The transnational circulation of radical ideas of equality and rights has deeply shaped European societies since the events of the French Revolution. Yet despite the eighteenth-century boom in translation, revolutionary-era translation practices have only recently attracted sustained scholarly attention (Chappey, 2013; Chappey and Martin, 2017; Bret and Chappey, 2017; Schreiber, 2020; D’hulst, 2022). This is surprising given that the language of revolution was transnational from the outset and its message was imagined—at least by its protagonists—as being applicable to all times and places (Jourdan, 2004; Alpaugh, 2022). This article considers the role of translation in extending revolutionary ideas and vocabularies into new contexts. It argues that this process of extension cannot be captured simply by using quantitative measurements, for instance by considering how many source texts circulated in a target culture or establishing the size of the readership they reached. For as “texts about texts”, all translations are also fundamentally a kind of “metastatement” (Tymoczko, 2010a, p. 232). During the revolutionary period, these translational metastatements became highly performative narratives in their own right as translators sought to actively construct a meaning for a historical process that was still unfolding. As this article shows, they came close to functioning as ‘metanarratives’, that is to say, highly self-reflexive accounts that reframed existing narratives about transformative social change (revolutionary or otherwise) through a process of comparison, identification, expansion, and differentiation. Lyotard (1979) famously associated metanarratives with ‘grand’ or ‘master narratives’, defining them as totalizing theoretical accounts of historical events that seek to appeal to universal values in order to legitimize power and reinforce authority. Although the Revolution is a case in point, this is not the sense in which I use the term here. On the contrary, I take metanarrative to mean a self-reflexive action in which the translator, either implicitly or explicitly, takes on the role of narrator in order to shape the outcome of a historical narrative whose significance is still unfolding. 1 These metanarratives were looser and more provisional than the types of myth-making sometimes associated with the period of the French Revolution. In their ensemble, they capture the extraordinary flexibility and open-endedness of the kinds of stories made possible by this unprecedented and, in many instances, unimaginable historical transformation. They were also extraordinarily concrete as translators grappled with the problem of extending a narrative that had developed in one historical context into another. Although highly self-conscious, during the tumultuous period of the French Revolution these metanarratives assumed a pragmatic function. Through them translators also sought to establish networks of solidarity across borders and insert themselves as social and political actors into a fast-developing transnational narrative of revolution whose final form was as yet undetermined. Finally, in seeking to legitimate a certain interpretation of the direction of history over others, these narratives promoted new ways of relating to past and present authorities and new models of kinship, sometimes at great personal risk to the translators themselves.

Considerable challenges, however, confront any historian who seeks to recover and assess these translational metanarratives. Chief among them is that we, too, as historians today, are also engaged in constructing narratives of the past. We too risk reproducing a “methodological nationalism” (Beck, 2007; Bielsa, 2022) whenever we privilege nationally-specific chronologies—and by extension narratives—of where any given revolution begins and ends. This article proposes a new model for understanding the transnational circulation of revolutionary texts and translators in this period. Its point of reference is the research undertaken by the UK-based project Radical Translations: The Transfer of Revolutionary Culture between Britain, France and Italy (1789-1815).2 This project has identified nearly 1000 revolutionary-era translations and constructed a prosopography of some 500 translators in order to map the circulation of radical ideas in the revolutionary period between English, French and Italian. In doing so it has raised the further difficult question of how to relate our bibliographical and interpretative studies of translations as texts to our historical knowledge of translators as political and social actors.

This article consists of two parts. First, I will consider how translational narratives of revolution came to be constructed and their significance for how we, as historians today, tell this story about the past. Secondly, I will focus on three distinct moments in the revolutionary period during which translation played this role of metanarrative: (a) the period of the 1780s and early 1790s, when a transnational idiom of revolution first emerged; (b) the years 1788-1792, a high point of French revolutionary culture when the need to establish the authoritative basis of a new way of thinking became most acute; and (c) the period after 1796, when the French revolutionary armies exported the Revolution into new political and social contexts, in the process generating new contradictions.

A corpus of radical translations

It must be noted from the outset that the corpus of ‘radical translations’ discussed here is not a catalogue of all the translations undertaken during the revolutionary period. Nor does it include state-sponsored translations, an important activity during the revolutionary period when official documents needed to be translated both internally, into other languages and dialects spoken in France (De Certeau et al., 1975), and externally, when the creation of new sister republics necessitated the translation of legal and other documents into adjacent European languages (Schreiber and D’hulst, 2017). Rather, this is a corpus of what scholars of more contemporary historical periods have referred to as activist translations (Baker, 2006; Tymoczko, 2010b). These are translations that seek to intervene politically or socially, reflect the choices and convictions of a group of like-minded individuals, and operate independently or at some remove from established institutions or state structures. Such translations are “selected, invented and improvised for their tactical values in specific situations, contexts, places and times” (Tymoczko, 2010a, p. 230); create new kinds of “narrative communities” through “election or conversion” (Baker, 2006, p. 472), and establish networks of solidarity between different groups, movements, and concerns (Fernández, 2021). Extremely context-dependent, these translations operate differently from other kinds of translations in that they are primarily future-oriented. What matters is not fidelity to a prestigious source text, but the impact that a translation itself can have in a rapidly evolving situation in which lives are at risk and political decisions can have irreversible consequences.

