SOURCE: LeBlanc, Jacqueline. “Politics and Commercial Sensibility in Helen Maria Williams' Letters from France.” Eighteenth-Century Life 21, no. 1 (February 1997): 26-39.

[In the following essay, LeBlanc explores the radical nature of Letters from France, claiming that the connection Williams makes between revolution and commerce differs from the writings of others sympathetic to the French Revolution, who tend to ignore that relationship.]

Helen Maria Williams has rightfully taken her place in the newly formed canon of British women writers, most notably as a correspondent from revolutionary France. A popular poet and sentimental novelist of the late eighteenth century who used her verse to speak out on the oppressions of war, the slave trade, and colonialism, Williams traveled to France in July 1790 and began a series of letters to an imaginary friend in support of the Revolution.¹ A dramatic tour of French life and politics, Williams' Letters From France is a cross section of genres, merging personal correspondence, travel narrative, sentimentalism, and radical politics.² In volumes one and two (1790 and 1792), the most dramatic and emotional of the Letters, Williams responds to the turmoil in France with the personal excitement of a tourist, detailing the spectacle of the nascent republic and cheering the victory of the revolutionaries in the impassioned style of sentimentalism.³ These first volumes—as much an account of Williams' “emotional ecstasies” as of political restructuring—often strike readers as lacking serious critical perspective; and though widely read in her own day, they are seldom included in the 1790-92 British canon of revolutionary debate, usually comprised of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstone-craft.⁴ Although not a direct reply to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, they are, however, a thorough critique of Burke's ideas, especially since Williams invokes Burke's strongest fear by praising France as an ideal model for England.⁵ The aim of this essay is not, however, to argue why Williams' Letters should be in the canon of revolutionary discourse; rather it is to show that Letters demonstrates an intriguing and radical correspondence between revolutionary politics and a culture of commercial sensibility, a correspondence shunned by her fellow revolutionary sympathizers Paine and Wollstonecraft.⁶

Williams' sentimentalism draws on an eighteenth-century culture of feminine sensibility sprung from the expansion of consumerism and leisure culture, at the center of which was a burgeoning market for sentimental novels. As G. J. Barker-Benfield explains, women and what were considered “feminine” sensibilities dominated the markets of a rising commercial capitalism, since “home became the primary site for consumption on a broad scale.”⁷ As prepared foods and other domestic products became available for purchase, middle-class women found more time to decorate and furnish their homes—and more time to read. Novels of sentiment catered to this lucrative female market by featuring deep emotion, melodrama, and sensitive heroes. Indeed, women began reading and writing in greater numbers than ever before, often with radical consequences, since they (and some of their male counterparts) began questioning women's economic status, their gender roles, and the patriarchal values of society. This sensibility—initiated and sustained by a consumer society—advanced political and economic reform by posing the social affections of sympathy, compassion, benevolence, and pity against competitiveness and selfishness.⁸

This movement did not, however, eradicate masculinist precepts. A sentimental vision of reform existed concurrently in Britain with a masculine standard of political identity. Even as women experienced a new authority and independence in the eighteenth century, British nationalism found a strong reactionary voice in supposedly male rationalism. As Linda Colley has noted, eighteenth-century Britons regularly defined themselves and their form of government in opposition to what they saw as an effeminate and materialist French culture. Considered emotional, devious, and preoccupied with fashionable consumption of commodities, the French were thought to be governed by a “boudoir politics” infiltrated by feminine influences. The British conversely “conceived of themselves as an essentially ‘masculine’ culture—bluff, forthright, rational, down-to-earth to the extent of being philistine.”⁹ Paine, Wollstonecraft, and Burke draw on these popular notions of Britain and France, albeit to different ends. While each lays claim to a “natural,” masculine politics, each accuses the opposition of empty theatricalism and deceptive feminine appeals to emotion.

Letters From France diverges from this rhetoric by celebrating revolutionary politics as a commercial and affective-performative enterprise. Williams, like her contemporaries, exploits popular depictions of the French and the British, but she reverses their message: the French, she argues, have a distinct advantage over the British because they eschew rigid rationalism in favor of feminized consumerism and emotive theatricalism. By celebrating the commercialism of French sensibility, Williams follows a line of more favorable depictions of France in the eighteenth century, one that includes, most famously, Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) which, like Letters From France, capitalized on the fervor over sentimentalism in British culture and the popular British opinion of France as “a society in which commerce flourishe[d] alongside civility.”¹⁰ For Williams, French commerce encourages freedom and egalitarianism. The Revolution marks the ascension of a reformist culture of sensibility to the field of government, while the symbolic spectacles of revolutionary celebrations testify to France's political liberality. An expatriate who rejects British rationalism in favor of a culture more in tune with her own feminine sensibility, Williams successfully exported revolutionary sentimentalism by selling her political romance in great numbers to a British audience.¹¹ Because of her ability to project the changes in France in terms that every magazine reader could understand and enjoy, Williams “became something of a rage and remained for more than ten years the principle interpreter … for political changes in the neighboring republic.”¹²

THE CRITIQUE OF SYMBOLISM AND SENSIBILITY: PAINE, WOLLSTONECRAFT, AND BURKE

Esther Schor remarks that “the Revolution controversy was, in large part, a crisis about sentimentalism. From that fierce debate about the sovereignty of monarchy in France and Britain emerges another about the sovereignty of feeling within the public order.”¹³ Paine and Wollstonecraft were, like Williams, invested in the values of sensibility; yet theirs was manifested in an appeal to “natural” transparent political systems with “no need for politicians and no place for the professional manipulation of sentiments or symbols.”¹⁴ Paine and Wollstonecraft strove for a discourse liberated from the dissembling figures and tropes of the ancien régime. In response to Burke's specious rhetoric and emotionalism, they identify metaphor and sensibility as tools of ancien régime political propaganda, while claiming reason, common fact, and plain language as indicative qualities of revolution.

Denouncing the style of Burke's Reflections, Paine's Rights of Man impugns a cultural aesthetic as much as a political institution. Paine argues that Reflections “degenerates into a composition of art,”¹⁵ an affectation that merely reflects the pretenses of the monarchical heritage Burke defends. All traditional forms of government, Paine maintains, are fictions: they are, by nature, only “creatures of imagination” (p. 38). Shaped in symbols and metaphors, they rely on “the romantic and barbarous distinction of [making] men into kings and subjects” in order to mask abuse of power (p. 382). The ancien régime is an exploitative iconical government, the crown disguising inequities in order to “obtain money from a nation under specious pretenses” (p. 364). By contrast, a new republican rule “by the people” is not a form of government at all but the only natural political structure; it dispenses with symbolism to establish complete transparency between government and citizens. Finally, the ancien régime, in Paine's argument, is tantamount to a debased symbolism, while the republic, liberated from symbols, is nature's law.

