THE LITERARY IMPACT
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OF THE AMERICAN AND FRENCH REVOLUTIONS
those of anti-Semites against the Jews. And the honest intellectual may
also have to play the role of a scapegoat, the "sacrificial Jew." But to be
aJew is always better than to be an anti-Semite.
Susan Sontag:
May I interpose a few remarks about our theme? Most
people would now take for granted that the American and French Rev–
olutions are not simply two examples but two poles of revolutionary
endeavor. Indeed, this polarity between the American Revolution and
the French Revolution became an important
topos
in the discourse of the
repudiation of Communism in Europe. To repudiate the Bolshevik
Revolution was also to repudiate the French Revolution, of which it
was seen as a successor and fulfillment, and to acclaim the American
Revolution as a positive model.
I'd like to speak to the American perspective on this question. For
many of us, the first consideration of this polarity came through reading
contemporary European political philosophers such as Hannah Arendt. It
was Arendt who introduced many Ame ricans to the idea that their rev–
olution was truly radical too, as radical in its way as the French Revolu–
tion. We may call the events that started in 1776 our "revolution," but I
think I am correct in saying that we didn't think it was really a revolu–
tion; not a revolution in the same sense as was the French Revolution. It
was, first of all, a war of secession. Nothing that happened here seemed as
radical as what went on in France, where, in one of its most decisive
symbolic acts, the revolution decreed a new calendar, with new names
for the months of the year. All the imitations of the French Revolution,
such as the short-lived republics in various city-states in Italy, adopted the
French civic calendar.
In contrast, the Americans had no need to rename time in order to
define their break with the past. We had a new space, and creating a
different society in a new space was in itself a revolutionary idea. The
notion of emigration, of migration, of making a new society was radical
enough; we didn't have to think of a new time . The notion of space
superseded that of time. And the American relation to time , both in the
form of the past and of the future, is one of the ways in which we as a
post-European society are most different from the traditional European
societies. We have always had a different, more unforgiving relation to
the past, and a different, more optimistic relation to the future.
As for "The Literary Impact of the American and French Revolu–
tions," isn't it significant that all the important literary texts that come
to mind deal with the French Revolution? Isn't this because, again, we
regard the French Revolution as the real revolution? Think of Carlyle's
The French Revolution,
Buchner's
Danton's Death,
Hugo's
Quatre-vingt-