During the period of the French Revolution, such committed translations were supported or promoted by a transnational network of revolutionaries, translators, publishers, authors, and booksellers who worked across geographical, political, and linguistic borders and shared some of the same revolutionary experiences, notably exile. Through a sometimes highly creative use of paratextual material (titles, title pages, dedications, epigraphs, prefatory material, footnotes and even, in some cases, publishers’ imprints), activist translators interpolated new readers, and in so doing attempted to enlarge the public narratives around revolution. But because these narratives were also highly personal, they provide a unique window into how revolutionary events were experienced by the protagonists themselves, the ways in which these protagonists explicitly or implicitly referenced their own role in writing this developing historical narrative, and what they made of the contradictions and aporias that revolutionary language produced when applied to their own personal and political context.

Translation, of course, was not the only space where narratives of revolution were elaborated. Especially with regards to the French Revolution, narratives were produced by state actors and private individuals alike and communicated via a variety of forms: theatre, festivals, paintings, songs, journalism, processions, monuments, funerals, memoirs, and letters, to name just a few. Because many of these were performed or expressed in a monolingual context, studies of revolutionary culture have not always taken into sufficient account the extent to which Revolution itself was a transnational movement, fundamentally influenced by the mobility of both people and texts.

By contrast, translation offers a privileged access to revolutionary culture even if it cannot account for all the ways in which revolutionary meaning was created and communicated. Revolutionary culture, after all, is unlike any other culture. It is characterized not by the desire for continuity but by claims of rupture with the past and the sense of living in a new time. Within such a context, pre-existing relationships with the past no longer hold, and new sources of authority must be established in the absence of any knowledge of what the future will look like. Faced with this extraordinarily open future and the lack of an established canon, translations became key vehicles for establishing new lines of descent between past and present. Consider, for instance, the role of translation in reactivating the latent potential of established source texts that were already perceived as having anti-establishment qualities. In the Radical Translations corpus, this includes the writings of Machiavelli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the anti-tyrannical plays of Shakespeare, and the ‘underground classics’ associated with what historians have called the atheistic or ‘Radical Enlightenment’ (Jacob, 1981; Israel, 2002). Many (but not all) of the radical translations in this corpus present themselves as continuing this enlightenment tradition of extending, modifying or publicizing source texts whose contents were once deemed (or were still deemed) too dangerous to be openly published. Translators also promoted new source texts written by contemporaries. In this category we find, for instance, the many translations and retranslations of Thomas Paine, the various retranslations of Volney’s Ruines, and the multiple, sometimes simultaneous translations of official or semi-official texts such as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the different constitutions promulgated by the French government.

All these translations are concerned less with preserving the prestige of a source text than with how it can function as a model, or as what Even-Zohar (1990) has called a “potential set of instructions” (p. 19). Indeed, as Even-Zohar observes, during times of crisis, “when at a turning point no item in the indigenous stock is taken to be acceptable”, translated literature, precisely because it brings into the centre of the target system texts or codes that have been developed elsewhere, assumes a “central position” (p. 48). We see this clearly with Gaspare Sauli’s 1797 Italian translation of La Religieuse, Diderot’s sexually explicit novel about cloistered nuns. Sauli justifies the need for his translation by arguing that convents in Italy still exist, unlike in France where they had been recently abolished. He furthermore uses the text to issue a set of instructions, dedicating his translation to “all girls who have just turned 14” (Alle fanciulle che han compiti 14 anni) (Diderot, 1797, p. 5).3 and exhorting them to read the novel and resist their “parents”, “their confessor” and anyone else in a context where “the barbaric custom of burying so many innocent victims alive still exists” (ove l'uso barbaro di seppellir vive tante vittime innocenti ancora sussiste) (Diderot, 1797, p. 3). For Sauli, the interlingual aspect of translation as a process of cultural transfer across languages is inseparable from its intralingual function of adapting a text to new purposes, in this case by communicating new ideas of sexual freedom that cross religious, political and gender divides. He notes, “I am a friend of freedom even in language” (Sono amico della libertà anche nella lingua) (Diderot, 1797, p. 4,). Translation, in this case, is also an opportunity to develop a new aesthetic language that aims to extend the intended readership of the source text through a transparent, readable, ‘plain’ style that nevertheless introduces neologisms such as the term sensibilité from the French (Villa, 1990).

As Sauli’s translation makes clear, activist translations are about much more than simply creating a new or different literary canon. They are also a means of drawing attention to the structures of inequality in one’s own domestic or political context. In other words, they promote narratives that address what happens in a period of crisis when overarching interpretations of social value and one’s place in the world begin to dissolve or exist only in embryonic form. When it comes to revolution, these metanarratives about historical rupture are never singular but always plural. Since translations always reference at least two chronologies or timelines—that of the source text and that of the target culture—, they articulate shared, yet differentiated narratives of the significance of historical events and their pace of change. A perceived revolutionary opening in the source culture becomes the catalyst for creating a new opening in the target culture, the way, for instance, the French abolition of convents galvanized Sauli to urge his compatriots to do the same, taking Diderot’s text much further than its author had envisioned or intended.

