 30 Archives parlementaires, Tome 81, p. 346 (December 12, 1793). 156 recognizable, and that you would think you were in the middle of one of the forty-eight sections of that city, too long prone to the most atrocious calumny. Electrification makes the outskirts feel like Paris itself; it remakes them in the true revolutionary mold, and the transformation is shot through with ecstatic emotions. The letter continues: the “triple aristocracy” of the rich, the nobles, and the priests defeated, the suspects rounded up, “perverse” former administrators dismissed, farmers forced to turn their graineries over to the use of the nation, and last but not least the perfect unity and fraternity of all, These are the fruits of the fecund Mountain, these are the benefits of Parisians among us. Peace, peace will crown these illustrious works; that the Mountain may never cease to throw its lightning bolts; may the revolutionary army bring national vengeance across the surface of France.31 The administration of the department of Cher in the center of France made another such glowing report which arrived at the Convention in mid-October of 1793. Jacques Léonard Laplanche, a montagnard representing Nieve, was sent to the neighboring departments of Cher and Loiret on August 23, 1793 by decree. “In a week,” reported the local administration, “he electrified and reanimated the public spirit of the hearth with his persuasive eloquence and his republican virtues. His presence produced in the public spirit of the department the kind of effect a few drops of a fortifying drink has on the human body.” “The department of Cher was already located on the mountain of liberty,” the administrators concluded, “Laplanche brought it to the very summit, 31 Archives parlementaires, Tome 77, p. 342 (October 20, 1793). 157 never again to descend.”32 Later in October, Laplanche was redeployed to Calvados on the northwestern border, on what would surely be tougher mission, to a borderland resistant to the levée en masse, likely on the strength of reports from Cher. Electricity here is paired with reanimation, in the sense of the revitalizing effects a few drops of some heady liquid would have, bringing a weary body back to life. The inclusion of the second figure indicates the novel abstraction of electricity. The administrators of Cher turned to a much more familiar bodily experience, the feeling of taking a sip of a strong drink, perhaps to get the point across more viscerally, as if the drafters of the report themselves looked for a way to understand the new idea of electricity. In cases such as this, the electrification enacted by Jacobin representatives on mission called upon all the suggestive and mysterious power of the late-eighteenth- century phenomenon of electricity. Dartigoeyte, a representative of Landes in the Convention, was sent through late summer and fall to le Gers, Les Landes, Haute- Pyrenees, and Basses-Pyrenees, where by his “civic preaching,” he “had electrified all minds and drawn together all hearts,” according to one description.33 In December, the Convention received a letter which the legislative minutes summed up: “The members of the popular society of Ile-Jourdain are pleased to have representative Dartigoeyte among them.” But this gloss did not capture the vivid description the Société Populaire gave of the electrical effects of Dartigoeyte’s presence. It is worth quoting at length to capture the full drama of the report: 32 Archives parlementaires, Tome 76, p. 573 (October 15, 1793). 33 Archives parlementaires, Tome 80, p. 377 (November 30, 1793). 158 Citizen legislator, we come from having just been electrified by a rock from the holy Mountain, foaming with civility and the burning heat with which you impregnated it. Like globes of fire vomited by volcanos burning from afar and bringing everything with them in their wake, thus Dartigoeyte, emerging from your womb, ignites and sans-culotte-izes all he encounters in his steps...The apostolate of your colleague, citizen legislators, produced in this city the most salutary shock. The reign of sans-culottes consolidates itself and grows in a manner difficult to describe; aristocracy is nothing but a hideous, dry skeleton, and dying fanaticism awaits your administration of the coup de grace, to put it out of the misery of its agonized convulsions. Dartigoeyte’s presence would still have produced good effects in these parts. His reminder was for us a lightning strike, love at first sight, but the wisdom of your decrees taught us for a long time to forbid ourselves any reflection. However if the circumstances ever cause you, saviors of the patrie, to send a representative of the people to us, we ask in the name of public interest that you entrust this mission again to Dartigoeyte; it should be his by the confidence he enjoys among us and by the miracles he has worked here. (26 signatures follow).34 The popular society’s central request is to send Dartigoeyte back, should the Convention decide to send another representative through the small southern town. But the imagery here is so vivid it almost seems to be the real point of the letter. Electricity appears in three separate forms. First, the society itself is “electrified” by Dartigoeyte, likened to a rock from the volcanic Mountain of the Jacobins in the Convention. Second, the 34 Archives parlementaires, Tome 80, p. 657 (December 5, 1793). 159 presence of the representative produces a “salutary shock,” an image derived from a medical-electrical repertoire. What does this shock achieve? Two mysterious effects: it convulses the social body of aristocracy and turns it into a “hideous, dry skeleton.” Meanwhile another social body forms, as the sans-culottes consolidate and grow. Like targeted radiation, Dartigoeyte’s electric shock shrivels and kills the bad while breathing new life into the good within the body politic, in a manner even the vivid imagination of the writer of this letter finds difficult to describe. Painful but necessary, this medico- electrical operation regenerates the provincial town. The third instance of electrical language in the letter is the lightning strike of falling in love, by which the society expresses the cognitive effects of Dartigoeyte’s arrival. This lightning strike, the rest of the sentence suggests, circumvents thoughtful consideration in favor of instantaneous, overwhelming, emotional response. The Convention itself, the letter continues, had long ago taught society how to succumb to the lightning strike without reflection. If this sounds counterintuitive to our ears as a compliment, it is also telling that the proper role for the public to play here is a passive, receptive one, akin to falling in love, or being struck by lightning. Like the aesthetic sublime developed by theorists over the eighteenth century, Jacobin electricity circumvented though altogether, operating instead directly on the sentiments via an electrifying agent. These three instances of electricity—the popular society “electrified” by the volcanic rock of the representative on mission, the “salutary shock”, and the lightning strike—reiterate without repeating the electrical image. Each instance folds in a new aspect to the cognitive revolutionary experience as expressed in the electrical metaphor. 160 As Mary Ashburn Miller argues, the Jacobin Mountain as erupting volcano became a rhetorical trope during the “Terror.” It expressed the overflow of revolutionary violence metaphorically as a natural force. Total destruction, by volcano as well as by levelling lightning, was necessary for regeneration. Figuring this destruction metaphorically as an inevitable natural disaster, like a lightning strike or a volcanic eruption, rhetorically justified state terror and violence, making it seem an inevitable, unstoppable, and cosmically necessary process, the representatives no longer responsible agents but themselves swept along in events over which they had no control.35 In the passage above, a rock from this volcanic mountain lands upon Île- Jourdain in the form of representative Dartingoeyte, as if of its own accord. “O Mountain,” wrote the Société Populaire of Dorât, west of Lyon, “Electrify yourself! [Electrise-toi!] Make the lightning of your energy explode and millions of rocks will roll over the heads of the tyrants.” The letter imagined both electrification and volcano, combined in the Jacobin Mountain. Its electric destruction purified the atmosphere around it: “May the pure air we breathe around you chase away the exhalations from the swamp.”36 Such visions built upon electrical theories of the eighteenth century, in which electricity, atmosphere, volcanoes, earthquakes, and bodily illness were intimately connected. In this vision, (metaphoric) volcanic eruption was the result of electrification. When the Mountain “electrified itself,” it exploded in lava and lightning against the enemy. 35 Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789-1794 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 36 Archives nationales C 281, dossier 775 (December 1793). 161 Fig. 15. A 1793 print, in which the outlines of the Jacobin Mountain are just visible behind the smoke and lightning issuing from around the tablets, which read “rights of man” and “Constitution of 1793.” The caption reads, “The Republican Constitution, like the tablets of Moses, emerges from the heart of the Mountain, in the midst of lightning.” 162 Local authorities described the transformative effects of representatives Rovère and Poultier in the Bouches-du-Rhône, a department on the southern Mediterranean coast: “Representatives,” they write, “we are not the same men who once occupied the role of magistrates of the people. The sojourn Rovère and Poultier made in this city has completely changed the face of things, their presence electrified the souls of patriots and gave them their first energy.”37 Poultier, a Jacobin representative from the department of Nord had accompanied Rovère, the Bouches-du-Rhône’s own Jacobin deputy, on a well-funded mission to retake the southern department, rocked by rebellion in Marseille and treason—collusion with the British navy—in Toulon. If administrators here were “not the same men”, it may have been that they were inwardly transformed. But the electricity of souls only went so far. It is perhaps equally likely that they were literally different people, while former administrations had gone to the guillotine. Reverent tones characterize these reports from the mouth of the Rhone, an area rife with what the Conventionals called federalism. Marseilles and Lyon were already in open revolt when the port city of Toulon became another center of resistance on the Mediterranean border, when Jacobins who had been in power since the summer of 1792 were overthrown. On August 23, the same day as the levée en masse and the deployment of a new batch of representatives on mission to enact it, the sections of Toulon proclaimed Louis XVII king of France, in exchange for the protection of the British navy under Admiral Hood. The sections of Toulon had committed treason. The port city was besieged for three and a half months until December 17th, when a land campaign led by none other than the young captain Napoleon Bonaparte overtook the hills 37 Archives parlementaires, Tome 77, p. 385 (October 22, 1793). 163 surrounding the city and forced Hood to abandon his position.38 It is against this background that administrators in the Bouches-du-Rhône write of the representative’s electrifying power over the department, and of the complete overhaul they enacted. Electricity appears here as the antidote to federalism, administered by those Jacobin emissaries sent to end a civil war by all means necessary. Lyon was a special case. Over the course of the spring of 1793, Jacobin clubs and societies under the leadership of Joseph Chalier had rounded up royalists in the city and made arrests, against the municipal authorities and the local legislator, which rose against him and had him executed in July, with four blows of a blunt guillotine. Having made martyrs of their Jacobin leaders, Lyon, France’s second largest city, was in revolt against the progress of the revolution and posed a dangerous threat from the very center of the hexagon. In the first few days of October, the city which had held out against revolutionary armies through months of siege and cannonfire finally surrendered. The formal surrender was made to Couthon, a représentant en mission. On October 12, the Committee of Public Safety ordered the city renamed Ville-Affranchie, the very name Lyon destroyed. But in late October, there was more work to be done. Couthon and his colleagues wrote, “the Lyonnais are not yet friends of the Republic.” There was a need for “regeneration” in the fallen city by a new Jacobin mission from Paris. The Committee of Public Safety responded: As for a mission of citizens to electrify this country which is absolutely still in a counter-revolutionary stupor...These missionaries will be sent by the society of Jacobins, they will be chosen by the most ardent patriots. Further, we need for 38 Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, 254. 164 this city, which is not yet subdued, representatives for whom a firm and vigorous hand assures on the one hand, the execution of the laws, on the other surveils and protects the judicial commission. The Committee of Public Safety, though already reduced to a few members, believes it can send from within its ranks Collot-d’Herbois, and continue to send Montaut and Fouché (of Nantes), who is now at Nièvre. Because the current mission is only intermediary, it has begun the movement that others will carry out.39 Thus in November, Couthon was returned, his approach deemed too conciliatory, and not up to the enormity of the task required at Lyon. The former actor Collot-d’Herbois and ardent dechristianizer Joseph Fouché, whom we met earlier as the “great master of the electricity of souls”, took over the project of electrification at Ville-Affranchie. The new representatives on mission found the guillotine insufficiently speedy given the sheer number of executions to be carried out, though blood ran in the streets from the effort. In early December, the condemned were lined up and shot with cannon fire into open graves. By spring of 1794, 1,880 had been sentenced to execution without trial.40 Electricity here, in the rhetoric of Parisian Jacobins looking toward Lyon, is meant to awaken a countryside from its “counter-revolutionary stupor”. But the electrifying agents sent on this mission do not speechify, nor do they awaken patriotic fires in the hearts and souls of the people of la Ville-Affranchie. They carry out executions on a staggering level. Revolutionary electricity here takes on its terroristic aspect. If, according to the Jacobins of the Convention, the upper Rhone valley would be 39 Archives parlementaires, Tome 78, p. 52 (October 30, 1793). 40 Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, 254. 165 electrified by the example made of its rebel city, that electricity is to be found in the reverberation of terror’s violence, the kind of electrical inner experience in which terror is edged with awe. Dechristianization Lyon was not the only town to lose its name in the process of electrification. Toulon was renamed Port-de-la-Montagne. But towns across France wrote to the convention asking to be allowed to relinquish former names that were too weighted by the past. The town of Ris, named for a marquis, asked to be renamed Bourg-Brutus, evoking a more ancient, republican past. The idea had come from the electrical effects of the name itself: Ready to depart for combat, a young republican, son of our schoolmaster, spoke to us of Brutus; at that sublime name, our hearts were electrified. His image, his republican virtues penetrated us with respect; inspired by the example of this hero, we have quickly replaced Saint Blaise with Brutus as our patron. At the foot of his statue, erected in our public square, our children learn to become republicans. Our patriarchs, on his furrowed brow, read their duties. In his eyes, our warrior youths gather that energy that makes the tyrant tremble... All of Rome is in our neighborhood...We ask if it pleases, that the neighborhood of Ris, district of Corbeil, department of Seine-et-Oise, may call itself Bourg-Brutus.41 In Tournan, near Paris, similar language linked electricity and a name-change: “We ask... that to the name Tournan be added “Union”, which we have adopted. We work to 41 Archives parlementaires, Tome 78, p. 83 (October 31, 1793). 166 electrify the rest of the spirits which fanaticism has misled.”42 The popular society of Tournan-Union, the petitioners hoped, would become a “magnet” to attract all good republican citizens. The town of Vagirard likewise asked to be renamed after Jean- Jacques Rousseau, recounting how the “decrees of the Holy Mountain...electrified all spirits, and soon, Vagirard regenerated itself, fanaticism making way for purest civic spirit.”43 The name changes, explained by way of electrification, were part and parcel of the cultural regeneration necessary to the ultimate success of the revolution. Renaming was one powerful marker of regeneration; dechristianization was another. A rapid stripping down and destruction of all vestiges of old-regime Catholicism, dechristianization reached its fever pitch in October, November and December of 1793, between the establishment of the atheistic “cult of reason,” and the backtracking of deists like Robespierre in late December 1793, favoring a monotheistic “cult of the Supreme Being.” The fall of 1793, precisely those months in which the frequency of electrical vocabulary spiked in the parliamentary archives, also bore witness to religious upheaval and transformation. Across the country the pendulum swung from counterrevolutionary catholicism to atheism to deism. The representative on mission and “master of the electricity of souls” Fouché was again decisive in this process. Sent to central France from the Vendee in 1793, before reaching Lyon, Fouché took it upon himself to launch a kind of civic religion, inaugurating a “Feast of Brutus” on the autumnal equinox. On October 5th, the Convention adopted a new republican calendar, back-dating Year 1 to September 22, 1792, the day France had become a 42 Archives parlementaires, Tome 78, p. 178 (November 2, 1793). 43 Archives parlementaires, Tome 79, p. 413 (November 18, 1793). 167 republic. Each month was given a new name devised by the poet and playwright Fabre d’Eglantine, who constructed neologisms for each of twelve months, each 30 days long: Vendémiaire, beginning September 22nd, Brumaire, Frimaire; Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse for winter; Germinal, Floréal, Prairial for spring; and Messidor, Thermidor, and Fructidor for summer. Within each month, time was restructured decimally, with ten days per décade, ten hours per day, each hour 100 minutes, each minute into 100 seconds. Reflective of the novelty of the new era, the new names and new decimally- divided time seem designed to reflect the profundity of the transformation undergone, a transformation which had occurred, not in nature itself, but in the way the French people made sense of it. The revolutionary campaign to eradicate ‘unnatural’ priestly celibacy was a powerful element of dechristianization especially championed by Fouché, himself a former priest. Consequently, the marriages of former priests, monks, and curés became the focal points of a new kind of revolutionary festival. Priestly marriages were reported in electrical terms. For the Republican Society of Saint-Aignan in the Dordogne region, south-central France (the town’s name notwithstanding) the marriage of a local pastor was “further proof that the Revolution spreads its empire over the souls of honest folk.” The newly-wed pastor administered to 696 souls in the town of Mareuil. The letter tells of how the neighboring Republican Society sent four of its members, uninvited, to the wedding ceremony. The pastor “responded with dignity and wrote a letter which paints his republican disposition.” The patriotic wedding-crashers were even “invited to stay at the wedding banquet,” where “a humble meal was served, joy and decency presided over it.” The Republican Society describes the pastor as having exchanged his religious 168 commitment to celibacy “that priestly egoism had rooted” for his natural right to a spouse: “As a true philosopher, he took back the right that nature grants in taking a companion.” The Republican Society concludes: “May the example of this minister electrify all good priests.”44 The conclusion to this report speaks to the aims of the Republican Society in attending the wedding. They viewed the pastor’s marriage in a town in the Dordogne in terms of its electrifying potential. By writing to the Convention, the Republican Society amplified the virtual attendance of this wedding to the nation itself, the broadcast described as an electrifying process well before the advent of electrical broadcasting. In another example, a former monk recounts the electrical effects of his reverse conversion. “Twenty-one years of captivity under an episcopal tyranny, and thirty-seven of the absurd monastic profession. Need there be more to convince me of the excellence of the Revolution, to electrify my entire being and to bless a thousand times the happy moment when, by your doing, the august title of child of the patrie and defender of the Republic was conferred upon me, when my wife and I swore to defend these sacred interests to the death?”45 For this former monk turned public functionary, writing from Champigny in what are now the eastern suburbs of Paris, the reverse conversion after so many long years, and the new calling given him by the revolution electrified his whole being. Given the somewhat rambling nature of the discourse, the array of standard images and declaration, one gets the sense that the electrification of one’s whole being, far from being fantastical or a particularly poetic image, had become a standard way to 44 Archives parlementaires, Tome 79, p. 4 (November 11, 1793). 45 Archives parlementaires, Tome 78, p. 79 (October 31, 1793). 169 indicate this particular transformation from the celibate priesthood and monastic life to a new, republican vocation. Over the fall of 1793, electrification expressed something akin to religious conversion, albeit a conversion that abjured religion itself. Representative Carrier wrote from Nantes in November 1793 of the “regeneration” of the city administration in terms that combine enlightenment and electrification. With trusted commissaires hard at work in Nantes, “the apostolate of Reason enlightening, electrifying all spirits, raises them to the level of the Revolution: prejudices, superstition, fanaticism, all dissipates before the torch of philosophy.”46 Enlightenment and electrification combine in the figure of the “torch.” Similar figures of speech emanated from other parts of the country. “Ever since the torch of philosophy lit the horizon of France,” wrote the commune of Villiers-le-Bel in central France, as they offered up leather and silver goods for the support of the revolutionary armies, “ever since the sacred love of liberty and equality electrified our souls, we have boldly overcome the prejudices of childhood and we have recognized at last that the Supreme Being engraved in all our hearts the principles of true religion, that is to say, natural law—innate principles within us which have no need for an outside religion.”47 Electrifying love awakened the people to a natural, internal law, such that they could do away with organized religion altogether. The popular society of the tiny town of Provins to the southeast of Paris described an electrical process of conversion to revolutionary principles. Gathering in the public square, the people of Provins, “abjuring the errors of fanatical priests,” 46 Archives parlementaires, Tome 80, p. 290 (November 28, 1793). 47 Archives parlementaires, Tome 79, p. 327 (November 16, 1793). 170 declared through the organ of the popular society that they “recognize only the God of the free and no longer want priests, which they view as useless and dangerous beings.” Guided by “feelings which are no longer the fruit of fanaticism but the feelings of purest republicanism, [the people of Provins] will march with great strides along the straight line of principles.” “Electrified by the presence of Rousselin,” the national commissioner at the neighboring town of Troyes, the letter continued, “[the people of Provins] swore hatred to tyrants, war against despots, and complete submission to the decrees of the national Convention.”48 Through electrical intervention, the town converted. Not a représentant en mission this time, but a public functionary who seems to have acted much like a représentant en mission would as he passed between Paris and Troyes, stopping at the small town of Provins along the way and leaving reports of a revolutionary transformation in his wake. Rousselin, however, was apparently not sufficiently electrifying to save himself from being accused of moderation and imprisoned until Thermidor. As part of mass dechristianization, church bells were taken down and melted to serve as materials in the manufacture of weaponry in the ongoing war. This kind of dechristianization involved a material transformation of erstwhile markers of old- regime time in French towns and villages into weapons of war. In Pas-de-Calais at the northernmost tip of France, a report sent to the convention describes the pleasure of witnessing the brass church bells brought down for the foundry: It was a pleasure to see brought down from the belltowers the hanging bells which were found there; under the reign of fanaticism, they served to stun men; 48 Archives parlementaires, Tome 79, p. 133 (November 13, 1793). 171 under the reign of reason, they will serve to defeat tyrants, great enemies of the human race...The administrators of this district, incorrigible Republicans, assure you through my pen, that, always electrified by the patriotic fire that erupts from the mountain of the Convention, they will serve the people to their dying breath.49 The two cognitive effects described here—the bells that “stun” and the patriotic fire that electrifies—sets patriotic feelings in stark contrast to the cognitive effects of the sound of the church bell. Being stunned into inaction, stationary, unthinking is contrasted to electrifying eruption, the energetic defeat of tyrants, and the dramatic invocation of the dying breaths of the “incorrigible” republican administrators. There is no bittersweetness in the transformation, only a detached pleasure in watching the bells come down. Through dechristianization, through electrification, the material brass of the church bell loses its former shape and consequently its power to “stun”, exchanging that function for the far more kinetic, revolutionary power of dealing death to tyranny. In this context of dechristianization, stones taken from the original Bastille took on a new status as sacred objects. As such, they also had electrifying power. Pierre- François Palloy, one of the most successful building contractors in Paris, had been on site when the Bastille was taken – by his own account published in 1791, he had been one of the first to rush into the fortress’s inner courtyard. Palloy played a central role in the demolition of the building, and his purposeful recasting of its stones as patriotic relics. “It did not suffice for me to have participated in the destruction of this fortress’s walls, I had the desire to immortalize the memory of its terror,” he wrote in a letter in 49 Archives parlementaires, Tome 82, p. 7 (December 20, 1793). 172 1790.50 In a kind of second taking of the Bastille, days before the municipal government’s retroactive sanctioning of the act, Parisian crowds mixed with workers employed by Palloy to dismantle Bastille. The mayor, Jean-Sylvain Bailly sanctioned the demolition retroactively, to “bring it under authority, so that a blind multitude does not accustom itself to usurping and exercising that authority.”51 It seemed that Palloy had control over the rubble once the demolition was done. 50 Pierre-François Palloy, “Lettre au Conseil général du Calvados,” 26 Oct 1790. Quoted in Hans- Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom, trans. Norbert Schürer (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 118. 51 Jean Sylvain Bailly, Mémoires d’un témoin, vol. 2, (Berville and Barriere, 1821-22), 46. 173 Fig. 16. One of Palloy’s Bastille stones, which reads, “This stone comes from the cells of the Bastille. Given to the District of _____ by Patriot Palloy on July 14th, 1790.” Musée de la Révolution Française, Domaine de Vizille. 174 Palloy took it upon himself to distribute the stones of the Bastille across the nation. The stones arrived in towns across France, in the metropole and overseas, and were installed as monuments, accompanies by fanfare and speechmaking. He sent them at his own expense, via “Apostles of Freedom,” to every French department, and eventually to each of 544 French districts, including overseas to Saint Domingue and Guadeloupe. One of these “apostles” by the name of Woillez, arrived in the alpine department of Mont-Blanc in March 1793. He carried with him a letter signed “your compatriot and brother in arms, republican Palloy, patriot,” in which Palloy explained that the purpose of this gift of “debris” from the old regime was “to electrify the souls that are still impervious to the French Revolution.”52 The stone was installed with Woillez representing Palloy as master of ceremonies. In a rousing speech, he described the march of little Bastilles, distributed throughout the country, “from Nord to Midi, from the Alps to the Pyrenees.” These would stand as monuments to the defeat of “cannibal” tyrants.53 In November 1793 writing to the Société populaire, Palloy outlined an educative purpose for his relics. Their public ceremony of their dedication would, he hoped, “make those men who are still numbed by the burden of their toils emerge from their stupor…when they have seen the light will reason replace their prejudices.”54 This idea had a lot in common with the electrification the stone would enact on souls who had 52 Pierre-François Palloy, letter, 25 February 1793, in Extrait des registres du Directoire du Département du Mont-Blanc, séant à Chambéry (Chambéry: Chez Lullin, 1793), 4. 