Burke, Paine, and the newspapers: an "archaeology" of political knowledge 1789-93.

Howell, Peter

The MURTHER took place at four o'clock this morning, and was conducted in the most private manner. The Guillotine was erected in ya court of the Temple--a hole was dug in it, into which the King's head fell, and his body precipitated afterward .... (This must be understood as the prevailing report of the moment. It is impossible to vouch for its absolute truth.) This scene of infernal assassination, which a base and cowardly faction have now degraded human nature by executing calls for a marked execration which it is not in the power of language to convey .... Almighty vengeance must be the portion of those who have thus step by step arrived at this damnable crisis. To that awful moment, when the great King of Kings shall sit in tremendous judgement of men and daemons, do we consign the diabolic spirits. It will come, and in thunders speak terrors to their hearts, now hardened in human iniquity.

THIS DESCRIPTION OF THE FRENCH REGICIDE FIRST APPEARED IN THE St. James' Chronicle on 24th January 1793, and was copied during the next few days in a number of other pro-ministerial newspapers. Its publication was a few days after the execution of Louis Capet, and clearly uses and elaborates upon a rumor to suit the political purposes of that newspaper; the French King, murdered at night, in private, the perpetrators using all the cunning of a villain in a Gothic novel to keep their crime secret. The Gothic tropes are built up so that, despite the partially-admitted dubiousness of the narrative being reported, a number of eschatological prophesies are made about the results. Today we would probably respond to this passage by claiming that it is bad journalism, as it draws conclusions from facts not yet established, and accepts rumor as fact simply because it suits a particular political agenda. Against this, I intend in the following pages to argue that the imagination of political action, in this case imagining the King's death, cannot be read as simply "bad journalism" in the early 1790s; that in fact the equivocal nature of political factuality and truth steins from the whole system of the representation of political events at this time, and that this act of creative imagining is one of the ways in which political activity could legitimately be construed during the 1790s.

"I hope you do not think me weak enough," wrote Burke in a letter of January 1790, "to form my opinion of what is doing here [i.e., in France] upon the representations of newspapers, much less upon those of a country in which the true spirit of the several transactions cannot be known." (1) The letter was probably intended for Thomas Paine, or at least reads very like a reply to a letter that Burke had received from him a few days before, in which Paine assumes of his addressee an over-reliance on the London press for knowledge of the situation in France. Paine had stated, "everything in the English papers is either untrue or misrepresented" (75). So the writers of the most famed political appropriations of the events of the French Revolution, upon which so much debate turned, did not think much of the reporting to be found in newspapers. Instead, they claimed more privileged access to information, Paine through his friendship with Lafayette and his late presence in France, Burke by a more general appeal to men of quality, or, "those who have a considerable share in the formation of public measures" (79).

"You really shouldn't believe everything you read in the papers"-hardly a surprising sentiment to find in the correspondence of two men of letters and active politicians such as Burke and Paine. It is perhaps statements such as these, and also the apparent disparities throughout the eighteenth century between government policy and "opinion" as expressed in the newspapers, that have led certain historians to claim that the influence of the press on political affairs at this time was strictly limited; that the newspapers were much more concerned with the commercial interests of their readers; that people in reality did not believe what they read, or that they did not form effective critical opinion based on what they read; and even if they did, the executive powers worked in a rarefied world that was not influenced by, or rather did not need to be particularly bothered with, the formation of opinion outside a relatively small circle attached to the court and the cabinet. As Marie Peters points out, the kind of political history of the period during the "Namier-era" of historical research would naturally favor such an interpretation of the publicity provided by the development of newspapers. Where this development is considered, it is most often in a narrative of the progress of the idea of a free press, which has an important landmark in 1771 when parliamentary reporting was allowed for the first time, but which did not triumph in any practical way until the provision of a press gallery in the new House of Commons in 1852. (2) The personalities and courtly influence which made up the world of eighteenth century politics according to this kind of history, had their own grapevine, private letters and private audiences that consistently evaded any informed opinion outside that world.

If the findings of this paper are to be considered of any mainstream interest, such a view clearly has to be challenged, or at least substantially rewritten. Reawakening of interest in eighteenth century newspapers during the past fifteen years, caused by the wider availability of the most substantial collections on microfilm, and also by the publication in English of Habermas' work on publicity, has generally told a story of the increasing influence of the opinion-forming newspapers on the political stage. The most substantial work of this sort has been undertaken in a series of articles and then in collected form by Jeremy Black. (3) This tends to follow the maxim that all civil government requires the manufacturing of opinionated consent of one form or another; and that even, or perhaps especially, where there are the loudest protestations to the contrary, such opinion often comes from the sources of information most readily at hand, that is, newspapers. To illustrate this, a few days after the letter cited above, Burke mentions that his supposedly exclusive sources are in fact the Courtier de Provence, the cahiers presented to the Estates General in June 1789, and the Proces-verbal of the National Assembly, all corresponding to the type of "publicity" which he explicitly eschewed.

I intend to take a rather different direction with this study which, as will be shown, challenges some conceptual problems with Habermas' historiography and the scholars influenced by him respecting a strangely uncritical use of the concept of "criticism," and also accounts for the apparent disregard for "opinion" displayed by the executive. I shall first establish empirically, by a wide-ranging survey of the political reporting of the first year of the French Revolution and comparisons with other political reporting in England, the existence of certain widespread generic characteristics in such reporting. And indeed, I will go further, arguing that these genres or topoi in political reporting impose themselves on, indeed constitute as archaeological necessities, the possible ways of construing "politics" or the "political arena," that is, the negotiations between different actors as they relate to each other in questions of authority and the execution of that authority. These archaeological necessities will be grouped as two opposing tendencies, forming more or less coherent "discourses" or language games played in order to represent the reality being aimed at. The generic characteristics of political reporting impose a form on knowledge, and it will then be shown how these discourses are picked up by the likes of Burke and Paine, who become their respective talismen. After suggesting the important respects in which these modes of political representation correspond to the discourses of sovereign and disciplinary power, I will finally suggest some of the ways in which the positions structurally inform reception of events in France during the following years.

Three brief historiographical and methodological points need to be made here before the exposition of the genres of political reporting can begin. The first concerns the sheer volume and variety of the material under discussion, and is designed to head off the objection that the inevitably tiny proportion selected for direct discussion will be incapable of proving conclusively the existence of any generic characteristics, and hence of any coherent discourse to underpin them. It is true that there was, in 1789, very little editorial policy or control in the selection of reports for inclusion, and the haphazard way in which information became available meant that the same titles often carried contradictory reports of major events, often in the same issue. But it is also true that there was a strictly limited number of sources, and indeed, a similarly limited number of accounts available. To give an example, one account of the Versailles Days in October 1789, which first ran in the London Gazette on 7th October, appeared in almost unaltered form in nine subsequent daily newspapers that I have read, and probably more that have not survived in the major collections; more such instances will become clear in the study that follows. The most comprehensive recent study of eighteenth century newspapers concludes "despite the limited use of correspondents during the French Revolution, the practice at the end of the century was still essentially the same as that at the beginning. Newspapers relied on other papers, a cheaper, more comprehensive and not necessarily less reliable method" (Black 99). Black may in fact be overstating his case; many newspapers did have correspondents employed on a semi-formal basis in Paris. They also took information (up until war started) from travelers, most of whom were merchants, and from "private letters" from gentlemen in France. But the most important sources were indeed the London Gazette (itself a distillation of official information from diplomats and foreign envoys), the French newspapers, and the French-language papers of the French-Protestant diaspora in the Austrian Netherlands and Holland. One could indeed construe the British papers of this period as a kind of post-structuralist paradise, intertextual, parasitic on each other, the scriptors to be seen not as originating authors but as compilers of cultural fragments, and with the referent always fading into the background. However, I hope that analysis will show not simply a pluralistic play of words but also a certain coherence in the way in which different groups of political actors played the linguistic game of politics at this specific historical moment. It should be clear that I am not intending a thorough examination of their "reliability" as historical sources, nor a detailed analysis of the channels through which information came, although in some cases the latter will be necessary. Rather, it is an attempt to reconstruct the way in which political actors construed the arena of the political, to list the ways in which it was possible to experience the French Revolution in Britain, and to show how representation of the Revolution helped to construct the terms of the ideological clash during the early 1790s. It is in this sense that the study is an "archaeology."

The second concept that needs to be examined in a preliminary way is the sign under which we come to experience the events in France from 1789, that is, "Revolution"; how does one "think" a revolution? Many academic accounts of the contemporary experience of that Revolution start with the proposition, which was perhaps first theorized in Marx's pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that one cannot really imagine a revolution at all, at least not in the modern sense of a violent rupture with the past, and one can represent it only indirectly by the intertextual play of comparison, or a kind of incredulous affirmation that the events talked about go beyond the conventionally representable. This at any rate is the opinion of Ronald Paulson, who offers an analysis of the strategies employed by various artists and writers to construe revolution--crucially, by convenient historical analogies (with the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the '45 Rebellion, the Gordon Riots, the French Wars of Religion) and aesthetic categories (darkness and light, winter and spring, the sublime and the beautiful). (4) Paulson's art history provides a startling--and humbling--interpretation of political debate and the opinion-forming process as nothing more than the interaction of allusive or sensuous references, over which it is impossible to have much control, there not being available sufficient discursive resources to cope with an event as rapid or as vast as a revolution. But Paulson does not, perhaps, take seriously the ways in which politics of any particular cultural configuration sets itself apart from other discourses, and demarcates the conditions of its own propriety. If one is to say that the novelty of revolution makes such an event very hard to think and write about, one must be very clear about which events are so hard to experience and represent, for the reason that they break certain rules or conventions that had existed before that revolution. In building up an inventory of these conventions in England at the time of the French Revolution, it will become easier to discern which events in France confound such expectations, and which therefore are likely to be difficult to deal with, writers being less sure of the procedures, and having fewer discursive resources to call on when describing them.