These translations, then, should not be dismissed as foreign imports or efforts to passively imitate the French. On the contrary, they constitute a highly self-reflexive attempt to create new lines of descent between past and present, or what Nietzsche, and more recently Foucault, have called the task of writing a critical genealogy of the present. Translations such as Sauli’s not only proposed new ways of relating to historical antecedents, they also opened up new debates, for example about the extent to which Italy should or should not sever ties with Catholicism in the process of its own revolution. They demonstrate the extent to which metanarratives of revolution also functioned as genealogical models, opening up new lines of kinship by attempting to change how people relate to the artefacts—physical, conceptual, social, textual, artistic or linguistic—that form and inform them. At the same time, it is amongst the pages of translated literature that we can track how these new genealogical models were also challenged, revised, or otherwise altered by the revolution’s many protagonists and their own changing relationship to historical events. For the assertion of new lines of kinship is almost always something intensely personal, intimately tied to the personal life stories and complex personas of the translators themselves.

This is certainly the case for the radical English author and translator Helena Maria Williams, who undertook an abridged retranslation of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s bestselling novel Paul et Virginie while imprisoned in Paris as a suspected enemy agent during the Terror.4 Translation, she notes in her preface, was an escape from “overwhelming misery” as well as a way to keep writing when “writing was forbidden employment” and “even reading had its perils” (Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, 1796, p. iv). Williams draws attention to how she added her own sonnets alongside the translation. Some of these, she bitterly regrets, were confiscated by a suspicious French government as if they too were “political” writings, to be filed away in some government bureau alongside “revolutionary placards, motions and harangues” (Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, 1796, p. v). But Williams, who was close to the British radicals in Paris, was also a suspect in the eyes of the English, not least because of her sympathies with the French Revolution. In her preface, written in 1795, she repudiates the Terror and distances herself from it. Moreover, by choosing to translate Paul et Virginie, a novel with perceived abolitionist undertones, she not only asserts her continued allegiance to principles of liberty and equality, but also aligns herself with like-minded sympathizers in the English-speaking world who were already familiar with the source text. Partly on the strength of her own abridged translation, which was printed in twenty editions by 1850 (Robinson, 1989), Paul et Virginie became a favourite text of the British abolitionist movement (Barker, 2011), and was even adapted for the London stage (Calè, 2007). In this case, a translation acts not only as a metastatement on a source text, but also as a metanarrative of the French Revolution itself, a way of inscribing the translator’s own position and influence (or not) on the unfolding sequence of events.

Many translators, different life stories, shared commitments

It is important to pay attention to these personal narratives—often expressed through a paratextual apparatus—because they contribute to a broader understanding of Revolution itself as a political category that refers to a pluralistic movement involving many actors. Pluralistic movements require us to take into account both a committed core of known agents and people who were only sporadically involved in certain contexts and times (Armando and Belhoste, 2018). So too with revolutionary-era translators who never just translated but also had other roles, be it as politicians, teachers, diplomats, lawyers, publishers, printers, journalists, doctors, playwrights, or scientists. And yet, it is striking how many of these activist translators shared similar professional profiles, indicating that they belonged to a shared social group, or at least to similar or overlapping social circles. This raises an immediate challenge for any historian wishing to reconstruct a coherent narrative of the role played by revolutionary-era translators and, perhaps, activist translators more generally: how to integrate their translation practices within a larger personal and collective biography in which translation only played an occasional role. Some translators, such as Thomas Jefferson, were highly visible public figures whose translation work has often been overshadowed by their more prominent publications. Others of equally high profile, such as Mirabeau, used translation as a means of hiding in plain sight. Legions of others wrote anonymously or under pseudonyms, either because they feared repercussions or because they were so universally known that they did not need to be named.

This raises a second, related, challenge for research, namely how to disentangle the various motivations for translating that such people may have had. Translators sometimes worked on commission or simply to eke out a living, especially when, due to their political convictions, they experienced hardships of various kinds. At other times, their political activities might have led them to overtly, even ostentatiously, foreground their identity as authors or, conversely, hide behind the translator’s mask when they could not openly express their allegiance to revolutionary ideals, whether due to their public position, outright censorship or because they were imprisoned. Correlating what they translated with when, how and where they translated can provide us with additional clues to their motivation. In terms of the Radical Translations project, this required the researchers to cross-reference a corpus of translated texts with historical knowledge of people, including the events they witnessed or took part in, and the places they lived or passed through, where they may have encountered one another.