53 “Discours prononcé par le citoyen Woillez,” in Extrait des registres du Directoire du Départment du Mont-Blanc, 9. 54 Pierre-François Palloy, letter, 28 Brumaire an II, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. n.a.f.3241, fol. 178, I. Quoted in Lüsebrink and Reichardt, The Bastille, 122. 175 still not come around to the revolutionary spirit. “How could one not be electrified in treading this pavement?” Palloy wrote, in a proposal for the now-empty Place de la Bastille in 1792. To heighten those electrifying effects, Palloy proposed that the outline of the old fortress should be traced out on the pavement in granite, “lasting traces [which] will always speak powerfully to the souls of Frenchmen and foreigners alike.”55 At the dedication ceremony of a Bastille stone in the department of Loiret, the president espoused a similar symbolic electrification: We are gathered here in this arena on the occasion of an imposing and august ceremony. May it be painful for the Enemies of the Revolution. It takes centuries to sow in the human heart the eternal seeds of Egalité and Liberté, but the imperishable monument, the precious stone that you have before your eyes, will inculcate them in an instant within every soul, and electrify the spirit.56 The account stresses the instantaneousness of electrification compared to the long germination of the “seed” the stone would plant. Electricity acted immediately, leaping from stone to spirit. Even if stones are not the best condensers of electricity, one can imagine the analogy between this stone and experiments like the “flying boy” in the early eighteenth century, by which an electrified object communicated electricity to the body from a distance. Dechristianization and electrification thus went hand in hand; electrical sentiments are sparked and in turn spark the transformations dechristianization required, 55 Archives Parlementaires, Tome 39, p. 576 (March 11, 1792). 56 Extrait du Proces-verbal des Délibérations du Conseil du Déliberations du Conseil du Départment du Loiret. Séance publique du 10 Septembre 1793, l’an second de la République, une et indivisible (Orléans: l’imprimerie du Département, 1793) 1-2. 176 whether the renaming of towns, marriages of former priests, individual conversions from old-regime Catholicism to the revolutionary cause, and even the melting of the brass of the church bells into weapons of war. Bastille stones spread throughout the country electrified on sight, accomplishing what slower methods would take centuries to germinate, and conquering those still “insensitive” to collective revolutionary conviction. As a letter from the far-flung western edge of France attested, even in the Vendée, the revolution would triumph with the compelling force of a new, electric communion: “The patriots will eventually crush the aristocrats. Yes, citizens, they will be crushed, the moment of the defeat of our enemies cannot be far off when the energy of republican virtue passes through all hearts, when in the Vendée one already sees these principles propagate with the greatest force, and may this divine fire fully electrify all souls.”57 Here divine fire has been repurposed and in its identity with electricity, works over the population of the Vendée. Within the context of dechristianization, this report from the heart of the religious resistance to the revolution takes an old concept of divine fire and gives it a new, electrical function. Electric Speech, Electric Silence In its transformation from specialized natural-philosophical phenomenon to figure of speech, electricity in 1793 became about speech itself, about the aesthetic experience of revolutionary communication. Interestingly, electric speechmaking in the archive often produces its opposite: electric silence. While words electrify, the electrified subject is struck dumb. Within this silence, a transformation takes place, 57 Archives parlementaires, Tome 80, p. 273 (November 28, 1793). 177 which it is left up to the new metaphor of electricity to capture. The individual self disintegrates into a unified whole, the People. Jean-Jacques Rousseau rejected deliberative, representative democracy in favor of a silent, unerring general will. Like electricity, sovereignty for Rousseau operated through physical presence, without mediation.58 Could electrical silence be a figurative expression of something akin to the formation of a Rousseauian general will? As critics following Jean Starobinski have emphasized, the incongruity between internal conviction and outward expression is a major tension that runs through Rousseau’s thought. In the disjunction, Starobinski writes, “paradise is lost, for paradise was the state of transparent communication between mind and mind, the conviction that total, reliable communication is possible.”59 Revolutionary electricity in 1793 expressed a fantasy of this kind of instantaneous, transparent communication “between mind and mind.” But electricity added a hierarchical dynamic between electrifier and electrified. Electric speech and electric silence thus address the central paradoxes of democratic sovereignty: How can a singular-willed People be constituted? How is the general will be discovered? How can popular sovereignty be reconciled with a practical need for representation? The following section focuses on electric speech, electric silence, and the function of electricity as revolutionaries attempted to resolve the contradictions of popular sovereignty and show how collective sentiment came about. 58 “The Sovereign cannot act save when the people is assembled.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book III, Chapter XII, trans. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 59 Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 8. 178 Parliamentary records describe speech as electrifying only when spoken in the physical presence of an audience. Reports inviting the Convention to prolong the stay of the représentants en mission stress physical presence, alongside speech. Popular societies who often wrote such reports may have feared a backlash once these key authority figures had left for Paris. Representatives Ysabeau and Tallien for example, were asked to be allowed to continue their mission by petitioners who affirmed that they were “electrified by their energetic speech and their presence.”60 Here, speech electrifies, in addition to the physical presence of the representatives in question. This marks a shift from the electricity of earlier years. In 1790, Poyet’s “kind of electrification” united hearts and minds through common, simultaneous experience. Though the Fête de la Fédération hinged on a spoken vow, the electricity Poyet describes stems from the fact of people physically gathered together, not from a stirring phrase in a speech. Yet in 1793, reports highlighted particular phrases and words as electrifying. The electricity of calls to arms like la patrie en danger, explored in chapter two, now applies to any set of words that bring about the desired effects on the souls of its audience. In its earliest revolutionary uses, electricity was still thought of as a fluid aether, a medium through which feelings might be communal while experienced internally. While this background remained, the “electricity” invoked during this period of Jacobin control was more straightforwardly figurative, comprehensible without a grounding in natural philosophy. The fact that speech, turns of phrase, and rhetorical art can be electrical illustrates this change. When speech becomes electrical, even as it silences the hearers, electrification invites more complicated questions about how it 60 Archives parlementaires, Tome 81, p. 5 (December 6, 1793). 179 transmutates individuals into a collective. What does it mean for a speechmaker to harness the bodily, physical, vital force of electricity to create a unified audience out of assembled individuals? In the following example, a few stirring phrases at the funeral of a représentant en mission electrify. The speech sparks a collective desire to remember the representative and preserve the love of the people for him. The memorial in question was for representative Gasparin had been posted to Lille as a représentant en mission. He had fought to retake traitorous Toulon before dying of pneumonia in November 1793. The minutes recount the memorial service, quoting what was said and its striking effects on the audience: “‘Gasparin had greater merit in remaining virtuous because he was surrounded by vice; he resisted the corruption of most of the co-deputies of the department; he dared to stand up to them and tear off the masks which covered them.’ At these words, all hearts seemed to be electrified, and, in concert, each wanted to transmit to posterity, with the memory of Gasparin, the love that his fellow citizens bore him.”61 Here an electrifying speech moves everyone present to want to preserve their collective feeling of love—something electricity alone, operating in a flash, cannot achieve. Electricity prompts a collective impulse to remember Gasparin. The report stressed not only the collective nature of this impulse but its internal, emotional nature. The words used to describe the effect of the speech—“electrified” hearts, “in concert,” each wanting—all point to emotions that are difficult to describe in terms of words spoken or external, visible signs. How does the minute-taker know that each person wanted to do this? The theory of electrification bolsters this description of collective 61 Archives parlementaires, Tome 80, p. 373 (November 30, 1793). 180 desire, where other descriptors may have fallen short. Because if all hearts were electrified, then they would, according to the theory behind electricity, have felt the same thing at once. No visual description, no audible sound, was necessary (or perhaps even available) to transcribe. A month later, as part of the process of local dechristianization, a procession of former religious leaders made their way up to a podium, one by one, abjuring their former faith. This performance sent an electric shock throughout the audience at the Popular Society. The minutes are a window into a moment, early in December 1793, in which dechristianization, electrification, and speechmaking intertwined: The speaker proposed to the Society to make a solemn abjuration of the worship of the so-called Catholic Church; all the members, all the citizens in the stands rise up at the same time, and someone exclaims: We no longer want, we swear, any worship other than that of freedom! Several others debate the issue of fanaticism. Finally, Ribet goes up to the podium; Lavergne, Saux, Mossaron, Vitaloque, the former parish priest of Rounecoupe, that of Vic-sur-l’Osse succeeded him with three others; they frankly admit, with the accent of repentance, that for a long time they pretended to believe in what they never believed; that the time has come when they must tell the people that the priests have played with their credulity for all these centuries. The Society listens to them in the greatest silence. All heads are soon electrified and we vow, unanimously, to publicly execrate priests who lack the courage, or rather 181 probity, to right the wrongs they committed toward reason and the people, by a solemn retraction.62 Electricity is palpable in this dramatic retelling. Catholicism renounced, former religious leaders reveal their former faith to have been a centuries-long string of lies. What greets this revelation is first silence, then, electrification. As in the previous example, speech causes electrification, which in turn makes the audience a single social body with a unitary capacity to feel. This new body collectively swears to enforce the dechristianizing process by making priests confess to their “wrongs” against “reason.” Most striking in this passage is the “greatest silence.” Through silent electrification, many “heads” turn grammatically into a “we,” the subject and agent of the rest of the passage. Speech electrified, but in the actual experience of electrification, speech is absent. The process by which many heads became “we” instead takes place on the level of inarticulable bodily cognition. Anyone who has accidentally shocked themselves knows that speech is impossible as electricity courses through the body. While electrified one is struck dumb, and gasping after the current has been broken, it is nearly impossible to put into words the whole-body experience, apart from “I was shocked.” As Jason Frank writes in his book on the “democratic sublime,” the collective subject of Rousseau’s “general will” was constituted in physical assemblies of the people— “sovereign assemblies” marked by an “odd silence.”63 These sovereign assemblies are silent because the general will is not produced by aggregating individual opinions, nor 62 Archives parlementaires, Tome 80, p. 656 (December 5, 1793). 63 Jason Frank, The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly (Oxford University Press, 2021), 64. 182 by deliberation. In the passage above, it seems, the great mystery of exactly how the subject of the general will is constituted finds form through the metaphor of electricity. Electricity produces silence, but that silence is transformative. In the absence of words, minute-takers turned to electrical description to describe what had transpired. Electrification was in fact often more momentous than words because it skirted the problem of possible deception introduced by the medium of language. As a bodily, sensory experience, as an experience that compelled, revolutionary electricity was incapable of dissimulation. This is the kind of electricity described in an account of an impromptu speech given by Thuriot, a representative who opposed Robespierre from the left, calling him a “moderate,” and who had resigned from the Committee of Public Safety on September 20, 1793. Now, in early November, he appeared at the meeting of the popular society of the section of the Tuileries in Paris. The society had met as usual, and speeches were underway, when someone spotted representative Thuriot, who lived nearby, in the audience. The representative was asked to give an insider’s account; no one other than he, argues the writer of the account, could “so energetically” describe the processes of dechristianization which were underway. As he spoke, “the Society— electrified by Thuriot’s speech—listened with the most scrupulous silence to his story and the striking truths which followed, then rose spontaneously and made the room resound with cries of joy and ‘Vive la république!’”64 Thuriot’s speech first produces the silence of electrified listening. Electrifying speech enacts the formation of a single “people” out of assembled individuals, bound together in electrified silence, and then erupting in spontaneous, unified movement. 64 Archives parlementaires, Tome 78, p. 580 (November 8, 1793). 183 In late November 1793, a delegation of citizens appeared at the bar of the Convention. They had been to the Opéra Comique on rue Favart together, where they had seen a play by one Citoyen Lesur, the virtues of whom they now extolled before the representatives. A feeling dear to republicans, that of esteem and recognition for a friend of liberty, brings us to the bar. We are asked to express to you the wishes of our fellow citizens who gathered yesterday evening at the theater of the Opéra Comique on rue Favart. It was there, in a meeting hall of free and strictly principled men, we applauded the talents of a young patriotic author who, ready to fly to the border where the law and his country call him, electrified our souls with the sacred love of liberty and redoubled our hatred of tyrants, in a work presented under the title of the Widow of the Republican, or, the Slanderer.65 The group at the bar asked that this work be played in theaters throughout the Republic, and that Lesur had made himself worthy of his country. The close proximity of Lesur’s readiness to defend his country at the border to this testament to his electrifying writing ties the act of playwriting to military defense of the country. Rousseau had written in his Letter to d’Alembert, that theater was anathema to republican government, rejecting d’Alembert’s proposition that what Geneva needed was a good theater. His reasoning: theater, while thought to be collective and edifying, was in fact passive, individuating, and let audience members off the hook morally, allowing them to relieve their pity over a work of fiction and dissemblance. If they later passed a beggar in need of charity, Rousseau reasoned, the theater-goer would do nothing, since his emotions at the theater 65 Archives parlementaires, Tome 80, p. 56 (November 25, 1793). 184 had already absolved him of his moral duty to feel for the unfortunate. Yet here was a republican play, electrifying and thus unifying an audience full of patriots. Rather than exhausting their patriotism, the play’s electricity multiplies their emotions. Rather than Rousseau’s finite pie of moral feeling, electricity changes the equation, multiplying feeling. Electricity escapes the bounds of the dark theater, creating from the audience a people’s assembly. This assembly then address the Convention to ask that this play be put on throughout the country, exponentially multiplying its sentimental effects. What did electrical rhetoric or speech consist in? As an example from the Fête de l’Être Suprême of summer 1794 demonstrates, electrical speech was not eloquent or complicated speech. In fact, electrification was supposed to be artless. To electrify is not to overawe, or “dazzle,” one festival discourse explained: But, brothers and friends, let us seek to ignite ourselves, to electrify each other with the sacred fire of patriotism, rather than to dazzle ourselves, and to make us admirers; no long sentences, no eloquent speeches, no brilliant paintings that do not already appear in our hearts.66 In keeping with a republican rejection of finery and eloquence, patriotic speech “ignites” as well as “electrifies.” Proper patriotic speech concerns the anti-hierarchical sharing of the “sacred fire” of patriotism among “friends” and “brothers.” The speaker contrasts this ineffable fire and electricity with rhetorical aesthetics that overawe, fostering a relationship of admirer and object of admiration. This writer at the Fête de l’Être Suprême rejects “eloquent” and “brilliant” arts, contrasting these aesthetic qualities with those aesthetic qualities that “electrify.” This is particularly interesting because in 66 Archives nationales, AN DXXXVIII1 - 7 Être suprême. Dated February 8, 1794. 185 writing about electrical speech, we might be tempted to link it to rhetorical art. And yet, this example shows us that speech that ignited and/or electrified was as far as possible not art and not rhetoric. As Edmund Burke had written, decades earlier, “no work of art can be great, but as it deceives; to be otherwise is the prerogative of nature only.”67 The challenge for the speaker in the above passage is to electrify without artifice. It follows that the ultimate source of rhetorical electricity—whether sacred fire or something else ineffable in the heart—had to be nature, and not the artifice of human beings. For the speaker of the above passage, only what was already found in the heart could electrify. Revolutionary electricity in 1793 addressed some of the central quandaries within the revolutionary order—contradictions that went back to the stranger aspects of Rousseau’s concept of the exercise of popular sovereignty. In the scenario that echoes through the parliamentary archives through the fall of 1793, silence follows a stirring speech. In that silence a transformation occurs, neither visible nor audible. Instead it was attested to in the new idiom of electricity. In a political order that called for perfect transparency of communication “between mind and mind,” the theory of electricity offered up a mechanism, rooted in contemporary natural philosophy, by which this might be possible. Electricity, unlike language, could not dissimulate. Instead, it attested to the bodily, sensory experience of communal feeling. If Rousseau popular sovereignty was exercised through a process of silent assembly, then it shares two essential qualities with the process of electrification, as attested to in the fall of 1793: physical presence, and silence. 67 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 2nd edition, (London: 1759), 137. The quotation comes from part II, section X: “Magnitude in Building.” 186 This chapter has identified three distinct functions of electrical language during the period known to historiography as “the Terror.” While the idea of a capital-T Terror has been rightly historicized as a Thermidorian invention, there is no doubt that the majority of electrical language found in the parliamentary archives during the years of the early revolution is found during this period, particularly in the summer and fall of 1793. Biard and Linton’s reassessment of the idea of the Terror elevates a new emotion alongside terror, which they claim characterizes the period. Alongside fear, they place a new kind of revolutionary exhilaration as the primary emotional engines driving political violence in the fall of 1793. The latter is a feeling of being “intensely alive.” This could be attributed to an “adrenaline rush,” the authors write, “however there is something there that goes beyond the domain of individual sensation. The real emotional power of the Revolution emanates from the feeling that it provokes of being linked to one another in a fusional fraternity. No feeling comes close to this one.”68 Having analyzed so many examples, we can recognize that electricity gave expression to this feeling, in a way that captured what was theoretically crucial about it. In countless examples, the représentants en mission wield electricity, deploying it at the border and in areas of internal strife. Dechristianization meant that a kind of fervor previously associated with religion needed another, secular form—this too found expression in electricity. Lastly, in echoes of Rousseau’s strangely silent assemblies, we find electric silence, a silence that circumvents language and its attendant problems of mediation and dissimulation, instead giving way to irresistible, instantaneous bodily experience, governed by the laws of the eighteenth century’s mysterious new physical force. 68 Baird and Linton, Terreur! La Révolution Française face à ses démons, 54. 187 188 189 CHAPTER 4 ELECTRIFICATION, SUBVERSION, AND ZOMBIFICATION IN SAINT- DOMINGUE Two years into the French Revolution, another revolution of world-historical importance began in Saint-Domingue. The western half of the island of Hispanola, Saint Domingue was “ground zero” of European colonization and indigenous genocide, as Columbus had landed on the island during his first voyage in 1492.1 Settled and occupied by the French since the early seventeenth century, the colony was both the leading exporter of sugar and coffee in the world by the time of the revolution, and the “centerpiece of the Atlantic slave system,” with a population that was 90 percent enslaved.2 In 1791, the uprising began that would develop into the Haitian Revolution. The radical anti-slavery politics of this revolution, and its central relationship to Western modernity, have long been overlooked and silenced within the historiography of the so- called age of revolutions.3 Yet, the history of the French Revolution was intertwined with the story of the Haitian Revolution, and the story of French revolutionary electricity 1 Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 13. 2 David Brion Davis, “Impact of the French and Haitian Revolutions,” in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. David Geggus (Columbia, S.C., 2001), 3-9, 4; Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 19-21. 3 There is ample scholarship exploring the relationship of the Haitian Revolution to Western thought and revolutionary historiography. See especially Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Sibylle Fisher, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Duke University Press, 2004); and Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). R. R. Palmer, who coined the term “age of revolutions,” focused on the American and French Revolutions. 190 cannot be properly told unless we understand, as revolutionary contemporaries did, that France extended beyond the héxagone. Electrical metaphors not only crossed the Atlantic, but they gave figurative form to trans-oceanic communication that connected one revolution to another. What happened to revolutionary electricity in the French Caribbean? Refracted through burgeoning race science, the “electricity” described in Saint Domingue by European commentators, many of whom had never set foot in the colony, took on a negative connotation it did not have in the metropole. On the floor of the Constitutive and Legislative Assemblies, French representatives developed electricity’s threatening side. Some legislators speculated about whether electrical thought and sentiment could be transmitted the same way among people of different races. Jacques-Pierre Brissot appears to have done more than anyone to pioneer the electrical language with reference to the Caribbean. In keeping with gradual abolitionism, Brissot’s electrical descriptions were shot through with the tension between revolutionary sentiments in theory, and unwillingness to commit to the end of slavery, and the end of an extremely profitable sugar colony built upon it. By looking at the stark tonal shift as electricity crossed the Atlantic, we can investigate the deep tension and contradiction within French conceptions of revolutionary energy. Meanwhile, writers from Saint-Domingue like Moreau de Saint-Méry used electrical language to describe what happened between spectators and dancers in dances associated with what he called vaudoux. An outsider’s description, this electricity also had threatening implications. Whether invoked by Brissot or Moreau de Saint-Méry, electrical language came from France and was applied to phenomena Frenchmen and white creoles had no other words to describe. 191 This chapter turns electrification on its head. Electricity was a way to conceptualize revolutionary energy in terms of a new scientific idiom from the metropole. It was thus a misplaced imposition of a European conception onto what colonists observed in Saint Domingue. How was energy conceptualized by revolutionary actors themselves in Saint Domingue? I argue that the revolutionary energy European observers observed, and explained to themselves through the language of electricity, might be more accurately explored with reference to a pair of syncretic conceptions of energy within Haitian vodou. This chapter explores the twin concepts of spirit possession and zombification, opposite extremes within vodou. As this chapter will explore, both concepts have historical roots in the revolutionary era. Haitian revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines was deified after independence, becoming one of the pantheon of lwa who possess vodou practitioners. The revolutionary legend of Jean Zombi as well as contemporary, eighteenth-century reports of zombies and zombification demonstrate the currency of the zombi in the revolutionary decade. In spirit possession, writes Alessandra Bendicky-Kokken, “the body becomes a location that registers that which passes through it.”4 Lwa and human meet in one body. The human is temporarily dislodged. This spiritual transfer focused on the body suggests a parallel to the way French revolutionaries thought about electrification. But spirit possession is of course a totally distinct phenomenon. The passage of Dessalines into the form of a god, or lwa, provides a powerful contemporary expression of revolutionary energy transformed. The figure of the zombi, an embodiment of the horror 4 Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History (Lanham; Boulder; New York; London: Lexington Books, 2015), 34. 192 of soul-less work, provides another. Both possession and zombification might function as a revolutionary metaphors, but they draw upon a separate epistemological framework from that of revolutionary electricity. The zombi, a dead body reinvigorated but without consciousness, made for endless field labor, has often been seen as a supernatural metaphor for the condition of slavery.5 Comparing electrification with zombification and possession shows how death, life, energy, consciousness and revolt were differently conceptualized, within different epistemological frameworks, during these two simultaneous and inextricably intertwined revolutions. 