"Une Sève Nouvelle et Pure": Tree Sap and the Regeneration of the Nation in French Revolutionary Discourse and Practice
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"Une Sève Nouvelle et Pure": Tree Sap and the Regeneration
of the Nation in French Revolutionary Discourse and Practice
Giulia Pacini
Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 53, Number 3, Spring 2020, pp. 409-427
(Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2020.0039
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/754146
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]Pacini / “Une Sève Nouvelle et Pure” 409
“Une Sève Nouvelle et Pure”: Tree Sap
and the Regeneration of the Nation in
French Revolutionary Discourse and
Practice
Giulia Pacini
In 1793 the French lawyer and political essayist Charles-Louis Cadet Gas-
sicourt gave a speech at the Parisian revolutionary section of Mont-Blanc honoring
Jean-Paul Marat and Michel Le Peletier de Saint Fargeau. The occasion was the
inauguration of two busts of these “martyrs” of the Revolution, but it also offered
time for reflection on the political significance of the tens of thousands of liberty
trees that French men and women were planting across the country to celebrate
the new republic:
Voici l’emblème du corps social, l’image de notre République. Ce tronc
respectable représente l’Assemblée de nos Législateurs: ces racines qui
pompent les sucs bienfaisants de la terre, ce sont les sociétés populai-
res qui puisent partout les principes vivifiants, bases éternelles de nos
lois. Cette sève qui parcourt l’écorce, les branches et les feuilles, c’est
le patriotisme qui anime tous les coeurs; en voyant ces bras couverts
de verdure, qui s’entrelacent élégamment et qui partent tous du même
centre, on conçoit l’accord qui nous unit, l’amour fraternel qui de 25 mil-
lions d’hommes ne fait qu’une famille; quand la sève abandonne quelques
rameaux, le cultivateur industrieux les émonde, c’est ainsi que l’on
retranche de la société ceux chez qui s’éteint le patriotisme.1
[Here is the emblem of the body politic, the image of our Republic. This
respectable trunk represents the Assembly of our Legislators: these roots
which pump the beneficial juices of the earth are the popular societ-
ies that everywhere draw in vital elements, eternal foundations of our
laws. This sap which flows through the bark, branches, and leaves is the
patriotism that animates all hearts; when one sees these arms covered in
Giulia Pacini is Associate Professor of French & Francophone Studies at William & Mary. She
wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers of this essay for their excellent feedback.
© 2020 by the ASECS Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 53, no. 3 (2020) Pp. 409–27.410 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 53, No. 3
elegantly intertwined greenery and all departing from the same center,
one understands the accord that unites us, the fraternal love that of 25
million men makes but one family; when sap abandons certain branches,
the industrious cultivator prunes them; it is thus that one eliminates from
society those in whom patriotism has died.]
Gassicourt thus argued that the liberty trees facilitated citizens’ understanding of
the nation’s new structure. Standing in front of a verdant sapling, he pointed to
the primary role of the roots (collectives of engaged French citizenry) which were
pumping vivifying sap (loyalty to the revolutionary cause) through the venerable but
fundamentally inert body of the trunk (the governing assembly). He concluded his
presentation by remarking on the virtues of political monitoring and intervention:
to ensure a healthy flow of sap, and therefore the well-being of the body politic,
careful pruning was required.
In the following pages I trace the history of this rhetoric of pruning and
sap, showing how its quality and flow came to figure as a fundamental sign and
source of strength for the allegedly regenerated nation. This rhetoric built on a
longstanding monarchic tradition of politicized arboreal discourse. It was reinvigo-
rated in the early 1790s by the official planting projects of the Revolution and its
intentional embodiment of the nation in sacred liberty trees. Sap’s significance in the
late eighteenth century was further enhanced by current botanical research, physio-
cratic thought, and other economic and philosophical debates on the importance
of circulation in bodies both physical and abstract. The still rather inchoate quality
of sap’s scientific definition in the eighteenth century meant that the metaphor was
relatively free to signify a beneficial substance, a bonding and transformative force,
or vitality and agency per se; it could represent the circulation of financial assets,
critical information, physical energies, political power, patriotism, a republican
ethos. As such, sap’s location, distribution, quality, and potential ability to self-
generate continued to be issues of critical importance even as the epistemological
and ideological frameworks within which this rhetoric operated fluctuated in the
Revolution’s ever-shifting political climate.
Drawing on the work of cognitive linguists such as George Lakoff and
Mark Johnson, and of cultural historians such as Lynn Hunt, Roger Chartier,
Keith Baker, and Joan Landes, I take as a general point of departure the notion
that people’s identities, activities, and world views are engendered and constrained
by the language they use.2 I too am interested in the ways in which metaphors
shape and naturalize our perceptions and actions, and I too believe that the French
revolutionaries’ language served as “an instrument of social and political change.”3
As I consider the symbols and rhetoric of this period, moreover, I find inspiration
in Antoine de Baecque’s analyses of corporeal metaphors and the body politic.
Like de Baecque, I explore the popularity of organic imagery during this period of
“dizzying” political turmoil, showing how metaphors and allegories of live bodies
helped the French narrate and understand the ever-evolving life and character of
their Nation, as well as its internal functions and organization.4 Yet contrary to
the degenerate, sick, excessive, or tragic bodies that have been de Baecque’s focus,
trees, wood, and sap both evoked and constituted the hopes and future well-being
of the nation; they did not just figure its past or present state.5 As fundamentally
uplifting images, trees and sap similarly distinguished themselves from the morePacini / “Une Sève Nouvelle et Pure” 411
ambiguous earthquakes, storms, and volcanic eruptions that have recently been
the object of Mary Ashburn Miller’s attention.6 Miller has argued that the natural-
ized rhetoric of the Revolution fashioned an understanding of the latter’s course as
“surprisingly divorced from human will or individual agency,” and she concludes
that this view ultimately limited the possibilities for political action: After all, if the
Revolution erupted like a volcano, what could humans do?7 Within this model, hu-
man agency was either lacking or impossible, and this, Miller argues, unfortunately
led to a belief in the inevitability of the Terror: the Jacobins’ language ultimately
“[stifled]” action.8
By contrast, I propose in the following pages, if the Revolution was un-
derstood to be not simply akin to a natural force or disaster, but a phenomenon
actually energized by a beneficial and malleable “circulation végétale” [vegetal
circulation], then patriot gardeners and pruners still had a role to play.9 As they
talked about trees and sap flow, the revolutionaries pinpointed the concrete work
they could do: by imagining and planting real saplings or forests, and by pruning,
watering, and fertilizing them to enhance the flow of sap, they created conceptual
models and vital material resources for themselves and the new republic. While
the Jacobins’ volcanoes were purely metaphorical, trees and sap offered allegorical
narratives and constituted physical realities that actually did contribute to the health
and wealth of both the individual and the nation. In addition, they were well chosen
images for a largely rural population predominantly employed in agricultural work.
