Abstract
The public response to the fall of the Bastille is enshrined in the much-quoted words of the poets. William Cowper has the distinction of predicting the popular reaction, writing of the Bastille in 1785: ‘There’s not an Englishman that would not leap/To hear that ye were fall’n at last.’1 Wordsworth’s more famous response — ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/But to be young was very heaven’ — expressed emotion recollected in 1804, when Britain was at war with Napoleonic France. Wordsworth looks back 15 years to that ‘time when Europe was rejoic’d,/France standing on the top of golden hours,/And human nature seeming born again’.2 Robert Southey, who was still a schoolboy at Westminster when the Bastille fell, conveyed the same sentiment more prosaically: ‘Few persons but those who lived in it can conceive or comprehend what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.’3 Southey and Coleridge would soon together try to give practical shape to their faith in perfectibility by means of their notorious yet unfairly ridiculed plan to set up their pantisocratic community in America.
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Notes
William Cowper, ‘The Task’, V, lines 389–90. But he would write to William Hayley 29 January 1793: ‘I will tell you what the French have done. They have made me weep for a king of France, which I never thought to do, and they have made me sick of the very name of liberty which I never thought to be.’ See Philip Anthony Brown, The French Revolution in English History (Cass, 1918), 89. Robert Burns responded to the uprising of ordinary men and women, but as an excise officer he was somewhat muzzled. The first volume of William Blake’s The French Revolution, A Poem in Seven Books’ was printed in 1791 by Johnson but not published. Blake did wear a red cap of liberty in English streets. See Brown, 32–5.
The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, ed. Edward Dowden (Dublin, 1881), 52.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems, ed. John Beer (London and Vermont: Everyman, 1993), 5–6.
See Nicolas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 21–2.
20 February 1790 Burke to Sir Philip Francis in Correspondence of Edmund Burke ed. T. Copeland, 10 vols (Cambridge and Chicago, 1968–78), VI, 88–92.
The Debate on the French Revolution ed. Alfred Cobban, 2nd edn (Black, 1960), 53.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France … (Dent, Everyman, 1910), 69.
C.J. Fox to R. Fitzpatrick 30 July 1789 in L.G. Mitchell, Charles fames Fox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 111.
John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, II, The Reluctant Transition (Constable, 1983), 47.
PH XXIX 368 in Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: a Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992), 419.
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in certain Societies in London relative to that Event. In a Letter intended to have been given to a Gentleman in Paris (Dodsley, 1790) in GM LX (Nov. 1789), 1032. See also James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963; and Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press 1975).
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© 2000 Stuart Andrews
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Andrews, S. (2000). Bastille Euphoria. In: The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution, 1789–99. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403932716_1
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