Burke, Paine, And the Newspapers: An "Archaeology" of Political Knowledge 1789-93‪.‬

The MURTHER took place at four o'clock this morning, and was conducted in the most private manner. The Guillotine was erected in ya court of the Temple--a hole was dug in it, into which the King's head fell, and his body precipitated afterward .... (This must be understood as the prevailing report of the moment. It is impossible to vouch for its absolute truth.) This scene of infernal assassination, which a base and cowardly faction have now degraded human nature by executing calls for a marked execration which it is not in the power of language to convey .... Almighty vengeance must be the portion of those who have thus step by step arrived at this damnable crisis. To that awful moment, when the great King of Kings shall sit in tremendous judgement of men and daemons, do we consign the diabolic spirits. It will come, and in thunders speak terrors to their hearts, now hardened in human iniquity. THIS DESCRIPTION OF THE FRENCH REGICIDE FIRST APPEARED IN THE St. James' Chronicle on 24th January 1793, and was copied during the next few days in a number of other pro-ministerial newspapers. Its publication was a few days after the execution of Louis Capet, and clearly uses and elaborates upon a rumor to suit the political purposes of that newspaper; the French King, murdered at night, in private, the perpetrators using all the cunning of a villain in a Gothic novel to keep their crime secret. The Gothic tropes are built up so that, despite the partially-admitted dubiousness of the narrative being reported, a number of eschatological prophesies are made about the results. Today we would probably respond to this passage by claiming that it is bad journalism, as it draws conclusions from facts not yet established, and accepts rumor as fact simply because it suits a particular political agenda. Against this, I intend in the following pages to argue that the imagination of political action, in this case imagining the King's death, cannot be read as simply "bad journalism" in the early 1790s; that in fact the equivocal nature of political factuality and truth steins from the whole system of the representation of political events at this time, and that this act of creative imagining is one of the ways in which political activity could legitimately be construed during the 1790s.