Copyrighted Material
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
I Revolution (1789–1798) The ‘Revolution Controversy’ The books, pamphlets, and essays written in response, pro and con, to the French Revolution constitute a vehement battle of ideas now called the ‘Revolution Controversy’.1 Leading supporters of the French Revolution were Thomas Paine, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Principle oppo- nents included Edmund Burke, William Windham, Arthur Young, and, through the succession of The Anti‐Jacobin, George Canning, William Gifford, and John Gifford. These alliances crossed party boundaries between Whigs and Tories; or, rather, the shifting alliances caused factional party divisions. After using his influence in the Whig party to rally support of the American Revolutionaries and Catholic emancipation, Burke surprised many of his constituency when he opposed the French Revolution. He thus became a leader of a conservative fac- tion within the Whig Party. The repudiation of the events in France was articu- lated by Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke defended the rights of the landed gentry, who saw much to be risked and nothing to be gained in the overthrow of the existing monarchy. Burke represented a strong constituency, but nevertheless only a fraction of a large populace lacking prop- erty and therefore lacking voting rights as well. With Burke representing the ‘Old Whigs’, Charles James Fox was called upon as spokesperson for the pro‐ revolution ‘New Whigs’. As the violence increased, more of the pro‐revolution faction switched sides. A turning point came early in 1793 with the British declaration of war against France. The first printing of Paine’s Rights of Man (13 March 1791) quickly sold out. Burke’s ReflectionsCOPYRIGHTED sold 30,000 copies; Paine’s MATERIAL Rights sold nearly a million copies.2 Aware of the government efforts to block further publication, Paine nevertheless proceeded with his Rights of Man, Part the Second, Combining Principle and Practice in February 1792. Potentially more volatile, this second part outlined the steps to put the changes into practice. Paine described the A History of Romantic Literature, First Edition. Frederick Burwick. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 0004308583.INDD 22 04/30/2019 1:03:33 PM Revolution (1789–1798) 23 formation of representative government, the establishment of schools and social programs, and the alleviation of excessive tax burden on commoners by means of progressive taxation, which would shift the burden to the wealthier. If a gov- ernment resisted changes that would benefit its citizens, those citizens had the right to overthrow their government. The British government considered Paine’s work a seditious threat. Both publisher and author were indicted for seditious libel. The trial commenced on 18 December 1792. Paine was tried in absentia, found guilty, and sentenced to be executed were he to be found again in his own country. Advocates of individual rights – Thomas Paine, John Horne Tooke, John Thelwall – were joined by other groups campaigning for equality and freedom. Thomas Clarkson wrote on the injustice of slavery in 1785 as a student at Cambridge, and subsequently published his Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade (1788) and An Essay on the Slave Trade (1789). Women playwrights effectively dramatized the exploitation of women in factories as well as in the domestic workplace. Women novelists, too, boldly engaged feminist issues, as in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799), and Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1804). Also, being launched in polemical tracts and essays was the vigorous campaign including Mary Hays in Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793), Catharine Macaulay in her Letters on Education (1790), and Priscilla Wakefield in Reflection of the Present Condition of the Female Sex (1798). The best‐known contribution to this campaign was Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Fear of French invasion was a major factor in inhibiting the progress of the reform efforts. England’s declaration of war on France made it difficult to declare the enemy as a model to be emulated. With the advent of the bloody Reign of Terror (September 1793 to 28 July 1794), sympathy with the cause of radical revision of government was effectively diminished. Former followers of Paine or of Godwin abruptly altered their allegiance. William Windham, once a supporter of the French Revolution, joined Burke and became a leading anti‐ Jacobin. Like Burke, Windham denounced Jacobinism, but he argued that Britain must make room for French émigrés. Expecting no long continuation of war, Windham favoured a return of the Bourbon monarchy on the model of Britain’s Restoration of 1660 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. As is evi- dent in his Plain and Earnest Address to Britons (November 1792), Arthur Young adopted the arguments of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Young’s simpler prose was well suited for popular distribution. Again confirming his