The 1790 Fête de la fédération in the early French Revolution evoked the memory of the taking of the Bastille while tamping down on the simmering social forces that had erupted on 14 July 1789. How to do both? As an official architect put it, through the festival, ‘the sentiment of each becomes the sentiment of all by a kind of electrification, against which even the most perverse men cannot defend themselves’. This paper argues that a new language of revolutionary electricity came into being with the French Revolution. It argues that revolutionaries drew upon concepts of medical electricity developed in the 1780s to analogize the literal electricity of the ether to the revolutionary electricity of collective political sentiment. Though historians have associated electricity with radical politics, this paper argues that in the hands of bureaucrats and festival planners, electricity entered revolutionary discourse as a powerful mechanism for exercising authority and control over an unruly revolutionary public.

法国大革命初期的 1790 年 Fête de la fédération 唤起了人们对攻占巴士底狱的记忆，同时镇压了 1789 年 7 月 14 日爆发的酝酿中的社会力量。如何做到这两点？正如一位官方建筑师所说，通过节日，“每个人的情感通过一种电气化变成所有人的情感，即使是最反常的人也无法为自己辩护”。本文认为，随着法国大革命，一种新的革命性电力语言应运而生。它认为，革命者借鉴了 1780 年代发展起来的医疗电力的概念，将以太的字面电力类比为集体政治情绪的革命电力。尽管历史学家将电与激进政治联系起来，但本文认为，在官僚和节日策划者的手中，电作为一种强大的机制，可以对不守规矩的革命公众行使权力和控制，进入革命话语。