The English Volunteer Movement of the French Wars, 1793–1815: Some Contexts

Abstract

Probably the greatest popular movement in Georgian Britain was that formed around military volunteering during the wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Often cited is the number of volunteers enrolled in 1803–4, nearly 400,000. These were the most active participants. Outside the ranks there existed an even larger mass of organizers, subscribers and supporters, including sometimes female committees; at this time volunteering was one of several developments which brought Britain recognizably close to ‘total’ war in terms of its population's war-involvement. Yet historians have said little about the movement. We have not progressed very far beyond the gospel according to Victorian and Edwardian nationalism in which Napoleonic volunteering was depicted as the British people's inevitable response to the threat of foreign invasion, proud testimony of their ‘warlike spirit’, ‘love of freedom’ and ‘patriotic unanimity’. The only critical evaluation there has been remains based on an article by J. R. Western, published as long ago as 1956. This refined the established ‘wave of patriotism’ version by linking volunteering with the counter-revolution of the 1790s directed against popular radicals. Volunteers were depicted as armed loyalists, their corps as the successors of the loyalist associations and the movement as a whole as a key component of an extensive and dominant ‘party of order’. The most recent work on the anti-radical reaction barely disturbs this interpretation. While it is not denied that the threat of foreign attack was also instrumental in producing volunteers, the emphasis continues to be on volunteering, at least in its early phase, as an outgrowth of counter-revolutionary loyalism.