In fact, of the approximately five hundred radical translators in the Radical Translations corpus, nearly half are anonymous or partially anonymous, reflecting the sheer number of ‘radical’ translations that circulated anonymously during this period. There remains, thus, an important gap in our knowledge that can only be bridged by unmasking—or trying to unmask—the identities of the translators themselves. To do so, it was necessary to adopt a prosopographical approach that situated translators as members of a social circle or group, even where their individual identities remained obscure. Prosopography developed as a method of recovering the collective identity of a group where individual biographies may be lacking or missing in the historical record (Verboven et al., 2007). But it has also been used very effectively to document collective movements that have no single authors or agents (Verboven et al., 2007), such as humanism, the Enlightenment, freemasonry (Porset and Révauger, 2013) and, more pertinently, the French Revolution itself (Tackett, 1996; Horn, 2004; Armando and Belhoste, 2018). It is an appropriate method because such movements are constituted either by people who have similar social and political identities or whose interaction (as freemasons, revolutionaries, etc.) creates new kinds of sociability. In both cases, movements always imply a networked world, thus raising the question of where prosopography might overlap with the study of social networks, and how it differs from it.

One advantage of studying networks is that they are not tied up with questions of identity, which presuppose certain concepts of selfhood as well as a great deal of historical knowledge about the professional and personal details of people living in the past, some of which remain forever lost to us. In the Radical Translations project, we used networks to register weak ties between translators, publishers, authors, and editors and thus gain a picture of all the possible people who may have been in direct or indirect contact with an anonymous translator.5 In a few cases, knowing the printer and publisher networks of a translation enabled the research team to deanonymize the translator. Likewise, such networks also led us to discover new translations that were unknown to us, thus enlarging our corpus.

In our experience, however, networks were less useful in identifying the degree and nature of collaboration involved, how long it lasted, and where it broke off as different people entered and exited the process of revolution at different points. Given that revolutions are made up, in large part, of statements of intent and expressions of loyalty to a cause, it makes sense to consider how translators constructed their real and imagined identities, especially during times of trouble or when the relation between friend and enemy was no longer so clearly marked. For this, a prosopography is arguably of more use, because even if we do not know who these anonymous translators are, we can make assumptions about the type of person they were trying to be. For instance, even if the anonymous Italian translator of Thomas Paine’s Compact Maritime did not know the French translator whose work they used, we can assume that by extending the French translation into a new linguistic context the Italian translator was also trying to enter an existing debate and, therefore, project their own identity as someone who belonged to this group of like-minded individuals.

Consolidating a transnational narrative of revolution

In an important sense, revolutions have always been considered in a transnational context, even though the specific role of translation during such periods is frequently overlooked. One case that has been much discussed in the historiography on the French Revolution is Mirabeau’s so-called atelier, a circle of translators and writers who wrote for Mirabeau’s newspaper Courrier de Provence (Bénétruy, 1962). These translators and writers penned many of his political speeches and wrote texts that were published anonymously or under Mirabeau’s name. An early example of this type of collaborative production is the Considérations sur l’ordre de Cincinnatus (1784), a French translation of the Irish-American soldier Aedanus Burke’s tract of the same title, famous for being one of the first direct attacks on the principles of nobility. When Mirabeau translated this rallying cry for abolishing hereditary privileges, he expanded it greatly, including translated letters by Washington and Turgot as well as a translation of Richard Price’s Observations on the importance of the American revolution and its benefits to the world. In this veritable portmanteau of revolutionary writings, even the publisher’s errata became a carrier of revolutionary purpose. On the back of the title page of the 1785 edition, Mirabeau urged his readers to consult the errata carefully, for they contained “many necessary clarifications, more befitting an author than a printer” (plusieurs éclaircissemens nécessaires ; de sorte qu’il est presque autant celui de l’Auteur que celui de l’Imprimeur) (Mirabeau, 1785, my translation). This repackaged text was in turn immediately translated back into English by Samuel Romilly, a prominent English abolitionist, who added his own preface and footnotes. This extended French translation and simultaneous retranslation back into English offers a privileged insight into how revolution, in the 1780s, was still imagined in a plural and comparative context. Samuel Romilly did not go back to the original source text because what mattered was the translation itself, the debates it generated and the new narratives of community that it had made possible.

Now one might be surprised to find Mirabeau cited in a corpus of radical translations, given his subsequent political career, when he went from being a national hero and leader of the French Revolution to being posthumously discovered to have been in the king’s pay and thus, in the eyes of many of his contemporaries, a traitor. But this underlines a specificity of all activist translations, namely that they are extremely time sensitive. What makes for a radical intervention in one context may no longer function, or be interpreted as such, in another, later context. In the case of the French Revolution, events were moving so fast that all publications, including so-called activist translations, need to be correlated against a timeline of events that is divided not just in years, but in months and even days. It is only against this highly contextualized background that assumptions can be made about the choices and motivations of a given translator. In other words, this means that, as historians, we have to entertain multiple narratives constructed out of several intersecting chronologies in which the unfolding of historical events in both source and target cultures assumes equal importance. Indeed, one of the innovations of the Radical Translations project is to propose that any historiographical narrative of revolutionary-era translation must take into account several timelines. In our case, we proposed five different political chronologies (for Britain, France, the Italian states, Ireland, and America) to account for the circulation of translations between the three target languages (French, English and Italian) on which the project focused. These timelines were not taken off the shelf but were instead constructed out of a carefully chosen typography of events relevant for understanding both translation history and the history of revolution. These include changes in censorship laws, regime change, military occupations, constitutional changes, and other key social and political reforms.

