Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut

ELIZABETH AMANN is professor in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University, Belgium. She is the author of Importing Madame Bovary: The Politics of Adultery.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-18725-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-18739-6 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226187396.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Amann, Elizabeth, author.

Dandyism in the age of Revolution : the art of the cut / Elizabeth Amann.

   pages : illustrations ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-18725-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-18739-6 (e-book)

1. Dandyism—France—History—18th century.   2. Dandyism—Political aspects—France.   3. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Social aspects.   4. Dandyism—Europe—History—18th century.   5. Dandyism—Political aspects—Europe.   I. Title.

GT867.A45 2015

391'.1—dc23

2014023199

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Dandyism in the Age of Revolution

THE ART OF THE CUT

Elizabeth Amann

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Published with support of the University Foundation of Belgium.

Publié avec le concours de la Fondation Universitaire de Belgique.

Uitgegeven met steun van de Universitaire Stichting van België.

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

1. Muscadins

2. Jeunes gens

3. Incroyables

4. Currutacos

5. Crops

Epilogue

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

NOTES

INDEX

Illustrations

1. Ah! Quelle antiquité!!! . . . Oh! Quelle folie que la nouveauté, engraving by Alexis Chataignier

2. Carle Vernet, Les incroyables, engraving by Louis Darcis

3. Francisco Goya, La tortura del dandy

4. Isaac Cruikshank, The Rival Pigs

5. Simon Petit, L’anarchiste: Je les trompes tous deux

6. L’ami de la justice et de L’humanité

7. Henry William Bunbiry, La rencontre des incroyables, engraving by Louis Charles Ruotte

8. Ah! Qu’il est donc drôle!

9. Carle Vernet, Les merveilleuses, engraving by Louis Darcis

10. Les croyables au Péron, engraving by J. P. Levilly

11. Collets dit parasabre

12. Correction croyable

13. Perfecto currutaco

14. Francisco Goya, Quién más rendido?

15. Francisco Goya, Ni así la distingue

16. Philip Dawe, The Macaroni: A Real Character at the Late Masquerade

17. Isaac Robert Cruikshank, Dandies Dressing

18. Isaac Cruikshank, No Grumbling

19. Isaac Cruikshank, A Crop, of 1791

20. Isaac Cruikshank, The Knowing Crops

21. Isaac Cruikshank, Whims of the Moment or the Bedford Level!!

22. Tippy Bob

23. Mr. Moss in the Character of Caleb

Introduction

At the end of the eighteenth century, a series of new words emerged to describe a character type that already had a long history in European literature. The man once called a fop, coxcomb, beau, popinjay, or macaroni in English, a précieux or petit-maître in French, and a lindo or petimetre in Spanish became the swell or the exquisite, the incroyable or merveilleux, the élégant or elegante, and, in all three languages, the dandy. This lexical shift reflected a change in the value of the character. Whereas the old terms evoked the effeminacy (lindo, beau), absurdity (coxcomb, macaroni), apishness (popinjay), and smallness (petit, preciosity) of the figure, the new terms retain to this day positive connotations: to be swell, exquisite, incredible, marvelous, or elegant is ultimately fine and dandy. The character that was once a lampoon of fashion became in the late eighteenth century an ideal of self-fashioning. The emergence of these positive figures also involved a change of aesthetic, a shift from a cult of accumulation and excess—a style that drew attention to itself—to a principle of understatement and nuance: the art of the cut. My study traces this transformation in dandyism by examining five dandy figures that emerged during the 1790s in Europe: the muscadins, jeunes gens, and incroyables in France, the currutacos in Spain, and the crops in Britain.¹ I argue that the positive revalorization of the figure and its shift in aesthetic cannot be understood outside the revolutionary politics of this moment.