1793 found Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, lawyer, slave owner, freemason, and prolific documenter of pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, on the run across the Atlantic. An advocate for colonial self-determination and the preservation of a plantation system based on enslaved labor, Moreau de Saint-Méry had run afoul of Jacobin authorities, who issued a warrant for his arrest in Paris. Narrowly escaping the guillotine, Moreau boarded a ship in Le Havre and arrived as an exile in Philadelphia. He left trunks full of notes behind—notes which by some miracle made their way across the Atlantic. From his new perch in Philadelphia, Moreau compiled his encyclopedic Description Topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue. The multivolume work was intended to be a time capsule, describing the colony as it had been on the eve of 1789. Moreau was explicit about avoiding discussion of either the French or the Haitian revolutions, instead 5 See for example Maximilien Laroche, “The Myth of the Zombi,” in Exile and Tradition: Studies in African and Caribbean Literature, ed. Rowland Smith (New York: Dalhousie University Press, 1976): 44–61. Laroche writes, “[the zombie] is the symbol of the slave, the alienated man robbed of his will, reduced to slavery, forced to work.” 193 focusing on the past splendor of the colony he had known. “In these fields still smoking with blood and carnage,” he wrote in his introduction, “we must bring back abundance.”6 Description Topographique drew upon Moreau’s own research in Parisian archives as well as information gathered through the collective efforts of the colonial scientific society of which he was a member-at-large, the Cercle des Philadelphes. It was intended to remedy royal administrators ignorance of life in Saint Domingue, administrators who nonetheless exercised full control over colonial governance. After 1789, the tumult of the French Revolution as well as the first successful slave insurrection in the world engulfed Moreau’s former colonial home. Moreau himself became involved in French revolutionary politics and was rendered “powerless to accomplish my project” by this new political work.7 As the revolution radicalized, Moreau’s advocacy in favor of slavery and racial segregation eventually placed him on the wrong side of revolutionary politics. He fled to the United States. There he stayed, until the Alien Act was passed by President John Adams, allowing peacetime deportation of so-called “aliens” from U.S. soil. With the new United States in a so- called “quasi” naval war with France, foreigners who were French were particularly a threat, even more so if they had shown themselves to be as politically active on both sides of the Atlantic as Moreau had. Before long, Moreau was again on the run, back to Paris this time, a trans-Atlantic refugee two times over. 6 Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Déscription Topographique, Physique, Civile, Politique et Historique de la Partie Française de l’Isle Saint-Domingue (Philadelphia: Chez l’auteur; Paris: Chez Dupont, 1791), 5-6. Moreau’s work is probably the best known source on life in Saint Domingue on the eve of revolution. 7 Moreau, Description topographique, I: xxvii. Quoted in Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 9. 194 The Déscription topographique contains the first known written instance of the word “vaudoux” in the historical record.8 It appears when Moreau describes a set of dances which he explains as part of le vaudoux, a distinct, syncretic spiritual practice developed among the enslaved black population in the colony. Long suppressed both in colonial Saint Domingue and in independent Haiti afterwards, le vaudoux, “voodoo” as occupying Americans called it, or vodou in Kreyòl, was only decriminalized in 1987. As Kate Ramsey argues, over 150 years, successive Haitian governments held vodou’s official illegality, rarely enforced, poised like a weapon over the heads of most Haitians. At any given moment anyone practicing forms of Afro-Caribbean spirituality, itself in the process of being objectified as a single entity called le vaudoux, was perpetually trespassing.9 Moreau’s act of putting a name to the spiritual practices he witnessed in Saint Domingue stands near the beginning of this long history of both outsider naming, and subsequent prohibition of a set of practices subsumed under that name. Curiously, in the same passage in which he introduces le vaudoux to his mostly white, European and American audience, Moreau makes use of an electrical idiom to describe this unfamiliar spiritual practice. “Le vaudoux,” Moreau wrote by way of introduction, was remarkable for this aspect of the dance: “that kind of magnetism that brings those that are gathered together to dance until they lose consciousness.”10 Having described several dances, venues for sortileges or spell-casting, Moreau comes to the Danse à Don Pedre: 8 Kate Ramsey, “Vodou, History, and New Narratives,” Transition 111 (2013): 30-41, 31. 9 Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011). 10 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Déscription topographique, 50. 195 There is a dance called Danse à Don Pedre, or simply Don Pedre, which kills its dancers by degrees; and the spectators themselves electrified [électrisés] by the sight of this convulsive exercise, sharing in the drunkenness of the actors, accelerate their singing and fast rhythm triggering an epileptic seizure which is, after a fashion, communal. It became necessary to forbid the dancing of Don Pedre under strict, sometimes ineffective, punishment.11 The Danse à Don Pedre which Moreau describes was clearly much more than a dance in the European sense. It was a nearly deadly experience that came close to an epileptic fit.12 Spectators, he wrote, found themselves electrified by the sight of this ecstatic dance. By this electrification, they were drawn into an explicitly communicable and communal experience of frenzy and abandon, which the author calls drunkenness. The dance, according to the author, was quickened by the participation of these electrified spectators, and it reached a fever pitch when the singing became louder and the beat quickened. Above all, the Danse à Don Pedre was dangerous. As Moreau wrote in a separate volume focused on dance alone the Danse à Don Pedre “caused great disorder and stirred up ideas contrary to public order,” and on those grounds had to be prohibited. Electricity appears again in this second account of the Danse à Don Pedre, again drawing outsiders inexorably into the dance. “By electrical effect,” he writes, “the spectators joined in the drunkenness, and instead of stopping their singing when they saw the frenzy begin, they grew louder and sped up the rhythm, propelling the epileptic fit by sharing in it to a certain degree. What a strange being is man! In what excess does 11 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Déscription topographique, 51. 12 Moreau de Saint-Méry, La Danse, (Parme, imprimé par Bodoni, 1801), 42. 196 he seek pleasure!”13 The second description reorders and restates the first: both paint an image of an “electrical” dynamic between singing, drumbeating “spectators” and dancers who, electrifying the non-dancers, are in turn pushed to greater speed and energy by the acceleration of the rhythms. Moreau describes a complex interaction between inside and outside, at the center of which electricity appears. The descriptions written by this white creole slave owner of the Danse à Don Pedre describe the hold the dance had over its spectators in terms of electrical effect, relating specifically to the outsiders of the dance. The author may well have been a spectator himself. The “electrical effect” and the “electrified” spectators ultimately only add to the frenzy. In both descriptions Moreau de Saint-Méry emphasizes the quickening effect spectator involvement has on the rhythm of the danse. Spectators and actors alike partake in the “epileptic fit” in which the experience culminates. And of course, Moreau de Saint-Méry does not let us forget that the dance was prohibited in Saint-Domingue because of its dangerous power. The communal “seizure” and “drunkenness” that happened in the Danse à Don Pedre could subvert colonial order. Moreau had a precedent in seeing electricity in non-European forms of dance. The abbé Raynal’s Histoire des Deux Indes contained just such a description. Writing about Surat, a city in modern-day Gujarat, Raynal reports on “these dancers, or bailladeres.” Their movements “cause both the contagion of enthusiasm and the furor which set them ablaze to fly in all directions in which they twist and turn. It is no longer a passion, it is an electric fire which spreads from a single body to all the bodies which surround it: it is a still more subtle fire, from which its visible spark causes a universal 13 Moreau de Saint-Méry, La Danse, 42-3. 197 trembling in the organs, a general shock through all the people in the gathering.”14 Raynal describes the relationship between dancers and audience in terms similar to Moreau’s. More than a dance, and more than a passion, Raynal reaches for electrical language to describe the effects, after the vocabularies of contagion, enthusiasm, furor have been exhausted. Then the description slips into a vocabulary that evidences the fluid conceptions of the natural world behind it: the concept of “electric fire” as a super subtle matter, from which a “visible” spark can cause remarkable effects in the audience. Notable too is the similarity in the way this electrical fire physically passes from one body to all the rest of the bodies in attendance. Raynal emphasizes the collective nature of the experience through “universal trembling [ébranlement]” and “general shock [commotion].” Raynal continued to use electrical language with this collective emphasis decades later. He used it in a metaphorical sense when he wrote to the Assemblée nationale in 1791, describing two “tribes” within revolutionary France: “that of good people with moderate minds is scattered, mute, dismayed, while the violent ones crowd together, electrifying themselves and creating formidable volcanoes that vomit fiery lava.”15 Whether Moreau read Raynal’s Histoire des Deux Indes or not, Raynal’s address to the Assemblée nationale is listed in Moreau’s library. Electricity expressed something specific in these dances performed by non-Europeans; both Raynal and Moreau reach for bodily, fluid-electrical explanations of how the emotion of the dance 14 Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, Vol. 2 (Amsterdam: 1770), 20. 15 Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Adresse de Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, remise par lui-même à M. le Président, le 21 mai 1791, et lue à l’assemblée le même jour. Paris: Chez Gattey, 1791, 16. 198 escaped the single body of the dancer, transforming everyone in attendance into a kind of collective body. That electricity can be found Moreau de Saint-Méry’s account of life in Saint- Domingue attests to the fact that this language traveled far beyond the French hexagone and could be found across the Atlantic in France’s slaveholding colonies. It also demonstrates a continuity between implications and associations of electrification in the metropole and across the Atlantic. For Moreau, electrification by dance was a communicatory and communal experience. The electricity of the danse traveled through the air and via visual and aural sensory experience. Most strikingly, it irresistibly overcame the will of would-be spectators, making them join in the dance. All of these elements are recognizable in electrical language used in continental France, at the very beginning of its shift from scientific discourse into political discourse. Poyet’s espèce d’électrisation bears a close resemblance. In Poyet’s Rousseauian dissolution of the distinction between spectator and actor, we find a direct parallel to what happened at the Danse à Don Pedre. In both cases the mystery of this dissolution is solved by the invocation of mysterious, aetherical, and physically real electricity. But unlike early examples of “electrification” in the metropole, Moreau de Saint-Méry’s electricity, and its pull over spectators, is deeply subversive. The danse in question, with its irresistible pull over spectators, was so dangerous it was banned outright. At the heart of the mystery of the Danse à Don Pedre, at the crux of the subversive, contagious power to accelerate the energy of dance to a kind of fever pitch, we find electricity. In her article “Vodou, History and New Narratives,” Kate Ramsey compares Moreau de Saint-Méry’s use of electrical descriptors in the context of le vaudoux with 199 his description of another more elite and to his mind, rational, form of electrification. This was the mutual electrification of the members of the Cercle des Philadelphes, electrified by the prospect of coming together to enlighten the colony and to root out pretended sciences such as mesmerism, “the superstitious doctrine of magnetisme animal.” This Cercle was the community on whose research Moreau relied for his Description topographique. For Moreau, these two metaphorical uses of electrical language in fact correspond to different words entirely: electriser for the electricity of the dance, electrifier for the electricity of the Cercle des Philadelphes (on s’electrifia).16 Electriser became a French revolutionary political metaphor in the years after the composition of Description topographique. Meanwhile, electrifier cannot be found within the revolutionary discourses presented at successive French National Assemblies while there are more than a hundred instances of electriser. Whether an anglicism or a stylistic quirk, electrifier seems to have meant something different from electriser. For Moreau, électriser belonged to the powerful Danse a Don Pèdre, which he construed as a threat to the colonial order of enslavement, and likewise a threat to that colonial, slave-holding society which the author looked back on with longing from exile in Philadelphia. The following chapter starts from Moreau de Saint-Méry’s electriser/electrifier distinction to examine electrical vocabularies in the context of France’s Caribbean colonies, especially Saint Domingue. Revolutionary electrisation, which snowballed into a short-hand for revolutionary feeling in Jacobin France, developed an oblique and 16 Kate Ramsey, “Vodou, History, and New Narratives,” Transition No. 111, New Narratives of Haiti (2013), 33-4. 200 ambiguous relationship to the first successful slave revolt in modern history. Far from marginal to the history of Atlantic revolutions, the Haitian Revolution stands at the center of the paradoxes of the revolutions of the late eighteenth century and highlights the hypocrisy of French revolutionary liberty, equality, and fraternity. I aim to follow the story of electrical vocabularies across the Atlantic to shed light on how theories of revolutionary electricity operated in the context of a complex, transatlantic revolutionary network, which brought the questions of race, slavery, and the limits of freedom to the forefront. In Saint-Domingue after the 1791 uprising of the enslaved population in the north, a European discourse of electrisation was deployed to make sense of revolutionary feeling in the context of a slave society. But, as we have seen with Moreau, when French colonists imagined the electrification of black people, they leaned into its medical associations, emptying it of political content and substituting inexorable biological force for the revolutionary political discourses which they found incomprehensible. Meanwhile, they framed this electrification as a threat rather than a revolutionary movement in parallel to the French Revolution. We see this even in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s description of the Danse à Don Pedre, in which the electricity of the dance draws spectators in and brings it to a point of crisis. Meanwhile in the metropole as we have seen, electrification had positive connotations. This chapter is concerned with how transatlantic revolutionary discourse navigated a metaphor which took on bipolar characteristics as it moved overseas and applied to a society founded on plantation slavery and white supremacy. It parallels a similar paradox pointed out by many scholars of the Haitian and French Revolution: while French revolutionaries 201 constantly evoked the abolition of “slavery” in its metaphorical or quasi-metaphorical sense, slavery that was in no sense metaphorical continued in France’s colonies overseas. Similarly, electrification, though at once metaphor and more-than-metaphor, was embraced as a positive revolutionary expression in France while in Saint Domingue, unthinkability and racial prejudice refracted it, resulting in multiple ambiguous connotations. Electrical metaphors were applied in the debate over abolition, in the back-and- forth over the Société des Amis de Noirs, especially in the discourses of Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville. Known for his warmongering and leadership of the Girondins in 1792, Brissot was involved in a number of classic Enlightened pursuits, before the Revolution, writing pamphlets on law, human happiness, and geopolitics, serving a stint in the Bastille, and even spying on literary circles for the police.17 As we have already seen, Brissot’s close friendship with Marat and admiration for Franklin point to a familiarity with electricity as the cutting-edge natural philosophical phenomenon of the late eighteenth century. Brissot brought the electrical vocabulary he applied to the new revolutionary mode of waging war to his passionate interventions in debate related to Saint-Domingue and French slavery. Brissot had a major hand in the inception of organized French abolitionism, such as it was, before the revolution began. Writing to the English Quaker abolitionist society mere months after its founding in 1787, Brissot soon became an honorary member of the English society and endeavored to create a parallel society in France. To this end, he founded Société des Amis des Noirs. Brissot’s Société counted among its members Condorcet, Lafayette, Mirabeau, and Gregoire, a 17 See Robert Darnton, “How Historians Play God” Raritan vol. 22 issue 1 (2002): 1-19. 202 group of pre-revolutionary Enlightened thinkers who would become influential revolutionaries, and who would end up on different sides as the revolution continued. In 1789, hearing rumors that this Society planned to propose the emancipation of all slaves at the Estates General, a group of concerned colonists tried to discredit Brissot and his collaborators by claiming that the Society was shrouded in mystery: “this mystery, gentlemen, hides the most enormous project that the human mind has ever dared to conceive: the overthrow of all empires.”18 The English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, attending a meeting of the Société in August 1789, noted that it was thinly attended, with only Brissot present among the powerful political figures he had hoped to see.19 It was Brissot, likewise, who saw Clarkson off, and it’s with a description of Brissot that Clarkson ends the section on his reconnaissance mission to revolutionary France: The last person whom I saw was Brissot. He accompanied me to my carriage...From the simplicity of his appearance, and the severity of his morals, he was called The Quaker; at least in all the circles which I frequented...He was no patriot in the ordinary acceptation of the word; for he took the habitable globe as his country, and wished to consider every foreigner as his brother.20 Clarkson couched this “very concise vindication of his character” as a response to Brissot’s many attackers in England; after all, he had been an advocate for war against 18 De l’état des negres rélativement à la prospérité des colonies françaises et de leur metropole; Discours aux réprésentans de la nation. 1789. ANOM BIB-ECOL-11991. 19 Hélène Palma, “The Abolitionist Cause in Britain and in France (1787-1790): A Case of Counter- Productive Transposition?” MFDS Le Monde français du dix-huitième siècle 4, no. 1 (2019). 20 Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (London: 1808), Vol. I, chapter XXV. 203 England and a major cause of wars that were ongoing as Clarkson wrote. Though he had gone to the guillotine in 1793 when the Girondins were purged, this “mediocre Mephistopheles of the Gironde” was in large part responsible for touching off more than two decades of warfare in Europe.21 Clarkson’s short portrait combined with the details of Brissot’s commitment to the Société des Amis des Noirs attests to Brissot’s transnational conception of fraternity. That his English counterparts considered him to be particularly interested in the outer world, to the extent that he could not be called a patriot, helps make sense of his frequent use of electrical metaphors to illustrate the effects of the French Revolution in the rest of Europe as well as in France’s Carribean colonies. In an address presented to the Constituent Assembly in late January 1790, and published as a pamphlet in February of 1790, Brissot described a future image of revolution in the colonial context, sparked by a potent cocktail of principles and blatant hypocrisy of the new revolutionary regime. Like every European abolitionist at the time, Brissot advocated for the abolition of the slave trade first and foremost, and advocated for a gradual abolition of slavery itself to follow. He did not advocate for the right to revolution on the part of the enslaved population. As Michel-Rolph Troulliot notes, no one did: “In 1791, there is no public debate on the record, in France, in England, or in the United States on the right of black slaves to achieve self-determination, and the right to do so by way of armed resistance.” This incapability to follow through on revolutionary principle when it came to slavery, on the part of political figures who 21 Jean Jaurès, Histoire Socialiste Tome II: La Législative (1791-1792) (Paris: Jules Rouff, 1901-1908), 909. 204 celebrated their own violent overthrow of an unequal, hierarchical system, makes the Haitian Revolution “the ultimate test to the universalist pretensions of both the French and the American revolutions. And they both failed.” For Trouillot, Brissot and other abolitionists’ incapacity to think of the insurrection against slavery as right, testifies to the general “unthinkability” of what happened in Saint-Domingue in 1791. Brissot was no exception. Although an abolitionist and proponent of the rights of people of color, Brissot ultimately shared the aims of the colonists who had made and continued to make their fortunes by enslaved plantation labor: that is, averting a mass slave revolt and preserving the basic structures of the colonial system. This meant preserving slavery, if in theory it should be phased out over time. As he explained in his 1790 pamphlet warning of the dangers of inaction on the abolition of the slave trade, Brissot saw in French revolutionary principles the perfect impulsion to a mass uprising of the enslaved population: If some motive could carry them to the point of insurrection, would it not be the indifference of the National Assembly to their kind? Would it not be the fact that we continue to load them with chains, when everywhere we consecrate that eternal axiom: that all men are born free and equal in rights! And what, there’s nothing but irons and gallows for blacks when happiness is reserved only for whites? Have no doubt that our happy revolution will reelectrifiy the slaves, and that vengeance and resentment have electrified them for a long time; and we cannot suppress the effect of that shock. From an insurrection brutally put down, twenty more will be born of which just one could ruin the colonists forever. There is only one way to prevent them: the abolition of the slave trade: at least 205 its the resolution taken by this assembly that we should work on without delay. The news of a decree, even preparatory, would produce good effects: it would calm the excitement of the slaves, it will force the planters, who would not be able to wait for reinforcements from Africa, to treat their slaves better.22 Here Brissot warns of a powder keg of a situation created by a revolution which abolishes metaphorical slavery while operating a slave economy. He argues that the enslaved population of Saint-Domingue would be struck by the glaring hypocrisy of French revolutionary principles, the notion that men are born free and equal, from which they are somehow excluded. Seeing equality and liberty proclaimed everywhere to be the central values of the new regime, how could slaves not revolt against such vastly unequal application between black and white people on French territory? The way electricity comes into the equation elucidates the layers of Brissot’s thinking on the subject. On the one hand, Brissot writes of the electrifying effects of the French Revolution on the enslaved population. Replicating a common problematic narrative that attributes all political and intellectual impetus for the Haitian Revolution to European ideas, Brissot credits a kind of trickle-down effect of European rights discourse on enslaved populations. This, however, is where electrical rhetoric intercedes. Rather than attributing the original electrifying power to French ideals, Brissot imagines a “re-electrification,” a word not previously used on the floor of the legislature. The original electrifying emotions of vengeance and resentment long predated 1789. Thus, when Brissot’s 22 Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Adresse à l'Assemblée nationale, pour l'abolition de la traite des Noirs (Paris: de l’'impr. de L. Potier de Lille, 1790), 19-20. 206 “happy revolution” re-electrified the enslaved, it re-emphasized the injustices and trauma which they had already lived through for generations. The hypocrisy of French revolutionary principles added insult to injury, charging an already highly-charged thundercloud of resentment. The idea of re-electrification carries within it a latent conservative implication: that after initial electrification caused by slavery, the enslaved somehow became un-electrified, that the situation was stable before the French Revolution stirred resentment up again. How does Brissot propose to solve the glaring paradox of revolutionary principles of liberty and equality in a slave-holding empire? Again like every European abolitionist, Brissot falls short of a call for insurrection or immediate abolition of slavery. In calling for the end to the slave trade, the “good effects” of which would safely discharge the pent up, long-term electrification of the enslaved, Brissot in fact advocates against a slave revolt. In making an argument for the the immediate abolition of the slave trade, Brissot argues for prolonging slavery of a more humane form. Thus the abolitionist suggests an alternative and even more insidious way to discharge the re-electrification caused by the hypocrisy of the principles of liberty and equality within a slaveholding empire. Returning to the electrical metaphor and the center of his prediction, Brissot seems to have in mind an electrical charge built up and discharged, as in a Leyden jar, when he explains that from this electrification must come a “shock” which cannot be suppressed. Brutal repression of an insurrection, he says, would only multiply the charge (to take the metaphor further than Brissot himself takes it) twenty times over. The environment of the Leyden jar, once the charge had been built up by static electricity, possessed such an imbalance of charges that the act of evening them out 207 using one’s body to complete the circuit could be deadly. How to discharge the Leyden jar of centuries of injustice without such a shock? Put another way, could there be a bloodless revolution? Oddly enough, Brissot’s answer to this question of avoiding a shock abandons theories of electrification, re-electrification, and pent-up charge altogether, when he proposes a half-measure that preserves the root cause of injustice intact. What would happen to the pent up charges of generations of enslavement, in Brissot’s gradual abolitionist model? In a case of a metaphorical outstripping of authorial intentions, pent up electrification and re-electrification did lead to a cataclysmic shock, one which razed the colonial system of Saint-Domingue to the ground and built the independent Haitian Republic. Over the course of 1790-1791, debate raged on how the new revolutionary principles should be applied to the colonies. Brissot’s Société des Amis des Noirs and the planter-dominated Club Massiac, of which Moreau was a member, fought through pamphlets and lobbying. In 1790, the Club Massiac seemed to be winning. The anti- slavery aims of radicals like Brissot were tabled. Potentially “electrifying” news of what had happened in France was kept from the enslaved people in Saint Domingue as far as possible—even in July 1789, several enslaved women who had arrived in France from Saint Domingue were quickly sent back before they might learn of the revolution underway and spread the word in the colony. In April 1790, the postmaster of Le Cap in Saint Domingue intercepted all mail addressed to people of color and sent it to the city for surveillance, as directed by colonial administrators, in order to screen for any plans for an uprising.23 In March 1790, the Colonial Committee established under the 23 Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 84; 77. 208 National Assembly decreed that the French Constitution would not apply in the French colonies. The white planters’ interests had won out, and Saint Domingue would be governed internally by particular laws and assemblies. The debate, however, was far from over, particularly on the question of whether free men of color would be granted rights and political participation. Electricity first appeared in arguments on the floor of the Assembly in May of 1791, in the form of a quotation of a single sentence from Brissot’s address—this same reference to electrification and re-electrification. The quotation features in the throes of the debate over whether free people of color should be granted civil rights and equality under the law, like their white colonial counterparts, a population almost equal to free people of color in size and collective financial clout.24 On the one hand, it undercut the universalism of the declaration of the rights of man and citizen in a particularly glaring way, to deny free men of color rights based entirely on skin color. On the other, free men of color posed a challenge to white supremacy, which in turn threatened the institution of slavery. Most white planters and administrators supported racial segregation. The cahiers de doleances sent from Saint-Domingue to the Estates General in 1789 explicitly demanded the exclusion of free men of color from political life in the colony.25 Although the “colonial question” had never been far from the order of the day since the Constituent Assembly, the debate over race and equal rights reached a fever pitch over 24 Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore, M.D.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 4-5. 25 Gabriel Debien, Les Colons de Saint-Domingue et la Révolution: Essai sur le Club Massiac (août 1789-août 1792) (Paris, 1953), 153. Cited in Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 74. 