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Introduction

Bede Scott
Affiliation:
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
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Summary

[T]he affective quality of the world matters more than its geography.

Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, 1953

[Feeling] is nothing without form.

Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, 12 August 1846

I would like to begin, if I may, in a rather unpredictable place: provincial France in the summer of 1789. At this time, the country was undergoing a political and economic crisis that has been well-documented. The harvest had failed, food prices were rising, and unemployment was rife. In Paris, the Revolution was gathering momentum, and as news of the fall of the Bastille filtered through to the provinces, a number of rumours began to circulate. It was said that the aristocracy were planning to subdue the uprising by force, and that they had recruited foreign soldiers and ‘brigands’ in order to do so. It was also said that this army of mercenaries would be marching through the provinces to quell the various disturbances that had taken place there too. These rumours travelled with astonishing speed, and as they moved from village to village, they produced a particular kind of affective response that has come to be known as the Great Fear of 1789. People everywhere experienced an overwhelming sense of panic and anxiety, but this was not a vague and intangible national mood; it was a circulation of feeling whose speed and specific coordinates, at any given point in time, can be traced with remarkable accuracy (see Figure 1). According to Georges Lefebvre, the fear travelled from Clermont-en-Beauvaisis to the Seine, a distance of about fifty kilometres, in twelve hours. As it moved more slowly at night, it covered the five hundred kilometres from Ruffec to Lourdes in nine days, while elsewhere it travelled ‘from Livron to Arles – a hundred and fifty kilometres – in forty hours, which makes [an average of] four kilometres an hour, night and day’ (Lefebvre, Great 155). In his classic study of the Revolution, Lefebvre was able to follow the progress of this emotion as it was transmitted throughout the provinces:

A ‘disturbance’ at Nantes alarmed Poitou. At Estrées-Saint-Denis, in the Beauvais, another spread fright in all directions. A third in southern Champagne sowed terror through the Gâtinais, Bourbonnais, and Burgundy.

Type
Chapter
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Affective Disorders
Emotion in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature
, pp. 1 - 30
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • Introduction
  • Bede Scott, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
  • Book: Affective Disorders
  • Online publication: 02 July 2020
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  • Introduction
  • Bede Scott, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
  • Book: Affective Disorders
  • Online publication: 02 July 2020
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Bede Scott, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
  • Book: Affective Disorders
  • Online publication: 02 July 2020
Available formats
×