The British Reception of Two French Revolutionary Songs: Ça ira and the Carmagnole, from 1789 to Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Abstract

The French revolutionary songs “Ça ira” and the “Carmagnole” circulated in Britain, from their emergence in France in the early phases to the French Revolution. This article examines the intermedial reception of those songs from 1790 to the mid-Victorian period (Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, 1859).  The songs crossed generic boundaries and were used, by both British radicals and loyalists, in songs, poetry, as tags on objects and caricatures, and as slogans in pamphlets and novels. While “Ça ira” was at the centre of a flurry of ‘Jacobin’ and ‘anti-Jacobin’ polemics in the 1790s, it remained a potent symbol of revolution and emancipation after Waterloo. At the time of Peterloo, radicals broke out into song to reclaim public spaces and test the limits of public speech and conservative repression. Two generations after the French Revolution, the Victorians still remembered the songs, which were revived by the waves of revolutions that battered the Continent in 1830 and 1848. The article ends by exploring the gothic uses of French revolutionary songs by Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens, whose works did much to anchor the negative vision of the French Revolution that has been dominant in Britain to this day.