CHAPTER 5

Ideas and Bayonets

A revolution is an idea plus bayonets.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

The revolution was made, not to make France free, but to make her formidable.

EDMUND BURKE¹

The revolution, seen at first as bringing France and Britain together, in fact signalled a new parting of the ways. But the meaning of their opposition was now reversed: Britain, hitherto the byword for change and modernity, came to symbolize stability and tradition. France, formerly the epitome of monarchical power and social hierarchy, represented rejection of the past, democracy and upheaval. The revolution, at first assumed to weaken France, soon made it stronger, and the combination of war with revolution threatened to reverse, and could actually have reversed, the results of 100 years of struggle between France and Britain. France expanded further than under Louis XIV, while Britain’s hold on Ireland, the Caribbean and India was shaken.

Blissful Dawn

Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! – Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance! . . .
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us, – the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH²

I defy the ablest Heads in England to have planned, or its whole Wealth to have purchased, a Situation so fatal to its Rival, as that to which France is now reduced by her own intestine Commotions.
LORD CARMARTHEN, Foreign Secretary, 1789³

Reactions in Britain and Ireland to the sensational news of 1789 were overwhelmingly favourable. London theatres re-enacted the events. Bastille Day almost began as a British celebration, for the House of Commons proposed a ‘day of thanksgiving for the French Revolution’, which was rejected by the Lords by only 13 votes to 6. Reformers hoped that France would provide a healthy example to Britain: that its recent emancipation of Jews and Protestants would spur the abolition of religious discrimination, and its constitutional debates revive flagging parliamentary reform. Many foresaw France moving closer to Britain, following in the footsteps of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, whose centenary had just been celebrated. Events were also a source of patrioticSchadenfreude. Lord Carmarthen felt that British diplomats would be ‘strutting about Europe with an Air of Consideration unknown to us for some Time’. War with France, so close a few months earlier, was now remote. Wordsworth, who most famously expressed the euphoria, was an undergraduate at St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1789 more concerned with his examinations and job prospects than with the revolutionary dawn; but he did develop a genuine enthusiasm during a visit in 1791–2, stimulated by a love affair with a girl from Blois, and friendship with a Patriot officer.⁴

The greatest enthusiasts were religious Dissenters and the opposition Whigs, led by Charles James Fox: ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!’ Fox and his followers were not very knowledgeable or concerned about what was really happening in France, but they were obsessed with the mythical threat to liberty posed by George III and a conspiratorial ‘junto’. So they saw the defeat of the Bourbons as another blow against ‘despotism’, like the American Revolution. A friend of aristocratic French reformists, Fox assumed that the latter would take control. He persistently sought French ‘Whigs’ – even in such unlikely figures as the Jacobin terrorists Robespierre and Saint-Just. The Whig line was that the French revolution, whatever its horrors, was more sinned against than sinning, and that its victory over Austria, Prussia and later Britain (under a leader, William Pitt, whom they demonized) would be a victory for progress. Fox continued to blame the domestic and foreign opponents of the revolution for all that went wrong, and urged negotiation and peace with France from a mixture of sympathy, stubbornness, defeatism and fear.

The leading pro-revolution intellectuals were ‘rational Dissenters’, many of them from the Unitarian tendency of Presbyterianism. They denied the doctrine of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. This undermined the basic assumption of the religious, political and social order: that Church and State were divinely ordained. Prominent Unitarian ministers such as Dr Richard Price and Dr Joseph Priestley (also a renowned scientist), political sympathizers such as the Duke of Richmond, the Marquis of Lansdowne and the Duke of Grafton, and young enthusiasts such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, interpreted the revolution as a Providential blow against Popery and state religion. In Priestley’s notorious phrase (which won him the nickname ‘Gunpowder Joe’), ‘a train of gunpowder [was] being laid to the Church establishment’. For years Priestley, as assiduous an analyst of the prophecies of Daniel, Isaiah and Revelations as of atmospheric gases, had been expecting ‘the downfall of Church and State together . . . some very calamitous, but finally glorious events’. Now it had happened: ‘The French Revolution is of God,’ pronounced a Baptist minister in radical Norwich. ‘No power exists or can exist, by which it can be overthrown.’ However great the turmoil and suffering, it would destroy the Whore of Rome and the Beast of the Apocalypse, and usher in the Second Coming and the Kingdom of God on earth. Many millenarian pamphlets appeared with titles such as A Prophecy of the French Revolution and the Downfall of Antichrist. ‘The Saints of the Most High’, predicted Priestley reassuringly, ‘shall take the Kingdom and possess it for ever.’ The sinners, victims of the revolution, were consigned by ‘the discipline of a wise and kind Providence’ to the same theological dustbin as those engulfed by Noah’s flood or incinerated in Sodom and Gomorrah.⁵ The intellectual certainty, moral invincibility and millenarian expectancy of these ‘miserable bigots’, as Edmund Burke called them, shaped the British version of revolutionary ideology.

Such expectations touched a range of intellectual opinion. In Cambridge, endemic religious radicalism led the intense undergraduate Coleridge to burn the words ‘Liberty’ and ‘Equality’ with gunpowder on to the smooth lawns of St John’s and Trinity, and more sedately caused the Vice-Chancellor’s Latin prize to be given in 1790 to an essay praising the revolution as ‘likely to prove advantageous to this country’.⁶ However, the wider conflict was over the next few years played out in Cambridge on a lilliputian scale. William Frend, a Unitarian fellow of Jesus, not only declared that the execution of ‘Louis Capet’ was ‘no business of ours’, but also roped in the ‘men in black’ of the Anglican church and their ‘superstitious’ sacraments, implicitly compared with ‘the orgies of Bacchus’. This caused him to be deprived of his fellowship for blasphemy, causing demonstrations amid which Coleridge narrowly escaped being sent down. The chaplain of Trinity more cautiously identified the Austrians and Prussians as the Beast of the Apocalypse. Religious and social radicals such as William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake shared this millenarian perspective. Blake, influenced by the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem sect, believed that ‘the Beast and the Whore rule without control’, and that ‘the English Crusade against France [was due] to State Religion’. A radical underworld, sometimes highly eccentric even by the generous standards of the time, combined visionary religion and political conspiracy.⁷

The French revolution appealed to those on the margins of the British political system: self-educated small businessmen, professional men and skilled artisans in old cities such as Norwich, Bristol, Leicester and Newcastle and in rising industrial centres such as Birmingham, Belfast, Sheffield and Manchester. Dissenting congregations provided organization and audiences. The foremost spokesman of this community was the picaresque Thomas Paine, once corsetmaker, sometime Quaker, excise man, privateer, journalist,and a famous defender of, and participant in, the American Revolution. A network of societies spread the word. Some dated from the Seven Years War and the American Revolution (the Societies for Constitutional Information, Friends of the Constitution, Patriotic Societies). Others were new, most famously the London Corresponding Society, founded in January 1792 by a cobbler, Thomas Hardy. Fraternal relations were established between political societies such as the Jacobin Club in Paris and the Society for Commemorating the Revolution, presided over by the Whig Earl Stanhope, at whose annual dinner in November 1791 Jérôme Pétion, who had recently escorted Louis XVI and his family back to Paris as prisoners after an attempted escape, was guest of honour.

One fraternal gesture had durable consequences. Richard Price, who as well as being a Unitarian minister was a leading writer on political economy, spoke ‘On the Love of our Country’ to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution on 4 November 1789. His address was subsequently read out in the French Constituent Assembly. At home it caused a sensation by stating that ‘most’ governments were ‘usurpations on the rights of men’, that established churches were ‘priestcraft and tyranny’, and that ‘love of country’ should be purged of ‘prejudices’ and ‘does not imply any . . . particular preference of its laws and constitution’. He ended with a stirring declaration that the French revolution had ‘kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes, and warms and illuminates EUROPE!’⁸ Price ignited a great war of ideas, for his words elicited Edmund Burke’s ‘thundering’⁹ Reflections on the Revolution in France, published a year later in November 1790. This is the most important English book ever written about France, and one of the most important ever written about Britain, because, as Derek Beales has remarked, ‘everything in the book is about France, and everything in the book is about Britain’.¹⁰

REFLECTING ON REVOLUTION

No Monarchy limited or unlimited, nor any of the old Republics, can possibly be safe as long as this strange, nameless, wild, enthusiastic thing is established in the Centre of Europe.
EDMUND BURKE, June 1791¹¹

Hardly had we conquered a fraction of our liberty than the English let loose the orator Burke against France: his insulting writings and salaried quibbles flooded our provinces.
BERTRAND BARERE, speech in the Convention, 1794¹²

Edmund Burke, born in Dublin in 1729, is, if not Britain’s greatest political thinker, surely its greatest thinking politician. He was a critic of Crown patronage, a supporter of Catholic emancipation in Ireland and of American independence, the scourge of corruption and oppression in India, a friend of Charles James Fox and a correspondent of Thomas Paine and Richard Price, and his attack on the French revolution owed part of its impact, and much of the vituperation it aroused, to his seeming apostasy. He split the Whig opposition and broke with his friends, reducing Fox to tears in the House of Commons.¹³ Burke has been criticized as an enemy of the Enlightenment, a counter-revolutionary ideologue, a prophet of Romanticism, a xenophobe, even a harbinger of Fascism. In fact, he was defending what he saw as the Enlightened ‘Commonwealth of Europe’: tolerant, pluralist, hierarchical, propertied, commercial, practical, and cosmopolitan – the Enlightenment of Locke, Hume, Smith, Gibbon and Montesquieu, whoseEsprit des lois Burke described as the most important book since the Bible. He did not gloat at the downfall of France, and was one of the first to warn, in November 1789, of the dangers of ‘the total political extinction of a great civilized Nation situated in the heart of our Western System’.¹⁴ He condemned revolution as a regression into chaos and violence, driven by precisely the same psychological naivety and theoretical arrogance that he denounced in imperialism.¹⁵ He defended the middle ground, the ‘third option’, between the ‘despotism of the monarch’ and the ‘despotism of the multitude’.¹⁶

‘Smelling out a rat’: Burke, champion of American and Indian liberty, was accused of now siding with authority – hence the crown and the crucifix.

Burke tried to define the differences between the (justified) Glorious Revolution and the (unjustified) French Revolution, against those who took them as jointly demonstrating the absolute right of a people to overthrow its rulers. He had also to defend existing social and political systems that he admitted to be imperfect against those who demanded theoretical perfection – what he had earlier mocked as ‘the fairy land of philosophy’. The heart of his argument is that sentiment, experience and real life outweigh abstract theory. Interestingly, his disagreement with Price on how human beings understand the world – through experience or through metaphysics – went back thirty years. The events of 1789 made that philosophical difference a matter of life and death in the face of what he later called the revolution’s ‘homicide philanthropy’.

Burke asserted that the justification of a political system was not its theoretical basis – ‘the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction’ – but its practical ability to ‘provide for human wants’. These constituted the ‘real’ rights of man, such as ‘justice’ and ‘the fruits of their industry’. Political stability, which the people of England regarded as ‘among their rights, not among their wrongs’, was indispensable. This did not rule out careful reform or, in extreme cases, the punishment of ‘real’ tyrants. But societies and states could not be set up or pulled down on ‘abstract principles’, in reality the ideas of an arrogant few. ‘I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.’¹⁷ Such people ‘have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own’. Political systems were made by human beings in different cultures and circumstances, not ordained by universal laws of nature. Their functioning relied on willing acceptance and loyalty, ‘prejudices’ which ‘the longer they have lasted . . . the more we cherish them’. Individual reason was fallible, and so individuals should ‘avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages’. In the English case, this ‘capital’ of liberties went back to Magna Carta, and was an ‘inheritance’ not dependent on any abstract theory of rights. Societies and states were, like the Common Law, the result of generations of accumulated decisions and experience, ‘the wisdom of unlettered men’. This inheritance was the true contract between government and governed, a permanent ‘partnership’ of the living, the dead and the yet unborn. Unless it were willingly accepted that none had the right to ‘separate and tear asunder’ this partnership, government could depend only on force. He predicted that such would be the fate of France until finally ‘some popular general [is] the master of your assembly, the master of your whole republic’.