209 the spring of 1791 after the death in February of Vincent Ogé, prominent advocate for the rights of free men of color, who became a martyr for the cause after his brief uprising led to torture and execution, his head displayed on a pike in Le Cap. Increasingly, revolutionaries in France sympathized with the cause of free men of color like Ogé, especially the Jacobins, whose political stars were on the rise. Fear-mongers on both sides sketched bloody tableaus of what would happen in the colony if free men of color were accorded full citizenship and equal rights, or on the other hand, if they weren’t. Those against including free men of color in political life argued that it would spell the end of the colony, an explicit admission that colonial society in Saint Domingue rested on a rigid racial boundary. Those in favor of nondiscriminatory rights, Brissot included, argued from universalist principle (“Perish the colonies rather than a principle!” Robespierre famously interjected during one of these debates.) Yet these advocates also undercut those same principles in making the more pragmatic point that free men of color were what kept the enslaved population on the island safely enslaved. Advocates like Julien Raimond, himself a free man of color, argued that this relatively well-off group served as a crucial buffer against the real threat, a potentially “re-electrified” enslaved population. The special police force of the island, the marechausse, tasked with hunting down maroons, relied heavily on free men of color as soldiers. On May 11, 1791, the Assembly opened its session with an announcement of the ordre du jour: on the table was a decree granting full civil rights to free men of color in the French colonies and in the metropole. Abbé Grégoire, the first to speak, launched into a passionate case for equal rights, which was punctuated by short, predictable objections from members of the colonial lobby, advocating for the preservation of a 210 strict racial boundary. In the words of a 1773 law against men of color taking the names of their white masters or relatives, there existed an “insurmountable barrier” dividing the two free communities, which public opinion and government “wisely” sought to enshrine over the 1770s and 1780s with a new spate of laws promoting racial segregation.26 The arguments of white men whose families had made their fortunes in Saint Domingue, well represented in the Assembly, followed the same logic. Louis Marthe de Gouy d’Arsy, deputy from Saint Domingue to the Legislative Assembly, was one of these men. In the course of arguing against rights for free men of color, he took Brissot’s Société des Amis des Noirs to task for what he interpreted to be a perverse pleasure taken in the idea of an insurrection: These men [of the Société des Amis des Noirs] signed and distributed bloody calls against us: “Have no doubt,” they wrote in their barbarous enthusiasm, “that our happy revolution is going to re-electrify the blacks, whom vengeance and resentment had long ago electrified; that an insurrection badly pacified will give rise to twenty others.” These are their own words. They await, they hope, they call upon the force of 300 slaves against a white colonist who, perhaps for thirty years, lived among them and witnessed most of their births, who made it a duty, a pleasure, to meet all their needs [...].27 Gouy d’Arsy thus countered Brissot’s insurrectionary ideas with a vision of a good paternalistic slavery in which the white colonist took care of those he enslaved. What 26 Lauren Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 62; Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 166-168. 27 Archives parlementaires, Tome 25, p. 747 (May 11, 1791). 211 Brissot, secretary of the session, might have thought upon hearing his language construed as a call for an uprising, we can only speculate. The irony that Brissot had been arguing against such an insurrection, calling for the abolition of the slave trade as a way to avoid an uprising and ultimately preserve a more humane form of slavery, was not lost on him. But for our purposes, it is particularly telling that Gouy d’Arsy, reaching for something incendiary to cite from the writings of the Société des Amis des Noirs, fell upon Brissot’s striking metaphor of double electrification. From a twenty-page discourse, this was the sentence that struck him as a prime example of the incendiary rhetoric of the French abolitionists. What Brissot had described as a quasi-natural, inexorable effect of French hypocrisy, the wealthy, white colonist read as advocacy for revolution. The debate hinged on speculation about the communicability of revolutionary energy. How would the psychological effects of the French Revolution manifest in the colonies? What were the cognitive effects of revolutionary principles, and how did revolutionary thinking spread? And was revolutionary electrification in a society built on slavery a good or bad thing? Gouy d’Arsy’s misreading of Brissot’s electrical figural language relies on the ambiguity of political electricity when it came to enslaved populations. The ambiguity extended to Brissot’s own language. As we have seen, no European commentator, revolutionary though they may have been when it came to their own rights, advocated for a slave revolution. The Société des Amis des Noirs was no exception. Instead Brissot was constantly defending himself and the Société against this very charge. Feilding accusations such as those of Gouy d’Arsy, Brissot and others tried to make it clear that they did not advocate for slave insurrection. In this debate, both parties drew on the 212 affordances and inchoate connotations of a political metaphor of electrification. For Brissot, electrification naturalized the effects of injustice, analogizing the revolutionary shock of revolution as simply what one should expect to happen given the conditions, just as when an experimenter connected the two parts of a fully charged Leyden Jar. In naturalizing the effects of rights declarations in physical terms, Brissot could play the detached, natural-philosophical observer, a witness to the predictable cognitive effects of generations of enslavement. He could perhaps especially use electrical language in this way in 1790, around the same time when Poyet used it. But a year later, for Gouy d’Arsy’s purposes, electrical language carried connotations of radicalism which could be read as advocacy, especially when employed by men who were themselves radical revolutionaries in France. Just as logically, for this defender of slavery, langauge of electrification was proof of a kind of enthusiasm for the violent, revolutionary overthrow of slavery. “Have no doubt that our happy revolution will reelectrifiy the slaves, and that vengeance and resentment have electrified them for a long time”—as the radical connotations of electrification came into crisper focus, and as rights for free men of color were days away from being passed by the Legislative Assembly, Brissot’s natural-philosophical prediction sounded to detractors like a call to arms. 213 Fig. 17. “Discussions about free men of color.” This detailed print satirizes the colonial lobby, including Moreau de Saint Méry, featured on the left, and Gouy d’Arsy, hopping out of Barnave’s pocket at center. In the form of allegories of justice, liberty and reason, Robespierre, Petion, and abbé Grégoire try to come to the aid of the men of color whom the deputies are keeping chained, as they engage in “discussion,” and other nefarious activities, including ripping up the Declarations of the Rights of Man at center. 214 Gouy d’Arsy’s last ditch effort did not stop the granting of rights to free men of color whose parent were both free. On May 15, 1791, a decree was passed to grand the rights of citizenship to free men of color. Robespierre spoke more than anyone at the Assembly, of which Brissot was not a member until October that year, and had the last word in a heated, raucous debate. He reminded the assembly that free men of color were free, thus they were “men whom you did not find stripped of freedom, but whom you found free and whom you must keep free.”28 “Now,” Robespierre concluded, “I recognize the same rights to all free men, of whatever father they are born, and I conclude that the principle must be admitted in its entirety. I believe that every member of this Assembly realizes that he has already done too much by constitutionally enshrining slavery in the colonies…All free men of color must be allowed to exercise the rights that belong to them.”29 The minutes record constant yells and interruptions from the “left” and “right” of the chamber, reflecting a deepening divide. Moreau de Saint-Méry was in attendance on the right, as was Gouy d’Arsy who tried to block the decree, asking for a roll call, trying to halt the decree by the last possible means left to the colonial lobby. His motion which was greeted by heckling from the left side of the chamber. Cries of “but there is no doubt!” came from the left; “but there was doubt yesterday!” replied the right. It was clear, however, that a large majority were in favor of the decree and the assembly rejected the roll call was made.30 28 Archives parlementaires, Tome 26 (May 15, 1791) 94. 29 Archives parlementaires, Tome 26 (May 15, 1791), 95. 30 Archives parlementiares, Tome 26 (May 15, 1791), 97. 215 News of the decree arrived in Saint Domingue over the summer. When news reached le Cap on June 30, according to mid-nineteenth century Haitian historian Thomas Madiou, “the white class experienced the same sensation throughout the colony.”31 By July, reports of the effects of the news of the decree flooded in. Most of it was hate mail, admonishing the Assembly for even this circumscribed granting of rights to men of color. One letter from Le Cap despaired: “All is lost…Saint Domingue would rather bury itself in its own ruins than see the May 15th decree promulgated.” Another reported that the “first news of the decree excited a general fermentation among the inhabitants,” before accusing the National Assembly directly of being the cause of this disorder: “By admitting people of color, born of a free father and free mother, in the parish and colonial assemblies, you erase the political line that separated the colored people from the whites, and you destroy a necessary intermediary for the conservation of the colonies.” In a third letter from Les Cayes, the fermentation of the previous letter becomes electrification: This decree has electrified the entire colony, and will with reason raise the loudest cries...The abasement of free people of color was a barrier between the white and the slave. Let us not believe that, become our equals, they will defend us even better...The humiliating position in which the slave saw the mulatto consoled him about his fate and made him revere white men. Now the opposite will happen: the slave seeing that by means of an insurrection the men of color have obtained everything, it is to be feared that this class of men will come to 31 Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haiti: Livre Cinquième (1791), (Port-au-Prince: 1847), 68. 216 see insurrection as the way out of slavery...you will probably shudder at this idea...this is what follows from your decree.32 The author of this letter cites the specter of a slave insurrection to admonish the Legislative Assembly. On the heels of Vincent Ogé’s failed insurrection in late 1790, granting political rights to free men of color, even to such a small group, demonstrated to the enslaved population that an insurrection, and perhaps only an insurrection, led to liberty. The consensus of the whites in the colony was that the May 15th degree would simply not be honored, under the principle of the colony’s self-rule as established by the National Assembly in March 1790. But the mere news of the degree had already “electrified” the entire colony. An insurrection did indeed follow. On August 14th, a gathering was held in northern Saint Domingue. Soon afterwards, either that night or a week later, a religious ceremony held, known to the historical record as Bois-Caïman.33 What happened there remains the subject of speculation. The only written record by a contemporary is the hostile portrayal of plantation surgeon Antoine Dalmas. His memoires, written in 1793- 4 from exile in the United States, reported that before the uprising of August 20, a group met in the woods to plan the uprising. After making the plan, “they celebrated a kind of festival or sacrifice, in the midst of a wooded area…called le Caïman, where the slaves gathered in large numbers. A black pig, surrounded by fetishes, laden with offerings, each more bizarre than the last, was a burnt offering to the all-powerful genie of the 32 Archives parlementaires, Tome 30, p. 596 (September 12, 1791). 33 Laurent Dubois writes that “Although the service is usually described as having taken place after the meeting on August 14th, it probably took place on the following Sunday, August 21.” Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 100. 217 black race.” In the terms of this “absurd, bloody religion,” Dalmas writes, those gathered drank the pig’s blood as a “kind of talisman…which would render them invincible.”34 Writing about the episode fifty years later, Thomas Madiou made no mention of the spiritual aspect to the meeting in the woods of August 14th, writing that it had been held in order to present a false decree in which the French king had granted three free days a week.35 Contemporary historians and anthropologists, meanwhile, have emphasized the spiritual aspect of the ceremony. Some of them with ulterior motives: outside commentators have historically used this episode to paint a “gothic scene of blood drinking and abandon,” as Colin Dayan puts it, at the inception of the Haitian Revolution.36 Dalmas’s report is merely the first instance of this interpretation. A significant day in any year, August 14th is the annual feast day of Ezili Kawoulo in the vodou tradition, and August 15th is the feast of Assumption in the Marian tradition. During the nighttime meeting between these days in 1791, maroon and vodou hougan Dutty Boukman together with Cecile Fatiman, a vodou mambo, conducted a ceremony known as Bwa Kaiyman. Oral histories collected by anthropologist Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique richly testify to the centrality of the episode in cultural memory.37 The next week, on August 25, 1791, in the northern part of the colony, a widespread insurrection began which would never be quelled until the abolition of slavery in 1793-4. Across the ocean, deputies imagined they were seeing 34 Antoine Dalmas, Histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue, Depuis le commencement des troubles…suivie d’un mémoire sur le rétablissement de cette colonie. Tome 1. (Paris: Mame Frères, 1814), 117-118. 35 Madiou, Histoire d’Haiti, 70. 36 Colin Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (University of California Press, 1998), 29. 37 Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, Investigations autour du sites historique du Bois Caïman (Cap-Haitien: ISPAN, 2000). 218 the inevitable “shock” they had imagined, with varying degrees of fear and trembling, from the outset of their revolution. As will become evident later in the chapter, the electrical framework by which French deputies conceptualized what happened in Saint Domingue was not shared by revolutionaries in Saint Domingue. Partaking of an entirely different epistemological framework, Haitian revolutionaries also conceptualized the processes and workings of revolutionary energy, but in ways that “electrification” vocabularies were fully unable to make sense of. Two months after Bwa Kaiyman and the August uprising, the Constituent Assembly became the Legislative Assembly. No deputy who had been in the first assembly was allowed to serve in the second. While Robespierre was therefore out, Brissot was in. The “troubles in Saint Domingue” were hotly debated by the French legislature, with the colonialists blaming the May 15th decree as well as Brissot’s abolitionist society for all that had happened afterwards. By way of explaining the “causes of the troubles in Saint Domingue,” Brissot told his own version of the arrival of the May 15th decree in the colony. He reported on how white colonists rioted at the news: The decree of 15 May arrived in Le Cap on July 2nd, inserted in the Moniteur Universel. Soon the members of the provincial assembly of the North, spread through the streets, crying that all was lost, that the National Assembly had given free men of color political equality; that it was a step toward the abolition of slavery, that there was no doubt it would be the ruin of the colony, in going back on their word a second time. They announced an extraordinary assembly, reading an address from the department of the Gironde; yelling, threatening, 219 blaspheming against the Constitution, electrifying all spirits, and causing a motion to be made in the street that men of color be shot.38 In Brissot’s account, it was the members of the rogue provincial assembly in the north of Saint Domingue who had done the electrifying, and it was electrification of the least helpful kind, calling for a kind of racial genocide. If the letter from Les Cayes attributed the electrifying or revolutionizing power to the decree itself, Brissot here describes intentional self-electrification of the colonists. His discourse lamented the neglect of the actual provisions of the decree, granting political rights and participation to a select group of free men of color. In refusing to do this, colonial assemblies rather chose to electrify themselves into a frenzy, which spurred them out into the streets and threatened to whip up a massacre of men of color. As in the metropole, electrification addressed the problem of collective sentiment, and the problem of how to forge a new social body without the divisions of the corporatist old-regime society. In the colonies, unified nationhood faced a different set of divisions, which the May 15th decree had tried to abolish. Commissioners sent from the metropole to the colonies expressed the change the revolution ideally enacted in their proclamations. “The old regime in the colonies had divided the population into three different classes,” wrote a group of commissioners sent to the Îles du Vent, including Sonthonax and Raimond, “that of whites, of men of color, and of slaves: it is to these classes, now united as French citizens, that we address ourselves alternatively.”39 But in Brissot’s report of the scene at Le Cap, electricity 38 Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Discours de J. _. Brissot, député, sur les causes des troubles de St. Domingue: prononcé a la seance du premier decembre 1791, (Paris: L’Imprimerie du Patriote Française, 1791), 41-2. 39 “PROCLAMATION...au nom de la Republique Française. Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, Julien Raimond, Marc-Antoine-Alexis Giraud, Pierre-Georges Leblanc, et Philippe-Rose Roume, Commissaires 220 works divisively and along racial lines as the white population riots against the new decree. In December 1791, Brissot weighed in at length on how the insurrection had been sparked. He had access to patchy information, and no access to the political strategies and revolutionizing of the enslaved people of the northern plantations themselves, who had risen up against the institution of slavery in a way neither Brissot nor the Société des Amis des Noirs had advocated. Defending himself and fellow French abolitionists from charges that they were the outside agitators responsible for the uprising in Saint Domingue, Brissot pointed to the electrifying power of revolutionary rights and principles themselves. They accuse the Société des Amis des Noirs: is it for having written? If so, put on trial all the philosophes who wrote before them, and who wrote the same truths as they did. Put the Constituent Assembly itself on trial, which sanctioned those truths. Put on trial the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the most philosophical text and most able, by its brevity and character, to set alight and electrify the spirits. Put on trial the colonists of Saint Domingue, who were also drunk on liberty, which they manifested in front of their slaves. Put on trial their assemblies, which wrote in giant letters on the doors, on the flags, on the courthouse, those eloquent and sacred words, “live free or die.” Is there a text délégués par le Gouvernement français, aux Isles sous le vent.” Courrier Français (April 13, 1796) Published in Philadelphia. ANOM F 3 200. Crucially, two years after the abolition of slavery, the proclamation combines all three previous categories under the banner of “French citizens.” 221 more perfectly designed to arm the blacks, if texts arm them, and if these unfortunate ones know how to read?40 To indict the Société des Amis des Noirs, Brissot argues, is to indict the whole Enlightenment, and the Revolution which sanctioned it. Among the results of philosophical writing, the Declaration of the Rights of Man has the most electrifying potential, as Brissot describes it. The passage continues: the uprising was the fault of the colonists themselves for, essentially, letting the enslaved population know about the fact of the revolution. If the Declaration of the Rights of Man electrified the enslaved population of Saint Domingue depends on the truth or falsehood of a series of conditions, expressed as “ifs”—if texts can arm the enslaved population, and if the enslaved can read in the first place. These Brissot adds almost as an afterthought. Brissot and others wondered if electrification worked the same way in the Colonies. Many believed that the Caribbean atmosphere had a corrupting effect on people’s spirits, including white Creole colonists: “the natural vice of Creoles is egotism,” wrote one account, combined with “an unruly character and a disorderly taste for licentiousness which the Creole develops from childhood.” The only way to avoid these defections of character, according to this report, was to grow up and be educated in France.41 Responding to Brissot in those days early in December 1791, Jean-Francois Michon-Dumaret, a deputy from the department of Rhone-et-Loire, adopted both Brissot’s electrical language, and his rejection of the notion that the Société des Amis 40 Brissot, Discours...du premier decembre 1791, second discourse, 70-71. 41 B…. de S. Mémoire sur la Guadeloupe, ses Isles dépendantes, son sol, ses productions & généralement sur toutes les parties, tant Militaires que d’Administration. Îles du Vent. ANOM RC2 vol. 5. 222 des Noirs had somehow caused the uprising in Saint Domingue. Also like Brissot, Michon-Dumaret cited the revolution itself as the impetus for a rejection of the basic and blatant injustice of slavery, though this particular injustice had simmered for centuries. “When the slaves revolt, they blame the colonists, who in turn charge the Amis des Noirs with having provoked this insurrection,” the deputy concluded, “but neither deserves this imputations when the French, in their sublime efforts, broke the chains that had been painstakingly riveted for 1,200 years.” What, then, provoked the uprising? Michon-Dumaret continued: It is much more natural to think that the feeling of liberty, which may be dormant, but still lives in the heart of the lowest slave, has awakened with energy in the souls of some proud and courageous blacks; who communicated this feeling to their companions in misfortune; and that the spark, coming out of the brain which, though under a black fleece, is capable of strong conceptions, has electrified all those who broke their chains.42 With a reference to hair texture standing in for racial difference, the process of electrification was racialized and simultaneously called into question. Michon-Dumaret rejected the idea that liberty and electrification would be felt differently by people of another race; at the same time, he acknowledged that it might be called into question. Brissot had also obliquely addressed this question, writing in October of 1791 that “men of color are French, and thus sensitive and generous.” Their (newly bestowed) French citizenship being a guarantor of their sensitivity, men of color were thus open to the usual processes of revolutionary electrification. “Patriotic civil commissaires will 42 Archives parlementaires, Tome 35, p. 549 (December 3, 1791). 223 electrify them,” Brissot concluded, “and knead them to their will.”43 Revolutionary electrification, which applied automatically to white French revolutionaries, was up for question when it came to men of color, such that Brissot relied on their Frenchness to prove the point of their sensitivity to patriotic electrification, their common humanity presumably being less of a stable rhetorical resource. Likewise, Michon-Dumon argues that in spite of racial difference, the enslaved are “capable” of “energy,” “feeling,” and “strong conceptions,” all of which point toward insurrection against slavery. Electrification stood for all these functions when it referred to the metropolitan, “white” revolution; in expanding the same cognitive functions to the enslaved, Michon-Dumaret makes a point that must not have been intuitive to his audience. According to his theory, the feeling of liberty lies dormant in someone who is not free. This feeling, however, still exists and may be awakened. Not only that, but the feeling of liberty is also communicable from one person to another. Those revivified, communicable feelings of liberty produced the “spark,” “coming out of the brain” in Michon-Dumaret’s words, that “electrified” the enslaved population into revolutionary action.44 In colonies other than Saint Domingue, electrification was less ambiguously used to signify strong, communicable feelings of allegiance to France. “The sacred fire of patriotism electrifies all hearts,” reported a French commissioner in Guadeloupe in 1793, a rhetorical turn of phrase employed to make the point that though the Guadeloupean town of Point-a-Pitre was besieged by the British navy, the population remained loyal to France.45 The British did successfully invade Guadeloupe in 1794, 43 Archives parlementaires, Tome 34, p. 526 (October 30, 1791). 44 Archives parlementaires, Tome 35, p. 549 (December 3, 1791). 45 Archives parlementaires, Tome 60, p. 633 (March 28, 1793). 224 but Victor Hughes’s abolition of slavery on the island shortly thereafter, in accordance with the Convention’s decree, delivered Guadeloupe back to France. Yellow fever decimated newly arrived British sailors, playing a crucial role in French victory. The following year, the French commissioner Goyrand wrote to the republican forces of Saint Lucia to encourage a similar electrifying patriotism as a bulwark against the British navy: “So that your souls electrify themselves, swear like us to die before losing sight of the sign of our regeneration” — the French tricolor flag.46 Electrical language was at the crux of the polarization and deep ambivalence within the Constituent and Legislative assemblies around questions of race and slavery. Brissot’s penchant for electrical vocabulary as an expression of revolutionary impetus features prominently in his commentaries on slavery, the rights of people of color, and the August 1791 uprising in Saint Domingue. His colleagues in the legislature picked up on precisely the electrical aspects of his rhetoric as the most dangerous. Pro-slavery, pro-segregationist deputies like Gouy d’Arsy seized upon Brissot’s “electrification” and ‘re-electrification” to argue that the Société des Amis des Noirs aimed to trigger the downfall of the colony. Other deputies like Michon-Dumaret meanwhile echoed Brissot’s re-electrification concept, postulating a natural, communicable and electric “feeling of liberty,” “dormant” under slavery but now “awakening with energy” within the hearts of enslaved people. It was this electrical feeling, some argued, that sparked the 1791 uprising. 46 Lettres (de commissaire Goyrand) aux Républicains de Sainte-Lucie, 22 février 1795. 225 But electrification’s cognitive workings were also racialized and questioned when it came to people of color, even for those revolutionaries at the center of French abolitionism. Representatives who used electrical language, at the same time asked whether electricity even functioned the same way in the colonies. And did Brissot’s Société des Amis des Noirs advocate for the revolution that must follow from the electrification and re-electrification they imagined for the enslaved population? Brissot himself was unsure, despite his choice of electrical framing. This tension crept into his electrical language. Thus there was deep ambivalence, on the part of Brissot and his associates, when it came to this revolutionary electrification that threatened the downfall of the slave economy. It was precisely that deep contradiction that allowed electrification to be read in opposite ways in the context of Saint Domingue. Far from advocating for electrification, Brissot and his colleagues preferred to find another way to discharge the pent-up “electricity” they described, in every instance falling short of addressing it at its root cause, and in every instance shying away from endorsing the “shock” that should logically follow. So-called abolitionists poured energy into evading that shock. Revolutionary electricity, reflected overseas, thus lost the positive connotations it had in the metropole and took on a threatening aspect. It took an uprising and subsequent revolution to cut through this calculated ambiguity and force the hands of France’s revolutionaries; slavery was abolished by decree in February 1794, after commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel had declared slavery abolished in the colony on August 29th, 1793, forced into this measure when they could not quell the uprising begun in the spring of 1791. Following Michel-Rolph Trouillot, we can view electrical language applied to Saint Domingue as another brick in the wall of “silencing” of the 226 Haitian Revolution, revealing an “incapacity of most contemporaries to understand the revolution on its own terms.”47 Introducing the idea of electricity, rather than meaningfully describing the atmosphere of Saint Domingue, rather reflected back on the contradictions of French revolutionaries who found it easier to free metaphorical slaves than literal ones. Zombi(e)s and Revolutionary Energy In the next section, I want to try to get a sense of how “energy” was conceptualized in revolutionary Saint Domingue. There is little evidence for “electrical” conceptions playing a role, other than when they are invoked by colonists like Moreau de Saint-Méry. Instead, this section focuses on a syncretic, Haitian supernatural concept touching upon will and energy: the zombi.48 In this section, I argue that rather than electrification, Haitian revolutionary energy might more appropriately be understood through the twin conceptions of the zombi and of possession. While electricity during this period was supposed by Erasmus Darwin, Luigi Galvani, and others to be a kind of vital fluid, even the key element that distinguished living bodies from dead, zombification was likewise a process that straddled life and death. The zombi figure in Haitian cultural tradition is a live body with no consciousness, the soulless husk of an unfortunate dead person which nonetheless can be put to work in fields. Colin Dayan writes of the zombi as a “terrible composite,” a “slave turned rebel ancestor turned lwa.” 47 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 75. 