Oswald’s combination of vegetarianism and aggressive revolution-peddling was both scary and puzzling. His hypersensitivity about animals was matched with an equally extreme aptness for revolutionary violence, and this extraordinary paradox of aversion to shedding animal blood and eager bloodthirstiness remained the image that shocked and amused both his friends and enemies. ‘Here is to be remarked the contrariety of the human character,’ wrote the literary critic Joseph Haslewood. ‘He whose mildness of disposition could not behold a drop of blood without shuddering with horror – he who could call a Soldier by no milder epithet than that of Butcher! – even he instantaneously fled from one extreme to the other.’10
After Oswald had moved to France to use his military expertise to further the ambitions of the French revolutionary National Convention, a compatriot, Henry Redhead Yorke, remembered the perplexity with which most contemporaries received him:
He dined on his roots one day at a party of some members of the Convention, at which I was present, and in the course of the conversation, very coolly proposed, as the most effectual method of averting civil war, to put to death every suspected man in France … The expression was not suffered to pass unnoticed; and from the famous Thomas Paine he received a short but cutting reprimand; ‘Oswald,’ said he, ‘you have lived so long without tasting flesh, that you now have a most voracious appetite for blood.’11
William Wordsworth – who David Erdman suggests may have befriended Oswald during his secretive phase of revolutionary activism in Paris – immortalised this image of Oswald in his poem The Excursion (1814), portraying the character ‘Oswald’ as a ‘modest comrade’ who opposes the shooting of wild animals but serves as a valiant military instructor and dies a hero. As a whole the poem gives a sympathetic hearing to the case for animal rights in the figure of ‘The Wanderer’. In the final draft of Wordsworth’s The Borderers (1842) Oswald reappears as a mutinous, duelling revolutionary who is interested in herbs and has imbibed ‘certain curious beliefs’ among the Brahmins.12 Amusement tinged with horror was the usual tone in which Oswald was discussed by Englishmen as they observed his progress through the ranks of the French revolutionary machine.
Oswald was by no means unaware of the apparent paradox in his character, and he strenuously set out to explain how both sides sprang from the same heart. His sympathy for all beings convinced him that killing was an evil, but equally that it was necessary to get rid of killers. Peace and equality in society could not be achieved without first purging the world of tyrants. Weapons were a regrettable invention, but he argued that it was necessary to take bitter remedies to cure the greater evil. We cannot ‘arrive at the age of gold without passing through an age of iron’, he said; ‘let us use it like those poisons which, taken in copious draughts, are said to defeat the fatal effects of a smaller dose.’ Armed with this rationale for ruthlessness, Oswald knitted together the philosophy of militant vegetarianism.
Responding to misrepresentation in the press, in 1791 Oswald published the copious and rhetorically charged treatise, The Cry of Nature; Or, an Appeal to Mercy and to Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals. Rousseau had elevated ‘sympathy’ into the philosophical basis for both human and animal rights: Oswald took this to its radical extreme, transforming sympathy into a mandate for democratic revolution and vegetarianism. On the title page Oswald declared his allegiance to Rousseau by quoting the lines from Juvenal’s fifteenth satire which Rousseau had used in the Discourse on Inequality: ‘Nature avows she gave the human race the softest hearts, who gave them tears.’ Sympathy, declared Oswald, was ‘that kindly principle of union which nature has infused into our bosoms’; it was ‘that sentiment of brotherhood which united mankind from the beginning, and which was taught as the base of morals by Plato, Brimha, Confucius, Jesus Christ’. Sympathy was nature’s voice crying out the eternal law that humans should exist in egalitarian brotherhood.13
In the same year, 1791, Thomas Paine published the seminal republican treatise The Rights of Man, which used Rousseauist principles to defend manhood suffrage; others were using the rhetoric of sympathy to promote the emancipation of slaves and political rights for all sectors of the human race. The French Revolution had inspired Oswald with the belief that ‘the barbarous governments of Europe [were] giving way to a better system of things’. Now he hoped that this ‘growing sentiment of peace and good-will towards men will also embrace, in a wide circle of benevolence, the lower orders of life’.14