Unlike his opponents, who interpreted events in France (to which they often paid scant attention) according to their domestic political and theological concerns, Burke followed the development of the revolution closely. He realized it was something new, a ‘dreadful energy’ that could not be explained as the rational redress of real grievances. It came from the ideological impulse to create what Burke called ‘despotic democracy’, which rejected all restraint on its own power; and also from a utopian vision of total change as expressed by a prominent member of the National Assembly, the Calvinist minister Rabaut de Saint-Etienne: ‘everything must be destroyed, yes everything; for everything must be recreated’. For Burke, political wisdom was both to ‘preserve’ and ‘improve’, because to destroy historic structures was also to destroy modern society.¹⁸

Reflections had an immediate impact: 7,000 copies were sold in a week in England, and 13,000 in a year in France¹⁹ – a high proportion of the reading public. It provoked a spate of criticism, often accusing Burke of siding with absolutism and Popery (hence the symbols in Gillray’s cartoon). Fox called it ‘Cursed Stuff’, and the Prince of Wales ‘a Farrago of Nonsense’. The most influential rebuttals were Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) andVindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Wollstonecraft paraphrased Rousseau (above 106): ‘Nature, or, to speak with strict propriety, God, has made all things right; but man had sought out many inventions to mar the work.’ She asserted that God-given reason was the only source of legitimate authority, rejecting the claims of tradition (the English constitution was ‘a heterogenous mass . . . settled in the dark days of ignorance’). She condemned property, politeness, ‘effeminacy’ and commerce as sources of oppression and immorality, and called for a moral revolution. Paine’s Rights of Man was sly, rambling, naïve, and a huge publishing success. He did not try to engage with Burke, but simply to dismiss him; Burke did not bother to reply. For Paine, everything in France was going wonderfully: the revolution was simply ‘a renovation of the natural order of things . . . combining moral with political happiness and national prosperity’.²⁰

Burke’s polemic was regarded by many moderates, including his friends, as absurdly extreme and alarmist. Pitt famously judged the Reflections to be ‘Rhapsodies in which there is much to admire and nothing to agree with.’ Pitt never accepted that the revolution was intrinsically wrong, and is said to have thought privately that Paine would be right ‘if everybody had sense to act as they ought’.²¹ Yet Burke largely prevailed in the war of ideas. None of his opponents would attempt a systematic defence of the French revolution as it developed after 1792: with civil war, economic collapse, the Terror, external aggression, war with Britain, attacks on Christianity and Bonaparte’s coup d’état, which fulfilled Burke’s prediction concerning ‘some popular general’. Paine’s confidence that ‘they order these things better in France’, and that ‘a thousand years hence’ the French would look back on the revolution ‘with contemplative pride’²² gave way to attempts to blame all problems on foreign interference. Wollstonecraft, horrified by the ‘barbarity and misery’, wished ‘I had never heard of the cruelties . . . practised here’.²³ Paine, fleeing prosecution in England, was feted in France, became a citizen, a member of the National Convention, an official propagandist, and an amateur adviser on plans to invade England. But he backed the wrong faction, was arrested during the Terror, imprisoned, and narrowly escaped the guillotine. He understandably reverted to the safer field of homespun theology in The Age of Reason (1794), and wrote nothing further on the revolution. Yet if Burke won the battle of ideas, endowing the British system with ‘historic pedigrees of incalculable legitimising force’,²⁴ he died in 1797 fearing that Pitt’s search for coexistence with the revolution would eventually allow it to triumph.

Burke’s conception of a political community as a complex and restraining accretion of agreements, rights, duties and sentiments was his alternative to the universalist ‘despotic democracy’ shaped by republican idealization of Sparta and Rome. Though usually described as conservative, Burke’s vision was an indispensable ingredient of what the philosopher Benjamin Constant was to call ‘the liberty of the moderns’, based on individual political and economic freedoms. Burke differed from French counter-revolutionary theorists, who called for theocracy and the iron rod of authority as the only cure for revolution. Reflecting on the French revolution redefined British and European political ideas, for Burke’s ‘third option’ made him a godfather both of conservatism, through his praise of tradition and loyalty, and of liberalism, through his acceptance that change was necessary for survival.

The main popular response to the revolution in Britain was not radicalism. Radical societies had dozens or at most a few hundred core members (probably the largest provincial group, the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information, had about 600 active members in 1792).²⁵ More significant was Loyalism, which mobilized British society as the revolution mobilized that of France. There were eventually some 2,000 loyalist societies, such as the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, founded in November 1792. Loyalists argued that rich and poor alike stood to lose from a French-inspired upheaval. But Loyalism did not mean unqualified support for Pitt’s government. It often sympathized with popular grievances, particularly over food shortages; and it did not guarantee unflinching support for a long and hopeless war. At the sedate end of the spectrum of its activities were loyal addresses to George III bearing thousands of signatures, and sermons, poems, pamphlets and newspapers. Less sedate were popular festivities – marches, bonfires with Tom Paine as Guy Fawkes, fireworks, ox-roasting, and drinking, often subsidized by local gentry. Intimidating radicals was an important aspect of Loyalist activity: burning them in effigy, ejecting them from pubs and friendly societies, boycotting and sacking them, and privately prosecuting writers and publishers. At the extreme end of the spectrum was violent disorder. The most notorious example was the ‘Priestley riots’ in Birmingham, which stifled radicalism in one of its strongholds.

On 14 July 1791, a dinner held to celebrate Bastille Day by some ninety reformers at a hotel in Birmingham led to three days of rioting across the town and in surrounding villages – the biggest popular tumult of the revolutionary period.²⁶ The main targets were Dissenting chapels and the houses of men attending the Bastille dinner; then, the houses of leading members of the local Dissenting patriciate – bankers, ministers, magistrates, and large manufacturers – some with dubious business connections with France (see above, page 83); and finally, those of members of the Lunar Society, the core of the Midlands Enlightenment. Its members included Matthew Boulton, Birmingham’s leading industrialist, James Watt, Britain’s leading engineer (they were Anglicans, so their houses were spared) and Joseph Priestley, Fellow of the Royal Society, renowned experimenter with air and electricity and a Unitarian fundamentalist who believed that the revolution heralded the overthrow of the Antichrist and the Second Coming – ‘It cannot, I think, be more than twenty years.’²⁷ Although he prudently stayed away from the dinner, perhaps warned off by threatening graffiti, his house was gutted and his scientific instruments and papers were destroyed. In all, one Baptist and three Unitarian chapels and at least twenty-seven houses were looted, vandalized or pulled down in the ritual of English popular protest, their owners terrified and humiliated but not physically hurt. One victim was ‘hauled to a tavern . . . forced to shake a hundred hard and black hands’, and buy the crowd 329 gallons of beer. Why did the owners of those hard, black hands – Birmingham and Black Country harness-makers, metal-workers, carpenters, glaziers, button-makers, colliers and bricklayers – turn on genteel francophiles in the name of ‘Church and King’? The Dissenters were the local plutocracy: the ten men who suffered most property damage were all extremely rich. They were traditionally unpopular as killjoy Puritans – the West Midlands had seen recurrent riots against them throughout the century, formerly under the Jacobite banner. Dissenters’ demands for religious and political reform – never widely popular – crowned by their public enthusiasm for the increasingly menacing French revolution, seemed to threaten the traditional ideal of a united, harmonious and stable society. This patriotic ideal of unity had powerful appeal to skilled tradesmen; the alternative seemed to be ‘a cruel universe in which exploitation of the many by the few ran rampant’.²⁸

Priestley moved away to London, succeeding Richard Price as minister to a Unitarian congregation. He was made a French citizen and elected to the Legislative Assembly, though he declined to serve on the grounds that he could not speak French. Despite the Terror, he continued to see the revolution as ‘opening a new era in the world and presenting a near view of the millennium’, and he ‘read with . . . enthusiasm the admirable Report of Robespierre on the subject of morals and religion, and I rejoice to find by it, that so great and happy a change has taken place in the sentiments of the leading men of France’.²⁹ He eventually retreated to America.

Loyalists and radicals alike were stimulated by events on the Continent. Growing violence turned many decisively against the revolution. A new level of horror was reached on 2–6 September 1792, when revolutionaries, threatened by invading armies and fearing a plot by their imprisoned enemies, began to massacre the inmates of the Paris gaols. Princesses, prostitutes, bishops, beggars, officers, ex-ministers, vagrant children and financiers by the hundred were dragged into the street and cut down by patriotic tribunals acting as judge, jury and executioner. The killings were particularly shocking as they contradicted the conventional image of the French people as light-hearted, gentle and deferential.

The unexpected success of French forces in turning back Prussian and Austrian invaders on 20 September 1792 at Valmy in eastern France caused surprise and, to sympathizers, relief. Charles James Fox, though upset by the September Massacres, wrote of Valmy that ‘no public event, not excepting Saratoga and York Town, ever happened that gave me so much delight’.³⁰ Other French victories in the Austrian Netherlands caused jubilation among British sympathizers, who had been collecting clothes, blankets, boots and ammunition for the hard-pressed French armies. Now they planted Trees of Liberty, roasted oxen, rang church bells and illuminated their windows. Clearly, revolutionary France would not, after all, be powerless.

The British, and particularly the English, reaction to the French revolution has long been a subject of debate. Left-wing historians saw the radical response, including the multiplication of political societies, as a sign that England too might have had its revolution, or at least might have pursued a more democratic path. Recent scholars, however, generally concur that earlier historians ‘severely overestimated’ popular sympathy for the revolution. Rather, ‘one of the most significant impacts . . . was the enormous boost it gave to popular conservatism’.³¹ Many famous early enthusiasts eventually changed their minds under the pressure of events, including the poets Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Burns. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the ex-bishop turned diplomat who was serving the first of what would be several spells as envoy to Britain over the next forty years, reported in 1792 that

the mass of the nation . . . attached to its constitution by ancient prejudices, habit, comparison of its lot with other states, and prosperity, does not imagine that anything would be gained from a revolution of which the history of England makes it fear the dangers. The country is solely occupied with questions of material prosperity.’³²

Only when the strains of war damaged that prosperity was there serious unrest.

CANNIBALS AND HEROES

Gillray drew and etched ‘Un petit souper’ quickly, and it was published, with bright, elementary colouring, a fortnight after the first news of the September Massacres reached London. An eyewitness account of the massacres by a diplomat, Colonel Munro, was later echoed by the two great British image-makers of the revolution, Thomas Carlyle, in his History of the French Revolution (1837) and Charles Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities (1859).

The execution of Louis XVI on 18 January 1793, some four months after the September Massacres, had a comparably negative effect on British opinion, not least because it recalled the execution of Charles I. Louis drew the same parallel. Obsessed with the lessons of British history, he read Hume’s History of England and Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion during his last months. Perhaps he reflected on Hume’s dictum that in historical events a ‘great measure of accident . . . commonly concurs with a small ingredient of wisdom and foresight’.³³ He was accompanied to his death by Abbé Edgworth, a priest of Irish Jacobite descent, to whom was ascribed the memorable but apocryphal farewell at the steps of the guillotine: ‘Son of St Louis, climb up to heaven.’

