Scotland And The French Revolution

"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.

Presents a study of the political culture of Scotland in the 1790s. This book compares the emergence of 'the people' as a political force, with popular political movements in England and Ireland. It analyses Scottish responses to the French Revolution across the political spectrum; explaining Loyalist as well as Radical opinions and organisations.

Excerpt from Scotland and the French Revolution This study of the influence of the French Revolution on Scotland was accepted by the University of Edinburgh as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Letters. Its main theme is the political awakening of Scotland. I have therefore devoted considerable attention to the various reform move ments which either originated in the political upheaval of the period or were stimulated by it. I have tried to show, more briefly, that although the dread of innovation suspended the activity of the reformers for a time, the Reform Bill of 1832 was due, in part at least, to the agitation engendered forty years before. An attempt has also been made to trace the effects of the French Revolution in other departments of the national life, chiefly social and ecclesiastical, and to describe the role assigned to Scotland in French schemes for invading the British Isles. Though I am indebted to the recent works of Professor Hume Brown, and Dr. W. Law Mathieson, the ampler space at my disposal has enabled me to draw largely on unpublished material, and to give a fuller account of a somewhat neglected aspect of Scottish history than has hitherto been possible. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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For the British government's supporters in Scotland in the 1790s, one thing was paramount: they were fighting French principles in any shape or form they might take. Whether this meant defeating the influence of French revolutionary ideas in Scotland, or defeating the military menace of the French republic, they were determined to stand firm in their support of the British state.This book charts the Scottish contribution to, both the war effort of the 1790s, and the British governments struggles to defeat political radicalism at home; lasting from the first outbreak of political disturbances in Scotland in 1792, until the French revolutionary war came to an end in 1802. In this, the Scots made their very distinct mark in terms of recruitment for armed service, demonstrations of loyalty, and prosecutions against political radicals in the law courts but, perhaps less so, in terms of their financial contributions . The government of Scotland was further integrated into the British state in a structural sense over the course of the decade, yet retained many distinctly Scottish features none the less and on the whole the 1790s comes across as a time when the Scots found little difficulty in seeing themselves as both British and Scottish.