Sanja Perovic’s chapter treats one of the most significant events in French history and an unprecedented period in theatre history. While the Revolution is often overlooked as a ‘dead period’ in French theatre, Perovic describes the scale and ambition of this extraordinary period. Never before had so many newcomers been able to forge successful careers as writers, actors and directors. Artistic innovation peaked, as revolutionary performance was more akin to what today is termed performance art, than to the kind of repertory theatre that preceded or followed it. Covering some of the major events, influential figures and key texts of this extremely fertile period, Perovic shows how theatre addressed the questions key to revolutionary culture: who is the audience? Where is it located? Who speaks on its behalf, and in what (theatrical, artistic) language? She concludes by contrasting two utopian works – Louis Beffroy de Reigny’s Nicodème dans la lune, ou la révolution pacifique (Nicodème Goes to the Moon, or the Peaceful Revolution, 1790) and Sylvain Maréchal’s Le Jugement dernier des rois (The Last Judgement of Kings, 1793) – with Beaumarchais’ La Mère coupable (The Guilty Mother, 1792), an altogether more sombre assessment of the effects of revolution.

The chapter begins with an effort to explain the book’s starting-point in the Enlightenment. Moving from historiography to the events of the time, it begins by telling the tale of the essay competition on the question “What is Enlightenment?,” in which Moses Mendelssohn came first, followed by Immanuel Kant. Mentioning that some 200 years later, the French post-modernist historian-philosopher Michel Foucault wrote yet another essay under the same title, in which he explicitly combined German and Jewish history, the chapter moves once again from historiography to history, concentrating on the biography of Moses Mendelssohn, especially on his repeated confrontation with the religious intolerance of some of his enlightened colleagues and then, stressing the ambivalence of the situation, typical of the German Enlightenment as a whole, the chapter ends with a comment on Lessing’s Nathan der Weise.

In The Prelude (1805/1850), Wordsworth reimagines time through the ritual calendar and festivals of revolutionary France. The Revolution’s rituals, moreover, complicate the common notion that Wordsworth retreats from politics into poetry. By way of ritual, Wordsworth enters what Walter Benjamin calls now-time or higher time, moments in which the past – via memory – becomes simultaneous with the present. Such now-times allow Wordsworth to juxtapose, on the one hand, his own past calling to a poetic vocation with, on the other hand, the Revolution’s founding vocation to bring liberty. In that juxtaposition, Wordsworth’s own faithfulness to his poetic calling tacitly critiques the Revolution’s infidelity to its origins. The higher time of ritual, then, mediates between Wordsworthian memory and revolutionary history. Wordsworth provides foundations for many Victorian liturgies. His sacralization of material reality, his resistance to the market’s dehumanizing rituals, his imbrication of memory and higher time – each of these undergoes further elaboration as the century unfolds.

The blockade has been a long-standing economic and military tactic to isolate enemy nations and force them to endure siege conditions. This chapter examines how British or pro-British cultural actors managed to disseminate propagandized cultural texts and information via secret channels of communication, smuggling in the cultural capital of the enemy nation(s). The first example is the Bibliothèque britannique, the Geneva-based journal which commissioned and published many translations of British scientific and literary works during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars; second, the translation activity during 1914–18 with poetry as case study; third, the role played by the pro-European group, the Federal Union and finally the internationalism and human rights discourse of writing advocated by PEN in London during the Second World War. The chapter concludes with a Cold War section examining soft diplomacy in the use of literature and art to disseminate liberal thinking behind the Iron Curtain. How far do these blockade moments articulate federal and internationalist aims and projects while risking isolationist rhetoric in the construction of liberal ideals in wartime?

