‘without doubt, you have seen the elephants, the rhinoceroses, and those savage cannibals, the Gintoos, who eat nothing but herbs, and entertain a most treasonable antipathy to roast beef, the glory of Old England.’29
Oswald transformed Indian vegetarianism into a political opposition to the tyrannical British establishment. The bull was no less useful and deserving of protection in Britain than in India: it should be conserved for economic reasons; figuratively John Bull had to be saved from the predatory rapacity of the country’s current leaders. Vegetarianism opposed carnivorous exploitation both figuratively and literally. In that sense, Pimpleface was right: vegetarianism was treason, but treason against an illegitimate and corrupt monarchy and oligarchy.30
Oswald’s espousal of Indian vegetarianism united radical politics and animal rights: symbolic opposition to a blood-sucking elite, literal opposition to their greedy appropriation of material goods, solidarity with the undernourished poor, and the enfranchisement of all sentient life. It was with this manifesto that Oswald took himself and unnumbered other followers to the battle-front of the French Revolution. Social revolution and animal rights flowed from the same source, and Oswald was prepared to lay down his life in their name.
Despite his most unusual views, Oswald carved out for himself an impressive literary and political career. His early works gained him a spot in the Five Hundred Celebrated Authors of Great Britain Now Living and later among the Lives of the Scottish Poets. Collaborating with Thomas Paine and John Horne-Tooke, the radical parliamentary reformer, Oswald counted himself among the principal instigators of Europe’s revolutionary movement. At a time when the vote was still in the hands of a few propertied men and could be literally bought and sold by unscrupulous politicians, Oswald called for the democratisation of British politics. Renowned for scathing commentaries in his own journal, the London Mercury, and his columns in others like the London Gazetteer and the Star, Oswald outraged Parliament with his incendiarism, and Edmund Burke singled out his theory of the sovereignty of the people as ‘the most false, wicked, and mischievous doctrine’.31
Oswald argued that the corrupt House of Commons had become a ‘mock-representation of the people’; the Lords were unelected and could only represent their own interests; and the King was the greatest ‘devourer of the people’. He called for universal enfranchisement (a more extreme position than the limited enfranchisement endorsed by most French revolutionaries) and even claimed that representation itself was a flawed concept. Oswald imagined that true democracy could only operate if everyone had a chance to voice their views directly: they should gather in masses to discuss political issues and all vote with their own voices. Laws should only be established if ninety per cent of each region assented. This would be a far better way of spending time than being forced to attend obsolete church services on Sundays. One of Oswald’s ex-comrades once sardonically mocked this ideal democratic ‘cry of nature’, recalling that ‘I have often endeavoured to persuade him, that his plan was not sufficiently extensive, as he had excluded from this grand assembly of the animated world the most populous portion of his fellow-creatures, namely, cats, dogs, horses, chickens, &c.’32
Aware that the British government were never going to assent to his plebiscitary system of direct democracy, Oswald turned his attention to France. In 1789 the French populace revolted against the privileged tax-breaks granted to the richest of France’s nobility. They succeeded in forcing Louis XVI to allow the Estates-General – the body of nobles, clergy and the democratically elected Third Estate (the commoners) – to abolish the feudal system and form a new constitution based on the redistribution of land and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Oswald, committed to the end of monarchy and the establishment of a republic, formed an alliance with the Rousseauist primitivist Nicolas de Bonneville (an advocate of the communal sharing of sexual partners), with whom he became an important leader in the proto-communist Cercle Sociale.
As hostilities began between the two main factions of the Revolution – the moderate republican Girondins and the ultra-radical followers of Maximilien Robespierre, later called the Montagnards, who presided over the Reign of Terror – Oswald collaborated closely with the leader of the Girondins, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, impoverished son of a pastry cook to whom the keys of the fallen Bastille were delivered in 1789 and who controlled the political situation from late 1791 to September 1792. For his services to the revolutionary cause Brissot nominated Oswald – along with Paine, Horne-Tooke and Jeremy Bentham – for honorary French citizenship, and Oswald was possibly the first British man to join the Jacobin Club,* the principal revolutionary political society.