Gillray’s hanging bishop, monks and judge, the profaned crucifix and the burning church – this was not a time for anti-Popery – illustrate the image’s subtitle, sarcasm aimed at the revolution’s British sympathizers: ‘Religion, Justice, Loyalty & all the Bugbears of Unenlightened Minds, Farewell!’ France had declared war on Britain twelve days before this print appeared. The central figure of the sans-culotte (always taken literally by Gillray) is linked to pre-revolutionary francophobe imagery. The long bagged hair and the fiddle had long been symbols of French frivolity, now transmuted into capricious political cruelty. The message was that French vices had been worsened, not cured, by revolution. As Lord Auckland put it, ‘all the ferocity of barbarism had been engrafted on the corruption of a polished society’.³⁴

‘Polished society’ was even more harshly criticized by the revolutionaries themselves, who extended ideas of patriotism and virtue partly imported from England.³⁵ They intended to create a new morality and culture as well as a new political system, spurning the aristocratic French style so admired by the likes of Chesterfield (see above, page 106). Maximilien Robespierre declaimed in 1794, at the height of the revolutionary Terror:

The zenith of French glory.

We will substitute . . . morality for egoism, probity for honour . . . the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion . . . good people for good company, merit for intrigue, genius for cleverness, truth for brilliance, delight in goodness for satiety in voluptuousness, the greatness of man for the pettiness of great men, a magnanimous, powerful and happy people for an agreeable, frivolous and wretched people, that is to say, all the virtues and all the miracles of the Republic for all the vices and all the absurdities of monarchy.³⁶

Plain clothes and natural hair combed casually forward – a development of the fashionable English look of the 1780s – became associated with radical chic. For women, the simplicity of the English look took on pseudo-Greek tones, with eventually far more revealing effect. In fashion, as in politics, revolutionary France took the English style to new extremes.

Jour de gloire

Unquestionably, there never was a time in the history of this country, when, from the situation of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace than at the present moment.
WILLIAM PITT in the House of Commons, 17 February 1792³⁷

It will be a crusade for universal liberty . . . Each soldier will say to his enemy: Brother, I am not going to cut your throat, I am going to free you from the yoke you labour under; I am going to show you the road to happiness.
BRISSOT DE WARVILLE in the Jacobin Club³⁸

War was neither desired nor expected on either side of the Channel in the first years of the revolution. It seemed that France would settle down as a constitutional monarchy less likely to threaten its neighbours. War was not caused by the wish of Europe’s monarchs to reinstate Bourbon absolutism, which they feared. Nor did they march on France to suppress the horrors of revolution – most of which, it is worth recalling, had not yet happened, for they were the consequences, not the causes, of war. The mainContinental powers were on the verge of another bout of predatory conflict in eastern Europe and the Balkans, the details of which need not detain us. Revolutionary France might even be a useful ally. Its internal politics were its own affair.

The impulse towards war came from within France, as its factions, for quite different reasons, came to see war as a solution to political difficulties. Foremost were the ‘Brissotins’, followers of Brissot de Warville, who wanted war to make the king and his ministers seem unpatriotic, to bring about a republic, and to put themselves into power. ‘War is necessary to France,’ Brissot told the Assembly, ‘for her honour, external security, internal tranquillity, to restore our finances and public credit, to put an end to terror, treason and anarchy.’³⁹ The Austrians reluctantly, and the Prussians eagerly, took up the challenge, and declarations, threats and ultimatums flew back and forth. The French National Assembly voted on 20 April 1792 to declare war, with only seven votes against. Both sides expected an easy victory. The Austrians and Prussians assumed that professional troops would rout the revolutionary rabble and be home by the autumn. The Brissotins imagined revolutionary patriotism sweeping aside tottering monarchies: ‘Louis XIV, with 400,000 slaves, knew how to defy all the powers of Europe; can we, with our millions of free men, fear them?’⁴⁰

The British government was bent on ‘the most scrupulous neutrality in the French business’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, Lord Grenville. He thought Austro-Prussian threats against the French ‘ill-conceived and undignified’. Britain had its own problems with Spain in North America and with Russia in the Near East. The experienced William Eden (now Lord Auckland) admitted that while ‘abstractedly considered’ he detested the revolution, in practice a ‘disjointed and inefficient’ government in France suited Britain well. Similarly, the Brissotins, who had no liking for Britain – abstractedly considered – had enough enemies. In October 1792 Brissot complimented ‘the power which has respected our revolution and its emblems most scrupulously’. A Foreign Office official thought that, protected by its ‘salt-water entrenchment’, British involvement in a Continental war was ‘as unlikely a contingency as can well be foreseen’.⁴¹

The war with Austria and Prussia began badly for the French. Their commanders, the heroes of the American war La Fayette and Rochambeau, considered their troops unfit to fight. When the enemy appeared, they retreated, provoking accusations of treason. These early reverses radicalized the revolution far more suddenly and violently than the Brissotins could have imagined. The Duke of Brunswick, commander of the Austro-Prussian forces, issued a Manifesto threatening to punish Paris if the royal family were harmed. In response, arms were distributed to the people. But they used them to attack the Tuileries palace on 10 August 1792 and over-threw the monarchy. The British ambassador left, but London remained ‘extremely neutral’.⁴² Enemy troops advanced on the capital. Verdun, the last fortress in their path, surrendered on 2 September. Several ‘virgins of Verdun’ were later guillotined for welcoming the invader. Amid rumours of treason and conspiracy, the September Massacres took place (see above, page 202), followed by the epoch-making French resistance at Valmy. Grenville congratulated himself that ‘we had the wit to keep ourselves out of the glorious enterprize . . . of sharing the spoils in the division of France [and] crushing all democratic principles all over the world’. He insisted that ‘this country and Holland ought to remain quiet as long as it is possible’.⁴³

What changed the situation was an unexpected threat to the bulwark of British security, the Low Countries. On 6 November 1792 the French routed the Austrians at Jemmapes and occupied Brussels. This astonishing change from peril to triumph, with reports that French troops were being greeted as liberators, encouraged the new National Convention to heights of daring, as rival factions vied to demonstrate their patriotism and cautious voices were drowned. ‘Revolution . . . donned warrior’s garb to challenge the world.’⁴⁴ On 19 November the Convention unanimously decreed ‘fraternity and assistance’ to all peoples struggling for liberty. Soon invasion was being justified not simply as assistance, but as an assertion of revolutionary France’s universal rights. Georges Danton declared that ‘just as it is our duty to give freedom to other peoples . . . we also have the right to tell them “you will have no more kings”’. ‘We cannot be calm,’ wrote Brissot, ‘until Europe, all Europe, is in flames.’ And he asserted that ‘The French Republic’s only border should be the Rhine.’⁴⁵

Pitt’s government also felt confident. At first, French victories and the approach of war had given a worrying boost to the radicals. But a surge of loyalist activity from November 1792 buoyed up the government’s spirits, as did the break-up of the Foxite opposition, precipitated by Burke. As Grenville put it to Auckland, ambassador at The Hague, ‘Nothing can exceed the good dispositions of this country in the present moment. The change within the last three weeks is little less than miraculous. God grant that it may last long enough to enable us to act with that vigour which can alone preserve us . . . it will enable us to talk to France in the tone which British Ministers ought to use . . . and to crush the seditious disposition here.’⁴⁶ Frantic semi-official diplomacy continued almost until the outbreak of war, but could not bridge the widening abyss. In a Note dated 31 December 1792, Grenville stated that ‘England never will consent that France shall arrogate the power of annulling at her pleasure, and under the pretence of a . . . natural right, of which she makes herself the only judge, the political system of Europe.’⁴⁷

It was the French who declared war on Britain and Holland on 1 February 1793, eleven days after Louis XVI was guillotined in a gesture of defiance to monarchist Europe. Paine drafted a call to the British people to rise in revolt, which was smuggled into England by French fishing boats and American travellers. Pitt’s statement to the House of Commons placed the struggle on an elevated plane: ‘a free, brave, loyal and happy people’ were fighting for ‘the tranquillity of this country, the security of its allies, the good order of every European Government, and the happiness of the whole of the human race’.⁴⁸ Britain’s entry into the war created the ‘First Coalition’, essentially a London–Vienna axis.

Should Pitt and his colleagues have done more to avoid war, as critics then and later accused? Was personality – ‘Pitt’s icy reserve and Grenville’s haughty arrogance’ as one French historian puts it⁴⁹ – a barrier to an understanding with the French, by which they would have kept out of Holland in return for British recognition of the French Republic and assurances of neutrality? This is to misunderstand the dynamism of revolutionary politics, as Fox and his colleagues, who urged negotiation and appeasement, constantly did. François Furet explains that ‘the revolutionary war had no definite aim because it sprang from deep within the revolution itself . . . That is why even French victories could at best result only in truces; to look for peace was . . . suspect.’⁵⁰ This, another French historian has recently argued, created something new in history: total war.⁵¹

As in many long wars, both sides expected a quick victory. French agents, who spent much time drinking and reading newspapers at the White Bear in Piccadilly, reported that Britain was on the verge of revolution. Evidence came from fraternal messages from radical societies such as the Stoke Newington branch of the Friends of the People, or an address from ‘several patriotic societies’ proclaiming, ‘Frenchmen, you are already free, but the Britons are preparing to free themselves. When we look for our enemies, we find them amongst the members of that voracious aristocracy that is rending the heart of our society.’⁵² That the French took this seriously is an example of blissful, but culpable, ignorance: no attempt was made to sound out wider opinion in the country, or even to talk to the founder of the London Corresponding Society, whose shop was just down the street from the White Bear.⁵³ The British government had more reason to believe that France was in a state of chaos, dissension and near bankruptcy. But its error was to suppose that this would stop the French from fighting: their ability to do so, at immense cost in suffering, was to astonish the world.

War changed the nature of the revolution, and the revolution changed the nature of war. France’s leaders – especially now that they were regicides – were literally fighting for their lives: against the foreign invader, against the royalists within, and even against each other, as failure or weakness could mean death. Their followers risked the loss of newly gained rights, freedoms, property and position. The dangers were magnified by an omnipresent fear of foreign and internal conspiracies – not always imaginary – planning murder, famine and massacres. As the ‘Marseillaise’ emphasizes, failure meant that the bloody flag of tyranny would fly, ferocious enemy soldiers would rampage through the countryside, and the wives and children of patriots would be massacred. ‘They tear out the entrails of pregnant women and slit the throats of old men.’⁵⁴

First, volunteers were raised. Then 300,000 men were drafted. Local communities, with quotas to fill, sent the halt and the lame or those causing trouble on both sides of the political fence (priests, nobles, and republican militants). Deserters had their property confiscated or had soldiers billeted on their families. There was a rush to get married to avoid the draft: elderly widows had never been in such demand. On 23 August 1793 the Convention decreed a levée en masse, total mobilization:

The young men will go to battle; married men will forge arms and transport provisions; women will make tents and clothing and serve in the hospitals; children will shred linen; old men will have themselves carried to public places to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.