Thus, I will argue, although sap never did compete in popularity with the
more frequent and formidable images of the Revolution as an (allegedly purifying)
natural disaster, it served a useful rhetorical function for assessing the new polity’s
commitment to its declared principle of equality, for conceptualizing the value
of distributive justice and social cohesiveness, and above all for envisioning the
political and ethical contours of the citizen-gardener’s role within the revolution-
ary state. This rhetoric encouraged patriots to ground their political endeavors in
individual practices, and it cast the Revolution as a natural, righteous, produc-
tive project wherein every citizen’s local efforts could make a material difference
for the entire polity. While more spectacular representations of the Republic as
Hercules or Marianne left little space for ordinary citizens to visualize their indi-
vidual positions and roles within the newly established nation, the sap rhetoric
engendered allegories that allowed and encouraged the people of France actually
to see themselves in practice, as active and productive participants in the nation’s
(silvicultural) work.10 Equally as important, as a figure of cyclical regeneration,
sap authorized a renewal of hope after the fall of each successive regime. It was
thus that in the aftermath of 30 Prairial 1799, after ten years of political pruning
and replanting, the economist and newspaper editor Jean-Baptiste Say could still
argue that the only way of saving France’s faltering republic—then weakened by
a corrupt administration and the resurgence of old “terrorist” forces within the
Directory itself—was to ensure that new sap circulated within it.11
This article documents both the existence and the value of this rhetoric of
sap, situating it within the broader cultural contexts of eighteenth-century arbori-
culture and economic, medical, and political theory. The quotations included here
speak to the perceived relevance of this figure across time and across disciplinary
fields, social spheres, political positions, and textual genres. Eminent encyclopedists,412 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 53, No. 3
philosophers, journal editors, presidents of revolutionary assemblies, professors,
and simple citizens alike adopted trees and arboreal or sap metaphors to describe
the state of the nation and to encourage civic engagement. They did so in theoreti-
cal treatises, political speeches, newspapers for urban and rural areas, dramatic
texts, poetry, popular songs, caricatures, and paintings. The rhetoric was initially
dominated by the voices of the intellectual and political élites, and up until the
declaration of the republic it remained rather abstract and analogical in character.
It also focused predominantly on mechanical or structural issues: How could one
enhance the circulation of resources and distribute power more fairly within a
reformed constitutional monarchy? Texts dated 1792 or later included more popu-
lar voices and acquired a literal dimension as the newly founded republic started
planting live trees to signify the regeneration of the nation. Sap was reconfigured
in qualitative terms and mobilized to address a new set of questions: How could
one boost the potency of this physical substance and strengthen the republican
ethos that it represented? Who was responsible for the cultivation of this project?
Where was revolutionary agency located? If the Revolution was a natural force,
did that it necessarily mean that it would best develop on its own?
THE SAP METAPHOR
A search through the University of Chicago’s ARTFL database reveals that
in the French tradition sap had long been used as a figurative signifier for physical
strength, mental creativity, the power of imagination, spiritual faith, regenera-
tion, and life broadly defined. From a strictly linguistic point of view, however,
the metaphor only acquired its official credentials at the time of the Revolution.
Seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French dictionaries offered literal glosses:
namely, that the word “sève” signified a “Humeur qui se répand par tout l’arbre,
et lui fait pousser des fleurs, des feuilles, de nouveau bois” [Humor that circulates
throughout the tree, stimulating it to develop flowers, leaves, new wood].12 By
extension, the term could also be used to denote the time of year in which sap
circulated most freely, or to refer to the vigor and good taste of wine (the French
term derived from the classical Latin “sapa, sapae”). It was only in 1787 that Jean-
François Féraud’s Dictionnaire critique de la langue française [Critical Dictionary
of the French Language] explicitly recognized that “sève” could also be used figu-
ratively, and it took the Académie Française until 1835 to do so.
The power and emergent popularity of the sap metaphor certainly prof-
ited from the ambiguity of the literal reference: in the eighteenth century what
exactly constituted the substance of sap was still rather vague, as is evident in the
naturalist Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau’s glossary entry at the end of La
physique des arbres [The Physics of Trees] (1758): “SEVE: l’humeur qui se trouve
dans le corps des plantes, prise d’une façon générale, car on aperçoit qu’il y a dans
les plantes différentes liqueurs comme la lymphe, le suc propre, etc.”13 [SAP: the
humor that is found in the body of plants, taken generally, as one notices that
in plants there are different fluids such as lymph, actual juice, etc.]. Alternative
words used to signify these liquids were “sucs nourriciers” [nutritious juices] or
“sucs bienfaisants” [healthy juices], although in general these two terms referred
to inert nutrients whereas “sève” [sap] could be envisioned as a vital substance
or force. These metaphors were relatively free-floating—and therefore potentiallyPacini / “Une Sève Nouvelle et Pure” 413
useful—signifiers that could be applied to a wide variety of situations and in sup-
port of diverse ideological agendas.14
From a scientific point of view, interest in the flow of sap had been stimu-
lated by discoveries and debates about the circulatory systems of animals and
plants.15 In 1628 the English physician William Harvey had observed that hearts
continuously pump blood through the animal body, and this discovery had in turn
launched discussions about how sap might move around within plants.16 It took
another century for the botanist Stephen Hales to conclude in 1727 that sap did
not circulate in a closed system as that of animals, and that plants drew water from
the soil via their roots. These ideas reached France in 1735 through Georges-Louis
Leclerc de Buffon’s translation of Hales’ Vegetal Staticks, and they were further
publicized in important works such as du Monceau’s La physique des arbres (1758)
and Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1765).17 At the end of the eighteenth
century, two main points were generally accepted: that wood was inert, and that the
movement of sap carried water and nutrients throughout the body without shap-
ing it in any specific way.18 How exactly this circulatory system worked, and how
sap ascended within the trunk, remained an object of great curiosity and debate.
