led a chorus of prophets who invested the political events in France with the explosive power of the great Western myth of apocalypse, and so expanded a local phenomenon into the perfervid expectation that man everywhere was at the threshold of an earthly paradise restored” (331). Abrams, “Richard Price and Joseph Priestley. īritish radicals viewed the French Revolution of 1789 not simply as a localized occurrence but also as a mythic event of worldwide importance, “as the portent of universal felicity” (Abrams 64). Yet while the spark of revolution in 1789 seemed to ignite the flames of a visionary world, the chilling events of 1793 began to extinguish them. The formation of the National Assembly (17 June), the storming of the Bastille (14 July)-the “great symbolic act which has been associated with the revolution ever since” (Breunig and Levinger 13)-the approval of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (26 August), and the march on Versailles that led to the enforced relocation of the royal family to Paris (5-6 October) fired the imagination of many abroad regarding the political and spiritual future of Europe.
The anticipation of revolutionary change that had been growing for many British radical writers during the American Revolution (1775-1783) had reached a feverish pitch by 1789, when the events of the French Revolution began. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race. Using William Blake’s America as a case study, this article examines how the violence of 1793 not only complicated and ultimately terminated the possibility of interpreting the revolutionary events in France as a fulfillment of the grand biblical narrative of human regeneration but also placed in doubt the potential for human interventions in the historico-political realm to ever initiate this new world.įew persons but those who have lived in it can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. These disturbing events left many radicals questioning the viability of revolution and, more specifically, the efficacy of violence in producing fundamental and widespread change for the better. However, two major events in 1793 undermined the optimism of these readings: the regicide of Louis XVI and the start of the subsequent Reign of Terror. In 1789, many British radicals interpreted the early events of the French Revolution in mythic terms, as signs that a cataclysmic event, akin to the Christian apocalypse (entailing the renovation of the fallen world), was at hand-and that, paradoxically, human beings rather than God were the agents of this absolute change.
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