CREATION OF A NEW ‘POLITICAL CULTURE’ IN THE FRENCH

REVOLUTION

Yes, a new political culture was created during the French Revolution. For
Lynn Hunt, the origins of the Revolution, its course and legacy may all be
explained in terms of the creation of a new political culture. The Revolution
began with the rejection of the old political culture by the nobility, and this
process was completed by the bourgeoisie who not only concurred with
aristocratic opposition to the bankrupt monarch, but also rejected
traditional noble privilege, which was the cornerstone of the Ancien
Regime in France. Once the old political order had been displaced and a
new one was being created, the new political class also realized the need to
invest their order with legitimacy and sacrality. This goal could be achieved
only through a transfer of the charisma and sacrality of the Ancien Regime
to the new political order. Finally, says Hunt, what made the years 1789-99
revolutionary was their drastic transformation of political culture; contrary
to the Marxists, Revisionists and the Tocquevillian schools then, she does
not assess the Revolution in terms of a transition from one society to
another, but in terms of its establishment of an enduring political culture
that has survived in liberal democracies upto the present day.

The new political culture derived its ideological coherence from the
Enlightenment. The Rousseau-ean ideal of kingship as a social contract and
the ‘general will’ of the people were the bases for the construction of
democratic republicanism. Yet, as mentioned above, this ideology needed a
coherent, tangible form which it found in various places – the rhetoric of
the revolution, the revolutionary festivals, manners of dress were all
politicized in the period 1789-99. The politicization of everyday life is
another feature of the new political culture that Lynn Hunt speaks of. She
notes that the new political class was wary and mistrustful of politics.
Leaders claimed to be ‘serving the nation’ rather than their partisan
interests. In other words, universalist public action was equated with
service, while public action for the benefit of a few was associated with
politics. As a result of their reluctance to bestow political power in any
limited group of people, the revolutionaries succeeded in making everyday
political, and in multiplying the centres from where power might be
exercised. In other words, mundane activities and phenomena assumed
symbolic political importance in revolutionary France. Hunt illustrates her
point by referring to the ‘poetics’ or the rhetoric of revolution. The nation,
liberty, citizenship as well as counter-revolutionary all assume the nature
of incantations. Mothers named their children after the heroes of classical
antiquity; lawyers dropped fancy titles for the simple descriptive label ‘man

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of law’. Equality and national sovereignty were articulated through the
language and actions of daily life.

Yet, Hunt has noted, one of the fall-outs of the politicization of all life was
that since power could be exercised from anywhere (such as the donning of
the revolutionary cockade), enemies too could be found anywhere. This
created and strengthened the revolutionaries’ ‘siege mentality’ –
conspiracy and the threat of counter revolutionaries was a persistent
theme in revolutionary rhetoric.

If rhetoric and everyday life served to convey the Rousseau-ean sympathies

of the new political class, then so did these tools reassert the patriarchy of
the new order. As Joan Scott and Lynn Hunt have noted, the new order was
based on the notion of universal citizenship. Yet this clearly reflected the
contradictory nature of women’s position, for on the one hand they were
being designated citizens, yet on the other, their status as political subjects
was in doubt, for they were passive citizens, confined to the domestic
sphere. This too has been traced back to Rousseau, for whom the
decadence and corruption of the Ancien Regime was a product of women’s
public role and the influence they wielded over public men. Thus, if the new
political culture was universalist, it had also to be transparent and
therefore exclusively masculine. The partisan nature of politics in the old
regime and their consequent corruption were both attributed to the
feminization of politics. To establish a universalist political order would
thus involve the paradoxical task of barring women from entering the
public sphere.

This new aspect of political culture – its masculinity – was once more
conveyed through the rhetoric and symbols of the French Revolution.
Hercules replaced Marianne as the symbol of the new republic, which was
centralized, strong and virile rather than effeminate and weak. Moreover,
the ‘Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen’ did not omit the mention of
women by oversight; rather, this was a deliberate omission that conveyed a
strong view of the new regime regarding the proper place of women.

An extension of the gendered nature of the new political culture is what

Lynn Hunt has called the ‘family romance’ of the French Revolution. While
in this module, which exerted a shaping influence upon the new political
culture, women’s proper place lay within the home (and therefore the
attacks on the virtue of public women like Marie Antoinette), another
important change was taking place. The French nation, if conceived of as a
family, had lost its ‘father’; positions of authority had now been taken up by

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the ‘band of brothers’. This story, says Hunt, performs two important tasks
– it relocates political charisma within the body of the brothers (or the
political fraternity) while also marking a new epoch in the life of the
family/nation.

The two facets of this ‘family romance’ mentioned above were articulated
in political rhetoric, and as Mona Ozouf notes, in revolutionary festivals as
well. These festivals utilized the rituals of Catholicism as well as its
paraphernalia of worship – like altars – along with Masonic and classical
symbolism to transfer sacrality from the body of the king to that of the
republic. Part of these festivals included oath taking, which reiterated the
solidarity of the nation. Moreover, since these festivals utilized traditional
symbols, Ozouf believes they were not revolutionary in content as much as
they were in the manner in which they viewed the new political order. In
other words, these festivals regarded the Revolution as a critical watershed
between past and present, an assumption that was reflected in the naming
of years with reference to 1789.

Hunt also noted that while the political culture of the revolution derived its
coherence from ideas and symbols, it also focused its unity in the new
political class. This class was fairly varied, and moreover its composition
kept changing, which changes were then echoed in political culture. Yet,
says Hunt, the very diversity of their backgrounds would have made the
appeal of a uniform political culture even greater; furthermore, despite
differences of backgrounds, these new political leaders shared certain
cultural experiences, their youth, their political inexperience, and later,
their political experience gave them a unity of vision and ideas.

If the arguments of neo-conservative historians like Francois Furet are to

be accepted, the French Revolution marked the culmination of the
centralizing propensities of the Ancien Regime. It was in this respect not a
watershed as its participants believed. At the end of the Revolutionary
decade, an Emperor was reinstated in France. Yet, as Lynn Hunt notes, the
crucial difference between France of the old regime and France at the turn
of the 19th century was in terms of political culture. Thus, Napoleon was not
King as Louix XVI had been, for he ruled in the name of the people. He was
of humble origins, and had earned his political clout. Moreover, on
assuming power, he claimed to eradicate partisanship, which had been a
constant theme of the Revolution. Thus, says Hunt, the Revolution made it
unthinkable to have a King without an assembly, and made Revolution in
itself a continuous fact of public life. Finally, in terms of the place accorded
to women in public life, the French Revolution was very different from the

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Ancien Regime, where, as Joan Landes notes, women occupied positions of
public importance, though in a limited way.

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