The association between dandyism and revolution may at first seem counterintuitive. We tend to think of the dandy as disengaged and indifferent, too superficial to espouse a political cause and too self-absorbed to care about society. If we ascribe to him any ideological position at all, it is usually a reactionary one. In Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle famously opposed the Dandies—the conservative aristocracy—to the Drudges, the working classes of 1830s Britain, which seemed increasingly to threaten the former’s existence.² But during the French Revolution, the figure did not fall neatly on one side or the other of this dichotomy. Indeed, much of the literature around these types sought to recuperate an ideological center that had vanished during the Terror. As political paranoia escalated in the fall of 1793, the ideological spectrum was reduced to a binary: modéré (moderate) became a taboo word. Many of the texts examined in this study struggle to create a space for a political critique that would not be dismissed as treason, to define a center that was antiterrorist but not counterrevolutionary. The posing of these dandy figures was often a form of opposing, an attempt to make room for dissent in a monolithic political culture.

This study has two parts. The first examines the French figures of the muscadin, jeunes gens, and incroyable and the politics of self-fashioning in France during the Revolution. Through consideration of pamphlets, songs, treatises, newspaper articles, parliamentary debates, vaudeville theater, and caricatures, it argues that after the Terror, these types had an important role in coming to terms with the trauma of the recent past—salvaging the ideals of the Revolution from its excesses—and in forging new forms of political expression that would avoid the binary logic of terrorist thought.

The second part of the project explores the repercussions of the Revolution outside France by examining counterparts of the muscadins and incroyables in Spain and England. Dandyism has always been a deeply cross-cultural phenomenon. Throughout the eighteenth century, the dandy figures in Spain and England—the petimetre and the beau or macaroni—were Francophiles, condemned for wearing costly and often ridiculous French fashions, while the petits-maîtres across the Channel cultivated English styles, introducing l’anglophilie in France.

During the 1790s, however, this cross-cultural exchange took on a new subtext: the politics of revolution. The second part of this study examines how two figures that emerged during this period, the currutaco and the crop, became sites for reenacting and reflecting upon the political turmoil across the Pyrenees and Channel. As with the French types, these figures embodied the struggle to locate a middle ground that preserved the ideals of the Revolution while eschewing the excesses of the Terror. The final chapter, on the English figure of the crop, shows how the modern dandy ideal of understatement emerged from these political reflections.

MASCULINE SINGULAR

Most modern studies of dandyism take their cue from what is undoubtedly the dandiest work on the topic: Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1845 essay Du dandysme et de G. Brummell.³ Placing footnotes within footnotes and winking at the reader with witty aperçus, Barbey d’Aurevilly dresses his text as skillfully as Brummell tied his cravat. This playful vision has come to define dandyism as we know it—as a style that is carefree, flamboyant, idiosyncratic, and without transcendence. It also set the terminus a quo to which most discussions of the figure adhere. By choosing George Beau Brummell as his hero and Regency England as his starting point, Barbey d’Aurevilly began his narrative long after the terrors of Year II (1793–1794) or the pleasures of the Directory (1795–1799). Later histories of the dandy would almost invariably follow suit: in Ellen Moers’s 1960 The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm, French dandyism is born as the exiles return to Paris; it flourishes in a post-Napoleonic world.⁴

If Barbey d’Aurevilly’s treatise cast such a long shadow, it may be because it gave voice to the new ethos and function of fashion in the nineteenth century. Historians and sociologists have observed that the meaning and understanding of dress shifted significantly between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One aspect of this change was a movement away from the determinist vision of clothing prevalent in the ancien régime. In the literature around the petit-maître and in the luxury debates of the eighteenth century, moralists had often argued that opulent attire led to moral corruption. Clothing, in their view, had a formative role on character. In the nineteenth century, this view gave way to an expressive conception of dress. Attire now functioned not as the maker but as the mirror of personality, an expression of the wearer’s individuality.⁵ This shift in function influenced the interpretation of fashion. In the eighteenth century, dress pointed primarily to social status and occasionally to political affiliation. While it continued to have these meanings in the nineteenth century, it increasingly became a way of foregrounding individual particularity—be it by flattering the body of the wearer or by conveying personal idiosyncrasy.⁶

Barbey d’Aurevilly’s vision of dandyism fit with this emphasis on individual expression. Where earlier discussions of elegance—for example, Balzac’s Traité de la vie élégante (1830) or Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)—had dealt with dandies and dandyism, Barbey d’Aurevilly’s subject is a dandy, Beau Brummell, who has no equal: in Du dandysme, the dandy, the singular male, exists only in the masculine singular. Although Brummell also makes an appearance in the Traité de la vie élégante, Balzac introduces him as a teacher of elegance: the goal of the essay is to convert his individual flair into a social and aesthetic code; its assumption is that his style may be reproduced.⁷ Barbey d’Aurevilly, in contrast, insists on the ineffability and irreproducibility of the Beau’s elegance: independence makes the Dandy. There would otherwise be a code of dandyism, but there is not.⁸ For Barbey d’Aurevilly, Brummell’s self-presentation is an emanation of his peculiar genius.

