Summary
It's a serene day, and the speaker leaves his home in the Loire Valley. The king of France has been ousted. The foreign armies who invaded France in order to put a stop to the revolution have turned around in defeat, and France is now a republic. Violence had been committed and even worshiped in the name of the French Republic, but these ills seemed to have been forgotten forever. Feeling hopeful, the speaker heads to Paris. He passes the city's new landmarks—the building where the royal family is imprisoned, the emptied-out palace, and the square that only recently was full of dead bodies. To the speaker, these violent sights feel oddly distant, even as they inspire him with a degree of both fear and political fervor. Lying in bed that night above Paris, he reads and thinks, feeling newly fearful as he thinks about the violence that has transpired so recently: the recent past seems to foretell the future. The next morning the speaker walks to the palace grounds and hears hawkers calling out denunciations of Robespierre (one of the most extreme and powerful figures in the radical phase of the French Revolution). The speaker remembers the recent faceoff between the more moderate revolutionary Louvet and Robespierre, which left Louvet exposed with no supporters. The speaker, despite himself, is afraid that the political power struggles in Paris will lead to misery and repression throughout the country, and he hopes desperately that wisdom and fairness will win out—perhaps with help from some divine power. He mentally plots various solutions, but has no power to bring them about. If he could have, he reflects, he would have taken great risks for the sake of the Revolution. He considers that nature holds ultimate wisdom and should be the guide to men's decisions: a person or movement in harmony with nature and the divine cannot fail. Suddenly a set of cliches strike the speaker as revelatory, fresh truths, just as they must have struck ancient philosophers: that tyranny is a false, weak power compared to that of nature, and that God can't be tempted by power or charm. Anything that isn't just and well-reasoned is bound to fail. The speaker wishes that some influential figure might have arisen to put a stop to the growing tyranny in France, weaving a path to a truly just, thriving state.
He heads back to England, mostly because he needs money. He reflects on how, had he stayed in France, he might have martyred himself for the Revolution—never becoming known as a poet and never even meeting Coleridge. When he arrives back in England, he finds a different political debate raging, this one over abolishing the slave trade. He suspects that this welcome political shift is a result of the French Revolution's influence. The speaker personally believes that, if the general goal of abolishing tyranny and creating a more just government is achieved, the slave trade will inevitably also die out. In general, the speaker has always been convinced that progress in one area will lead seamlessly to progress elsewhere. But, when England takes up arms against France to stem the Revolution, he experiences a kind of internal revolution, becoming disillusioned with his own country. This is a horrifying event for the speaker, who feels such an attachment to and love for the natural landscapes and villages where he was raised. He finds himself hoping for the defeat of his own countrymen. The speaker resents the powerful forces who have turned young people against their own countries, but reflects that this is a bizarre time, when terrible causes and events are given beautiful names and when betraying one cause sometimes seems necessary to support a better one.
Before the British warships depart for France, the speaker sees them docked. He walks along the shore and hears cannons every night at midnight, feeling heartbroken. But French tyrants are, if anything, glad to have an enemy to fight. The war offers them a convenient justification for even the most extreme deeds, and everyone, including France's Senate, is powerless to intervene. The yearly calendar is dotted with the anniversaries of innocent deaths, and tyrants have a childishly compulsive desire to kill. This is all done in the name of liberty: Wordsworth mentions the moderate revolutionary Madame Roland, whose last words before her execution commented on this irony. In fact, these times are painful for those who had believed in the cause of the Revolution and even more painful for those who still, somehow, cling to hope. Meanwhile, France continues to defeat invaders like an infant God strangling snakes—but those who support liberty there are repeatedly disappointed. For years, the speaker says, he has been haunted by these events—especially in his dreams, where he saw terrible visions and tried in vain to plead with rigged tribunals. He compares this fear to the fear he felt as a child in the face of nature. The two were utterly different: one was an ennobling experience of devotion to God, but this new fear felt like being a prophet of doom. He doesn't enjoy this role, but it does feel like a kind of God-given duty. In fact, he says, these injustices should renew people's faith in God, nature, liberty, and equality. The injustices occurring in France aren't caused by democratic governance, they just cynically make use of the idea of democracy. Of course, there are moments of joy amid the sorrow. One joyful memory is the speaker's first trip to France, when the Revolution was still a source of hope. He visited Arras, the hometown of Robespierre. Now, the happy memory feels mocking and cruel. The speaker then recounts the joyful memory of hearing that Robespierre and his allies have been defeated. The day he hears this news, he visits the grave of his former schoolteacher who had loved poetry. He wonders whether the teacher, who had encouraged him to write poems of his own, would have liked the speaker's work. Feeling meditative and peaceful, the speaker walks along the coast and passes an ancient chapel and, nearby, a celebrating crowd. One member of the crowd tells him that Robespierre is dead. He feels that morning has arrived after a long night. The madness of the Reign of Terror has been shown for what it really is, and progress is inevitable, if slow. He finishes his walk full of joy among a happy, rowdy crowd.
