Writing, Movement/Space, Democracy: On Jacques Ranciere’s Literary History

At a certain moment in his argument in Vitesse et politique, Paul Virilio describes the French Revolution in a particularly idiosyncratic way as a circulatory flow of traffic, thus suggesting that one way of representing the events of the Revolution is to see them as a series of traffic jams and roadway accidents. The general conscription to which the Revolution gave rise in 1793, for example, did not simply enroll a large number of the new citizens of the republic into its military activities, it effectively sent those republican soldiers out onto the roads in defense of the principles of the Revolution:

The new organization of the flow of circulation that has been arbitrarily called the French Revolution . . . is but the rational organization of a social abduction. The “general conscription” [levée en masse] of 1793 is the kidnapping of the masses. . . . While [the bourgeoisie] stayed home and acquired new properties, new buildings and houses, . . . what that same bourgeoisie offered as land to these soldiers called up by decree of the Convention were the roads of Europe. “Wherever the feet go, there is the fatherland” (ubi pedes, ibi patria), as Roman law had already put it. With the French Revolution, all roads became national.¹

(29, Virilio’s emphasis)

By recalling one of the tenets of citizenship in Roman law, “Wherever the feet go, there is the fatherland,” Virilio insists on an important dimension of the Roman Empire, well known for its logistical expertise at sending large armies to far flung places with a speed and a road system that were the envy of the ancient world: Roman citizens carried their rights with them even when they were on the move.