The chapter focuses on the influence of French cuisine in Britain. The innovations of French courtly cuisine were frequently mocked in Britain which had its own tradition of sound and economical country house cooking. The Industrial Revolution brought a loss of cooking skills among the urban poor. The affluent benefitted from the flight of French chefs after the French Revolution, leading to the culinary pretensions of the (equally mocked) Regency period. French chefs set up French restaurants and cooking schools, popularising French cuisine, thus influencing the tastes of the middle classes and stimulating a range of gastronomical writings. Examples from Antony Trollope’s Vanity Fair, Virgina Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet, Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, the Wife and Her Lover and Elizabeth David’s postwar books serve to gauge the extent of French infuence and help define what makes British food, British.

Chapter 14 traces the development of Romanticism and positions Goethe within it. It addresses the factors that shaped Romanticism, such as the rise of the prose novel and the revival of interest in folklore, and positions the movement in relation to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Above all, the chapter demonstrates that – despite his well-known ambivalence about aspects of Romanticism – Goethe contributed to it throughout his life, paving the way for it with his early works, and embodying many of its tendencies later on, above all in Faust.

Chapter 6 explores the impact of the French Revolution on Goethe and examines the development in his responses, especially as reflected in the literary works he composed between 1789 and 1797. Goethe was horrified by the violence of 1789 and its aftermath; at the same time, he was critical of the French elites, and saw their fate as a warning to their German counterparts. This chapter highlights the ambivalence of his attitudes and aligns him with the reform conservatives, who favoured the maintenance of privileges but also reform from above.

Chapter 13 examines the development of Weimar Classicism, from the impact of Goethe’s own experiences in Italy to his collaboration with Friedrich Schiller. A crucial factor in any classicism, including that of Goethe and Schiller, is the absence of the ancients, and the chapter argues that Weimar Classicism was far from the settled, canonical project for which it is often taken. Rather, it emerged from historical crisis, above all the French Revolution, and it is characterised by internal tensions, between antiquity and modernity, desire and restraint.

This chapter addresses the political and intellectual context for Wagner’s revolutionary socialism. The nineteenth century stood in the light and shadow of the French Revolution, emboldened and fated to revisit and to relive many of its questions and practices. Wagner’s life mixed revolutionary theory and practice: in the Dresden uprising of 1849, but also in its ‘Vormärz’ prologue and in its apparently counter-revolutionary aftermath. Wagner experienced revolution on at least three geographical levels, European, German, and Saxon, the third receiving particular attention here. The focus is on Wagner’s most unambiguously revolutionary period, the 1840s and early 1850s, yet these ideas continued to play out in life, thought, and dramatic oeuvre: not only until completion of the Ring in 1874, Wagner’s revolutionary ‘fire cure’ reaching fulfilment in the final conflagration of Götterdämmerung, but in Parsifal and beyond. Earlier themes did not go unchanged; they provided shifting foundations for further dramatic exploration.

This chapter addresses the limitations potentially placed on the success of revolutions by “human nature” - which in psychological terms are the hard-wired characteristics that limit change in behavior. It is argued that in the long term, even behaviors that we conceptualize as hardwired at present tend to change (particularly through changes in the environment). The avowed goals of the French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, and Iranian revolutions are examined, and it is concluded that none of these revolutions achieved their goals. Despite failure, the regimes that survive in China, Cuba, and Iran continue to use the rhetoric of revolution. Four ways in which human nature seems to doom revolutions are considered: extremists come to power; an “ends justify the means” approach is adopted and corruption results; the style of leader–follower relations persist after revolutions, with the result that one dictatorship replaces another; and revolutionaries typically fail to set up the necessary conditions to achieve the behavioral changes necessary to reach their revolutionary goals (such as collectivization).

This chapter addresses Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), the work in which she engages most explicitly with contemporary political economic thought. Noting that she gives particular prominence to the liberation of the grain trade in the early years of the Revolution, it explores how Wollstonecraft uses the issue to yoke commercial with political forms of liberty. The free circulation of grain was a totemic issue in Adam Smith’s new political economy of ‘natural liberty’, but it also pitted the market against traditional notions of ‘moral economy’. The chapter also explores Wollstonecraft’s links with Girondin politicians, including Jacques Pierre Brissot, and theirs with the Shelburne circle of the 1780s, and discusses the involvement of Americans Joel Barlow and Gilbert Imlay in provisioning the French Republic in the mid-1790s: activity which informed the hostility to commerce of Wollstonecraft’s later works.

