Abstract
Jacques Mallet Du Pan’s essay ‘Du Degré d’influence qu’a eu la philosophie française sur la Révolution’ [‘Of the degree of influence which the French Philosophy has had upon the Revolution’], was one of the most significant essays he ever wrote. A partial refutation of the philosophic and freemasonic conspiracy theories popularised throughout Europe by abbé Augustin Barruel’s celebrated Mémoires pour server à l’histoire du jacobinsme français, it illustrates the extent to which even one of the most informed, politically moderate and, reputedly, judicious of revolutionary exiles, blamed the revolutionary contagion on the enlightenment and its enthusiasts. This essay uses Mallet’s engagement with Barruel’s argument, and the contexts in which it arose, as a starting point to explore the emergence and circulation of conservative discourses concerning the dangers of philosophie and demands for liberty through the cosmopolitan public sphere and international conservative networks, both before and after the outbreak of the French revolution. In the process, it suggests that then, as now, the print public sphere – so often associated in this period with progressive politics – was, save in times of revolutionary rupture, structurally conservative to a degree unrecognised hitherto, and shows how key conservative discourses were circulating in the Christian apologetic writings and among an elite European audience two decades before the French revolution.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Cosmopolitan Conservatisms: Countering Revolution in Transnational Networks, Ideas and Movements (c. 1700‒1930) |
Editors | Matthijs Lok, Friedemann Pestel, Juliette Reboul |
Place of Publication | Netherlands |
Publisher | Brill |
Pages | 86-107 |
Number of pages | 22 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9789004446731 |
ISBN (Print) | 9789004445239 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2021 |