One such category of happening conies immediately to mind, that is, the interventions of the sans-culottes, those acts of popular justice, insurrection against tyranny, and lawless violence which intermittently furthered and frustrated the aims of the bourgeois politicians. Foucault once argued that the practice of popular justice in pure form should

not, and indeed could never, take the form of a court or any other juridico-political procedure, because it is, precisely, the other of the juridico-political. (5) The form of the tribunal in modern societies consists of a table, and behind the table, separated from the litigants, "les tiers"--the third-party judges--all of which would be alien to popular justice. To illustrate his case, Foucault cites approvingly the most infamous episode (for the bourgeois historian) of the French Revolution, the September Massacres. During this event, so argues Foucault, the People identified their enemies by their experience of being oppressed, and expressed their rage in forms of justice that pre-dated those juridico-political procedures he was later to identify in his research that led up to Surveiller et punir. (6) The mob had the following practices, says Foucault nonchalantly and with some glee: dismantling and burning the houses of their enemies, disembowelling the occupants, and carrying their heads on spikes. After this first expression of popular justice, in which there were only the masses and their enemies, the table was set up, the tribunal reinstated, and state oppression in the name of "third party" justice was once again imposed. Now, the accuracy of his account of the Massacres may be questionable, as might be the make-shift genealogy of the procedures of popular justice. But the conceptual point he brings out very strongly is the foreignness of the juridico-political forms--with which we are all familiar but which do not, or should not, or in any case cannot, comprise a monopoly on the possibilities for "political" action--to certain actions of the Parisian "mob." When examining reports of events in Paris, it is noticeable that, almost without exception, the compilers of reports found such happenings the most prickly to deal with, and in their descriptions we find either great silences or reformulation in terms of preconceived models for political action. Although in what follows I will be more interested in what commentators were able to say than in what they were not, some consideration of the sense of frustration experienced, and consequent distortion of events, by writers whose expectations did not tessellate with reality will be given.

The final set of preliminary comments concerns Habermas' history and conceptualization of publicity in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. (7) In what follows it will become clear that I have appropriated and expanded upon some of the important concepts expounded in that work, which will be discussed in full later. In particular, Habermas' idea of "representative publicness" has been important in my construal of the characteristics of reporting associated with the Tory press, which is that form of political presentation in post-Renaissance Europe in which centralized power is embodied in the King, and his deputies represent "not 'for' the people, but 'before' the people," in a "staging of power" (8). However, as with other accounts of the "rise of the press" in the eighteenth century, there is a certain Whiggishness about Habermas' analysis of British development in this respect, which always opposes the forms of "representative publicness" to a comparatively free press in the process of becoming a "genuinely critical organ of a public engaged in critical debate" (60). In answer to this, it will be shown, on the one hand, that this representative publicness did not in fact preclude opposition; and on the other, that the "new" criticality in turn took on certain prescriptive forms other than the structure of critical rationality of which Habermas writes, and responded to certain archaeological necessities, which it is the aim of this article to identify and describe. The story to be told is not one of a transition to a "genuinely critical public," but, on the contrary, of a radical conflict in the assumptions and necessities that formed the locus, procedure and aims of discourse and representation in the public-political arena.

On May 7th, 1789, The Times reported preparations for the meeting of the Estates General thus:

 The BISHOPS: rochet et camail: a long white linen robe thrown over
 their shoulders fringed, with a Capuchin velvet cap. The other
 CLERGY: nearly the same, with square caps. The NOBILITY are to
 wear black, with a cloak of the same colour of thin gauze, white
 stockings, cravat of lace, and a hat with white feathers. If in
 mourning, the dress of black and silk muslin cravat, and if in very
 deep mourning, the dress to be black cloth, crape cravat, and cap
 cocked a la Henri Quatre. The THIRD ESTATE likewise to wear black,
 cloak the same, but with armholes, and lace cravats.

 We are promised some more particulars by the next mail.

Now, why might anyone want more particulars!? My hypothesis is that these outward forms of visible power, with their sense of spectacle and glamor, provided the focus for a certain genre of political discourse. The London Chronicle (9th-12th May 1789) provided an account of the opening of the meeting which betrays similar interest; none other than a seating plan of the royal family at the ceremony, and the proximity of the ministers to these centers of (supposed) power. This is the form the meeting took, its political functioning; it is not a stylistic device, in the manner of some modern journalists, to make distant events "come alive," but, precisely, the rendering of the most important significance that the events hold for the journalists and their public.

What is the significance of the meeting of the Estates-General for the modern commentator? If one were to believe a certain kind of twentieth century historian, a "liberal" one might say, the key is the idea of discussion, of coming together in order to debate and reach some kind of rational synthetic conclusion, in this case crucially on the state finances. No consensus was to be possible, and without consensus conflict expressed itself outside civil society, with violence and other disruptions to the law. Another kind of historian, a Marxist perhaps, might emphasize the conflict more, and see the meeting as the culmination of a series of insurmountable contradictions inherent to the ancien regime, in which one class, the bourgeoisie, was able, not so much by debate but by co-option of a much more (to the aristocracy) frightening class, the sans-culottes, to gain the upper hand, but in so doing sowed the seeds of further conflict. Such interpretations are clearly not of any particular interest to the compilers of accounts such as the one above, and if we are to make a serious attempt at an "archaeology" of political reporting, in other words an examination of the discourses underpinning construals of the arena of "politics," it is necessary first to have a firm grasp of our own view of that arena as irreparably "archaeological"--to become aware of our own positions in order the better to imagine the positions of others. What we are seeing in these descriptions of the preliminaries of the French Revolution is the articulation of an interest in outward display of power, the political "theatre," of which the basic form in the newspapers is the court circular.

Of what did the court-circular consist, and what purposes did it serve at the end of the eighteenth century? The skeleton was a description of the precise whereabouts and activities of several members of the royal family, and also of the personages, usually noblemen and women, often ministers, who were present and as such close to the center of power. The descriptions of the outward forms the court took often went into some detail, particularly on special occasions such as birthdays, cataloguing the particulars of each participant's dress (an important way of defining and disseminating fashion), and praising the general splendor and magnificence of the occasion as a whole. But to say that these descriptions were "simply" lighthearted fashion columns would be grossly misleading; most originate in the London Gazette, the official organ of government information, and are part of a very specific way of giving out information, and a locus and procedure for coming to know about political events, that is, what I will call a particular "politico-epistemology." Court circulars usually appeared at the top of the editorial sections of newspapers (that is, after the advertisements and just in front of what we would regard as the main news). Onto the splendid court-scene comes in many cases a messenger from a foreign diplomat, or in times of war from military command, who informs first the King then the appropriate ministers, at which point the substance of that information, in other words the "news" story, starts. The politico-epistemology is such that the court, one could say, is like a screen onto which events from the "real" world are projected. Or, to use the analogy better known to epistemology, it is like the back of Plato's cave, on which shadows of reality are to be seen, and which the "public" has to face in order to see the political knowledge generated in the narrative from which the referents are very deliberately absent. Even though they are absent, however, such a narrative bears the stamp of authority provided by the scene that, as the London Chronicle of the 9th Feb. 1790 had it, "manifested the love and opinion of the world," through the splendor of the princess' dresses, and the legitimacy of the King as represented in these descriptions of the display of sovereignty

Marilyn Moris has argued that such descriptions of royal splendor in the London Press were a development of the 1790s, perhaps in response to the threat felt by those close to government. (8) It is also true that the public's attention became more focused on the court during and--with relief--after the first regency crisis, an episode on which Price was to preach critically in his momentous sermon A Discourse on the Love of our Country. (9) As will be seen, descriptions did become more sophisticated during this time, particularly under the influence of Burke's Reflections, but the basic template and procedure for the dissemination of political knowledge had been in place for over a century. A longer perspective on newspaper history explains this; newspapers developed at the end of the seventeenth century not out of a spirit of realistic and probing documentary, but in fact from "newsletters," gossip columns, as it were, concerning the particulars of the centers of power at court. As Henry Snyder has argued, these newsletters started as examples from the state apparatus, that is, the spectacular presentation of the sovereignty of the monarch and its appendages. But being outside laws aimed at printed materials, they often developed into oppositional tracts satirizing certain personages at court, operating as a covert grapevine for the intrigues of government. (10) The transformation from newsletters to the kind of newspaper reporting being talked of here is not a structural change, but merely a more sophisticated and more widely publicized version of similar formats.

The topos of the court-circular, then, is a way both of organizing and of giving authority to information. This mode of structuring reality at a rhetorical level was the most important way of reporting the early stages of the French Revolution in England. It has already been shown that it was in this way that reporters found meaning in the events following the calling of the Estates-General; a series of set-pieces are presented to the public, in which the King and the three estates are choreographed in their various oppositions. The crisis over the "doubling of the third estate" culminates, in the Public Advertiser (1st July 1789), with the King on his throne, accepting "huzzas from the majority of the nobility and the clergy," while the different factions are "reciprocally looking at one another" across the Hall. By French custom, the estates should have been in their respective chambers, but it is the set-piece, the drama of their confrontation and spatial proximity to one another, which brings, in such representations, the nation, as the British newspapers conceived its relationship to itself in the political arena, to a crisis.

I intend to exemplify in a preliminary way this genre of political reporting by detailed reference to one further event, one that becomes the most generally appropriated in the political debates that followed in Britain, that is, the expedition to Versailles and the bringing of the royal family to Paris during the so-called "October days." The most widely-disseminated account of these events can be seen in the Public Advertiser, which shows the framing of the main story to good effect (fig. 1). The content of the whole page is taken from the London Gazette, as is indicated at the top, and starts with the usual lists of appointments and honors. Under the title "London" (the column on the left) are presented the activities and itinerary of the members of the royal family; in addition there is similar news of the most important members of executive government, planned practices of the court and some information on the fashion at court (and the benign effect of that fashion on the economy generally). There follows a short comment on the reliability of the Gazette's account of the happenings in Paris, imagining that the situation is in fact worse than the restrained account suggests.

[Note: The unclear text at the top of the right-hand column in fig. 1 reads: "It being customary for the Gardes du corp at Versailles to give an entertainment to any new regiment that arrives there, the Regiment de Flandres was, on Thursday last, sumptuously entertained by that corps in the Palace. After dinner their Most Christian Majesties judged proper to honour the company with their presence, and condescended to shew their satisfaction at the general joy which prevailed amongst the guests."]

It is noticeable, I think, how much the report of the news breaking from France, under the title "Paris," resembles the court-circular under the title "London"; as in London, the salient points are seen to be the whereabouts of the sovereign and his family, and the touching magnificence of the customary scene at court. Of course, it is something of a "frustrated" court-circular; the story is one of the interruption of that scene by a mob from town, the forced removal of the royal family without proper procedure to a palace that is "totally unprepared for their reception." This account, the most widely-disseminated, is in fact the barest of the versions of this episode. Subsequent accounts attempt to show how the emotive reactions to the various scenes become the motor for later developments. In the London Chronicle (10th-13th October 1789), the entertainment is expanded upon:

 The appearance of the King and Queen, with the Dauphin, who entered
 the place merely to do honour to the guests, encreased the show
 of loyalty; but when the music struck up the air of 'Richard, O mon
 roi' ... the officers felt themselves wound up to the highest pitch,
 and, as if animated by one soul, began to sing the words of the song.
 The King himself was affected; he immediately walked out, unable to
 speak, and with his handkerchief up to his eyes. The officers then
 solemnly pledged themselves to one another, that they would stand by
 their King, release him from the bondage in which he was kept, or
 perish in the attempt. [Versions of this passage, with minor
 amendments, appeared in the Morning Post, The Times, and the Morning
 Chronicle.]