If, for Paine, monarchical power is sustained by artful propaganda, for Wollstonecraft, the pernicious agent is sensibility, the affective front. Her Vindication of the Rights of Men contrasts Burke's reactionary appeal to emotions with the simplicity and honesty of republican reason. Burke's Reflections, Wollstonecraft maintains, excites compassionate tears at the expense of reasonable judgment, and his “sophistical arguments” simply extend the rhetoric of absolute monarchy. To counter this effect, in the monarchy and in Burke's Reflections, Wollstonecraft de-naturalizes sentiment:

A kind of mysterious instinct is supposed to reside in the soul, that instantaneously discerns truth, without the tedious labour of ratiocination. This instinct … has been termed common sense, and more frequently sensibility; and … it has been supposed, for rights of this kind are not easily proved, to reign paramount over the other faculties of the mind and to be an authority from which there is no appeal.¹⁶

According to Wollstonecraft, a divine right of the heart is accomplice to the illegitimate heredity of monarchy since it interprets allegiance to centralized political power as filial bond. Wollstonecraft chastises Burke for exploiting this sentimentalized version of the royal family¹⁷ and entreats him to question “the infallibility of that extolled instinct which rises above reason.” Burke, she concludes, should “learn to respect the sovereignty of reason” (Vindication, pp. 60-61).

Wollstonecraft's defense of populist principles in the name of reason is full of nostalgia for the original republican ideals of England's “ancient constitution” and invokes the pre-eighteenth-century conception of reason as “the organ of morality.”¹⁸ The meaning of reason was, in fact, in rapid change during the eighteenth century, and the indeterminacy of the word is played out in this debate between Wollstonecraft and Burke.¹⁹ While Wollstonecraft condemns the culture of sensibility for replacing the rational mind with the emotional heart as the primary seat of moral guidance, Burke's rhetoric of sensibility devalues reason as a purely instrumental intellectual activity devoid of moral conscience. Nature's “powerful instincts,” he remarks, fortify “the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason” (p. 46). Aesthetic beauty similarly serves to soften the brutal hands of cold philosophy and absolute power. “To make us love our country,” writes Burke, “our country ought to be lovely” (p. 91).

As a tribute to feelings and beauty, Burke's style, if not his argument, seems consonant with Williams'. Yet Burke does not completely avoid the rhetoric of British common sense. Although famous for the emotional exaggeration of which Paine and Wollstonecraft accuse him, Burke, as Tom Furniss notes, is ambivalent in his arguments about politics and aesthetics.²⁰ Despite his own rhetorical use of sentiment and spectacle, Burke simultaneously mimics Paine and Wollstonecraft's appeals to natural simplicity. His sentimentalism invokes “genuine” nature, while his appeals to the sublime and the beautiful differentiate between “wholesome” and “peccant” forms of representation to establish differences between traditional and radical government (Furniss, p. 69). According to Burke, the ancien régime is benevolent, “intuitive” beauty, while the Revolution is a dangerously sublime theatre of the monstrous. Revolutionary France, he argues, is volatile because its leaders merely create “a magnificent stage effect [and] … a grand spectacle to rouze the imagination” (pp. 77-78). The stability of English monarchy, by contrast, “has emanated from the simplicity of our national character and from a sort of native plainness and directness of understanding” (p. 103).

Another significant common bond between Paine, Wollstonecraft, and Burke is the representation of the enemy as female or feminine. Each make use of an antifeminine gendering of political factions typical of revolutionary polemics.²¹ In republican rhetoric, Dorinda Outram remarks, “the monarchy was par excellence a regime characterized by the corruption of power through the agency of women,” and the Revolution was reciprocally characterized as masculine.²² Paine, for instance, depicted the nascent French republic as having “breached itself in manhood,” acquiring “a gigantic manliness” by outgrowing “the baby clothes of count and duke” (pp. 318, 379). In An Historical and Moral View of the … French Revolution, Wollstonecraft personifies the “effeminate” court of the ancient régime in the figure of Marie Antoinette, “a profound dissembler.” By contrast, Wollstonecraft argues, the Revolution “exhibited a scene … of masculine and improved philosophy.”²³ Similarly, while Burke writes in a feminine tradition of sensibility, he also asserts his love for “a manly, moral, regulated liberty,” a liberty afforded by monarchy based on “masculine Morality” (p. 19).²⁴ Even as Marie Antoinette, evicted from her home, serves as Burke's centerpiece of embattled monarchical beauty, his most vivid description of the violence of the revolutionaries takes the form of the feminine underclass.²⁵ The revolutionaries' attack on the palace takes place, writes Burke, “amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams … and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women” (p. 85).

This gendered rhetoric finds its culmination in the bourgeois distinction between public and private roles for men and women. As the new France defines itself against a monarchy identified as feminine, women become excluded from political activity.²⁶ Further, by denouncing the icons of the ancien régime, Paine and Wollstonecraft initiate an antithesis between revolutionary politics and aesthetics. Even Burke, while appealing to the necessity of “pleasing illusions,” distinguishes between natural beauty and the “tricks” of revolutionary spectacle.²⁷ If the 1790 debate over the French Revolution recognizes the political strength of symbolism, this recognition was consistently pointed at the enemy in revolutionary and reactionary rhetoric alike. The symbolic quality of politics was exposed only to become a taboo.

REVOLUTION IN REPRESENTATION: HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS

Challenging this anti-aesthetic, antifeminine discourse, the first two volumes of Letters From France tread an alternate path in the revolutionary preoccupation with representation. While Williams shares the republican convictions of Paine and Wollstonecraft, she resists their rhetoric of transparency by identifying a transformation, rather than elimination, of symbols and sentiment in Revolutionary France. Williams' sentimentalism is also distinct from Burke's since she sees no opposition between sentimentalism and affectation. She resists British nationalist appeals to natural simplicity by locating “the heart” in the pure spectacle of revolutionary celebration. Further, while Burke maintains an elitist position on art, deriding the “low spectacle” of Revolution in favor of the “high beauty” of the ancien régime, Williams celebrates the crude popular culture of an emerging capitalist consumerism. Drawing attention to commodities, performances, and sentiment, Williams registers a “dramatically new political culture” investing both sensitivity and symbolic actions with profound and liberating agency.²⁸ Finally, Williams' depiction of France, encoded with the signatures of a new marketplace increasingly dominated by the feminine, indicates the political participation of women during the early years of the French Revolution.

