4 - Sentimentalism in the rhetoric of the Revolution

Summary

The French Revolution has made a number of somewhat fleeting appearances in these pages, and it is essential now to draw the different threads together, and to propose a deeper and more nuanced analysis. What has been said so far? On the one hand, the Revolution appears as a butt to the sentimental vision: for both Gorjy and Vernes, although in different ways, sentimentalism becomes enmeshed with a hostile reaction to the perceived excesses of the Revolution, notably the Terror. Something similar will be seen in chapter 6: the turmoil of the 1790s is probably a decisive factor in Mme de Staël's espousal of pity as a political value fundamental to liberalism. On the other hand, in the previous chapter, I looked at two aspects of the Revolution: firstly, I examined its attitudes, discourse and action in the area of poverty and mendicity, culminating in the decrees of floréal Year 2 which established the livre de bienfaisance nationale and the fête du Malheur; and I concluded, at a much higher level of generalisation and abstraction, that sentimentalism belongs to the Revolutionary project by virtue of the manner in which it envisages the relationship between the individual and the universal.

I would like, firstly, to develop this last point in just a little more detail.