Inspired in part by this science, a broad interest in matters of circula-
tion and a “rhetoric of flow” developed during the second half of the eighteenth
century.19 This was particularly visible in economic discourse and especially in
contemporary physiocratic theory: in 1757 the surgeon-turned-economist François
Quesnay insisted on the importance of a healthy flow of resources (bodily fluids,
metaphoric sap, grains, or money) within both the human body and the nation’s
economy, calling for the removal of whatever obstacles might hinder this move-
ment.20 Nurturing the earth (the work of agriculture) was deemed an essential
activity as the health of the state depended on good sap production and circula-
tion; after that, however, all other branches of economic activity were to be left to
grow freely.21 As these ideas gained influence, the sap metaphor established itself
as a convenient way of conceiving of the ideal circulation of human and financial
assets within a given economy. The metaphor continued to carry with it, moreover,
the Physiocrats’ emphasis on material productivity (a rather ironic fact given that
in the 1760s physiocratic theory was translated into agricultural land clearance
edicts which ultimately severed the flow of sap in thousands of French trees in the
name of promoting agricultural yield).
SAP, TREES, AND THE BODY POLITIC
In the meanwhile, the origin or impetus of sap’s movement within these
circulatory systems remained uncertain and contested. Early modern botanists were
divided or unsure of their conclusions, and Quesnay’s position too was ambiguous
and continues to puzzle historians today: What put (organic) systems into motion?
Could sap be said to have an agency of its own? Was it responsible for a plant’s
growth and productivity? In 1733 the physico-theologist Noël-Antoine Pluche
had denied sap any active role, but practicing agronomers and naturalists such
as Jean de La Quintinie and Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville insisted on the
contrary.22 This debate was still alive at the end of the eighteenth century, when
physicians in the School of Medicine of Montpellier argued that the movements of
sap depended on an immutable principle that governed life, and that contrary to414 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 53, No. 3
animals plants needed neither a heart, nor any other mechanical pump or agent.23
J.V.Y. Degland and his vitalist colleagues believed that animals and plants were to
be understood as holistic organisms rather than as mechanical aggregates. In their
view, bodies bonded—and came into being as such—through the circulation of vital
fluids such as blood and sap. Life was everywhere, so organs should be studied in
their interconnectedness rather than as distinct entities.24
These ideas permeated contemporary discourse about the nature and
health of the body politic, at times reshaping traditional conceptions of the state in
dynamic terms, as a live and potentially evolving organism, rather than as an inert
structure only set in motion by some higher power.25 According to historian Peter
Hanns Reill, vitalist science may even have inspired Rousseau’s understanding of
the social contract: it explained how a collective body might come into being as
more than a sum of its constitutive parts, as well as how this association could al-
low each contracting member still to maintain his individual freedom and agency.26
During the Revolution these scientific ideas were explicitly translated into political
terms as patriot writers strove to understand the nature and current conditions
of the French body politic. France no longer had to be envisioned as an aggregate
of different and clearly localized organs organized hierarchically around a central
locus of power (as per a mechanistic model); rather, the nation might be an organic
whole whose vitality and agency were distributed throughout the body.
Not surprisingly, writers of the Third Estate were particularly attracted
to this vitalist model: de Baecque has shown how they wanted “to be in step with
the medical science of the time, which mainly [directed] its researches toward the
circulation of the blood and vitalist principles, as against the localist anatomy in-
herited from Latin medicine.”27 It is an organic metaphor of the body, de Baecque
continues, that “allows us to understand the fracture of 1789,” the moment when
France moved beyond its traditional and highly hierarchical organization in three
Estates, and formed instead a national assembly of equals.28 De Baecque has there-
fore studied how figures of diseased and freakish bodies allowed revolutionaries
to come to terms with the period’s ever-evolving events and narrate the death of
one political system and the birth of another.
The Revolution’s discourse of sap in many ways ran parallel to this dis-
course of disease as it too postulated the need for medical intervention or a ‘pruning’
of the state.29 Unlike the political bodies of interest to de Baecque, however, arboreal
metaphors were grounded in common material referents (trees) and in widespread
socio-economic practices. Furthermore, as the building-blocks of every day life in
France’s preindustrial economy, trees bore a much more positive connotation: to
the entire population they offered heating and energy, as well as critical materials
for tools, construction, food, medicine, transportation, and timber for the navy.30
By the end of the eighteenth century, French scientists had also became aware of
the fact that trees served as environmental agents protecting against air pollution,
soil erosion, aridity, and torrential inundations.31 Yet strong demographic growth,
increased royal regulations, land privatization, wide-spread clearings for agricul-
tural purposes, and the wood appetites of new metallurgical manufacturing plants
had taken their toll on the wood supplies of the nation: by 1789 less than thirteen
percent of France’s territory was still forested.32 Over the course of the century,
both the intellectual élite and more popular voices therefore expressed concern overPacini / “Une Sève Nouvelle et Pure” 415
existent or potential wood shortages, and arguments over the use and ownership
of traditionally communal woodlands ran through the thousands of cahiers de
doléances that reached the Estates General in 1789.
