What did the British think of the French revolution?

'How much the greatest event that has happened in the history of the world, and how much the best' - Charles James Fox, Opposition Whig leader 1789

News of the opening events of the French Revolution was greeted with widespread enthusiasm by British observers, although some, patronisingly, saw it as evidence that France was abandoning absolutism for a liberal constitution based on the British model. Enthusiasm was most potent among those championing domestic political reform - Dissenters excluded from political office by the Test and Corporation and Subscription Acts, members of the middling orders denied the vote by antiquated constituency boundaries and a restricted suffrage, and Parliamentary Whigs whose ambitions for office were blocked by Pitt's firm hold on power. For these groups and their associated literary, scientific and political circles, events in France signified a much deeper change in government.

Following hard on the American Revolution (1776-83), the sweeping aside of the French feudal order demonstrated the irresistible rise of freedom and enlightenment. In November 1789, Richard Price's sermon commemorating the Glorious Revolution of 1688 concluded by hailing events in France as the dawn of a new era. 'Behold all ye friends of freedom... behold the light you have struck out, after setting America free, reflected to France and there kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes and warms and illuminates Europe. I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading; ...the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience.'

The controversy gave renewed energy to metropolitan and provincial reform societies, such as the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI), and fuelled the emergence of new associations, some organised by ordinary working people who declined the patronage and control of the wealthy. Thomas Hardy's London Corresponding Society (LCS), formed early in 1792, spent five evenings discussing whether they 'as treadesman (sic) shopkeepers and mechanics', had any right to seek parliamentary reform. The society went on to become hugely influential and developed scores of divisions and local branches.

The debate rapidly became an escalating battle of political rhetoric and mobilisation. Those sympathetic to reform were tarred with France's worst revolutionary excesses and responded by taking their message to the mass of the people through political organisation and the circulation of cheap pamphlets and broadsides. Their most potent weapon, Paine's Rights of Man reached several hundred-thousand readers. In May 1792, the government reacted with a Royal Proclamation against seditious writing. In the subsequent prosecution of Paine, the Attorney General succinctly expressed the government's anxieties: 'all industry was used to obtrude and force this upon that part of the public whose minds cannot be supposed to be conversant with subjects of this sort.... Gentlemen, to whom are these positions addressed...to the ignorant, to the credulous, to the desperate.' Paine escaped to France but others were less fortunate.

Following the trials, the LCS focussed on mobilising popular unrest against the war, taxation, food shortages, and recruitment, through mass public meetings in June and October 1795. Days after the October meeting, during the state opening of Parliament, the king's coach was attacked (the king claiming to have been shot at) and when it returned empty it was destroyed by protesters. The government rushed in the 'Two Acts' or 'Gagging Acts' to tighten the treason statute and to ban large political meetings. A huge petitioning campaign followed, with loyalists expressing support and reformers protesting against the restriction, but the Bills were passed.

The Two Acts encouraged an increasingly close alliance between the Foxite Whigs and the reformers. By the end of 1797 Fox was denouncing Pitt's 'reign of terror', and later seceded from Parliament in protest. Meanwhile, following further prosecutions and harassment, the popular movement was driven underground and into more conspiratorial activity - emerging in a series of splinter groups - the United Englishmen, United Irishmen and United Scotsmen.

The Irish radicals, with a longer history of repression and a nationalist cause to fight, produced a full-scale insurrection in the summer of 1798, but were savagely repressed and collapsed before the promised French invasion force arrived. The Union of Ireland and Britain in 1800 further weakened Irish radicalism, although there was a final rebellion in 1803. In Britain the suspension of habeas corpus enabled the government to imprison most of the leading radicals and to silence the popular movement, despite widespread social unrest from 1799-1801 due to poor harvests and high taxes.

Ministers, however, were far from complacent. The Defence of the Realm Acts of 1798 and 1801 sought to gauge the extent of popular loyalty throughout the country. The results suggest neither widespread loyalism nor extensive alienation. Although some announced they would not fight, people's willingness increased sharply in the south-east which was expected to bear the brunt of invasion. Others were not prepared to fight far from home but would enlist in local volunteer and militia units. Responded to such concerns, a national defence force of regular units, militias, and Volunteer units was constructed. At the height of the invasion scare in 1803-5, following the lull of the Peace of Amiens (1801-3), approximately one in five able-bodied men enlisted in some form of military organisation. War became, for the first time, a national endeavour touching practically every family in the land.

Reformers' attempts to bring the 'debate' to the people from 1791, were mirrored in the reaction of loyalists from 1792, and was further intensified following war with France after February 1793. At the height of the invasion scare in 1803 the mass dissemination of loyalist ballads and broadsides had become a hugely efficient part of government strategy - so much so that, during the invasion threat loyalism became completely ascendant. But the practical struggle for the hearts and minds of the British people meant that popular awareness of the national political agenda expanded dramatically. The reformers may have failed, but British political culture changed fundamentally in the course of resisting their efforts.

When the reform movement re-appeared around 1807, it did so largely under the leadership of Parliamentarians such as Frances Burdett, and it eschewed Paine's radical, democratic rhetoric for a more constitutionalist idiom demanding the restoration of proper balances between the Crown, Lords and Commons. One major element of this movement was the attack on corruption - with William Cobbett becoming the populist spokesman, denouncing the use of royal pensions to buy political allegiance, inefficiency in the administration of the state's finances, and incompetence among senior government ministers as the war dragged on until 1815.

Limited electoral reform was conceded in 1832, universal suffrage in 1928. This slow evolution might be attributed to the resilience of the British political elite, the weakness of political opposition, or the failures of the extra-parliamentary reform movement. But the French Revolution was also a critical factor. British liberal and opposition writing up to 1789 concentrated almost entirely on the dangers of the excessive power of the crown. In contrast, 19th-century conservatism and liberalism were united in seeing the people themselves as the principal threat to liberty. Haunted by the spectre of popular revolutionary violence the political élite refused to trust the people to exercise democratic rights responsibly - while simultaneously understanding the importance of their loyalty. From 1793, propaganda, political ritual and the cultivation of a popular monarchy became key elements in a strategy that recognised the power of the people, but declined to accord them democratic rights.

Books

The British Armed Nation 1793-1815 by John Cookson (Oxford University Press, 1997)

Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 by Linda Colley (Yale University Press, 1992)

Britain and the French Revolution edited by H T Dickinson (Macmillan, 1989)

Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France by Marianne Elliot (Yale University Press, 1982)

The Friends of Liberty by Albert Goodwin, Hutcheson, 1979

An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age 1776-1832 by Iain McCalman (Oxford University Press, 1999)

Britain in the Age of the French Revolution by Jennifer Mori (Longman, 2000)

The French Revolution and British Popular Politics by Mark Philp (Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Places to visit

Visit Tom Paine's house in Sandwich, where he wrote his first pamphlet, entitled Common Sense.