THE REPUBLIC IN SYMBOLS

It is significant that Helen Maria Williams arrived in France in July of 1790, the day before the Festival of the Federation commemorating the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Traveling a year after the onset of the Revolution, she tours a celebratory landscape, witnessing not the actual siege on the Bastille but representations of the siege in parade, music, dance, and other spectacles. Williams leads her readers through a sort of revolutionary theme park, where historical events are replayed in staged sites and images, where a visitor can walk through the horrific dungeons of the Bastille, see the “chains by which the prisoners were fastened round the neck, to the walls of their cells” (1:22-23), where tourists view effigies of the two men who planned the construction of the prison now “chained to [its] wall” (1:32). This revolutionary theatre even features a series of spin-off consumer items.²⁹ Williams, for instance, purchases a souvenir: a small picture of the Abbé Maury (an enemy of the Revolution) contained in a snuff box: “You touch a spring, open the lid of the snuff-box, and the Abbé jumps up, and occasions much surprise and merriment” (1:53).

Williams' merrymaking with a formerly ominous figure of ancien régime despotism smacks of mockery and suggests the rebellious force of such commercial items. Lynn Hunt has remarked that “during the Revolution, even the most ordinary objects and customs became political emblems” and that “colors, adornments, clothing, plateware, money, calendars, and playing cards became ‘signs of rallying’ to one side or another” (p. 53). For Williams, these objects manifest the decentralizing of government icons. In her celebratory landscape, governance is transferred from monarch to citizen in the appropriation of symbols by the French people. Personages, architecture, and monuments of the ancien régime are not only demolished but also reappropriated as images now in the possession of citizens and Revolutionary sympathizers. Along with the Abbé in a snuffbox, Williams describes the Bastille, the very fortress of monarchical oppression, as a trinket that ex-prisoners can grasp in their hands or (even more provocatively) a candy they can swallow, since at the Place du Martroy, citizens can purchase Bastilles made of sugar (2:20-21). Those who assisted in taking the Bastille literally receive the prison in the form of “a ribbon of the national colours; on which is stamped, inclosed in a circle of brass, an impression of the Bastille” (1:30). Similarly, Williams records the presentation of eighty-three models of the Bastille, crafted from the stones of its ruin, to the eighty-three departments of the kingdom (1:32). Most spectacular, however, is the medallion worn by Madame Brulart made of a polished stone of the Bastille, surrounded by emeralds and diamonds spelling out “Liberté” (1:38). Thus, the opulence of despotism is now employed in the advertisement of revolution.

Madame Brulart's display of wealth is, of course, deeply ironic in a woman who has renounced her title in solidarity with the Revolution (1:35-36). Yet Williams' delight in the medallion is far from a signal of her political naïveté.³⁰ Her account of Brulart is, in fact, a candid representation of the revolutionaries' ambivalent relationship to the luxurious spectacles of the ancien régime. Rendering its icons, monuments, and personages as mere caricatures for the entertainment and embellishment of ordinary citizens, the Revolution recuperates the symbols of the ancien régime for its own subversive strategies and for establishing its own power. A taste for control as well as freedom infuses the nature of the Federation itself. As Mona Ozouf has noted, the Federation held in Paris was a profoundly conservative attempt to absorb, contain, and regulate the political energy of the spontaneous and riotous festivals of the provinces.³¹ As an attempt to restrict the diverse celebrations that proliferated after July 1789, the Federation ironically imitated the centralizing purpose of the symbolic apparatus of the ancien régime. Perhaps not surprisingly, however, these efforts failed. According to Ozouf, the “Great Federation” was modeled on the festivals of the provinces, which continued despite, and even because of, the collective enthusiasm in Paris.³²

For Williams, the Federation and the itinerant provincial festivals signal a democratic participation of the citizenry who invent, employ, and perform their own political festivities. Madame Brulart's medallion is thus not merely ironic. A medley of ruined stone and precious stone, it signifies a dual and complementary purpose of revolutionary symbolism, one that means to diminish monarchy and enhance the authority of citizens.³³ As the monarchy and its institutions become smaller than life, citizens become larger than life, objectifying and commodifying themselves, as well as the ancien régime, in productions honoring the Revolution. Political rebellion is commemorated in performance, for instance, as “the heroes who demolished the towers of the Bastille” proudly amuse the spectators of the Federation with a dance (1:15-16), while young ladies “dressed in white, and decorated with cockades of the national ribbon” lead liberated prisoners with silken cords in procession to church “where they returned thanks for their deliverance” (1:62).

Williams herself participates in self-objectifying performance as she shifts from her initial role as spectator of the Federation to an account of her participation in smaller, more spontaneous celebrations. La Fédération, ou La Famille Patriotique, a play performed by Williams and her friends the Du Fossés to honor the Revolution, displays the democracy implicit in the revolutionary theatrical. When Williams herself performs the role of Liberty in the play she is both object and agent, demonstrating the replacement of absolute male monarchy with a female icon.³⁴ Williams' role also suggests democratic distribution rather than monarchical containment, since she is one of many across France who “play” Liberty. During the Festival of Reason celebrated in Paris in November 1793, for instance, a commoner plays the role of Liberty—a direct challenge to the idolatry of monarchy.³⁵ Democratic participation is strengthened in the proliferation of such festivals: as each common citizen takes part, even sometimes playing the heroic centerpiece, each becomes symbolic sovereign. Indeed, the better a citizen plays liberty, the more genuine is that citizen's patriotism. “In France,” writes Williams, “talents and patriotism are … in strict alliance” (2:128). Art, entertainment, and play reflect the initial writing of the Constitution, “the beautiful work [the French] had created” (2:111).

Williams' account blurs the distinction between actual government and representations of ideal government. All of France is one grand political performance. “Living in France at present,” she declares, “appears to me somewhat like living in a region of romance” (2:4). Indicating her Girondin commitment to monarchy as well as to constitutionalism, Williams alludes to a lost world of chivalry and court manners, one vivid to her British readers steeped in the popular revival of medieval romance. Romance in the eighteenth century was also more generally “synonymous with magic … the incredible and the impossible.”³⁶ Williams thus asserts her conviction that the Revolution is a spectacle of fantastic proportions spurred by the imagination and incomprehensible according to laws of reason. By enlisting romance for her argument, Williams enters an eighteenth-century British debate between realist and romanticist opinion. While images of romance were widely used to describe the events of the French Revolution, “the language of romance was peculiarly unstable and ambivalent. Its imaginative force was recognized, but its legitimacy not generally accepted.”³⁷ Often criticized as an affront to common sense and nature, romance was censured and satirized by novelists who wanted to be known as writers of realistic fiction.³⁸ Using the very same phrase as Williams, Frances Burney summarizes this disdain for romance in 1778:

Let me … prepare for disappointment those who, in the perusal of these sheets, entertain the gentle expectation of being transported to the fantastic regions of Romance, where Fiction is coloured by all the gay tints of luxurious imagination, where Reason is an outcast, and where the sublimity of the Marvelous, rejects all aid from sober probability. The heroine of these memoirs … is … the offspring … of Nature in her simplest attire.³⁹

Burney exemplifies the late-eighteenth-century opposition to the fantasy of romance in favor of the “sober” faculties of reason and simplicity.