As the French monarchy and successive revolutionary governments became
aware of this situation, they adopted the role of tree stewards for the nation. It is
thus that one should read official initiatives such as Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s “Or-
donnance sur le fait des eaux et des forêts” [“Ordinance on Waters and Forests”]
(1669), promulgated under Louis XIV, or the repeated (though ultimately ineffec-
tual) attempts at forest legislation and extensive afforestation that characterized
the 1790s. Royal and republican governments alike invested in trees to ensure the
country’s material strength, to assure the geopolitical potency of the State, and to
naturalize its power. Following in the footsteps of François II who had ordered
the planting of elms alongside the main roads of his kingdom, in the 1790s French
republicans planted tens of thousands of liberty trees in revolutionary communes
across the nation and abroad (with some political leaders such as Nicolas-François
de Neufchâteau even pushing for the planting of one hundred million more).33 Dur-
ing the Directory in particular, the Minister of the Interior issued repeated decrees
and prizes to encourage these patriotic efforts, while articles in revolutionary news-
papers such as La Feuille Villageoise and the Bulletin Décadaire de la République
Française trumpeted the economic and environmental value of trees, telling rural
readers who wanted to support the faltering republic to plant as many as possible.34
Arboriculture was extolled as an ideal civic behavior, the expression of a republican
cult of nature that would enhance the nation’s character while serving both private
and public interests.35 Above all, positive images of tree-planting and a rhetoric
of tree-care came to function in opposition to images of (forest) vandalism which
were linked instead to the degenerate behaviors of the ancien régime.36
Tracing this context helps to explain why, during the second half of the
eighteenth century, celebrations and criticism of the French government’s ac-
tions—whether royalist or republican in spirit—could be couched in a language of
trees, with discourses and images of pruning, grafting, and felling carrying serious
political undertones.37 Economists, demographers, philosophers, and critics of the
French monarchy chose to express their concerns through a diverse array of images
of overgrown trees whose sap was blocked or drying up before it could reach the
trunk’s peripheral branches. To start with a few early examples dating back to the
middle of the eighteenth century, Victor Riqueti marquis de Mirabeau proclaimed
in L’ami des hommes (1756) that the state was a tree with agriculture as its roots.
This tree, he argued, drew vivifying sap from its roots, and this stimulated the
development of prosperous industries, commerce, and the arts, while problems at
the roots (agricultural issues) could have grave consequences and ruin the health
of the entire body politic.38 In a different vein, an Encyclopédie article (1765)
by Etienne-Noël Damilaville lamented the limited demographic growth of large
modern nations with heavy administrative structures, arguing that in a public tree
an excessive number of intermediary agents could impede the passage of sap (i.e.
information or truth).39
On a more explicitly political level, the philosopher Voltaire recommended
in La religion naturelle [On natural religion] (1756) that rulers trim their trees
to control undesirable movements and to stimulate their nation’s economy. This416 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 53, No. 3
was particularly important in France, since religious and political divisions had
torn the country apart and damaged its economy since the late sixteenth century.
The French could therefore learn from the management skills of Frederick II, the
steward-king of Prussia who had managed to discipline his country’s forces and
to redirect their energies to more productive purposes:
[L’heureux cultivateur . . . maître de son terrain. . .]
Arrache impunément les plantes inutiles;
Et des arbres touffus dans son clos renfermés,
Emonde les rameaux de la sève affamés :
Son docile terrain répond à la culture,
Ministre industrieux des lois de la Nature,
Il n’est point traversé dans ses heureux desseins ;
Un arbre qu’avec soin il planta de ses mains,
Ne prétend point le droit de se rendre stérile,
Et du sol épuisé tirant un suc utile,
Ne va point refuser à son maître affligé,
Une part de ses fruits dont il est trop chargé.40
[The happy cultivator . . . master of his terrain. . .]
[Freely weeds out useless plants;
And of the thick trees enclosed in his field
He prunes the branches hungry for sap:
His docile land responds to cultivation,
This industrious minister of the laws of Nature,
Finds no resistance to his happy projects;
A tree that he carefully planted with his hands,
Does not claim the right to be sterile,
And drawing useful sap from the exhausted soil
Does not refuse its saddened master
A portion of the fruits that burden him.]
This use of pruning images to illustrate France’s need for reform drew on
a figurative tradition that can be traced back at least to the publication of Cesare
Ripa’s highly influential Iconologia.41 This tradition was reinvigorated during
Voltaire’s time thanks to the publication of a beautifully illustrated re-edition of
Ripa’s text by Johann Georg Hertel (1758–60). Voltaire expanded on this work,
however, as he envisioned a whole managerial system wherein the land was “doc-
ile” and trees had no “right” to oppose their master’s desires: they yielded to his
force, offered up a “useful sap,” and therefore ensured the nation’s productivity.
Voltaire thus represented trees and the land as distinct entities entirely subordinate
to—and set in motion by—Frederick II. His imagery mapped onto a mechanistic
and hierarchical model of power in which all vitality and political agency were
located in a superior steward-king. Within this ideally pruned space, supposedly
an exemplar for ancien régime France, nothing stood in the way of the master’s
“happy designs.”
Sap was granted a much more central and active role when Jean-Jacques
Rousseau shifted the focus of attention away from the master gardener, applauding
instead the ways in which, once all external disciplinary constraints were removed,
sap reasserted its original direction and naturally straightened a plant. Far from
simply being a “useful” substance directed by a master-gardener, as in Voltaire’sPacini / “Une Sève Nouvelle et Pure” 417
poem, in “Nature, habitude” (1764) sap was envisioned as a flowing force of its
own, and as such, Rousseau concluded, it resembled human inclinations.42 Here
too a botanical analogy supported a philosopher’s larger agenda, serving in this
case as the language of choice for an assessment of man’s nature and expressive
power. Sap represented the innate righteousness and freedom of humans, includ-
ing their inherent ability to counter external pressure. More importantly, the
ideological underpinnings of this discourse of trees and sap had shifted, offering
a convenient platform for more radical visions of autonomous movement within
a social or political body.