Hinduism, he felt, had instituted the law of universal sympathy that justified both vegetarianism and violent revolution. All other religions, he said, had been ‘Satisfied with extending to man alone the moral scheme’, leaving ‘every other species of animal … unfeelingly abandoned’. By contrast, the merciful Hindu, ‘Diffusing over every order of life his affections’, considered every creature a kinsman, and thus on the basis of secular justice Hinduism deserved a place ‘above all religions on the face of the earth’. Hindu pantheism instilled a worthy respect for the natural world, and even animal worship, Oswald explained, ensured that all creatures were treated with care.15 He argued, in line with his favourite author Lord Monboddo, that Indian civilisation had faithfully reinforced the natural law of universal sympathy, while anthropocentric Judaeo-Christianity had suppressed it under the influence of the misled Jewish sacerdotalists, St Augustine and latterly Descartes who promulgated ‘unfeeling dogmas, which, early instilled into the mind, induce a callous insensibility, foreign to the native texture of the heart’.16 But nevertheless, like Monboddo, Oswald had faith that progressive cultural enlightenment had the power to overcome these malign influences until eventually peace and harmony would reign again on earth. Despite his atheistic detestation of Judaeo-Christianity, Oswald clung to the promise of future perfection, which he believed the human race, rather than God, would achieve.17
Oswald felt that the physiological capacity for sympathy proved that killing animals was unnatural. But whereas George Cheyne and Bernard Mandeville (whose views on this he quoted) had always been forced to acknowledge the Bible’s explicit permission to eat animals, Oswald had no such difficulties, for he had dismissed Christianity to the slag heap of human credulity and delusion. He took up the gauntlet cast down against Rousseau and the vegetarians by the Comte de Buffon, who argued that human intestines were carnivorous, and replied: ‘holding up the entrails of man, ye exclaim; behold the bowels of a carnivorous animal! … Barbarians! to these very bowels I appeal … to these bowels … entwined with compassion.’ It is a striking image – the scientist holding the guts of a human cadaver in mid-air; and in doing so demonstrating, so Oswald pointed out, that by cutting open human bodies scientists had become hardened to the most unnatural activity: ‘in quest for your nefarious science, the fibres of agonizing animals delight to scrutinize’. Reclaiming the bowels from the domain of scientific investigation and returning them to their traditional role as the source of tenderness, Oswald appealed: ‘Vainly planted in our breast, is this abhorrence of cruelty, this sympathetic affection for every animal?’
Despite this Rousseauist anti-rational assault on science, Oswald himself backed up his visceral appeal to sentiment with the old arguments about human anatomy. He quoted the Plutarchian passage from Cheyne’s Essay of Health and Long Life: humans, he said, do not have the speed, fangs, sense of smell, digestive organs, rapacious appetite, or insensible heart of predators. We only manage to kill and eat animals by making sure that ‘the dying struggles of the butchered creatures are secluded from our sight’. Without this distance, the senses would irrepressibly recoil ‘to devour the funeral of other creatures, to load, with cadaverous rottenness, a wretched stomach’. ‘[L]isten to the voice of nature!’ he declaimed: it is audible in ‘the combined evidence of your senses, to the testimony of conscience and common sense’. Whether Cheyne and other Enlightenment scientists intended it or not, they had laid the foundations for a radical assault on Western mores.18
Oswald’s belief
