Tacitean Studies - Enlightenment and Revolutions

Enlightenment and Revolutions

Early theoreticians of raison d'état used Tacitus to defend an ideal of Imperial rule. Other readers used him to construct a method for living under a despotic state, avoiding both servility and useless opposition. Diderot, for example, used Tacitus' works, in his apology for Seneca, to justify the collaboration of philosophers with the sovereign.

During the Enlightenment Tacitus was mostly admired for his opposition to despotism. In literature, some great tragedians such as Corneille, Jean Racine and Alfieri, took inspirations from Tacitus for their dramatic characters.

Edward Gibbon was strongly influenced by Tacitus' historical style in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,

The French Revolutionaries, for whom Tacitus had been a central part of their early education, made much use of his criticisms of tyranny and love of the republic—he is one of the authors most often quoted (behind Cicero, Horace, and Plutarch) by the members of the National and Legislative Assemblies and by revolutionary authors such as Jacques Pierre Brissot. Later, during the Reign of Terror, Camille Desmoulins and the writers of the Actes des apôtres used him to denounce the excesses of the Jacobins.

Napoleon, on the other hand, attacked his works furiously, both for style and contents. This would-be founder of an Imperial dynasty, praised by amongst others Goethe for his insight in literature, knew the danger that Tacitus's histories might pose to one who wished to go around grabbing for power. François de Chateaubriand, for one, had already compared the new Emperor of the French to the worst emperors of Rome, warning that a new Tacitus would someday do for Napoleon what Tacitus had done for Nero. The Emperor's reaction was vicious: to Goethe and Wieland he complained that "Tacitus finds criminal intention in the simplest acts; he makes complete scoundrels out of all the emperors to make us admire his genius in exposing them". To others he swore that Tacitus, ce pamphlétaire, had "slandered the emperors" whom, he averred, the Roman people had loved.