REVOLUTIONARY DISCOURSES AND PRACTICES
Throughout the 1780s, writers and political deputies issued repeated calls
for the French to “prune” the monarchy and its institutions. Although such arboreal
allegories were mobilized by writers across the political spectrum, the frustrations
of the Third Estate in particular found expression in images of blocked or depleted
sap. High-ranking forms of obstruction and ‘parasitism’ were allegedly causing
an uneven distribution of the country’s economic resources and political power,
and this situation was said to be detrimental to the health of the body politic as a
whole. In “Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etat?” [“What is the Third Estate?”] (1789), the
political writer and abbot Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès complained that the nobility
was “véritablement un peuple à part, mais un faux peuple, qui ne pouvant, à défaut
d’organes utiles, exister par lui-même, s’attache à une Nation réelle, comme ces
tumeurs végétales, qui ne peuvent vivre que de la sève des plantes qu’elles fatiguent
et dessèchent” [truly a people apart, but a deceitful one who, unable to exist on
its own for lack of useful organs, attaches itself to a real Nation like those vegetal
tumors that can only live off the sap of plants which they fatigue and desiccate].43
This example is probably the most famous, but Sieyès was not the first to use such
imagery. During those early years of the revolution it was commonplace to argue
that the clergy’s and aristocracy’s privileges were parasitic organs that dangerously
blocked the natural flow of sap within the tree/nation.44
These concerns over the mechanics of an equitable distribution of re-
sources combined with more qualitative considerations regarding the character,
composition, and health of the sap itself. After all, a simple arboreal pruning—as
in the strategic removal of branches or polyps to enhance sap flow—risked being
insufficient if this liquid was internally compromised: its very chemistry might
have to change for the polity to function properly. In the toxic environment es-
tablished or left behind by the ancien régime, pure or purified sap came to signify
the tree/nation’s patriotism, its revolutionary fervor, and more generally a culture
of respect for the common good. As early as April 1789, even before the opening
of the Estates General, the deputies of all three Orders in the bailiwick of Dijon
assembled to take an oath of solidarity in the hope that “une sève nouvelle et pure
va couler dans tous les membres de cet état malade et languissant, et lui redonner
la fraîcheur d’une jeunesse active, brillante et vigoureuse” [a new and pure sap will
flow through all the members of this sick and languishing state, returning it to the
freshness of an active, brilliant, and vigorous youth].45418 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 53, No. 3
This discourse of pruning and regeneration toughened quickly. Only one
year later, when faced with a “contre-révolution” in the south fomented by an
allegedly fanatical clergy and “aristocrates de toute couleur,” Marc-Guillaume
Vadier, deputy to the National Assembly (and future president of the National
Convention) declared that the state-tree actually had to be felled and its toxic
roots and malignant parasites removed so that another, healthier, specimen could
take its place [counter-revolution; aristocrats of every color].46 This idea found
broad appeal, with rhetorical competitions between monarchic and republican
trees taking visual forms as well, as evidenced for instance in a 1790 painting by
Colinart that featured a powerful figure of Liberty standing over a felled tree of
despotism.47 This broken trunk, wherein snakes circulate in the place of sap, lies in
clear opposition to a healthy grove of fruit trees, positive figures of a constitutional
monarchy’s more productive and decentralized economic and political structures.
Nevertheless Jacobins continued to worry that residual traces of the royal tree/
body might continue to poison the soil and sap of their “arbre constitutionnel”
[constitutional tree], and arboreal contests of this kind persisted even after the
execution of Louis XVI in January 1793.48
This rhetoric acquired a literal dimension when the French started plant-
ing live saplings to celebrate their newly won republican freedoms. Throughout
1790 and 1791 many communities had autonomously declared the end of feudal
privileges by erecting wild maypoles or trees without roots, but after 1792 govern-
ment officials and political clubs across the country realized that live trees were
more appropriate and convincing representations of the vitality and regeneration
of the nation. French citizens composed poems, songs, and speeches to accom-
pany their tree-planting ceremonies, naturally drawing on the arboreal rhetoric
of their predecessors, but now grounding it by way of references to their material
practices. In 1793 citizen Hyver applauded the fact that the monarchic trunk had
(figuratively) been felled as he gazed upon the republican tree that was literally
growing out of France’s traditionally aristocratic ground. (Interestingly, his speech
wavered between traditional images of mechanical assemblage—e.g. a tree with
distinct parts and crowned by a superior head—and a new holistic, radical, vision
of a united organism.49 Such was the paradoxical nature of the revolutionaries’
language, wherein the expression of radical ideas could sometimes remain trapped
within a royalist rhetoric. In this case, the pure sap that was to nurture even the
smallest root of this new arboreal body—and thereby holistically to represent the
bond between the tree’s many organs—was still expected to support the “majesté”
of the tree’s crown.) Regardless of these ideological inconsistencies, Hyver’s speech
stands out as yet another iteration of the concept that the nation’s purified sap was
slowly overcoming the poison left by aristocratic bodies: “chacune des racines de
l’arbre que vous avez planté, en repoussant . . . le vénin aristocratique, ne recevra
de cette terre que les sucs purs et nourriciers qui feront grossier, élever sa tige” [as
it pushes the aristocratic poison away, every root of the tree you have planted will
receive nothing but pure and nourishing juices that will allow its trunk to develop
and stand tall.]50 Here too a material tree and arboreal allegory gave visible form
to otherwise abstract ideas about the importance of reforming the tree/nation’s
internal character.Pacini / “Une Sève Nouvelle et Pure” 419
The purification of the liberty tree’s sap entailed more than the abolition
of the monarchy and its associated toxins. It also required the establishment of
large communal programs such as an “école de républicanisme” or a politics of
“justice distributive” to eliminate the nation’s poverty [school of republicanism;
distributive justice].51 In 1793, in rural communes across the country La Feuille
Villageoise alerted its readers that, for sap to flow, the tree of liberty needed to be
incessantly nurtured with “idées justes . . . sentiments droits . . . courage . . . vertus
républicaines” [correct ideas . . . righteous feelings . . . courage . . . republican
virtues].52 This was important because only a cultural revolution could consolidate
the identity and health of the republic. In addition, ordinary citizens were now be-
ing called upon to enact these changes, no longer just a rarified political élite (the
presumably superior king-steward or a representative body of government). The
locus of revolutionary agency was broadening, as teachers and parents reminded
the young in their charge that it was up to the republic’s citizens to water the liberty
tree and stimulate its sap (both figurative and literally).53 Through this labor they
would demonstrate their patriotism and further develop their attachments to the
land, the republic, and to each other, across generations:
Au pied de cet arbre . . . vous vous souviendrez que vous êtes Français .
