Revolutionary Volcanism
s. 11 z 19FLPI.2025.09.13The Aesthetics and Politics of Volcanoes…Revolutionary VolcanismVolcanoes have always been symbols. They stood for the entrance to the un-derworld, for the downfall of civilization or for the eruption of passions. Their polit-ical metaphors fed the rhetorical imagery of the French Revolution. As the literary scholar Joachim von der Thüsen explains in an essay on volcanic metaphors dur-ing the time of the French Revolution, the volcano metaphor was new and avant-garde in 1789 (von der Thüsen 1996: 113–143). In Central Europe, where there are no active volcanoes, knowledge of fire mountains had not been widespread, and they were considered to be destructive only. With their increasing exploration and with popular geological works such as Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei, this changed. Knowl-edge of volcanoes grew, and their aesthetic perception as grandiose phenomena and as a creative force allowed for positive political charges. The revolutionaries used the volcanoes as a symbol for a social upheaval that took place according to natural law: for explosive resistance against static oppression and for the unstoppa-ble spread of a movement.
But the rhetorical appropriation of volcanoes was not without problems. In Georg Büchner’s drama Dantons Tod (1835), which is largely based on original doc-uments and speeches from the French Revolution, the Jacobin Saint-Just compares the violence of the revolution with the violence of a natural catastrophe (Büch-ner 2004 [1835]: 103–105 (our translation)): “The spirit of the world uses our arms in the spiritual sphere just as it uses volcanoes or floods of water in the physical sphere.” For the advocate of revolutionary terreur, who has less radical freedom fighters like Danton executed, political upheaval proceeds with biological or geo-logical inevitability. Saint-Just equates human and natural history to justify killing: “What does it matter whether they die of pestilence or revolution?” Büchner uses this attitude to demonstrate the cynicism of the extremists. But even for more moderate circles, social progress was a natural process and had to be achieved by force if necessary.
Since 1789, revolutions have repeatedly been depicted as volcanic eruptions. The “dance on the volcano” has become a popular cliché. It misinterprets the French aristocracy’s decadence in the 1780s, but also the failure of the German de-mocracy in the 1920s and 30s as inevitable by misrepresenting the Revolution or Nazism as irresistible forces of Nature.
In one of Pietro Fabris’s paintings in Campi Phlegraei (Plate XXXVIII), we see the King and Queen of the Two Sicilies in the face of a volcanic eruption in 1771, as if they were facing the outbreak of a revolution (see Fig. 2). Hamilton dismissed such signs in his reports as the mere uprising of a superstitious mob demanding that the authorities appease the volcano with images of saints. At the time, he had no idea that a few years later he and the ruling couple would have to flee to safety from the revolutionary forces.