The result, though less than hoped, was still a vast horde – chaotic, disorganized, filthy, ragged, unequipped, and armed often with pitchforks, pikes and shotguns hastily fitted with bayonets. Hungry, and tormented by epidemics of scabies and venereal disease, thousands (sometimes whole units) deserted or flocked into fetid hospitals that killed far more than the Austrians could. Yet large numbers still remained to fight, and even to win: by 1794 France had 800,000 men under arms.⁵⁵ The legend of the barefoot citizen soldier triumphing over the foreign invader by combining enthusiastic bayonet charges with revolutionary zeal inspired, and to some extent still inspires, republican patriotism. Superior numbers were a crucial part of the explanation: the bigger army practically always won, and it was usually the French. In Britain, the perceptive realized that this was a ‘new invention’: a formidable ‘military democracy’ mobilized by ‘popular tyranny’ and ‘waging war with their whole substance’.⁵⁶

War pushed France into a vortex of terror from 1791 to 1794. The levée en masse caused unprecedented riots across the country. Bands of deserters turned to brigandage. All over western France, in what was known as the Vendée uprising, there was open revolt, and towns were invaded by angry peasants. The cost of war, met by printing more money as taxes were withheld, caused galloping inflation; the official printing house literally caved in under the weight of new notes. Bad harvests, trade disruption and hoarding raised the price of corn by 25–50 per cent in 1791, causing more rioting. The government responded by economic controls and requisitions backed by terror. Black-marketeering and military defeats were blamed on treachery, and led to purges of those considered lukewarm or unreliable. A succession of generals fled to the enemy. As the Austrians and Prussians advanced again on Paris, the formerly dominant Girondin faction was driven out of the National Convention by the Paris crowd in June 1793, and their leader Brissot was accused of being a British agent. Power was concentrated in the hands of the Convention and its executive committees, most crucially the Committee of Public Safety, dominated from the summer of 1793 by Maximilien Robespierre. Repression of real or suspected opponents ignited more violent resistance. The Federalist civil war broke out between the Paris regime and the cities of the south, Lyons, Bordeaux, Toulon and Marseilles, led by the ousted Girondins. The revolution’s enemies hoped that this presaged collapse. But accounts of the republic’s demise proved premature, and in June 1794 it won a crushing victory over the Austrians at Fleurus.

The impact of war on Britain was vastly less traumatic, and remarkable for that very reason. In comparison with France, England, Wales and Scotland had low levels of political and social conflict. The rowdy enthusiasm of Loyalism palely reflects that of the Jacobin clubs and the sans-culottes. Official days of fasting and thanksgiving, and more flamboyant celebrations of victory, helped to buttress support. Most accepted the arguments of anti-revolutionary propagandists such as Hannah More that rich and poor alike would lose from a French victory. The churches, including most Dissenters, now supported the message, to which the actions of the French – the Terror, attacks on religion, and external aggression – gave substance.

Even so, support for the war fluctuated seriously, with strong pressure on the government to make peace in 1796–7 and 1800–1802, especially from manufacturing interests. Though people lit bonfires to celebrate the naval victory of Camperdown in 1797, they burned Pitt in effigy on them. This was partly because of continuing ideological division over the revolution itself; partly because of confusion over Britain’s war aims; but mostly because of the seeming impossibility of winning. There were waves of riots and strikes, serious war-weariness, a few revolutionary conspiracies, and alarming naval mutinies. But most unrest in Great Britain was of a non-revolutionary kind, provoked by food shortages, recruitment and economic disruption. Recent research shows that disturbances were generally handled with sense and even sensitivity by relatively efficient and confident central and local authorities. Acts to repress sedition were little used. Generous administration of the Poor Law in times of economic strain and for the families of men in the armed forces was an essential factor: spending on poor relief was far higher than in any other country. The economy and overseas trade remained generally buoyant. The country accepted huge increases in taxation, including an income tax in 1799. The government was careful to place the main burden on the better-off. Paper money was introduced, while a low rate of inflation was maintained. Compulsory militia service caused riots, but volunteer units proved a great success. All in all, the ordeal of war revealed a society mostly accepting that its system of government was legitimate and its independence worth defending. Ireland was a different story, as we shall see.⁵⁷

National hatred was an inevitable product of the conflict. As in past wars, there was the usual asymmetry: France was Britain’s great enemy; but Britain was only one of France’s enemies. Austria, the treacherous former ally, the invader and the homeland of the detested Marie-Antoinette, was the target of the most visceral French loathing during 1789–93. When popular resistance flared up in the ‘liberated’ Low Countries, Germany and Italy from 1795 onwards, the revolutionaries tended to dismiss their peoples as treacherous, fanatical, cowardly and generally inferior. Yet Britain was soon raised to the highest eminence of hatred. This drew on existing anglophobia accumulated earlier in the century, particularly at the time of the Seven Years War. As conflict persisted, ‘England’ was identified as the most stubborn enemy, with ‘venal and shopkeeping London’ the heart of the anti-revolutionary struggle. The republicans knew as well as the Bourbons that British control of the oceans weighed in Continental power politics, and that France could not dominate Europe without destroying Britain. ‘Carthage’ – vampire, tyrant of the seas, ‘perfidious’ enemy and bearer of a corrupting commercial civilization – contrasted with ‘Rome’, bearer of universal order, philosophy and selfless values. ‘A people of Soldiers must vanquish a people of Merchants.’⁵⁸

As early as the summer of 1789, rumours of British plots had disturbed the short-lived euphoria. Fear of conspiracy heated the murderous factionalism of the 1790s. Politicians accused their enemies of being Pitt’s agents. The Jacobin Club itself was said to be full of French-speaking Englishmen taking notes. One speaker in the National Convention asserted that

Paris is full of Englishmen . . . they come here to insult us with their openly counter-revolutionary clothes. By their jeers they provoke any Frenchman who fails to adopt English manners and customs. They flaunt their luxury at the same time that they spy on us and betray us.⁵⁹

It is easy to see why Britain became the chief suspect. For a century it had financed anti-French alliances. Many French revolutionaries and ex-revolutionaries did have British links, not least Mirabeau, General Dumouriez (a genuine traitor), Danton, Brissot and the ferocious Marat. Jean-Paul Marat had practised fraudulently as a doctor in England, had been wrongly suspected of theft from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, had been greatly influenced by Wilkes and earlier English republicanism, and his earliest political writings were written and published in England.⁶⁰ The British government really did have agents, it did forge French currency, and it did use money to influence politics. Pitt’s machinations – ‘rivers of gold’ flowing from the slave cabins of the West Indies via the hovels of the Vendée to ‘the seraglio of Constantinople’ – were a necessary excuse for factionalism, revolts, shortages, defeats, and inflation. ‘Of all the Powers of Europe, England is undeniably that which has plotted most actively not only against the liberty of France, but even against the existence of its inhabitants.’⁶¹ Robespierre produced the ultimate conspiracy theory in 1793: the British had plotted the whole revolution, abetted by the Duc d’Orléans, in order to weaken France, put the Duke of York on the throne, seize ‘the three great objects of its . . . jealousy’ (Dunkirk, Toulon, and the French colonies) – and then reconquer America.⁶² Pitt was officially declared an ‘enemy of the human race’.

At first, the ‘English’ people were regarded differently from ‘the infamous Pitt’ and ‘the imbecile George’. They were thought not to want to fight France, and so they would sooner or later overthrow Pitt or at least demand peace, if only because ‘they are losing valuable trade, and they love their wealth more than they hate us’.⁶³ The Committee of Public Safety was urged to appeal to British opinion by expressing its ‘esteem for that brave and generous nation’; and by holding out the prospect of ‘the two most powerful and enlightened nations in Europe, no longer the playthings of politicians’ passions, assuring the peace of Europe and nurturing the arts useful to humanity’.⁶⁴ But as war continued, reality dawned:

The great Jean-Louis David, the revolutionary regime’s all-purpose artist, turns his hand to caricature à la Gillray.

We have deluded ourselves about the true character of the English people. Superstitiously attached to their Constitution and their Religion, they have never liked, and can never like, French principles. If they applauded our revolution, it was rather due to an old hatred of our Kings than to any love for a Republican System. Used for several centuries to a mixed government, they have rarely felt the direct blows of despotism. Their benefits are numerous; their civil rights are assured by wise laws; and their political rights, cleverly combined with those of the aristocracy and the King, give them a deceptive importance that contents them.⁶⁵

The English people were doubly guilty because they opposed the revolution freely: ‘they reject liberty because we embrace it; they draw closer to the pope because we have renounced him . . . they will never forgive us for having dethroned the son of Mary . . . Never were Rome and Carthage more determined to destroy each other.’ A tidy-minded foreign ministry official drew up a table of the Republic’s policy towards its many enemies: while the smaller states were to be ‘intimidated and contained’, Russia ‘watched’, Holland ‘ruined’, and Prussia ‘fought and defeated’, Austria and England, at the top of the list, were to be ‘exterminated’.⁶⁶ Robespierre himself ended all ambiguity early in 1794: ‘Why should I distinguish between a people that makes itself the accomplice of the crimes of its government and that perfidious government? . . . There is something more contemptible than a tyrant and that is a slave.’⁶⁷

Anglophobia in the Convention accelerated. British goods were embargoed. British subjects were ordered to be arrested. As the Terror reached its peak in the summer of 1794, Bertrand Barère, a spokesman for the Committee of Public Safety, demanded the killing of all British and Hanoverian prisoners of war:

a feeling of esteem used to attach us to the inhabitants of England . . . we invoked its liberty, we believed in its philanthropy, we envied its constitution. This dangerous error was spread by the perfidious English themselves, along with their fashions and their books . . . There must be an immense ocean between Dover and Calais; young republicans must suck hatred of the English name with their mothers’ milk . . . If, being more enlightened than the soldiers of other governments, the Englishman comes to murder liberty on the Continent, he is the more guilty: generosity towards him is a crime against humanity . . . Every calamity that besets the Revolution and strikes the people, stems from the system of horrors organized in London . . . whose Machiavellianism has indirectly killed more than a million Frenchmen . . . The civilized savages of Great Britain are foreign to Europe, foreign to humanity: they must disappear . . . Let the English slaves perish and Europe will be free.⁶⁸

The Convention responded with ‘the liveliest enthusiasm’, and decreed that ‘No English or Hanoverian prisoners will be taken.’ It seems that some prisoners were indeed killed after the French victory at Fleurus a month later; and the crew of a captured merchantman were executed. However, Robespierre complained that the decree was not being generally obeyed, and it was soon a dead letter.⁶⁹

EXILES: THE REVOLUTION

Let us hope that the victorious troops of liberty will lay down their arms only when there are no more tyrants or slaves . . . we shall see the formation of a close union between the French republic and the English, Scotch and Irish nations.
British ‘Club of the Friends of the Rights of Man’, Paris, 1792⁷⁰

If by birth a Frenchman I’
‘Tis with thee my loyalties lie,
In my breast an English heart
Hails thy virtuous energy
In the fight ’gainst tyranny.
Verses by a French exile in England, 1798⁷¹

The revolution attracted the curious and the committed, radical exiles and refugees. A British club met regularly in Paris at White’s Hotel or the Hôtel d’Angleterre. On 28 November 1792 it sent a fraternal address to the Convention, like those sent by similar groups in Britain: ‘You have taken up arms solely to make reason and truth triumph. It doubtless appertained to the French nation to enfranchise Europe.’⁷² However, the extension of war to Britain broke up the club, as many of its members went home. Some stayed to join in the revolutionary struggle, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and inevitably Thomas Paine. They were close to the ascendant Girondin faction, and when this was overthrown Williams and Paine were imprisoned by the Jacobins, who replaced revolutionary internationalism with xenophobic suspicion. Some 250 British subjects were arrested in 1793, including remaining members of the eighteen Irish and British religious houses, and several descendants of Irish Jacobites serving in the army. Some were guillotined, among them Martin Glynn, superior of the Irish seminary in Bordeaux, Generals Ward and O’Moran, and a boy, Thomas Delany, accused of spying.⁷³ Two Irish seminarians were reprieved to serve in the French navy. There were some British Jacobins. Two Scots, John Oswald and William Maxwell, were among those guarding Louis to the scaffold, and Oswald and his sons were later killed – reportedly by their own men – when fighting against rebels in the Vendée. After the end of the Terror in 1794, the most significant presence was that of Irish radicals, including the leader of the United Irishmen, Theobald Wolfe Tone, who arrived in 1796.

