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BRITISH ATTITUDES TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2007

EMMA VINCENT MACLEOD
EMMA VINCENT MACLEOD*
Affiliation:
University of Stirling
*
Department of History, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA[email protected]
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Abstract

The study of British attitudes to the French Revolution continues to attract substantial scholarly attention. In recent years, this has resulted not only in the excavation of a substantial volume of new detail, but also in increasing attention being paid to the political experiences of members of the middling and lower orders during the revolutionary and Napoleonic decades. While historians have been interested in radicals and reformers from these social strata since the publication of E. P. Thompson's The making of the English working class in 1963, it is only more recently that their loyalist and less partisan counterparts have been examined by scholars to the same extent. This article begins by summarizing the recent publication of large collections of primary sources and of major biographies in this area. It then discusses recent historiographical advances and debates in the following areas: the British debate over the French Revolution; the political participation of members of the middle and working classes in patriotic and loyalist activities; the culture of popular politics; and the question of national identity.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , September 2007 , pp. 689 - 709
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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59 Austin Gee, The British Volunteer movement, 1794–1814 (Oxford, 2003).

60 See Emma Vincent Macleod, A war of ideas: British attitudes to the war against revolutionary France, 1792–1802 (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 187–95.

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95 John Barrell, Imagining the king's death: figurative treason, fantasies of regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford, 2000). See also Alan Wharam, The treason trials of 1794 (Leicester, 1992); and Michael T. Davis's forthcoming book on the Scottish political martyrs of the 1790s, to be published by Palgrave.

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97 Mark Philp, ‘The fragmented ideology of reform’, in Philp, ed., French Revolution and British popular politics, p. 70.

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101 Christie, ‘Conservatism and stability in British society’; cf. Christie, Stress and stability.

102 Roger Wells, ‘English society and revolutionary politics in the 1790s: the case for insurrection’, in Philp, ed., French Revolution and British popular politics, pp. 188–226; cf. Roger Wells, Wretched faces: famine in wartime England, 1793–1801 (Gloucester, 1988); and idem, Insurrection: the British experience, 1798–1803 (Gloucester, 1983).

103 Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, culture and politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998); Steve Poole, The politics of regicide in England, 1760–1850 (Manchester, 2000); Frank Prochaska, The republic of Britain, 1760–2000 (London, 2000); Anthony Taylor, ‘Down with the crown’: British anti-monarchism and debates about royalty since 1790 (London, 1999); McCalman, Radical underworld.

104 N. A. M. Rodger, The command of the ocean: a naval history of Britain, 1649–1815 (New York, 2005), ch. 29.

105 Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English state’, pp. 162–5.

106 See Macleod, A war of ideas, ch. 8.

107 Hampsher-Monk, Iain, ‘Edmund Burke's changing justification for intervention’, Historical Journal, 48 (2005), pp. 65–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tom Furniss, ‘Cementing the nation: Burke's Reflections on nationalism and national identity’, in Whale, ed., Burke's Reflections, pp. 115–44.

108 Colley, Britons; for discussion see, for instance, A. Grant and K. J. Stringer, eds., Uniting the kingdom? The making of British history (London, 1995); Alexander Murdoch, British history, 1660–1832: national identity and local culture (Basingstoke, 1998); Koditschek, Theodore, ‘The making of British nationality’, Victorian Studies, 44 (2002), pp. 389–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Terry Brotherstone, Anna Clark, and Kevin Whelan, eds., These fissured isles: Ireland, Scotland and British history, 1798–1848 (Edinburgh, 2005).

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114 John Brims, ‘The Scottish democratic movement in the age of the French Revolution’ (Ph.D. thesis, Edinburgh, 1983), which has some interesting material on conservatives as well; idem, ‘The Scottish “Jacobins”, Scottish nationalism and the British union’, in Roger A. Mason, ed., Scotland and England, 1286–1815 (Edinburgh, 1987), pp. 247–65; idem, ‘The Covenanting tradition and Scottish radicalism in the 1790s’, in Terry A. Brotherstone, ed., Covenant, Charter and party. Traditions of revolt and protest in modern Scottish history (Aberdeen, 1989), pp. 50–62; idem, ‘From reformers to Jacobins: the Scottish Association of the Friends of the People’, in T. M. Devine, ed., Conflict and stability in Scottish society, 1700–1850 (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 31–50; idem, ‘Scottish radicalism and the United Irishmen’, in David Dickson, Dáire Keogh, and Kevin Whelan, eds., The United Irishmen: republicanism, radicalism and rebellion (Dublin, 1993). See also Elaine W. McFarland, Ireland and Scotland in the age of revolution: planting the green bough (Edinburgh, 1994).

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116 Andrew Mackillop, ‘More fruitful than the soil’: army, empire and the Scottish Highlands, 1715–1815 (East Linton, 2000), ch. 7; Macleod, Emma Vincent, ‘A city invincible? Edinburgh and the war against revolutionary France’, British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23 (2000), pp. 153–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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121 Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan, 1798: a bicentenary perspective (Dublin, 2003).

122 Jim Smyth, The men of no property: Irish radicals and popular politics in the late eighteenth century (Basingstoke, 1992); Kevin Whelan, The tree of liberty: radicalism, Catholicism and the construction of Irish identity, 1760–1830 (Cork, 1996); Dáire Keogh, ‘The French disease’: the Catholic church and radicalism in Ireland, 1790–1800 (Dublin, 1993).

123 Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong, eds., The mighty wave: the 1798 rebellion in Wexford (Dublin, 1996); Daniel Gahan, The people's rising: Wexford, 1798 (Dublin, 1995); A. T. Q. Stewart, The summer soldiers: the 1798 rebellion in Antrim and Down (Belfast, 1995).

124 McFarland, Ireland and Scotland in the age of revolution.

125 Philp, Mark, ‘The role of America in the “debate on France” 1791–1795: Thomas Paine's insertion’, Utilitas, 5 (1993), pp. 221–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goodrich, Debating England's aristocracy, passim.

126 J. C. D. Clark, ‘Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in America (1777); or, how did the American Revolution relate to the French?’, in Crowe, ed., An imaginative Whig, pp. 71–92.

127 Stephen Conway, The war of American Independence, 1775–1783 (London, 1995), ch. 2.