Williams defends the marvelous against this criticism by depicting sublimity as the cornerstone to political peace in France. Like the spectacles and souvenirs of revolutionary celebration, romantic sublimation plays a crucial role in the restructuring of power. As spectacular romance, the Revolution eradicates despotism by sublimating ancien régime violence into aesthetic representation.⁴⁰ In the description of her initial theme tour, for instance, the Revolution replaces the actual victims of the ancien régime (once literally chained to the wall of the Bastille) with the effigies of the men who constructed the Bastille. Thus, the prison, under the control of revolutionaries, houses spectacular figures rather than flesh and blood inmates. As such, “the ruins of that execrable fortress were suddenly transformed … into a scene of beauty and of pleasure” (1:21). Williams envisions a peaceful distribution of power under a constitutional monarchy. Unlike Burke, whose sensationalist description of violence foreshadows regicide, she expects that the dauphin will be “educated in the principles of the new constitution, and will be taught to consider himself less a king than a citizen” (1:87). In these early volumes, revolutionaries never lust after blood. They exhibit instead a desire to aestheticize and thus eradicate violence, a benevolent pacifism evident in the French crowd's reaction to the heavy rain on the day of the Federation: “La révolution Françoise est cimentée avec de l'eau, au lieu de sang” (The French Revolution is cemented with water instead of blood) (1:15). The battle of 1789, having achieved its purpose, now passes the revolutionary torch to the peaceful representation of itself. French patriots consequently engage “beauty as one of their auxiliaries” (1:62-63) and work together to build an amphitheatre instead of a new prison: “Already in the Champ de Mars the distinctions of rank were forgotten; and, inspired by the same spirit, the highest and lowest orders of citizens gloried in taking up the spade, and assisting the persons employed in a work on which the common welfare of the State depended” (1:6).

While Williams praises the building of the Champs de Mars as an egalitarian project, her commitment to class justice is limited. Once the Terror's guillotine replaces the festival as the central site of public spectacle,⁴¹ Williams' middle-class prejudice blames, in part, the quick rise to power of “persons in the lowest classes of life,” who were “incapable of executing with wisdom or propriety the functions of legislators” (4:173-74). Ultimately, Williams tells us, the art of government needs a citizenry refined by middle-class education.

A DEMOCRACY OF SENSIBILITY

Despite her repulsion for the lower-class violence of Jacobin rule, even during the Reign of Terror Williams maintained her faith in the French people and her hope in constitutionalism. She never ceased trusting in a French compassion that transcends class boundaries.⁴² Participatory performance and romantic sublimity would on their own prove insignificant to the political reform of France had they not so forcefully struck at public sentiment: “One must have been present, to form any judgment of a scene, the sublimity of which depended much less on its external magnificence than on the effect it produced on the minds of the spectators” (1:5). Ultimately, Williams argues, affective sensibility provides the momentum for the constitutional monarchy. “The leaders of the French revolution,” she observes, “are men well acquainted with the human heart” (1:61-62).

Williams' appeal to French sensitivity is striking since she is writing to an audience primed with British propaganda wielded against effeminate and frivolous French emotionalism. She, in fact, exploits this popular opinion but reconstructs it in praise of French passion and in criticism of cold English rationalism. The French culture of sensibility, according to Williams, is marked by nonconformity, flourishing commerce, and loose boundaries between government and pleasure. Democratic inclusion and equality are the consummation of the liberal attitude the French have toward the spheres of business and pleasure, solemnity and gaiety, the public and the private. “Pleasure and business are united on the Place du Martroy,” observes Williams,

for not only does it present fine sights and resound with patriotic songs, but there, by way of interlude, the corn-market is held: gowns, petticoats, sweetmeats, grapes, and Bastilles of sugar are also sold in little booths erected for that purpose, and which somewhat disfigure the square. But the French are an amiable, accommodating people, and permit many things of this kind which would not be suffered in England.

(2:20-21)

As Williams extends her comparisons between the unrestricted French and the inflexible English, this “amiable” abundance of commerce bears strong political implications. Williams comments that the entrance halls at the National Assembly are “filled with little shops, where books, paper, &c. are sold.” By contrast, “[i]f this were attempted in the avenues to the House of Commons, our honourable senators would very soon order the passages … to be cleared” (2:21). The difference of external orders suggests a further divergence in what goes on inside these institutions. The commercial clutter in the halls of the National Assembly signifies a wealth of participation and debate in the central rooms of government: “The spectators in the galleries take such a part in the debate [between Democrats and Aristocrats] as frequently to express their applause by clapping their hands with great violence” (1:57). French politicians are equally excitable, and are all the more judicious for it. The members of the National Assembly, who never dispute “with calmness on any subject,” spur genuine social reform, while the “great orators” of the House of Commons “may be as eloquent as they will … but … their eloquence does not influence even one solitary vote” (2:109-10).

As pleasure is divided from government in England, so too is citizen divided from citizen. French sociability, on the other hand, builds community against divisive class hierarchy. While the French enjoy themselves in public places, attending one of the affordable theatres of Paris, a “London tradesman, when the business of the day is over, sits down contentedly with his wife and children, and reads the newspaper” (2:79). Williams continues: “when we [the English] wish to acquire knowledge, we shut ourselves up for that purpose in sober meditation, and serious solitude,” while “Parisians cultivate science and the belles lettres, amidst the pleasures and attractions of society” (2:130). In these cultural comparisons, Williams reverses the English association of the private with the emotional and the public with sobriety and reason: the English are cold and serious, she argues, because they are isolated in domesticity, while the French are “amiable” and “warm hearted” because they favor public entertainment and interaction. Ultimately, Williams suggests, British solitude manifests in an unjust political hierarchy.⁴³ By contrast, French Revolutionaries, as we are reminded throughout the Letters, renounce their titles and give up their valuables to weaken divisions of class.

