The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution 1789-99 [Hardcover]

This study challenges the conventional polarities used to describe British politics of the 1790s; Pitt versus Fox, Burke versus Paine, Church versus Dissent, ruling class versus working class, Jacobin versus anti-Jacobin. Such polarities were sedulously promoted by Pitt's wartime government, which applied 'Jacobin' shamelessly to all its critics and opponents, and thus foreshadowed the McCarthyite tactic of guilt by association. The author seeks to make the less strident but more persuasive contemporary voices again audible. He takes seriously those who questioned the necessity for Burke's crusade to destroy the French republic, and who deplored Britain's alliance with the partitioners of Poland.List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Bastille Euphoria Burke Rebutted Instant History: Burke, Godwin and the Annual Registers War, Sedition and Censorship Pitt the Apostate: Beddoes, Coleridge and The Watchman Canning's Counterattack; the Weekly Anti-Jacobin 'Jacobin Poetry': Southey, Cottle and Lyrical Ballads Smears and Subsidies; the Monthly Anti-Jacobin 'Jacobin Morality': the Wollstonecraft Memoirs 'Jacobin Prints': Courier and Star , Chronicle and Post Reviewers Reviewed: Monthly and Critical Murder by Ridicule; the End of the Analytical Cromwell's Ghosts: Republicans and Dissenters Millennialism and Popery Transatlantic Comparisons: American Porcupine Jacobins and Anti-Jacobins Appendix Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index

'Stuart Andrews's analysis of how the British press reacted to the French Revolution shows that the rhetoric of the age can still be discussed clearly and untechnically without any loss of scholarly rigour. Convinced of the importance of language in shaping what happened, he brings a lucid style of his own, and a sharp eye for a telling quotation, to this wide-ranging survey. The result is a sure guide to a decade of debate which laid the intellectual foundations of modern politics throughout the English speaking world.' - Willial3Y