Epilogue: Napoleonic Challenges and Cosmopolitan Legacies

Abstract

The short-lived Peace of Amiens had reopened the continent to tourists from the British isles, and Napoleon’s 1814 abdication once again promised to make France accessible to Britons eager ‘to mix in their parties and bring home their fashions’, as Barbauld complained of her compatriots’ hypocrisy (Works 2: 142). Writers like Maria Edgeworth, Fanny Burney, Amelia Opie and Anne Plumptre had travelled to France during the 1802 Peace, experiences reflected in Edgeworth’s two Tales of Fashionable Life set during the Revolution (‘Madame de Fleury’, 1809, and ‘Emilie de Coulanges’, 1812), Burney’s The Wanderer (1814) and Opie’s The Warrior’s Return (1808).¹ Plumptre arrived in France with her friend Opie,² but unlike most tourists she stayed once the war recommenced, not as a self-exile like Burney, but as a devotee of revolutionary principles who hoped to emigrate permanently.

Is there not something strange and rather revolting in speaking of the French, as most have done for these twenty years past, with the utmost abhorrence and contempt, — and pouring ourselves over their country the moment it is accessible, to mix in their parties and bring home their fashions?

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, letter to Mrs Fletcher (1814)