Sharing in this “common feeling of humanity,” Williams is at home among the sentimental French. Indeed, she supports the French Revolution precisely because it speaks to her sensibility:

In vain might Aristocrates have explained to me the rights of kings, and Democrates have descanted on the rights of the people. How many fine-spun threads of reasoning would my wandering thoughts have broken; and how difficult should I have found it to arrange arguments and inferences in the cells of my brain! But, however dull the faculties of my head, I can assure you, that when a proposition is addressed to my heart, I have some quickness of perception. I can then decide, in one moment, points upon which philosophers and legislators have differed in all ages.

(1:195-96)

In this conventionally feminine pose of ignorance, Williams slyly champions her own sentimental acuity, while simultaneously diminishing the rationalist agenda of Paine and Wollstonecraft. Like the French, Williams mingles private and public by responding to a political event according to “feelings of private friendship” (1:72), and by regarding the rebellion in France as a revolution in the private lives of individuals. Williams tells of Madelaine of Barèges, for instance, who “was a firm friend to the Revolution” because its political reforms allowed her to marry her lover Auguste, who was from a higher social class. This romantic liberty makes Madelaine “as warm a patriot from this single idea, as if she had studied the declaration of rights made by the Constituent Assembly, in all its extent and consequences” (2:174-75). The Revolution “speaks to the heart” of Madelaine, whose marriage to Auguste represents ideal economic and political equity.

Williams' lengthy Gothic-style tale of Monique Coquerel and Thomas du Fossé is the Letters' central allegory of class-mixed marriage as democratic state. The first part of Letters published in Great Britain, the allegory was Williams' greatest commercial success and her strongest merging of French constitutionalism with the culture of sensibility.⁴⁴ It follows the ordeal of Thomas, who is forbidden by his father, Baron du Fossé, to marry Monique because she is the daughter of a mere farmer. Marrying against the baron's will, the couple flee to England until Thomas is tricked into returning to France, where he is imprisoned by his father. The Revolution finally eradicates the baron's order, enabling the couple to live together in France. Thomas' eventual escape from prison and his reunion with Monique represent the victory of constitutional monarchy over the ancien régime.

The tale of the Du Fossés replaces the ancien régime imagery of the father-king with a new icon of democracy: marriage. While capitalizing on the familial imagery of monarchy, the tale subverts its purpose of elitist exclusion. The marriage of Monique and Thomas intervenes in the passing of despotism from one generation to the next, and inaugurates instead a familial model of equality. Thomas immediately breaks with the hierarchical tradition of his father by sharing his inheritance with his brothers and by relinquishing his title. The rupture of familial harmony in Thomas' rebellion against his father is mended in the next generation: Thomas passes on a new democratic ethic to his daughter, who in turn expresses her gratitude and pledges her duty to her father. Williams here recasts the chivalrous loyalty and courtly love of medieval romance by replacing its associations of masculine nobility with domestic sentimentalism. According to Williams, the age of chivalry is not threatened by the Revolution as both Burke and Wollstonecraft claim,⁴⁵ but is redefined in the form of conjugal and familial love.

For Williams, the period of constitutional monarchy (1789 to the autumn of 1793) is an exceptional period in history when politics and the private sphere are democratized because they overlap through both the distribution of revolutionary symbols and the influence of ethical sensibility in government. By the third volume of the Letters, revolutionary France is betrayed by Jacobins, a “faction of anarchists,” whom Williams figures as a mountain: “that elevated region, where, aloof from all the ordinary feelings of our nature, no one is diverted from his purpose by the weakness of humanity, or the compunction of remorse” (4:1). Williams' “unsullied joy” in volumes one and two of the Letters attests to her early conviction that the bloodshed of the Revolution had ended with the fall of the Bastille.⁴⁶ The Terror dashes these hopes, eradicating what Williams calls “the golden age of the revolution” (3:6), and marking both the resumption of a divide between private and political spheres and the dissolution of a democratic “politics of sensibility.”

NON-GENDERED REVOLUTION

As the allegory of the Du Fossés suggests, the Revolution thrives on a moral sensibility identified with a feminine romance genre. We might conclude then that Williams simply reverses gender hierarchy by privileging “female sensibility” over “male reason.”⁴⁷ Yet many moments in the Letters evince a far more complicated depiction of gender. Letters observes the conventions of gender-bending sentimentalism, including a glorification of the “man of feeling”;⁴⁸ and moral compassion is non-gendered, as it comes to represent the Revolution's inclusive approach to politics and life in general. Sacrificing their fortunes and titles for the cause of revolution, French men are graced with the same charitable solidarity as French women.⁴⁹ The spheres of politics and economics are likewise not exclusively male.⁵⁰ Williams believes, for instance, that the Revolution is strengthened by the active involvement of women in civic and military life. She asserts that “women have certainly had a considerable share in the French revolution” (1:37), braving, for instance, the violence at the site of the embattled Bastille:

The women too, far from indulging the fears incident to our feeble sex, in defiance of the cannon of the Bastille, ventured to bring victuals to their sons and husbands; and, with a spirit worthy of Roman matrons, encouraged them to go on. Women mounted guard in the streets, and, when any person passed, called out boldly, “Qui va là?”

(1:27-28)

Having proven themselves as vital members of the siege, the women in Williams' early Letters continue to socialize and work alongside men in the early 1790s. They are admitted to the coffeehouses of Paris and are often “instructed in arithmetic,” working “the whole day in [their husbands'] counting house[s]” (2:80, 63). For Williams, the Revolution respects and even extends the role of women in public life, a role that ironically flourished during the ancien régime but was ultimately forbidden after the Jacobin takeover.⁵¹

Williams' attention to gender inclusion stands out in relation to Burke, Paine, and Wollstonecraft, who were strongly invested in binary gender identities.⁵² That Williams was historically accurate in recording a high level of political activity by women before the Terror is supported by evidence. While the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie certainly exacerbated the confinement of women to the domestic sphere, Darline G. Levy and Harriet B. Applewhite have shown that “[t]his transitional period between constitutional monarchy and republic is … the moment of a surge of women's individual and collective political participation.”⁵³ Others have noted that during this same period, the feminized private sphere of the salon provided an essential forum for revolutionary activists.⁵⁴ Spurred by their new clout in a spreading commercial market, women entered a political and economic world outside the home, while the political world “came home” to the domestic sphere. The first two volumes of Letters From France are evidence of the Revolution's early resistance to strict separate worlds of feminine domesticity and masculine politics. Williams resists bourgeois boundaries of gender by using a conventionally feminine style to influence political opinion, establishing her place in contemporary debates about monarchy and democracy.