I raise this point because the critical question of how to select relevant events to make up a narrative also brings up the question of temporality, or where to begin and end such chronologies in order to situate that narrative in time and space. In other words, it raises the related narrative question of how we choose to frame our histories in order to make visible the centrality of translations in creating a new translational language of revolution. Foundational events for national histories may not be the same as those relevant for a transnational history, much less a history of translation itself, which, as we have already noted, references at least two timelines, sometimes three or more in the case of indirect translation. In terms of revolutionary movements, the 1780s and early 1790s were crucial years during which a transnational narrative of revolution was developed within the English- and French-language contexts, thereby also establishing and promoting new networks among the translators themselves.

The same transnational narratives of revolution also extended to the effort to abolish the slave trade, which featured some of the same protagonists as Mirabeau’s atelier; these protagonists alternated between being translators and authors of their own texts. When Brissot de Warville and Étienne Clavière founded the Société des amis des noirs in 1788, they were inspired by the Quakers and the Pennsylvania abolitionist movement. Brissot, a French journalist and future leader of the Girondins, was one half of a translating couple and often collaborated with his wife Félicité Brissot de Warville, née Dupont, a well-regarded translator who may have translated Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (Bour, 2022). Clavière, meanwhile, was a Swiss patriot who participated in the Genevan Revolution and became one of Mirabeau’s translators; he later served as minister of Finance during the French Revolution (Whatmore, 2019). Clavière’s own Adresse à la Société des amis des noirs (1791) was translated into English by the American colonel Eleazar Oswald. Here, too, the title of the translation greatly expands the original source text and acts as a kind of metanarrative in its own right: Essays on the subject of the slave-trade, in which the sentiments of several eminent British writers are attended to: and also containing extracts from an address of the Abolition Society in Paris, to the National Assembly, and to their countrymen in general, dated March 28, 1791. Particularly honorable to that nation, and friendly to the rights of mankind.

Even after the painful events of the revolutionary decade dissipated the easy cosmopolitanism of the earlier years, translation remained central to the abolitionist movement. When David Baillie Warden—an Irish insurgent from the 1798 Rebellion and acting US consul in Paris in 1810—translated Abbé Grégoire’s De la littérature des nègres (1808), he did so “to powerfully contribute to hasten in all countries, the abolition of this unjust and inhuman traffic” and to endorse “a plan recently adopted by the government of the United States” and the British government (Warden, 1810, p. 11). Warden conspicuously reproduces Grégoire’s own dedication, presenting it as equally relevant to his own translation. Grégoire’s dedication notably hails by name all the French, English, American, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and (presumably stateless) “black and mulatto” (Grégoire, 1810, p. ix) writers sympathetic to the cause. In the source text, by naming only Avendano as the sole Spaniard, Grégoire also used his dedication to attack the Portuguese and Spanish colonialists for being “friends of slavery and enemies of humanity” (Grégoire, 1810, p. v). By faithfully reproducing this dedication-cum-rollcall structure, and repeating many of the same names, which also includes his own name (listed as D. B. Warden under ‘American’ writers), Warden makes it clear that France and England are ahead of other countries, including America, in the abolitionist struggle. His intended American readers are thus called upon to accelerate the historical process, to be more like the French or British than the retrograde Spanish or Portuguese. At the same time, the names moved or omitted warrant closer scrutiny, whether this concerns Grégoire's reference to the Creole revolutionary and Jacobin Claude Milscent (known as Michel Mina), now moved under France, or a number of prominent American abolitionists that featured in Grégoire's text—including Thomas Jefferson, Fernando Fairfax, Alexander McLeod and Warner Mifflin—but have been dropped from Warden’s translation.

These few examples of intersecting translations and retranslations represent a small sample of a much larger corpus of translations published, many of which performed similar cosmopolitan gestures, asserting new kinships across national and political boundaries, and with them new genealogies. They reflect a historical moment of intense borrowing, where the need for political intervention usually trumped any concerns with fidelity to the source text. They also pose a problem for the researcher because many of these publications appeared in the ephemeral press. The examples I cited above self-consciously instrumentalize, even weaponize translation, but others were published without any indication that they are translations at all. In the latter case, it is only by relying on what we know about the identities of people and their networks that we are able to find and identify fragments of translations.

The French revolutionary moment

With the tumultuous events of the French Revolution itself, the need to delineate a new relationship to the past became especially urgent. Strikingly, some of the earliest expressions of this new geneaology made use of the performative function of translation to utter new modes of address that would have been unthinkable just a few years prior: a threat to a reluctant king, a call to arms, a promise of an imminent future. In these instances, translators explicitly saw themselves as “founders of discursivity” (Tymoczko, 2010a, p. 231), not only in terms of creating new metanarratives about citizenship that crossed national boundaries, but also through performative speech acts. The three translations I will briefly discuss below all relate to source texts originally published in English and to an English republican tradition now reactivated by the French.

