Women and Revolution in the 18th Century

April 22, 2014 - April 23, 2014
Human Rights Studies, Department of History and Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University

Pufendorf Institute
Biskopsgatan 3
Lund 22362
Sweden

Speakers:

Ulrika Björk
Uppsala University (Sweden)
Anna Cabak Rédei
Lund University
Geneviève Fraisse
CNRS, Paris
Lund University
Carla Hesse
University of California, Berkeley
Jane L. Hodson
University of Sheffield
Stefan Jonsson
Linköping University, Sweden.
Timo Miettinen
University of Helsinki
Cecilia Rosengren
University of Gothenburg, Sweden

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SPEAKERS, TITLES, AND ABSTRACTS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

Ulrika Björk | Uppsala University and Södertörn University College

Romantic Counter-Enlightenment: Innerlichkeit in Rahel Varnhagen’s Berlin Salon

This paper addresses the Counter-Enlightenment of the German Romantic Circle in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The focus is on the political implications of Romantic Innerlichkeit (inwardness) as staged in Rahel Varnhagen’s early Berlin salon (1790-1801). Two modern interpretations will frame my discussion. The first is Hannah Arendt’s (1958) objection to the ”worldless” sensibility the ideal of Innerlichkeit represents. On Arendt’s view, the salon displays qualities of mind and feeling that are the opposite of those required by political actors. By dissolving the boundaries between the intimate and the shared, it dissolves our very sense of reality. Contra Arendt, Seyla Benhabib (1995) argues that the salon designates a genealogy of modernity, one that brings to life the Enlightenment idea of the human being as such (l’homme, der Mensch) and evokes the image of a ”proto-political” space where new forms of sociability can be enacted. According to Benhabib, Varnhagen’s internally egalitarian and transgressive salon cultivates the joy of conversation, friendship, intimacy, and the erotic.

       My paper problematizes both of these 20th century approaches to the salon, turning instead to Novalis, contemporary with Varnhagen. Novalis’ Counter-Enlightenment challenges the distinctions between the internal and the external world, and a strict boundary between the intimate and the shared. In ”Christendom or Europe” (1799), he articulates the ideal of a political community centered on emotion, spirituality, and concrete connectedness of human beings (Kleingeld 2008). While I find Novalis’ ”universalism” problematic, his ideal of Bildung gets to the core of Varnhagen’s non-individualistic notion of an Innerlichkeit that requires the social context of a community.

Anna Cabak Rédei | Lund University

Germaine de Staël’s Réflexions sur le procès de la reine: an act of compassion?

In August 1793 Germaine de Staël published anonymously a small volume in defence of Marie-Antoinette who was facing the guillotine. But no one doubted the author hiding behind the signature “par une femme”. It made a stir in Paris and M. de Staël got a visit at the Swedish Embassy from two commissaries. They impounded his papers. However, the tone of the plaidoyer is emotional, which might be explained by the fact that Mme de Staël sympathized with Marie-Antoinette, not politically, but as a woman and mother. The experience of being in disgrace and subject to public calumnies, which illustrated the misogyny and xenophobia of the time, was something Germaine de Staël could share with Marie-Antoinette. They were both considered in the public eye to be “monstrous”, in the sense of being “abnormal” women deviating from the norms. In the opening of the text she addresses women in “all countries and social positions” and asks them to listen to her “with the same emotion” that she lived through (de Staël, 1996/1820: 20). How are we to understand the purpose of this piece of work which did not have an overtly political aim, nor personal (Mme de Staël did not belong to Marie-Antoinette’s the circle of friends)? Following Martha Nussbaum’s (2008) distinctions of compassion, the purpose of my presentation is to analyse Germaine de Staël’s text in the light of emotions in two ways: philosophically and historically, the latter as it has been proposed by William M. Reddy (2000) in his elucidating of the connection of sentimentalism and the Enlightenment in the period before 1794.

Geneviève Fraisse | CNRS, Paris

Contradictions of a gendered democracy

After having called the new political era, which began after the revolutionary rupture that took place in France, an ”excluded democracy” (Fraisse, 1989, 1993), I had to specify the fears of the democrats facing the concretisation of sex equality. Historical setbacks, the puzzle of domination, sex/gender as an “empty” category, and deregulations of social and aesthetic representations are – due to the effort of making sexes “similar” as people – all consequences that form the thorny problem of women’s emancipation.

Lena Halldenius | Lund University

Mary Wollstonecraft – A Revolutionary Without a Revolution

In the first published response to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Mary Wollstonecraft, in spirited republican terms, defended the principles of the French revolution. She did not, however, advocate revolutionary action, not then and not later. In fact, in the course of her brief career, Wollstonecraft grew ever more cautious of revolutionary means of resistance, which is not to say that she grew less radical in terms of political critique. In An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution she used the new constitution in France as a warning of what will happen when radical change is introduced too quickly. Danger lurks when philosophically sound political ideas are introduced prematurely and without practical prudence. Listening to the advice of philosophers – who, dedicated to perfection as they are, carry their views beyond the present – comes, therefore, with the risk of purchasing “the good of posterity too dearly, by the misery of the present generation.” My aim in this paper is to explicate Wollstonecraft’s complex and tortured position on revolution, and how she manages to make a radical feminist case for political change, while holding revolution to be simultaneously justified, inevitable, and ill advised.