The longer accounts also expand on the entry into Paris, the so-called "leading in triumph" on which Price, Burke, Paine, Wollstonecraft and others were later to pick up, the spectacle of the Queen, a figure of distress but still of magnificence, is presented thus:

 Their majesties, the King and Queen of France, were on the road for
 six hours; those who have any feeling for greatness--or, if the word
 be more acceptable--for Royalty in distress, will feel stronger
 emotions, on being informed that, of this time, one hour and a half
 were spent debating whether the Queen should be put to death or not.
 In this momentous interval, the Queen sate, pale, passive and
 resigned--the humanity, or perhaps the gallantry of the nation
 prevailed, and she was dismissed. She was dismissed to enjoy what
 repose she may in the forlorn palace of the Thuilleries. (Public
 Advertiser, 13th August 1789)

Interestingly, it is public debate that most threatens the life of the Queen, while only the feelings aroused by the tableau of this object of pity--feelings to which the writer also appeals in his public--can ensure mercy. Compilers of newspapers, in response to such accounts, point out pan-European political implications that follow from such representations of Marie-Antoinette:

 The murder of the Queen of France has been attempted in the middle
 of the night, while she was in slumber, and unprepared to appear
 before the tribunal of her Maker, at a time the most awful and
 barbarous, because the most sacred and inoffensive. What must have
 been the consequence--a Queen, who is the sister of the Emperor and
 the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and allied to the houses of Spain,
 Sardinia, Naples and almost all the princes of Italy! (London
 Chronicle, 10th-13th October 1789)

I am arguing, then, that in newspapers, especially those of conservative leaning, the topos of the court-circular gave rise to a tendency to represent the events in France in a similar way, and the descriptions of royalty inherent to that form led to a construal of the events in France as, so to speak, the "tragedy of the fall of the house of Bourbon." In summary, one can say that the descriptions of the British court set up a scene that organized and gave authority to the representations that were projected onto it. The representations of the events in France repeat the pattern of this "framing" device, the locus being the court, the objects being the persons of the royal family and those in their orbit, the procedure one of stage-managed theatricality, and the required response affective and intuitive rather than rational and critical. Some of the connections between such reporting and the most famous passages of Burke's Reflections should be obvious; these, and the development of these conventions later in the decade will be discussed in due course.

A competing discourse in political reporting needs now to be specified, the one that Burke was to find so distasteful in France, that is, public debate. By 1789, many London newspapers, and especially those of a Whig orientation, published detailed transcripts of the British and Irish Houses of Commons and Lords; during the 1790s, transcripts of the French Assembly in its various forms, and debates in the political clubs of London, Dublin and Paris were added to these. Texts of controversial trials were often published in extenso, which although far from being "debates" as such, became structurally comparable in the representations of the radicals. Transcripts in many cases ran to three or four pages for the most important debates and trials, and in the Whig papers, of which the Morning Chronicle is exemplary, they often made up the vast majority of the non-advertising space in individual issues. Such reporting of parliamentary proceedings still had great political significance, as the ability to do this had only been won in 1771 following the Wilkes campaign, and the most important reformist political club in 1789 was, significantly, the Society for Constitutional Information. Still, reporters were given access to the Strangers' Gallery above the Commons only by indulgence, and could be cleared at the request of the Members. Note-taking was not allowed, although it was often done covertly, and great significance was attached to certain reporters' abilities of memory and shorthand note-taking. Moreover, the gallery had to be cleared when a division was called. Reporters were squashed into the Strangers' Gallery, and had to be discreet if they were not to be ejected; many still believed that regular publication of debates "lowered the dignity of the house" (Aspinall 36). The facilities for reporting debates became a key issue in the years following the French Revolution, and on several occasions we read British reporters commenting enviously on the transparency of procedures in Paris:

 So properly attentive is the Assembly to the true interests of the
 people, that, for the sake of publishing correct accounts of the
 proceedings, the respectable papers have bureaux and places allotted
 to them, that they may write accounts on the spot. There is none of
 the affection and prudery, by which knowledge is sacrificing to the
 unbecoming of the English Parliament. (Morning Chronicle, 23rd
 September 1791)

"Debate" then must be publicly observable and communicable--but not only this, it must be so in a minutely faithful representation, rather than as the discontinuous coups de theatre typical of the spectacular forms of political representation. There is a structural difference in such reports between the French model and the English Parliament, which was still a kind of Gentlemen's club to which observers were allowed access only under sufferance. Unlike in Britain, the French ideal was not concerned primarily with outward forms, but with the significance of the words spoken as they probed the affairs of the nation. "Debate" for this style of journalism would be a frank and manly exchange of views in conditions of public observability and communicability; it would also be oriented towards the production of agreement and what one might call "truth"--or as Priestley wrote, "if time be allowed for the discussion of differences, so great a majority will form one opinion." (11)

How did the twos of debate inform the reporting of the French Revolution? Two ways that are interlinked but distinguishable for analytical purposes will be identified in the following descriptions of the Assembly in English newspapers. The debates of the Assembly formed a large percentage of the coverage of the Revolution in the Whiggish titles, so that, from this point of view, the Assembly, with its formalities and its ordered, rigorous scrutinizing, "was" (in the strictest, but also in critically ironic senses) the Revolution. Its publications (the Proces-verbal and Journal des Debats) were, as will be seen, the main sources of information about events on the streets in Paris; it had the most highly-developed system of communication, and texts of messengers giving reports of those events to the assembly were the nearest one could get to eye-witness accounts (sometimes they were). As such, the Assembly's form shaped the English public's experience of insurrection in Paris. There is an important parallel here with the court in the opposing mode of journalism described earlier, in that the chamber of debate becomes the means by which politics can be experienced, the screen onto which events are projected, a locus and a procedure, but with this crucial difference: according to this politico-epistemology, a certain penetration, a certain fidelity, in other words a distinct idea of the proximity of sign to referent, was to be generated, which, through information technologies and precision with words, was to by-pass the theatrical show of the rival mode of political reporting. Largely because of this, and this is the second point, the Assembly's "debates" did not end in its chamber, but, for the English newspapers at least, its procedures informed and shaped the actions of the formless mob. The Assembly and its agents became either a moderating influence on the streets, in which respect Lafayette's mediating between the crowd and the King is exemplary, or else it was able to represent the very opinion of that crowd by condensing it into an effective juridico-political form.

First reactions to the National Assembly are ambivalent in most of the English newspapers. For some, the Assembly is essentially dull, uninteresting, bureaucratic and harmful to the nation's interests. The Morning Herald (2nd September 1789) comments on the discussions leading up to the Declaration of the Rights of Man by saying, "it is a wonder that they should proceed wholly on a subject so abstracted and open to a variety of discussion, especially so among a people who are not by nature lovers of simplicity." Meanwhile, outside, "the people begin to exclaim against the slowness of the Assembly, and bread is scarcer than ever." Others see this open exchange of views as welcome, realistic, beautiful and even sublime. On the news that the King was to allow the doubling of the Third Estate--in other words, to allow the conditions for a full and frank exchange of views to take place--the Public Advertiser (4th July 1789) ascribes the "universal joy" to their ability to "continue the great works for which they were assembled; the regeneration of credit, the establishment of a constitution." Later, the same paper mentions, "the true, sublime and affecting discourses of M. Necker," during a speech to the Assembly (8th August 1789), and then praises Lafayette's oratory and its function in coming towards decisions (2nd September 1789). This is the main role ascribed to the National Assembly in general, and Lafayette in particular, by the newspapers, who make something of a personality cult out of Lafayette at times. He first comes into view during the insurrection following the storming of the Bastille, when the savagery of the mob on his command suddenly gives way to "perfect order and tranquillity" (London Chronicle, 23rd July 1789)--in other words, a certain kind of juridico-political structure is imposed on the apparent formlessness of the crowd. The precise relationship of the Assembly to the crowd in these representations will be discussed later, but for the moment it is enough to note that the "personality cult" of Lafayette is not of the same order as that of Marie-Antoinette and the royal family in general; or, more precisely, it is constructed within a contrasting discourse of politics. The contrast is similar to that construed by Habermas in talking of the two brothers-in-law in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister; the aristocratic figurehead has a "representative publicness," while the bourgeois man of state consists in "what he produces" through engagement in social activity (Habermas 12-14). Examples of the two modalities occur side-by-side in the Bristol Journal's rendering of Lafayette's role in the October days (24th October 1789), interesting because, as a provincial paper, it carried the news rather later than the London press, and tended to patch together several different metropolitan accounts. The King and Lafayette are portrayed as having a robust and open exchange of views at Versailles, which leads to the decision that the court should move to the Tuilleries. Afterwards, the Queen appears, in all her angelic symbolism, whose representative publicness demands not discussion but chivalrous sentiments.

One of the most noticeable features that becomes apparent after a prolonged exposure to these texts is the constant tendency of commentators to declare the changes to be at an end, in other words to construe events as having conformed to a prior model of politics, only to find a few days later that things have not turned out that way. Narratives attempt to establish stability of political discourse, but are consistently confounded by the course of events. Following the story in any particular paper is illuminating; the Public Advertiser (1st July 1789) describes the triumphant symbolism of Louis' acceptance of the doubling of the Third Estate, but then comments that the crowd has become "very troublesome." The next day, it is reported that an "insurrection has absolutely taken place" in Paris, and the day after that France is in the grip of "intestine war." The London Chronicle (2nd-4th July 1789) carries a very similar article for this day, but suddenly everything conies right, an "end" to events having happened with the doubling of the Third Estate: after something of an "intestine war, all parties seem happy and contented, and the English Constitution will in all appearance be established in this country." Three days later, it is said that it will be "fifty years before a settled government is made" (Public Advertiser, 6th July 1789), then ten days later in the same publication, events are construed to have already set up a golden age of liberty, which "Britain must behold with heart-felt pleasure." Then the Bastille news breaks (20th July), the mob violence of which is "so vague and contradictory that we know not how to state them to the public." One way of relating events that appear not to correspond to preconceived forms of action is by historical comparison: "Every Englishman who remembers the outrages in London in 1780 will commiserate; the disturbances are far from the hope of-adjustment than when the last accounts were seen from Paris." For a few days, there is a very pronounced annoyance at being unable to represent in an orderly manner the disorderly events, and apart from brief descriptions of the storming of the Bastille, reporters seem to be more interested in cataloguing the various curiosities discovered in that prison. Then, suddenly, "tranquillity is restored, despotism is destroyed, Necker is returned" (22nd July), by way of the moderating negotiating skills of Lafayette and the "third party" juridico-political structure of the Paris militia. Things seem to be losing their structure again by the end of August, there being "no law but the caprice of the populace" (29th August), leading up to the Versailles expedition.

