My dissertation contributes to current scholarly interest in pre-Revolutionary French political culture. It studies eighteenth-century representations of Greco-Roman antiquity and establishes that focusing on trends within this idiom helps make sense of political choices subsequently made by French Revolutionaries. It is thus part of historians' shift, pioneered by François Furet, away from efforts to explain the Revolution using socioeconomic models, and toward cultural and intellectual history. Studies in this category seek to recover the assumptions that Revolutionary utterances and practices were premised upon, by examining the pre-Revolutionary era. Classical republicanism has occupied an important position in the political landscape unearthed by such projects. However, a shortcoming of influential work on political culture has been to study classical republicanism through a few texts of political theory only, and to present it as a discourse out of tune with key Enlightenment-era values. My dissertation reinterprets the pre-Revolutionary meaning of classical republicanism. I argue that its fusion with sentimentalist tropes allowed it to become a mainstream language, not a marginal one. Moreover, I show that it was implicated in pre-Revolutionary oppositional politics in more complex ways than scholarship on political culture has appreciated.

These conclusions are based on my use of a broader range of sources, and a more historically sensitive definition of the political. I study representations of ancients in tragedies, novels, periodicals, and submissions to académie competitions between 1748 and 1789. These sources convey the fictionalized, domesticated forms in which eighteenth-century audiences encountered ancient republican exemplars, much more accurately than the sampling of political theory (Rousseau, Mably) examined in most studies of classical republicanism. In terms of the politics of ancient-inspired texts, Cambridge-School-influenced scholars rely on methods of intellectual history to determine which texts were oppositional. Borrowing models of the political from theorists like Raymond Williams, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, and Jacques Rancière, I inquire, instead, what artifacts contemporaries found to be politically charged, and in what contexts productions previously considered unthreatening acquired oppositional meanings.