BASTILLE

(A)s the reality of the Bastille became more of an anachronism, its demonology became more and more important in defining opposition to state power. If the monarchy was to be depicted (not completely without justice) as arbitrary, obsessed with secrecy and vested with capricious powers over the life and death of its citizens, the Bastille was the perfect symbol of those vices. (...)
And in some senses it was reinvented by a succession of writings of prisoners who had indeed suffered within its walls but whose account of the institution transcended anything they could have experienced. So vivid and haunting were their accounts that they succeeded in creating a stark opposition around which critics of the regime could rally. The Manichean opposition between incarceration and liberty; secrecy and candor; torture and humanity; depersonalization and individuality; open-air and shut-in obscurity were all basic elements of the Romantic language in which the anti-Bastille literature expressed itself. The critique was so powerful that when the fortress was taken, the anticlimactic reality of liberating a mere seven prisoners' (including two lunatics, four forgers and an aristocratic delinquent who had been committed with de Sade) was not allowed to intrude on mythic expectations. (...) revolutionary propaganda remade the Bastille's history, in text, image and object, to conform more fully to the inspirational myth.
The 1780s were the great age of prison literature. Hardly a year went by without another contribution to the genre, usually bearing the title The Bastille Revealed (La Bastille Dévoilée) or some variation. It used the standard Gothic devices of provoking shudders of disgust and fear together with pulse-accelerating moments of hope. In particular, as Monique Cottret has pointed  out, it drew on the fashionable terror of being buried alive. This was such a preoccupation in the late eighteenth century (and not only in France) that it was possible to join societies that would guarantee to send a member to one's burial to listen for signs and sounds of vitality and to insure against one of these living entombments.
In what was by far the greatest and deservedly the most popular of all the anti-Bastille books, Linguet's Memoirs of the Bastille, the prison was depicted as just such a living tomb. In some of its most powerful passages Linguet represented captivity as a death, all the worse for the officially extinguished person being fully conscious of his own obliteration.

IMAGES

(such ) images represented a systematic attempt by the propagandists of Jacobin culture to build a new, purified public morality. The nation would not be truly secure until those whom it comprised internalized the values on which it had been reconstructed. Inheriting from Rousseau (albeit in garbled form) the doctrine that government was a form of educational trust, the guardians of the Revolution meant to use every means possible to restore to a nation corrupted by the modern world the redemptive innocence of the presocial child. On the ruins of monarchy, aristocracy and Roman Catholicism would sprout a new natural religion: civic, domestic and patriotic. (...) it was to images, in their broadest sense, that the Jacobin evangelicals paid special attention. Fabre d'Eglantine (...) used sense-impression theory from the Enlightenment to convince the Convention that "we conceive nothing except by images: even the most abstract analysis or the most metaphysical formulations can only take effect through images."
There was, then, an organized endeavor to replace the visual reference points of the old France with a whole new world of morally cleansed images. The public Salon of 1793, for example, featured, along with David's two martyrologies, innumerable paintings in which domestic and patriotic virtues were fused. The "Woman of the Vendée," for instance, in manyversions, blows up herself and her family rather than surrender powder to the "brigands." Child-heroes became important, among them the "young Darruder," who picked up his father’s weapon on the field of battle and charged the enemy with it. At the level of popular art, tradesmen were encouraged to exhibit their patriotism by displaying "civic boards" outside their shops in place of the traditional signs. Even playing cards were subjected to this épuration, the queen of hearts being transformed into "Liberty of the Arts" while the king was a sans-culotte general.
The most serious attempt to create a new "empire of images," in Fabre's arrestingly modern term, was the invention of the revolutionary calendar. This was also an attempt to reconstruct time through a republican cosmology. The special commission appointed to make recommendations was a peculiar mixture of literary men such as Fabre, Romme and Marie-Joseph Chénier and serious scientists such as Monge and Fourcroy. Together the saw the reform as an opportunity to detach republicans from the superstitions they thought embodied in the Gregorian calendar. Their efforts were directed especially at the rural world, to which the vast majority of Frenchmen still belonged. In keeping with the cult of nature, the twelve months were to be named not just after the changing weather (as experienced in northern and central France) but in poetic evocations of the agricultural year. The first month (which necessarily began with the founding of the Republic in late September) was the time of the vendange, the wine harvest and thus was called Vendémiaire. 

REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE.

Popular revolutionary violence was not some sort of boiling subterranean lava that finally forced its way onto the surface of French politics and then proceeded to scald all those who stepped in its way. Perhaps it would be better to think of the revolutionary elite as rash geologists, themselves gouging open great holes in the crust of polite discourse and then feeding the angry matter through the pipes of their rhetoric out into the open. Volcanoes and steam holes do not seem inappropriate metaphors here, because contemporaries were themselves constantly invoking them. Many of those who were to sponsor or become caught up in violent change were fascinated by seismic violence, by the great primordial eruptions which geologists now said were not part of a single Creation, but which happened periodically in geological time. These events were, to borrrow from Burke,  both sublime and terrible. And it was perhaps Romanticism, with its addiction to the Absolute and the Ideal; its fondness for the vertiginous and macabre; its concept of political energy as, above all, electrical; its obsession with the heart; its preference far passion over reason, for virtue over peace that supplied a crucial ingredient in the mentality of the revolutionary elite:  its association of liberty with wildness. (...)
There was another obsession which converged with this Romanticization of violence: the neoclassical fixation with the patriotic death. The annals of Rome (and occasionally the doomed battles of Athens and Sparta) were the mirrors into which revolutionaries constantly  gazed in search of self-recognition. Their France would be Rome reborn, but purified by the benison of the feeling heart. It thus followed, surely, that for such a Nation to be born, many would necessarily die. And both the birth and death would be simultaneously beautiful.