The Demonization of Pitt

Abstract

A state of war between Britain and France was something with which everyone was familiar. It was only ten years since they had last been fighting each other. In the past these conflicts had been concerned with national security or competition for imperial markets. They had been government affairs, although they had inevitably generated feelings of national antipathy on both sides. These had been most pronounced at the popular level; politicians exploited them and intellectuals were inclined to treat them as matters of vulgar prejudice. Pitt still inhabited this mental world. He was unimpressed by Burke’s appeal for a crusade in defence of civilization and more concerned with the possibility of annexing sugar islands. Nevertheless, even from his point of view, this was more than just another Anglo-French contest. The revolution had divided French society; there was a civil war in the west and unrest in other parts of the country that he could hope to exploit, by means of agents, subsidies and perhaps the landing of troops. The revolutionary government was bound to see this as interference in French politics, and to extend to the British the feelings of passionate hostility that it applied to French royalists. In these circumstances it was likely that the British government would also be contaminated by the civil war mentality, to the point of discarding the elastic but meaningful restraints that states normally imposed upon themselves in the conduct of eighteenth-century wars.