This vision of dandyism as personal idiosyncrasy has come to dominate readings of the dandy, which emphasize the quirks and whims of eccentrics such as Oscar Wilde or Max Beerbohm. The figure itself, however, was born not at the end point of the shift in the role of dress but during the pivotal moment of the transition itself: the French Revolution. As Cissie Fairchild has shown, various views of clothing coexisted and competed during the 1790s.⁹ While the revolutionaries sometimes embraced freedom of dress, at other times they attempted to instill republican values through enforced sartorial codes: obligatory patriotic accessories or national costumes for male citizens. Dress could function in both expressive and formative ways. It was also subject to diverse interpretive frameworks: it could be read as a sign of moral character or of individual caprice. And, very often, it was viewed as a marker of ideological conviction.

This politicization of clothing was probably the most striking aspect of fashion during the Revolution. Throughout this period, dress was a constant source of contention, debated in the legislature and disputed on the streets. The revolutionaries wore their politics on their sleeves (adorned with tricolor cockades), their heads (topped with bonnets rouges), and even their feet (shod in mules révolutionnaires). Tellingly, one of the major icons of the Revolution was identified by a piece of clothing or rather the lack thereof: the sansculotte. Because of this politicization, fashions changed with unprecedented speed during the period. Each shift in ideological tide ushered in a new sartorial fad: the carmagnole might be de rigueur one day, but the scarf à la guillotine would be cutting edge the next. The modern dandy emerged from this moment of flux, from the collision of conflicting visions of clothing and from a series of conflicts that took dress as their battlefield.¹⁰

THREE IMAGINATIONS

This study traces the intersection between male self-fashioning and the political upheaval of the period. In what follows, we will see that the relation between dandyism and revolution was generally viewed from one of three angles. The first, which I refer to as the paranoid imagination, privileges the opposition between surface and depth, appearance and reality. The second, which I call the catastrophic imagination, focuses on the distinction between self and other, us and them. And the third, which I have dubbed the anachronistic imagination, emphasizes the divide between past and present, old and new. Almost all texts about dandyism from the revolutionary period tap into one or more of these imaginations.

The first approach, the paranoid imagination, is concerned with the legibility of social identity. Revolutionary ideology inherited from Rousseau an ideal of transparency and authenticity and an abhorrence of duplicity in all forms. It associated the court and the ancien régime with hypocrisy and falsehood and sought to usher in an age of honesty, a world in which a citizen’s heart could be read upon his face. Transparency was not only a political notion—an ideal of sincerity and solidarity—but also a scientific one: many of the revolutionaries studied physiognomy and believed that they could find correspondences between character and facial features.¹¹

During the 1790s, however, many revolutionaries felt that this ideal of legibility was under threat. As counterrevolutionaries and enemies of the Republic resorted to subterfuge and camouflage, appearances were increasingly perceived as misleading; few signs, indeed, seemed more unreliable than clothing and accoutrement. During these years, dress became a constant source of anxiety and paranoia, subject to countless ordinances and regulations. Police advisories and newspapers warned against signes de ralliement, which could at times be quite subtle: a fleur-de-lis embroidered on an inner lining, a waistcoat with seventeen buttons (a coded allusion to Louis XVII, the young son of the executed king), or an assignat note folded in half in such a way that its legend—usually unity, indivisibility of the Republic, liberty, fraternity or death—read instead liberty, equality, unity, indivisibility, fraternity or the death of the Republic.¹²

In this context, dandyism and self-fashioning introduced a disturbing ambiguity. The dandy is a figure who makes his own life a work of art; he is at once an author and his own character. Dandyism, indeed, might be regarded as a form of autobiography that takes as its medium not words but fabric. Just as the diarist is both subject and object, so the dandy is at once the fashioner and the fashion plate. In both dandyism and autobiography, moreover, the relation between these two positions is a circular one. The writer creates his image on the page, but his writing also shapes his vision of himself. Similarly, the dandy-artist expresses himself through his dandy-persona but is also transformed by the image he creates. To put it another way, the dandy’s clothing volleys back and forth between the expressive and the formative functions of dress: it is alternately the mirror and the maker of the man. In a world that insisted on transparency and authenticity, this artifice and variability inevitably generated suspicion.

