La voix de la girouette: The French Connections of John Thelwall’s Elocutionary Theory
La voix de la girouette: The French Connections of John Thelwall’s Elocutionary Theory

Summary/Abstract: This article is drawn from the first full biography (in progress) of John Thelwall, the foremost radical orator and leading theorist, teacher and therapist of speech in the British Romantic period. Focusing on his little-known travels in France in 1814-1818, it explores his relationship with two philosophes he met there: the Abbé Sicard, who ran the famous École des Sourds-Muets (School for the Deaf and Dumb), and Amaury Duval, a founder of the groundbreaking journal La Décade Philosophique. Revaluing and adapting to Thelwall a derogatory term often applied to these men (girouette, or weathercock), it compares their strategic uses of the language of action to navigate political change from the revolutionary to the post-revolutionary periods. It relates Thelwall’s oral theory and practice to French materialist theories of body and mind, to orthophonie (or logopaedia) and to prosody (modern “therapoetics”) and highlights three defining features of orality he shares with Sicard and Duval – materialism, mobility and multivalence – which unite Thelwall’s political and elocutionary careers.

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