Notes

1. Williams published her novel, Julia, a reworking of Rousseau's Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, in 1790. For a discussion of her poetry in historical and political context, see Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (N.Y.: Routledge, 1992). The 1st vol. of Letters From France, entitled Letters Written in France in the Summer of 1790, to a Friend in England, was published in late 1790 upon Williams' return to England. The 2nd vol., Letters From France, containing many new Anecdotes relative to the French Revolution and The Present State of French Manners, appeared in 1792, followed by vols. 3 and 4 in the next 2 years. The last 4 vols. were published together in 1795-96 as Letters containing a Sketch of the Politics of France. Hereafter cited by vol. and page number from Letters From France, 8 vols. in 2 (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975).

2. These genres naturally overlap in Williams criticism, but the following is a list of examples according to the order of genres I have listed: Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge & N.Y.: Cambridge Univ., 1993); Sandra Adickes, The Social Quest: The Expanded Vision of Four Women Travelers in the Era of the French Revolution (N.Y.: Peter Lang, 1991); Chris Jones, “Helen Maria Williams: Radical Chronicler,” in Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London & N.Y.: Routledge, 1993), pp. 136-59; Nicola J. Watson, “Novel Eloisas: Revolutionary and Counterrevolutionary Narratives in Helen Maria Williams, Wordsworth, and Byron,” Wordsworth Circle 23 (Winter 1992): 18-23.

3. Vols. 1 and 2 record France during a celebratory and relatively peaceful period. Vol. 1 recounts Williams' first visit to France in the summer of 1790, beginning with the Fête de la Fédération held on 14 July 1790. Vol. 2, recounting her second visit from Sept. 1791 to Apr. 1792, opens with the king's signing of the new constitution in Sept. 1791 and closes with the French declaring war on Germany and the “dishonor” of the “assassinations at Lisle,” marking, for Williams, the end of a peaceful era of revolution.

4. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men were originally published in 1790, the same year Williams published her first vol. of Letters. Paine's Rights of Man appeared in 1791. Williams' emotionalism has often been cited as precluding political judgment. In “Helen Maria Williams and the French Revolution,” M. Ray Adams describes Williams as “flighty,” pointing to an incongruity between her style and the Letters' subject. He writes that, “Crowded figures of speech, emotional ecstasies, and barbarous diction rob her style of the gravity and decorum which the subject demands” (Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George Mclean Harper, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs [N.Y.: Russell & Russell, 1962], p. 99). In Romantic Correspondence, Mary Favret notes that Williams' writing grows from the naïveté of the first 2 vols. to the maturity of the later vols. where her letters serve as a register “for political rather than emotional turbulence” (pp. 57, 79-80). Sandra Adickes similarly recognizes a new maturity in later letters, noting Williams' greater outspokenness on the position of women (p. 79). In the early Letters, Adickes argues, Williams “persuaded others to her point of view by appealing to a sense of virtue and emotions, rather than by making cogent arguments on the basis of issues” (p. 59). Mary Wollstonecraft also found it difficult to treat Williams as a serious political intellect: “Her manners are affected, yet the simple goodness of her hearts continually breaks through the varnish, so that one would be more inclined, at least I should, to love than admire her” (To Everina Wollstonecraft, 24 Dec. 1792, in Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle [Ithaca & London: Cornell Univ., 1979], p. 226).

5. Williams affirms the position of dissenter minister Richard Price, whose sermon to the radical Society for Commemorating the Revolution (of 1688) prompted Burke to write Reflections. In his sermon, Price suggests that England look to France to reform its own society and government. In “Helen Maria Williams and Edmund Burke: Radical Critique and Complicity,” Matthew Bray discusses Letters From France as a response to Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) and Reflections on the Revolution in France (Eighteenth-Century Life 16 [May 1992]:1-24).

6. Recent historical and cultural studies of the French Revolution focus on the symbolic and commercial practices that make up the Revolution's new political culture. See Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1984); François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Foster (Cambridge & N.Y.: Cambridge Univ., 1981); and Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham & London: Duke Univ., 1991).

7. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1992), p. xxv.

8. Barker-Benfield, pp. 168, 215. For the reformist ideals of sensibility, see: Chris Jones; Barker-Benfield; and Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1995). The political thrust of sensibility is not uniformly reformist, however. In Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford & N.Y.: Clarendon, 1975), Marilyn Butler identifies both a radical and a conservative manifestation of 18th-century sensibility, but locates the former in the man-of-feelings tradition of the mid 18th century and the latter with a conservatism of the 1790s when writers like Edmund Burke appropriated the style of liberals for reactionary ends (pp. 28-37). In Sensibility: An Introduction (London & N.Y.: Methuen, 1986), Janet Todd interprets sensibility as mostly conservative, serving to quell the insubordination of domestics by presenting “service as an ideal sentimental community” (p. 13). For general discussion of 18th-century literature of sensibility, see John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); and Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics, ed. Sydny McMillen Conger (London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1990).

9. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven & London: Yale Univ., 1992), p. 252.

10. Adam Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca & London: Cornell Univ., 1994), pp. 142-43. Potkay remarks that “A Sentimental Journey may be read as Sterne's fable of the ways in which commerce … supplants traditional forms of rhetoric with the new imperatives of polite style” (p. 143). Like Williams, Sterne's Yorick is warmly welcomed as a stranger in France, the country's sentimental commerce in 1768 being an early indication of its sentimental egalitarianism as described in 1790 by Williams.

11. As some critics have observed, Williams yokes sentimental conventions to political argument, which reflects a revolutionary culture preoccupied by the politics of affective style. In “Spectatrice as Spectacle: Helen Maria Williams at Home in the Revolution,” Studies in Romanticism 32 (Summer 1993): 273-95, Mary Favret most strongly presents Williams' Letters as a politics of sentimentality and the private sphere. She argues that “the structure of Williams' Letters From France defies any careful separation of interior and exterior, private and public, sentimental and political” (p. 276). See also Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility, and Gary Kelley, Women, Writing and Revolution 1790-1827 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). In examining this further, we find that Williams' sentimentalism caters to a market receptive to melodrama and fascinated by the theatricalism ubiquitous in early revolutionary France: using music, dance, theater, and procession, during the Fête de la Fédération in Paris and in smaller festivals throughout the provinces Williams' revolutionaries reenact the early days of the Revolution in symbolic ceremonies praising liberty. These celebrations, designed to arouse patriotism, produced a market for symbolic souvenirs of the Revolution, often caricatures of nobles or models of the Bastille.

12. Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740-1815 (London: Oxford Univ., 1962), p. 260.

13. Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton: Princeton Univ., 1995), p. 73.