. . . là les citoyens sentiront palpiter leurs coeurs en parlant de l’amour
de la patrie, de la souveraineté du peuple, de l’indivisibilité républicaine
. . . . “J’aidai à le planter, je l’arrosai,” dira le vieillard. . . . “Vous qui
nous succéderez dans la carrière, réunis sous ses rameaux, racontez à vos
enfants quels furent nos efforts pour fonder la République.”54
[At the foot of this tree . . . you will remember that you are French. . . .
there, citizens will feel their hearts palpitate when they speak of their love
of the country, of the sovereignty of the people, of the republican indivis-
ibility. . . . “I helped to plant it, I will water it,” the old man will say. . . .
“united under its branches you who follow us in life, tell your children
about our efforts to found the Republic.”]
Two minority views complicate this narrative regarding the location of
revolutionary agency. First of all, although the necessity and consequent value of
human labor figured most prominently in this arboreal discourse, some speeches
voiced the possibility that sap might be a natural force with a vitality and telos
of its own. There may even have been a certain comfort in reducing the scope of
human agency. In April 1791, the writer and deputy Joseph-Antoine Cerutti wrote
an elegy for Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau, applauding him for his work
as president of the National Assembly. Before this group Cerutti proclaimed that
Mirabeau had certainly distinguished himself as the “rameau le plus fécond” of
this (hierarchically organized) political body, but even after his death “l’oeuvre
national” would not falter [most fertile branch; national work]:
[L]’esprit public a jeté dans les têtes de si fortes racines, qu’il a besoin
d’être cultivé, mais qu’il n’a plus besoin d’être soutenu. L’arbre vivifi-
ant couvre la France. Son immensité fait sa stabilité. Les talents qui
l’entourent peuvent périr: ce sont des ornements, ce sont des branches
productives qu’il perd; mais sa tige est immortelle, et sa sève inépuis-
able.55420 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 53, No. 3
[(T)he public spirit has planted roots so strong in our minds that it needs
to be cultivated, but no longer supported. The tree of life covers France.
Its immensity ensures its stability. The talents that surround it may perish:
these are ornaments, productive branches which it loses; but its trunk is
immortal and its sap inexhaustible.]
In this arboreal model, political resourcefulness and power were holistically dis-
tributed across the body rather than being attached to a specific individual or to
a superior “branch.”56 Sap flowed freely across the body’s organs, and all motion
came from within. Far from requiring a gardener-citizen or president to force her
into productive action, nature would regenerate and power the Revolution on her
own, immediately filling any existent voids.57
This vitalist strain disappeared in the years following the Terror. After
1794, more traditionally mechanist models of applied human labor prevailed,
possibly because the radical dimensions of the former had become less politically
appealing and in any event they did not enable or encourage pragmatic action.58
Like the Jacobins’ visions of the Revolution as an inexorable natural force, as
discussed by Miller, vitalism diminished the scope of human agency, stifling pos-
sibilities for political or civic intervention. It is therefore not too surprising that
the alternative minority position spoke from the opposite side of the ideological
spectrum, stressing the importance of human engagement so forcibly that it eclipsed
all mentions of nature’s gifts or powers and positing that the regeneration of the
nation rested entirely on the labor of virtuous citizens. The theophilathropist Jean-
Baptiste Chemin-Despontès’ lyrics for a hymn for the Festival of the Foundation
of the Republic (1798) described the duties inherent in this republican ethos: “A
l’arbre de la liberté/ Fournissons une sève active; / Par l’héroïsme il fut planté; /
Par les vertus on le cultive” [To the tree of liberty/ Let us provide an active sap;/
By heroism it was planted;/ With virtue one cultivates it]. Humans, not nature,
were to supply this precious substance.59 These were minority positions, however,
and speeches given during the Directory mainly tended to suggest that ensuring
a good flow of sap was a shared task: humans were to protect and to stimulate
nature’s original gifts and powers so as to enhance her ultimate performance.60 The
Revolution was generally represented as the result of a laborious process powered
by a hybrid collective of human and nonhuman agents.
A DEMOCRATIC CIVIC CULTURE
As it spoke of enhancing nature’s yield, the discourse of sap retained
traces of its intellectual roots in the economic discourse of the second half of the
eighteenth century. Scholars today regularly cite the symbolic importance of the
liberty trees, but one must remember that Grégoire had already stated in year II
(1793–94) that the liberty trees should be valued for their material usefulness as
well: they were to provide shade, refuge, a meeting place for political and social
gatherings, in addition to wood, food, and clean air for the whole nation. Ideally,
moreover, they would be surrounded by more plants offering the same advantages.61
Grégoire thus expanded upon the concept of the republican tree: quantitatively, as
he moved from considerations of an individual sapling to recommendations for the
establishment of larger woods and forests, and qualitatively as he added concrete
functions to what at first had simply been an abstract symbol. Similarly expansivePacini / “Une Sève Nouvelle et Pure” 421
views of the liberty trees continued to circulate during the Directory, as the Minister
of the Interior Neufchâteau also insisted in his articles on planting that “tout doit
tendre à l’utilité” [everything must tend towards usefulness].62
Even young children should therefore learn and get used to practicing
that “vertu morale qui engage à planter des arbres dont le produit est réservé aux
générations suivantes” [moral virtue that engages one to plant trees whose fruits
will be reserved for future generations].63 This education had become particularly
critical ever since the National Assembly had decreed in September 1791 that
forestal oversight be decentralized, thereby allowing private property (including
woods) to be administered as each individual proprietor saw fit. Given the fact that
during these same years extensive ecclesiastical and emigré lands had been sold into
private hands, it seemed all the more crucial that ordinary citizens be well versed
and ethically invested in silvicultural matters.64 During both the Convention and
the Directory administrators expressed concern over the results of this decree and
the consequent deterioration of the French forests, but as renewed efforts at legis-
lation continued to be ineffective, Neufchâteau in particular directed his energies
towards promoting a republican culture of tree-planting.