Carla Hesse | University of California, Berkeley

The French Revolution and Feminism: The History of an Ideology

The paper will examine the political processes that produced the ideological concept of “feminism” in the wake of the French Revolution and its relationship to the issues of suffrage, social movements and, ultimately the “Parité” law of 2000. I will argue that civic and social issues have been more critical in determining the place of women in the revolutionary republican tradition than has the struggle for formal political representation.

Jane L. Hodson | University of Sheffield

Language and revolution in the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays and

Elizabeth Hamilton

In this paper I explore the role of language in novels by three women intellectuals – Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays and Elizabeth Hamilton. I consider how these novels depict women who are constrained by institutions which deny and devalue female voices, and how the heroines of these novels seek to wrest back control of their own language. I also explore how women from the lower orders are represented in these novels. While women intellectuals of the period have been criticised for focusing exclusively on the lot of middle class women, I argue that in these novels the writers create space for the lower orders to speak of their own lives, and I consider the revolutionary potential of such speech.

Stefan Jonsson | Linköping University

Why Monsters Appear: The Place of Women and Femininity in Representations of Revolutionary Change

In the history of European imagination monstrosity has a fairly well defined meaning. A monster is first of all a creature that demonstrates -- the Latin word monstrare means "to show" or "to exhibit" -- some kind of vice. The function of the monster is thus to warn (Latin, monere) humanity of the punishment awaiting those who commit the vice. In European cultural history, it is primarily the vices of ingratitude, rebellion, and disobedience, particularly toward parents and superiors, which has most commonly attracted the appellation 'monstrous'. For instance, it was vice of such kind that Edmund Burke had in mind as he condemned revolutionary France as a "monster of state", "the mother of monsters", "a monstrous compound", and a "cannibal republic". The revolution was monstrous because it demonstrated an unpardonable disobedience of servants toward their masters and of children toward their parents.

       When liberal writers defended the revolution against Burke they seized on the theme of monstrosity, stating that it was the monstrous injustice of the feudal system that had caused the rebellion of the French people, whose violence was thus justified. Among those who used this argument were, most famously, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, the parents of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. This debate posed for the first time the problem concerning the legitimacy of social change and its relation to stability and permanence. How do we judge social transformations from within a discourse of modernity which regards development as a continuous negation of the past, and which calls upon every new generation to set right the unjust order of their parents? Mary Shelley's novel about doctor Frankenstein's relationship to his monster elaborates on the relation of a historical cause to its possible effects. In Frankenstein's case, this causality can only be thought of as an absolute discontinuity, the same kind of discontinuity, that is, as the one pertaining between pre-revolutionary France and the first Republic.

       This discontinuity thus speaks of the difficulty to imagine how one society is transformed into another, to conceptualize historical change. As Kaja Silverman has argued, this difficulty is experienced most sharply during "historical traumas", in periods of revolution, war, and catastrophies. These discontinuous events breed most if not all monsters that appear in the iconography of revolution. This talk will discuss how and why a large proportion of these creatures are also creatures of a particular kind of femininity.

Timo Miettinen | University of Helsinki

Crisis and Revolution

This presentation deals with the specifically modern idea of universal history. It elucidates the intellectual background of some of the basic ideas of this tradition with the specific focus on the concepts of crisis and revolution as central categories of historical reflection characteristic of the 18th and 19th centuries. By doing so, the presentation investigates the role of the French Revolution as the key event in the new philosophy of history, as a revolution anticipated and justified on the basis of this type of reflection. Instead of serving as tools of mere legitimation, the paper argues, the notions of crisis and revolution also served as mechanisms of critique, which challenged the seeming powerlessness of human activity in the great cycle (or teleology) of history.

Cecilia Rosengren | University of Gothenburg

A (pre)revolutionary discourse? The concept of happiness according to Émilie du Châtelet

The French natural philosopher Émilie du Châtelet lived in a time when the Enlightenment movement had not yet transformed into a more political revolutionary phase. Deeply rooted in an aristocratic family she was moreover no direct spokesperson of social change. However, she could not escape the fact that her actions as an intellectual woman in the early modern period made her a revolutionary figure. In one of her essays du Châtelet analyses a key concept in the political discourse of the eighteenth century – happiness. The essay was written in the 1740s but was first published posthumously ten years before 1789. Nevertheless, this paper wishes to explore the revolutionary potential in du Châtelet’s concept of happiness.

Organizers

Ulrika Björk – [email protected]

Anna Cabak Rédei – [email protected]

Lena Halldenius – [email protected]

Location: The Pufendorf Institute, www.pi.lu.se

Supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond

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