Print transformed the French Revolution from events into a replicable model
Evidence
Hobsbawm observes that ‘The French Revolution was not made or led by a formed party or movement in the modern sense, nor by men attempting to carry out a systematic programme. It hardly even threw up “leaders” of the kind to which twentieth century revolutions have accustomed us, until the post-revolutionary figure of Napoléon.’ But once it had occurred, it entered the accumulating memory of print. The overwhelming and bewildering concatenation of events experienced by its makers and its victims became a ‘thing’ – and with its own name: The French Revolution. Like a vast shapeless rock worn to a rounded boulder by countless drops of water, the experience was shaped by millions of printed words into a ‘concept’ on the printed page, and, in due course, into a model. Why ‘it’ broke out, what ‘it’ aimed for, why ‘it’ succeeded or failed, became subjects for endless polemics on the part of friends and foes: but of its ‘it-ness’, as it were, no one ever after had much doubt. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 313
Categorization
- XREF: This ‘shapeless rock worn to a boulder’ passage is the print analogue of Anderson’s homogeneous empty time concept; it also complements the earlier claim about collective imagined experience.