Britain In The Age Of The French Revolution

This new survey looks at the impact in Britain of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic aftermath, across all levels of British society. Jennifer Mori provides a clear and accessible guide to the ideas and intellectual debates the revolution stimulated, as well as popular political movements including radicalism.

Using interpretations of the French Revolution as a model, Eyes Across the Channel asks what history meant to Victorian Britain, how events became enshrined with the authority of history and how such cultural assumptions might help us to read nineteenth-century British literature. Britain and France are now joined by a tunnel, yet the narrow stretch of sea that divides the two countries has for centuries represented both closeness and difference. Eyes Across the Channel argues that between the July Revolution of 1830 and the actual beginning of the construction of a Channel Tunnel in 1882, Britons more frequently interpreted France's role as their closest continental neighbour historically and politically than geographically.

"This superb collection of essays brings together the most exciting new work in cultural and literary history. Although the authors focus on the various cultural revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the significance of their investigations extends far beyond that moment. They show how the major categories of modern social life took root in this era, but they emphasize the surprising and often paradoxical ways those developments took place. Nothing about the experience of class, gender, race, nation, sentiment or even death was pre-ordained. These essays will enable readers to take a fresh new look at the origins of modernity."—Lynn Hunt, editor of The New Cultural History and coeditor of Beyond the Cultural Turn "This is a valuable and provocative set of essays. Differing markedly in subject matter, they are linked by their intelligence and concern to re-assess early modern English and French histories, and the differences conventionally drawn between them, in the light of current work on language, class, race and gender."—Linda Colley, author of Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837

The French Revolution catapulted Europe into a new period of political upheaval, social change, and into the modern era. This book provides a concise introduction to the impact of the French Revolution on Britain and to the ways in which this impact has been assessed by historians. The book is organised thematically. It begins with a survey of the ideological debate sparked off by the Revolution discussing, in particular, the work of people such as Burke, Paine, Spence and Wollstonecraft. From here it presents an exploration of the Revolution s impact on * Parliamentary polities * The growth of radicalism and loyalism * The way in which French ideas influenced Irish aspirations to generate rebellion The third main section of the book focuses on the causes and course of Britain s war with Revolutionary France, and on the effects of the war on the home front, most notably the recurrent, serious food shortages.

"Despite the profusion of work in recent decades on Irish and English politics in the French revolutionary era, Scotland in this period remains largely neglected, barely featuring in some recent books ostensibly on the history of Britain. The essays in this volume, written by scholars from Britain and Ireland, will help fill this gap. While not presenting a single, uniform view, several of them at the very least cast doubt on the notion of a Scotland in this period of adamantine stability and begin to recover some powerful dissident voices in the political exchanges of the 1790s. They show that the stability discerned in retrospect by some historians was not what struck most contemporaries who were witness to the successive, often alarming strains and challenges of the period which served cumulatively to shatter any complacency which existed about the terms of elite rule and authority in a society undergoing profound and rapid change."--BOOK JACKET.

Charts the transformation in the way people thought about democracy in the North Atlantic region in the years between the American Revolution and the revolutions of 1848.

This book examines diverse encounters between the British community and the thousands of French individuals who sought haven in the British Isles as they left revolutionary and Imperial France. This painstaking research into the emigrant archival and memorial presence in Britain uncovers a wealth of underused and alternative sources on this controversial population displacement. These include open letters and classified advertisements published in British newspapers, insurance contracts, as well as lists of addresses and passports drawn up by local authorities. These sources question the construction by British loyalists and French émigré elites of a stereotyped emigrant figure and their use of the trauma of forced displacement to advance ideological agendas. In fact, public and private discourses on governmental systems, foreigners, political and religious dissent, and the economic survival of French emigrants, demonstrate the heterogeneity of the responses to emigration in Britain. Ultimately, this book narrates a story in which the emigrant community and its host have been often unnoticeably yet fundamentally transformed by their encounter, in both practical and ideological domains.