Jeanne Fuchs "Sexual Politics: Marivaux's La Colonie" demonstrates
the same metaphorical transformations in three little-known works of the
eighteenth-century playwright Marivaux. Many years before Michelet haunted
the National Archives and even before the Revolutionary People took
providence into their own hands, Marivaux had carnivalized the sexual politics
of his society. In a world as topsy-turvy as the one discussed by Professor
Mannucci, Marivaux's female heroines declare their independence from men
and claim their right to equality. However, as Professor Fuchs concludes, no
literal transformation results from Marivaux's metaphors. Nevertheless,
although his sexual revolution had yet to be conceived on the political stage,
some of its underlying motivations were represented on the comic stage,
demonstrating the extreme complexity of the relationship between discourse
and events. Are events not representations of discourse, just as discourse is
representation of events? Jeffrey Mehlman's essay takes up this paradoxical
problem in Chapter 14).

Claudine Hunting, in "Cazotte and the Counterrevolution, or the Art of
Losing One's Head," and Gislinde Seybert, in "The Concept of Virtue in
Literature and Politics During the French Revolution of 1789: Sade and
Robespierre," also examine traditional prerevolutionary structures as they are
appropriated and changed to deal with revolutionary realities. Jacques
Cazotte, in his quasi-delirious counterrevolutionary apologies, reads the French
Revolution through the Book of Revelations, and casts himself in the role of
the prophet Eleazar and the executed king in the role of the crucified Christ.
Events can only signify through preexisting texts--through old language--and
Professor Seybert shows both how revolutionaries like Robespierre strove to
make use of old language, in this case the Christian and antique concepts of
virtue, to establish and exercise totalitarian political control, and how a
"subversive" like Sade articulated and undercut the revolutionaries' ideological
program in his "Libertine's" carnivalizations of virtue.

Women played a role in revolutionary politics, and it is further
illustration of the highly politicized nature of historical representations that
their role in the making of the Revolution and in the inscribing of it in
discourse, has all but been effaced, and is only just now being re-created as
history by writers such as Susan Tenenbaum, Mary Trouille, and Catherine
Montfort. Susan Tenenbaum, in "Mme. de Staël: Comparative Politics as
Revolutionary Practice," demonstrates Mme. de Staël's mastery of the
Montesquieuian system of comparative politics, and shows how in her hands
it became a "revolutionary practice, "alternately a sharp propaganda technique
deployed against Napoleonic hegemony in Europe and a constructive agenda
for the advancement of democracy among all European peoples. Mary Trouille
, in "Revolution in the Boudoir: Mme. Roland's Subversion of
Rousseau's Feminine Ideals," shows how a different Enlightenment discourse
shaped the life and the writings of Mme. Roland. This extraordinary woman,
who was to welcome death on the guillotine because it permitted her to die
both in love and virtuous like Rousseau's divine Julie, played a key role in the
Girondist period both as a writer and as a behind-the-scenes political activist.

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