Journal Article

The Conservative Distrust of Movement in the ‘French Revolution Debate’

Fischer, Pascal

2012

Overview

From our perspective, it may not be easily understood that mobility can be very negatively connoted. But this was the case when conservatism came into being in England during the French Revolution. In the present study, I am going to show that a distrust and a denigration of movement were in fact important elements in the formation of conservatism and that this strongly affected the structure of conservative narrative literature. While there have been several attempts to define this ideology by enumerating its positions on governmental, social, cultural and religious questions, I propose to understand conservatism as a weltanschauung that is, at least partly, metaphorically conditioned. My theoretical framework is cognitive metaphor theory, which has directed our attention to the fact that our perception of reality is to a large extent based on metaphors. Anti-Jacobins, as conservatives started calling themselves at that time, drew heavily on the contrast between mobility and immobility to depict their own world-view and that of their political opponents. Embracing stability as a central constituent of their identity, conservatives regularly voice their aversion to movement and present mobility as a serious threat to everything the English nation treasures.

• Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG
• Subject: British history / Conceptual metaphor / Conservatism / French history / French Revolution / Ideology / Metaphor / Plot (Narrative)