Kevin Duong
Sep 9, 2017
Flash Mob: Revolution, Lightning, and the People’s Will
Kevin Duong explores how leading French revolutionaries, in need of an image to represent the all important “will of the people”, turned to the thunderbolt — a natural symbol of power and illumination that also signalled the scientific ideals so key to their project.
It is often observed that the French Revolution was a revolution of scientists. Nourished by airy abstractions and heartfelt cries to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, its leaders sought a society grounded, not in God or tradition, but in what Edmund Burke decried as “the conquering empire of light and reason”. To be sure, if we tallied the professional affiliations of the members of the first National Assembly, we would find it overwhelmingly populated by lawyers. But the revolution’s symbols and motifs were not derived from legal practices and traditions, and it was not as men of law that Maximilien Robespierre and Jean-Paul Marat called for the death of their king and the creation of a democratic republic. Rather, they did so as scientists—middle class intellectuals who saw in government a field ripe for experimentation, innovation, and improvement.
Nowhere was this as clear as in their approach to “the will of the people”. Of the many puzzles to which revolutionaries applied themselves as scientists, few seemed so pressing and so intractable. It is obvious what a king’s will looks like, or so we like to think. Kings are individuals, they have bodies, and they can tell us what to do. However they choose to communicate their will — through voice, a gesture, a written pronouncement — it is relatively clear when such acts belong to them. But “the people” enjoy no such obvious body and no evident means of self-expression. What does the will of the people actually look like? And how do we hear their voice if they don’t have a mouth with which to speak? As French revolutionaries enthroned the will of the people, they stepped into uncharted terrain. Democratic revolution, it turned out, required men capable of visualizing the invisible and making appear what escaped our immediate senses. Indeed, it seemed to require the labor of scientific inquiry applied to the people themselves. Like the invisible composition of air, the secret patterns of a magnetic field, or the stratifications of the earth’s soil, democratic politics was governed by a hidden law that the scientist-statesman had to uncover.
Flower Still Life with a Timepiece. Creator: Willem van Aelst
Revolutionary scientists designed a variety of strategies to make the will of the people discernable. They ranged from the statistical to the legalistic. However, one particular approach stood out, both for its intrinsic peculiarity and for its frequency: attempts to analogize the will of the people to lightning strikes. The historian Mary Ashburn Miller has documented the long history of symbolizing sovereignty as lightning.1 In the absolutist imagination, lightning symbolized royal power and its Jupiterian pretensions. The frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 Leviathan features a thunderbolt alongside a crown, cannon, and other items in absolutism’s symbolic ensemble.
With the Revolution, French intellectuals seized this lightning and redirected it against their king. In 1792, as the Revolution radicalized into a democratic revolution, members of the National Convention found themselves debating what to do with Louis XVI.
A similar visual vocabulary is employed in a painting from the same year allegorizing August 10, 1792, the date of the popular insurrection that brought down the French monarchy. Although the painting’s provenance is unknown, its symbolism is clear enough. Lightning erupts from “the mountain”, the nickname for the Jacobins who were seen as the people’s true faction. The lightning disperses the dark clouds with a flash.
These men shared an enthusiasm for democracy and electricity which, oddly enough, informed one another. Yet it shouldn’t be surprising. When faced with new political questions about democracy, these men applied themselves as they were wont to do, namely as scientists. The outcome was a transatlantic circuit of research, discovery, evidence — and radical politics.
