which represents the apex of human progress, but the View places that assumption under stress, by investigating the relationship between economic liberty and political improvement. Its desire to fold the achievement of a measure of economic liberty into a narrative of improvement is achieved in the face of the seeming collapse of the very possibility of reading the Revolution in such terms. Indeed, Wollstonecraft is often prompted, in her role as a historian, to reflect why, despite the advances of enlightened thinking, the Revolution has produced such frequently shocking and chaotic events; the inadequacies of current “manners” is one of her answers. Her determination to read the French Revolution optimistically thus comes under significant pressure. Clearly, enlightened thinking itself is not enough to secure improvement: it must encounter, and negotiate, hostile circumstances, and preserve itself even in the face of opposing historical forces; such self-preservation might, it seems, involve a change in form. Some indication of this is given when Wollstonecraft remarks on how the Physiocrats “eluded the dangerous vigilance of absolute ministers” by disseminating “truths in the economy of finance” within the “abstract work” of the Encyclopédie (225). In hostile times, enlightened knowledge finds cover in alien forms. Elsewhere in the View, meanwhile, Wollstonecraft considers how reforms are achieved even in the absence of enlightened knowledge – in an episode which takes to its limit her faith in knowledge as the basis for historical change. How far does a sense of generic or formal disguise apply too to Wollstonecraft’s own work – a historical and “moral” account of the French Revolution, in the conventions of enlightenment philosophical history, which nevertheless engages, perhaps unexpectedly, with detailed matters of the “science of finance”? As Jane Rendall has shown, Wollstonecraft was familiar with the progressive histories of improvement written by John Millar, William Robertson, and others in the 1770s and 1780s. Philosophical or “conjectural” history narrated
Wollstonecraft’s own text participates in the state of epistemological uncertainty it identifies in the mob, both in giving credit to “romantic” aristocratic plots around which other historians skeptically skirt, and by ensuring that its own suspicions regarding a bread shortage are raised in the reader too – by leaving sufficient references to it to operate as a kind of crumb trail to a mystery which the text doesn’t quite address or solve, until it is exploded with the decree for the free circulation of grain and the triumphant procession of wheat, flour (and King) to Paris. The coyness of the View on the issue of bread and the grain trade masks the specificity of Wollstonecraft’s personal, political, and professional relationships in France, where she had close links to those involved in grain importation; the symbolic significance of bread, and the mob’s desire for it, nevertheless runs through her text as a whole. Obscurity on such issues may indeed have been advisable at the time Wollstonecraft was writing, as, with the ascendency of the Jacobins in late 1793, the early revolutionary association of economic with political freedoms had been replaced by a climate in which commercial freedoms were not to be spoken of. However, on her first arrival at Paris, Wollstonecraft moved, like many British supporters of the Revolution, in Girondin circles, and would have heard much of the need for economic as well as political liberty. Such concerns were not only theoretical: Thomas Christie, co-founder of the Analytical Review to which Wollstonecraft contributed, and a close friend of hers, was acting in Paris as the agent of Turnbull, Forbes, and Co., London merchants who, until “the decree against the English,” which in October 1793 banned the import and sale of all merchandise originating in the British empire, imported flour from Britain to France. Indeed, this trade relationship was at least once the means for Wollstonecraft to receive money from Joseph Johnson, Christie’s publisher at the Analytical Review, as she was able to draw bills from Johnson through Turnbull’s account. As agent in the flour trade, Christie would evidently have had a professional interest in economic
honest women and the “lowest refuse of the streets,” both women and armed men (196-7). This duality is later given geographical and temporal expression, as, on arrival at Versailles, Wollstonecraft asserts that the unarmed women go to the Assembly, whilst the armed proceed to the Palace; correspondingly, for Wollstonecraft, events at the Assembly can be read as a proto-typical act of popular political expression being met with concessions by governing representatives, whilst, like other commentators, she is uncompromising in her account of the violence, confusion and disorder of the attack on the Palace. This double character of the mob in the View is properly read not as contradiction or ambivalence, but as structurally required: the mob represents the dangers of uneducated political actors or sentiments, as announced by the “Preface,” but also the potential of the “sovereign” will of the people: realized in the storming of the Bastille, and the object of all the exhortations towards the future improvement of Europe (100). Just as the National Assembly is caught in a moment of political hiatus, so too are the mob suspended between what they are and what they might be. The appearance of the mob, “famished,” but only “half famished,” equally suggests a corresponding betweenness in the uncertain and unknowable presence or absence of bread, caught between an absence suggested by the near-starving mob, and a presence which for free trade supporters would be secured by liberalization of the grain trade. Wollstonecraft’s representation of the mob – a term also widely and unapologetically used by other radical writers – is arguably more complex than that of other writers on the revolution, who nevertheless concurred on the dangers of its combination of “heated” passions and suspicious irrationality. For Paine, the Parisian mob is a “class” present in all European countries, produced by the “ill construction” of governments; the violence seen in Paris, he suggests, is comparable to that of the
programme at odds with Wollstonecraft’s more sentimental vision of agrarian domesticity; her support for Physiocracy thus points to a desire to turn the argument about liberalized trade in her direction, as well as illustrating the fluidity of contemporary debate on such matters. By ending her philosophical history with an engagement with Smith, Wollstonecraft appears to recognize that the economic future is increasingly at odds with the bucolic agrarianism expressed in the few moments of lyrical reverie in her text. Unlike a figure such as Paine, who praised commerce as “the greatest approach towards universal civilization that has yet been made by any means not immediately flowing from moral principles” (Paine, Rights, Part Two, 82), her conclusion also indicates the difficulties of integrating economic improvement, as envisaged by Smithian political economy, into philosophical history’s narrative of human progress. According to Scottish philosophical historians, commerce brings improvement in manners, knowledge and hence liberty, but, as Smith himself was aware, the division of labor, a keystone of the fully-articulated capitalist system of economic production, threatened the well-being and “improvement” of the workers by reducing their leisure and hence opportunity for education. Smith’s innovation thus threatens the place of commerce in the virtuous cycle of enlightenment, and the very narrative of enlightened improvement is threatened. Burke’s recognition of this prompts his comparison, in Reflections, in the context of his denouncement of the National Assembly’s attack on monastic property, of the life of the monk and that of the “many wretches” doomed to work “from dawn to dusk in … servile, degrading, unseemly, unmanly, and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations”; for Burke, the “toleration of such trades and employments” is a finely balanced capitulation to the needs of wealth distribution (271). In this light, the economic basis