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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2021
The 1790 Fête de la fédération in the early French Revolution evoked the memory of the taking of the Bastille while tamping down on the simmering social forces that had erupted on 14 July 1789. How to do both? As an official architect put it, through the festival, ‘the sentiment of each becomes the sentiment of all by a kind of electrification, against which even the most perverse men cannot defend themselves’. This paper argues that a new language of revolutionary electricity came into being with the French Revolution. It argues that revolutionaries drew upon concepts of medical electricity developed in the 1780s to analogize the literal electricity of the ether to the revolutionary electricity of collective political sentiment. Though historians have associated electricity with radical politics, this paper argues that in the hands of bureaucrats and festival planners, electricity entered revolutionary discourse as a powerful mechanism for exercising authority and control over an unruly revolutionary public.
1 Bernard Poyet, Idées générales presentées par le Sieur Poyet, architecte du roi et de la ville, sur le projet de la fête du 14 juillet, a l'occasion du Pacte-Federatif, entre les Gardes nationales et le Troupes de ligne de la France; pour célébrer l’époque de la Révolution (Paris: Ve. Delaguette, 1790), p. 5, Cornell University Library, Kroch Rare Books, DC 141 F87 v.229 no. 14+.
2 Galvani's treatise De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius was published in 1791.
3 As James Delbourgo writes, however, an American revolutionary political electricity, which ties electrical science spread in the American colonies by travelling showmen to revolutionary politics, pre-dates the French revolutionary invention by a few decades. See James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
4 For instance, Mona Ozouf quotes Poyet in La fête révolutionnaire 1789–1799, Paris: Gallimard, 1976, p. 67, when she writes, ‘c'est aussi que le simple fait du rassemblement paraît alors une prodigieuse conquête morale: la fête consacre le passage du privé au public, elle étend à tous le sentiment de chacun par une espèce d’électrisation’. The same phrase appears in the published proceedings of a 1974 colloquium on revolutionary festivals, in an article on festival architecture by Richard Etlin. See R.-A. Etlin, ‘L'architecture et la Fête de la fédération: Paris, 1790’, in Jean Ehrard and Paul Viallaneix (eds.), Les fêtes de la Révolution: Colloque de Clermont-Ferrand (juin 1974), Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 1977, pp. 131–54 (reprinted in 2012). For a more recent example see Volker Sellin, Violence and Legitimacy: European Monarchy in the Age of Revolutions, Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2018, p. 217. Sellin reproduces the quote in a footnote, citing Poyet to illustrate the principle of festivals as nation-building exercises: ‘architect Bernard Poyet wrote that the great public celebrations produced an electrifying effect on the participants and had the result that in the end they were all dominated by the same sensations’. In none of these cases is the idea of électrisation examined in connection with the contemporary science of electricity.
5 Examples include Patricia Fara, An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002; Morus, Iwan Rhys, ‘Radicals, romantics and electrical showmen: placing galvanism at the end of the English enlightenment’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society (2009) 63, pp. 263–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Simon Schaffer, ‘Priestley and the politics of spirit’, in Robert Anderson and Christopher Lawrence (eds.), Science, Medicine and Dissent: Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), London: 1987, pp. 39–53.
6 Iwan Rhys Morus, Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century, London: Icon Books, 2004, p. 70; Stephanie O'Rourke, ‘Girodet's galvanized bodies’ Art History (November 2018) 5, pp. 868–93, 869.
7 Jessica Riskin, ‘The lawyer and the lightning rod’, in Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp. 139–88.
8 Keith Michael Baker, ‘Was Marat a vitalist?’, in Keith Michael Baker and Jenna M. Gibbs (eds.), Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016, pp. 110–24.