14. Hunt, p. 45. Hunt describes the revolutionary goal of “‘transparency’ between citizen and citizen, between the citizens and their government, between the individual and the general will. Accordingly, there should be no artificial manners or conventions separating men from each other and no institutions blocking free communication between citizens and their delegates” (pp. 44-45). See also Furet, who describes an “imaginary cohesion” constructed by the Revolutionary consciousness (p. 27).

15. The Rights of Man, in “Reflections on the Revolution in France” and “The Rights of Man” (N.Y.: Dolphin, 1961), p. 288.

16. A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1960), pp. 68-69.

17. See, e.g., Burke's description of the eviction of the royal family from the palace in Reflections on the Revolution in France (“Reflections on the Revolution in France” and “The Rights of Man,” pp. 84-85).

18. Adam Potkay explains the 18th-century republican movement as “a return to the original republican principles of England's ‘ancient constitution’ … [and] championing the republican elements of the constitution over the monarchic” (p. 30).

19. In The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1964), C. S. Lewis writes that “nearly all moralists before the eighteenth century regarded reason as the organ of morality. The moral conflict was depicted as one between passion and reason, not between passion and conscience or duty” (p. 158). During the 18th century this understanding of reason begins to give way to a more narrow modern understanding of reason as “the power by which [humans] deduce one proposition from another” (pp. 159-60). For further discussion of competing notions of reason during the Enlightenment, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame, 1988).

20. In Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1993), Furniss explains that Burke's conservative argument against his own earlier radical aesthetics in Enquiry Concerning the Sublime and the Beautiful creates a strong contradiction in Reflections. While Burke demonizes the dangerous sublime of the Revolution, he praises the “safe” sublime of the British constitution and other traditional forms of government (p. 117).

21. The image of women in Revolutionary rhetoric is certainly ambivalent since female imagery served the propaganda of both sides. Revolutionaries replaced a male monarch with the icon of female liberty, while Burke's famous appeal to pity in his Reflections exploited the delicacy of Marie Antoinette.

22. The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven & London: Yale Univ., 1989), p. 125.

23. An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Effect it has Produced in Europe, in A Wollstonecraft Anthology, ed. Janet Todd (N.Y.: Columbia Univ., 1990), pp. 129, 126. This whole work is structured as a contrast of masculine revolution and feminine ancien régime.

24. Claudia Johnson contends that Burke was forced into masculinizing his appeals to sensibility to counteract charges of effeminacy leveled against him (p. 4).

25. See Tom Furniss, “Nasty Tricks and Tropes: Sexuality and Language in Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Women,” Studies in Romanticism 32 (Summer 1993); 183, for a discussion of the convergence of class and gender in Burke's Reflections.

26. In Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca & London: Cornell Univ., 1988), Joan B. Landes asserts that “the collapse of the older patriarchy gave way to a more pervasive gendering of the public sphere” (p. 2).

27. Burke praises, on the one hand, “all the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle” (p. 90) and denounces, on the other, “the confederations, their spectacles, their civic feasts, and their enthusiasm [as] … nothing but mere tricks” (p. 206).

28. I take this description of revolutionary culture from Lynn Hunt who contends that the French Revolution was marked by a “crisis of representation” since revolutionary radicals rejected the traditional monarchical model of authority “and in the process created a frightening vacuum in their social and political space” (p. 88). Williams' Letters attest to the subsequent reinvention of culture by citizens themselves.

29. “Theme” items, so familiar to American culture today, were popular in 18th-century Britain. Barker-Benfield tells us that Richardson's Pamela spun off other consumer items, including a series of prints, fans, and flat straw hats (pp. 167-68).

30. I contest Julie Ellison's argument in “Redoubled Feeling: Politics, Sentiment, and Sublime in Williams and Wollstonecraft,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 20 (1990): 201.

31. In Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard Univ., 1988), Ozouf writes, “In the minds of its organizers … the ‘Great Federation’ was a way of bringing a turbulent period to a close rather than setting men in motion” (p. 44).

32. Ozouf notes that the provincial festivals “enjoyed relative autonomy in relation to the Paris model” (p. 50).

33. Williams' description of the fireworks at the Federation, for instance, signifies the destruction and resurrection of political symbols: “The fire-works represented two trees: one, twisted and distorted, was emblematical of aristocracy, and was soon entirely consumed; when a tall, strait plant, figurative of patriotism, appeared to rise from the ashes of the former, and continued to burn with undiminished splendour” (1:64-65).

34. Lynn Hunt has argued that feminine allegorizations of liberty that replace the representation of the king signal “the rejection of paternalist or patriarchal models of authority” (p. 31). In their introduction to Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (N.Y. & Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1992), Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine suggest, by contrast, that feminine allegorization was merely a mask covering women's actual political impotence in the revolutionary period (p. 5).

35. The frequent festivals organized by the provincial classes suggest that such exhibitions among the people were fairly widespread: any citizen reserves the right to “play” Liberty. For a discussion of these provincial festivals, see Hunt, pp. 62-64.

36. Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (London: Athlone, 1964), p. 9. Romance was also the “heroic romance” of 17th-century France, the most widely read mode of long prose fiction in England in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Related in style to the literature of sensibility, this genre is more accurately a “salon romance” stressing “feminine” social and psychological concerns and the “internal state of the heart.” Since Williams describes her romance of Revolution as an “affair of the heart,” she no doubt had this French tradition in mind. Writing in 1790, Williams might also be thinking of Gothic romances of the late 18th century, a genre that often combines the “magic” of medieval romances with the emotionalism of salon romances.

37. David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1994), p. 12.

38. Ioan Williams notes that by 1785, “critics were agreed in distinguishing between the novel and the romance as between realistic and idealistic fiction.” Literary reviews of the last few decades of the 18th century express a dissatisfaction with contemporary Gothic romances, thinking them a decline from the standards of earlier “naturalistic” novels (Introduction, Novel and Romance 1700-1800: A Documentary Record, ed. Ioan Williams [London: Routledge, 1970], pp. 5, 3).

39. From Preface to Evelina, Or, A Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778), by Frances Burney, in Novel and Romance 1700-1800: A Documentary Record, p. 302. Another essay collected in the same vol. declares romance “dangerous” since it “withdraws the attention away from nature and truth” (“On Fable and Romance,” by James Beattie [1783], p. 327).

40. Adam Potkay points out that such aestheticizing of violence was central to the 18th-century culture of manners where modern politeness replaced the passionate style of ancient eloquence. He presents Macpherson's Poems of Ossian as an example of the 18th-century polite obscuring of violent passion. In Macpherson's alleged translations of antique Gaelic manuscripts, “primeval force is advertised, but concealed; paraded, but veiled behind a polite aesthetic” (p. 198). Like Williams, Macpherson offers a world in which the passionate eloquence of ancient republican ideals “proves compatible with the most refined sentiment” (pp. 189-90).

