Jacques-Louis David’s painting of the June 1789 Oath of the Tennis Court, during which the French National Assembly swore not to dissolve until a new constitution had been enacted. In the foreground, a Catholic monk, a Protestant minister, and a layman clasp hands. In the background, a man stands on a table with one hand raised and the other holding a book, presumably reading the oath, while the hall full of legislators raise their hands in disorganized affirmation; one man in the lower right is seated and dour, refusing to take the oath, while a crowd looks down from the windows and the gallery above, and a revolutionary wind billows the curtains.
6 April 2021
In political discourse, it’s routine to refer to the left and the right, with the left being the liberal/reformist faction of a body politic, and the right being the more conservative. This particular phrasing comes down to us from the French Revolution, when the more radical elements of the National Assembly tended to sit on the left side of the chamber and the more conservative elements to the right.
The left/right political division first appears in English in a translation of Camile Desmoulins The History of the Brissotins, published in 1794 (the French original was published the previous year):
I establish it as a fact, that the right side of the Convention, and principally their leaders, are almost all partizans of royalty, accomplices in the treason of Dumourier and Bournonvillę; that they are directed by the agents of Pitt, Orleans, and Prussia; that they wanted to divide or rather overturn France into twenty or thirty federative republics, that no republic might exist.
And later in the same work:
The greater number of those who composed the constituent. and legislative assemblies, ill disguised the anger they felt at seeing their work destroyed by the republicans of the Convention. Their love of royalty appeared in their imprecations against Paris. La Source, the least corrupted of those who voted with the left, and dined with the right side of the Convention, but whose pride was excited against Robespierre, exclaimed, on the 14th of September, “I fear those vile men not vomited forth by Paris, but by some Brunswick.”
Desmoulins would go to the guillotine in 1794.
In his 1837 history of the French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle described, albeit from a very Anglo-centric and disapproving perspective, how the National Assembly organized itself into left and right factions, which he calls sides:
For the present, if we glance into that Assembly-Hall of theirs, it will be found, as is natural, “most irregular.” As many as “a hundred members are on their feet at once;” no rule in making motions, or only commencements of a rule; Spectators' Gallery allowed to applaud, and even to hiss; President, appointed once a fortnight, raising many times no serene head above the waves. Nevertheless, as in all human Assemblages, like does begin arranging itself to like; the perennial rule, Ubi homines sunt modi sunt [Where men are, rules are], proves valid. Rudiments of Methods disclose themselves; rudiments of Parties. There is a Right Side (Cóté Droit), a Left Side (Côté Gauche); sitting on M. le President's right hand, or on his left: the Coté Droit conservative; the Côté Gauche destructive. Intermediate is Anglomaniac Constitutionalism, or Two-Chamber Royalism; with its Mouniers, its Lallys,—fast verging towards nonentity.
The phrases right wing and left [wing] are first recorded in debate in the British parliament on 26 August 1841, and are used in reference to something other than the revolutionary French National Assembly:
Mr. E. Turner commenced by referring to the violence of language used by some of the Tory party towards the Roman Catholic clergy of Ireland, which was calculated to irritate and inflame the people of that country: At a dinner given, at which the hon. Member for Kent was present, a noble Earl referring to the great Reform party to which he belonged, spoke of the right wing of the Infidels and Radicals, and the left of the popish followers of factious demagogues, headed by O'Connell, and supported by “the most infuriated and bigoted priesthood that ever cursed a country”
The use of wing is presumably from the military sense of the word, referring to the divisions on either side of the center of an army.
Sources:
“Address in Answer to the Speech—Adjourned Debate” (26 August 1841). Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, third series, vol. 59. London: Thomas Curson Hansard, 1841, 296.
Carlyle, Thomas. The French Revolution (1837), vol. 1 of 2. London: Thomas Nelson, 1928, 202. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Desmoulins, Camille. The History of the Brissotins. London: J. Owen 1794, 5, 40. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2010, s. v. right wing, n. and adj., and right, n.; s. v. June 2016, left wing, n. and adj., left, adj.1, n., and adv.
Image credit: Jacques-Louis David, “Serment du Jeu de Paume” (“Oath of the Tennis Court”), after 1791, oil painting on canvas. Public domain image.