48 I will use “zombi” as the accepted scholarly spelling, while zombie is an anglicized spelling and thus will be used when discussing anglicized references to the figure. 227 Though the term more straightforwardly refers to evil spirits in Guadeloupe and Martinique, in Haiti it has this particular sense: that of the “animated dead, a body without mind” in Dayan’s words.49 In the description of Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber, the cultural theft of colonization acts as a kind of zombification: “People are separated from the parts of themselves that make them think and they are left as flesh only. Flesh that takes directions from someone.”50 Since the “Haitian turn” in French revolutionary scholarship, scholars like Raphael Hoermann have argued that by constructing the zombi as a “Gothic trope of horror”, and by overemphasizing the metaphorical connections between the condition of the enslaved and that of the zombi, anglophone culture demonized Haiti and Afro-Caribbean religion.51 Hoermann instead points to the early twentieth century US-American reinvention of zombies in North American culture as an act of symbolic re-enslavement, running parallel to and justifying the long US occupation of Haiti. The North American zombie, Hoermann writes, is thus “a deeply anti-revolutionary trope,” and the author expresses doubt that it could possibly be repurposed as revolutionary and emancipatory, though he makes note of Haitian writers’, poets’, and filmmakers’ work in this direction.52 Laurent Dubois, also recognizing the legacy of an outsider conception of “voodoo” used to discredit Haiti, writes that the “very structure” of the history of vodou is “layered with silences.”53 49 Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 41. 50 Erna Brodber, Myal (London: New Beacon Press, 1988), 37; 108. 51 Raphael Hoermann, “Figures of terror: the “zombie” and the Haitian Revolution,” Atlantic Studies Vol. 14, No. 2 (2017): 152-173. 52 Hoermann, “Figures of terror: the “zombie” and the Haitian Revolution,” 166. 53 Laurent Dubois, “Vodou and History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History. Vol. 43. No. 1 (January 2001): 95. 228 In the revolutionary era, however, the zombi had nothing to do with the newly- created United States. Possibly the earliest anglophone use of the term, in a British travel narrative published in 1788, the zombie is described as “the spirits of wicked dead men” who “torment the living.”54 Moreau de Saint-Méry described the enormous fear caused by a conte de Zombi, which he glossed in a footnote as “a creole word that means esprit, revenant [spirit, ghost].”55 Some historians trace the zombie back to a revolutionary figure described by Thomas Madiou and other early Haitian historians: Jean Zombi, a mixed-race Haitian revolutionary soldier whose eagerness in massacring whites surprised even Dessalines. Madiou described this man, the original Zombi, as a man with red hair and wild, furious eyes. This Jean Zombi habitually left home in a rage, found a white man, “led him then to the steps of the government palace and thrust a dagger in his chest. This gesture horrified all the spectators, including Dessalines.”56 Etymologically derived from Kongo words nzambi (god) and zumbi (fetish), the word zombi has an older history than Madiou’s Jean Zombi. Scholars like Dayan and Laroche concur, however, that the Haitan zombi comes out of the histories of enslavement, the middle passage, and the story of colonization. A figure grounded in Haiti’s independence struggle, Dayan writes, “Zombi crystallizes the crossing not only of spirit and man in vodou practices but the intertwining of black and yellow, African and Creole in the struggle for independence.”57 The Haitian Zombi, more than the African living- 54 The History of Okano: A Fragment of a Voyage to St. Domingo, in The Weekly entertainer: or, Agreeable and instructive repository, 6 Jan. 1783–27 Dec. 1819; 8 Dec 1788; 12, 309; British Periodicals p. 544. Quoted in M. Blake Connelly, “Zombie: an earlier usage, antedating the Oxford English Dictionary entry,” Notes and Queries (June 2017): 229. 55 Moreau de Saint Méry, Déscription topographique, 52. 56 Thomas Madiou, quoted in Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 40. 57 Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 40. 229 dead or the French revenant, is a social rather than a religious figure. The zombi reflects a person’s condition vis-a-vis other people, rather than a person’s condition with regard to the universe. The zombi is always man-made. Zombification is often studied in conjunction with spirit possession. According to scholars, the two are spiritual opposites within the vodou tradition. Possession, or “service” of the lwa, exists in a culturally specific relation to history. These spirits involved in possession, as Colin Dayan puts it, are thought of as “deposits of history, and as remnants of feelings that cannot be put to rest.”58 An especially prominent example, Dessalines is deified as Ogun Desalin, a powerful lwa in modern vodou.59 “Zombification represents a crude form of servitude,” writes sociologist Niame Adele, “unlike service to the loa [in which a demigod is “served”], the zombi can only serve a human master, much like his slave ancestors were forced to.” According to Adele, who reads both possession and zombification through a Lacanian frame as social constructions of the self, zombification functions as a tool of social control, a threat to strip soul from flesh and a fate far worse than death.60 Zombification has often been interpreted as a supernatural figuration of the condition of enslavement. In one of the earliest French anthropological studies of vodou, Alfred Métraux writes that “zombi’s life is seen in terms that echo the harsh existence 58 Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, xviii. 59 Lindsay Twa, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines: Demon, Demigod, and Everything in Between,” Romantic Circles Praxis Series, special issue “Circulations: Romanticism and the Black Atlantic,” ed. Paul Youngquist and Fran Botkin (October 2011). 60 Niame Adele, “Haitian Vodou Possession and Zombification: Desire and the Return of the Repressed,” disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory Vol. 14 (2005): 100-125. 230 of a slave.”61 Maximilien Laroche calls the zombi “the mythic figure of alienation.”62 Zora Neale Hurston, who visited Haiti in the 1930s, wrote that, “no one can stay in Haiti long without hearing Zombies mentioned in one way or another, and the fear of this thing and all that it means seeps over the country like a ground current of cold air.” Hurston’s anthropological work Tell My Horse included what she described as a photograph of a real zombi by the name of Felicia Felix-Mentor, which she had been taken to see in the yard of a mental hospital. Hurston writes, “This is the way Zombies are spoken of: They are the bodies without souls. The living dead. Once they were dead, and after that they were called back to life again.”63 Hurston, unlike Métraux, makes no mention of slavery with respect to zombification, but she emphasizes that ceaseless, soulless labor in the fields is at the crux of the horror of zombification. This horror is especially keen for upper-class Haitians, who “do not talk about it as openly as do the poor.” For these Haitians, zombification enacts a reversal of social position: Think of the fiendishness of the thing…[the upper-class man’s] resurrected body being dragged from the vault—the best that love and means could provide, and set toiling ceaselessly in the banana fields, working like a beast, unclothed like a beast, and like a brute crouching in some foul den in the few hours allowed for rest and food. From an educated, intelligent being to an unthinking, unknowing beast. Then there is the helplessness of the situation. Family and friends cannot 61 Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 282. 62 Laroche, “The Myth of the Zombi,” 56. 63 Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (New York, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1938), 189. 231 rescue the victim because they do not know. They think the loved one is sleeping in his grave.64 Although slavery is not explicit in Hurston’s account gleaned from ethnographical research on the ground, we can see in this example how zombification is a social condition. Hurston describes a condition that aligns with Orlando Patterson’s concept of slavery as social death—once a social figure of importance, the zombi is socially dead while the husk of his or her body labors on.65 Others agreed with Métraux in identifying slavery directly within the concept of zombie. Haitian poet René Depestre wrote that the zombi state mirrored the state of enslavement. “It is not by chance that there exists in Haiti the myth of the zombi…the man whose mind and soul have been stolen and who has been left only the ability to work.” Depestre follows Edna Brodber in connecting the condition of the colonized with that of the zombie: “The history of colonization is the process of man’s general zombification.”66 If the zombi is a worker without will and without consciousness, what resonance does the idea have with electrification? On the one hand, as we have seen, electrification in some ways paralleled the mysterious formation of a Rousseauian general will. Yet, as we have also seen, electrification was at the same time a process of dispossession of individual will through manipulation of the subtle fluid of electricity. Electricity expressed a fantasy of political control on the level of thought and sentiment. Where electrification expressed an irresistible force overcoming individual will, zombification 64 Hurston, Tell My Horse, 190. 65 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 38. 66 René Depestre, Change, Violence II, No. 9 (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 20. Quoted in Laroche, “The Myth of the Zombi,” 59. 232 expressed the absence of the spirit, and with it the possibility of resistance. According to Maximilien Laroche in “The Myth of the Zombi,” zombification is not a permanent state. The will-less, spirit-less condition of the zombie is reversible. This is proven by the fact that salt has the power to reverse the process: Salt is the agent which renews the awareness of life, the antidote to the spell which brought on the state of zombification. It is similar to divine fire in that it gives back the breath of life and reawakens the mind. The zombi’s state is a symbolic one for it is at the centre of a network of symbols concerned with life and death.67 Like electricity, then, zombification transforms and then leaves the body. Where electrification adds something to the body, zombification takes something away. In both cases, the body remains, separate from the soul and its electricity or will. In eighteenth- century vitalist theory, the vital spirit or “divine fire,” as Laroche has it, was thought to be a subtle fluid, superadded to inert matter. The concept of the zombi works with a similar framework. Something happens to shock the body, the taste of salt in this case. This strong sensory experience triggers the return of “breath of life” to an empty vessel of a body. Zombification highlights the difference between life and death, as well as highlighting the separation between body and spirit. Zombification shows that it is possible for the soul to leave while the body “lives.” So too does possession show how one body can be occupied by different spirits, which are capable of visiting and leaving the material vessel of the body. 67 Laroche, “The Myth of the Zombi,” 56. 233 This chapter has explored, firstly, how French revolutionaries and colonists saw revolutionary electricity building in Saint Domingue, and how they gave this electricity a negative aspect it had not had when it referred only to the metropole. Thus electrification illuminates the tensions and hypocrisies underlying French revolutionary attitudes toward slavery, and toward freedom in a Caribbean context. Electrification culturally and historically specific understanding of revolutionary energy, and that it was by no means the only concept to encompass life, death, and revolution in the Atlantic world. While Brissot and others used electrical language to express their observations of revolutionary stirrings in Saint Domingue, they refracted the idea of revolutionary electricity with its positive connotations, through the prism of a colonial society built on slavery. Electricity viewed through this prism took on new aspects. This electricity was threatening, leading toward an explosion. The goal of self-professed abolitionists like Brissot was to discharge this electricity without a “shock” that would topple slave society, on France’s most lucrative sugar-producing island. Electricity in the colonies embodied the contradictions of gradual abolitionism. In only rare instances does electricity appear preserved in the records left by French administrators and colonists who lived in the Caribbean. Moreau de Saint-Méry used two different verbs in his Description topographique. He used élecrifier to refer to the edifying sharing of enlightenment within the scientific community of which he was a part, the Cercle des Philadelphes. But in his vivid depiction of the Danse à Dom Pedre, Moreau used électriser, for him a bodily rather than intellectual phenomenon, an expression of the 234 extreme nature of this dance, which was banned as threatening to the colonial regime. Raynal in his Histoire des Deux Indes had described dances seen in India in the same language. Electricity, then, was an outsider’s way to explain the energy of the dance, and likewise the revolutionary energy Brissot and others saw stirring in Saint Domingue. But of the notions of energy of Haitian revolutionaries themselves? While there is little to draw on in the written record, this chapter has surveyed anthropological and literary approaches to syncretic, Haitian concepts of the zombi and possession by the pantheon of demigods known as lwa, including the deification of the revolutionary general Dessalines. While the zombi’s lack of consciousness combined with the horror of ceaseless labor has been thought to express the condition of enslavement, Thomas Madiou’s Jean Zombi origin story ties the idea together with revolutionary fervor. If electrification was a European idea imposed on vodou dances and revolutionary stirrings by outsiders like Moreau de Saint-Méry, Brissot, and others, zombification offers another way to interpret spirit and will in relation to the body. 235 236 EPILOGUE ÉLECTRO-VITALISME é-lèk-tro-vi-ta-li-sm's. m. Physiological term. Erroneous system in which the acts of the organism are explained by electricity as cause, or by a vital fluid analogous to the electric fluid. Dictionnaire de la langue française. 1873. Thus, everything is linked, and a revolution, like an electric shock, is felt at the same instant by the whole chain of peoples.1 François-René de Chateaubriand, Essai historique. 1797. In the spring of 1797, the Minister of the Interior sent a letter to the departmental administration of Rhône, which met in Lyon. In it, the Directory made the department aware that they had an important visitor coming through: the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. The local authorities, the letter read “must hasten to contribute, as much as they can, to the honors due to the Porte Ottoman, this former ally of France, in the person of its Ambassador.” It was a tense moment for the Directory. Napoleon Bonaparte was busily taking the islands of Corfu, Zante, and Cephalonia in the Ioanian Sea. The local administration detailed how they would honor the Ambassador, given a strained relationship with Istanbul. Upon his arrival, he would be escorted to his hotel by a military deputation, saluted with twenty-one cannon shots, and his hotel illuminated in 1 François-René de Chateaubriand, Essai historique, politique et moral sur les révolutions anciennes et modernes, considérées dans leurs rapports avec la Révolution française (London: 1797), 219. 237 the evening. The department would try to engage General Kellerman to rustle up some fireworks, as he had promised. There would be a gala, and a tour of the new public library, featuring the professors of the école centrale, all surrounded by their students. And, “if the dryness of the atmosphere permits, the Ambassador will be invited to participate in electrical demonstrations.”2 Though we do not know exactly what kind of demonstration took place, the Ottoman Ambassador may well have stood in a circle in Lyon to be shocked with a Leyden Jar. It was as literal an instance of political electrification as one could dream up: soft power expressed in the form of a literal electric shock. This epilogue asks: where did revolutionary electricity go post-1794? What happened to revolutionary electricity in a period in which electricity began to be viewed as a commodity within a newly industrialized society?3 After Thermidor, the words électricité, électrisation, and électriser necessarily underwent a shift in meaning under successive legislatures in France, under the Directory or under Napoleon. I argue that electricity’s new revolutionary political meaning was not forgotten but instead powerfully shaped the politics of the “galvanic boom” around 1800.4 It did so in ways that have not been recognized, because the full extent of electricity as a revolutionary concept, and the political affordances it developed during the revolutionary years, has not been fully studied. French literary scholars have called 1780-1820 the “period 2 Archives municipales de Lyon 1 | 154 Fêtes publiques, pièce 185. 3 See Iwan Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). Morus argues that electricity, seen as a cultural practice, was deeply connected to the rise of global industrialization and a culture of consumption. 4 Walter Moser, “Le galvanisme: Joker au carrefour des discours et des savoirs autour de 1800,” in Olivier Asselin,, Silvestra Mariniello and Andrea Oberhuber, eds. L’ère électrique / the electric age (Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2011), 61-84. 238 without a name,” situated between the lumières and romanticism.5 It was during this time, French literary scholar Étienne Beaulieu argues, that scientific electricity and literary electricity bifurcated, and the electricity traced a passage “from the electric jolt of the Leyden jar into the metaphorical field of romantic writers.”6 J. L. Heilbron traces another bifurcation, that of electricity splitting off from natural history towards the mathematical approach pioneered by Aepinus in 1759 and followed by Coulomb decades later. Yet another, better known bifurcation occurred through the debate between Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta, in which Galvani’s side argued that vital electricity was generated in animal bodies, while Volta showed that it could be generated in the interaction between two different metals alone, with no living (or recently-living) component. Through these overhauls of electrical science around the turn of the century, a demystification occurred. Beaulieu writes, “The advent of the electrical metaphor thus corresponds and responds to an imagined fall into a world of prose, in which the romantic writer tries to recall the cultural memory of a power—the magic power of electricity—which no longer exists.”7 But, as this dissertation has amply demonstrated, electricity had a metaphorical meanings that pre-dated romanticism, emerging from revolutionary politics and playing a central role in how revolutionaries thought about urgent political problems of the new regime. Rather than the invention of electrical metaphor detached from science, the years around 1800 witnessed the 5 “Une ‘période sans nom’: les années 1780-1820 et la fabrique de l’histoire littéraire,” international colloquium organized by Fabienne Bercegol, Stéphanie Genand et Florence Lotterie, Toulouse, April 2- 4, 2014. Olivier Ritz, Les métaphores naturelles dans le débat sur la Révolution, (Paris: Garnier, 2016), 11. 6 Étienne Beaulieu, L’Éclat du neutre: Études sur les cultures romantiques de la prose (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019), 134. 7 Beaulieu, L’Éclat du neutre, 130. 239 repurposing of a revolutionary electricity whose politics were both recognized by contemporaries and very much alive in both literature and electrical science, into the early nineteenth century. In France and abroad, revolutionary electricity played major roles in both scientific and literary developments. This epilogue has two sections. The first focuses on Galvani and the scientific puzzle of “galvanism” at the turn of the century. The second examines literary electricity in the early eighteenth century. In both cases, the politics of electricity developed through the crucible of revolution had a greater influence than has been recognized. Revolutionary electricity provided crucial political context for the electrical debate between Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta. Since the nineteenth century, on the heels of Volta’s triumph with the battery, historians have glossed the debate as a win for Volta, relegating Galvani to a minor role as a catalyst for Volta’s discovery.8 Napoleon’s patronage of Volta and Galvani’s resistance to Napoleonic control of his native Bologna may have had decisive influence on the outcome of the debate. Some scholars have introduced more nuance to the Galvani- Volta quarrel. Walter Bernardi argues that contemporaries conceived of several additional positions with respect to the puzzle of animal electricity.9 Iwan Rhys Morus writes that, at the end of the Enlightenment, “there was no fixed meaning for galvanic 8 See Marco Piccolino and Marco Bresadola. Shocking Frogs: Galvani, Volta, and the Electric Origins of Neuroscience (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Picolino and Bresadola revisit and in some cases rehabilitate Galvani’s experiments and legacy, arguing that it is only due to a pervasive narrative begun in the early nineteenth century that the Galvani-Volta debate is regarded as a victory for Volta. 9 Walter Bernardi, “La controverse sur l'électricité animale dans l’Italie du XVIIIe siècle: Galvani, Volta et...d’autres,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 54, no. 1 (Janvier-Mars 2001): 53-70. 240 experiments,” in spite of Napoleon’s endorsement of Volta.10 The question remains, however: how did the debate turn out the way it did? Could vitalist electricity, which developed metaphorically through the revolution and gained close association with the Jacobin project, have likewise had some influence on how electrical science emerged from this crossroads? The second part argues that romantic electricity has a closer relationship to both galvanic science and revolutionary electricity than has been recognized. In the works of Chateaubriand and de Staël, electrical metaphors brought with them both the memory of abbé Nollet’s electrified circle, and the democratic dimension the revolution had given it. In Britain, electricity became an important figure of early romanticism.11 Electrical language and images found their way into the poems and philosophical writings of the first romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, but even more so the Shelleys, influencing the natural philosophy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Lastly, the epilogue ends with a consideration of the revolution and democratic afterlives of electricity. Revolutionary science and the puzzle of galvanisme In the context of natural philosophy of the 1770s and 1780s, Galvani’s “animal electricity” was in keeping with electrical natural philosophical developments since the Leyden Jar. In 1773, John Hunter had made a similar comparison between electrical 10 Iwan Rhys Morus, “Radicals, Romantics and Electrical Showmen: Placing Galvanism at the End of the English Enlightenment,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 63 (2009): 263-75; 266. 11 See for example Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2013); Sharon Ruston, Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 241 vibrations and the vibrations of nerves and muscles in his study of the electrical torpedo fish. He reported in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society that “the effluvia or electric bodies seem to have vibrating motions…[which] resemble the motions along the nerves in sensation and muscular contraction.”12 As we saw in chapter one, Abbé Bertholet, Mauduyt de la Varenne, Sigaud de la Fond, Abbé Sans, Gautier d’Agoty and others had developed a notion of animal electricity in France, along with an array of medical uses and practices, touching off a wave of popular electrical medical treatments. In the 1750s, Floriano Caldani and Giambattista Beccaria anticipated Galvani by demonstrating that the muscles of dead frogs could be stimulated electrically. But the central discovery was yet to come. A meticulous natural philosopher, Galvani had suspected the existence of animal electricity long before he published his famous Commentary, including the idea in lectures for his anatomy students at the University of Bologna. His first recorded frog experiments date from 1780, but they were not the first experiments he had performed, as indicated by a note along the top of the manuscript: “Frog prepared in the usual manner.”13 12 John Hunter, “Anatomical Observations on the Torpedo,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 63 no. 2 (1773): 481-89. Quoted in Fulford, “Conducting the Vital Fluid,” 60. 13 Giulio C. Pupilli, “Introduction,” in A Translation of Luigi Galvani’s De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari Commentarius, Commentary on the Effect of Electricity on Muscular Motion, trans. Robert Montraville Green, (Cambridge, Mass.: Elizabeth Licht, Publisher, 1953), x. 242 Fig. 18. Illustrations of Galvani’s experiments, from his De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentaries (1791). “Frog prepared in the usual manner” meant that the upper body stripped away from the frog, leaving the spinal cord and the legs connected and intact. At first, Galvani was focused on the idea of using the frog as “the most delicate electrometer yet discovered,” hooking the frog up to metal wires and hooks in various kinds of weather, especially when the atmosphere was charged with lightning. But in broad daylight, one evening in September 1786, we placed some frogs horizontally on a parapet, prepared in the usual manner by piercing and suspending their spinal cords with iron hooks. The hooks touched an iron plate; behold! a variety of not infrequent spontaneous 243 movements in the frog. If, when they were quiescent, the hook was pressed with the finger against the iron surface, the frogs became excited almost as often as this type of pressure was applied.14 The convulsions happened no matter the weather, inspiring Galvani, aided by his nephew Camillo, to take the frogs inside. Through further experiments, Galvani became convinced that there existed an electricity latent within the muscles of the frog, which was discharged when a metal arc was applied connecting the spinal column to the nerve. It was not incorrect, he wrote, to “compare a muscle fiber to a small Leyden jar, or other similar electric body, charged with two opposite kinds of electricity; but should liken the nerve to the conductor, and therefore compare the whole muscle with the assemblage of Leyden jars.”15 Galvani the anatomist had a credible explanation for a structure that would allow this analogy. One only had to “imagine the nerves so constituted that they are hollow within, or composed of some material suitable for conveying electric fluid, but externally they are either oily or are fused with some other substance which prevents the effusion and dissipation of the said electric fluid running through them.”16 As we have seen, nerves had indeed already been imagined this way in the 1770s and 17780s, it was not a particularly new idea, but it had yet to be proven experimentally. As to the source of this electricity, Galvani and his experimenters believed “that electricity is prepared by the action of the cerebrum, and that it is extracted from the blood, and that 14 Galvani MS Facs. H del Plic. V. Quoted in Pupilli, “Introduction,” xi. 15 Luigi Galvani, De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius. Commentary on the Effect of Electricity on Muscular Motion, trans. Robert Montraville Green (Cambridge, Mass.: Elizabeth Licht, Publisher, 1953), 61. 16 Galvani, De viribus electricitatis, 64. 