In short, I hope it is clear that reporting of the Revolution had a stop-start character, the violence of the mob confounding the structures that the political events were supposed to have. There is in all accounts of political process a desire for order, for a unifying principle or a method of decisionmaking which political commentators, because of the necessities imposed by formal convention, construe the crowd as not possessing. As the Revolution went on, papers hostile to the Revolution continued sarcastically to denigrate the function of debate in France; "The Assembly, after some business, no way interesting, resumed the decision of the penal code, but contrived with some skill not to decree any new articles" (Public Advertiser, 23rd June 1791--a paper which had become hostile to the Revolution). Those that remained faithful to the Revolution continued to print full texts of the Assemblies' debates. Crucially, these latter had to negotiate the relations between this debate and the more ferocious acts of the crowd, and a greater dichotomy developed between the "inside" of the ordered Assembly, and the more formless "outside," "an oasis of reason surrounded by banditti" (Morning Chronicle, 2end January 1793).

The point at which the divergent interests of the bourgeois politicians and the Commune become most clear is the so-called Massacre of Champ de Mars in July 1791; this was the point at which Lafayette's powers to represent the interests of the nation failed on the occasion of the second anniversary of the taking of the Bastille, following the decision by the Constituent Assembly to protect the King after his flight to Varennes. As such, it makes a suitable focus for exposition of how the formless violence finally frustrated the Whiggish journalistic requirement of "debate" within a certain political structure; comparison of the treatment of this event in the Tory St. James's Chronicle and in the Whig Morning Chronicle will show how this works. The account from the former paper purports to be from a correspondent in Paris, although he seems to be dependent on second-hand accounts rather than having been there himself. Paris is already a scene of general disorder, and the news of another public lynching is treated lightheartedly, while the public dissemination of dissent by way of the coffeehouses is seen to be malicious:

 The General was beat throughout Paris at a very early hour--and
 before seven o'clock the mob had already cut off two heads!!!

 The Jacobin club and other factious societies (if there can be
 society among the wicked) were enraged at the decrees which did not
 include the King as guilty of high treason; they sent forth their
 emissaries into the most frequented places, there to animate the
 people against the people. (St. James's Chronicle, 21st-23rd July
 1791)

Some attention is then given to the bloody spectacle of the heads being carried on pikes. The scene on the Champ de Mars itself is recounted in much the same casual, informatively random way, the result of a populace that had lost respect for sovereignty (the King is portrayed still as the chief object of their rage), and an inept administration that only belatedly (and cold-bloodedly) decides to keep order:

 At two o'clock it was reported that La Fayette was assassinated; at
 three we found the report to have been groundless; eighteen thousand
 disorderly wretches were invited in the evening to Champ de Mars,
 there to swear, that they would have no King. As soon as [the red
 flag, denoting martial law] appeared, the populace threw stones at
 it, and wounded several soldiers; at length the Mayor of Paris
 ordered M. de La Fayette to execute the law; a general discharge
 took place, and many lives were lost, and great numbers wounded.
 (St. James's Chronicle, 21st-23rd July 1791)

Such off-hand, dismissive reflections are replaced in the Morning Chronicle by a detailed paraphrase of the proceedings in the Assembly the following day: "M. de Lafayette and the Municipality of Pans, presented themselves at the bar in order to give an account of the fatal events of yesterday" (22nd July). News of tumult and crowd violence is thus re-enacted on the "stage" of the debating floor, shaping its formlessness and containing its energy and power. The juridical procedure followed by the Municipality is emphasized in this account; first the detection that M. Bailly (the mayor of Paris) "from intelligence had been at pains to procure, understood that seditious persons, who had been very busy, would that day assemble at the Champ de Mars." A warning was thus issued not to assemble in crowds, but even so the "intelligence was soon brought that two persons had been killed by the mob" to the Municipality, that central surveilling point in Paris. After several warnings and the declaration of martial law, the Municipality informs the Assembly, very precisely, that, in the ensuing military engagement, twelve persons were killed and ten injured. A series of juridical interventions is finally proposed; a statement is proposed and accepted that the Assembly "is aggrieved to find that certain factious individuals usurp the milk of patriotism," the Tribunals are urged to "inform and act against the perpetrators," and reproductions of this decree are ordered to be posted around town as the "faithful expression of the sentiments of the Assembly." A new plan of law is then proposed to deal with riot, and, so the Morning Chronicle comments in a later section, the procedures implemented by the Assembly bring the matter to a close: "The experience of the preceding day seemed to have given the violent party a proper idea of their danger, and at 10 o'clock all was quiet." As so often happens, a line is drawn underneath the episode. Just as the Assembly finishes its proceedings for the day, the account of which the English paper gets its information from concerning events in Paris, so the violence ceases, because of the systematic and efficient enactments of that chamber. The Assembly is thus, for those still supportive of the bourgeois revolution, the politico-epistemological locus of presentation by which one comes to know about events outside it; and, as such, it shapes what happens outside it, its own procedures being repeated in the information it produces.

3

It remains to discuss the ways in which such reporting conditioned the modes of representation in the more famous accounts of the Revolution that made up the debate during the years 1790-92; and further, to go back to the newspaper reports of the events in France and the war that started in 1792, in order to see the possibilities open to individuals of the British public in imagining themselves as political actors, and constructions of political knowledge available in such a political community.

The most important rhetorical strategy used by both Burke and Paine to legitimize their political thought is to attack the authenticity of accounts of both the 1688 Revolution and the revolution in France; Burke, in the Reflections, takes to task Richard Price's account of these events, and Paine comes back at Burke in The Rights of Man. But these disputes are not simply over source-verification or allegations of bias; they in fact deal with the assumptions governing and arising from such representations, the very structure within which political knowledge, knowledge of political events, and location of "the political" are allowed to take place. The substance of their political philosophy is taken up with elaborations on these disputes, drawing from the specific instance to the general maxim, in other words with theorization of the "politico-epistemological" stances taken by each side on each particular event. In analyzing the appropriation of events in France by Burke and Paine, it will at the end of this section be possible to inventory in tabular form the different procedures of the two sides of the debate, thereby establishing in schematic yet reliable way the two discourses, or sets of archaeological necessities, that underpin them.

Burke's stated sources for information on France in the Reflections are as follows: de Calonne's accounts of pre-Revolutionary French finances; Necker's two reports on the French finances; Lally-Tollendal's Lettres on the events of October 1789; some writings by J.-J. Mounier (principally, judging from the subject under discussion when he cites it, Expose de ma conduite dabs l'Assemblee Nationale, but probably some of the others as well); some debates of the National Assembly published in the Courtier de France (and probably also from the Journal des Debats and the Proces-verbal, both being widely-available in England); and an account of events in early 1790 by one M. de la Tour du Pin. (12) To this we can add, as mentioned above, the Courrier de Provence, the cahiers presented to the Estates General in June 1789 (which he mentions having read in a letter early in 1790), (13) and letters from Charles-Jean Francois Depont, who was the nominal addressee of the Reflections, and whose correspondence was the immediate stimulus for his writing. But more than simply looking out for direct source material, by using the concept of discourse it becomes possible to argue that, despite his intermittent protestations to the contrary, Burke was tapping into the general climate of the representation of the political arena in Britain as disseminated by the newspapers in 1789. In fact, he was to say something very like this in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, when he stated that he "proposed to convey to a foreign people [i.e., the French], not his own ideas, but those of a nation renowned for wisdom, and celebrated for well-understood and well-regulated love of freedom." (14) Burke thus self-consciously takes on himself what he perceives as common-places of British political thought, that is to say, politico-discursive formations relating to the court circular that have been described.

The task I propose here is not a detailed reconstruction of his use of specific source material, but an exposition of how he develops a political form of political reporting to the level of general political theory (though of course avowedly anti-theoretical), starting from the images of the court during the Revolution and moving towards more general comments. His argumentative procedure in this respect is to invert Price's Discourse on the Love of our Country. This sermon had taken the form of an extended statement of the principles of the Revolution Society, commenting that the 1688 had been an "imperfect work," and that there was still much to do with regard to the Test and Corporation Acts, and parliamentary representation. Of most interest here are his comments on the monarchical representation of sovereignty as it effects both the royal and aristocracatic protagonists of the theatrical mise-en-scene and the political subjects of that form of rule:

 Adulation is always odious, and when offered to men in power it
 corrupts them, by giving them improper ideas of their situation; and
 it debases those offering it by manifesting an abjectness founded on
 improper ideas of themselves. (Price 22)

He then goes on to cite the event that had haunted and then confirmed the theory and practice of sovereign power, viz., the first regency crisis and the subsequent recovery of the King:

 I have lately observed in this kingdom too near approaches to this
 abjectness. In our late addresses to the King on his recovery from
 the severe illness with which it pleased God to afflict him, we have
 appeared more like a herd crawling at the feet of a master, than
 like enlightened and manly citizens. (22)

Such magnificent displays of the legitimacy of power have a demeaning effect on both lord and servant; the self becomes "abject," and one's consciousness of oneself in the political arena is founded on "improper ideas." Finally, he goes on to cite the late example of a people supposedly rejecting such abjectness, describing the entry into Paris, in the phrase which so offended Burke:

 I have lived to see thirty millions of people, indignant and
 resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an
 irresistible voice; their king led in triumph and an arbitrary
 monarch surrendering himself to his subjects. (49)

It is this image on which Burke most famously picks up. After some opening remarks, Burke's strategy is to insist that Price, in his public declamation, has got his facts wrong, first about British history from 1688, then about more recent events in France: "Those gentlemen of the old Jewry, in all their reasonings on the Revolution of 1688, have a revolution which happened in England about forty years before, and the late French revolution, so much before their eyes, and in their hearts, that they are constantly confounding all three together." (15) He then proceeds to give another account of those events within the discourse in which he is working. During the section on the Glorious Revolution, the famous idea of the constitution as an "entailed inheritance" is developed, "locked fast as in a family settlement." The idea of the nation as a kind of family is thus adopted, rather like in Filmer's Patriarcha, except that here a mechanisms by which it is possible to feel such attachments is proposed:

 Always acting as if in the presence of canonised fathers, the spirit
 of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered
 with an awful gravity.... It carries an imposing and majestic
 aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its
 bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery, of portraits,
 its monumental inscriptions; its records, its evidences and titles.
 We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon
 which nature teaches us to revere individual men; on account of
 their age; and on account of those from whom they are
 descended. (85)

One could say that there is a certain glamor or eclat, as in the magnificent representations of royalty on state occasions, and as diffused publicly, in the special sense of "representative publicness," through the court circular and those modes of political reporting that take the court circular as a template. The other side of this "awful gravity" is, of course, seen in the presentation of the body of the criminal at an execution. Such Mat binds individuals to each other by affective response, as each gives up himself and his sense of freedom to a greater whole.