This silvicultural discourse was generally meant to be democratic—it was
certainly spoken in the name of liberty, fraternity, and equality, and it encouraged
popular participation— but it also served the Convention’s and the Directory’s
political agendas. A condescending if not utterly authoritarian tone emerges in an
argument dated 1796, for instance, when a deputy to the Council of Five Hundred,
François-Boissy d’Anglas, argued that the National Convention’s law of 3 Bru-
maire year IV had been an indispensable, if admittedly shady, measure to protect
a young tree whose sap was certainly strong, but who had yet to take root. Only
by enforcing a temporary barrier around this plant—i.e. excluding émigrés and
their relatives from public office, including those who had just been elected—could
the government prevent the destructive actions of royalist and ecclesiastical pests
and of otherwise ignorant or “imprudent” citizens.65 Speeches such as these were
meant to explain that the regeneration of the nation was going to be a complex
and lengthy process, and they mobilized easily comprehensible and apparently
self-evident arboreal analogies to naturalize problematic governmental actions
(Boissy d’Anglas glossed these as “une ombre momentanée” [temporary shadow]).
That said, even this speech carried the promise of a more democratic future:
it implied that once the French citizenry had learned to live up to its republican
values, forceful governmental interventions would no longer be necessary. This
discourse therefore wavered between considerations of political and ethical issues,
and as such it makes most sense when read in the light of historian James Livesey’s
work on the civic culture of the Directory. Livesey’s point of departure is that the
Jacobin republic failed to generate a civic culture capable of giving life to the new
polity: the Convention supposedly fixated on theoretical issues of sovereignty
when it should have built itself a popular base of support. It was only during
the Directory that republicanism truly addressed this problem of representation,
identifying “specific ways for the people to imagine themselves [as citizens] and
through which they might live their lives” since the nation was too large for direct
assemblies.66 New political and ethical questions were therefore brought to the fore:
On what grounds should citizens rule, and how exactly might they participate in422 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 53, No. 3
the government of their democracy? Livesey cites the Directory’s investment in civic
education, as well as its national festivals and general re-sacralization of every day
life, as important ways in which modern citizens were able to demonstrate their
virtue and participate in the republican project even when they could not all be
elected to public office. Agricultural work and improvement were central to this
agenda, and Livesey has therefore studied the Directory’s ardent celebrations of
the citizen-farmer and interest in sponsoring plantation ceremonies in this light.
My analysis of the revolutionaries’ planting and rhetoric of sap helps situ-
ate this history of the Directory within a longer tradition of politicized arboreal
discourse, suggesting moreover that in this field at least there were more continuities
than ruptures between the Convention’s and the Directory’s political and civic cul-
tures. By tracing the use of the sap metaphor over the course of the late eighteenth
century, one remarks that the French gradually shifted their focus away from the
use of reactive images of pruning and structural reform (images which had raised
important questions for the élite about the distribution of economic resources and
the ideal form of political sovereignty), and towards a more proactive republican
agenda for the entire population. By cultivating trees and stimulating their sap,
citizens were supposed to demonstrate and enhance their own virtue, while also
engaging in activities that socially, culturally, and materially supported the republic.
Especially as they addressed themselves to the nation’s youth and rural inhabitants,
speeches under both the Convention and the Directory generally (albeit not always!)
encouraged the notion that the country’s agents of regeneration were distributed
across the entire class of citizen-gardeners—no longer were they narrowly limited
to the singular figures of a steward-king or a representative political body. When
Gassicourt in 1793 and Chemin-Despontès in 1798 distinguished roots and sap
as the vital element in the tree/nation’s life—suggesting in the process that wood
was an inert material, a formal vessel—they tried to reorient traditional French
thinking about trees and the body politic. Where imposing trunks, majestic crowns,
and attached (governmental) branches had once been the center of philosophical
or political attention, the discourse on sap granted more value to radical organi-
zation, dynamic social bonds, and popular engagement (at this point in history
photosynthesis had not yet entered the rhetorical picture).
On a more abstract level, sap served as a useful heuristic device for late
eighteenth-century thinkers. It seems to have functioned as a figurative “network,”
as defined by Pierre Musso, and it therefore participated in and contributed to the
historical shift which this philosopher has traced from linear to reticular forms
of thinking. As he studies the development of today’s network society, Musso
locates a critical turning point in the philosophy and sciences of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries: a new intellectual paradigm emerged from this period’s
fascination with geometry, cartography, crystallography, hydraulics, new forms of
transportation and communication infrastructure, and with matters of circulation
more generally.67 In this regard, Musso too notes the broad influence of physioc-
racy, of Harvey’s closed-circuit vascular model, and of eighteenth-century vitalist
medicine in its recasting of organic bodies as self-regulating structures. Together, he
claims, these models and projects undermined traditionally linear and hierarchical
modes of thinking, allowing instead for the development of a relational discourse,
in his words an epistemological “technique,” that in turn authorized the rationalPacini / “Une Sève Nouvelle et Pure” 423
examination and interpretation of natural bodies and their life processes within a
dynamic and secular framework.68 Like the waters and blood of interest to Musso,
sap too constituted an embodied network insofar as it became both an object of
study and a precious theoretical instrument for a holistic and reticular exploration
of the unknown and invisible: in this case: a reflection on the constitution of the
liberty trees or republican body politic and on the activities and attitudes that could
root and nurture the latter in an erstwhile monarchic land.69
It was on the force of these merits that a rhetoric of sap continued to be
used by writers across the political spectrum throughout the nineteenth century.
