The Age of Revolutions as an Age of Witnessing

History-writing depends on the witness of the archives. Yet we associate witnessing, more narrowly, with very specific traditions: the ancient and evolving legal tradition of court-room testimony, for example, or the Protestant commitment to witnessing the faith, with its violent roots in early martryology. Most powerfully, the late twentieth century produced the literary and moral tradition of Holocaust witness, and a theoretical response stretching from Agamben to Derrida. If witnessing is a transhistorical and transnational matter rooted in distinctive traditions, this paper explores the particularity of witnessing revolution across and between borders in the formative moment of the late eighteenth century.

The age of revolutions produced or propelled at least three distinctive modes of witnessing. Perhaps most well-known is that we might term epistolary tourism: the witnessing of writers, typically of radical bent, such as Mary Wollstonecraft or Helen Maria Williams, who published Letters from revolution’s side. Those well-known literary accounts contrast to what have become known as slave narratives, but which we might helpfully conceptualize in their late eighteenth-century form as testimonies to slavery’s suffering: the publication, in the 1780s and 1790s, of accounts by former slaves seeking to press upon the era’s proclamations about liberty and equality. Finally, and typically of less egalitarian or radical bent, was military reportage: the declaredly “eyewitness” event-based narratives composed by army officers who served the interests of ancien regime empire as much as independence. Each of these traditions, I argue, had a distinctive geography across the late eighteenth century revolutions and between New and Old Worlds. And each dwelled on what has been a hallmark of witnessing across time: a focus and a struggle with pain, suffering and death.