Burke's next target is the National Assembly; the portrayal of the faction-fighting and small-mindedness of this chamber has much in common with the account by Mounier, an embittered royalist whose policy has been defeated by the third estate (see Une nouvelle histoire). But he also construes it in a particular way that borrows from and develops those representations in some of the press:

 If we were to know nothing of this Assembly but by its title and
 function, no colours could paint to the imagination anything more
 venerable. In that light the mind of an enquirer, subdued by such an
 awful image as that of the virtue and wisdom of a whole people
 collected into a focus, would pause and hesitate in condemning
 things even of the very worst aspect. Instead of blameable, they
 would appear only mysterious. (91)

Burke asks of the National Assembly qualities which it probably did not ask of itself (or at any rate something which the modern political theorist would not normally ask of the legislature), that is, to be not a scrutinizing, critical chamber of discussion, but a venerable object of admiration for the rest of the nation, fulfilling a symbolic rather than a critical function; again one can compare such a construction to the magnificent body of the King, or to the body of the executed criminal. The distinction turns on what it would be to collect all the people into a focus. In this case it would not be the calculation of opinion by electoral means under the superintendence of that electorate, but what would seem to us to be a more abstract substitution of popular political will for grateful submission to the whole, as represented almost tautologically by its representative publicness. Burke also wants to represent it indirectly and imaginatively; the events need to be painted on to some canvas, to allow the mind a certain imaginative/ aesthetic reaction, to work alongside the ties of familial loyalty. There is a kind of conceit here that compares the arena of politics to a work of art to be gazed at, but it should be noted that it is not merely a conceit, for that linguistic figure implies that the object is not that to which it is compared; rather this language is the form that the object takes, and it defines the possibility for political knowledge itself. In Burke's text there is at this stage almost no reference to the substance of the debates, but instead there follows a discussion of the way the Assembly-as-work-of-art is composed. It is the reputations of the men involved, their outward relations with the world, their types or characters, that concern Burke here, rather than the "men within." The men to whom he particularly objects are the lawyers, and there is, again, a mechanism by which their value is defined by their outward relations in society:

 The degree of estimation in which any profession is held becomes the
 standard of the estimation in which the professors hold themselves.
 Whatever the personal merits of individual lawyers might have been,
 and in many it was undoubtedly very considerable, in that military
 kingdom, no part of the profession had been much regarded, except
 the highest of all, who often united with their professional offices
 great family splendour, and were invested with great power and
 authority. (93)

Rather than some kind of inner truth, the essence of an individual is the ensemble of impressions that other people hold; appearance becomes truth in all practical terms. This relies on a theory in which the political actor is not an individual potentiality ready to be filled up by its environment, but instead has a certain fitness to govern proceeding from the glamor of outward forms he holds or adopts. The description of the Assembly also reintroduces the discourse of the family with the phrase, "to love the little platoon we belong to is the first of public affections"; the members of the Assembly, on the contrary, are too ambitious, and disqualify themselves from being legitimate governors by neglecting the domesticity on which their position in their representative publicness depends.

The result of all this is that the Assembly is unable to go about the "reimbursement, the sinking of debt, and the other great objects of public credit and political arrangement" (107)--a phrase used sarcastically, being highly reminiscent of a phrase used in a Whiggish account of the reinstatement of Necker, "the regeneration of credit, the establishment of a constitution [so that] the public debt will be consolidated and every engagement fulfilled" (London Chronicle, July 6th 1789). Burke continues to consider the Assembly as an aesthetic form rather than a critical organ by calling it a "farce." He continues: "Who is it that admires, and from the heart is attached to national representative assemblies, but must turn with horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque, and abominable perversion of that sacred institute?" (119). Burke construes it as a confused theatrical production incapable of producing the attachment that he desires; this leads the way to the theatrical production that is capable, that is, the courtly scene at Versailles, and most especially the famous description of Marie-Antoinette. In precisely the same way as in the papers, the affective marks of respect at the glamorous scene at court are contrasted with the sudden intrusion of the mob from Paris; and, as in the papers, the main object of pity, the main focus of awareness of being in a political situation is the image of the wretched queen, demanding not debate, not rational scrutiny by citizens, but the intuitive, affective reaction, which Burke categorizes in this case as "chivalry." Like the newspapers, too, the focused interest in the sufferings of the French royal family pans out very quickly to European dimensions (130; see London Chronicle, 10th October 1789). The spectacle of the sufferings of the Queen, as contrasted with Burke's apparent recollections of her from a decade before, is the point at which the actors in the tragedy-observers and observed--become aware of themselves precisely as political actors, which is the point at which they are allowed to define who they are. For the King, his feelings for his wife, children and servants confirm him "as a man," and his feelings for his subjects confirm him "as a prince" (125). For the Queen's part, her "serene patience" is "in a manner suited to her rank and race." As far as the subjects are concerned, or at least the good ones like Burke, it is natural that they should but "harbour the common feelings of men" (131) in response to such a tableau. The "abjectness" of which Price talks is in Burke the mechanism, the instinctual, affective response around the figure of the extended nation-family that allows individuals to form themselves as socio-political actors. Hence the counter-enlightenment sentiments about "the old prejudices" (one might substitute "ideology") are of greater importance than the kind of critical scrutiny that would wish to cast them away (138).

Of course, the Reflections is not as anti-intellectual or as anti-rationalistic as these few samplings of the most striking images would suggest, although it does veer away from the kind of scrutiny typical of Burke's career during the preceding decades in the House of Commons, the nation's "grand inquisition." Most of the tract is taken up with detailed analysis of the accounts presented to the King and the assembly by Necker, opposing them to de Calonne's very different calculations; surely, then, it might be said, it is claiming too much for the kind of archaeology I have been employing when I say that Burke is immersed in the discourse of politics which takes as its template the court-circular, with its theory of knowledge that seems so foreign to us, because so unrealistic. Burke is, one could point out, attentive to "real" gains or losses, and is at heart a man of the Enlightenment, utilitarian, and concerned with making things work in the real world; if one or two delusional state presentations have to be carried out along the road to general happiness, then one shouldn't be too concerned: "Compute your gains," he says. "France has not sacrificed her virtue to interest; but she has abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue" (88). Surely, the kind of reading I have been carrying out here is taking his rhetoric too seriously by half. In possibly the most influential reading of Burke in the past fifty years, J. G. A. Pocock makes something like this claim; the primary destination of Burke's idea of chivalry and manners is in creating the possibility of successful commerce based on credit, and the primary discourse is thus that of political economy. Even the famous passage on Marie-Antoinette, so Pocock points out, is followed by a section on the creditworthiness (or lack of it) of the new French state, with the implication that the "virtue" of affective and deferential reaction to such personages is to have the effect of building up national credit. (16)

Against such objections, some consideration of what I shall call the "onto-linguistic" status of the information to be gathered and computed will reveal that the assumptions upon which Burke's critique is based are indeed the same as those governing the unashamedly imaginative representation of Marie-Antoinette in general, and specifically on 6th October 1789, in Burke's text and the "court-circular" newspaper format which dictates the conditions of Burke's representation. The thrust of Necker's appraisal of French finances was that France had become bankrupt because of the expense of imaginary goods--vainglorious war, courtly luxury--over the reality of the shortcomings of domestic taxation. Burke answers that France cannot be bankrupt because, so to speak, he does not believe it to be so. After listing at length the material attributes--high roads and bridges, ports and harbors, an advanced state of agriculture--that are "brought before his view" when thinking about that country, Burke continues:

 When I reflect on the excellence of her manufactures and
 fabrics, second to none but ours, and in some particulars not
 second; when I contemplate the grand foundations of charity, public
 and private; when I survey the state of all the arts that beautify
 and polish life; when I reckon the men she has bred for extending
 her fame in war, her able statesmen, the multide of her profound
 lawyers and theologians, her philosophers, her critics, her
 historians and antiquaries, her poets, and her orators sacred and
 profane, I behold in all this something which awes and commands the
 imagination, which checks the mind on the brink of precipitate
 indiscriminate censure, and demands that we should examine very
 seriously, what and how great are the latent vices that could
 authorise us at once to level so spacious a fabric to the ground.
 (180)

These things do not enter into a financial calculation, or become listed as data in an economic matrix (in which the figures would purport to correspond to things unproblematically), but instead they induce a certain aesthetic reaction, which goes towards the category of the sublime, and which when held in the imagination works like a rather weighty entry in a ledger comparing the vices and virtues of the state as it had stood in 1789. The contemporary significance of Burke's calculus here is demonstrated by a part of Priestley's reply to the Reflections, when he seems to have this passage in mind; he is on the subject of state finances, and blames their state on the expense of the American War. The ancien regime had been a vast machine for the gratification of imaginary needs; he then goes on to insist on the use of fiscal revenue for real things: "If the Pride of the Nation must be gratified, let it be in canals, bridges and noble roads etc. etc., and not in the idle pageantry of court" (Priestley 145). For Burke, first, no such clear-cut distinction can be made, and second, these elements of material infrastructure are grasped by the political actor in an act of awed imagination, as tableau whose significance requires an active aesthetic response. Their ontic status is thus in a sense inverted compared with the habitually "modern" method of cataloguing and understanding them.

It is for this reason that, towards the end of the tract, Burke finds himself in the strange position of almost praising Law's famously catastrophic experiment with the state finances, in which Law attempted to raise money based on the imagined potential of land in the Mississippi valley. Despite its being a fraud, in other words not backed by anything real, the experiment consisted of "generous delusions":

 A grand imagination found in this flight of commerce something to
 captivate. It was the wherewithal to dazzle the eye of an eagle. It
 was not made to entice smell of a mole, nuzzling and burying himself
 in his mother earth, as yours [i.e. France's] is.... Above all
 remember, that in imposing on the imagination, the then managers of
 the system made a compliment to the freedom of men. In their fraud
 there was no mixture of force. (287)

The sign is a long way removed from the referent, here, and the two are separated by the action of the imagination. The state, and our relationship to the state, is not as it is, so to speak, it is merely as we see it. Noumena, those nuggets of truth at the center of every object or behind the veil of appearance, which it is modernity's political project to root out, have no relevance here. If we are to gather information about a state in the Burkean way, we gaze fondly upon the court-scene as it shows in outline the shadows projected onto it from the rest of kingdom. And if we are to calculate the worth of a state, we do so by an act of the imagination, for the calculating faculties will always be in awe of the greater whole that is perceived. As a consequence, we imagine our relationship to the state by letting go of our individuality--or rather, that individuality has never been there for us to grasp--because we are conscious of our part--role--in the linked whole.

