The Swiss Crisis and the Death of Revolutionary Idealism

The year 1798 marked a dramatic turning point in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s political consciousness. His radical journal The Watchman folded abruptly, its editor declaring he had “broken the creaking little trumpet of sedition and hung its fragments in the penitential chapel.” This symbolic act coincided with France’s brutal suppression of the Swiss Confederation—an event that shattered Romantic illusions about the French Revolution.

For Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and their circle, Switzerland had represented an almost sacred ideal. Wordsworth’s 1790 pilgrimage across revolutionary France had culminated in Switzerland, which they viewed as nature’s fortress protecting pure, uncorrupted liberty. The myth of William Tell—Switzerland’s folk hero who defied tyranny—had been revived as a symbol of resistance, much like England’s Robin Hood. When French troops crushed Swiss independence, the betrayal was profound. France, once hailed as liberator, stood revealed as just another imperial aggressor—one that hypocritically waved the tricolor banner of liberty while extinguishing freedom.

Coleridge’s furious poetic denunciation captured this disillusionment:

“France! That foulest of polluted heavens, incestuous, blind!
What boastest thou but deeds of patriot glory done in evil’s cause?
Tempting, betraying, ravishing the free, and with the spoils insulting liberty’s own shrine?”

The Retreat to Nature: Romanticism’s New Sanctuary

Rejecting revolutionary politics did not mean abandoning radical ideals. Coleridge and Wordsworth sought refuge in nature and poetry, crafting what would become the Lyrical Ballads (1798). This groundbreaking collection rejected artificial poetic diction, instead embracing the language of rural workers—a revolutionary act in itself.

At Nether Stowey, Coleridge found kinship with Thomas Poole, a democratic shoemaker who embodied his ideal of “honest simplicity.” Nearby, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy lived at Alfoxden, observing England’s rural poor with unprecedented intimacy. Their poems—like The Old Cumberland Beggar—elevated society’s outcasts:

“But deem not this man useless! Statesmen, ye
Who are so restless in your wisdom, ye
Who have a broom still ready in your hands
To rid the world of nuisances…”

The beggar, Wordsworth suggests, creates invisible bonds of community through his very vulnerability—a quiet rebuke to abstract political theories.

The Hazlitt Paradox: Radicalism’s Unlikely Chronicler

The arrival of young William Hazlitt in 1798 added another dimension to this intellectual ferment. The awkward, starstruck painter (later England’s greatest essayist) was mesmerized by Coleridge’s preaching:

“I was stunned, speechless, despairing—like a worm crushed on the highway, bleeding and lifeless.”

Yet Hazlitt’s eventual disillusionment with the Lake Poets’ conservative turn would fuel his brilliant critiques. Where Coleridge and Wordsworth retreated into nature’s “solitary” realms, Hazlitt remained fiercely loyal to revolutionary ideals—even idolizing Napoleon despite the emperor’s authoritarianism.

The Patriotism Paradox: From Radicals to Nationalists

By 1803, with Napoleon threatening invasion, Coleridge’s rhetoric had transformed completely. His Churchillian prose now framed Britain as liberty’s last bastion:

“Let France bribe and bully Europe into coalition against us! I shall not fear for my country… ‘He treads the winepress alone, and of the people there was none with him.’”

This patriotic fervor found its ultimate symbol in Admiral Nelson—the one-armed, one-eyed naval genius whose 1805 victory at Trafalgar saved Britain from invasion. Nelson’s celebrity (including his scandalous affair with Emma Hamilton) became a national obsession, his state funeral surpassing even royal ceremonies in grandeur.

Legacy: Romanticism’s Divided Soul

The Romantic movement’s journey from revolutionary enthusiasm to patriotic conservatism reveals a profound tension. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetic revolution—their focus on individual consciousness and nature’s healing power—endured, even as their political radicalism faded.

Meanwhile, figures like Hazlitt and Thomas Paine (who died impoverished in 1809, cursing Napoleon as “freedom’s chief butcher”) kept the flame of dissent alive. The era’s unresolved contradictions—between individual liberty and national identity, between nature’s solace and social justice—continue to resonate in our own polarized age.

In the end, the Romantics’ greatest legacy may be their demonstration of how ideals evolve under pressure—and how art can both retreat from and reshape the world.