The paranoid imagination manifests itself in two forms. The first is a melodramatic obsession with revelation: confronted with an uncertain and possibly misleading sign, the viewer seeks to unmask it, to uncover the reality beneath the ambiguous appearances. A classic example of this appears in the sansculotte newspaper Le Père Duchesne by the radical journalist Jacques-René Hébert. In one issue, the gruff, cigar-smoking sansculotte Père Duchesne tears the wig from the head of a sansculotte in the Palais Royal and reveals that he is really a muscadin in disguise.¹³

This imagination, however, can also manifest itself in more playful ways, taking pleasure in the transformative potential of the role. Dandy texts from the revolutionary period often conflate the subject and object of critique and play with the ambiguity between the two. In earlier eighteenth-century texts, these functions tend to be distinct: an author (the Enlightenment subject) ridicules the fop (an unenlightened other). In the 1790s, in contrast, the satirist often makes his commentary by assuming the persona of the target of his satire: he presents himself as the incroyable or the currutaco and offers himself mock praise. In such texts, it is often difficult to separate the author’s irony from the palpable pleasure that he takes in refashioning himself. At times, indeed, the satirical adoption of the dandy’s voice serves as a celebration and defense of the figure. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the patriotic ditty Yankee Doodle Dandy. The song originally served to mock the disheveled colonists of the French and Indian War. During the battle for independence, however, it would become the rallying cry of the American revolutionaries, a vehicle of their self-definition and political dissent. While the British soldiers parodied the makeshift fashion of the colonial dandy who stuck a feather in his cap and considered himself a stylish macaroni, the revolutionaries took pride in their active self-fashioning, converting provincial arrivisme into a patriotic gesture. In the paranoid imagination, thus, the confusion of subject and object can lead either to compulsive revelation or to playful masquerade.

In turning from the first imagination to the second, we move from the masculine singular to the masculine plural, from the dandy as an enigmatic and undecipherable individual to dandies as a class or political group. As revolutionary politics became increasingly polarized and veered toward class struggle, a binary logic began to prevail in public discourse. The catastrophic imagination reflects this us-versus-them opposition; it explores the distinction between self and other. The dandy is now not an undecipherable sign but rather an unassimilable other, be it social (the aristocrat) or political (the counterrevolutionary, the moderate). As this imagination pits one group against another, its titles tend to come in pairs: les incroyables et les sansculottes; los currutacos y los majos. And its discourse is often anthropological: it probes the strangeness of another culture, offering a glimpse of how the other lives.

The logic of this approach differs considerably from that of the paranoid imagination. The latter seeks out subtle distinctions that lie beneath the surface: the fleur-de-lis hidden under a sansculotte jacket. In the paranoid imagination, sameness is a superficial illusion; the truth is the dissidence and distinction lurking beneath. What lies on the surface in the catastrophic imagination, in contrast, is not similarity but difference. The two antagonists appear to walk, talk, and dress in opposite ways. Frequently, however, they are not as different as they seem, for they are bound by a deeper tie: their common humanity. This imagination often points to the tragedy of such oppositions, which, though essentially insignificant, can lead to catastrophic situations: persecution, violence, and even war.

As with the paranoid lens, the catastrophic imagination has both playful and alarmist variants. In its more ludic incarnations, it takes pleasure not in the confusions and slipperiness of the figure but in its over-the-topness, in its exaggerations and extremes, and in its diametrical opposition to other social groups. In other texts, however, the catastrophic perspective presents a grimmer scenario, imagining cataclysmic and even apocalyptic confrontations. If the threat in the paranoid imagination is confusion, that in the catastrophic is collision, a violent clash between irreconcilable forces that can end only in mutual destruction.