To quote one last example, in his Histoire de la Révolution française [History of
the French Revolution] (1847–1853), Jules Michelet meditated on the limits of
reformist politics: “Emonder servait très-peu,” he observed, “si la racine était la
même. C’est elle qu’il eût fallu changer par la force d’une sève nouvelle” [Prun-
ing had little effect when the root was the same. It was the root that one should
have changed thanks to the force of new sap].70 Writing half way through the
nineteenth century and from this side of the Revolution, Michelet was thinking
about France’s history in terms of innovation and ruptures. His rhetoric however
was far from new: his extended sap and pruning metaphors were a continuation
of late eighteenth-century discourses regarding the circulation of vital resources,
the importance of establishing a republican culture and ethos, and the distribution
of agency within the French polity.
NOTES
1. “Discours prononcé par le citoyen Cadet-Gassicourt à l’inauguration des bustes de Marat et le
Pelletier, faite le 12 frimaire, à la Section du Mont-Blanc,” in Fête en l’honneur de Marat et Lepelletier
. . . (Paris: Impr. De la Ce Fonrouge, an II/ 1793), 16–17. Italics added; punctuation minimally altered for
readability. “Martyr” is used in reference to both men on p. 14. All translations in this article are mine.
2. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1980); Lynn Hunt, Poetics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
Univ. of California Press, 1984); Roger Chartier, Les origines culturelles de la révolution française
(Paris: Seuil, 1990); Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1990); Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in
Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2001).
3. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 9.
4. Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, trans.
Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), 4.
5. De Baecque has also analyzed the more positive figures of Hercules and Marianne in his conclu-
sion of The Body Politic, 309–23. A discussion of their limitations follows shortly in this article.
6. In the midst of the revolutionary storm the French looked to the liberty tree for hope, shelter,
and nourishment: see Pierre Crouzet, Poëme sur la liberté, lu à la distribution des prix de l’Université
de Paris. . . le 4 août l’an II de la République française (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1793), 11.
7. Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution. Violence and Nature in the French
Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794 (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 2011), 4.
8. Miller, A Natural History, 169.
9. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Le nouveau Paris (Paris: chez Fuchs, 1797) 1:90–91.424 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 53, No. 3 10. As de Baecque has pointed out, Hercules was meant to represent the embodiment of popular sovereignty (The Body Politic, 314). I will argue that arboreal allegories shifted the Convention’s and Directory’s focus towards more practical and appealing considerations of the ideal forms of civic en- gagement. 11. “Il s’agit [de] faire circuler une nouvelle sève [dans le corps politique], c’est le seul moyen de le sauver”: Jean-Baptiste Say, “Politique. Affaires de l’Intérieur,” in La décade philosophique, littéraire et politique par une société de républicains (Paris: 1799), no. 30: 192. Text dated 30 messidor an VII/ 18 July 1799. In this case, sap stood in for the value of electing new members to the Directory’s Councils. 12. Le dictionnaire de l’Académie française (Paris: chez Coignard, 1694), s.v.: ”Sève.” 13. Henri-Louis Duhamel Du Monceau, “Discussion sur la circulation de la sève,” in La physique des arbres, où il est traité de l’anatomie des plantes et de l’économie végétale. . . (Paris: Guérin et Delatour, 1758), 2: 424. Emphasis added. 14. This article focuses on reformist and revolutionary uses of the metaphor, but for a conservative example see for instance the work of the refractory priest Jean-Baptiste Duvoisin, Défense de l’ordre social contre les principes de la Révolution française. . . (Londres [i.e. Hamburg]: 1798), 232. 15. In 1734 Voltaire observed the significance of these discoveries: “La circulation du sang dans les animaux et de la sève dans les végétables a changé pour nous la nature”: “Sur l’optique de Monsieur Newton,” in Lettres philosophiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 112. 16. For a history of British experiments and studies of the movement of sap, see Beryl Hartley, “Exploring and Communicating Knowledge of Trees in the Early Royal Society,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 64 (2010): 239–44. 17. Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt, “Sève,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (Neufchastel: chez Faulche et co., 1765), vol. 15; Du Monceau, “Discussion sur la circulation de la sève,” in La physique des arbres 2: 312–26. 18. Andrée Corvol, L’arbre en Occident (Paris: Fayard, 2009), 59. 19. I take the notion of a “rhetoric of flow” from Francine Markovits, L’ordre des échanges: philo- sophie de l’économie et économie du discours au XVIIIe siècle en France (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 181. 20. Liana Vardi, The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012), 66. One can therefore understand Quesnay’s collaboration with Mirabeau, whose L’ami des hommes I quote later in this essay. 21. François Quesnay, “Grains,” in Encyclopédie 7: 817 (volume published in 1757): “Il faut donc cultiver le pié de l’arbre, & ne pas borner nos soins à gouverner les branches; laissons-les s’arranger & s’étendre en liberté, mais ne négligeons pas la terre qui fournit les sucs nécessaires à leur végétation & à leur accroissement.” 22. Sarah Benharrech, “Vegetal Agency: The Sap Controversy in Early Eighteenth-Century France,” paper presented at the annual conference of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Denver, CO, 2019; Vardi, The Physiocrats, 63–65; H. Spencer Banzhaf, “Productive Nature and the Net Product: Quesnay’s Economies Animal and Political,” History of Political Economy 32:3 (2000), 517–51. 23. J.V.Y. Degland, “Examen de cette question: La sève circule-t-elle dans les plantes à l’instar du sang dans certaines classes d’animaux? Offert à l’école de Médecine de Montpellier, le 25 prairial, an 8 de la République” (Montpellier: Jean Martel Aîné, an VIII/ 1800), 18. 24. Contemporary studies of the human nervous system similarly emphasized the importance of an unimpeded flow of neural juices. For more background on vitalism see Elizabeth A. Williams, A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier (Aldershot, Hants, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), and Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2005).
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