Exile in Britain was a much bigger phenomenon. The earliest and most noted arrivals were members of the royal family and great nobles. The king’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, arrived immediately after the fall of the Bastille. As the revolution radicalized, several deputies of the Constituent Assembly followed. The revolutionary wars began the largest influx, with steady arrivals from the early months of 1792. By the end of the year, hundreds of refugees were arriving daily along a stretch of coast from Dover to Southampton. Beaumarchais arrived in this period, though he was later expelled for buying arms. Escaping became increasingly difficult and expensive, and many refugees arrived penniless. Probably half the total were clergy, including thirty bishops. The Anglican church raised funds for their support: ‘the difference is wide in doctrine [but] those venerable exiles [are] endeared to us by patient suffering for conscience’ sake’. Oxford University Press printed large numbers of Latin bibles and Catholic breviaries free of charge. The government gave Winchester Castle as a temporary monastery, and provided a solid ration including a pound of meat and four pints of beer a day. ⁷⁴ Political antagonisms were not forgotten: ‘Even Noailles has taken refuge in England, the last country in which he ought to have shown his face. Lafayette and he, Noailles, were treated in England with a generosity and frankness that no foreigners ever before or since experienced, and yet they went, warm with our civilities, in the most treacherous manner, as if they had come here merely as spies, to attack us in America.’⁷⁵ The war inevitably caused friction. Fear of republican agents led to the resented Aliens Act (1792) which placed exiles under surveillance. The British government was lobbied by bitterly opposing factions among the refugees, and it refused to commit itself to a Bourbon restoration. Enterprises involving exiles repeatedly went wrong, especially the disastrous landing at Quiberon Bay in 1795 (see below, page 221). After the end of the Jacobin dictatorship, and especially during the 1800s once Bonaparte was in power, most went home.

The refugees needed financial help. The main fundraiser was John Eardley Wilmot, a lawyer and former MP, who in November 1792 formed a committee, including Burke, which collected over £400,000. After Quiberon Bay, a women’s committee was set up to help widows and children. Between 1794 and 1799, the government gave more than £1 million. Much of the money was managed by the Bishop of Saint-Pol de Léon and the Duc d’Harcourt. Burke was very active, among other things in founding a school for French boys under an exiled priest. If some former courtiers for a time went ‘from château to château, very fêted everywhere’, most exiles soon had to earn a living. The Comtesse de Guéry ran a London café famous for its ice cream. A former Benedictine monk used his library to open a bookshop.⁷⁶ Erard founded his great piano-making business. Refugees worked as seamstresses, dancing or fencing masters, tutors or governesses. Several schools were founded, including the Jesuit school at Stonyhurst. Auguste Charles Pugin, who arrived in 1792, produced engravings for the publisher Ackerman. Marc Brunel, who arrived in 1799, designed machinery for the navy. Both married Englishwomen, and their sons created some of the greatest monuments of nineteenth-century Britain.

Soho maintained its position as the centre of exile life, particularly attracting those of intellectual bent and little money, such as the writer René de Chateaubriand. Two bookshops became meeting places, and the French House in Lisle Street offered French meals for two or three shillings. Marylebone attracted the aristocracy and princes of the blood, including the Comte d’Artois, the Duc de Berry and the Prince de Condé, who colonized Portman and Manchester squares. A meeting place was the Rose of Normandy, in Marylebone High Street, and for less convivial assemblies, the French Chapel Royal. Poorer exiles lived in large numbers across the river in the slums of Southwark.

These years saw the closest-ever contact of the French elite with Britain and its ways, far greater that that of the Free French during the Second World War, the only comparable episode. Though numbers fluctuated, the total has been estimated at 60–80,000, among them France’s next three kings and several future prime ministers. Chateaubriand, France’s first great Romantic writer, declared that his years in exile had made him

English in manners, in taste and, up to a point, in thought; because, if, as has been claimed, Lord Byron took some inspiration from René in his Childe Harold, it is also true that eight years of living in Britain . . . and a long habit of speaking, writing and even thinking in English, had necessarily influenced the development and expression of my ideas.⁷⁷

On a less exalted note, a French schoolboy wrote, ‘J’aime John Bull, j’aime les beef-steaks et comme dit Lord Byron, j’love a porter beer as well as any.’⁷⁸ We may safely conclude that ‘the years of the Emigration softened the animosity which had existed between the two populations and promoted lasting links between the two nations in the nineteenth century’.⁷⁹ However, if Chateaubriand on his return to France found it difficult to get used to ‘the dirt of our houses . . . our uncleanliness, our noise, our familiarity, the indiscretion of our chatter’, he soon found that ‘our characteristic sociability . . . our absence of pride and prejudice, our inattention to wealth and name’ convinced him that ‘Paris is the only place to live.’⁸⁰

Internal Injuries

France . . . is, I am convinced, weakness itself if you can get to grapple with her internally.
EDMUND BURKE, 1793⁸¹

The coup of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) overthrew the Jacobin dictatorship, executed Robespierre and his entourage, set up a governing Directory, and ran down the Terror. Pitt, who never accepted Burke’s idea of an ideological crusade, was prepared to negotiate with a stable Republican regime, which the Directory might have become. But instead war continued and intensified. The British would not accept French possession of conquered territories, especially in the Low Countries; and Pitt’s moderate-sounding war aims – ‘security, with just a mixture of indemnification’⁸² – were unthinkable for the French. With the war going well, they would not give up the conquests on which the prestige of the Republic and its political and economic stability depended. Realpolitik laced with ideology was enough to cause each to inflict long-term damage on the other by fomenting civil war. There was nothing new in this. French aid to Jacobites had been a feature of previous conflicts, and if Britain had failed to aid Protestant rebels in France, it had been largely due to lack of opportunity. In the 1790s, opportunity abounded. Both sides exaggerated the vulnerability of the other, portrayed as staggering towards a collapse that internal revolt would hasten. Both discerned ideological allies and popular unrest among the enemy, and the idea of exploiting these was energetically, if not always wisely, encouraged by exiles in both Paris and London. The consequence was that both sides ended up helping Catholic peasants abroad, and slaughtering them at home.

The struggle to mobilize France for war in 1793 had met violent resistance, as we have observed. Rural communities were forced to provide large numbers of men to defend a distant republic whose acts had often disappointed popular feeling and at worst – especially in religious policy – had outraged it. Over the spring of 1793, two-thirds of France saw disturbances. The most serious were in the west. Devotion to the Church, ethnic difference, disputes over land sales, mass conscription, and not least distance from the war zones (hence sparseness of government troops) were a recipe for wholesale insurrection, which became known as ‘the Vendée’. It began in April 1793, when rebels seized towns and butchered republican officials. The following month the Girondin faction was expelled from the National Convention, and this, as we have seen, precipitated revolt in Bordeaux, Lyons, Marseilles and Toulon. The south too felt its separateness from Paris; it had suffered economically from the war; and ancient hatred between Catholics and Protestants bedevilled local politics. The expulsion of the Girondins was the last straw. In west and south, rebel leaders looked for external aid.

Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe, 1795–1815

Across the Atlantic, the Caribbean was as always the great strategic and economic prize. This time, ideology and politics changed everything. Revolution in France led to a conflict for power in the sugar islands between the planter oligarchy and the free mixed-race and freed-slave ‘middle class’, often themselves slave owners. In 1791 the conflict spread to the huge slave population of Saint-Domingue, and it would eventually cost 200,000 lives. When war broke out with Britain, the French encouraged revolts against British rule, especially in islands recently taken from France such as Grenada, and then, in 1793 and 1794, they proclaimed the liberation of slaves in the hope of winning the support of the vast African majority, and thus preserving control over Saint-Domingue and striking a blow at Britain. By 1795, all the islands hung in the balance, and with them trade, finances, and ability to finance the war.

Britain and Ireland were in a far less incendiary state in 1793 than France or the Caribbean. Before 1790 there was no nationalist movement in Ireland. Political concessions during the American war had opened prospects of economic growth, greater autonomy and reasonable coexistence with Britain. Imperial connections brought commercial benefits. Full Catholic emancipation seemed in the offing. In short, there was ‘a general mood of confidence’.⁸³ War with France gave further reason for conciliating Catholics in order to bolster Irish unity in the face of what one Catholic bishop called ‘the diabolical spirit of the Jacobins’.⁸⁴ Hence, a militia was established in which Catholics and Protestants served together, and in 1793 Catholic gentlemen were given the vote.

Optimism was misplaced. As in Great Britain, Presbyterians in Ireland – ‘a stiff, proud, discontented people’ – were drawn to the democratic and anti-Catholic aspects of France’s revolution. Belfast paraded on Bastille Day, and small Ulster towns celebrated French victories: ‘They were all on the Americans’ side during the American war. Now they are all on the French side.’⁸⁵ In Belfast, a group of Presbyterian businessmen set up the Society of United Irishmen in October 1791, which also attracted members of the Catholic gentry, many of whom had links with France through education or military service. Like its counterparts in Britain, the society made fraternal contacts with French revolutionaries. However, it was not a revolutionary society. Its aim was political reform, which it now expected to accelerate. But events in France stimulated a rawer kind of militancy: that of the Defenders, a Catholic secret society born of land hunger and sectarian violence in rural south Ulster in the 1780s. In response to Defenderism, Protestants created the Orange Order in 1790. Wartime hardships aggravated sectarian violence, and Defenderism began to spread across rural Ireland in the millenarian belief that ‘the French Defenders will uphold the cause, the Irish Defenders will pull down the British laws’.⁸⁶ ‘The great majority of the people [are] in favour of the French,’ noted a contemporary, even ‘in mountains where you could not conceive that any news could reach’.⁸⁷

The British government was chary of French politics. They mistrusted the royalist émigré leaders, whom they found excessively reactionary, quarrelsome, anti-English and unreliable. Neither Bourbons nor Hanoverians forgot that they had been enemies. The foreign secretary Grenville had ‘an extremely bad opinion of any scheme the success of which is in the smallest degree to depend on the exertions, or prudence, or means of the French Aristocrates’.⁸⁸ However, the Federalists in Marseilles and Toulon asked for British and Spanish aid in July 1793 – a strategic windfall. Admiral Hood’s Mediterranean fleet sailed into Toulon, the great Mediterranean naval base, in August. The government was not committed to the Bourbons, for a weakened Republic might offer favourable peace terms. Events in Toulon somewhat forced their hand, for the rebels – royalists and anti-Jacobin republicans – proclaimed the young son of Louis XVI, imprisoned in Paris, as Louis XVII. This, said Pitt, was not ‘in all respects as we would wish’. The British kept republican officials and institutions in Toulon in place, and London published a declaration to the French people stating that they would not seek to impose a regime on France, even though they considered that a constitutional (not absolute) monarchy was the best alternative. But Louis XVII’s little kingdom could not survive a determined land attack, in which the young Napoleon Bonaparte first made his name. Hood evacuated the port after four months’ presence, taking away or burning thirteen French ships of the line and eight frigates – a blow comparable with Trafalgar. It was compounded by the torching of Toulon’s huge stocks of shipbuilding timber, which put the dockyard out of action for years. The Federalists fled on British ships or into the hills. The Republic taught another of its lessons: mass executions (in Lyons, some by cannon-fire), and the symbolic obliteration of the rebel cities, which were renamed ‘Freedtown’, ‘Nameless Town’, and ‘Mountain Port’. The loss of Toulon increased Corsica’s importance as a naval base. Under their old leader Pasquale Paoli, the Corsicans asked to join the British empire on the same basis as Ireland, with George III as king of Corsica. This plucky wartime experiment in Enlightenment nation-building – with a parliamentary constitution, trial by jury, religious toleration, and habeas corpus – was realized in 1795. Despite good will on both sides there were predictable disagreements. But the outcome was determined by strategy, not politics. Finding the island too hard to defend, the British withdrew at the end of 1796, taking with them 12,000 refugees. Corsica was reoccupied by the French.⁸⁹

In August 1793 the Vendée rebels similarly asked Britain for aid: arms, troops, money and a Bourbon prince to lead them. The government were willing to send money, arms and French émigré troops – though not a Bourbon – if the rebels could capture a harbour. They marched north in October to take the port of Granville. This sudden expedition, known as ‘la virée de Galerne’, turned into catastrophe: Granville held out, and the rebels, accompanied by their families, suffered horrific losses during their long retreat – 60–70,000 were slaughtered. When British ships arrived, there were no rebels. Aware of British involvement, the Republic reacted ferociously to the Vendéen threat, ordering ‘extermination’ of the rebels, complete destruction of the countryside, deportation of surviving women and children (one suggestion was to Madagascar), and resettlement with Republican colonists. At Nantes, there were mass executions, including several thousand by drowning. In the countryside, General Turreau’s ‘hell columns’ set out to exterminate opposition by rape, torture, massacre, devastation and famine: ‘Burn the mills . . . demolish the ovens . . . If you find peasants or women . . . shoot them, all support our enemies, all are spies.’ Wrote one soldier to his father, ‘We shoot them every day in batches of 1,500.’⁹⁰ Some towns were still uninhabited in 1800.

