Rust as a figure for social decay can be found in texts ranging from the Hebrew Bible through to the present day. It is at the heart of Roman longing for a lost Golden Age, invulnerable to rust, from within an Iron Age beset by corruption. A like dichotomy is incorporated into an oft-quoted passage from the gospel of Matthew which, seemingly uninterested in the properties of specific metals, admonishes, ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt’, but rather ‘lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt’. But rust is not only a fact of a fallen existence; it is also a scientific and technical problem that humans have long strived to understand, and to overcome. As such, it became a powerful figure for differential progress, however conceived: thus does William of Malmesbury praise William II for polishing off the rust of Scottish barbarism; thus does Voltaire declaim against what he perceived to be medieval violence, fanaticism and wrong thinking, all of which thickened a rust of barbarism which his contemporaries’ gothique tendencies, he claimed, threatened to bring back. As a scientific and technical problem, rust is also at the heart of the Chemical Revolution, over the course of which the phlogiston theory of rusting – according to which rust is inherent to iron, which is itself the unstable union of this rust and the substance phlogiston, ever prone to escape – was replaced by Lavoisier’s theory of rusting as the attack of iron by oxygen. This paper explores the possibility that our familiarity with metaphors of rust and rustiness may obscures the links between the scientific, conceptual and metaphoric contestation of rust. From rust in philosophe and anti-philosophe writing, the paper moves to the deployment of rust by revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. In the 1790s, members of the National Convention and local sociétés républicaines speak of purifying the nation of aristocratic or seigneurial rust. Burke moves to defend the ‘rust of superstition’ against ‘the hot spirit drawn out of the alembick of hell, which in France is now so furiously boiling’, whilst counter-revolutionary enfant terrible Rivarol deploys phlogiston-era imagery to argue that the real rust is the barbarous mob, lurking within even the most polished civilisation and contained only by keeping up the coat of religion and tradition. In all these instances, rust-as-metaphor communicates, and perhaps shapes, beliefs about the nature of society and social change. What kind of substance do different rust metaphors cast the French national community as? Does rust figure corruption as springing from within or without the bounds of a society? Can such corruption ultimately be overcome, or does any given civilisation – or civilisation in general – inevitably fall to it? How does conceiving of social decay as rust also shape the proposed defences? And to what extent does the imagery of rust and iron encourage us to think of the march of human civilisation as part of, or entirely distinct from, nature?

Jessica Stacey is currently a Career Development Fellow in Early-Modern French at The Queen’s College, Oxford. Her research focuses on the importance of narrative and metaphor to our conceptions of time and civilisational development. Her first book, Authors of Catastrophe: narrative and historicity in eighteenth-century France, will be published at the end of 2021.

Join the event