In the midst of Frances revolution, and the shockwaves it sent all over Europe and further, another revolutionary change took place. It was the threat of literature. This paper studies certain political actor’s solutions to the challenges that faced but also shaped politics and the technologies themselves, such as reading, in England during the 1790’s. For many the spreading of literature was an end in itself. It held the enlightenment promise of a world runned by reason. But it was also a means. The intellectuals typically associated with the revolution in France, and the welcoming of it in England, – say Voltaire and Thomas Paine – were all well versed in the workings of literature. Pitted against the revolutionaries we usually find political actors such as Edmund Burke. This paper argues for more nuanced and historical understanding of the conflict, one that doesn’t give literature any inherent properties, as an a priori radical tool. We need to understand these technologies as something that there could be a different kind of solution to than repression, that Burke and his fellow hostiles to the revolution rather shaped these technologies in a mould that would fit their political cast. In this way there was, besides the ideological disputes, a struggle for the nature of literature. This took shape through a renewed interest in educating the people in institutions such as Sunday schools, and by press efforts like the magazine Anti-Jacobin; or, the weekly examiner, which form the basis of the study. This paper argues that they changed the rules of literature. Therefore it is not the immediate introduction of a technology or media that necessarily is revolutionary – not Gutenberg, nor Arpanet – but when it is spread to the people and when certain protocols for the media is shaped, that is, when they are assigned a function. This paper is a study of the shaping of literatures protocols and with that the anti-Jacobins themselves.

Cette thèse étudie un corpus de romans anglais, encore peu étudiés en France et jamais étudiés collectivement, publiés entre 1782 et 1805 par des écrivains et des écrivaines se rattachant par leurs idées et, pour certains, leur militantisme actif, au mouvement radical qui se développe en Angleterre dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, s’amplifie et s’organise sous l’impulsion de la Révolution française, puis, sévèrement réprimé par le gouvernement de William Pitt, s’effondre à la fin de la décennie. Cette séquence historique laisse des traces profondes dans l’œuvre des romanciers radicaux, dont beaucoup, comme William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft et John Thelwall, sont philosophes ou polémistes avant d’être romanciers et prennent la plume pour défendre les droits de l’homme (et de la femme) dans le débat anglais sur la Révolution française qui oppose Edmund Burke à Thomas Paine. En croisant l’histoire des idées politiques, l’histoire sociale et culturelle du mouvement radical, l’histoire du livre et la narratologie classique, ce travail s’efforce de mettre en lumière la façon dont les romans encodent une certaine idéologie politique dans leurs formes – du discours des locuteurs au format de publication des romans, en passant par leurs narrateurs, leurs intrigues, leurs personnages, leur style et leurs silences signifiants. Un tel examen fait ressortir, plutôt qu’une idéologie radicale unifiée, une tension récurrente entre deux versions, libérale et jacobine, bourgeoise et plébéienne, du radicalisme, dont l’articulation conflictuelle revêt différentes formes d’un auteur à l’autre et d’un terme à l’autre de la période étudiée, à mesure que la réaction conservatrice enterre les espoirs radicaux de réformes. / This dissertation examines a corpus of English novels which have been little studied in France as yet and never as a whole. The novels were published between 1782 and 1805 by a group of writers who, by their ideas and in some cases active political commitment, belong to the radical movement which developed in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, gained impetus and structure in the wake of the French Revolution, and collapsed at the end of the decade when faced with repression from the government of William Pitt. Radical novelists, many of whom, like William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and John Thelwall, were philosophers and pamphleteers before they took to novel-writing, flew to the defence of the rights of man (and of the rights of woman) in the revolution controversy which pitted Thomas Paine against Edmund Burke – and their work bears the mark of the rise and demise of the radical movement. Combining intellectual history with classical narratology, book history, and the social and cultural history of radicalism, this dissertation seeks to highlight the way in which political ideology is built into the very forms of the novels – in the characters’ speech and the characters themselves, in the novels’ plot and narration type, in their style and publishing format, as well as in their meaningful silences. Such a study brings to light, rather than a coherent radical ideology, a recurring tension between two versions of radicalism, liberal and jacobin, bourgeois and plebeian, whose partly conflicting conjunction assumes different shapes from one novelist to the other and between the early 1780s and late 1790s, as radical hopes of reform sink under the conservative backlash.

This diploma thesis deals with the famous controversy concerning interpretation of the French Revolution between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. This controversy is put into context with English debate on the revolution, which commenced with Price´s sermon (On the Love of our Country, 1789). Burke responded with his work Reflections on the revolution in France to that and subsequently Paine reacted with a text Rights of Man, in which he expounded his philosophy of the rights of man. The focus concentrates in the diverse interpretation of the concept of human rights with both authors.