Guest Editors' Introduction: ‘Radical Transnationalism: The French Revolution in Europe's Political Imagination’

Abstract

What happens when a transnational revolutionary idiom is translated into specific languages, each equipped with its own historical frames of references? This special issue tracks the various ways the French Revolution was creatively re-appropriated in British, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish and Polish contexts in order to recover the multiple futures of the Revolution's past. By shifting the focus towards the mobility of revolutionary language – not just what it says, but how it travels, where it goes, and what it becomes – we seek to offer new tools to assess the potential and limits of the revolutionary project.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation History

“…The work that has been carried out on translation in the radical milieu of the Huguenots, the diffusion of Enlightenment texts through translation, and the role of translation in the press has begun to highlight the ways in which ideas circulated in the eighteenth century, not Review Copy -Not for Redistribution File Use Subject to Terms & Conditions of PDF Licence Agreement (PLA) only through Latin or French as lingua franca but also, and crucially with regard to a less literate popular audience, through translation. This activity, which seems to have become increasingly pervasive in the later part of the century, may have been a crucial node in the ways in which radicals in France, America, and Britain exchanged and promoted ideas relating to and supporting the new 'democratic' revolutions (Jacob 2007: 11-12;Mucignat and Perovic 2018). The hypothesis put forward long ago of an 'Atlantic' revolution (Palmer 1959;Godechot 1965) and taken up recently by Jonathan Israel (2017) may find some confirmation in further research into translation in the 1780s and 1790s.…”