In spite or because of these reprisals, guerrilla war continued in the west, and ‘White Terror’ – revenge killings of republican officials and militants – in the south. After the fall of the Jacobin dictatorship in July 1794 an attempt was made to pacify the west: General Lazare Hoche, the regional commander, offered amnesties and cash bounties for disarmament. A peace treaty was signed with the rebel leaders. But in 1795 the British and the royalist leaders reignited the revolt as part of an ambitious plan to defeat the Republic by combining seaborne landings in the west, resistance in the south, and Allied invasion from the east, facilitated as usual by ‘Pitt’s gold’ spread among French generals. On 25 June 1795, 4,500 French royalists enrolled in the British army landed on the Quiberon peninsula to link up with local guerrillas, the Chouans, and secure the area for later British reinforcements. The Republican authorities sounded the alarm: ‘the English (may the very name of that perfidious and ambitious nation make you tremble with horror and indignation) have just vomited onto the coast . . . the wickedest scoundrels who have ever infected their country’s soil’.⁹¹ The invaders lost the advantage of surprise by quarrelling and dithering. The royalist gentlemen-soldiers found their Chouan allies uncouth and incomprehensible, ‘like Indians’. Hoche used the respite to seal off the peninsula. Amid bad weather which forced British warships out to sea, he overran the landing zone, trapped 9,000 royalists and captured 10 million livres’ worth of forged money, 20,000 muskets, 150,000 pairs of boots, sides of ‘best Irish salt beef’ on which his victorious troops feasted, and coffee, a luxury most had never tasted. It was, reported Hoche, ‘like the port of Amsterdam’.⁹² Over 700 royalists were shot on the spot, many of them ex-officers of the Bourbon navy. This stunned the émigré community in London. Although the British navy had striven under fire to rescue 2,000 French from the beaches, there were inevitable recriminations, even accusations that London had planned the disaster to weaken France.

Neither the royalists nor the British gave up. Despite bad weather and French gunboats, money, weapons and encouragement continued to trickle into western France. This helped to keep resistance alive, even after the original leaders were captured and killed. New plans were drawn up for mass uprisings supported by British troops. In the south, money channelled through Switzerland similarly maintained royalist resistance, which now often took the form of assassination of hundreds of Republican officials and Jacobins. Far more money, reaching to Paris itself, paid for royalist political organizations and propaganda, which threatened to overthrow the Republic. But its beleaguered rulers held on to power through a series of coups between 1795 and 1799, backed by the army. Thus, Britain unwittingly paved the way for the eventual dictatorship of General Bonaparte.

After the Quiberon invasion, the French decided to retaliate, outraged by British incitement of what they saw as savage banditry. Hoche became the driving force behind a plan to invade Britain. He combined Republican zeal with ambition, seeing a chance to end the war at a stroke and establish himself as France’s leading general – a primacy he was disputing with Bonaparte. He planned to land criminals in England to cause maximum disorder and violence. More important was a landing in Ireland, ‘England’s Vendée’. This was being urged by the United Irishmen, whose main intermediaries were the Protestant Dubliner Theobald Wolfe Tone, and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Jacobin son of the Duke of Leinster. They were alarmed when the French suggested that the Irish might like a Stuart (the elderly Cardinal Duke of York) as ruler – Ireland had changed in five years, let alone in fifty. The United Irishmen had become a republican nationalist movement, principally because of the hardening political situation. Pitt’s government failed to bring in Catholic political emancipation – one of several reform measures postponed indefinitely because of the fraught international situation and George III’s opposition. The United Irishmen, banned in 1794 for contacts with France, concluded an alliance with the Defenders for a nationwide uprising. The leaders trusted in a French invasion to bring them to power, and to restore order before there could be a peasant revolt against landlords and a sectarian bloodbath.

In December 1796 15,000 men under Hoche sailed from Brest, with another 15,000 ready to follow. As the British had found in Brittany the year before, communication and coordination posed insurmountable problems. Hoche slipped past the Royal Navy under cover of bad weather, but his ships were scattered. The main force – minus Hoche, the only man who knew the plans – reached Bantry Bay in a snowstorm, and found no Irish revolutionaries; indeed, no Irishmen at all. So they went home. This was sensible, even inevitable. But it was another lost opportunity for France to win the Hundred Years War, and for the revolution to knock out its principal enemy. Ireland had few regular troops, and the United Irishmen now had the will and capacity to raise a major insurrection. The panic caused by Hoche’s other idea – to land a band of criminals – shows how vulnerable a war-weary Great Britain was too. In February 1797, 1,400 men, some taken from the prisons of western France, and wearing uniforms captured at Quiberon, set off to burn Bristol under the command of an elderly American pirate named William Tate. Winds forced them to Fishguard, in Pembrokeshire, where, famished, they spent their time scouring the countryside for food. They quickly surrendered, tradition has it after spotting a group of Welsh women in red cloaks whom they took for ‘a Ridgment of Soldiers . . . and the Lord took from our Enemies the Spirit of War and to him be the Prais’. This fiasco was the last invasion of Great Britain, for which in 1853 Queen Victoria awarded the Pembrokeshire Yeomanry the battle honour ‘Fishguard’.⁹³ Yet it was enough to cause alarm in London and a run on the Bank of England, forcing the government to end the convertibility of paper money into gold. The French had aimed at causing a financial panic like this for half a century, and they managed it with a few hundred bedraggled gaolbirds. They were convinced that it would ruin British credit. Unexpectedly, the paper currency turned out to be economically beneficial.

More serious blows to British self-confidence were the naval mutinies of 1797, when Britain was without allies and dependent on its fleet. In April 1797 the Channel Fleet refused to put to sea, though the mutineers repeatedly promised to do so if there were any movement by the French. After negotiations and major concessions, a settlement was reached with the sailors, and celebrated at Portsmouth with a banquet of mutineers, admirals and civic dignitaries. This encouraged mutineers in the North Sea Fleet at the Nore and Yarmouth, who made further demands. The government now contemplated coercion, while offering to pardon men returning to duty. Much of the public turned against the mutineers, for fear of French invasion. Letters from families urged submission, and suspected mutineers on shore were beaten up. Open conflict threatened, and sailors fought among themselves. On 14 June, the mutiny ended. Over thirty men were hanged, and over 300 received lesser sentences, including flogging and transportation. Contemporaries and later historians have assumed that civilian democratic and anti-war groups influenced the mutineers; moreover, a proportion of sailors were Irish, including suspected republicans drafted into the navy as a precautionary measure. Yet the evidence for political motivation is negligible, and there is substantial evidence to the contrary, including the ostentatiously loyal acts and declarations of most of the mutineers. The mutinies seem essentially to have been large-scale instances of the traditional collective bargaining tolerated in the navy, which included petitions to the Admiralty and Parliament. But discontent was made less controllable by huge wartime expansion, from 16,000 men to 114,000; by inflation reducing the value of sailors’ pay; and by the rigours of blockade duty. Though patriotism and loyalism prevailed in the fleet as on shore, discontented minorities remained.⁹⁴

Though Hoche had missed his chance in 1796, the Bantry Bay expedition had terrible consequences. The Dublin government ordered General Lake to disarm Ulster, the main stronghold of the United Irishmen. Wrote one officer, ‘I look upon Ulster to be a La Vendée . . . It will not be brought into subjection but by the means adopted by the republicans [in France] – namely spreading devastation through the most disaffected parts.’ Murder, torture, and looting showed that this was meant literally – ‘every crime, every cruelty that could be committed by Cossacks or Calmucks has been transacted here,’ protested General Abercromby, who resigned his command.⁹⁵ The United Irish leadership was being rounded up, so they set off rebellion in May 1798, mainly in north-eastern and south-eastern Ireland. The rebels were convinced that this would bring France to their aid. The outcome was horribly similar to the Vendée: a civil war in which religion, socio-economic grievance and politics engendered genocidal fear, hatred and horrific violence – the outcome the United Irish leaders had hoped French intervention would prevent. The largely Catholic militia and the Protestant yeomanry, with some Scottish and English support, were ordered by Lake to ‘take no prisoners’, and they duly imitated the savagery of Turreau’s hell columns. After a few small battles, most famously Vinegar Hill on 21 June, and many punitive expeditions and vicious skirmishes, the rebellion was stamped out amid massacre, rape, plunder and arson. As Wolfe Tone saw it, ‘to their immortal disgrace and infamy the militia and yeomanry of Ireland concur with the English to rivet their country’s chains and their own’. They did this to defend Irish property against a revolution of the Irish poor. The Irish elites looked to either France or Britain to maintain the social order. Even if the rebellion and a French invasion had succeeded, argues Brendan Simms, the outcome would have been ‘not the end of an old trauma for Catholic Ireland, but the beginning of a new one’. Social, political and religious divisions meant that the rebellion contained opposing revolutionary and counter-revolutionary elements, united only by hostility to Britain. If the British had been defeated, these divisions would have emerged, as on the Continent, with the likely outcome ‘a murderous bourgeois secular satellite state, subservient to the needs of French foreign policy’, at war with the Catholic church and the Irish peasantry.⁹⁶

When it was too late, in August 1798, 1,000 French soldiers arrived unannounced in the remote north-west of Ireland under General Humbert (who had crushed France’s own rebels at Quiberon three years earlier). Jubilant Mayo peasants rallied to the French, but soon little love was lost between them. Humbert and his men, veterans of the real Vendée, found their Irish allies too much like their own peasant enemies – superstitious, dirty and indisciplined – and they executed a few as a sharp lesson. Humbert marched far inland in the hope of restarting the rebellion. He routed Lake’s militia, but was met by a large Anglo-Irish force at Ballinamuck on 8 September – the last French battle in these islands. Humbert’s 4,000 Irish volunteers, firmly placed in front by the French, were slaughtered, and many of the survivors massacred. The French surrendered and were well treated. Humbert and his officers regaled their British counterparts in Dublin with anecdotes about Irish stupidity. The United Irish leaders were dead, in gaol, awaiting the gallows, or in exile. Prisoners were conscripted into the British and Prussian armed forces, or transported to labour in New South Wales or Prussian coalmines. The lucky ones reached America – missionaries preaching vengeance against England. Others reached France, where they served succeeding regimes: republican, Bonapartist and finally the restored Bourbon. Some lived on in France until the 1860s.