Mirabeau’s 1788 translation of Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) used the Englishman’s plea for press freedom to harangue the French king to accept a limited constitutional monarchy (Lutaud, 1988, 1990; Hammersley, 2010, p. 174–184).6 What mattered was not the source text per se but the critique of power relations it made possible. The immediate pretext for Mirabeau’s intervention was the temporary suspension of censorship granted by the king in order to accept the cahiers de doléances (or lists of public grievances), a freedom of the press over which the king now appeared to vacillate. In his postface, Mirabeau ostensibly addresses the future members of the Estates-General.7 But in so doing, he also performs a speech act, transforming them into a political (and not just advisory) body before they had even convened, a point made explicit by Mirabeau’s post-script dated 4 December 1788.8 At the same time, he remains menacingly ambiguous about who or what has the power to carry out the required reforms (the assembly? the king?), denouncing whoever has the temerity to block it (the king? his advisors?):

Que la première de vos loix consacre à jamais la liberté de la Presse, la liberté la plus inviolable, la plus illimitée : qu’elle imprime le sceau du mépris public sur le front de l’ignorant qui craindra les abus de la liberté ; qu’elle dévoue à l’exécration universelle le scélérat qui feindra de les craindre… Le misérable ! Il veut encore tout opprimer ; il en regrette les moyens ; il rugit dans son cœur de les voir échapper !

May the first of your laws consecrate in perpetuity the freedom of the press, the most inviolable and unlimited liberty: may it stamp the seal of public scorn on the forehead of the ignorant who fear the abuse of this liberty; may it devote itself to the universal execration of the scoundrel who pretends to fear them… The wretch! He still wants to suppress everything, he regrets lacking the means; his heart blushes to see them elude him! (Mirabeau, 1788, p. 64, translated by Nigel Ritchie)

One might argue that, given the extensive paratextual framing and reworking of the source text, Mirabeau’s tract hardly counts as a ‘translation’. Yet it is surely significant that Mirabeau discovers his own voice as an emerging leader of the revolution, about to verbally make demands on the king himself, not directly, but indirectly, by naming something else: a real-life precedent that provides a compelling alternative genealogy for the present situation. In other words, Mirabeau authorizes himself to speak the way he does by pointing to an alternative model, developed in an adjacent culture. Translation thus functions as a trojan horse. It is a means to destroy the foundations of one’s own print culture and political system by placing another history, another authority, at its heart.

The same illocutionary mode of speech appears in the anonymous French retranslation of Bolingbroke's The idea of a patriot king. This appeared in 1790, at the height of attempts to fashion a constitutional monarchy, and projected Bolingbroke’s vision of kingship onto the age of democratic revolution (Hammersley, 2010, p. 162–163).9 The title page brandishes an epigraph, conspicuously written in English: “I neither court, nor dread, the frown, or the smile of a king.” The translator’s dedication meanwhile does the reverse: refashioning the conventional notion of a dedication as an expression of loyalty, duty, or a pledge, into a not-so-veiled threat:

A LOUIS XVI, PREMIER ROI PATRIOTE DES FRANÇOIS

Ce n’est pas une dédicace que je veux faire; mon épigraphe s’y oppose : il me suffit de rappeler à notre monarque qu’il occupe le premier trône de l’univers, & qu’il va commencer à régner sur une nation libre, généreuse & invincible. Puissent la vérité et le patriotisme devenir ses premiers ministres !

TO LOUIS XVI, FIRST PATRIOT KING OF THE FRENCH

It is not a dedication I wish to make; my epigraph goes against the very idea. It is enough for me to remind our king that he sits on the first throne of the universe and that he is about to commence reigning over a free, glorious, and invincible nation. May truth and patriotism become his first ministers! (Bolingbroke 1790, back of the title-page, my translation)

In addition to communicating the translator’s warning, this abridged translation removes most of the English context. It expands or universalizes a message published in 1749, but in fact first circulated in 1738, for private use. It also makes it more aggressively concrete. Whereas the source text repudiates the divine right of kings by addressing a hypothetical patriotic king, the French translator interpolates not an imaginary ideal type but the reigning French monarch. Patriotism is no longer an idea but a threat and a veiled call to direct action.

Indeed, some of the best-known translations of the revolutionary period are French retranslations of well-known English republican texts (Monnier, 2011; Hammersley, 2005, 2010). Théophile Mandar’s retranslation (1790) of Marchamont Needham’s The excellencie of a free state (1656; reedited 1767, first translated by Chevalier d’Eon in 1774) contained a wealth of paratextual material—including translated fragments from Rousseau and Machiavelli, footnotes, a preface and two postfaces—which unambiguously mobilized Needham’s plea for popular sovereignty in the context of the French political debates of 1790 (Monnier, 2009).10 In an ebullient prefatory section, Mandar dedicated the book to his fellow French citizens, calling on them to turn the ideals of political liberty set out by Needham and other authors into a reality: “WISE LEGISLATORS, and you, my fellow FRENCHMEN, BROTHERS IN ARMS, Oh my citizens! It is to you that I dedicate this work!” (SAGES LÉGISLATEURS, et vous FRANÇAIS FRÈRES D’ARMES, ô mes concitoyens ! C’est à vous que je dédie cet ouvrage !) (Mandar, 1790, p.  xlij, my translation).