At one point in Paine's revised description of the events of June-October 1789, in order to introduce the copy of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, he mentions the rivalry between the Court and the Assembly:

 The palace of Versailles, where the court was sitting, was not more
 than four hundred yards distant from where the National Assembly
 was sitting. The two places were at this moment like the separate
 headquarters of two combatant armies; yet the Court was as perfectly
 ignorant of the information that had arrived from Paris [of the
 storming of the Bastille], as if it had resided at an hundred miles
 distant. The then Marquis de Lafayette ... named, by order of the
 Assembly, three successive deputations to the King ... to inform and
 confer with him on the state of affairs: but the ministry, who knew
 not so much that it was attacked, precluded all communication, and
 were solacing themselves how dextrously they had succeeded; but in
 a few hours the accounts arrived so thick and fast, that they had to
 start from their desks and run. Some set off in one disguise, and
 some in another, and none in their own character. Their anxiety now
 was to outride the news lest they should be stopped, which, though
 it flew fast, flew not so fast as themselves. (17)

The Court and the Assembly are two loci that increasingly house mutual oppositions. These oppositions extend beyond the narrower, more immediate sense of supporting different ministries, to the whole procedures and assumptions on which they are based. The Assembly is in possession of in formation about what is happening outside it; news of any significant happening travels immediately to it, in a series of privileged and faithful representations, and, for the observer, as in the accounts of the Massacre of the Champs de Mars, all such information immediately becomes projected onto the canvas of that assembly. It is the center of affairs, as the Court had been in another kind of political discourse. It is, so to speak, the central tower of the Panopticon, whose perfect information lends it the possibility for, and the right to, agency. Meanwhile, there is this wonderful image of the King's ministers fleeing just that information from which the Assembly had profited, the inadequacy of the reality behind their glamorous make-believe brought into view by the relentless power of free information, which only a body like the Assembly could channel.

Throughout The Rights of Mau, Part I, Paine maintains that those hostile to the revolution in France and England have made errors of representation which issue from the politico-epistemological positions they have taken. The events in France are of a quality and magnitude that make them impossible for Burke, in particular, with his information from "mouldy parchments," to grasp fully. Paine says of Burke and his allies, "the revolution ... takes in a field too vast for their views to explore, and proceeds with a mightiness of reason they cannot keep pace with" (48). The fault lies in construing the revolution within the discourse of sovereign power: "Mr. Burke ... considers the King as the only possible object of a revolt" (48); radical acts in the political arena can only be envisaged within this discourse as attacks on the sovereign, the imagination of the death of the King. Whereas, in Paine's construal, the King is only a symbol for the real acts of despotism, which are, in fact, the regime; the revolutionaries are interested in something other than this figurehead, the system which lies behind it and which it legitimizes rather than enacts directly. This brings in Paine's important distinction between "persons" and "principles" (47). The form of representing politics that revolved around the court circular would clearly always recognize persons rather than principles; or rather, those legitimizing principles that existed were embodied in those persons, and sewn, as it were, into the intricately-decorated hems of the princess' dresses. To consider those principles for what they are requires a vision that is both wider and more penetrative, that both "pans out" from the carefully-managed scene of the court, and also fixes its objects in a way that brings things hidden to light. Such a vision is not possible within the discourse and practice of sovereign power: "Mr. Burke might have been in the Bastille his whole life, as well under Louis XVI as Louis XIV and neither the one nor the other have known that such a man as Burke existed" (48).

Hence in Paine the use of multiple analogies to convey the difference between appearance and reality, the "music in the ear and nothing in the heart" (46), the famous Burkean plumage which is in reality a dying bird, or the "tragedy-victim" obscuring "the real prisoner of misery" (51). And hence the complaint that all of Burke and tributary representations are theatrical, artful, stage-managed, mere effect. Paine dutifully rewrites the events of the Revolution within the terms he has set up, claiming both a greater perspicuity and less selectivity than in Burke's account. Of course, this posturing tries to hide a different kind of selectivity dictated by the necessities of the discourse within which he is working. His interest is obviously in defending the actions of his friends in the National Assembly--and by extension defending representative assemblies in general--so he emphasizes the honesty and mildness of transactions within that chamber as against the vengeful machinations of the Court. But his main difficulty is, as in the Whiggish papers, how to negotiate the relationship between the Assembly under the presidency of Lafayette and the more distasteful acts of popular insurrection; some analysis of the margins at which these meet in Paine's text will lay bare the particular political form being enunciated. First, Paine accepts that, during July and October of 1789, the Assembly was essentially dependent on the actions of the people of Paris--" the citizens of Paris, upon whom the Assembly must immediately depend" (54). They start out "as undisciplined and unarmed as the citizens of London now are" (perhaps having in mind the event that he mentions a few sentences later, the Gordon Riots); but, following a moment of disrespect shown by the commander of royalist troops, the formless mass is suddenly galvanized: "Uniting with the general fermentation they were in, produced a powerful effect, and a cry To arms! To armst. spread itself in a moment over the city" (54).

It is one of those magical moments--magical, that is, in its perfect rationality--of which the eighteenth-century democrat dreams (but which Rousseau had already said would never be practicable): that a nation, or at least a large body of political actors could unite, by means of a communication--as in the Panopticon, and as in the debating chamber--that is immediate and perfect. It is in effect the unanimity created by discussion in the debating chamber writ large and accelerated to infinity, its perfect unity going out into the street, imposing spontaneously juridico-political structure upon the formlessness of the crowd. To quote a later phrase said by one member of the London Corresponding Society, Joseph Gerrald, "were all mankind to assemble in public meeting ... THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE would then be THE VOICE OF GOD." (18) The magic is soon spoilt, of course, by those acts of popular justice that are the horror of the eighteenth century democrat (but also of the modern bourgeois historian)--putting the heads of class enemies on spikes after decapitation--demanding some explanation from Paine. There is an interesting contrast to be made between his explanation and Foucault's interpretation of the same practice in the apparently blood-thirsty interview on popular justice mentioned above (see 362). For Foucault, let us remember, acts of such an order are spontaneous expressions of hatred by the masses for their perceived enemies, prior to a mediation presided over by the concept and personification of third-party justice, at which point the "table" is set up to separate judge from litigant, and state structure re-imposed. As such, these acts are relics from a pre-juridico-political Europe; Foucault in fact claims that demolition of the homes of popular enemies and carrying their heads on pikes were common practices in early medieval central Europe. Whereas, for Paine, such habits have been learnt directly from the ancien regime, and he cites the execution of Damiens, by coincidence the incident with which Foucault famously begins Surueiller et punir, as the archetype of the retributionary aspect of sovereign power in practice. The ferocity of the mob is thus efficiently distanced from the juridico-political structure that Paine imposes upon the crowd, becoming a repetition of the practices of pre-revolutionary society. Where the crowd is working in the interests of the Assembly, there is a kind of blankness, a silence, as here with the march to the Bastille:

 A vast mixed multitude of all ages and all degrees, and armed with
 all sorts of weapons. Imagination would fail in describing to itself
 the appearance of such a procession, and of the anxiety for the
 events which a few hours or a few minutes might produce ... I am not
 undertaking a detail of the attack: but bringing into view the
 conspiracy against the nation which provoked it, and fell with the
 Bastille. (56)

This is not, so am I arguing, a (failed) expression of the sublimity felt by observers, but instead a result of the formlessness of popular justice as compared to the "table" that Paine so wants to interpose between the mob and the violent regime. The anxieties over insurrection are assuaged in his representation in two ways; first, the Revolution is to reform this rage, by the implementation of a just and substantive structure of justice as opposed to the "puppet-show of state and aristocracy," and by taking "pains to instruct and enlighten mankind, and to make them see that their interest lies in their virtue, not in their revenge" (59). In other words, by a process of education and discipline, they are to learn that they have mutual interest, and hence mutual responsibility. Or, one could say that the new formation of political information and discourse will make a sort of social contract self evident, transparent in its workings, and susceptible to a continuous process of improvement by the communicative process.

Second, Paine insists that the Assembly and its agents are able to act as intermediaries, and "by the influence of example and exhortation, to restrain so much." This is the role emphasized for Lafayette during his account of the October days--he is "mediator between the enraged parties" (62), and then has "a second time to interpose between the parties" (63) at Versailles. Paine's stated sources for his accounts of these events are Lafayette himself, and the radical Parisian paper Revolutions de Paris. This latter account ends with the "victory" of Lafayette insofar as a mode of accommodating the wishes of the crowd outside without the death of the King is found, but the divergence of interest between politician and sans-culotte is negotiated rather differently. In Paine, the shout of "le roi a Paris" is the "shout of peace" (63). In the Parisian paper, the same desire is rather more threatening. The situation is that, late in the night of the 6th, the crowd had chosen a few deputies to represent its wishes to the actors inside the Palace. However, there was then a lengthy delay, causing frustration at Lafayette's apparent unwillingness to remove the court to Paris. The crowd started to exclaim against the slowness of the proceedings: "Un soldat non-solde avoit crie a ses camarades,--Il est bien etonnant que M. de Lafayette veuille commander la commune, tandis que c' est a la commune a le commander; il faut qu'il parte, nous le voulons tous." (19) This is a clear resistance to the revolutionary leader coming between the different parties to inject the idea of moderation and justice. Adhesion to the general will of the masses must be immediate rather than procedural. At length, a decision is made through the proper channels, and is accepted by Lafayette, although with a slightly ominous (for him) resignation, which also becomes, in this case, his victory: "Vous le deirez, j'obeis," he says. Paine rather smoothes over such problems. It is not problematic for him that the crowd's general will cannot be known immediately; and crucially, Lafayette's mediation has turned the crowd to thoughts of mercy rather than blood, a considered moderation and just compromise between the two parties, presided over by the neutrality that he represents. Of course, the governor is in a sense the servant of the governed, but the conception of the governed seen as the extended chamber of debate pertains.