Both sides had done each other permanent damage in these ‘internal grapplings’. Neither was devoid of sincerity. Grenville, Burke, William Windham (the Secretary at War) and the controlling agent in Swizerland, Wickham, were sincerely royalist and keen not to abandon their French allies. Hoche and Lazare Carnot, the Jacobin war minister, to name only two, felt similarly genuine concern for Irish liberty. But other priorities, whether military events or embryonic peace negotiations, would cause plans to be postponed, or ships, troops, arms and money diverted to other destinations. Even when seaborne operations were pursued, they were at the mercy of weather and enemy action. Communications and coordination with guerrillas, conspirators and agents were tenuous. British and French ships arrived early, or late, or in the wrong place. In Provence, the Vendée, Ulster and Leinster it was not only material assistance, but the expectation of help that counted. Both British and French were more impressive in their promises than in their delivery. The great 1798 Irish rebellion happened between Hoche’s failure and Humbert’s failure, but in the firm belief that the French would eventually come. The price was paid by those who started, or got caught up in, rebellion. Knowledge that the enemy was involved increased the ferocity of repression. A modern estimate of the number killed in Ireland in 1798 is 10,000.⁹⁷ The total loss of life in the civil war in Western France alone – in combat, from massacres, epidemics, and privation – was 250,000 or more.⁹⁸ In both countries, senior commanders representing the central government tried to curtail the violence and offered amnesties, but too late.

Livid emotional and political scars remained. The west and south of France were hotbeds of violence until 1815 and later. Strong support for the Right – Catholic and anti-Republican – lasted well into the twentieth century, constituting one of the deep divides in the ideological and political struggle that has been called ‘the Franco-French War’. The consequences for Ireland and Britain were greater still. Optimism and progress were replaced by fear and hatred. The Ulster Presbyterians, who had been the bedrock of the United Irishmen, moved over to the other side of a sectarian divide. A direct consequence of the mess – in which some British politicians and soldiers were horrified by the incompetence and brutality of the Anglo-Irish authorities – was the Act of Union of 1800. This aimed vainly to control and pacify Ireland by abolishing its parliament and government and bringing it into the United Kingdom, and so strengthening the whole against France. As one official argued, ‘the French will never cease to intrigue in this kingdom [Ireland]’ and ‘as we wish to check the ambition of that desperate, and unprincipled power . . . we should be favourable to the principle of union’.⁹⁹ But union made the ‘Irish question’ a perennial issue in British politics, especially as the quid pro quo of full Catholic political rights was postponed. As Marianne Eliott sums it up, ‘An entire world separated the nineteenth century from those years when Ireland had seemed to be moving towards a gradual resolution of her problems. The French revolution itself may simply have reacted upon the underlying tensions, but it is unlkely that the upheavals which consumed any chance of lasting solutions would have occurred without it.’¹⁰⁰

From Unwinnable War to Uneasy Peace

The great object . . . was defence in a war waged against most of the nations of Europe, but against us with particular malignity . . . I had hopes of our being able to put together the scattered fragments of that great and venerable edifice [the French monarchy] in the stead of that mad system which threated the destruction of Europe . . . This, it is true, has been found unattainable.
WILLIAM PITT in the Commons, November 1801¹⁰¹

When war began in 1793, an ideological gulf had already opened between France and Britain. Yet the cause of the war was conventional and familiar: control of the Low Countries. It was not, and is not, possible to make a clear distinction between ideology and realpolitik. This ambivalence about the nature, causes and aims of war affected contemporaries, and has divided historians. Pitt was a realist, ready to treat with any French government that was stable and would renounce a policy of revolutionary conquest. But was any republican regime stable, and could any give up its conquests? For France to stigmatize Britain as the new Carthage to be destroyed was both an extreme ideological view and a realistic assessment of Britain’s colonial and commerical dominance. French support for revolutions abroad was an ideological crusade. But it was also an instrument of power, ruthlessly used. The Republic soon made clear that it would only support revolution in unfriendly countries, and only help those who could help themselves, as the Irish discovered to their cost. Even if liberated, the ‘sister republics’ found themselves paying for French armies on their soil, fighting France’s wars, and being treated as cultural and political satellites.

French strategy was mainly continental. The collapse of its navy and the loss of valuable colonies eclipsed its overseas power and trade. Gains in European territory, treasure and natural resources compensated. Paris heard the news of the conclusion of a peace treaty with Holland when the French negotiator rushed into the Committee of Public Safety, threw down a handful of golden guilders, and proclaimed ‘I have brought you a hundred million of these.’ This was one of endless such infusions from the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy. Belgian towns were still paying off the costs in the 1920s. Bonaparte rose to power on loot. His famous proclamation to his threadbare Army of Italy defined a whole system: ‘Soldiers, you are naked and hungry; the government . . . can give you nothing . . . I am leading you into the most fertile plains on earth. Rich provinces and cities will be in your power; you will find there honour, glory and wealth.’ During the first few months, official booty alone amounted to over 45 million francs in cash and 12 million in bullion – several times the previous annual tax burden. Bonaparte became the paymaster of the Republic.¹⁰² War had become both self-sustaining and indispensable.

British strategy was subject to diverging assumptions about the war. The least ideological view, consistently represented by Pitt’s friend and colleague Henry Dundas, was that in this war, like any other, Britain should advance its own interests and security, and prepare for a negotiated settlement. So it should seize strategic and economic assets in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, which would finance the war and ensure an advantageous peace. Dundas argued that ‘a compleat success in the West Indies is essential . . . No success in other quarters will palliate a neglect there . . . By success in the West Indies alone you can be enabled to dictate the terms of peace.¹⁰³ The greatest military effort was made there, using and losing through disease the core of the army. It kept the sugar trade flowing and supported the huge cost of the war. The opposite view, trumpeted by Burke and consistently urged by Pitt’s other most influential colleague, his cousin and foreign secretary Grenville, was that this was no conventional war. The revolution itself had to be defeated, for no secure peace was possible with an unstable ‘military democracy’ that used subversion and aggression for its own survival and expansion. So the war should concentrate on France itself, by invasions, by aiding internal resistance, by building coalitions of European powers, and if necessary returning colonial conquests to sweeten a Bourbon restoration. In Grenville’s view, ‘the Jacobin principle has remained unshaken . . . and so it will be, as I believe . . . till the principle itself be attacked and subdued in its citadel at Paris’.¹⁰⁴ Pitt was in the middle, more concerned with the social, political and economic costs of war. British strategy has been criticized as incoherent, with effort being spread too widely; or alternatively defended as the inevitable consequence of stretched commitments, uncertain allies and the changing fortunes of war. Emphasis on maritime or continental strategy alternated, as circumstances dictated. Britain could not defeat France alone, and so had to fit her actions to her allies. But they – most importantly Austrians and Russians – had their own interests, which might better be served by agreement with France. Moreover, they mistrusted Britain. The ‘Carthage’ image was not for French consumption alone.

In brief, the story of the War of the First Coalition (1793–7) is that of the French armies rolling up opposition on the Continent. Austria and Britain were forced out of the Low Countries; Austria and Spain made peace; and Holland (valuable for its fleet and its wealth) declared war on Britain. The Quiberon invasion, as we have seen, failed in 1795. But Britain seized the Cape of Good Hope, sent powerful forces into the Caribbean, and, in December, made the first peace feelers to France, which came to nothing, and were renewed with no more success in 1796. During 1796 and 1797 Britain’s position in Europe worsened: Spain changed sides, and the Royal Navy left the Mediterranean, abandoning Corsica. Hoche had his near miss at Bantry Bay, the Bank of England suspended its gold payments, and parts of the fleet mutinied. Another attempt was made to negotiate with France, and contemptuously rejected after the coup of Fructidor (4 September 1797) foiled British plans for a royalist takeover in Paris. Austria, Britain’s main ally, cut its losses after Bonaparte’s advance through Italy and made a deal with France in the Treaty of Campo Formio in October. Within a few months the Republic consisted of a vast block of territory from Holland via the Rhineland and Switzerland to northern Italy. Bonaparte began to assemble an ‘Army of England’ for his first invasion attempt – the second of four increasingly elaborate projects between 1794 and 1805. Yet things were not as bad for Britain as this bald summary suggests. Control of the oceans, and of colonial trade, was kept, and affirmed by a series of naval victories – most notably over the Spanish in February 1797 at Cape St Vincent and the Dutch in October at Camperdown (won by the recently mutinous Nore fleet), which were occasions of state-sponsored but genuinely popular rejoicings.

In May 1798 Bonaparte tried to break the stalemate. He postponed invasion of England. ‘Truly to overthrow England,’ he told the Directors, ‘we must occupy Egypt.’¹⁰⁵ Using plans drawn up in the 1770s, he sailed with an army in 280 ships from Toulon, seized Malta on the way, and in July defeated a Turkish army at the battle of the Pyramids, making the grandiose proclamation: ‘Soldiers, forty centuries are watching you.’ This incursion was a historic turning-point in the relationship between the Muslim world and the West. Napoleon intended to capture trade with the Levant, and compensate for the loss of France’s sugar islands and British colonial conquests. It opened the possibility of controlling North African food production, greatly increasing France’s war-making power. Bonaparte also intended, as the British feared, to make Egypt his base for a land attack on India. Admiral Nelson, in hot pursuit, attacked the French fleet anchored in Aboukir Bay on 1 August 1798 in the Battle of the Nile. Admiral Dupetit-Thouars, his legs smashed by a cannonball, had himself propped up inside a barrel to encourage his men to keep fighting as the British methodically worked their way down the paralysed French line, destroying it ship by ship. It was one of the most complete victories in naval history: eleven out of thirteen battleships were destroyed or captured. Bonaparte and his army were thus cut off in Egypt, but they remained a threat to Turkey and India. A consequence was that the British in India, to pre-empt a French attack, defeated France’s abandoned ally Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, ‘a victim’, in Pitt’s words, ‘to his attachment to France’.

Nelson’s victory encouraged Austria, Russia and Turkey to risk joining Britain in a Second Coalition in 1798. Pitt, though worried by war weariness, financial strains and food shortages in Britain, agreed to one final effort in 1799 to overthrow the tottering French Republic. This time success seemed certain. The French had vast territories to defend with dwindling manpower. Revolts broke out in all the conquered territories and inside France, with both the West and the South again up in arms; while France’s allies in Ireland and Naples were bloodily crushed. British troops prepared another invasion to link up with the Vendée rebels, and the navy mopped up remaining French colonies. The Russians and Austrians were advancing through Italy, Switzerland and Germany. British and Russian troops landed in Holland and captured the Dutch fleet.

This was indeed the final crisis of the Republic, but not in the way the British expected. Bonaparte slipped out of Egypt in a fast corvette, telling a friend, ‘If I am lucky enough to get back to France, the reign of the chattering classes is over.’¹⁰⁶ He reached Provence on 9 October 1799. A month later he had seized power in the coup d’état of Brumaire, telling his troops that the politicians were in British pay. He at once offered peace terms, which were promptly rejected by Grenville. The British thought that Bonaparte, on the verge of defeat, was trying to gain time and divide the Coalition: ‘the whole game is in our hands now, and it wants little more than patience to play it well, to the end’.¹⁰⁷ The final push was set for the summer of 1800, when the Allies would march into France from Germany and Italy, and the British army would land in Brittany. But as First Consul, Bonaparte showed himself to be more than just another general. He ended the western rising by force and concession, leaving the British with nowhere to land. He then struck a devastating blow where no one expected it, in Italy, narrowly defeating the Austrians at Marengo on 14 June. Hopes of a Coalition victory vanished in a day. Bonaparte sent a letter to the Austrian Emperor, supposedly written on the field of Marengo ‘surrounded by 15,000 corpses’, offering peace and blaming the war solely on the greed and selfishness of England – a version that many in Europe found plausible.