Under intense observation from British spies, Oswald acted as a middleman for the burgeoning radical societies in Britain, supplying money and weapons to the French revolutionary government. In turn, he called on the Jacobin Club to help export revolution to England and thence to spread democracy to ‘the human race in general’.33 The English, claimed Oswald’s followers, had produced the theoretical framework of democratic revolution: they should now be helped to bring their own ideals to fruition. Letters of encouragement from the French would, said Oswald, ‘revive the courage of our English brothers and patriots, shackled by royal proclamations and tyrannized by all the odious arts of a conspiratorial minister’. England would then help France ‘to achieve with you the revolution of Europe, of the human race’. During the heated months of 1792 at the Jacobin Club, he warned that without pre-emptive action George III would soon declare war against the French: ‘Scarcely having escaped the madhouse, where he should have spent the rest of his days, this mad king wishes to hurl the thunderbolts of war and shed the blood of the two fraternal peoples.’ And he warned, too, against monarchy itself: ‘Frenchmen, you have driven from your own house the monster royalty; but as long as this ferocious beast crouches in your neighbours’ field, can you live with out alarms?’34
Robespierre urged caution, warning that Oswald’s suggestions would precipitate a premature war with an already aggravated Britain and distract from the important work of radical reform at home. Oswald succeeded in passing his motion to send letters of encouragement, but he did not stop there. He took the most extreme step, advocated by Brissot – one that was inevitably construed as high treason in Britain. He called on the French to send a detachment of 60,000 volunteers who ‘knew how to die’ to lay siege to the Tower of London and bring it down just as they had the Bastille. Political agitation was spreading throughout Britain, and Oswald insisted that the disenfranchised English workers would welcome the French revolutionaries with open arms as liberators and together they would ‘form a single republic’. ‘It is in London,’ Oswald predicted, ‘you must attack him; it is in London, amid an immense population, oppressed, miserable, agitated, that it will be quite easy to topple the tyrant … George the sanguinary will soon suffer the fate of Louis the traitor.’ The French did finally declare war on Britain and Holland – or rather, on their monarchs – on 1 February 1793, and they planned a 100,000- strong invasion of England; but by then they no longer believed in Oswald’s promise of an enthusiastic reception.35
Unflinching in his belief that violence was an essential tool for overthrowing the tyrants of the people, Oswald was intimately involved in the process that transformed the French Revolution from a mainly peaceful process into a bloodbath. On 10 August 1792 the Parisian masses stormed the royal palace and arrested the King and his family; in September they broke into prisons and in a four-day orgy of bloodshed they massacred the detained aristocrats, dragging their bodies through the streets with their heads stuck on spits. At this critical turning point in the Revolution, many previously sympathetic British onlookers turned away in horror, and the French leaders themselves did their best to deny responsibility. But Oswald was among those who found it encouraging that the people were ready to use violence against the oppressors.
