Search

The French Revolution began with the astonishing events of 1789, but it has to be seen as an intense and profound process that changed and developed dramatically over the following decade and more. Its political and social experiments changed a great many aspects of French life, and these changes also had a major impact on all of France's neighbours, including Great Britain. The Revolution led to a bitter dispute across Europe about the French principles of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’, and, because the French revolutionaries sought to export these principles to the rest of Europe, it helped to provoke a war that posed an enormous challenge to France and all its neighbours. The French Revolution and the French Revolutionary war were the most discussed issues in British politics and the British press. The Revolutionary debate of the 1790s in Britain had a profound influence on the political, religious and cultural life of the country, while the French war produced almost unprecedented economic and social strains, and forced Britain to make a huge military, naval and financial effort to counter French ambitions. For a great many Britons the 1790s were a decade of crisis that polarized British society into the friends and enemies of the French Revolutionary cause. To understand the nature of this crisis, we need to appreciate the ideological disputes in Britain about French Revolutionary principles, to explore how these disputes encouraged Britons to support or oppose these principles, and to examine how these disputes strengthened the party of government, and seriously undermined the opposition in Parliament.

John Wilkes was one of the most influential and charismatic political activists in British history. He has attracted many biographers, none better informed on his private and public life than this ...

Many recent historians have stressed that there were two political worlds in eighteenth-century Britain. On the one hand, there was a narrow landed elite, composed of the aristocracy and the greater gentry. This remarkably cohesive and integrated group dominated the court, the cabinet, both houses of parliament and the administration of the counties. They regarded the possession of land as the essential qualification for those who desired to serve the king or to sit in parliament. The possession of landed property was also seen as the best means of attaching men to the interests of their country and of providing them with the independence, leisure and judgement needed to govern others. On the other hand, historians have also detected another political world which, if not entirely separate and distinct, at least sought to escape from the patronage of the aristocratic elite and was sometimes in conflict with it. This political world, both bourgeois and plebeian, existed outside the narrow confines of court, cabinet and parliament and flourished in urban areas. In the towns merchant oligarchies, popular radicalism or crowd demonstrations were largely beyond the control of the landed elite.1

Part One endeavoured to show that, although the governing elite undoubtedly dominated politics at court and in parliament, the people at large still managed to exert political influence because of their participation in parliamentary elections, pressure groups, urban politics and popular demonstrations. The British people were able to exploit their role in these activities in order to influence or at least to constrain the political decisions taken by the ruling class. Throughout the eighteenth century these activities provided the people with both a range of political opportunities and a political education that enabled them to limit the power of their political superiors. In addition, as we shall see in Part Two, both the ideological debate initially waged within the governing elite and the political actions taken by government and parliament eventually politicised a much wider public. In defending themselves against the power of the crown and in criticising the misuse of royal patronage, the propertied elite defended various rights and liberties of the subject. These actions initiated a prolonged and sometimes intense ideological debate on the rights and liberties of the subject; a debate which soon involved those outside the narrow circle of the ruling oligarchy and eventually led to demands for a wider range of liberties for a larger proportion of the population.

While it is clear that even in the later eighteenth century Britain was still governed by an aristocratic, propertied elite, another political world existed in which large numbers of people, mainly but not exclusively drawn from the middling ranks of society, were able to influence the decisions taken by the ruling elite and were often able to act independently of them. A century of political, social and economic changes moreover had combined to create a growing body of opinion critical of the power and the policies of the aristocratic elite. The rule of law limited the authority of the ruling elite and the civil liberties of the subject ensured that many Britons believed that they were free men living in a free state, and they acted accordingly. A century of commercial expansion and modest population growth had, by 1760, created towns in which moderately prosperous men had learned to exercise increasing control over their own lives. The population grew very rapidly in the later eighteenth century and much of this increase was concentrated in the larger urban centres. Urban growth produced an expanding middle class whose advancing wealth and improved education inspired demands for greater social status and increased political influence.

Historians interested in the study of popular politics and in the development of political radicalism have, not surprisingly, paid relatively little attention to the period between the Glorious Revolution and the accession of George III. Extra-parliamentary movements dedicated to the radical reform of the constitution did not exist in the early eighteenth century and did not develop until the era of the American and French revolutions. Historians interested in the politics of the first half of the eighteenth century have largely been preoccupied with the rage of party, the rise of oligarchy and the growth of political stability. Much recent work on this period has stressed the conservative nature of the Revolution Settlement, has traced the dominance in parliament and in the constituencies of parties led by the propertied elite, and has revealed the means by which a narrow oligarchy, proclaiming a rather conservative Whiggism, came to monopolise executive power and to exercise very considerable influence over parliament.

Although many of the middling orders and even some of the lower orders were drawn into parliamentary elections and pressure group politics the most common and the most effective form of plebeian politics was the crowd demonstration and the riot. Crowd activity, both peaceful and violent, was a major form of group expression by the common people of eighteenth-century Britain. It brought together in public places significant groups of ordinary people whose numbers and proximity allowed them to influence each other’s behaviour and whose collective strength was sufficient to impress or even alarm their social superiors. The common people engaged in a wide range of collective behaviour, much of it stressing social order and integration, on festive, ceremonial and celebratory occasions and in recreational, patriotic and popular assemblies. Peaceful crowds might gather to celebrate coronations, military and naval victories, and local festivals or they might provide audiences at political rallies or be spectators at an execution or a sporting occasion. In periods of tension, however, crowds could gather together in a more aggressive and hostile mood in order to engage in social protests and political demonstrations.1

For the great majority of people in Britain politics existed and was experienced not at Westminster but at the local level. The exercise of political and social control occurred primarily at the local level and often within the framework of parliamentary constituencies. Hundreds of thousands of individuals — voters and non-voters alike — experienced politics at this level. In looking at the role of politics in the parliamentary constituencies, however, historians have too often concentrated on the control exercised by the propertied elite. Not enough attention has been paid to the voters themselves, even though there were several hundred thousand of them and their actions frequently excited the interest of leading politicians and were reported in both the London and the provincial press. It has been too readily assumed that the vast majority of the electorate could not vote as they wished, but had to vote as they were instructed by their superiors. Historians have too often focused their attention on how the propertied elite exploited this patronage in order to gain control of parliamentary constituencies and too many of them have ignored the behaviour of the voters.

All historians interested in the politics of the people must pay particular attention to urban communities. After all, it was in the towns, especially the larger towns, that popular politics in all its manifestations flourished most vigorously and most persistently. It was in the larger urban constituencies that parliamentary elections were most frequently contested and where the voters and even the non-voters were most often drawn into partisan activities. The activities of both popular radicalism and popular conservatism, whether they involved distributing propaganda, organising petitions, forming associations or holding public meetings, were mainly based in urban communities. The overwhelming majority of riots and crowd demonstrations also occurred in urban settings. All of these aspects of urban politics deserve and are given separate treatment in this study. In this chapter the focus is on the extent to which local government in the urban communities involved the townspeople at large and revolved around political issues which divided men along partisan lines. The first aim here is to show that access to office in the various institutions of local government was not always restricted to a narrow oligarchy and that the few who held office were not in fact able to ignore the interests of their fellow townsmen.

(1999). Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 116-116.