SANSCULOTTISED LITERATURE IN FRANCE. 



By Prof. Renicus Dowe Nauta. 



The fraction of the eighteenth century French literature 

 which it is my intention to consider in the present paper is the 

 period during which a series of preparatory and partial revolts 

 culminated in the final outbreak of the Revolution. I shall have 

 to discard all regular and ordinary literature, boiling down my 

 remarks to what might be called glimpses at French literature as 

 sansculottized during the great social upheaval. I shall equally 

 be debarred from drawing into the circle of my considerations 

 any of the literary lions of the pre-revolutionary eighteenth, 

 century; nor even shall I dwell upon the works of poets like 

 Marie- Joseph and Andre Chenier, the latter of whom fell a victim 

 to the guillotine ; Lebrun, the French Pindarus ; Ducis, the trans- 

 lator ( !?) of Shakespeare; Vergniand, the lyric; or on those of 

 Pixerecourt, the originator of the modern French melodrama; 

 Beaumarchais, the greatest of the dramatists of the time, author 

 of the exquisitely witty twin-comedies " Le Barbier de Seville " 

 and " Le Mariage de Figaro " ; Mirabeau and Barnave, the 

 orators ; Chamfort and Rivarol, the moraliiLts ; Volney and 

 Dupuis, the philosophers. I intend confining myself to a few 

 outstanding and well-defined types : Hebert, Marat, Robespierre, 

 Danton, Camille-Desmoulins. To show the corroding influence 

 of the revolutionary neurosis on their mentality, and the various 

 consequences accruing from it for their surroundings, will be mv 

 chief endeavour. 



Buffon, in his famous " Discours," writes " Le style c'est 

 I'homme " ; and if any corroborative detail should be required to 

 confirm the truth of this maxim, we have only to look for it in 

 the literature of the great Revolution. The language of the 

 people, that of the political leaders and zealots, as well as that of 

 the journalists and orators of the time, is steeped in the most 

 lurid hues ; it is highly emotive everyw^here, and representative of 

 the various temperaments of each and everybody. Some brand- 

 ish the whip of satire wath never-flagging skill and energ}- of 

 grasp ; others pontificate in a most solemn manner, like so many 

 divining augurs ; others, again, give iree scope to the most impet- 

 uous, the most fiery inspirations of their genius. It is through the 

 medium of their words and the style of their writings that we are 

 best enabled to judge the men of those times ; it is b}^ mentally 

 resuscitating the sessions of their assemblies and the meetings of 

 their clubs, by perusing the numberless journals, circulars, 

 gazettes, and placards which were daily scattered broadcast over 

 Paris with a sonorous, rustling flutter, that we succeed in under- 

 standing their most unimaginable decrees, their most extravagant 

 incongruities, and that, after emerging from this mass of motley 

 rubbish, we feel competent to realize the hugeness of the achieve- 

 ments of the Convention. 



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