Where the catastrophic imagination brims with anticipation, foreshadowing a dire and destructive confrontation in the future, the third angle—the anachronistic imagination—looks back to the past and examines its relation to the present. Revolution, in this vision, is viewed not as collision but rather as discontinuity, as a rupture in time. And dandyism now represents neither the indeterminacy of self-fashioning nor the threat of class struggle but rather a problem in chronology. The goal of the anachronistic imagination is to come to terms with this change, to understand the relation between the past and the present.

Like the first two imaginations, this angle can take various forms: the dandy may occupy either side of the querelle des anciens et des modernes. In some texts, he is a figure of fashion, embracing all that is modish and modern. Many authors and caricaturists take pleasure in the extreme and almost futuristic aesthetic of the figure: his newfangled accessories and innovative coiffure. In figure 1, which contrasts the fashions of the ancien régime and the Revolution, the incroyable on the left clearly represents the shock of the new: as his acquaintances comment, Quelle folie que la nouveauté (What folly novelty is).¹⁴ In other texts, however, the figure represents a throwback to the ancien régime. After Thermidor, for example, the reappearance of muscadins at the Théâtre Feydeau would strike one commentator as a spectacle from monarchic times.¹⁵ Such holdovers can be portrayed either nostalgically as a vestige of a vanished world or negatively as a threatening revival of prerevolutionary mores. Finally, some writers attempted to attenuate the rupture between the past and the present by tracing a genealogy between the prerevolutionary fop and the modern-day dandy. A British ditty from the period, for example, argues that Dandy and Macaroni are the same/Alike in all respects except the name.¹⁶ Rewriting revolution as evolution, such texts seek to create a continuity between the old and the new.

1. Ah! Quelle antiquité!!! . . . Oh! Quelle folie que la nouveauté, engraving by Alexis Chataignier (Paris: Depeuille, ca. 1797). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Each of these three imaginations views the dandy with a different focus. The paranoid imagination finds in dandyism an epistemological or hermeneutic problem; the catastrophic, a political problem; and the anachronistic, a historiographical problem. In the pages that follow, all three imaginations will come into play, often intermingled and inseparable from one another. Nevertheless, certain periods or groups of texts show a proclivity toward one approach or the other. As will become clear, the function of the dandy during the Revolution changed considerably from one moment to the next, often within a period of just a few weeks or months. The three imaginations will help us to chart these shifts and to understand the development of the figure.

OVERVIEW

The first chapter examines the figure of the muscadin, a term that first appeared in early 1793 in Lyon, the second city of France, famed for its silk industry and luxury trade. The word, however, quickly spread to Paris, where it took on a new range of meaning in the fall of 1793. Initially, it referred simply to the Lyonnais, who had rebelled against the Republic in the spring and had been under siege since August. But in early September journalists and politicians started to apply the term to Parisians as well. In some uses, the word merged with the preexisting term jeunes gens (literally, young people), which designated the youths who had protested (and, according to detractors, dodged) the draft in September 1792 and May 1793. More immediately, however, it became associated with duplicity and acting, with deceptive and ambiguous appearances. The muscadin was a compulsive performer who blurred the distinction between fiction and reality.

In this sense, the word played a central role in the institution of the Terror in the fall of 1793. One of the first examples of this usage appears in the famous speech of September 5 in which the deputy Bertrand Barère vowed to make Terror the order of the day. In the weeks that followed, the crafty self-fashioning of the muscadin would be used in the radical press to justify more rigorous forms of surveillance and punishment and to vilify political antagonists. For example, Jacques-René Hébert’s Père Duchesne conflated the muscadin with the modérés or modérantistes, representatives of the political center, in an attempt to exaggerate the threat of the latter. A fence-straddling figure, the moderate or muscadin introduced a vexing ambiguity that triggered the full excesses of the paranoid imagination. Eventually, Hébert would use the term to refer to any form of political difference or dissent.

