10 - Coleridge’s Rome

Summary

In a remarkable series of essays written for the Morning Post in 1802, Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested that the situation in Napoleonic France was not just parallel to that of Rome under the Caesars but a precise repetition of that earlier historical moment, with the only difference being “the degrees of rapidity with which the same processes have been accomplished.” As Coleridge insists, “The reigns of the first three Caesars have been crowded into the three first years of the reign of Bonaparte.” Speed, then, is what distinguishes the present from the past. As Coleridge seeks to anticipate the outcome of Napoleon's rule, however, the legacy of imperial Rome, that earlier and slower historical moment, remains relevant as Coleridge uses the parallel between Napoleonic France and Rome under the Caesars to predict that Napoleon's decline will be as swift as his rise.

Coleridge's argument here echoes a common understanding of the modern world as the heir to the ancient, an issue of continuity that turned, through much of the eighteenth century, on whether Europe might repeat the ancient cycle of decline and fall under the conditions of modern debt-financed warfare. As Michael Sonensher suggests, in linking the classical past with the European present what came to matter in the eighteenth century was whether new mechanisms for financing warfare through national debt would produce a repetition of the ancient cycles of decline and fall. The threat to political stability and economic prosperity, in other words, “was not so much the inequality and luxury that, according to a long-standing tradition of political and historical analysis, had been responsible for earlier cycles of decline and fall, but the new financial instruments and fiscal resources that had accompanied the transformation of warfare during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” Coleridge also links patterns of decline and fall in antiquity to his present moment, and he too moves away from an analysis of the link built around inequality and luxury, but for Coleridge the problem is not one of debt and credit. Rather, Coleridge adds to the issue of historical repetition and parallel the problem of historical speed or pace. Present events may repeat past events, but what distinguishes them is their “rapidity,” the speed or pace at which they unfold.