244 it enters the nerves, and that it runs through them.”17 More obscure was the mechanism by which the mind moved muscle. Perhaps the cerebrum made “some impetus…into whatever nerve it pleases,” the result being that “neuro-electric fluid will quickly flow from the corresponding muscle.”18 If true, the “obscure nature of animal spirits” had been found. At the very least, no one could call animal electricity into doubt. And though “many illustrious men had already mentioned it before,” Galvani and co. had not imagined they would be “first to handle it, as it were with our hands, lurking in the nerves, and to draw it out of the nerves, and almost to place it under our eyes.”19 Galvani had arrived at a discovery that appeared to confirm the suspicions of the dozens of medio-electricians, by way of a long set of meticulously-recorded experiments with the metal arc, electrostatic machines, and thousands of frogs sacrificed to science. Another Italian natural philosopher, Alessandro Volta, made himself Galvani’s main adversary until Galvani’s death in 1798. A chemist and physicist, Volta had an alternative explanation for what Galvani had observed. He claimed that the metals Galvani used were not just conveying a natural animal electricity from nerve to muscle. Using a bimetallic arc on his own frog, and then on his own tongue, he produced far more contractions than with a single metal. Volta was thus able to argue that it was the interaction between the two different metals, through a conducting medium, that produced electric effects. Galvani responded with an experiment that he believed solved the matter. He reported that he had produced electricity simply by touching nerve to muscle, with no metals involved. Volta meanwhile, stacked zinc and copper with layers 17 Galvani, De viribus electricitatis, 67. 18 Galvani, De viribus electricitatis, 72. 19 Galvani, De viribus electricitatis, 68. 245 of acid, demonstrating that the two metals together produced electricity by themselves. And in 1800, the Voltaic pile, the first battery to have a current continually running through it, was born. But Volta had not really answered Galvani’s final experiment. He did not directly refute animal electricity so much as discover a new way of generating electricity that skipped the animal element entirely. Galvani’s discovery instantly caused a stir in France, while Volta’s objections took longer to find recognition. Du Bois-Reymond would write a few decades later that “The storm among physicists, physiologists and physicians, which the appearance of the commentary created, can only be compared to the one that appeared on the political horizon of Europe at that time. It can be said that wherever frogs were to be found, and where two different kinds of metal could be procured, everyone wished to see the mutilated legs of frogs re-animated in this remarkable manner.”20 The French Revolution and the upheaval it caused proved an obstacle to institutional science. Yet, throughout the tumult of the revolution, interest in electricity and especially galvanism continued. Between 1792 and 1802, ten commissions were convened to tackle the case of galvanism in France, indicating an interest that eclipsed that of other scientific topics. Eusebio Valli performed a set of experiments taken from De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari, at Antoine François Fourcroy’s lab at the Academy of Sciences on July 11th, 1792, with Coulomb, Félix Vicq-d’Azyr, author of the 1781 medico-electrical treatise Avis sur l’électricité médical, and fellow medico-electrical practitioner Jean- Baptiste Le Roy. Volta’s first objections to Galvani’s theory of animal electricity, which 20 Emil du Bois-Reymond, Untersuchungen über thierische Elektricitāt (1848), quoted in Edwin Clarke and L.S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1987), 169. 246 appeared in 1792 in Italy, were not published in France.21 In May 1793, the Société Philomathique in Paris received word that someone had tried Galvani’s frog leg experiments on the amputated leg of a human being, to dramatic effect. “Citizen Larrey [a physician] was the first to make [a galvanic experiment] on man; having amputated a leg, he dissected the popliteal nerve, the trunk of which he isolated down to the smallest branches, then wrapping the trunk of this nerve with a blade of lead with a piece of silver, and on the other the muscles with a piece of the same metal, it produced very strong convulsive movements which acted on the leg and even on the foot.”22 In fact, Valli had himself done a galvanic experiment on a man during his showcase for the Académie des sciences a year earlier, though with far less exciting results. The minutes reported: “A man is placed on the table and the armatures put under him, in the same way as in the preceding experiments. No convulsions produced when connected by an excitateur.”23 In 1793, France’s scientific academies closed. Some of the scientists who had been pivotal in assessing galvanism from a medico-electrical standpoint did not make it through the next few years. Vicq d’Azir fell sick after attending the Fête de l’Être Suprême. “The moral afflictions complicated his illness, those sinister images of the 21 Christine Blondel, “Animal electricity in Paris: from initial support, to its discredit and eventual rehabilitation,” in Bresadola, Marco and Giuliano Pancadi, eds. Luigi Galvani International Workshop: Proceedings (Bologna: CIS, Dipartimento di Filosofia, Universita di Bologna, 1999), 187-209. French electricians, however, knew of Volta for his invention of various electrical instruments. In 1796, Sigaud de la Fond described a set of new experiments he had performed with the skin of a wild cat and “Volta’s electrophorus.”. Sigaud de la Fond, Joseph-Aignan. Examen de quelques principes erronés en électricité (Paris: Crapelet, 1796). 22 Augustin-François de Silvestre, Rapport général des travaux de la Société philomathique de Paris, depuis le premier Janvier 1792, jusqu’au 23 Frimaire de l’an VI de la République (Paris: Fuchs, 1789), 35. 23 Procès verbal des expériences sur l’électricité animale répétées par M. Valli devant les commissaires de l’académie, le 12 juillet 1792. Archives de l’Institut de France: Académie des sciences. 247 revolutionary tribunal, the guillotine, and the executioners his feverish imagination ceaselessly reenacted,” explained his elegy given at the new Institut, successor to the Académie de sciences, in 1798. “All conspired to make him succumb to his illness.”24 Antoine Lavoisier went to the guillotine on May 8, 1794, while Fourcroy, his collaborator and co-author of Méthod de nomenclature chimique, sat in the Convention. In 1796, in a memorial speech for Lavoisier, Fourcroy described how Lavoisier had presented “science in an entirely different form from that which it had before, the result of the revolution it had undergone for twenty-five years.” In the same breath, Fourcroy defended himself against the “calumnies” of those who accused him of watching while Lavoisier faced execution for his involvement in tax farming before the revolution. “Remember this distressing time in the history of our revolution, when our tears had to hide in our hearts…when terror estranged friends from each other…when even the slightest word, the slightest solicitation for the unfortunate ones who preceded you on the road to death were deemed crimes and conspiracies,” Fourcroy reminded his audience at the new Lycée des Arts. In that political environment, he had been powerless, he argued, to save even such a preeminent scientist and close friend as Lavoisier from the guillotine.25 Fourcroy’s memorial discourse speaks to the interconnectedness of revolution in chemistry, in electricity, and in politics. Changes in the political landscape were intimately connected to the shifts underway in how the natural world was thought to function. 24 Jacques-Louis Moreau, Éloge de Félix Vicq d'Azir, suivi d'un Précis des travaux anatomiques et physiologiques de ce célèbre médecin, (Paris: 1798), 50. 25 Antoine François Fourcroy. Notice sur la vie et les travaux de Lavoisier, Lue le 15 Thermidor, an 4, au Lycée des Arts (Paris: l’Imprimerie de la Feuille du Cultivateur, 1796), 45-6. 248 In 1797, a new commission composed of veterans like Fourcroy and Coulomb in addition to newer members set out to re-assess the phenomena of galvanism, this time with full knowledge of Volta’s objections. Alexander von Humboldt, who had performed around 3000 experiments and was of the opinion that the nerves were not electrical, per se, joined in for some of the experiments in the spring of 1798.26 The report laid bare the equivocal position of French institutional science between Galvani’s view of things and Volta’s. Article 1 of the report rejected Galvani’s analogy between the Leyden Jar and the frog leg: “Several of the experiments detailed in this article demonstrate, that one cannot fully accept the opinion of those who have attributed the galvanic phenomena to the concurrence of two different, corresponding influences on the part of the nerve and the muscle, as well as those who have compared the ratios of nerve and muscle, in these phenomena, to the ratios of the inner and outer linings of the Leyden jar.” But in a later article, the commission disagreed with Volta as well: This fact, that of electric atmospheres (art III, no. 69), the experiments made under water with the same success as in air, deducting the inevitable effect of the resistance of the medium; the results of the experiments made with identical supports and with the exciter arc composed of a single piece or of similar metals, naturally present consequences which seem to us, if not to destroy, at least to invalidate in part the theory of M. Volta on the influence of the respective electricities of metals on the phenomena of galvanism.27 26 Blondel, “Animal Electricity in Paris.” 27 Compte rendu a la classe des sciences mathématiques et physiques de l’Institut national, des 1ers expériences faites en floréal et prairial de l’an V, par la commission nommée pour examiner et vérifier les phénomènes du Galvanisme. Archives de l’Institut de France. 249 The experimenters produced galvanic convulsions inside and outside water, and with arcs composed of one metal or two. Volta famously claimed that Galvani’s “animal electricity” was really generated between the two metals in the arc. But how could this square with Galvani’s and the commission’s findings that convulsions could be produced with one metal in the arc alone? Or Galvani’s finding that he could produce movement without any metal arc involved? Far from declaring a winner, the 1797 commission critiqued parts of each theory, while adding to the growing body of experiments dedicated to revealing the true nature of galvanic phenomena. Around the same time, Xavier Bichat was authorized to use guillotined corpses for research that would later be published in his Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort, applying the metal arc to them, connecting nerves wrapped in metal as Galvani had done. Rumor had it he had been doing the same in a less-authorized fashion years earlier.28 Bichat detailed some of his experiments on these victims of the guillotine: The last galvanic experiment was made by transmitting the electric fluid from the spinal marrow to the cubital nerve near the elbow; the fingers moved quickly like those of a performer on a violin; one of the assistants who endeavored to keep the hand shut, found that it opened in spite of his efforts. A wire was applied to a slight incision made at the end of the first finger; the hand had been previously shut; the finger was instantly extended, and, after a convulsive 28 Xavier Bichat, Physiological Researches on Life and Death, trans. F. Gold (Boston: Richardson and Lord, 1822), 310-11. Bichat writes, “In the winter of the year 1798, I was authorized to make different essays on the bodies of persons who had been guillotined. I had them at my disposal thirty or forty minutes after they had undergone the punishment. In some of them, all mobility was extinct; in others, this property could be reanimated in all the muscles by the common agents, and in those of the animal life, by galvanism especially.” 250 agitation of the arm, the dead man seemed to point his finger at the spectators, some of whom thought that he had come to life.29 Bichat had little success trying restarting hearts through galvanic experiment, which was his aim. But reviving the muscles of the fingers proved easier, as well as more frightening to spectators. Though presumably an informed audience, these spectators believed that this guillotined body had been galvanized back to life. Luigi Galvani’s nephew, Aldini, would make this kind of galvanic experiment into a new kind of electrical spectacle. In 1803, he famously electrified the body of a murderer who had been hanged in Newgate Prison in London. He used Voltaic pile, which he rechristened the Galvanic Pile, to do so. That the new electrical spectacle centered around a single dead body rather than a chain of living ones reflects the shift electrical science underwent as it grappled with the puzzle of galvanisme. Where Nollet and Franklin had been interested in the nature of electricity, whether effluence, affluence, or a single fluid charged positively and negatively, French scientists at the turn of the 19th century were interested in electricity as it pertained to anatomy, movement, and above all, life and death. The guillotine loomed large in this scientific discourse, not only as a source of human bodies, but as it called into question what constituted life.30 Interest in galvanism and bodily electricity continued into the nineteenth century. In Great Britain it was associated, not only with French revolutionary 29 Bichat, Physiological Researches, 311-12. 30 Grégoire Chamayou “La querelle des têtes tranchées: Les médecins, la guillotine et l’anatomie de la conscience au lendemain de la Terreur.” Revue d’histoire des sciences 61, no. 2 (2008): 333-365. Chamayou demonstrates how the sudden abundance of “severed heads” prompted an anatomical debate. On the one side, Samuel Thomas Sömerling argued that consciousness and life were located in the brain, while Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis argued for a vitalist account of life and consciousness distributed through every fiber of the body. 251 republicanism, but also with “French” materialism. Galvanism was “the plaything of fashionable dilettantes, the hope of radical firebrands and the bête noire of conservative ideologues” writes Iwan Rhys Morus, all of which contributed to its “dodgy reputation” among scientists.31 The complex connotations of electrical bodies played a role in the publicly staged debate between John Abernethy and William Lawrence, two professors at London’s Royal College of Surgeons, between 1814 and 1819. The crux of the debate was whether life flowed from the organization of the body, or whether it was some superadded substance which gave the body life. Abernethy was a proponent of the latter view, and he developed it on analogy to electricity: “irritability is the effect of some subtle, mobile, invisible substance, superadded to the evident structure of muscles, or other forms of vegetable and animal matter, as magnetism is to iron, and as electricity is to various substances with which it might be connected.”32 Citing Humphrey Davy, Abernethy argued that electricity “formed an important link in the connection of our knowledge of dead and living matter.”33 This argument followed the logic of galvanism. But Abernethy would not go so far as to claim that electricity was a vital fluid, a position which might be mistaken for materialism: “It is not meant to be affirmed that electricity is life.” Nevertheless, Lawrence and other opponents picked up on the analogy Abernethy had drawn between life and electricity. 31 Iwan Rhys Morus, Shocking Bodies: Life, Death & Electricity in Victorian England (Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2011), 18-19. 32 John Abernethy, An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life: being the subject of the first two anatomical lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons, of London (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1814), 39. Quoted in Ruston, The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein, 91-2. 33 Abernethy, An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life, 48. 252 Fifteen years into the nineteenth century, this appeared an outdated view, compared to the bolder views propounded by Abernethy’s adversary. Lawrence argued that rather than some superadded substance like electricity, life and movement stemmed from organization. Lawrence followed Bichat’s definition: “Life consists in the sum of the functions, by which death is resisted.”34 Living things tended toward death, and whatever held them back temporarily constituted life. The “hypothesis or fiction of a subtle invisible matter,” wrote Lawrence, “is only an example of that propensity in the human mind, which has led men at all times to account for those phenomena, of which the causes are not obvious, by the mysterious aid of higher and imaginary beings.”35 Whether there was a subtle, invisible, aethereal breath of life or not, overreliance on the hypothesis tended toward mystical thinking and obscured understanding. “The truth is,” Lawrence concluded, rejecting a century of vitalist theorizing about electrical fluids, “there is no resemblance, no analogy between electricity and life.”36 In the context of his debate with Abernethy, Lawrence lost the battle but won the war. At first stripped of his position as a hospital surgeon under suspicion of materialist thought that went against religion, Lawrence was forced to suppress printed copies of his 1819 Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man in the scramble to retain his professional status.37 But the tide turned in the following decade, and Lawrence eventually became Queen Victoria’s Surgeon Extraordinaire in 1837.38 Abernethy’s 34 Bichat, Physiological Researches, 10. 35 William Lawrence, An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology (London: J. Callow, 1816), 174. 36 Lawrence, An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, 170. 37 Marilyn Butler, “Frankenstein and Radical Science,” Times Literary Supplement Issue 4697 (April 1993): 12-15. 38 Ruston, The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein, 104. 253 galvanic, vitalist electricity, superadded to the body and leaving theoretical room for a soul, was supplanted by Lawrence’s new anatomy, in which the question of the soul was neither here nor there. It was in the height of this widely publicized debate between Abernethy and Lawrence that the young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Shelley eloped. In 1816, they found themselves in Geneva, with their friend and fellow poet Lord Byron and his doctor, John Polidori. Because of the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Bali several months earlier, 1816 was known as the “year without a summer.” Stuck inside, the Romantics held a ghost story competition. Literal lightning accompanied Percy’s “electric communication of the mind,” as Mary Shelley composed Frankenstein. Published in 1818, the first reviews of the novel immediately identified Dr. Frankenstein with Abernethy.39 Shelley, like Abernethy, shied away from pointing to galvanism as the answer to how Frankenstein bestowed life on his stitched-together creature. Readers ever since have filled in that intentional blank with electricity. In the book, Frankenstein’s interest in science is piqued by his witnessing of a lightning strike to a tree: “I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak, which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump…I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed.” Turning to his father, fifteen-year-old Frankenstein asks for an explanation. “He replied, ‘Electricity;’ describing at the same time the various effects of that power. He constructed a small electrical machine and exhibited a few experiments; he also made a kite, with a wire and strong, which drew down that fluid 39 Butler, “Frankenstein and Radical Science.” 254 from the clouds.”40 From this original lightning strike, Frankenstein’s introduction to the “fluid” of electricity proves to be the gateway to his obsession with chemistry, life, and death. All of these were of course topical questions related to electricity, as they had been since the 1790s. After months of gothic, Bichat-esque obsession over the progression from life to death, Frankenstein experiences another lightning strike, this time within his own mind: “from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple that I became dizzy with the prospect which it illustrated.” In an echo of Galvani, Frankenstein expresses surprise that “I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.” Spending days and nights awake mastering the techniques, Frankenstein becomes capable of “bestowing animation upon lifeless matter,” a formulation which sounds much like Abernethy’s superadded “principle of life.”41 If life is something bestowed on inert matter, that makes Victor Frankenstein’s theory of life analogous to the kind of electricity we have seen throughout the revolutionary period; the same kind that Gautier d’Agoty imagined flowing through the lungs and the hollow nerves. Lightning had one final function in the novel: “I am a blasted tree,” Frankenstein tells the ship captain Walton, “the bolt has entered my heart.”42 Electricity may have given life to Frankenstein’s creature, but it also took life away, a connotation which had not been the focus of electrical science in the late eighteenth century. Toward romantic electricity 40 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1996), 23. 41 Shelley, Frankenstein, 30. 42 Shelley, Frankenstein, 110. 255 The “galvanic boom” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was felt in literature and the arts. That natural philosophy and literature were not the distinct modern disciplines we think of today is attested to by the way in which electricity, thought, and sentiment were linked. The following section traces how some scientistic thinking, akin to what we saw in chapter one, analogized thought to electricity, literally. It tracks this association as electrical thoughts make their way into romantic literature, articulating an ideal reader-audience relationship that preserves within it much of the original politics of revolutionary electricity. In 1798, an Englishman by the name of William Belcher published a treatise which he titled “Intellectual Electricity.” He was not a well-known author; his last publication had been his medical thesis on hysteria, presented to the board of examiners at the Royal College of Medicine in Edinburgh in 1793.43 By the end of the decade, Belcher had what he considered a major revelation, accompanied by his reading of Sir Isaac Newton’s Opticks, David Hartley’s materialist philosophy in Observations on Man, and reading about the discovery of oxygen by Joseph Priestley and Lavoisier. Mixing this new and older science with his own self-styled, half tongue-in-cheek mysticism concerning Saturn, Jupiter, Prometheus, and the number eight, the doctor reached the conclusion that human intelligence was of an electrical nature. The subtitle 43 William Belcher, Disputatio medica inauguralis de hysteria. Edinburgh: Adam Neill and Co., 1793. This was an era in which medical degrees could be bought from Scottish universities without formal medical training. Tim Fulford describes this “inchoate and contested medical context” at the turn of the century as a perfect breeding ground for mesmerism and mesmerist accusations. Tim Fulford “Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s,” Studies in Romanticism 43, no. 1 (2004): 57-78; 59. 256 explained what Belcher intended to cover in his two-hundred page “Novum Organum of Vision:” That the present State of Things is the Consequence of an incipient Change in Human Nature itself: a Revolution that, the more it is thwarted and crossed, the more its Spirit vibrates, kindles and flames; demonstrative of the present Existence of a Sense or Faculty in Man, anticipated or discovered by the Author; whereby Innate ideas are less necessary, and ordinary Optics superseded; the Connection between the material and spiritual World elucidated; the Medium of Thought rendered visible [...]. What was this medium of thought? In Intellectual Electricity, the self-styled “Rational Mystic” (i.e. Belcher) reported his discovery that “thoughts are conveyed to the sensory by means of Electricity, perhaps by the medium of oxygen,” and further, that “Possibly the Soul itself is conveyed in Electricity at birth.”44 Belcher arrived at this idea through Newton and Hartley. Glossing Newton in a way that that echoed natural philosophers throughout the eighteenth century, while at the same time oversimplifying, Belcher focused on Newton’s suggestions of a universal aether near the end of the Opticks: “Sir Isaac Newton conceived that electricity is actually aether, a refined substance pervading the universe. And if this aether, electricity, or oxygen, are successively vehicles of spirit, or, as Dr. Hartley terms the eye, possibly of a mixed material and spiritual nature, different however from ordinary matter, yet, like the soul, subject to its laws,”45 then, concluded Belcher, everything pointed to electricity as the medium of thought—or 44 William Belcher, Intellectual Electricity: Novum Organum of Vision, and Grand Mystic Secret. (London: 1798), 25. The title recalls Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum. 45 Belcher, Intellectual Electricity, iv. 257 perhaps oxygen, he could not be sure. Styling his treatise after the Opticks, the Rational Mystic presented his reasoning in the form of answers to a set of queries. The first of these: “May not electricity (and consequently lightning) convey ideas in some of the following manners?” after which Belcher elaborated the means by which electricity might be a literal vehicle of thought: 1. By means of the identity of the electric and nervous fluid. 2. By its action on the nervous fluid whether they are identical or not. 3. By its action on the blood, on supposition of the blood’s vitality. 4. By its action (on the same supposition) immediately on oxygen known to mix with the blood in the lungs, and to be in a manner the breath and spirit of life. Remember that Sir Isaac Newton affirmed, that “the powers of electrical bodies are owing to the action of the aether,” Hartley, p. 17. Thus aether impels electricity; and perhaps electricity, oxygen; and perhaps there are numerous gradations through the sensory to the soul. 5. By its subtile communication with the sensory. 6. By its direct access to the soul. 7. By its being the vehicle of spirit. 46 There were so many ways, reasoned the author, that electricity might actually be the stuff of thought. Using his own body as experimental proof, and quoting one of Newton’s queries reporting a similar phenomenon, Belcher claimed he saw flashes of light when his eyes were closed which he later correlated with moments in which he had been struck by ideas. The more “flashings,” the greater the “production of ideas.” 46 Belcher, Intellectual Electricity, v. 258 Lightning had the same effect. “That the mental and physical light have an analogy,” reflected Belcher, “can hardly be doubted; and it being known that lightning is electric, it seems certain that the common cause is directly, or indirectly, more or less electricity.”47 Belcher disavowed materialism and stopped short of claiming that the soul was any kind of material entity: “I am not a materialist…I am far from supposing myself a mere machine.”48 And yet broaching the subject of intellectual electricity and of electrical thought, situated the obscure Belcher on a materialist spectrum. From John Locke, who argued that all thought comes from sensation, but ruled out a “physical consideration of the mind,” to Priestley who imagined an organic brain structure materially related to thought, to Diderot and d’Holbach, the most committed materialists of the radical Enlightenment, and lastly to the Lawrence-Abernethy debate at the Royal College of Surgeons, eighteenth-century electricity brushed up against questions of materialism and the nature and existence of the soul.49 Even revolutionary radicals like Marat toed the line between electrical vitalism and the theological concept of an immaterial soul, retaining the soul as the sovereign organizing principle communicating with the body through the agency of the (possibly electrical) nervous fluid. Marat’s vitalist-but-not-materialist physiology corresponded, argues Keith Baker, to Marat’s political thought: he wanted an embodied, centralized sovereignty and an active, vital 47 Belcher, Intellectual Electricity, 35. 48 Belcher, Intellectual Electricity, i; xi. 49 See for example Charles T. Wolfe, “From the logic of ideas to active-matter materialism: Priestley’s Lockean problem and early neurophilosophy.” Intellectual History Review, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2020): 31- 47. 259 populace, just as he imagined the human body governed by a soul, but life distributed throughout.50 Intellectual Electricity demonstrates how in 1798, a mystically inclined doctor with an abiding interest in natural philosophy, who made efforts to keep abreast of new advancements, concluded that thought was literally made of electricity. The text is remarkable for its explicit avowal of the idea, metaphorical or more-than-metaphorical, behind revolutionary electricity, which so often applied to the soul of French citizens and soldiers. As we have seen, many eighteenth-century natural philosophers drew, like Belcher, upon Newton’s suggestions of aether in Opticks, developing a theory of active powers of matter as well as a spectacular mode of “heroic” lecturing, connecting electrical phenomena to popular enthusiasm.51 Here at the cusp of the nineteenth century was self-avowedly mystical text, repeating the same reasoning, after “revolutionary electricity” had subsided along with revolutionary radicalism in French politics. Belcher argued in the context of a scientific (or scientistic) treatise what the French revolutionary metaphor of électrisation had implied earlier in the decade. The author of Intellectual Electricity reported that he learned about Galvani’s work in April of 1798, after he had already written most of the treatise. Galvani died at only 61, later that same year. Belcher is unfamiliar enough with Galvani that he misspelled his name several times as “Gavani,” and reported confusedly that this Gavani and Volta shared the view that the nervous fluid and the electric fluid were one and the 50 Keith Baker, “Was Marat a Vitalist?” in Keith Michael Baker and Jenna M. Gibbs, eds. Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2016), 110-124. 51 Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science 21, no. 1 (March 1983): 1-43. 260 same.52 Tellingly, Belcher took what he understood from Galvani’s work—“the idea of ‘a nervous messenger of an electrical nature’”—to be a confirmation of what Hartley had already “derived” from “Sir Isaac Newton’s theory of vibrating aether,” and likewise a confirmation of what Belcher himself argued.53 This kind of reasoning abounded at the turn of the century in the anglophone world. Robert Southey wrote in 1800 that the “galvanic fluid” could be identified with the “nervous fluid.”54 Mary Wollstonecraft recognized mesmerism as a hoax; her husband William Godwin had even taken it upon himself to translate the 1784 anti- mesmerist report from the French commission led by Franklin for an English audience. Wollstonecraft, however, did not tar electricity and mesmerism with the same brush. In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she allowed for a “subtle electric fluid” within human bodies, reasoning that the “most powerful effects in nature are apparently produced by fluids, the magnetic, etc.”55 These ideas spread in the early American Republic as well. Though like Blecher, he appears not to have known of Galvani’s experiments or theories, medical doctor T. Gale, of the small town of Galway, New York used electrotherapy in keeping with his broader belief that electricity was “ethereal fire” and “the very soul of the universe,” responsible for both gravity and motion in general.56 The uptick in attitudes like these, which Delbourgo calls “electrical 52 Belcher, Intellectual Electricity, 37. 53 Belcher, Intellectual Electricity, 36-7. 54 Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 205. 55 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5 p. 253, 185n. Quoted in Sharon Ruston, The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein, 77. 56 T. Gale, Electricity, or Ethereal Fire, Considered (Troy, NY: Moffitt and Lyon, 1802), 7, 13-14. Quoted in James Delbourgo, Electricity, Experiment and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century North America, PhD Diss. (Columbia University, 2003), 243. 261 humanitarianism” in the United States context, was in fact part of a trans-Atlantic phenomenon.57 These widely-held beliefs about electricity played into the development of a romantic metaphor of electricity, specifically electrical thought. From Shelley and the “uncommunicated lightning” of the poet’s mind to Victor Hugo’s concept of “electric” communication between reader and author, scientific beliefs about electricity’s identity with thought and sentiment came to express an idealized author- reader relationship.58 Transported along with this romantic electrical metaphor, I argue, was the kernel of the political meaning given to it through the revolution: that electricity pertained to the soul, that it was communicable in an instant, irresistible, and most crucially, that it forged collective sentiment, collective will even, from a group of individuals, even one as large as a nation. Early French Romantic authors connected these qualities explicitly to revolution and republicanism. In his Essai historique of 1797, Chateaubriand described the reverberations of European wealth and greed on the laborers in the silver mines of Potosí. “Thus,” he wrote, “everything is linked, and a revolution, like an electric shock, is felt at the same instant by the whole chain of peoples.”59 Chateaubriand lifts the revolutionary electrical metaphor wholecloth, including the Leyden Jar chain seen in Poyet. Madame de Staël, the daughter of finance minister Jacques Necker, who grew up at her mother’s feet as she hosted a popular pre-revolutionary salon, likewise thought of political communication in a republic in terms of electricity. The two 57 Delbourgo, Electricity, Experiment and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century North America, 240. 58 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (London: C. and J. Ollier, 1820), xxi; Victor Hugo, Littérature et philosophie mêlées (Paris: Laffont, 1985), 155. 59 François-René de Chateaubriand, Essai historique, politique et moral sur les révolutions anciennes et modernes, considérées dans leurs rapports avec la Révolution française (London: 1797), 219. 262 concepts are linked several times in her work. In her posthumously published reflections on a revolution which she had fled, that electricity was clearly associated with republicanism. Though she deemed the first republic “irreconcilable with general tranquility” in France, “at least minds were electrified by the individual efforts which a republic always excites.” Under the “civil tyranny” and “military despotism” that followed, “what virtues can we find traces of in the political parties surrounding the imperial government?”60 Electricity distinguished the republic from the other types of government France had experienced during the revolution decade. With the republic gone, electricity was gone too. Michel Delon argues that for de Staël, electricity was severed from materialist connotations, instead figuring a kind of “moral energy” that characterized the right kind of politics.61 Electricity, for Madame de Staël, was double-edged. The intellectual energy of the new Constituent Assembly after July 14th, 1789, was not the same as the electricity of a crowd. In the former, “the electricity of thoughts was communicated in an instant,” this communication from person to person “irresistible,” and “nothing spoke more to the imagination than this unarmed will.”62 This “electricity of thoughts” gave way to an electricity of sentiment and of passion in de Staël’s philosophical work on passion. Against the notion that the multitude never errs—recalling Rousseau’s unerring general will—she argued that “precisely because its movements are natural and spontaneous,” 60 Germaine de Staël, Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution françoise, Tome 3 (Paris: Delaunay, 1818), 86. 61 Michel Delon, L'idée d'énergie au tournant des Lumières (1770-1820) (Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), 179. 62 Germaine de Staël, Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la République (1798; Genève, 1979), 285. Quoted in François Zanetti, L’électricité médicale dans la France des Lumières (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2017), 218. 263 the judgment of the multitude is subject to passion. And this judgment was ultimately anchored in passion, “because people gathered together only communicate with the aid of this electricity, and they share in common only their feelings. It is not the intellect of each individual, but the general impulse which produces a result.”63 Electricity for de Staël is equal to the stuff of thought, when it came to the Constituent Assembly, and passion, when it came to the masses. Electricity was exchanged in assemblies where the people are physically gathered together, whether through their representatives in legislatures, or in the form of the multitude, or crowd. Though Delon interprets this electricity as a non-materialist kind of moral energy, the traces of the literal electrification of the Leyden Jar, and its revolutionary associations, are evident. French romantics and theorists thus conserved electricity’s radical, Rousseauian connotations, developed through the crucible of revolution. For a particularly rich example of romantic electricity at precisely this intersection, American novelist John Neal developed a rich description in his novel Logan: The eloquent crimson of the heart dashes upward, like lightning to the cheeks, to the eye, through all the trembling and agitated extremities, in approbation of both! Such is man!…This incommunicable thought of passionate daring, sent home, like a fire brand, successively, through the linked hearts of a multitude, will kindle a whole people to rebellion. God! What is it! The electricity of the soul. One arm is waved, and lo! Unnumbered arms accompany it. One voice is 63 Germaine de Staël, De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations (Lausanne: 1796), 76. 264 lifted up; and straightway the heavens are ringing with the cry of a whole nation.64 It is not by accident that Neal channels a revolutionary electricity as well as a literal, galvanic electricity of the body. It is also not by accident that, through this electricity, the individual body literally becomes a multiplied body—a representation of the unrepresentable collective will. Neal was an eccentric but committed revolutionary sympathizer and an advocate for the abolition of slavery and for women’s rights. Electricity in his hands is resolutely political, at the same time as it is anatomical. In the following decades, Walt Whitman composed Leaves of Grass, published in 1855. The poems in the first edition are untitled. “I sing the body electric,” began one of them, “The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, / They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, / And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.” The poem meditated on the soul, and the primacy of electric connections between human beings. This electric body was the soul incarnate: “And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? / And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?”65 The poem meditated on the enslaved bodies Whitman saw being sold and purchased at an auction, and the variety of bodies, male and female, he imagined and saw around him, all vitally electrical. Christian Haines argues that in this poem, Whitman articulates an egalitarian, monist model of organic life, and through it both a “vital democracy and an eventual democracy,” that is, organistic democracy and 64 John Neal, Logan, A Family History (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey, 1822), 61. For an analysis of lightning metaphors in Neal, see Paul Gilmore, “John Neal’s Lightning Imagination: Electricity against Romantic Organicism,” Centaurus Vol. 57, No. 3 (August 2015): 156-172. 65 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, (1855). Accessed through the Poetry Foundation. 265 democracy as historical, revolutionary outcome. Haines argues that these two versions of democracy are in tension with one another—on the one hand democracy as revolutionary event, on the other democracy as “ontology of life”—and that this tension sustains the poem.66 Without losing sight of the differences between French revolutionary democracy and American revolutionary democracy, we can use the electrical, corporeal, vital democracy of Whitman’s “body electric” to think about the legacy of revolutionary electricity and its enduring relationship to democracy. As in French revolutionary electricity, Whitman’s electricity is deeply anchored in the body, even inseparable from it. Electricity does not act upon the soul, it is the soul; the “body electric” names the body and soul in one. It is an immanent version of what French revolutionaries imagined when they imagined electricity in revolutionary democratic festivals, in popular energy directed toward external and internal enemies of the revolution, and in the bodies and minds of the enslaved in Saint Domingue. Whitman imagines this electricity functioning in ways that resonate with how French revolutionaries imagined it. Surrounded by “armies,” compelled to “go off with them” and “respond,” the speaker in the poem “charges” the army of bodies with the soul’s electricity. Electric charge passes between bodies like so many soldiers shocked with the Leyden Jar. Even in the mid-nineteenth century world batteries, telegraphs, current generators, democratic, revolutionary, animal electricity thrived in literary form. No longer understood as a subtle aether, 66 Christian P. Haines, “The People and the People: Democracy and Vitalism in Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass,” in A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 76-79. 266 electricity and electric bodies express more forcefully than ever that far from an abstraction, democracy is vitally embodied. At the 8th Congress of Soviets in December 1920, two years after the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin rose to speak on the ambitious, revolutionary project of state technology that now obsessed him: Electrification. “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,” he declared. “Only when the country has been electrified…only then shall we be fully victorious.”67 H.G. Wells, meeting Lenin in September of 1920, came away with the impression that, “Lenin, who like a good orthodox Marxist denounces all ‘Utopians’, has succumbed at last to a Utopia, the Utopia of the electricians.”68 Lenin wanted a light bulb in every village, and in December 1920 he proposed in a letter that church bells everywhere be melted down to achieve it. The image of the peasant’s awestruck encounter with the lightbulb was soon immortalized on stamps, decorative boxes, and in photographs. Lenin recounted such an encounter in an electrified village in his address to the 8th congress of Soviets. “One of the peasants came forward and began to make a speech welcoming this new event in the lives of the peasants. ‘We peasants were unenlightened,’ he said, ‘and now light has appeared among us, an ‘unnatural light, which will light up our peasant darkness.’” Lenin concluded, “What we must now try is to convert every electric power station we build into a stronghold of enlightenment to be used to make the masses electricity- conscious.” 67 Kamanev closed the 8th congress with the following words: “The electrification of Russia [will serve as] the base for Soviet proletariat power…to open the road to a new conquest by technology, which will mark the greatest gigantic victory by mankind over the elemental forces of nature.” Quoted in Jonathan Coopersmith, The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926 (Cornell University Press, 1992), 177. 68 H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows (Doran, 1921), 158-60. 267 Electrification was tightly associated not only with Revolution but with mass enlightenment and exodus from a literally dark, oppressive past. Posters by Gustav Klutsis from the early 1920s give expression to the idea of electrification—rarely imagined separately, it would seem, from the person of Lenin himself. One reads: “Electrification of the entire countryside!” Lenin carries a pylon or similar equipment. In another, Lenin’s silhouette glows electrically and enormous lightbulbs appear on the left of the frame. In a third, image, an enormous lightbulb merges with Lenin’s head, an image celebrating the twelfth anniversary of the October Revolution. Fig. 19. Lenin’s electrified silhouette. Electric light exposes the counter-revolution, as in a 1922 illustration captioned “Electrification and Counter-Revolution.” Historian Adam Ulam has suggested that by 268 1920, “Electrification” assumed the role “Revolution” had played in Lenin’s speechmaking prior to October; “after the Revolution” became “after electrification.”69 While Russian revolutionary electrification coalesced around the symbols of the lightbulb and the pylon, eighteenth-century electricity was multivalent, embodied in a variety of ways, decoupled from the kinds of utility with which it would later be associated. It was, some thought, analogous to thought and life, flowing between the atmosphere and the nervous systems of living creatures. It struck naturally in the form of lightning but was also newly manipulable through the technologies of the Leyden jar and the electrostatic machine. This electrification was taken up into French revolutionary politics, and electrification was the order of the day, though a different kind of electricity than Lenin imagined. As in Whitman, revolutionary electric bodies formed a collective, sovereign body, united on the level of the soul. Witman’s “body electric” and Lenin’s electrification of the countryside illustrate the afterlives of revolutionary electricity, even as electrical science developed in new directions. This dissertation has traced a cultural history of French revolutionary electricity from late-eighteenth-century theories of animal electricity, through revolutionary festivals, revolutionary war, revolutionary missionizing, and revolutionary imbrications with colonialism and slavery, to the galvanic moment of 1800. It has investigated how revolutionaries brought natural philosophy to bear on political philosophy in ways that challenge the conceptual boundaries we tend to draw between the two. It has uncovered the vitalist history of electrical figures of speech, demonstrating that the political 69 Adam Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (Harvard University Press, 1998), 481. 269 electrification we invoke today is in some sense a dead metaphor, or a metaphor disconnected from its pre-industrial, revolutionary significance. In a sense, one purpose of this dissertation has been to broaden the scope of how we think about energy in politics, by giving us back this concept of revolutionary electricity, honed into a distinctive shape through late eighteenth-century revolutions, and addressing urgent problems of social cohesion, collective movement, and democracy which we still face. 270 271 REFERENCES Archives Archives de l’Institut de France. Archives municipales de Lyon. Archives nationales. Archives nationales d’outre mer. Archives parlementaires. Kroch Library Rare Books and Manuscripts. University of Oklahoma Libraries, History of Science Collections. Published Primary Works Abernethy, John. An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life: being the subject of the first two anatomical lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons, of London. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1814. Bailly, Jean Sylvain. Mémoires d’un témoin de la Révolution. Berville and Barriere, 1821-22. Belcher, William. Disputatio medica inauguralis de hysteria. Edinburgh: Adam Neill and Co., 1793. Belcher, William. Intellectual Electricity: Novum Organum of Vision, and Grand Mystic Secret. London: 1798. Bertholon, Pierre. De l’électricité des méteores. Paris, 1787. Bertholon, Pierre. De l’électricité du corps humain. Paris: Chez Croullbois; Lyon: Chez Bernuset, 1786. Boyle, Robert. Experiments and Notes about the Mechanical Origine or Production of Electricity. London: Printed by E. Flesher, 1675. Brissot, Jacques-Pierre. Un mot à l’oreille des académiciens de Paris. [Paris?]: [1784?]. Brissot, Jacques-Pierre. Adresse à l'Assemblée nationale, pour l'abolition de la traite des Noirs. Paris: de l’'impr. de L. Potier de Lille, 1790. Brissot, Jacques-Pierre. Discours de J. _. Brissot, député, sur les causes des troubles de St. Domingue: prononcé a la seance du premier decembre 1791. Paris: L’Imprimerie du Patriote Française, 1791. 272 Brissot, Jacques-Pierre. Mémoires de Brissot, membre de l’Assemblée Législative et de la Convention nationale, sur ses contemporains, et la Révolution française. Publiés par son fils; avec des notes et des éclaircissements historiques, par M. F. de Montrol. Paris: Maison Ladvocat, 1830. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. London: 1759. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1966. First published in London, 1790. Burke, Edmund. Thoughts on the prospect of a regicide peace, in a series of letters. London: Printed for J. Owen, 1796. Bichat, Xavier. Physiological Researches on Life and Death. Translated by F. Gold. Boston: Richardson and Lord, 1822. Casanova, Giacomo. À Léonard Snetlage [Dresden]: 1797. Cazeles, Masars de. Mémoire sur l’électricité médicale, et histoire du traitement de vingt malades traités, et la plupart guéris par l’Electricité. (Paris: Chez Mequignon; Toulouse: Chez Dupleix, Chez Sacarau & Moulas, Chez Laporte, 1780). Chateaubriand, François-René de. Essai historique, politique et moral sur les révolutions anciennes et modernes, considérées dans leurs rapports avec la Révolution française. London: 1797. Clarkson, Thomas. The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament. London: 1808. Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. Confédération nationale, du 14 Juillet 1790. Description fidèle de tout ce qui a précédé, accompagné & suivi cette auguste Cérémonie. Paris: Rue Haute- feuille, No. 5, 1790. d’Escherny, Comte. Correspondance d’un habitant de Paris avec ses amis de Suisse et d’Angleterre sur les événements de 1789, 1790, et jusqu’au 4 avril 1791. Paris: Desenne, 1791. 273 Extrait des registres de l’académie royale des sciences. Du 22 Novembre 1786. Rapport des Commissaires chargés, par l’Académie, de l’examen du Projet d’un nouvel Hôtel-Dieu, Paris: De l’Imprimerie Royale, 1786. Extrait des registres du Directoire du Département du Mont-Blanc, séant à Chambéry. Chambéry: Chez Lullin, 1793. Extrait du Proces-verbal des Délibérations du Conseil du Déliberations du Conseil du Départment du Loiret. Séance publique du 10 Septembre 1793, l’an second de la République, une et indivisible. Orléans: l’imprimerie du Département, 1793. Dalmas, Antoine. Histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue, Depuis le commencement des troubles…suivie d’un mémoire sur le rétablissement de cette colonie. Tome 1. Paris: Mame Frères, 1814. Darwin, Erasmus. The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society: A Poem, with Philosophical Notes. London: J. Johnson, 1803. Darwin, Erasmus. The Botanic Garden. A Poem, in Two Parts. Part I. Containing the Economy of Vegetation. Part II. The Loves of the Plants. With Philosophical Notes. New York: T. & J. Swords, 1807. Dictionnaire critique de la langue française. Ed. Jean-François Féraud. Paris: 1787- 1788. Dictionnaire de la langue française, 2e édition. Ed. Émile Littré. Paris: 1873. Extrait des registres de l’académie royale des sciences. Du 22 Novembre 1786. Rapport des Commissaires chargés, par l’Académie, de l’examen du Projet d’un nouvel Hôtel-Dieu. Paris: De l’Imprimerie Royale, 1786. Fourcroy, Antoine François. Notice sur la vie et les travaux de Lavoisier, Lue le 15 Thermidor, an 4, au Lycée des Arts. Paris: l’Imprimerie de la Feuille du Cultivateur, 1796. Galvani, Luigi. De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius. Commentary on the Effect of Electricity on Muscular Motion. Translated by Robert Montraville Green. Cambridge, Mass.: Elizabeth Licht, Publisher, 1953. First published 1791. Gautier d’Agoty, Jacques-Fabien. Exposition anatomique des organes des sens, jointe à la névrologie entière du corps humain, et conjectures sur l’électricité. Paris: Demonville, 1775. 274 Stephen Grey, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 37 (1731-32). Grimm, Fredrich Melchior, baron von. Correspondances Litteraires 1753-1790. Edited by Jean-Antoine Taschereau and A. Chaudé. Paris: Furne, 1829. Hugo, Victor. Littérature et philosophie mêlées. Paris: Laffont, 1985. First published 1834. Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood. New York: Cromwell and Co., 1887. First published 1862. Hunter, John. “Anatomical Observations on the Torpedo.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 63 no. 2 (1773): 481-89. Lawrence, William. An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology. London: J. Callow, 1816. Maistre, Joseph de. Considérations sur la France. 2e édition. London: 1797. Marat, Jean-Paul. Essai philosophique sur l’homme. Paris: 1774. Marat, Jean-Paul. Découvertes de M. Marat sur le feu, l’électricité, et la lumière. Paris: 1779. Marat, Jean-Paul. “Lettre à Monsieur le Baron.” Kroch Rare and Manuscript Library, Lavoisier 4712 Bd. Ms. 56 +++. May 6, 1786. Marat, Jean-Paul. L’Ami du Peuple. Paris: L’Imprimerie de la veuve Herrisant; L’Imprimerie de Marat, 1789-1792. Marat, Jean-Paul. Journal de la République Française. Paris: L’Imprimerie de Marat,1792-1793. Marat, Jean-Paul. Observations a mes Commettans et profession de foi. Paris: L’Imprimerie de Marat, 1793. Moreau, Jacques-Louis. Éloge de Félix Vicq d'Azir, suivi d'un Précis des travaux anatomiques et physiologiques de ce célèbre médecin. Paris: 1798. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric Louis Élie. Description Topographique, Physique, Civile, Politique et Historique de la Partie Française de l’Isle Saint- Domingue. Philadelphia: Chez l’auteur; Paris: Chez Dupont, 1791. 275 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric Louis Élie. La Danse. Parme: imprimé par Bodoni, 1801. Neal, John. Logan, A Family History. Philadelphia: H. C. Carey, 1822. Nollet, Jean-Antoine. Programme ou idée générale d’un cours de physique expériementale. Paris, 1738. Nollet, Jean-Antoine. Essai sur l’électricité des corps. Paris: Frères Guerin, 1746. Nollet, Jean-Antoine. Recherches sur les causes particulieres des phénoménes électriques, et sur les effets nuisibles ou avantageux qu’on peut en attendre. Nouvelle edition. Paris: Chez H. L. Guerin & L. F. Delatour, 1754. Poyet, Bernard. Idées Générales Presentées par le Sieur Poyet, Architecte du Roi et de la Ville, sur le projet de la Fête du 14 juillet, a l’occasion du Pacte-Federatif, entre les Gardes Nationales et le Troupes de Ligne de la France ; pour célébrer l’époque de la Révolution. Paris: Veuve Delaguette, 1790. Poyet, Bernard. Projet de Cirque National et de Fêtes annuelles, proposé par le sieur Poyet, Architecte de la Ville de Paris. Paris: De l’imprimerie de Migneret, 1792. Poyet, Bernard. Prospectus du monument à élever par sous-scription, à la gloire de Napoleon-le-Grand. Paris: 1806. Poyet, Bernard. Projet de Monument, présenté aux Deux Chambres. Paris: 1816. Priestley, Joseph. Experiments and observations on different kinds of air. 3rd edition. London: 1781. First edition 1774. Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas. Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes. Amsterdam: 1770. Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas. Adresse de Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, remise par lui- même à M. le Président, le 21 mai 1791, et lue à l’assemblée le même jour. Paris: Chez Gattey, 1791. Robespierre, Maximilien. Oeuvres complètes de Maximilien Robespierre. Ed. Ernest Leroux. Paris: 1910. Digitized by the ARTFL Project and the University of Chicago. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theater. Translated by Allan Bloom. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1960. 276 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile ou de l’éducation. In Œuvres complètes de J. J. Rousseau, Vol. 5 Paris: J. Bry Ainé, 1856. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Edited and Translated by Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. The Reports of the Royal Commission of 1784 on Mesmer’s System of Animal Magnetism and other contemporary documents. Edited and translated by IML Donaldson. Edinburgh: Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 2014. Sade, Donatien Alphonse François de. OEuvres, ed. Michel Delon. Paris: Gallimard, 1990-98. Sans, Abbé. Guérison de la paralysie par l’électricité, ou cette experience physique employee avec succès dans le traitement de cette Maladie regardée jusques à present comme incurable. Paris: Cailleau, 1772. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1966. First published 1818. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Prometheus Unbound. London: C. and J. Ollier, 1820. Sigaud de la Fond, Joseph-Aignan. Traité de l'électricité. Dans lequel on expose, & on démontre par expérience, toutes les découvertes électriques, faites jusqu'àu ce jour, pour servir de suite aux Leçons de Physique du même Auteur. Paris: Chez des Ventes de la Doué, 1771. Bibliothèque nationale R-14251. Sigaud de la Fond, Joseph-Aignan. Précis historique et experimental des phénomènes électriques, depuis l’origine de cette découverte jusqu’a ce jour. 2nd edition. Paris: Rue et Hotel Serpent, 1785. Sigaud de la Fond, Joseph-Aignan. Examen de quelques principes erronés en électricité. Paris: Crapelet, 1796. Silvestre, Augustin-François de. Rapport général des travaux de la Société philomathique de Paris, depuis le premier Janvier 1792, jusqu’au 23 Frimaire de l’an VI de la République. Paris: Fuchs, 1789. Snetlage, Leonard. Nouveau Dictionnaire Français contenant les expressions de nouvelle Création du Peuple Français. Ouvrage additionnel au Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française et a tout autre Vocabulaire. Par Leonard Snetlage Docteur en Droits en l’Université de Gottingue. Göttingen: Chez Jean Chretien Dieterich, 1795. 277 Staël, Germaine de. Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution françoise, Paris: Delaunay, 1818. Staël, Germaine de. Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la République. 1798; Geneva, 1979. Staël, Germaine de. De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations. Lausanne: 1796. The History of Okano: A Fragment of a Voyage to St. Domingo. In The Weekly entertainer: or, Agreeable and instructive repository, 6 Jan. 1783–27 Dec. 1819; 8 Dec 1788. Tressan, Louis-Elisabeth de La Vergne, Comte de. “Essay sur le fluid subtile conu sous le nom d'Électricité consideré comme agent universel.” Manuscript, 1750- 1765. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1855. Accessed through the Poetry Foundation. Secondary Works Adele, Niame. “Haitian Vodou Possession and Zombification: Desire and the Return of the Repressed.” disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory Vol. 14 (2005): 100-125. Adler, Ken. Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763- 1815. