A War of Ideas

British Attitudes to the Wars Against Revolutionary France, 1792–1802

Emma Vincent Macleod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429841903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The responses of British people to the French Revolution has recently received considerable attention from historians. British commentators often expressed a sense of the novelty and scale of European wars which followed, yet their views on this conflict have not yet attracted such thorough examination. This book offers a wide-ranging exploration of the attitudes of various groups of British people to the conflict during the 1790's: the Government, their supporters and their opponents inside and outside Parliament, women, churchmen, and the broad mass of British public opinion. It presents the debate in England and Scotland provoked by the war both as the sequel to the French Revolution and as a distinct debate in itself. Emma Vincent Macleod argues that contemporaries saw this conflict as one of the first since the wars of religion to be significantly shaped by ideological hostility rather than solely by a struggle over strategic interests.

Chapter 1
Edmund Burke and the War Against the French Revolution

[Burke] is the man that will mark this age, marked as it is in itself, by events, to all time.¹

After months of mutual suspicion, fragile communications and increasing tension, Revolutionary France declared war on Great Britain on 1 February 1793. Edmund Burke, the British conservative politician and polemicist, however, had been at war against the French Revolution since the autumn of 1790, when he had written and published his hugely successful Reflections on the Revolution in France. This eloquent and detailed condemnation of all that the French Revolution seemed to Burke to stand for was his personal declaration of a war of ideas whose active fire would cease only with his death in 1797. The British ministry often appeared vague and even divided about the nature of the conflict and its own fundamental aims, but Burke's campaign against the French Revolution was from its inception war to the death.

Burke's hostility to the French Revolution is well known. The French Revolution was an attack on aristocratic power and privilege in France, and Burke's concern deepened as he saw signs of the revolutionary Jacobin movement spreading throughout Europe. He came to see the Revolution as an attack on the basic foundations of European civilization, which included not only the social order but also the systems of morality and belief on which that order was built.² The Reflections and the rest of Burke's battery of literary weapons against the French Revolution were therefore fired against it primarily from a desire to preserve the old European order, especially since that of Britain was an integral part of it.

This chapter does not attempt to revise our understanding of his opposition to the Revolution in France. Rather, it explains how his hatred of the Revolution shaped his views on the war against Revolutionary France. This is a necessary context for the other British responses to the war discussed in this book. Burke largely set the tone for the rest of the British debate on the war, because of the early and vehement publication of his views, and because of his recognition of the French Revolution as an immensely significant ideological phenomenon. His views were instrumental in causing the British debate on the conflict to be substantially informed by ideology. The great majority of British people did not agree entirely with Burke; nor did many diametrically oppose his views by offering wholehearted support to the ideology of the French Revolution. It is also true that some denied that ideology had any part to play in the war. Nevertheless, in putting forward these opinions, they all had to respond to Burke's views in one way or another, because he had constructed a cogent ideological response to the Revolution and called for a war against it long before almost anyone else in Britain had taken the Revolution particularly seriously or recognized the possibility of war.

Burke did not limit his personal battle against the French Revolution to the Reflections and his wide private correspondence. He thought himself publicly 'bound to express his own sentiments with freedom and energy in a crisis of such importance to the whole human race,' as he wrote in his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (May 1791);³ and his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (August 1791), Thoughts on French Affairs (December 1791) and Heads for Consideration on the Present State of Affairs (November 1792) also denounced the Revolution and urgently insisted that the European powers intervene. Some of his pamphlets were clearly written in a specific attempt to prevail upon government policy, such as Hints for a Memorial to be Delivered to M.M. (1791) and Thoughts on French Affairs, and he even sent his son to Coblenz to try to influence counter-revolutionary tactics. Nor did his efforts to stir his country to action end with the outbreak of war, for he was rarely satisfied with the ministry's conduct of it and the national spirit often seemed to waver. He therefore continued to speak out in the House of Commons until his retirement in June 1794, and to write letters, talk to statesmen and publish his views on the war until his death, his language as colourful and pointed, as R.B. McDowell has remarked, as James Gillray's caricatures.⁴ There were times and circumstances, Burke declared in the Appeal, in which not to speak out was at least to connive.⁵ This chapter begins by charting his growing conviction that armed conflict would be necessary and considering his reasons for this and the aims for which he thought the war should be fought. It then examines his opinions on the nature of the conflict and the manner in which it should be fought by Britain, and his reasons for vehemently opposing peace with the French Republic.