It is now possible to draw up a schematic table of the characteristics of the two main styles found in the newspapers, existent as discourses in culture generally, and made into political theory by Burke and Paine:

 Burke Paine

Imagined locus of The court and its The debating
"political arena" orbit chamber and street as
 debating chamber

Primary procedure Affective response to Critical enquiry on
 glamorous display verified information

Politico- Self-consciously Direct: proximity of
epistemological indirect: imaginative referent to sign =
mode projection of events "documentary,"
 onto the court-scene facilitated by
 technologies of
 the debating chamber

Politico-ontological The glamor of surfaces Things constituted by
mode met with imaginative that which is within,
 act by observer discovered by
 penetrative gaze
 of the observer

Model for relation- Children/father = Citizenship, by way
ship of governed "nation-family" of transparent,
to governor habitual contract

Theory of political "Representative Representation based
representation publicness" on calculation of
 opinion

4

It may very well appear retrograde and simplistic to claim, as this paper has hitherto implied, that the so-called Revolution Controversy throughout the 1790s was structured within the terms set up by the most famous proponents of" each side at the start of the decade. Much recent work has pointed to the diverse nature of ideas and participants in this controversy. The most influential argument of this type is by Mark Philp, who claims that there was no coherent ideology of" reform, nor of conservatism; that the diffuse political ideas and arguments brought forward during this decade were responses to the realities of particular struggles and experiences of being political actors, and as such developed for immediate, strategic reasons rather than out of" wider ideological or philosophical concerns; and that, moreover, the term "debate" becomes by 1792 a misnomer, "the pamphlet [becoming] a weapon, the debate a struggle over popular mobilised and political ascendancy." (20)

It is certainly the case that it would be misleading to claim that the broad range of radicals and reformers of this period had a coherent set of consciously-thought ideas about policy and strategy. It might on the other hand be slightly more plausible to suggest that loyalist ideology had become a little more organized; as Clifford Geertz points out, the "flourishing of the search for systematic ideological formulations" was in this case a typical reaction of a social system under threat. (21) Yet the "archaeology" of political knowledge that I have been advancing here compared to the study of "ideology" (about which the only thing that can be said for certain is that no one quite agrees on what it means) makes a rather different kind of claim. The structural study of the reporting of "political" events both in England and in France at the beginning of the decade has shown that there were two main linguistic formations--the "court circular," and the "debate"--by which these events could be articulated; and that these formations were not simply ways of simplifying or making intelligible chaotic events, but were in the strictest sense political knowledge, constructing the arena of politics, its procedures, and the methods by which one can become conscious of oneself as a political actor. That these "archaeological necessities" constituted the extent of what could be said and thought is demonstrated by the fact that the respective polemics of Burke and Paine are clearly conditioned by the political discourses to be found in the newspapers, which were both the "raw materials" for their understanding of the Revolution, and distillations of construals of "politics" in society generally. In these concluding paragraphs I shall suggest that the interventions by Burke and Paine made the two rival discourses of political knowledge still more mutually-excluding in the following three years, so that, as Mark Philp says, the term "debate" is indeed a misnomer, the controversy instead being more like a clash between two language games with different rules.

One of the effects of Burke's intervention was to re-emphasize the figures of the royal family as the focus for those events, as with the widespread use of sentimental stories about their suffering:

 On Friday, the Dauphin stole downstairs--the Sentry at the door
 asked him where he was going--"into the street," replied the infant,
 "through all of Paris to beg the People to spare poor Papa." One
 of he guards carried him up to the King; when he heard what he had
 said, he burst into tears, and pressed him to his breast. (St.
 James's Chronicle, 22nd January 1793) (22)

Such stories originated in a number of sources, including pro-Royalist French accounts, but their inclusion and elaboration in British newspapers was certainly encouraged by the fact that news was unreliable, slow in coming, and dependent on the weather at sea. As such, news had to be "imagined." An apology of the type "we are still waiting for the packet from Boulogne" was often inserted at the head of a column, a situation which would obviously tempt speculation of a type that modern journalism, with its verification principles, would consider to be improper. The most important example of this surrounds the execution of the King; as the date approaches, a kind of intense soap-opera is told regarding the Royal Family, borrowing not only from the discourse of sensibility but also from the genre of the Ordinary's accounts at Newgate. Then, in the edition of 24th January (some days after the King was actually executed) the St. James's Chronicle had this to say, worth citing again in context because of its central importance:

 The Convention has taken care to spread a rumour that eleven will be
 the hour of execution--it will however take place at four in the
 morning, by torch light, to prevent all possibility of a rescue
 being attempted. The populace are everywhere seen weeping and
 lamenting the fate of their beloved Monarch. The Queen is in an
 extreme degree emaciated; the health of Mine Elizabeth is
 considerably deranged, and the Princess Royal is absolutely dying!

 The MURTHER took place at four o'clock this morning, and was
 conducted in the most private manner. The Guillotine was erected in
 a court of the Temple--a hole was dug in it, into which the King's
 head fell, and his body precipitated afterward.... (This must be
 understood as the prevailing report of the moment. It is impossible
 to vouch for its absolute truth.) This scene of infernal
 assassination, which a base and cowardly faction have now degraded
 human nature by executing calls for a marked execration which it is
 not in the power of language to convey.... Almighty vengeance must be
 the portion of those who have thus step by step arrived at this
 damnable crisis. To that awful moment, when the great King of Kings
 shall sit in tremendous judgement of men and daemons, do we consign
 the diabolic spirits. It will come, and in thunders speak terrors to
 their hearts, now hardened in human iniquity.

This story was widely reported; it was also reported that Marie-Antoinette was executed shortly afterwards. There is obviously some fibbing going on here, but I hope it is clear that I am not regarding this as sloppy reporting; on the contrary, it followed the discursive formations in which it was possible to think of the regicide. It does hesitate at the possibility that this was "only a rumour," but this is of little import; the execution is described with all the Gothic imagery that one would expect of the killing of a King, and the "appropriate" judgment of damnation is drawn. When the more authentic accounts arrived, what shocks commentators the most is not the fantastic horror of the occasion, but the speed and clinicality with which the execution was carried out. The narratives that come in later do not fit the template for the writers of the English newspapers; the Assembly had, in fact, arranged it so that it would produce the least emotion possible, and the guillotine, despite the symbolic importance that later became attached to it, was an example of that eighteenth century reforming tendency of softening the pain of punishment. As with Burke's description of the Assembly, they ask of French policy something which is never intended at source, that is, the kind of spectacular symbolism that infused the event with a meaning that it (perhaps) did not have at its origin.

Against this, there is in the Whig newspapers and in radical pamphlets an escalating frustration at this theatricalization of politics, especially once the war against France starts. In fact, this imaginary mode of reporting passed literally into the theater, events of the war being represented in a series of popular musical productions on the London stage, of which some titles give the flavor: The Death of Captain Faulkener; or, British Heroism; the Point at Herqui; or, British Heroism; Love and Honour; or Britannia in Full Glory at Spithead; and the highly camp Bantry Bay, a Musical Interlude about the attempted French invasion of Ireland in 1797, in which an all-singing, all-dancing chorus of Irish peasants celebrate the defeat of the French fleet. (23)

In 1795, following government reports of an allegedly successful engagement of British troops in Ireland, the Morning Chronicle, the leading Whig paper, published a satirical letter concerning the reliability of information in the newspapers:

 If his majesty would have no objection, representations so
 honourable to these kingdoms might be made so on a scale of
 tolerable magnitude, by converting St. James's Park into a
 kind of theatre, placing the eye-glass, which should be a
 large magnifier, at the Horse-Guards. The pond might easily be
 converted into tears and blood, for the use of orphans and widows,
 as well as wine and other beverages for the officers and
 soldiers.--You will have huge Forests, fine rivers, Citadels,
 Castles, Palaces, Towers etc., which, with the assistance of the
 guards, who are always at hand, and need not be kept from their
 other duties, may be taken possession of with very little loss on
 our side, to the great discomfiture of our enemies, the joy
 unspeakable of all true friends to our Constitution, and would
 convey so exalted an idea of the gallantry and achievements of our
 brave armies, as would silence all complaints against our pretended
 want of success. (Morning Chronicle, 26th September 1795)

The satire here is, I think, very sharp. The procedure of the court circular, the screen onto which events can be projected, linked to Burke's theorizing of the splendor of the performance and the affective reaction to it, meant that there was no epistemology by which reporters of the loyalist persuasion could gain direct access to the reality of events. The surface display meant in effect that the compilers of newspapers could legitimately imagine events, usually along the lines of the topoi that had already been established. It cannot therefore be so easily dismissed as "propaganda" or misinformation, because it followed certain established and legitimizing politico-epistemological procedures. In the same month, a letter to the liberal Morning Post used linguistic philosophy to attack the court papers:

 Sir, Mr. Locke, in his chapter on the Name of Things, recommends
 men to affix precise ideas to their words--This very salutary advice
 the Ministerial writers have not paid proper attention to, by which
 means they sometimes pay a compliment when they mean a satire,
 give an honourable title when they intend a disgraceful name.

 For example, Men of Republican Principles--A dangerous set of
 men who are advocates for the Revolution [i.e., the Glorious
 Revolution] and the Protestant succession established on that
 Revolution. (Morning Post, 25th September 1795)

The sign should be close to the referent, and should denote it directly. Whereas, certain words are imbued by the loyalists with a symbolic significance; examples would be the importance attached in the state trials to the use of French terms by radical organizations, such as "ca ira," "National Guard," and even "Convention." The ultimate example, as has been shown in a recent study, is the King, whose body and its representation have a significance that radiates to all parts of the Kingdom, and an attack on the methods of its representation becomes an attack on his rule and his body, therefore, in a law court, High Treason (see Barrell). The prosecutions of members of radical societies in 1793 and 1794 depend entirely on this construal of the political arena and the political self, and the defense of the accused depends on the destruction of this imaginative mode of gaining access to political knowledge. The theory of "modern" journalism--"documentary"--developed as a strategic response to the hegemonic legitimacy of the imaginative mode of reporting, as evoked in the satires above. The dream was to dispense with the manipulative backdrop of the court and the fashionable world to uncover things as they are. Yet, as has been seen, this theory too, which in the modern world we largely take for granted, responds inevitably to certain archaeological necessities, while all the time claiming that the knowledge it generates goes beyond "prejudice," or what we might call, "ideology."