Other writers and politicians, however, would take up the idea of an elusive, invisible enemy lurking in the countryside to deflect attention away from groups and individuals that might otherwise be targeted. In these texts, the muscadin serves as a straw man or decoy, an imaginary figure toward whom popular anger and frustration might be redirected. Chapter 1 traces the different ways in which journalists, playwrights, and legislators manipulated the word muscadin and shows how the term became a battlefield of sorts in the crucial debates about the laws and institutions of the Terror. While the word muscadin (like its predecessor petit-maître) still served as a derogatory label, we begin to see in this chapter how in some instances the discourse around the figure was used for antiterrorist ends, as a way of opposing (or circumventing) the monolithic political culture of Year II.

Chapter 2 turns to the Thermidorian Reaction, the fifteen-month period following the downfall and execution of Robespierre and his cohorts on 9–10 thermidor Year II (July 27–28, 1794). During this period, the terms jeunes gens and muscadins would again become contested locutions. For while opponents on the left continued to define those so labeled as counterrevolutionaries and royalists, many of the young men targeted by these epithets would begin to give them a more positive inflection, defining themselves as moderates or antiterrorist republicans. In the fall of 1794, the jeunes gens would become the unofficial militia of a group of deputies who sought to dismantle the Terror and to restore the social order that had been disturbed during Year II. These politicians encouraged the fashionable young men, who became known as the jeunesse dorée (gilded youth), to attack former terrorists in the press and on the street. The activism of the jeunes gens would ultimately lead to the closing of the Jacobin Club in late 1794, the depantheonization of Jean-Paul Marat, the destruction of Jacobin symbols and slogans, and the prosecution of a number of the more prominent terrorists. The behavior of the jeunes gens was often thuggish and vengeful, but their campaign was not simply a form of reaction. As I argue in this chapter, it was also an attempt to recover a political center. By positively reinflecting the terms muscadin and jeunes gens, the young men sought to make room for an opposition that was not considered a form of treason.

One of the most immediate problems they confronted was that of the recent past: whether to punish the former terrorists and how to do so without reproducing the summary judgments of Year II. Texts by and about the jeunes gens are often curiously torn between the impulse to forget, to repress the traumatic past, and the compulsion to remember, to reenact and avenge it. The second chapter of this study examines a series of plays in which the figure partakes in a collective debate about the value of memory in France after the Terror. Mona Ozouf has characterized the post-Thermidor period as one of a forgetting that is always reminding itself to forget.¹⁷ As we will see, the problem of how to deal with the past is central to the literature concerning the Thermidorian trendsetters. Their fashion experiments, indeed, were often wordless vehicles for historical reflection: styles such as the coiffure à la victime (imitating the cropped hair of the executed) or the ubiquitous blond wig (revisiting a vogue of the ancien régime) evocatively pointed to the past, reinserting it in the present. The focus of this chapter is the anachronistic imagination, the problem of understanding a historical rupture. In these texts, the dandy can occupy both sides of the divide: in some he embraces the new in an attempt to break with the past, while in others he is a disturbing throwback, a figure who brings back prerevolutionary mores or who reenacts recent history in troubling ways.

Chapter 3 turns to the Directory and the figure of the incroyable, which first appeared in December 1796 in a series of prints by the Parisian artist Carle Vernet (fig. 2). At first, the incroyable seems a more trivial, insignificant, and comic type than the muscadin or jeunes gens. With his bulky cravats and wide lapels, beribboned culottes, long sidelocks known as dog’s ears, and disarming smile, the figure comes across as innocuous and even endearing. Not surprisingly, the prints were an overnight success, and before long, the type had become a staple of newspaper articles, pamphlets, vaudeville plays, and caricatures. To this day, the incroyable and his female counterpart, the merveilleuse, are familiar figures in France, often encountered in schoolbooks.

The textbook story about them—a tale largely derived from the Goncourt brothers’ Histoire de la société française pendant le Directoire (1855)—is one of exhilarating release and revelry.¹⁸ After the death of Robespierre in 1794, Paris burst into a dancing frenzy—la dansomanie—a return to pleasure and decadence after the austerity, paranoia, and deprivations of the Terror. Throughout the city, balls, restaurants, and salons proliferated, as high society resumed its domain. A new sense of liberty was expressed through unchecked libertinage: women’s waistlines moved north while their necklines moved south, imitating classical models of dress—and debauchery. Hedonism was now the order of the day, and its most ardent partisan was the incroyable.