Analysis
This is one of the Prelude's most philosophical, meditative books, containing unusually vivid and colorful language, even for Wordsworth. As much as it is concerned with real historical events happening in Wordsworth's time, its primary interest isn't truly historical or external. Instead, it shows the speaker trying to hammer out internal conflicts and deal with challenges to his most dearly held beliefs and relationships. He is forced to confront, explore, and defend his feelings about the French Revolution, his identity as an English person, and his fundamental love of and faith in nature. Ultimately, these challenges to the speaker's belief seem to strengthen rather than weaken his faith. This is surprising. After all, the Revolution takes a turn so upsetting to the speaker that it haunts his dreams. England, his own country, pours resources into halting a cause that the speaker supports. Humanity and the world in general seem chaotic, violent, and unjust. It would be much simpler, in terms of characterization, for the speaker to simply become disillusioned with everything he once loved. The fact that he does not necessitates a good deal of explaining and helps us to understand the speaker and his worldview far more deeply.
In essence, the speaker says, the Reign of Terror is not a failure of the revolution, nor does it reveal that the underlying principles of liberty and equality are dangerous and unworthy. Instead, the Revolution's dark turn is a kind of unnatural betrayal of those principles, all the worse because it uses worthy-sounding goals to justify doing harm. The Reign of Terror isn't just a wrong turn on the path of progress—it's completely antithetical to everything the Revolution stands for. This is why, as the speaker says, it's most painful for those who most believed in the French Republic. In other words, the Reign of Terror is incredibly distressing, but it doesn't actually negate the cause the speaker so believed in. If anything, it affirms the importance of that cause by demonstrating that those who betray it will cause damage and face defeat. The speaker's feelings about the Revolution aren't based on specific historical occurrences as much as they are based on unalterable, fundamental principles. Similarly, the speaker feels anger at England's choice to go to war with France. But this choice is not so much a reflection of England as it is a betrayal of the land. His love of England has little to do, again, with whether he approves or disapproves of specific actions by the government. Instead, it's based on things he sees as more eternal and fundamental—the natural landscapes of his country and the divine, sublime force that he identifies with that land.
In general, then, this chapter can help us understand that Wordsworth and his speaker don't view the world as a chaotic or unpredictable place in the slightest. Instead, they believe that chaos and injustice are problematic but ultimately minor deviations from a more fundamental truth. That truth is expressed in its purest form through natural beauty, but it's also visible in human demonstrations of justice, artistry, devotion, and transcendence. People who are exposed to truth in the form of nature when they are young, according to the speaker, are much more likely to be wise and thoughtful as adults. In other words, everything is deeply intertwined, from the young speaker's adventures in nature to the French Revolution. This investment in the idea of interrelatedness comes through clearly when the speaker talks about the abolition of slavery. To him, this is not only good but in a way inevitable, and the French motion towards progress has created a ripple effect, moving England closer to its own kind of progress: both histories occur in concert. On a stylistic level, this book of the Prelude is particularly loaded with figurative language and allusions to history and myth, even more so than the rest of the work. Through these devices, Wordsworth links specific moments in his speaker's life and in eighteenth-century Europe to unexpected moments from very different times and places. In doing so, he again suggests that the different events in the world are far more connected than they appear at first glance.