41. In the 2nd vol. of the 2nd set of Letters From France, published in 1795, Williams, ordered to leave France in April 1794, bemoans the violent spectacle of the Terror and contrasts it with happier times: “We were obliged to pass the square of the revolution, where we saw the guillotine erected, the crowd assembled for the bloody tragedy, and the gens d'armes on horseback, followed by victims who were to be sacrificed, entering the square. Such was the daily spectacle which had succeeded the painted shows, the itinerant theatres, the mountebank, the dance, the song, the shifting scenes of harmless gaiety, which used to attract the cheerful crowd as they passed from the Thuilleries to the Champs Elysées” (2:7).

42. Williams, for instance, imagines what would have happened had the king been led to the National Convention upon his request at the site of his execution: “it is easy to imagine the effect which would have been produced on the minds of the people, by the sight of their former monarch led through the streets of Paris, with his hands bound, his neck bare, his hair already cut off at the foot of the scaffold in preparation for the fatal stroke—with no other covering that his shirt. At that sight the enraged populace would have melted into tenderness, and the Parisian women, among whom were numbers who passed the day in tears of unavailing regret, would have rushed between the monarch and his guards, and have attempted his rescue, even with the risk of life” (4:37).

43. The British, Williams notes, have yet to renounce a system of aristocratic political inheritance. She suggests that the French system of government is more widely open to varying levels of class than the British since French politicians have free membership in the National Assembly, while a British MP must often spend thousands of pounds to make “a whole country drunk for a week, merely to enjoy the privilege of serving his country without pay” (1:58).

44. Mayo writes that this tale became Williams' most popular contribution to reports of the Revolution and was published separately, reappearing 7 times in different miscellanies (p. 260).

45. Burke, of course, fears the death of chivalry while Wollstonecraft welcomes it. Burke writes that a monarchical “mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry … [which] produced a noble equality … mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings” (p. 89). Characteristically, Wollstonecraft writes in A Vindication of the Rights of Men that the death of dissembling chivalry is all for the good (pp. 64-65).

46. In her introduction to Letters From France, Janet Todd comments that Williams' “accounts of unsullied joy, as they move towards the dark events of 1793, become ominous. … She was gifted with no foresight of the horrors to come” (p. 4).

47. Matthew Bray argues that Williams ultimately affirms separate male and female spheres. He writes that “the patriarchal opposition—active desiring man/passive desired woman—could not be completely overturned when Williams reversed Burke's political aesthetic hierarchy [of the sublime and the beautiful] because it is the axis on which both writers' oppositions turn” (p. 17). I disagree that Williams follows the same sublime/beautiful opposition as Burke. She, instead, collapses the two together. As Julie Ellison notes, “[s]ublimity [in the Letters] is none other than the coincidence of grandeur, romance, sympathy, and ethical assent” (p. 200).

48. Henry Mackenzie embodies this character type—the man driven by affective sensibility—in his hero Harley in his 1771 novel The Man of Feeling. Claudia Johnson identifies the Revolution as a crisis of sentiment and in turn as a crisis of gender, sparking a renewed investment in binary gender identity.

49. See, for instance, Williams' account of a passionate young man, an eldest son, who begs the National Assembly to pass the law giving younger sons an equal share of fortune with the eldest (1:59-60).

50. Further, as critics have pointed out, the story of the Du Fossés offers a love paradigm in which man and woman are equal. The love between the Du Fossés is founded in Thomas' refusal to reject Monique as his social inferior. Indeed, Monique's common social status becomes void with the establishment of the National Assembly, uniting those “whom nature seemed for ever to have separated” (1:222). See Watson, “Novel Eloisas,” and Deborah Kennedy, “Revolutionary Tales: Helen Maria Williams' Letters From France and William Wordsworth's ‘Vaudracour and Julia,’” Wordsworth Circle 21 (Summer 1990): 109-14, both of whom contrast the story of the Du Fossés with William Wordsworth's “Vaudracour and Julia” from The Prelude. Watson argues that Wordsworth's narrative of “the failure of desire” is a counter-revolutionary version of Williams' story which she describes as a “euphoric narrative of illicit sexuality legitimated by the fall of the Bastille” (p. 20). Like Williams, Wordsworth traveled in France in 1790, taking part in the Festival of the Federation, and he later retells his own love affair with Anette Vallon in the Vaudracour and Julia episode of The Prelude, a story based also on the Du Fossés. Wordsworth's romance, unlike Williams, ends in tragedy: Julia is sent to a convent and Vaudracour eventually withdraws from the world after he accidentally causes their baby's death. Wordsworth's tragedy can be seen as an allegory of the failure of revolution. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Sex and History in The Prelude (1805): Books Nine to Thirteen,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 3 (1981): 324-60.

51. Landes writes that the “excessively personal and patriarchal political universe [of the ancien régime] tolerated arenas of public speech and performance by women. … elite women achieved a public position that had little if anything to do with their domestic roles” (p. 17). Women only begin to lose their social and political mobility after the “golden age” of political sentimentality. In contrast to the accounts of her many visits to the National Assembly in the early vols., Williams tells of the exclusion of women by the warmongers of the Jacobin faction: “On the morning of the tenth a watchword was given to the sentinels at the doors of the Convention by some persons unknown, forbidding them to suffer any women to enter the tribunes of the assembly that day; because, said these persons, we have an expedition to make, and men only must be admitted. The order was punctually executed: not one woman appeared in the galleries, which were filled with armed men” (4:56). Joan Landes notes that on 30 Oct. 1793, the Jacobin-controlled government decreed that “henceforth all women's clubs and associations are illegal” (p. 94).

52. Johnson argues that antisentimentalism in the 1790s is a reaction to sentimentalism's radical disruption of gender: “the fate of the nation is understood on all sides to be tied up with the right heterosexual sentiment of its citizens” (p. 11).

53. “Women, Radicalization, and the Fall of the French Monarchy,” in Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution, ed. Harriet B. Applewhite & Darline G. Levy (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 1990), pp. 81-82. See also Levy and Applewhite's “Women and Militant Citizenship in Revolutionary Paris,” in Rebel Daughters.

54. The Paris home of Helen Maria Williams was one such meeting place (Favret, “Spectatrice as Spectacle,” p. 275; Gary Kelley, p. 30). For a description of Williams' Paris salon and a list of her political and literary acquaintances, see M. Ray Adams, pp. 88-91.