Citizens Electric! Galvanized Bodies and Popular Sovereignty in the Revolutionary Francophone Atlantic

In an era before the lightbulb, when electricity meant both Benjamin Franklin's bottled lightning and the ethereal fluid that animated Luigi Galvani's frog legs, what did electricity mean politically? Electricity became a metaphor for the power of revolutionary festivals, speeches, and events to "shock" an audience, producing overpowering collective sentiment in an instant. Electrified citizens, equal and united in sentiment, replaced the stratified body politic as a model of social cohesion. A new era required new metaphors, and this talk investigated how science and politics intersected to produce the new metaphor of revolutionary electricity.