The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

One of the sources of the rebellious energy, both individual and social, that surges through The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was the outbreak of the French Revolution. William Blake was a Republican with no love of kings, and he supported the revolution as soon as news of it reached London in the summer of 1789. Enthusiastically embracing the revolutionary ideals of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” Blake expected that a new age of liberty was about to dawn. The revolution’s precipitating event was the fall of the Bastille, an old fortress and prison in Paris. Blake mentions it in the “Song of Liberty” at the end of The Marriage, in the command “France, rend down thy dungeon!” (Verse 3).

Blake made no secret of his support of the revolutionary cause. His first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, writes:

He courageously wore the famous symbol of liberty and equality—the bonnet rouge—in open day, and philosophically walked the streets with the same on his head. He is said to be the only one of the set who had the courage to make that public profession of faith (Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake. 1863. Reprinted, London, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1942, p. 81).

The bonnet rouge was a red cap worn by the French revolutionaries, and “the set” was a coterie of liberal sympathizers, republicans, and progressive thinkers who gathered at the shop and home of the London bookseller Joseph Johnson.