Beyond these last two examples, it is significant that a large number of translations in this corpus are in fact retranslations. Most conform to Anthony Pym’s (1998) definition of active retranslation, which takes place whenever several competing translations of a source text appear over a relatively short time span (p. 82). Unlike passive translations, which “involve relatively little rivalry between versions” and tend to provide historical information about the target culture that can usually also be obtained elsewhere, active translations indicate a debate, tension or even “blind spot” in the target culture (Pim, 1998, p. 82). There is no space here to cover all these retranslations, which merit a separate treatment on their own (see Perovic & Deseure, 2022). However, it is worth noting that wholesale debates on the meaning and function of revolutionary language often took the form of different, at times competing, retranslations of important source texts. Retranslation is thus an extraordinarily rich resource for understanding how a revolutionary impulse that began as an expression of a counterculture came to construct itself as an explicitly new culture, disqualifying some interpretations and promoting others.

Translating the revolution abroad: new genealogies, new contradictions

Nowhere was the intensity of retranslation practices more keenly felt than in the various French Constitutions that were eagerly translated abroad. Constitutions are often assumed to be singular texts, foundational documents that tell the story of one nation. But the Radical Translations project team has uncovered 119 translations and forty-one different source texts, in just three European languages, all of which contributed to a debate on constitutionalism that was Europe-wide as well as transatlantic and highly influential for the development of nineteenth-century revolutionary independence movements, not just in Europe but also in South America (Isabella, 2023). The Constitution of 1793—which famously proposed universal manhood suffrage, the right to resistance and the beginnings of a welfare state—is most revealing. It was never implemented and, after 1795, the French government forbade any reference to it either in written text or speech. So we have a French text entitled Qu'est-ce que la constitution de 93 ? Constitution de Massachusetts (De Lezay-Marnésia, 1795) where the author complains that, because he cannot directly address the French Constitution of 1793, he will instead translate, by way of discussion, the constitutions of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

More pertinently, at this moment of closure and repression of radical political thought in France, the spirit as well as the letter of the forbidden constitution found a new life abroad. It appears in utopian guise in Thomas Spence’s Constitution of a Perfect Commonwealth (1798) and again in the Constitution of Spensoria, a fairyland between Utopia and Oceana (1807). Spence’s fanciful titles belie the fact that his texts are not simply utopian projections but also include many of the articles of the Constitution of 1793. Once again it is important that he cites a historical document, a real-world model ratified by a government in an adjacent country, even if that model was never enacted. In his 1796 translation of the same Constitution, the Italian patriot Giovanni Fantoni (1964) adopts a different tack. Instead of undertaking a close translation, he cites the various articles to comment on the possible suitability of Italy to a French-style revolution (Morandini, 2021; Mannucci, 2021). On the periphery of Europe, a 1797 Greek translation by Rigas Velestinlis went furthest, both geographically and conceptually, in keeping the ideals of this constitution alive when both France and Britain entered a period of repression. Like the other texts discussed in this article, the title of the translation expresses both a proposition and a wish: New civil government of the inhabitants of European Turkey, Asia Minor and the Mediterranean islands and Wallachia and Moldavia, appended with a declaration of the ‘Rights of man’ (Velestinlis, 1976). This translation is often cited on account of the extraordinary map that was printed alongside it: a 12-sheet political map of this projected new state, cosmopolitan yet also highly local in character, alive to the different ‘nations’ and languages that inhabited the geographical area of the Balkans and Asia Minor.

Both Fantoni and Rigas translate in order to extend revolutionary ideas into a new context. In so doing, they also render them more concrete, revealing their promises and limitations in their respective contexts. Some of the articles are truncated, others are greatly expanded and read like mini treatises in themselves. Translation becomes a means of engaging in a debate about the nature and pace of historical change. In these translations, “resistance and activism are always metonymic activities” because “not everything problematic in a society can be changed at once” (Tymoczko, 2010a, p. 231). Can translations such as these be considered foundational narratives in themselves? Rigas’s translation, which cost him his life, is today considered a founding document of a Greek nation state that only emerged many years later, after a protracted struggle.11 Yet when considered in its own historical context, this translation arguably operates, in the first instance, more along the lines of a translational metanarrative, which is always comparative and plural. It actualizes an alternative code borrowed from an adjacent revolutionary experience to construct a new reality whose outcome remains open to interpretation. In other words, it inscribes the modern Greek experience within an unfolding transnational narrative of revolution, even as it differentiates itself from it.

This suggests that we cannot solely study translation—or, for that matter, revolution—in a purely diachronic context. Rather, we need to find ways to capture the synchronic unfolding of several linked but differentiated narratives of revolution, as different translators promoted different, and at times competing, genealogies for recasting the relation between past and future. If today this poses a problem for us, as historians seeking to reconstitute a transnational history of revolutionary translation, it was also a problem faced by the historical protagonists of the revolution themselves. For once the revolution came to be exported by force, by the Napoleonic armies, the mobility of revolutionary language began to generate new contradictions. For some, the creation of new ‘sister republics’ across Europe was experienced as a moment of liberation and a chance to improve on what the French Revolution had initiated. Translating revolutionary source texts thus presented a learning opportunity, a chance to do things differently and avoid some of the mistakes that the French were perceived to have made. Others were soon disillusioned with the experience and turned to translation to resist a revolutionary change that was externally imposed, sometimes by translating or retranslating source texts that represented a perceived ‘indigenous’ tradition, whether real or invented.