In January 1793, after vigorous strife between the Girond
ins and Robespierre’s Montagnards (also called the Jacobins since their successful takeover of the Jacobin Club), the National Convention voted to replicate the regicide of the English Cromwellians: they condemned King Louis XVI for treason and gave him a ‘painless death’ with the efficient killing-machine recently invented by Monsieur Guillotin. Although many Girondins opposed the execution of the King, Oswald no doubt applauded the final end to monarchy. One uncorroborated report claimed that
He is said to have commanded at those unspeakably horrid massacres at Paris … He also at the head of his infernal pikemen formed the guard which closely surrounded the scaffold on which the late King of France was guillotined. Immediately after the head of the unfortunate monarch fell into the basket, he and his whole troops struck up a hymn he had composed for the occasion, and danced and sung, like so many Savages, round and round the scaffold!36
Oswald became a cherished figure in revolutionary circles, continuing to publish and to draw attention to himself as a result of his unusual living habits. His vegetarianism became a legendary manifestation of his radical reappraisal of humanity, and he was not alone in dragging Rousseau’s animal rights arguments into the ideology of the Revolution. Not least among his notorieties was his unabashed practice of polygamy. In France he lived with two wives, and, it seems, succeeded in impressing his contemporaries with the viability of such a course. ‘They were extremely handsome,’ wrote one with tickled curiosity, ‘and he had brought his domestic economy to such a perfect state of discipline, that they lived together in the greatest friendship and harmony. A singular fact! which has, I believe, no parallel in the history of the fair sex.’37
Oswald’s gruesome fate was sealed when he devised the military deployment of the infamous killing instrument, the pike – to be thrust into the body of the opponent at close quarters, thus maximising total exposure to the bloody act of murder. If hundreds of thousands of impassioned voluntary citizens were trained in Oswald’s ‘simple, easy, and natural’ strategies, to advance according to their own natural instinct, following absolute necessity, in an egalitarian ‘line of science’ they would become ‘a powerful means of destroying all the despotisms and all the aristocracies on earth’. They would represent the natural power of the people over the powerful elites, and could not fail to succeed. This was Oswald’s masterminding of the pikemen, and in the words of one companion, he ‘had under tuition an immense concourse of both sexes, to instruct in the use of that instrument’.
It was this bloodthirstiness that shocked his contemporaries. In the liberal Edinburgh Review, Henry Brougham accused Oswald of ‘an incongruity unexampled’:
Retaining his unparallel’d humanity of disposition, and abhorrence at the sight of animal blood, this abstinent sage was the first who proposed to the Convention the introduction of the pike, both for the use of the army and the mob … A maniac who fought the massacres of Paris, and was zealous to avoid even the sight of blood: a wretch who would not kill a tyger, but died unsated in his thirst for human blood!38
Weapons were in extremely short supply in the early years of the Revolution, and Oswald’s military expertise made an important contribution to the victories of the unprecedentedly massive million-strong revolutionary army. Although Oswald’s troops did receive guns when they went to battle, his theoretical application of the Revolution’s favourite weapon proved successful. Oswald was elected Colonel Commandant of the First Battalion of Volunteer Pikemen, the Piquiers, and in 1793 – rather than risk sending him at the head of an army to his homeland – he was sent to suppress the royalist uprisings in La Vendée. He was applauded as a hero for expressing his man-of-the-people solidarity by wearing ordinary soldier’s garb and eating austerely: ‘He was exceedingly admired for the plainness of his dress and manners, and above all for the simplicity of his life. He had eaten no meat for the last twelve years, and scarce ever drank more than half a dozen glasses of wine,’ remembered one contemporary.
Oswald led to battle his men and women (the revolutionary government had allowed women to be soldiers for the first time, and this remained the case in Oswald’s regiment until his fellow officers concluded that they were ‘the mothers of all vices’, and in Oswald’s absence banished them from the battle zone). We can imagine Oswald trudging out to La Vendée to quash the army led by royalist aristocrats backed by thousands of peasants who had risen against compulsory conscription and restrictions on religious freedom. His determination that democracy would not be defeated made warfare appear justified. His words of a few years earlier must have come back to him: we cannot ‘arrive at the age of gold without passing through an age of iron’. Blood must be shed to establish the universal, bloodless peace.
After Oswald’s army had marched west across France and engaged in months of desperate fighting, on 14 September 1793, in a day of fierce battle at Thouars, they were totally defeated by the royalist insurgents. A massacre ensued, only a few being allowed to escape. As his old friend Henry Redhead Yorke recounted, following his final meeting with Oswald,
while bravely leading on his men at the battle of Pont-de-Cé, he was killed by a cannon ball, and at the same instant, a discharge of grape shot laid both his sons, who served as drummers in the corps of which he was colonel, breathless on their father’s corpse.