that vegetarianism was a suppressed human instinct gave him a free hand to interpret eighteenth-century sentimental literature as testimony to this primeval truth, despite the fact that this literature actually tended to repudiate vegetarianism. Oswald insisted that the ignorance of Pope’s ‘happy lamb’ heightened the pathos, and he illustrated this on the front page of The Cry of Nature with the cartoon by James Gillray (who made several pictures for Oswald’s works) in which a fawn lies slaughtered, and the mother – universalised into the multi-breasted classical goddess, Mother Nature – experiences it as a woeful violation. Oswald did archaeology on European culture, finding in the expressions of sympathy for animals in Thomson’s Seasons and Dryden’s Ovid the remnants of a suppressed nature bursting out. ‘The vestiges of that amiable sympathy, even in this degenerate age are still visible, [and] strongly indicate the cordial harmony which, in the age of innocence, subsisted between man and the lower orders of life.’ Instinctive sympathy, he wrote, was the ‘cry of nature’ calling for democratic revolution and the recognition of animal rights.19
Predation was symbolic of social inequality, and most people could not afford to eat meat, so for Oswald vegetarianism was also an act of solidarity. Indeed, like John Williamson of Moffat, Oswald recognised that the meat industry was a principal cause of economic oppression. Enclosing land for animal grazing displaced the poor, and once again it was in the crisis of limited resources manifested in the infamous Highland Clearances that Oswald saw a microcosm of the effects of human consumption: ‘Shall the field support no living thing except the victims of your gluttony?… This is literally the case in the north of Scotland, where large tracts of land that formerly supported a hardy happy race of men, are now converted to grazing ground for cattle.’ Vegetarianism, Oswald demonstrated, was a consumer choice that directly reduced social injustice.20
Oswald’s promotion of more sustainable means of food production owes something to the French physiocrats who tried to reform agriculture by changing people’s diets. In the years before the Revolution, France had the largest population in Europe and it was constantly struggling to stave off famine. Louis XVI’s reforming minister Anne-Robert Turgot (1727–81) had tried to convince Limousin peasants to increase output by cultivating potatoes instead of their staples of chestnuts (which they boiled) and buckwheat (cooked up as gruel). In 1764 the pre-revolutionary apocalyptic Simon Linguet, who later chafed under the bit of Turgot’s physiocratic ministry, proposed that the solution to France’s perennial bread crisis was to change the French diet from grains to potatoes, fish, maize, vegetables and rice. He also argued that chestnuts, the food of the ancient Gauls, could be made into civilised nourishment – as Rousseau himself advised in the Discourse on Inequality. In the climate of growing discontent among the French peasantry, frugality had been embraced by reformers as a way of distinguishing their own civic responsibility from the distasteful conspicuous consumption of the French court, grotesquely epitomised by Louis XVI’s ever growing addiction to hunting and feasting as political troubles mounted around him.21
The frontispiece of John Oswald’s The Cry of Nature, by James Gillray
When the revolutionary government took over in France, simplicity became a sign of egalitarian patriotism and many leaders harked back to the austere Spartan principles of the early Roman republicans. The vegetarian American revolutionary hero, Benjamin Franklin, who was ambassador to France, had set the trend in the 1770s and ‘80s by modelling himself on the simplicity of Rousseau’s fictional characters.22 He promoted vegetarianism, for example, in his comical essay on flatulence, in which he observed that ‘He that dines on stale Flesh, especially with much Addition of Onions, shall be able to afford a Stink that no Company can tolerate; while he that has lived for some Time on Vegetables only, shall have that Breath so pure as to be insensible to the most delicate Noses.’23 His frugal example was quickly followed by leaders such as Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville (1754–93) with whom Oswald was in constant collaboration. The revolutionary statesman Charles Talleyrand (1754–1838) was renowned for nibbling on only one mouse-like meal of biscuit, peach and cheese each day; patriotic leaders like Bertrand Barère called on all citizens to give up meat, and others tried to impose a ‘civic Lent’ to ensure egalitarian food distribution and to prevent depletion of animal stocks. The down-at-heel clothing of the common-man revolutionary, dubbed the ‘sans-culotte’ (literally ‘without’ the fashionable upper-class ‘knee-breeches’), was elevated as a sartorial badge of ultra-radical political allegiance; so also the fleshless existence of the lower classes became the ultimate sign of revolutionary fervour. Vegetarianism was not exactly an entry