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3 - Inflammatory reactions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Andrew M. Stauffer
Andrew M. Stauffer
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Summary

In December of 1777, Charles James Fox addressed the House of Commons in the following manner:

For the two years that a certain noble lord has presided over American affairs, the most violent, scalping, tomahawk measures have been pursued: – bleeding has been his only prescription. If a people deprived of their ancient rights are grown tumultuous – bleed them! If they are attacked with a spirit of insurrection – bleed them! If their fever should rise into rebellion – bleed them, cries this state physician! More blood! More blood! Still more blood!

In Fox's terms, tumult, insurrection, and rebellion (i.e., manifestations of the people's anger) have called forth a monoideistic program of therapy from George III's secretary of state for the colonies, Lord Germain. Bleeding, here a synecdoche for military repression, is metaphorically related to bloodletting as an anti-inflammatory remedy for fever. Explicitly mixing the rhetoric of revolutionary politics with that of medical therapeutics, Fox enacts a common trope of discourse that would achieve new urgency in the half-century following the American Declaration of Independence. It was during this period – that is, during the Romantic era – that the anger of the people assumed political legitimacy (in addition to mere efficacy), demanding from the ruling classes ideological resistance or capitulation (in addition to mere struggle or flight).

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Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism , pp. 64 - 86
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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