It was Britain that faced defeat now. Austria and Russia sought peace. Bonaparte aimed to win over the Russians, telling their envoy that ‘we are called to change the face of the world’. He was preparing an alliance with Spain to attack Ireland, Portugal and India. Prussia occupied Hanover, the last British foothold in Europe. Russia, Denmark and Sweden were forming an ‘Armed Neutrality’ and excluding British ships from the Baltic. Gold reserves were dwindling and bread prices rose to three times their 1798 level. Oxford students were rationed. Others less fortunate starved. A wave of riots tied down a large part of the army. Demands for peace became deafening. Pitt, on the edge of a breakdown, resigned in March 1801 when the king refused to extend equal political rights to Catholics following union of Britain and Ireland. Succeeded by a lesser though competent figure, Henry Addington, Pitt supported the new government’s search for peace, which he considered inevitable.

The British now lived their recurring nightmare: a dominant France preparing a Continental attack on British seapower. This had to be pre-empted by what Dundas called ‘a shake at the naval strength of the enemy’. He hoped that ‘one brilliant act of British enterprise would intervene to check and soften the uniformity of calamity and defeat’.¹⁰⁸ Fortunately for Britain there were two. In March 1801 General Abercromby forced a landing in Egypt and went on to defeat the larger French army – a remarkable success for the despised British. Grenville’s brother wrote, ‘we appear to have broken that magical invincibility sur terre of the great nation’.¹⁰⁹ In April Nelson, at the first battle of Copenhagen, destroyed the Danish fleet, threatened to bombard the city, and forced Denmark to withdraw from the ‘Armed Neutrality’, whose other members prudently did likewise. Tsar Paul was assassinated, and Russian rapprochement with France halted.

So a compromise peace could be signed at Amiens in March 1802. No agreement in British history, except that of Munich in 1938, has been so vilified and so welcome. As with Hitler at Munich, the hope was that Napoleon would be satisfied with his gains. Britain agreed to return its maritime acquisitions, including the Cape and Malta, whose inhabitants had requested British aid to expel the French. France in effect gave nothing in return. ‘We are going fast down the gulf-stream,’ wrote Windham, ‘and shall never stop, I fear, till, with the rest of Europe, we fall under the universal empire of the great Republic.’¹¹⁰ Even those who made the treaty regarded it as a sad necessity, precarious and, as the king said, ‘experimental’. Peace was publicly supported by most of the naval and military commanders, including Cornwallis, St Vincent and Nelson, who saw no prospect of victory and feared for the morale and discipline of their men. Pitt, as usual, provided calm conviction:

We have survived the violence of the revolutionary fever. We have seen Jacobinism deprived of its fascination, stripped of the name and pretext of liberty, capable only of destroying, not of building . . . I trust this important lesson will not be thrown away on the world . . . I will venture to predict that [Bonaparte] will not select this country for the first object of his attack; and if we are true to ourselves, we have little to fear from that attack, let it come when it will.¹¹¹

The public was overjoyed. Food prices fell and rioting subsided. When the French envoy General Lauriston (a descendent of John Law) arrived in London with ratification of the preliminary agreement, a jubilant crowd pulled his carriage through the streets. The government itself illuminated public buildings. One critic of the peace admitted ‘the real enthusiasm and frantic joy . . . in the faces of every person I met, whether farmer, labourer or manufacturer’. The London Corresponding Society wrote an adulatory letter to Bonaparte declaring their devotion to France and thanking him that ‘peace reigns on earth, and this is the work of Frenchmen’. Charles James Fox owned that ‘the Triumph of the French government over the English does in fact afford me a degree of pleasure which it is very difficult to disguise.’¹¹² The French people rejoiced too. When the British ambassador arrived in Calais, he was greeted by cheering crowds, a band playing ‘God Save the King’, and a delegation of market women with a present of fish. He noted on the road to Paris the ‘misery and poverty’ of the peasants.¹¹³ More than a century of Franco-British struggle thus ended with Britain intact but France victorious, with her power in Europe established to an extent that Louis XIV had never attained.

THE FIRST KISS THIS TEN YEARS!

Lords, lawyers, statesmen, squires of low degree,
Men known, and men unknown, sick, lame, and blind, Post
forward all, like creatures of one kind,
With first-fruit offerings crowd to bend the knee,
In France, before the new-born Majesty.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, ‘Calais, August, 1802’

The peace boosted Bonaparte’s reputation in Britain. Gillray’s un-martial Britannia, quivering to be seduced, is Charles James Fox in drag. He was one of many political personalities (including eighty-two MPs and thirty-one peers) who went to see the charismatic dictator. Many were impressed. Fox, however, found him rather a dull fellow, which by Fox’s exacting standards of amusement (wit, wine, women, horses and cards) he undoubtedly was. Though Bonaparte was a gambler, it was for infinitely higher stakes. Fox considered him ‘considerably intoxicated by success’ and realized, as did many visitors of all political persuasions, that France had become a dangerously powerful military dictatorship.

Ordinary tourists streamed across the Channel, as after previous wars. All wanted to see what post-revolutionary France was like. They noticed ruined churches and chateaux, and lots of soldiers. Some thought French manners had become ‘abrupt and familiar’. The eighteen-year-old Lord Aberdeen, in military uniform, was ‘hissed’, and he found French people, though generally ‘obliging’, as gloomy as the ‘Scotch’. Many visitors – according to French cartoonists – made straight for the new restaurants. A few sought out compatriots who had stayed on in France during the war. One was a Mr Thompson, who looked after the elephant in the zoo. More famous was Tom Paine, who had kept busy writing propaganda and drawing up invasion plans. But after a tiff with Bonaparte, his hope of becoming head of a British Republic had evaporated, and he was drowning his sorrows in Paris. The end of the blockade allowed him to slip safely away to America, to fantasize in peace about an invasion of England. Artists, including Turner, made for the Louvre, crammed with captured booty. Some 3,000 French visitors travelled to Britain, though as usual with more practical concerns. Some came to report on British industrial progress, and were astonished at the changes. One French agent renewed pre-war contacts with John Wilkinson and James Watt. Others went for private business reasons, such as the famous balloonist and pioneer parachutist, André-Jacques Garneri, who planned to give displays; and Madame Tussaud, who brought waxworks of Napoleon and Josephine, and a collection of revolutionary horrors – including Robespierre’s death mask, a guillotine, and a waxwork of Marat stabbed in his bath.¹¹⁴

CULTURE WARS

Britain owes a considerable part of its ‘national heritage’ directly to the French revolution and Napoleon. Revolutions are a godsend to the art world: ‘bliss indeed was it to be a collector in that dawn, but to be a dealer was very heaven’.”¹¹⁵ Men with money and others keen to help them spend it – one of the shrewdest a young Scottish law student named William Buchanan – developed a sudden passion for art. In 1792 the Duc d’Orléans sold his family’s collection of 400 pictures, considered the world’s greatest in private hands, including multiple works attributed to Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, Correggio, Tintoretto, Veronese, Rubens, Velasquez and many others. They went for 1.2 million livres (£52,000) to the banker Laborde (the admirer of Captain Cook) – a ‘panic price’. Laborde shipped the pictures to England – a suspicious act, which may have contributed to his subsequent arrest and execution. World events did not encourage buyers, and the whole was eventually bought cheaply for £43,000 by a syndicate led by the Duke of Bridgewater, who kept the best for themselves and almost covered their costs by selling off the rest. Lesser French collections were also sold in London, including that of the émigré ex-minister Calonne. Lord Yarmouth bought works in Paris for the royal collection and started what later became the Wallace Collection. Furniture, sculpture and porcelain (including an incomplete Sèvres service for Louis XVI, which was planned to take twenty years to make) also crossed the Channel, and some of the finest is now at Windsor Castle. In 1796, Bonaparte rampaged through Italy levying huge contributions in cash and in hundreds of named works of art. Princely families were forced to sell their collections to pay the French. Most of what was not taken for the Louvre came to London, especially paintings, as Bonaparte was mainly interested in sculpture. The same happened on a smaller scale in Spain and Germany.”¹¹⁶ In both France and Britain, the public display of works, including those privately owned, became a demonstration of individual patriotism and of national prestige.

Marble metope: The French revolution and the Napoleonic Wars brought a flood of art treasures to Britain.

The treasure hunt extended beyond Europe. Napoleon’s 1798 Egyptian invasion was cultural as well as military, with 160 scientists and artists forming an Institute under his patronage to carry out ‘a veritable conquest . . . in the name of the arts’.”¹¹⁷ The Rosetta stone, the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphics, was their greatest archaeological find. When the French army surrendered, they were allowed to keep their notes and specimens of insects and animals, but not manuscripts or antiquities. General Menou tried to keep the Rosetta stone, but it was seized amid the jeers of French troops by a British detachment commanded by a keen antiquarian colonel, who took it to the British Museum. British and French scholars competed subsequently to decipher it. The French consoled themselves by publishing a multi-volume Description de l’Egypte (1809–22), and in the 1830s obtained the Luxor obelisk, now in the Place de la Concorde. Meanwhile, the British had beaten the French to Assyrian antiquities.

The greatest cultural tussle took place in Greece. The French ambassador appointed in 1783, the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier, was an avid collector, and he instructed his agent, the artist Fauvel, to ‘Take away everything you can. Miss no opportunity to pillage Athens and its territory of all that is pillageable.’”¹¹⁸ Covetous eyes had long been cast on the statues, external panels and internal frieze of the Parthenon itself. Though seriously damaged by wars and vandalism, and increasingly dilapidated by illegal sale of fragments of sculpture to tourists, this was not yet ‘pillageable’ on a large scale, though Fauvel managed to acquire fallen pieces, now in the Louvre. War provided a new opportunity. The Ottoman empire needed British help against the French, and the young ambassador Lord Elgin attained an unprecedented position of favour. He and his agents were given permission to enter the Acropolis to make drawings and casts, to excavate, and to ‘take away any sculptures or inscriptions’. The original intention was not to remove pieces from the building, but this gradually began, with the negligent acquiescence of the Turkish authorities. Elgin, using his own initiative and money, was spurred on by the accelerating damage being done to the sculptures, and by knowing that the French were after them too. He decided to remove as much as he could. Appropriately, he used equipment, including a huge cart, made by Choiseul-Gouffier for that very purpose. He was not a connoisseur: his attitude was similar to that of Napoleon – that this was a question of national (and personal) prestige. In August 1801 his chaplain reported that ‘these admirable specimens . . . which have repeatedly been refused to the gold and influence of France in the zenith of her power’ were on board ship. By June 1802, Lady Elgin was confident that ‘We yesterday got down the last thing we want from the Acropolis so now we may boldly bid defiance to our enemies.’”¹¹⁹ The end of the Franco-Turkish war and the return of French diplomatic influence came just too late. Much that had not been removed was subsequently defaced or stolen by swarms of souvenir hunters. Elgin, travelling home through France, was arrested and interned when war resumed in 1803, and was treated with some rigour. He believed that Napoleon was trying to force him to cede his collection to France. The finest part was still in Athens, and French agents – now allies of Turkey – were determined to get hold of it. They succeeded with some small pieces, which they dispatched overland to the Louvre, where they remain; but the huge marbles could only be moved by sea, where the French were powerless. Another reversal of alliances enabled Elgin to ship over fifty heavy cases of marbles during 1810 and 1811. These included the best of the Parthenon sculptures. The one intact panel secured by the French was captured at sea by the Royal Navy, and is now also in the British Museum. Elgin was violently denounced for vandalism and theft, most famously by Byron, lover of Greece and admirer of Napoleon. Elgin’s marriage collapsed and the family was ruined for two generations by the huge expenses he had incurred, which an ungrateful nation refused to defray. To escape his creditors, he spent his last years in France.