requirement for the hard core of the Revolution, but for the first time in European culture it became a definite status symbol among the new ruling elite. ‘A glass of wine and a crust, that’s all that true sans-culottes need,’ declared the radical journal Père Duchesne. In truly Rousseauist style, idealists imagined that nature provided everything for her children – from wild nuts to raw vegetables – as long as all gifts were shared equally. Oswald cultivated this image of Rousseauist frugality in his translation of The Almanach of Goodman Gérard, which championed Michel Gérard, a political delegate who used to turn up at the meetings of the Estates-General, not in the traditional black and white costume of the Third Estate, but in a suit of brown fustian as if he had just stepped out from the pages of Rousseau’s novel Julie. This was no doubt in Oswald’s mind when living in Paris, where his family, recalled one contemporary, were ‘truly reduced to Sans-Culottes in their clothing, he turned out both his sons to feed on what they could pick up in the neighbouring gardens and forests, for they possessed an equal antipathy with the Father to animal food.’24
The politicisation of gastronomy played into the hands of British counter-revolutionaries who claimed that French idealism led to nothing but starvation. The English caricaturists Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray showed what would happen to the corpulent John Bull – the mascot figure of patriotic England – if forced to exchange his roast beef for the meagre bread of Liberty. Refined French cuisine, typified by soupe maigre, onions and frog’s legs, had always been juxtaposed to the hearty meat diet of the British.25 In The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) Tobias Smollett voiced the emerging antipathy to the Frenchified ‘macaroni’ (a long-wigged dandy, named after the exotic refined pasta, who displayed exquisite continental manners). His character of a fat landlady whose ‘corporation is made up of good, wholesome English fat’ berates France, where she tells Fathom, ‘you have been learning to cabbage*… you have been living upon rye bread and soup maigre, and now … pretend to find fault with a sur-loin of roast beef.’ These xenophobic images were magnified by the British reaction to revolution; the typical sans-culotte was depicted in the British press as a half-starved onion- and snail-eater. Gillray’s ironic French Liberty: British Slavery (1792) presents the emaciated French revolutionary imagining himself in the millennial utopia of ‘Milk & Honey’ while nibbling on radical roots flanked by a chamber pot filled with live snails, while John Bull’s constitution is preserved by a massive joint of roast beef.26
Oswald twisted these images round to reveal that the fat beef-eater was the oppressive tyrant of Britain, not the common man, while the frugal Frenchman represented sympathetic egalitarianism. He managed to direct his critique of beef-eating against the political establishment while also presenting himself as a radical British patriot. For Oswald, the true John Bull was no longer the beef-eater, but the labouring, free, living bull. Most beef was eaten by comparatively few people, so beef-eating was a sign of unjust privilege. Raising beef-cattle meant herding people off their land and laying waste the healthy constitution of the nation: the true Briton was the bull being sacrificed for the gratification of the rich.
‘John Bull’s Sacrifice to Janus’ by James Sayers, 1794
In John Bull’s Sacrifice (1794), the cartoonist James Sayers depicted the threat that the French Revolution posed to Brit
ain by representing John Bull as a bull with his head in a guillotine. Oswald had the same image in mind, except that he was arguing that the sacrifice of John Bull was being committed by the beef-eating British ruling classes, rather than the revolutionary French. Oswald turned the idea that cattle were protected for their usefulness into an elaborate political metaphor: sacrificing John Bull stood for exploiting the labouring poor of Britain.27
In his early operatic farce, The Humours of John Bull (1789), Oswald attacked the British for selling themselves – in the form of beef exports – to the decadent ancien régime.28 The innkeeper Timothy Pimpleface is complicit in this unpatriotic sell-out, and consequently does not see the irony of his own garbled misinformation which he addresses to one Mr Worthy who has just returned from India (in whose worthiness one can detect traces of the author):
The Bloodless Revolution Page 38