I The Menace of Jacobinism

In August 1789 Burke had expressed his initial thoughts on the French Revolution to Lord Charlemont: 'It is true, that this may be no more than a sudden explosion: If so no indication can be taken from it. But,' he continued ominously, 'if it should be character rather than accident, then that people are not fit for Liberty, and must have a Strong hand like that of their former masters to coerce them.'⁶ By October 1789, his own hesitation and doubtful admiration were evaporating and he was writing to his son Richard about his concern for 'the portentous state of France—where the Elements which compose Human Society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be produc'd in the place of it—where Mirabeau presides as the Grand Anarch; and the late Grand Monarch makes a figure as ridiculous as pitiable.'⁷

It was not long before Burke began to view war against the French Revolution as a possibility. As early as 12 November 1789, he told Earl Fitzwilliam that he would wish to see France 'circumscribed within moderate bounds'. In his speech in the House of Commons debate on the Army Estimates, on 9 February 1790, he in fact gave it as his opinion that France need not be considered as much of a military threat for some time to come; but he also suggested that the French Revolution had 'brought on such calamities as no country, without a long war, has ever been known to suffer, and which may in the end produce such a war, and perhaps, many such.' In the Reflections he hinted that the British government 'may find it expedient to make war' upon the revolutionaries.⁸ Burke was also the first to argue that force must be used against revolutionary France. On 25 January 1791, he wrote to a distressed member of the French aristocracy, the Comtesse de Montrond. 'Alas! Madam, it is not to me, or to such services as can come from me, that the persecuted honour of France must apply,' he told her. 'Nothing more can be said. Something must be done. You have an armed Tyranny to deal with; and nothing but arms can pull it down.'⁹ From this time on, he vigorously advocated European intervention in French affairs, certain that the royalists within France were too weak to overturn the Revolution by themselves, dispersed and disarmed as they were, and equally convinced that '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 Center of Europe'.¹⁰ He told Sir James Bland Burges that Britain must be prepared for 'very great and awful Events both at home and abroad', and expressed his astonishment that the European powers without exception had chosen to be 'mere Spectators of this scene'. By July 1791 he was becoming more impatient. Writing to Henry Dundas, the Home Secretary, he argued that 'this seems to me a moment for some decision in the foreign System so far as it regards France.—Surely a Step may be taken with great safety, great dignity and great Effect. The time for it may pass.' He told his son in August that he was sure that the revolutionaries were making preparations of some kind, and he began talking in terms of an enemy: 'Oh! let those who would [restore] the good in that Country be careful how they despise their Enemy!'¹¹

Burke's view of the French Revolution was fundamental to his reasons for insisting that Britain and indeed Europe should make war upon France. The war he advocated was no typical eighteenth-century pursuit of territorial aggrandizement and power. Nor was it primarily motivated by a desire for vengeance against the foreign aggression of revolutionary France, which to him was a mere symptom of its real malignancy. He reduced the French Revolution to a system of principles which had overturned the ancien régime in France, and which was fast spreading to menace the peace, security and moral values of all Europe, and he insisted that it must be wholly destroyed for the future of European civilization. The French Revolution was an ideological enemy, and this was its primary danger.

The particular danger of the French doctrines of equality, reason and liberty lay in their superficial appeal to ordinary men. Burke argued that these abstract principles were a menace to political and social order because they encouraged men to seek perfection in human affairs, where it could not be found. In its pursuit, they overturned all else (including admirable compromises with perfection), leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.¹² The Revolution was the result of a plot hatched by a combination of philosophers, the new monied interest in France and men of letters. Their political system, based as it was on the immediate self-interest of the individual, was inherently unstable. Their professed desire for universal peace and international concord, he argued, was 'a coarse and clumsy deception': far from peace and good will to men, the French revolutionaries 'meditated war against all other governments' through systematically inciting sedition among the peoples of Europe.¹³ One of the principal targets of the Revolution had therefore been France's international relations: 'The Revolution was made,' he wrote, 'not to make France free, but to make her formidable'.¹⁴ He feared French expansion per se, and its upset of the European balance of power, but still more did he fear the subversion of the continent by French principles. The combination of these two threats was terrifying, for it meant the destruction of European society. The Revolution was not just the subversion of the monarchy, but a crusade against a whole way of life, against the social order which to Burke was the embodiment and bulwark of men's rights and liberties in its protection of property and the propertied.

Burke was by no means a war-monger, as his pleas for peace in India, Ireland and America had demonstrated, but he was quite clear that war was the ultimate means of justice in the world, and that this was an occasion when it was indispensable.¹⁵ He realized that the balance of power was too often made the pretext for wars of ambition, but he constantly defended the right of a country to interfere in the internal affairs of another if it became necessary for the sake of its own security. Those who argued otherwise, he said, failed to distinguish between the promotion of sedition and rebellion in another country and the support of one side in a country already divided. He frequently referred to Vattell's Law of Nations (1758) for support, where it was stated t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chronological Table
• Introduction
• 1. Edmund Burke and the War Against the French Revolution
• 2. Government Attitudes: The Pitt Administration and George III
• 3. Loyalists and War Crusaders
• 4. The Opposition to the War (I): The Foxite Whigs
• 5. The Opposition to the War (II): Radicals and Friends of Peace
• 6. Churchmen: Political Preaching, Patriotism and Pacifism
• 7. Women at War: British Women and the Debate on the Wars Against Revolutionary France
• 8. The Voice of the People? Public Opinion and the Wars Against Revolutionary France
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index