9 Jean Deprun, ‘Sade et la philosophie biologique de son temps’, in Deprun, De Descartes au romantisme: Etudes historiques et thématiques, Paris: Vrin, 1987, pp. 133–48; de Castro, Clara Carnicero, ‘Le fluid électrique chez Sade’, Société française d’étude du dix-huitième siècle (2014) 1(46), pp. 561–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Marco Bresadola and Marco Piccolino, Shocking Frogs: Galvani, Volta, and the Electric Origins of Neuroscience, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013; Bernardi, Walter, ‘La controverse sur l’électricité animale dans l'Italie du XVIIIe siècle: Galvani, Volta et … d'autres’, Revue d'histoire des sciences (2001) 54(1), pp. 53–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, New York: Schocken Books, 1968, p. 3.
12 Riskin, op. cit. (7), pp. 104–37.
13 Riskin, op. cit. (7); Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011; Mary Fairclough, Literature, Electricity, and Politics, 1740–1840: ‘Electrick Communication Every Where’, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
14 Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
15 Michel Delon, ‘Electriser, un mot d'ordre au siècle des Lumières’, Revue des sciences humaines (January–March 2006) 281, pp. 39–51.
16 Leonard Snetlage, Nouveau dictionnaire français contenant les expressions de nouvelle création du peuple français. Ouvrage additionnel au dictionnaire de l'Académie française et à tout autre vocabulaire. Par Leonard Snetlage docteur en droits en l'Université de Gottingue, Göttingen: Chez Jean Chretien Dieterich, 1795, p. 77.
17 Giacomo Casanova, À Léonard Snetlage, [Dresden], 1797, p. 41.
18 Casanova, op. cit. (17), p. 6.
19 Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, Birmingham, 1790, p. xxiii.
20 See especially Fairclough, op. cit. (13); Delbourgo, op. cit. (3); James Delbourgo, ‘Electricity, experiment and enlightenment in eighteenth century North America’, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2003, p. 2, original emphasis.
21 Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden. A Poem, in Two Parts. Part I. Containing The Economy of Vegetation. Part II. The Loves of the Plants. With Philosophical Notes, New York: T. & J. Swords, 1807 p. 60.
22 Archives parlementaires (13 October 1793) 76, p. 482.
23 Archives parlementaires (12 December 1793) 81, p. 346.
24 Bernard Poyet, Projet de Cirque national et de fêtes annuelles, proposé par le sieur Poyet, architecte de la ville de Paris, Paris: De l'imprimerie de Migneret, 1792, pp. 7–8.
25 Bernard Poyet, Prospectus du monument à élever par sous-scription, à la gloire de Napoleon-le-Grand, Paris, 1806, p. 3.
26 Bernard Poyet, Projet de monument, présenté aux Deux Chambres (1816), p. 2.
27 Poyet, op. cit. (25), p. 3; Poyet, op. cit. (26), p. 2.
28 For this argument on the transformation of medical electricity over the 1770s and 1780s in Paris see François Zanetti, ‘Curing with machines: medical electricity in eighteenth-century Paris’, Technology and Culture (July 2013) 54, pp. 503–30; see also Zanetti, L’électricité médicale dans la France des Lumières, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2017.
29 See especially Fara, op. cit. (5). Iwan Morus shows that theatricality and exhibitionism continued to characterize electrical scientific experimentation in the early nineteenth century, culminating, he argues, with the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early Nineteenth-Century London, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
30 Zanetti, ‘Curing with machines’, op. cit. (28), p. 514.
31 Christine Blondel, ‘Animal electricity in Paris: from its initial support to its discredit and eventual rehabilitation’, in Marco Bresadola and Giuliano Pancadi (eds.), Luigi Galvani International Workshop: Proceedings, Bologna: CIS, Dipartimento di Filosofia, Universita di Bologna, 1999, pp. 187–209, 199.
32 J.L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999, p. 490.
33 Bernardi, op. cit. (10), argues that there was not one galvanism but three to five distinct theories of animal electricity in late eighteenth-century Italy. See also Marco Bresadola, ‘Early galvanism as technique and medical practice’, in Paola Bertucci and Giuliano Pancaldi (eds.), Electric Bodies: Episodes in the History of Medical Electricity, Bologna: Università di Bologna, pp. 157–79.
