Abstract
The underlying theme of the preceding chapters is that anti-Jacobin propaganda of the 1790s has coloured modern perceptions of what Cobban called ‘the Debate on the French Revolution’. Robert Birley, writing in the 1920s, admittedly claimed that ‘it is the custom now to consider Pitt too exclusively a reactionary’. Birley was inclined to sympathize with Pittite policies, remarking that ‘a time when men searched in Holcroft’s plays for sedition was not a time for change’.1 And E.P. Thompson’s insistence on the revolutionary potential of the political societies has unintentionally validated government repression and anti-Jacobin smear campaigns.2 More recent studies of the period have demonstrated in detail that the conservatives won the contemporary debate, while literary critics still sneer at the youthful political idealism (and subsequent ‘apostasy’) of the Romantic poets.3 Yet we recall that Cobbett, hammer of the American ‘Jacobins’ in the 1790s, and darling of the Anti-Jacobin Review, recanted his anti-Jacobinism on returning to England.4
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Notes
R. Birley, The English Jacobins From 1789 to 1802 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), 40.
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1980 reprint). Thompson (p. 109) did defend the ‘Jacobins’ against the more extreme Pittite charges: ‘Paine and his followers did not preach the extermination of their opponents, but they did preach against Tyburn and the sanguinary penal code. The English Jacobins argued for internationalism, for arbitration in place of war, for the toleration of Dissenters, Catholics and free-thinkers, for the discernment of human value in “heathen, Turk and Jew”.’
Cobbett, Rural Rides (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985), 199–200.
Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs and the French Revolution: the Middle Years (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 1988), 123. Morel’s oration was intended to assert the practicability of Abbé de St Pierre’s Project of Perpetual Peace (1713).
Appendix to Thomas Cooper, A Reply to Mr Burke’s invective against Mr Cooper and Mr Watt, in the House of Commons on the 30th April 1792 (Manchester, 1793), 86–7. See also S. Andrews, The Rediscovery of America: Transatlantic Crosscurrents in an Age of Revolution (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press; 1998), 95–8.
See M.L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs and the French Revolution: the First Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 233–41.
See Carl B. Cone, The English Jacobins: Reformers in Late 18th Century England (New York: Charles Scribner, 1968), 81.
For a careful weighing of ideological factors, see E.M. Macleod, A War of Ideas: British Attitudes to the Wars against Revolutionary France 1792–1802 (Aldershot and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1998).
See Robert Hole, ‘English Sermons and Tracts as Media of Debate on the French Revolution 1789–99’ and John Dunwiddy, ‘Interpretations of Anti-Jacobinism’ in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Gayle Trusdel Pendleton in ‘Towards a Bibliography of the Reflections and Rights of Man Controversy’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 85 (1982), 65–103 gives full weight to sermons, and thus presents a 2:1 advantage to Burke’s supporters.
J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 249.
Burke, A Letter to Richard Burke, Esq. on Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland (1793), in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 6 vols (Bonn, 1883–6), VI, 398. For ministerial involvement in BC, see Ch. 13 above.
J.E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) ranks Anglican clergy with the best of government pamphleteers.
For individual circulation figures of AR, CR and MR, see Ch. 11 above. See also Roper, Reviewing before the Edinburgh, 24, and C.H. Timperley, Encyclopaedia of Literary and Typographical Anecdote, 2nd edn (Bonn, 1842),
Burke, First Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796), in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford and others, 10 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981–91), IX, 223–4. Richard Dinmore in An Exposition of the Principles of the English Jacobins … (London: Jordan; Norwich: March; both 1796) expressed his pride that ‘their great enemy Edmund Burke admits there are eighty thousand men yet in England, thinned as they have been by emigration, who hold these doctrines’. See AR XXV (Jan. 1797) 85 and Ch. 12, note 53 above.
Philip Ziegler, Addington: a Life of Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth (Collins, 1965), 77–8. Sidmouth’s last speech in the Lords was against Catholic Emancipation in 1829, and his last vote was against the 1832 Reform Bill.
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© 2000 Stuart Andrews
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Andrews, S. (2000). Jacobins and Anti-Jacobins. In: The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution, 1789–99. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403932716_16
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