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Anderson, Robert and Christopher Lawrence, eds. Science, Medicine and Dissent: Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). London: Wellcome Trust and Science Museum, 1987. Andress, David. The Terror: Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005. Asselin, Olivier, Silvestra Mariniello and Andrea Oberhuber, eds. L’ère électrique / the electric age. Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2011. Baecque, Antoine de. Le corps de l’Histoire: métaphores et politique (1770-1800). Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1993. Baecque, Antoine de. La Révolution terrorisée. Paris: CNRS éditions, 2017. 278 Baker, Keith Michael. “Was Marat a Vitalist?” In Keith Michael Baker and Jenna M. Gibbs, eds. Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2016), 110-124. Baker, Keith Michael and Jenna M. Gibbs, eds. Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century. University of Toronto Press, 2016. Beaudreau, Sherry Ann and Stanley Finger. “Medical Electricity and Madness in the 18th Century: the legacies of Benjamin Franklin and Jan Ingenhousz.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine Vol. 49, No. 3 (Summer 2006): 330-345. Beaulieu, Étienne. “Neutralisation de la métaphore électrique.” In L’Éclat du neutre: Études sur les cultures romantiques de la prose. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019. Beauvoir-Dominique, Rachel. Investigations autour du site historique du Bois Caïman. Cap-Haitien: ISPAN, 2000. Bell, David. The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Bell, David. The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Benedicty-Kokken, Alessandra. Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History. Lanham; Boulder; New York; London: Lexington Books, 2015. Beretta, Marco. “From Nollet to Volta: Lavoisier and Electricity.” Revue d’histoire des sciences 54, no. 1 (2001): 29-52. Bernardi, Walter. “La controverse sur l'électricité animale dans l’Italie du XVIIIe siècle: Galvani, Volta et...d’autres.” Revue d’histoire des sciences 54, no. 1 (Janvier-Mars 2001): 53-70. Bertaud, Jean-Paul. The Army of the French Revolution: From Citizen-Soldiers to Instrument of Power Translated by R. R. Palmer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. First published as La révolution armée: les soldats- citoyens et la Révolution française. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1979. Bertucci, Paola and Giuliano Pancaldi, eds. Electric Bodies: Episodes in the history of medical electricity. Bologna: CIS, Dipartimento di Filosofia, 2001. 279 Bertucci, Paola. “Sparking controversy: Jean-Antoine Nollet and medical electricity south of the Alps. Nuncius / Istituto e museo di storia della scienza Vol. 20, No. 1 (2005): 153-187. Bertucci, Paola. “Revealing sparks: John Wesley and the religious utility of electric healing.” British Journal for the History of Science 39, no.3 (Sept. 2006): 341- 362. Bertucci, Paola. “Domestic Spectacles: electrical demonstrations between business and conversation.” In Christine Blondel, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, eds., Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Bertucci, Paola. “Shocking Subjects. Human experiments and the material culture of medical electricity in eighteenth-century England.” In Erika Dick and Larry Stewart, eds. The Uses of Humans in Experiment: Perspectives from the 17th to the 20th Century (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016). Biard, Michel. “Les pouvoirs des représentants en mission (1793-1795),” Annales historiques de la Révolution française No. 1 (Janvier-mars 1998): 3-24. Biard, Michel. Missionnaires de la République. Les représentants du peuple en mission (1793-1795). Paris: CTHS, 2002. Biard, Michel, and Marisa Linton. Terreur! La Révolution française face à ses démons. Paris: Armand Colin, 2020. Blanning, T. C. W. The French Revolutionary Wars 1787-1802. London, New York, Sydney, Aukland: Arnold, 1996. Blondel, Christine, and Matthias Döries, eds. Restaging Coulomb: Usages, Controverses et Réplications aujour de la balance de torsion. Florence: Leo S. Olsckhi, 1994. Blondel, Christine. “Animal electricity in Paris: from initial support, to its discredit and eventual rehabilitation.” In Bresadola, Marco and Giuliano Pancadi, eds. Luigi Galvani International Workshop: Proceedings (Bologna: CIS, Dipartimento di Filosofia, Universita di Bologna, 1999), 187-209. Blondel, Christine. “L'électricité et le magnétisme au XVIIIe siècle à travers la bibliothèque virtuelle du CNAM.” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 320 (2000) 213-218. Bossi, Laura. “L’Âme électrique.” In Jean Clair, ed. L’Âme au corps. Arts et sciences (1793-1993), Paris: Gallimard, 1993. 280 Bresadola, Marco and Giuliano Pancaldi, eds. Luigi Galvani International Workshop: Proceedings. Bologna: CIS, Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università di Bologna, 1999. Bresadola, Marco. “Animal Electricity at the End of the Eighteenth Century: The Many Facets of a Great Scientific Controversy.” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 17, no. 1 (2008): 8-32. Brodber, Edna. Myal. London: New Beacon Press, 1988. Brown, Howard G. Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Brown, Howard G. Mass Violence & the Self: From the French Wars of Religion to the Paris Commune. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2018. Brown, Vincent. The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Brown, Vincent. Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Buck-Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. Butler, Marilyn. “Frankenstein and Radical Science.” Times Literary Supplement 4697 (April 1993): 12-15. Canguilhem, Georges. La Formation du concept de reflex aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Vrin, 1977. Cantor, G. N., and M. J. S. Hodge, eds. Conceptions of ether: Studies in the history of ether theories 1740-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Castonguay-Belanger, Joel. Les Écarts de l’imagination. Pratiques et représentations de la science dans le roman au tournant des Lumières. Montréal, Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 2008. Chamayou, Grégoire. “La querelle des têtes tranchées: Les médecins, la guillotine et l’anatomie de la conscience au lendemain de la Terreur.” Revue d’histoire des sciences 61, no. 2 (July-December 2008): 333-365. 281 Chandler, James, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Hrootunian, eds. Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion Across the Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Chappey Jean-Luc. “Enjeux sociaux et politiques de la « vulgarisation scientifique» en révolution (1780-1810).” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 338 (2004) La vulgarisation des savoirs et des techniques sous la Révolution, 11- 51. Chickering, Roger and Stig Förster, eds. War in an Age of Revolution, 1775-1815. Washington, D.C.: The German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2010. Clarke, Edwin and L.S. Jacyna. Nineteenth-century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1987. Coleman, Charly. The Virtues of Abandon: An anti-individualist history of the French Enlightenment. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Colwill, Elizabeth. “Fête de l’Hymen, Fête de la Liberté”: Marriage, Manhood, and Emancipation in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue.” In David Geggus and Norman Fiering, eds. The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 125-155. Connelly, M. Blake. “Zombie: an earlier usage, antedating the Oxford English Dictionary entry.” Notes and Queries (June 2017): 229. Connor, Clifford D. Jean Paul Marat: Scientist and revolutionary. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997. Coopersmith, Jonathan. The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Cunningham, Andrew and Nicholas Jardine, eds. Romanticism and the Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Curran, Andrew S. The Anatomy of Blackness : Science & Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Daggett, Cara New. The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019. Dalton, Dave and Sara A. Potter. “Introduction: The Transatlantic Undead: Zombies in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Cultures.” 2018. 282 Danon, Rachel. Les Voix du marronnage dans la littérature française du XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015. Darnton, Robert. Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Darnton, Robert. “How Historians Play God” Raritan vol. 22 issue 1 (2002): 1-19. Daut, Marlene. Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Dayan, Colin. Haiti, History, and the Gods. University of California Press, 1998. Debien, Gabriel. Les Colons de Saint-Domingue et la Révolution: Essai sur le Club Massiac (août 1789-août 1792). Paris, 1953. de Castro, Clara Carnicero. “Le fluide électrique chez Sade.” Société Française d’Etude du Dix-Huitième Siècle 46, no. 1 (2014): 561-577. Delbourgo, James. Electricity, Experiment and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century North America. PhD Diss. Columbia University, 2003. Delbourgo, James. A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Delon, Michel. L'idée d'énergie au tournant des Lumières (1770-1820). Presses Universitaires de France, 1988. Delon, Michel. ‘Electriser, un mot d’ordre au siècle des Lumières.” Revue des sciences humaines 281 (Jan-Mar 2006): 39-51. Depestre, René. Change, Violence II, No. 9. Paris: Seuil, 1971. Deprun, Jean. De Descartes au Romanticism: Études historiques et thématiques. Paris: Vrin, 1987. Deren, Maya. “Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti.” 1983. Diop, David. Rhétorique Nègre au XVIIIe siècle: des récit de voyage à la littérature abolitionniste. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018. Donovan, Arthur. Antoine Lavoisier: Science, Administration, and Revolution. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 283 Doyle, William. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Droixhe, Daniel. Les Charlatans du Cancer: Offre thérapeutique et presse médicale dans la France des Lumières. Paris: Hermann, 2018. Dubois, Laurent. A Colony of Citizens : Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804. University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004. Dubois, Laurent. Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012. Dun, James Alexander. Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Duong, Kevin. The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Edelstein, Dan. The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. Ehrard, Jean. L’idée de la nature en France dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle. S.E.V.P.E.N. (Paris, 1963. Elliott, Paul. “‘More Subtle than the Electric Aura’: Georgian Medical Electricity, the Spirit of Animation and the Development of Erasmus Darwin’s Psychophysiology.” Medical History Vol. 52 (2008): 195-220. Etlin, Richard A. “Architecture and the Festival of Federation, Paris, 1790.” Architectural History, Vol. 18 (1975): 23-42; 102-108. Fairclough, Mary. The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Fairclough, Mary. Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740-1840: ‘Electrick Communication Every Where.’ Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Fara, Patricia. An entertainment for Angels: electricity in the Enlightenment. Duxford: Icon Books, 2002. 284 Ferrer, Ada. Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Fisher, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Duke University Press, 2004. Forrest, Alan. “L’armée de l’an II : la levée en masse et la création d’un mythe républicain,” Annales historiques de la Révolution Française 335 (janvier-mars 2004): 111-130. Forrest, Alan. The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: The Nation-in-Arms in French Republican Memory. Cambridge University Press, 2009. Forrest, Alan. The Death of the French Atlantic: Trade, War, and Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Frank, Jason. The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly. Oxford University Press, 2021. Friedland, Paul. Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Punishment in France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Fruchtman, Jack Jr. Atlantic Cousins: Benjamin Franklin and His Visionary Friends. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Fulford, Tim, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era. Cambridge University Press, 2004. Fulford, Tim. “Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s.” Studies in Romanticism 43, no. 1 (2004): 57-78. Furet, François. Interpreting the French Revolution. Translated by Elborg Forster. Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and Cambridge University Press, 1981. Originally published as Penser la Révolution Française. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. Garraway, Doris Lorraine. The Libertine Colony : Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Gaspar, David, and David Geggus, eds. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Geggus, David and Norman S. Firing, eds. The World of the Haitian Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. 285 Genovese, Eugene. From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Ghachem, Malick W. The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Gigante, Denise. Life: Organic Form and Romanticism. Yale University Press, 2009. Gillispie, Charles Coulston. Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. Gilmore, Paul. “Romantic Electricity, or the Materiality of Aesthetics.” American Literature Vol. 76, No. 3 (2004): 467-494. Gilmore, Paul. “John Neal’s Lightning Imagination: Electricity against Romantic Organicism.” Centaurus Vol. 57, No. 3 (August 2015): 156-172. Goldstein, Jan. The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750- 1850. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Golinski, Jan. Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Gombrich, E. H. “The Dream of Reason: Symbolism of the French Revolution.” The British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies vol. 2, no. 3, Autumn 1979. Gomez, Alejandro. Le Spectre de la Révolution noire. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013. Gonzalez, Johnhenry. Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. Goodman, Deena. “What It Meant to be Linnean in Revolutionary France.” Isis Volume 111, Issue 1 (March 2020): 67-85. Griffiths, Devin. The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Guiomar, Jean-Yves. L’invention de la guerre totale: XVIIe-XXe siècle. Paris: Le Felin Kiron, 2004. Haines, Christian P. A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. 286 Harkup, Kathryn. Making the Monster: the science behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. London; New York: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2018. Hazareesingh, Sudhir. Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Heering, Peter. “On Coulomb’s Inverse Square Law.” American Journal of Physics 60 (1992): 988-1000. Heering, Peter. “The Replication of the Torsion Balance Experiment: The Inverse Square Law and its Refutation by early 19th-Century German Physicists.” In Blondel and Dörries, eds. Restaging Coulomb (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1994), 47-66. Heering, Peter. “Jean Paul Marat: Medical Electricity Between Natural Philosophy and Revolutionary Politics.” In Bertucci, Paola and Giuliano Pancaldi, eds. Electric Bodies: Episodes in the history of medical electricity (Bologna: CIS, Dipartimento di Filosofia, 2001): 91-116. Heilbron, J. L. “Franklin, Haller, and Franklinist History.” Isis Vol. 68, No. 4 (1977): 539-549. Heilbron, J. L. Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study in Early Modern Physics. Mineloa, New York: Dover, 1999. Hoermann, Raphael. “Figures of terror: the “zombie” and the Haitian Revolution” Atlantic Studies Vol. 14, No. 2 (2017): 152-173. Huet, Marie-Hélène. “Thunder and Revolution: Franklin, Robespierre, Sade.” The Eighteenth Century Vol. 20, No. 2 (1989): 13-32. Huet, Marie-Hélène. Monstrous Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Huet, Marie-Hélène. Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Hughes, Thomas P. Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880- 1930. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. 20th Anniversary Edition. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984; 2004. 287 Hurston, Zora Neale. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. New York, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1938. James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 2d ed., rev. New York: Vintage Books, 1963. Jamet, Denis. “Les égarements poétiques du discours scientifique ?” L’ALEPH Philosophies, Arts, Littératures 11 (2003): 25-33. Jaurès, Jean. Histoire Socialiste Tome II: La Législative (1791-1792). Paris: Jules Rouff, 1901-1908. Jenson, Deborah. Beyond the Slave Narrative : Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011. Keaton, Tricia Danielle, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Tyler Stovall, eds. Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2012. King, Stewart R. Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre- Revolutionary Saint Domingue. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Knox, MacGregor and Williamson Murray, eds. The dynamics of military revolution 1300-2050. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution.” In Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Trans. Keith Tribe. Columbia University Press, 1985. Laroche, Maximilien. “The Myth of the Zombi.” In Exile and Tradition: Studies in African and Caribbean Literature, ed. Rowland Smith (New York: Dalhousie University Press, 1976): 44-61. Lemke, Thomas. “An Alternative Model of Politics? Prospects and Problems of Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism.” Theory, Culture & Society 2018, vol. 35(6) 31- 54. Lebreton, Capucine. "Être vivant, être sensible: le rôle de la sensibilité dans le vitalisme des lumières.” In Pascal Nouvel, ed., Repenser le vitalisme. Histoire et philosophie du vitalisme, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011). Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth. Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 288 Lieberman, Jennifer. Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and Letters, 1882- 1952. Cambridge, MA; London: The MIT Press, 2017. Lüsebrink Hans-Jürgen and Rolf Reichardt. The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom. Translated by Norbert Schürer. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997. Madiou, Thomas. Histoire d’Haiti: Livre Cinquième (1791). Port-au-Prince: 1847. “‘Man electrified man’: Romantic revolution and the legacy of Benjamin Franklin.” In Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 179- 197. Mankin, Robert. “Electricity and Static: Franklin and his British compatriots.” Transatlantica: revue d'études américaines. 2 (2009): 1-12. Mayer, Arno J. The Furies: violence and terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. McGuire J. E. and P. M. Rattansi. “Newton and the Pipes of Pan.” In I. Bernard Cohen and Robert Westfall, Newton: A Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1995), 96-108. Métraux, Alfred. Voodoo in Haiti. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959. Michelet, Jules. History of the French Revolution. Trans. Charles Cocks. Ed. Gordon Wright. University of Chicago Press, 1967. Miller, Christopher L. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Duke University Press, 2008. Miller, Mary Ashburn. A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789-1794. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011. Morus, Iwan Rhys. “Marketing the Machine: The Construction of Electrotherapeutics as Viable Medicine in Early Victorian England.” Medical History 36 (1992): 34-52. Morus, Iwan Rhys. Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early Nineteenth-Century London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Morus, Iwan Rhys. Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century. Icon Books, 2004. 289 Morus, Iwan Rhys. “Radicals, romantics and electrical showmen: placing galvanism at the end of the English enlightenment.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 63 (2009): 263-75. Morus, Iwan Rhys. Shocking Bodies: Life, Death & Electricity in Victorian England. Cheltenham: History Press, 2011. Morus, Iwan Rhys. Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future. Icon Books, 2019. Moser, Walter. “Le galvanisme: Joker au carrefour des discours et des savoirs autour de 1800.” In Olivier Asselin and Silvestra Mariniello and Andrea Oberhuber, eds. L’ère électrique / the electric age (Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2011): 61-84. Neidleman, Jason. “Rousseau and the Desire for Communion.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 53-67. Nessler, Graham. An Islandwide Struggle for Freedom. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Nouvel, Pascal. Repenser le vitalisme. Histoire et philosophie du vitalisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011. O’Neal, John C. The Authority of Experience: Sensationalist Theory in the French Enlightenment. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. O’Rourke, Stephanie. “Girodet’s galvanized bodies.” Art History 5 (November 2018). Ozouf, Mona. La fête révolutionnaire 1789-1799. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Ozouf, Mona. L’homme régénéré: essai sur la Révolution française. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Palma, Hélène. “The Abolitionist Cause in Britain and France (1787-1790): A Case of Counter-Productive Transposition?” MFDS Le Monde français du dix- huitième siècle 4, no. 1 (2019). Palmer, Jennifer. Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pancaldi, Giuliano. Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment. Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2003. 290 Paret, Peter. “Napoleon and the Revolution in War.” In Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Peabody, Sue. “There Are No Slaves in France” : The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pera, Marcello. The Ambiguous Frog: The Galvani-Volta Controversy on Animal Electricity. Translated by Jonathan Mandelbaum. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Piccolino, Marco and Marco Bresadola. Shocking Frogs: Galvani, Volta, and the Electric Origins of Neuroscience. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Picot, Pauline-Marie. “‘Magnétisme, électricité, spiritisme’: L’imaginaire du fluide dans le théâtre du XIXe siècle.” Thèse de doctorat, L’université Lumière Lyon 2, 2021. Popkin, Jeremy D. You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Puri, Shalini. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism and Cultural Hybridity. New York; Houndmills; Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Quinlan, Sean. “Shocked Sensibility: The Nerves, the Will, and Altered States in Sade’s L’Histoire de Juliette,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 25 (spring 2013): 533-556. Quinlan, Sean. “Physical and Moral Regeneration after the Terror: Medical Culture, Sensibility, and Family Politics in France, 1794-1804,” Social History, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2004): 136-164. Ramsey, Kate. The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2011. Ramsey, Kate. “Vodou, History, and New Narratives.” Transition No. 111, New Narratives of Haiti (2013), 31-41. Rey, Terry. The Priest and the Prophetess: Abbe Ouviere, Romaine Riviere, and the Revolutionary Atlantic World. Oxford University Press, 2017. 291 Riskin, Jessica. “Rival Idioms for a Revolutionized Science and a Republican Citizenry.” Isis Vol. 89, No. 2 (June 1998): 203-232. Riskin, Jessica. “The Lawyer and the Lightning Rod.” Science in Context 12, no. 1 (1999): 61-99. Riskin, Jessica. Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Ritz, Olivier. Les métaphores naturelles dans le débat sur la Révolution. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016. Robbins, John. “‘It Lives!’: Frankenstein, Presumption, and the Staging of Romantic Science,” European Romantic Review 28, no. 2 (2017): 185-201. Roberts, Lissa. “Science Becomes Electric: Dutch Interaction with the Electrical Machine during the Eighteenth Century.” Isis 90, no. 4 (Dec. 1999): 680-714. Rogers, John. The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Ruston, Sharon. Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Ruston, Sharon. The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein. Oxford: Bodleian Library Publishing, 2021. Sala-Molins, Louis. The Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment, trans. John Conteh-Morgan. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Schaffer, Simon. “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century.” History of Science 21, no. 1 (Mar 1983): 1-43. Schaffer, Simon. “Self Evidence.” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 327-362. Schechter, Ronald. A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-century France. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018. Schiffer, Michael Brian. “Studying technological differentiation: the case of 18th- century electrical technology.” American anthropologist Vol. 104, No. 4 (Dec 2002): 1148-1161. Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 292 Sellin, Volker. Violence and Legitimacy: European Monarchy in the Age of Revolutions. Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2018. Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1985. Simili, Raffaella. “Luigi Galvani.” In Bresadola, Marco and Giuliano Pancadi, eds. Luigi Galvani International Workshop: Proceedings (Bologna: CIS, Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università di Bologna, 1999), 187-209. Simmons, Dana. Vital Minimum: Need, Science & Politics in Modern France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Smith, Crosbie. The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Spary, Emma. “Political, natural, and bodily economies.” In Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Spary, Emma. Jardin d’Utopie: L’Histoire naturelle en France de l’Ancien Régime a la Révolution. Paris: Publications scientifiques du Musée, 2005. Starobinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Stieber, Chelsea. Haiti’s Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic. New York: NYU Press, 2020. Tackett, Timothy. The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. Terrall, Mary. Catching Nature in the Act: Réaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Thorel, Sylvie et Claude Jamain, eds. L’Imaginaire de l’électricité dans les lettres et les arts. Lille: Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2006. Tozzi, Christopher J. Nationalizing France’s Army: Foreign, Black, and Jewish Troops in the French Military, 1751-1831. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2016. 293 Tresch, John. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Twa, Lindsay. “Jean-Jacques Dessalines: Demon, Demigod, and Everything in Between.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series, special issue “Circulations: Romanticism and the Black Atlantic,” ed. Paul Youngquist and Fran Botkin (October 2011). Ulam, Adam. The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia. Cambrdige, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. “Une ‘période sans nom’: les années 1780-1820 et la fabrique de l’histoire littéraire,” international colloquium organized by Fabienne Bercegol, Stéphanie Genand et Florence Lotterie, Toulouse, April 2-4, 2014. Vasak, Anouchka. Météorologies, discours sur le ciel et le climat des Lumières au romantisme. Paris: Champion, 2007. Verhoeven, Claudia. “Epilogue: Shock and Awe, Terrorism and Theory.” In Carole Deitze and Claudia Verhoeven, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). Vovelle, Michel. La découverte de la politique: géopolitique de la révolution française. Paris: Editions la Découverte, 1993. Wahnich, Sophie. In Defence of the Terror: Liberty of Death in the French Revolution. Translated by David Fernbach. Verso: 2015. First published as La Liberté ou la mort: Essai sur la Terreur et le terrorisme. Paris: La Fabrique, 2003. Walzer, Michael. Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI. Translated by Marian Rothstein. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Webster, Suzanne E. Body and Soul in Coleridge’s Notebooks, 1827-1834. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Wells, H. G. Russia in the Shadows. New York: Doran, 1921. Wolfe, Charles T. “Materialism and ‘the soft substance of the brain’: Diderot and plasticity.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Vol. 24, No. 5 (2016): 963-982. 294 Wolfe, Charles T. “Models of Organic Organization in Montpellier Vitalism.” Early Science and Medicine, Vol. 22, No. ⅔ Special Issue: Between Physiology and Ethics: The ‘Science of Man’ as a Middle-Range Discipline (2017): 229-252. Wolfe, Charles T. “From the logic of ideas to active-matter materialism: Priestley’s Lockean problem and early neurophilosophy.” Intellectual History Review, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2020): 31-47. White, Ashli. Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic. Baltimore, M.D.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Williams, B. Innes. The Matter of Motion and Galvani’s Frogs. Bletchingdon: Rana, 2000. Williams, Elizabeth A., Andrew Cunningham, Ole Peter Grell. A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Williams, L. Pearce. “Science, Education and the French Revolution.” Isis 44, no. 4 (December 1953): 311-330. Zanetti, François. “Curing with Machines: Medical Electricity in Eighteenth-Century Paris.” Technology and Culture Vol. 54, No. 3 (July 2013): 503-530. Zanetti, François. L’électricité médicale dans la France des Lumières. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2017. Zelbstein, Uri. “Mauduyt de la Varenne, un électrothérapeute au siècle des Lumières.” Bulletin d’histoire de l’électricité 4 (December 1984): 49-55. 295 ccxcvi