34 Simon Schaffer, ‘Natural philosophy and public spectacle in the eighteenth century’, History of Science (1 March 1983) 21(1), pp. 1–43.
35 Zanetti, ‘Curing with machines’, op. cit. (28), p. 515.
36 Masars de Cazeles, Mémoire sur l’électricité médicale, et histoire du traitement de vingt malades traités, et la plupart guéris par l’électricité, Paris and Toulouse: Chez Mequignon and Chez Dupleix, Chez Sacarau & Moulas, Chez Laporte, 1780, pp. 7–8.
37 Extrait des registres de l'académie royale des sciences. Du 22 Novembre 1786. Rapport des Commissaires chargés, par l'Académie, de l'examen du Projet d'un nouvel Hôtel-Dieu, Paris: De l'Imprimerie royale, 1786, p. 127.
38 Poyet, op. cit. (1), p. 10.
39 Delbourgo, op. cit. (20), pp. 13–14.
40 Fara, op. cit. (5), p. 56.
41 Schaffer, op. cit. (34), p. 2.
42 Heilbron, op. cit. (32), p. xi, 1999 preface to the 1979 work.
43 Heilbron, op. cit. (32), p. xi.
44 Heering, Peter, ‘On Coulomb's inverse square law’, American Journal of Physics (1992) 60, pp. 988–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 991.
45 Peter Heering, ‘The replication of the torsion balance experiment: the inverse square law and its refutation by early 19th-century German physicists’, in Christine Blondel and Matthias Dörries (eds.), Restaging Coulomb, Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1994, pp. 47–66.
46 Schaffer, op. cit. (34), p. 4.
47 Poyet, op. cit. (24), pp. 7–8.
48 Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (trans. Alan Sheridan), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 43.
49 One festival goer reported, ‘We were too small for the spectacle or the spectacle was too great for us. The due proportion between spectacle and spectators was broken’. Comte d'Escherny, Correspondance d'un habitant de Paris avec ses amis de Suisse et d'Angleterre sur les événements de 1789, 1790, et jusqu'au 4 avril 1791, Paris: Desenne, 1791, quoted in Ozouf, op. cit. (48), p. 49.
50 He continues, ‘The wish to unite was already the union of hearts, perhaps the very best unity’. Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution (trans. Charles Cocks, ed. Gordon Wright), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967, p. 464.
51 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre (trans. Allan Bloom), Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960, p. 126.
52 Michelet, op. cit. (50), p. 448. See also Neidleman, Jason, ‘Rousseau and the desire for communion’, Eighteenth-Century Studies (2013) 47(1), pp. 53–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 59, for the idea of Rousseau's concept of festival communion.
53 Ozouf, op. cit. (48), pp. 9–10.
54 Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, ‘Aline et Valcour’, in Sade, Oeuvres (ed. Michel Delon), vol. 1, Paris: Gallimard, 1990, pp. 387–1105, 575, quoted in de Castro, op. cit. (9), p. 562.
55 Poyet, op. cit. (1), p. 5.
56 Ronald Schechter, A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018; Miller, op. cit. (13).
57 Fairclough, op. cit. (13), p. 3.
58 This point follows the logic of the linguistic turn, that words have causal power in history, in that they define and set the limits for historical action. It should also be understood in the context of an important scholarly tradition in the history of science that reads political and social arrangements as intimately related to conceptions of the natural world, how it is ordered and how it operates. See especially Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985; John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
59 For a characterization of early nineteenth-century electricity as a newly commodified ‘symbol of Victorian progress’, see Morus, op. cit. (29); Delbourgo, op. cit. (20). Delbourgo draws upon Simon Schaffer's notion of ‘self-evidence’ as an important epistemological notion for eighteenth-century natural philosophy. Simon Schaffer, ‘Self evidence’, in James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson and Harry Harootunian (eds.), Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 56–91.
60 Michel Delon, L'idée d’énergie au tournant des Lumières, Paris: PUF, 1988.