In Search of Mary by Bee Rowlatt

Author:Bee Rowlatt [Rowlatt, Bee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846883781
Publisher: Alma Books

Chapter Eleven

How Not to Betray the Light?

This slightly maddening encounter has provoked more questions than answers. The defence of complexity is worthwhile in principle, but the struggle for simplicity strikes me as a whole lot more useful. Professor Belissa lights a cigarette and walks us to the Metro, exuding elegant smoke and chatting away merrily. I’ve enjoyed meeting him very much, but can’t help wondering what he made of it. But then… a British Wollstonecraft fanatic with a baby. What did he expect?

Later on I am still reflecting on Professor Belissa and his apparent ease in accepting the price of the Revolution. Perhaps he’s right that the blood-soaking and distracting violence has stopped me from seeing the good that happened. Wollstone-craft is harrowed by the violence: she publicly cries out at the sight of the blood-stained street. She makes such a fuss that she herself is at risk: concerned bystanders hurry her away to safety. Her once-pumped enthusiasm now tempered, she writes:

Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.

But then, she is right here at the heart of it all, escaping the old ways and traditions. Here at the decapitation of the Ancien Régime, the birth of the values of modern civilization. Unprecedented freedom is springing up all around her. And freedom has unforeseen consequences: it is also freedom for your enemy. William Blake, the Enlightenment’s own illustrator, knows this when he says of Milton’s Paradise Lost that Milton is “of the devil’s party without knowing it”.

And maybe it’s bloody, but what’s the alternative? Back home Wollstonecraft has some powerful enemies. England, so recently the scene of that magnificent ding-dong between Wollstonecraft and Burke, is now in full backlash mode. The suspicion she arouses as a foreigner in France pales beside the hostility she would face if she returned. She’s not welcome in England. The vibrant debate of 1792 is annihilated in repressive measures bearing names like the Aliens Act and the Treason Trials.

The 1793 Aliens Act is the government’s response to the thousands of refugees (or émigrés, for your posh refugees: several noted Marquises and Chevaliers become waiters and window cleaners in their new English lives) fleeing the Revolution in France. This legislation requires all arrivals from France to register with the authorities, and failure to do so means imprisonment without trial. On top of the suspension of habeas corpus, prohibitive taxes are imposed on pamphlet publishing, and large public gatherings are banned. Anything to squash public interest in the shockwaves emerging from France.

The 1794 Treason Trials are an especially ugly expression of establishment fear. Growing numbers of people, inspired by the French, have begun to call for a more representative government, and an end to MPs buying their titles. The most outspoken are accused of revolutionary tendencies. They are spied upon and harassed by the government. They are arrested, and in a hearty assertion of proper traditional values, they face being hung, drawn and quartered. Even when acquitted, the defendants are crucified by the press.

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