What is the politeness of a revolutionary? What indeed have revolutions to do with politeness? The last three chapters have been concerned with the codes regulating behaviour, speech and writing in a confined world, that of the honnêtes gens, of fashionable or at least respectable society. In Chapter 4, however, I considered the possibility of a politeness that would go beyond this narrow world. As the social hierarchy was overturned in the months and years following the fall of the Bastille, the social norms of the ancien régime – involving for instance dress, modes of address, meeting places, relations between the sexes – were all called in question. But all societies, however turbulent, need rules or conventions to prevent conflict getting out of hand and promote the common happiness. Whether such rules and conventions could still go by the name of politeness in 1792 is another matter. The subject is a large and fascinating one; I shall approach it here by discussing one limited (though still enormous) subject, the eloquence of the revolutionary assemblies.

French writers of the ancien régime often lamented the decline of high political eloquence, whose distant echo they heard in the literature of ancient Greece or Rome. There are periods, however, when persuasive speech recovers some of its old powers. May 1968 was perhaps such a period in France; another, on a much vaster scale, was the French Revolution.