Vincenzo Cuoco’s historical novel Platone in Italia (1807) was written while he was in exile from the failed Neapolitan revolution of 1799, which had been bloodily suppressed, notoriously with help from the British. It presents itself as a pseudotranslation from the Greek in which the author claims to have uncovered evidence of an archaic Italy, older even than the Greek culture it went on to influence. This archaic culture, he argues, can be a new resource for Italian regeneration and, eventually perhaps, even an indigenous Italian revolution. This search for indigenous roots is also expressed in Cuoco’s Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione di Napoli (1801), an attempt to write a history of the present by drawing on his own recollection of the Neapolitan revolution which had been so brutally supressed. In this work, Cuoco invents the concept of a ‘passive revolution’, a term that would later be taken up and developed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. According to Cuoco, the Neapolitan revolution failed because it was a revolution led by elites who imitated and thereby reproduced all the blind spots of the French; the latter, he argues, went too far because they misunderstood the basis of their own revolution. Cuoco argues that what Italians need instead is a slow-moving reform of public opinion so that when the time comes, any revolutionary rupture “presents what the people desire and do not know how to procure themselves” (e gli presenti ciò che desidera e che da se stesso non saprebbe procacciarsi) (Cuoco, 1913, p. 106, my translation).

Interestingly, both the first and the second editions of Cuoco’s Saggio storico were translated into French in 1807 by Bertrand de Barère. A former Jacobin and well-regarded linguist who translated from both Italian and English, Barère presumably embodied what Cuoco considered an excessive or superfluous revolution that went too far. By 1807, Barère, who narrowly avoided deportation to Guyana and survived thanks to a general amnesty granted by Napoleon, had his own reasons for not reminding people of the past. On the title page of Voyage de Platon en Italie he referred to himself simply as a translator who was a “member of several academies” (membre de plusieurs académies) (Cuoco, 1807, my translation). On the Histoire de la Révolution de Naples he is unnamed. We can surmise that he translated these texts on commission or to make a living. But this is not to discount a certain emotional investment. One can only imagine how he might have felt translating Cuoco’s recollections of compatriots who died in Naples, some of whom he too may have known or been in contact with, or when Cuoco analyses Robespierre, whose fate Barère very nearly shared. To glean any sense of the translator’s own voice in this case, we would have to closely read the two texts, looking for divergences, omissions and other reticences in an otherwise faithful translation.

Conclusion

As these heterogeneous translation practices make clear, revolutionary-era translation enabled a polycentric circulation of radical political ideas and discourses across several languages that assumed a variable intensity as translators entered or exited the process of revolution at different times, constructing their own narrative about the significance of events. This suggests something quite different from the master narratives typically associated with revolutionary historiography. Indeed, as this brief survey of revolutionary-era translation practices makes clear, the concept of a master narrative is too basic to describe the actual way that revolutionaries and militants constituted themselves as a movement. The concept of a master narrative tends to assume a single overarching plot and a single chronology, whose shape and final form tends to become apparent in retrospect, when an endpoint is assumed to have been reached. Translation, however, as already noted, presupposes at least two historical chronologies which it puts into play simultaneously. In their comparative focus, the activist translations discussed in this article construct what might more precisely be described as dynamic metanarratives that continually revise and interrogate the basis of any eventual master narrative. Such metanarratives are critical histories because they chart several possible genealogies or lines of descent between the past and a present in the making.

Although the prefix ‘meta’ might suggest that these narratives are theoretical and perhaps even inherently abstract, this could not be further from the truth. During the revolutionary period, translators constructed genealogies to promote kinships between actual people, whether real or projected, and to create a sense of shared participation in shaping the future. By the same token, these same translational narratives also register complex personal stories of belonging and loss. Although often overlooked, these highly individual perceptions of the pace, meaning and outcome of revolutionary events played a critical role in framing what later became nationally specific narratives of the revolutionary process. Their impact can be traced whenever later historians speak of acceleration or delay, the sense of being ‘ahead’ or ‘behind’ a certain historical development, which always involves a subjective element. In other words, translation is much more than a simple conduit for the communication of revolutionary ideas; it is also a precious record of how revolutionaries felt, saw, justified, and understood their own participation in the narratives they sought to articulate.

If, then, we are to properly integrate translation into our historical studies of the revolutionary past, it is necessary to go behind the scenes and recover how an apparently authorless master narrative of revolution was in fact constructed by the myriad authors and translators who sought to extend revolutionary ideas into new contexts. For revolutions are never purely national phenomena but are instigated by dense and overlapping networks of solidarity among people who enter and exit the historical process at different times, reflecting upon—and shaping the narrative of—the unfolding sequence of events in their own way. By paying attention to these translational metanarratives, we can reconstruct how revolution itself was experienced, in its own present, as an open-ended process without a clear outcome—that is to say, as a series of events constructed out of multiple, simultaneous chronologies whose accompanying narratives all share one defining feature: namely, the attempt to fix a point of no return, in the absence of future knowledge and in the presence of an obsolete past.