‘Fellow-citizens in science and brothers in humanity’: Anglo-French rivalry and the discursive practices of the Critical Review, 1756–1763

Abstract

This essay examines the discursive practices of the Critical Review during the period of the Seven Years War, when Tobias Smollett – reputedly a fervent anti-Gallican – was editor-in-chief and one of the journalists to whom a substantial number of articles have now been attributed. Reading the Critical Review from the perspective of Anglo-French relations, throws into relief the critics’ animated engagement with French culture, thought and literature, and discloses the review’s multifaceted reformist agenda. This means modifying previous characterizations of the journal’s aims and ethos. The Critical Review’s journalists endorsed the philosophes’ conception of an ‘Enlightenment Republic of Letters’ whose ultimate goal was personal and social amelioration, and acclaimed the efforts of all writers, whatever their nationality, who wrote like ‘true’ patriots or ‘citizens of the world’ or ‘friends of mankind’. Reviewers poured scorn on the ‘ridiculous national prejudices of the vulgar’ and condemned the manifestations of xenophobia that historians have argued were expressions of a distinctive sense of British or English identity. Anti-French slurs do appear on occasions, and some French works were downgraded, but many were generously praised, and different markers signalling affinity and alignment with French writers abound.