adherence to the principles of the ‘Old Whigs’, Young opposed the reform motion in Parliament from the second Earl Grey and issued his caveat, Example of France a Warning to Britain (1793), against the liberal poli- cies of the ‘New Whigs’. The Civil War (1642–1651), the Glorious Revolution (1688), and the American Revolution (1776) were repeatedly cited as models for civic uprisings 0004308583.INDD 23 04/30/2019 1:03:33 PM 24 Revolution (1789–1798) to enforce reform. With each of these historical precursors came disparate records documenting the extent of destruction and slaughter assumed justifiable in realizing the change. Historical narratives were adapted to support one side or the other in the Revolution Controversy. The radicals argued that the revolu- tion in France, as an endeavour to restrict the powers of the monarchy, was analogous to the Glorious Revolution. Burke, however, asserted that the more relevant analogy was the Civil War, which similarly chose regicide to achieve its ends. If citizens were to revolt against their government, argued Burke, the act would undermine not just the prevailing order, but the very norms of culture and civilization that make a peaceful coexistence possible. Governments evolve from centuries of social development and progress. Once prevailing political consensus and established traditions are rejected, anarchy will ensue. Writing in the 1840s, Thomas Babington Macaulay was a Whig statesman and very much a Whig historian. He served as Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841, the years that saw the outbreak of the First Opium War with China, but also the end of the Afghan War and Britain’s sovereignty in Hong Kong. Throughout a dozen ensuing years, Macaulay worked zealously on his History of England from the Accession of James the Second (1848–1856). The label ‘Whig history’ implies a pejorative sense of convenient half‐truths and an insistence on progress. Macaulay was indeed committed as historian to tracing the progress and continuing advancement of the liberal freedoms. Had he lived in the1790s he would have stood with Burke in idealizing tradition and opposing radicalism. In describing the course of events as a national or cultural teleological drive towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, Macaulay praises the Glorious Revolution for having prepared the way for constitutional monarchy and thus avoiding the bloody terror of revolutionary France: ‘this revolution, of all revo- lutions the least violent, has been of all revolutions the most beneficent.’3 Macaulay’s pronouncement that it was ‘our last revolution’ obscures the fact that injustices and factional strife were by no means resolved. Well before the storming of the Bastille (14 July 1789), the elements of the controversy had already been voiced by Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and other dissenting clergymen and advocates of rights, reform, representative gov- ernment, and the separation of church and state. Price’s sermon defending the French Revolution, A Discourse on the Love of our Country (1789), denounced the extravagance of aristocratic privileges in terms that were answered by Edmund Burke’s Reflections, justifying monarchical tradition, a strong House of Lords, and the necessity of aristocratic government. Because Burke had previ- ously been a critic of monarchical power and defended the declaration of the American colonists that ‘taxation without representation is tyranny’, many thought that he would support the French revolutionaries. In response to the American colonists, however, Burke had not called for the taxation to cease, nor had he advocated actual representation. In his Parliamentary speech On American Taxation (1774), Burke maintained that it would suffice that 0004308583.INDD 24 04/30/2019 1:03:33 PM Revolution (1789–1798) 25 America was ‘virtually’ represented in Parliament.4 Not Burke, but William Pitt, the Elder, upheld the American protest against taxation: ‘this kingdom has no right to lay a tax upon the colonies.’5 Burke had long affirmed aristocratic paternalism and hereditary rank and property. His Reflections were no belated reiteration of traditional values.6 British intellectuals appraised the early stages of the French Revolution in terms of its ideals of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, the cry subsequently adopted as the national motto of France. Any attempt of citizens to overthrow their gov- ernment, Burke reminded his readers, must be judged an act of treason. William Godwin, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft developed the counterargu- ments which called for an increase in personal liberty and a larger representation of the people by limiting the authority of the House of Lords and expanding the House of Commons. Influenced by Price’s sermons at Newington Green, Wollstonecraft crafted a refutation of Burke in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). The following year, in Rights of Man (1791), Paine declared that a political revolution is justified whenever a government fails to safeguard its people and the free exercise of their rights.