2. Carle Vernet, Les incroyables, engraving by Louis Darcis ([Paris, 1796]). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

But like his predecessors the figure was quickly associated with the political struggles of the day, first during the contested elections of germinal Year V (March 1797) and later in the conflicts preceding the coup d’état of 18 fructidor (September 4, 1797). In the weeks leading up to the latter, tension broke out between the incroyables, also known as collets noirs (black collars), and the Jacobins and soldiers stationed in Paris. For many commentators, the street fighting seemed an unsettling harbinger of things to come. Journalists on both the right and the left anticipated a cataclysmic confrontation of opposites, a regression to the barbarism and binary logic of the Terror. The catastrophic imagination dominates the texts of this period.

Chapter 3 explores the strategies of self-fashioning adopted in the face of this crisis. As with the jeunes gens, one technique was to reappropriate a negative label and give it a new meaning. Originally, the word incroyable was a disparaging term, a parody of the muscadins’ habit of exclaiming c’est incroyable! (that’s incredible!), but the young men targeted by the term embraced the adjective, playing on its dual sense of amazement and disbelief. The point of these soi-disant incroyables, however, was somewhat different from that of the jeunes gens. For where the latter’s self-fashioning sought to perform and stake out an ideological center, the incroyables called attention to the meaninglessness of their dress. During the conflicts leading up to Fructidor, their controversial black collar was paradoxically a sign that pointed to its own designification. In contrast to the fiery jeunes gens, the incroyables adopted a dispassionate, ironic stance: their strategy was to sidestep the overheated and polarizing discourse of their antagonists and the overinterpretation of appearance by creating a space of nontranscendence, an ironic remove.

Emblematic of this stance was their use of their moniker. Punctuating their commentaries with c’est incroyable, the young men drew attention to the hypocrisy and corruption of their day, to a world so incredible as to be uncreditable. The incroyables’ form of disbelief, however, was very different from the paranoid imagination of the Terror. The typical gesture of the latter was to strip away the actor’s mask, to cross the footlights that separate fiction and reality. The incroyable, in contrast, did not cross the footlights but rather pointed to their existence. With his typical riposte, he underscored the fictionality of the fiction that was contemporary society and observed it at a skeptical remove, symbolized by his hallmark quizzing glass. To put it another way, where the terrorists paranoically revealed the reality underlying a fiction, the incroyable pointed to the fictionality of reality itself (and of his own self-construction). In his wit and detachment, we begin to recognize the modern dandy, but his stance was neither apolitical nor apathetic. It expressed a clear dissent as well as a reflection upon appropriate forms of critique in republican society.

The final two chapters examine the repercussions of the French Revolution abroad through two case studies. Chapter 4 explores the Spanish figure of the currutaco, which like the incroyable, seems at first cartoonish and frivolous. Born of a lighthearted newspaper exchange in the spring of 1795, the currutacos are pint-size creatures who inhabit a fictional, carnivalesque world. As with the French types, however, the specter of revolution hovers over the figure: in a haunting drawing from the period, Francisco Goya depicts a currutaco who looks at himself in a mirror and sees reflected back an image of torture and terror (fig. 3). The world of the currutaco was in many ways such a distorting mirror, an indirect reflection of and upon the events across the Pyrenees.

In the wake of 1789, Spain imposed one of the strictest cordons sanitaires in all of Europe. Customs bans on foreign publications and rigorous press censorship discouraged open public debate about the Revolution. But in the summer of 1795, the chief minister of Spain, Manuel Godoy, concluded a peace treaty with France in Basel, which led to a rapprochement between the two countries and, with it, a relaxation of censorship and a new influx of French publications. It was at precisely this moment that the currutacos began to proliferate in the Spanish press and theater.

Chapter 4 argues that the playful and relatively innocuous literature of currutaquería offered a safe space for debating the ideas of the new republic and their social implications. As in the French case, many of these texts tried to imagine modes of reform and critique that would avoid the excesses of the Terror and its monolithic political culture. Many of these texts dramatized catastrophic encounters, confrontations between the stylish currutaco and the popular Spanish type of the majo (a colorful and cheeky figure from the lower classes). By reenacting the tensions of muscadins and sansculottes in a local context, Spanish writers explored the causes and