Abstract

Reviews Une expérience rhétorique. L'éloquence de la Révolution. Textes réunis par Eric Négrel et Jean-Paul Sermain. Studies on Voltaire, vol. 2. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002. Pp. 333. Few disciplines in recent decades have grown faster than the study of rhetoric, and few aspects of it have attracted greater attention than the elo­ quence of the French Revolution. This collection of papers, a rich mosaic of findings, impressions, and critical stances, is not, however, narrowly focused in time (the oft favoured period by far seems to be 1789-1794), nor does it privilege the spoken word alone. Gathering together under three rubrics some twenty-one contributions to the debate that it invited, the volume pro­ poses a series of constantly overlapping reflections going from the rhetoric of pre-revolutionary France down to the late nineteenth century. Within these broad parameters, we tend to know generally what developments and what reactions to expect: the men of '89, continuing to have recourse to their own counter-rhetoric of the Enlightenment, stepped up their vehement denun­ ciations of the old orthodox rhetoric as an instrument of oppression and mystification. As the Revolution progressed, and as new actors came centrestage , pleading their causes with a polemical passion and intensity the like of which had never been seen before, so their views on a rhetoric appropriate to the circumstances fragmented even more: should it reflect Atticism or Asianism, rely upon pathos or the more rational ability to docere et probare? In parallel—and the point must not be neglected—this modern eloquence in its various new avatars—was not limited to political interventions alone: it flourished elsewhere, in the theatre, painting, engraving, opera, poetry, song. Events were to dictate, however, that the dominant rhetoric (albeit temporar­ ily) should be the rhetoric of the Jacobins and the Montague, an occurrence which was destined to leave France, for generations to come, with a moral problem that proved to be particularly acute in the domain of education: how could a great nation, originally motivated by the most exhilarating of hu­ man aspirations, end up floundering in gore? was it hence, after Thermidor, even advisable to teach rhetoric / eloquence to the young? When—with few exceptions - critics overwhelmingly concluded that the "Revolution," with its "synthetic" pathos and its murderous rationalism, had abused rhetoric, and prostituted it in a bid to seduce a popular public to the extent that it had become the very perversion of reason itself and the justification for the most abominable crimes, the answer to that question was inevitable. The© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XXII, Number 2 (Spring 2004). Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St, Ste 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223, USA 205 206 RHETORICA Idéologues in turn, who were influential in defining the curriculum for the new Écoles centrales, had equally fixed ideas on the matter. And so it also was that, throughout the nineteenth century, the experi­ ence of the First Republic tended almost overwhelmingly to define rhetorical practice and the more temperate use of language (whence the increasing re­ habilitation of the more "classical" rhetoric practised by the Girondins). This was not to say, however, that reference to l'éloquence révolutionnaire of the more "unbridled" sort disappeared: whatever people thought about it, they looked upon it either as a purveyor of "historical" documents, or as an oblig­ atory reference point for authors of treatises on rhetoric and Belles-Lettres. In parallel, however (for the phenomenon goes hand-in-hand with the slow and painful rebirth of the Republican movement), certain critics, scholars, and historians (starting with Charles Nodier)—particularly in the final decades of the nineteenth century—worked much more deliberately for the reappro­ priation of that revolutionary heritage in which eloquence, viewed also as having literary value (despite the ex cathedra pronoucements of a Taine and a Lanson), was an integral part of France's heritage. That, for example, is how—in 1894—Joseph Reinach (Le 'Condones' français. L'Eloquence française depuis la Révolution jusqu'à nos jours), came—albeit timidly—to foreshadow...