The above archaeology of political knowledge as it was constructed in newspapers and other texts during the 1790s in Britain has insisted throughout upon a certain coherence in what it is possible to write and possible to think. Perhaps, for the sake of the polemic engaged in, the coherence has been overstated. When I have said that all political representation responded to certain assumptions at the archaeological level, or rather was constituted by the discursive formations which it inhabited, there is a possible implication that these discourses by the early 1790s were static, having recently undergone a great rupture following the revolution in France. This is obviously something of a caricature; further, it is hard to see how, if all thought is enclosed within its rigid discursive formations, change can occur at all. In fact, something like the opposite was intended; loyalists formulated their ideology systematically in response to crisis, as did indeed the reformers and radicals, But this rather presupposes a certain continuity, the Revolution being reduced to something of an "accident," a historical event whose significance is of only incidental character. The discursive resources were already there, in the theory of sovereign power as it had been developed to its most sophisticated point from the days of Filmer onwards, and in the political expression of empiricism as disciplinary power, as it had permeated the thought of the eighteenth century, and upon these premises the debate took place; all they needed was a catalyst, so to speak, that would not strictly speaking be involved in the reaction.

So what is made possible by this archaeology is to reconstruct a British "Revolution Controversy" in which the events of the French Revolution are only incidental. This seemingly counter-intuitive position is, I think, justified by the analysis of representations in the press of the Revolution in terms of their strategies of appropriation; as ever, the referent fades into the background like a ghost that, after dusk, spooks the debating chamber of political discourse. One should spell out once again the paradox involved here, paradox, that is, in the terms of common-sense modern political thought: I am insisting on the ghostliness of the real, and on the structured, material concreteness of discursive formation and archaeological necessity, or, in another nomenclature, of "ideology."

The archaeological necessities working on what could be said and thought were strong. It is noticeable how, in some of the longer accounts of the French Revolution--"histories," or at least texts that begin to solidify the discreet but largely predetermined newspaper reports--authors feel they have to work through a debate about political knowledge on a theoretical level before getting down to the "facts" that they posit. Of these the most important were Wollstonecraft's Moral and Political History (1794) and Helen Maria Williams' eyewitness accounts in a series of variously-collected letters from Paris. (24) In the latter, Williams provides at one point a lengthy excursus on the difficulties for the British public in obtaining an "authentic" idea of events in France; hers is a useful contemporary commentary on the politico-epistemological problematics outlined throughout this study. It comes in a letter dated April 17th, 1793, when she is meditating on the reasons why the Revolution appears to have passed into demagogy or even anarchy, with particular reference to the massacres in Paris of September 1792, a careful reconstruction of which she gives. The general argument is familiar enough; that the hostility of the European powers to the new republic, combined with the earlier treachery of Louis and his courtiers, and that of the French General Dumouriez, inevitably, if regrettably, led to violence. But Williams' treatment of the September Massacres is quite unusual. As one would expect, she insists on careful use of sources to delineate as authentically as possible the causes and progress of the violence; but she also claims for the proceedings a curious form of legitimacy, or rather a natural or even primordial reaction to events that are beyond the People's control. "It was not a mere indiscriminate massacre, but a kind of savage justice, executed by a people frantic at the moment of fear," she comments, and, highlighting the problems of imposing juridico-political form on mob violence, says that, "it was soon found that a few lines traced in black and white would little avail to control that fierce conflict of passions in this country" (4: 202). But Williams goes further, and, conscious that she is writing for a British audience, wishes to go back and "trace the origin of the erroneous opinions entertained in England respecting the Revolution" (4: 207). She may, of course, not be in the best position to do this, having gone to France early in 1790--but the need for an intervention at this "politico-epistemological" level demonstrates how important it was to provide a meta-narrative to accompany and give weight to the factual narrative.

The primary mode and the primary problem in construing the French Revolution for the British public is, according to Williams, and as has been argued in this paper, the representations carried in newspapers. This arises in part, obviously enough, from "misrepresentation from ignorance" (210); there are not adequate mechanisms for the reporting and relaying of information, so that, as in the case of the execution of Louis Capet, much is "mere" speculation: "The editors of these journals were largely ignorant of the facts: yet, had they confined themselves to fact, their errors would have been comparatively few. But they indulged largely in criticisms and speculations on these facts; and for this they had neither adequate sources of information, nor sufficient knowledge of the genius and manner of the country" (208). What is necessary, according to Williams, is the kind of immediate experience of events that she has had, combined with a careful source criticism; otherwise, like travel-writing where only a short exposure to the culture is sampled, the papers are necessarily "filled with absurd wonders" (210). Like the modern historian assuming naivete in the production of accounts of "absurd wonders," Williams ascribes error to the producers of accounts that do not match her own, not seeing the agenda produced by the forms of knowledge propogated by her opponents (and of course, by herself).

In Williams' analysis, the exception to these projections of error is The Morning Chronicle, which "owes its superiority to the impartiality and talents of its editors--to their great exertions to procure information--and to their stricter adherence to the authority of the French journals" (211). But of course the French journals are not completely reliable, with their being published in Paris and not covering the apparently more tranquil provinces. The problematic of the "onion ring" of modern journalism, whereby one has constantly to peel away the layers of unreliability to find an inner core of truth within, is put in place.

It is not only systems of information and reporting that are at fault, but also "misrepresentations by design." In part, Williams construes this not as a matter of the "limits of what could be thought," as I have, but as a simple matter of political bias: "It was supposed from the outset that our court viewed it in an unfavourable light; and therefore all those called ministerial papers united in decrying it" (211). But turning to the influence of Burke, she begins the by-now familiar strategy whereby the imaginary and the real are brought into play, and claims that, in the conservative discourses concerning the French revolution, the imaginary takes precedence over the real; and further, suggests that the imaginary sentiments of Burke and others actually produced the more distasteful events that were soon to come to pass:

 In all probability, his predictions, and those of the writers who
 followed him on the same side, were in great measure the causes of
 the evils they foretold. Mr Burke predicted the death of Louis XVI
 at a time when not a human being in France had such an idea in his
 mind; and the eloquent and specious account he gave of the imaginary
 disgrace and distress of royalty, most certainly had a considerable
 effect on the mind of that unfortunate prince, and still more on
 that of the Queen, and the persons of her court. We all know that
 the King had no reason to be discontented with his situation as it
 was determined by the Constituent Assembly: but we also know that
 nothing is so easy for an able man as to render a weak man
 discontented with his condition, by painting him delusive pictures
 of advantages that he ought to enjoy, or inconveniences he ought not
 to suffer. Of consequence, he had a great share in producing the
 calamities of the monarch and his unfortunate family. (217)

The ontological schema as it relates to political action, observed throughout the analysis of debate during the first part of the 1790s is here presented in the form of an apology for the more gruesome aspects of the revolution. It is conservatives who have imagined political action as necessarily a treacherous threat to the life of the king. This imagined state of affairs is the result of a certain inattentiveness to the "real" political scene, that of assemblies, consensus, juridical apparatus, and constitutional arrangements for executive power. And these projections, which in truth are nothing but shadows, become a blueprint for events that follow in reality. Ideology--false consciousness, or, in a more contemporary term, "prejudice"--shapes social action; whereas, empirical observation of the political scene by a certain participation in it should shape the genuine consciousness and authentic knowledge ("opinion") that will then assuredly arise. It is, once again, the primacy of the signifier against the referent that is at stake here: is our political knowledge to be constituted by pre-existent forms supposedly intrinsic to mental processes, or does knowledge in fact come from the outside, to be discovered by a concerted act of perception and observation? This familiar dilemma was to ricochet around Romantic culture in the coming decades, informing the Romantics' engagement in and withdrawal from "politics" as hitherto constituted.

(1.) Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. A. Cobban and Robert A. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967) 3: 79.

(2.) Marie Peters, "Historians and the Eighteenth Century Press: A Review of Possibilities and Problems" in Australian Journal of Politics and History 34 (1988); see A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press 1760-1850 (London: Home and van Thai Ltd, 1949) 33-37.

(3.) Jeremy Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (Sydney and London: Croom Helm, 1987); see also, for a useful overview of the press during an eighteen-month period, Lucyle Werkmeister, A Newspaper History of England 1792-93 (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1967).

(4.) Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" (1851), in David McLellan, Karl Marx--Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977); Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution 1789-1820 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1983).

(5.) Michel Foucault, "Sur la justice populaire: Debat avec les Maos" in Dits et ecrits 1954-1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994) 2:340-69.

(6.) See Michel Foucault, "La verite et les formes juridiques" in Dits et ecrits 2: 538-646.

(7.) Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (London: Polity P, 1989).

(8.) Marilyn Moris, "Representations of Royalty in the London Press of the 1790s," in Journal of Newspaper and Publishing History IV.2 (1988): 2-15.

(9.) Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love our Country (London: T. Cadell, 1789); on public reaction to the regency crisis, see Christopher Reid, "Burke, the Regency Crisis, and the 'Antagonist World of Madness'" in Eighteenth Century Life 16 (May 1992): 59-75.

(10). Henry Snyder, "Newsletters in England 1689-1715" in Newsletters to Newspapers: Eighteenth Century Journalism, ed. Bond and Mcleod (Morgantown: U of West Virginia P, 1977).

(11.) Joseph Priestley, Letters to the Right Honourable Mr. Burke (Birmingham: Thomas Pearson, 1791) 145.

(12.) Jacques Necker, Discours de M. Necker a l'Assemblee Nationale, le 29 juillet 1789 (Paris: np, 1789); Lettre de M. Necker a l'Assemblee Nationale, le 23 juillet 1789 (Paris: np, 1789); Comte de Lally-Tollendal, Lettres (1789) in Collection de pieces interessantes sur les grands evenements de l'histoire francaise (Paris: np, 1801); J.-J. Mounier, Une nouvelle histoire des Etats Generaux (Paris: np, 1789).

(13.) Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke 84.

(14.) Burke, Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs (London: J. Dodesley, 1791).

(15.) Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. L. G. Mitchell, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) 8: 66.

(16.) J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: U of Cambridge P, 1985) 190-212.

(17.) Paine, The Rights of Man, ed. J. S. Jordan (London: Penguin, 1985) 190-212.

(18.) An Account of the Proceedings of the British Convention, by a Member (London: 1). I. Eaton, 1794) 13.

(19.) Revolutions de Paris, no. 13 (1789): 13.

(20.) Mark Philp, "The Fragmented Ideology of Reform" med., Mark Philp, The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991).

(21.) Clifford Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," in The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Fontana, 1993) 218.

(22.) See John Barrell Imaging the Kitty's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793-1796 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), chapter I, for a fuller analysis of the stories and visual representations surrounding the so called "Last Interview."

(23.) See Larpent Mss. #1079, #1124, #1039 and #1154.

(24.) Helen Maria Williams, Letters From France, 4 vols. (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1790-93).

St. Mary's College, University of Surrey, UK