Madame Brulart’s Bastille-bijoux: History and Private Lives in Women’s Writings around the French Revolution
Madame Brulart’s Bastille-bijoux: History and Private Lives in Women’s Writings around the French Revolution

Summary/Abstract: In her Letters Written in France (1790) poet, novelist, translator and Britain’s unofficial foreign correspondent Helen Maria Williams records the case of a certain Madame Brulart, “who wears at her breast a medallion made of a stone of the Bastille polished. In the middle of the medallion, Liberté was written in diamonds; above was marked, in diamonds, the planet that shone on the 14th of July; and below was seen the moon, of the size she appeared that memorable night.” Alternating between grand scenes of public events and emotionally charged narratives of individual lives, one could see such a tiny observation as emblematic of broader patterns in the Letters and probably even beyond that. In his foundational 2000 monograph Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 Mark Salber Phillips convincingly describes such cases as instances of “sentimental,” often novelistic history entering private, individual lives. This paper proposes to look at a few similar instances with an aim of complementing Phillips’s study by showing how the classical, rhetorical model of “exemplary history” survives, even if much altered, in these modern narratives. Although no longer only an educated response of a statesman to the acts of an earlier statesman, the more open-ended modern variety still often wishes to understand individual lives as echoes of larger, public historical events.

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