Chapter four analyses the period between the French Revolution and the First World War. For the first time, Europeans believed that it was possible to reorder societies to create new futures. Politics was turned towards a future that was open to human action. These ideas generated paradoxical results. The revolutionary urge to reshape societies according a rational plan sparked twenty-five years of wars and uncertainty. The turbulence of these years generated two consequences. First, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the experience of unpredictability gave rise to an idea that international politics requires active and multilateral management. This pragmatic approach, born out of uncertainty, increased predictability in the international system. Second, it created a yearning for certainty. A number of ideologies and sciences emerged claiming that societies are governed by underlying laws that can be discovered and manipulated. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, determinist world views dominated modern thinking and would play a key role in the outbreak and conduct of the First World War.

The introduction to the book describes the main claims in Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire. Readers are introduced to major terms in the book, including the military–theatrical complex, military–theatrical experiences, and the national–military phenomenon. The book’s arguments are discussed in the context of France’s evoling geopolitical goals from 1765 to 1794 and with the help of several critical approaches, including Theater and Performance Studies, Gender Studies, and the cultural history of the French military. The end of the Introduction lays out the structure of the book and posits several key questions that the study hopes to answer.

This conclusion returns to Saint-Domingue, which by the 1790s was rife with Jacobin sentiment, rebellions of enslaved Black laborers and free people of color, and intra-military disaccord. Provided are several short case studies of soldier violence and political action, which offer several limitations and conclusions to the eighteenth-century military–theatrical complex. Unlike the expansive national–military theatrical phenomenon in metropolitan France, the continued commitment to inequality and segregation in Saint-Domingue led to the disintegration of its white-centric theatrical institutions and practices – an important step in what would become the Haitian Revolution.

This chapter combines analysis of war dramas with military performance contexts to uncover strategies of totality, repetition, and reenactment in battle “event” plays from the French Revolution. The 1790s witnessed, according to some historians, the first “total war” and a deadly proliferation of both battles and casualties, especially after France raised a citizen army in 1793 of over 800,000 soldiers – one of the largest the world had ever seen. The Revolutionary (then Napoleonic) wars were not only massive in size but different in form and intensity. The Revolution was rife with military-themed drama, and this chapter highlights its war plays, performances, and their relations to the country’s evolving military goals and tensions. A corpus of approximately 110 dramatic and musical plays reveals stark differences between the Revolution’s war theater and its Old-Regime equivalent. Proposed here are new ways to describe and critically evaluate war theater, which often depicted recent military endeavors with documentary-inspired precision and an anxious totality of emotionally engaging performance strategies.

Since modern tyrannies tend to be ideological in character, they rely heavily on rhetoric or propaganda. This chapter consists of eight speeches that illustrate different ways that rhetoric has been used to foster tyrannical or immoral and violent policies in modern politics. The speakers include Maximilien Robespierre, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Deng Xiaoping.

There is a vital French tradition of political and social action in the name of the people and popular sovereignty, and French leaders and citizens have continually invoked popular sovereignty to claim political legitimacy and make demands for different political and social ends. At times the concept has been used to support a liberal ideal of the nation, at other times it has buttressed far-right claims to the nation. This chapter considers the concept of popular sovereignty within French politics and society at key historical moments – the Revolution, the brief second Republic, the Paris Commune, the interwar internal battles of the Third Republic, to populist street protests of the twenty-first century that do not adhere to a strict spectrum of left or right. The chapter does not simply track the historical existence of claims to popular sovereignty, but shows its uses across the political spectrum, the impact of couching political and social claims in the language of popular sovereignty and the demands of the people, and the malleability of that concept across centuries of a national politics and society.