So Oswald was killed in action, fighting to defend egalitarian vegetarianism. By a remarkable coincidence, the historian David Erdman discovered that Oswald’s was the only unit in the republican army for which an almost complete minute book of officers’ meetings has survived. As a result we know that Oswald’s two sons, William and John, did not in fact die with their father: they survived as dedicated drummers and fighters in the pike corps: they were killed years later in further battles with the royalists. Oswald himself was not forgotten, and rumours persisted that he had not died but continued to perpetrate military ravages in the name of universal fraternity. When Paine was imprisoned at the end of 1793 for having tried to save the life of King Louis, in fear of execution and unaware of Oswald’s death, he sent a letter to England promising that Oswald would carry it home.39 His old hack-master at Grub Street, William Thomson, became convinced that Oswald had invented a new pseudonym and was in fact Napoleon Bonaparte himself. (After all, both were small of stature, militaristic and humane, revolutionary ideologues and lovers of Ossian.)
By dying, Oswald escaped the persecution of Revolution sympathisers that followed his British colleagues: Thomas Paine had already been condemned in absentia for seditious libel and Horne-Tooke was narrowly acquitted of high treason by a jury in 1794. But Oswald’s theories of direct democracy – among the first advocates of that system – filtered into the radical milieu of his time and had a lasting influence on the history of socialism.40 His ‘Cry of Nature’ left a resounding echo in the radical vegetarian movements that spread across Europe.
* * *
*‘To pilfer’ (OED); Smollett is probably also punning on the other meaning, ‘To grow a head like a cabbage’ (OED), alluding to Fathom’s wig; as well as on the idea of eating cabbage.
*Not to be confused with the Jacobites, supporters of the Stuart succession.
Studio of Jan Brueghel the Elder, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, early 17th century.
Frans Snijders, The Butcher’s Shop, c.1640–50.
Jan Brueghel the Elder and P.P. Rubens, Adam and Eve in Paradise, c.1615. As Adam and Eve effect the Fall of man, the animals topple from herbivorous peace into the predatory war of fallen nature: dogs prepare to pounce on a duck and the leopard menacingly raises its paw.
David Teniers the Younger, In the Kitchen, 1669.
The frontispiece of Christopher Plantin’s Polyglot Bible (1569), in which the lion and wolf lie down in peace with the ox and lamb, symbolising the millennial harmony prophesied by Isaiah. Early Jesuit missionaries presented the Indian emperor, Akbar, (r. 1556–1605), with a copy and the motif was thereafter used frequently by the artists of the Mughal court.
This
17th-century ivory cabinet from Ceylon shows Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Under European patronage, ivory carvers from South and East Asia produced devotional Christian objects for new churches in the East, as well as for export toEurope. Some early European travellers toCeylon (now Sri Lanka)saw Buddhist vegetarianism as a vestige of Adam and Eve’s harmonious vegetarian relation to the animals in Eden.
Iskandar [Alexander] meeting the Brahmins, India, 1719. Alexander the Great’s encounter with the Indian Brahmins (or ‘gymnosophists’ as the Greeks sometimes called them) in 327 BC was celebrated in both Europe and India as the quintessential clash of Eastern and Western culture.
‘Maître François’, Alexander the Great meeting the Indian ‘gymnosophists’, or naked philosophers, Paris, c.1475–1480.
From a Ragamala (Garland of Melodies), Himachal Pradesh, India, 1685–1690.
Banyans and Brahmins from Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s Itinerario, 1596. ‘The Brahmans are the most esteemed and most high-ranking among the Indians …
They live on herbs, and abhor eating animals’. The Banyans ‘do not eat or kill animals … an unmistakable influence of the Pythagorean notion of metempsychosis.’
Indian huts, country houses and villages near Goa from Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s Itinerario, 1596. The ‘Canarim’ Indians ‘abstain from the meat of cattle, pigs and oxen. These animals are held in particular veneration by them, because the people live under the same roof and eat the same food together with those animals’.
The Bloodless Revolution Page 39