French Revolutionary Wars Research Articles

Mallorca ante la Guerra de la Convención Francesa. Defensas, movilización popular levantamiento de milicia

The War of the Convention (1793 to 1796) pitted Revolutionary France against the Spanish monarchy during the French Revolutionary Wars. This military episode altered international policy of that period and placed Majorca on alert as strategic site in the western Mediterranean. The island mobilised considerable number of men organised in a large number of urban militia while royal troops came to the aid of the Iberian Peninsula and Catalonia.

‘Valour Knows Neither Age Nor Sex’: The Recueil des Actions Héroïques and the Representation of Courage in Revolutionary France

The outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars prompted the production of wartime propaganda on an unprecedented scale. In France state-sponsored publications such as the mass-produced Recueil des Actions Héroïques et Civiques des Républicains Français reached an exceptionally wide audience throughout the Terror and inspired a variety of patriotic prints, plays, and paintings in the years that followed publication. This article argues that works such as this radically redefined the representation of courage in combat and left a lasting legacy on the representation of warfare well into the nineteenth century.

Was 1812 an Economic War?: The Motives for Napoleon's Russia Campaign Reconsidered

As scholars have argued, the microscope of Atlantic World paradigm may be too narrow. It has broadened our understanding of regional entanglement but blinded us to how regions beyond it were also entangled in the Atlantic trading axis. Examining eighteenth-century Russia’s place in what should be seen as a global economic system, this article argues that Napoleon’s 1812 campaign in Russia was motivated by economic factors tied to France’s competitive global trade in critical Caribbean colonial commodities. When one considers the realities of economic entanglement, significant questions arise about the centrality of global trade in the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars, suggesting a continuity in economic warfare across the entire period from 1792 through 1812/1815. The article is both historiographical and historical, and, admittedly, raising more questions than answers in hopes of encouraging more research and collaboration toward global/international historiography. It is available for publication in English and other language journals, other than Russian in which it was originally published.

THE ORIGINS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR, 1899-1902

During the last two decades, Longman has made name in the field of military history with the publication of a series of books on the origins of modern wars. In chronological order the series started with the origins of the French Revolutionary Wars and covered titles on most of the important wars since the eighteenth century, including the two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam and the Arab-Israeli Wars. The titles were not published in chronological order as the wars occurred, but at random, starting with the First World War. Just as well, as lain Smith's book on the South African War or Second Anglo-Boer War, was published in 1996, three years before the start of the centenary festivities of this war.

From Cannon to Steam Propulsion: The origins of Clyde marine engineering

This article revisits the origins of the Clyde's marine engineering works' contribution to steam propulsion, much of which has previously relied upon hagiographical accounts from contemporaries such as Robert and David Napier. It highlights the role of the Board of Ordnance during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in expanding its private sector suppliers of cannon across the country, which necessitated more up-to-date foundry techniques, particularly in furnaces and casting, and boring machinery capable of greater accuracy than hitherto to comply with exacting standards. This necessitated capital expenditure often with the aid of business networks and the experience gained was successfully transferred to the rapidly growing market for steamship engines and auxiliary equipment to service the burgeoning Clyde shipbuilding and marine engineering industries.

The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: The Nation-in-Arms in French Republican Memory. By Alan Forrest. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, volume 29. Edited by Jay Winter.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. viii+278. $99.00.

<i>The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: The Nation-in-Arms in French Republican Memory</i>. By Alan Forrest. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, volume 29. Edited by <i>Jay Winter</i>.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. viii+278. $99.00.

William Wrightson, the Yorkshire Whigs and the York 'Peterloo' Protest Meeting of 1819

William Wrightson (1752–1827), was MP for Aylesbury from 1784 to 1789, but then played a more significant role in Yorkshire politics over a longer period between 1795 and 1819, in close co-operation with Christopher Wyvill, the leader of the Yorkshire Association. During the years of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars the strengthening of Toryism in the West Riding, together with political differences between moderates and radicals among the Whig gentry, inhibited the public activities of those Whigs favouring moderate reform, previously expressed through county meetings initiated by the Yorkshire Association. After a long period of frustration, an opportunity for the Yorkshire Whigs to reunite was presented by the 'Peterloo' protest meeting held at York in October 1819 as a consequence of the disastrously-terminated public meeting in St Peter's Fields, Manchester, in August of that year. This article considers the York meeting in the context of the difficulties being experienced by Yorkshire Whiggism. The resolutions presented at the meeting are compared with the draft preserved among the archives of Earl Fitzwilliam to show how far traditional Whig modes of thought had to be adjusted to become acceptable to the mood prevailing among anti-Tory reformers in the post-war years.

So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (review)

So Great a Proffit: How East Trade 'Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism. By James R. Fichter. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. 400. Cloth, $35.00.)Reviewed by Rachel Tamar VanA common critique made of works on early American commerce with Asia is that trade never lived up to hype. Fables of oriental luxuries and millions of consumers belied paucity of actual exchange, leading scholars themselves to overvalue trade's history.If this dismissal ever held weight, James Fichter's impressive new book, So Great a Profst, puts it to rest. In considering impact of American trade in East on Anglo-American capitalism during years 1783 to 1815, Fichter demonstrates that American mercantile activity in Asia contributed to liberalization of British trade and empire at a pivotal moment and generated profits (and hence capital) for a budding class of American industrial entrepreneurs. By shifting emphasis from trade to capital, Fichter makes a distinction with a difference. Scholars too often focus on industrialization as an explanation for North Atlantic political and economic power in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing on capital, however, places both trade and industry in a larger trajectory of reorganization of finance.In its barest sketches, So Great a Profst tells a familiar story. As Douglass North wrote in 1961, European wars emerging out of French Revolution created an opening for neutral powers - especially Americans - to profit from markets otherwise monopolized by French, British, Dutch, and Spanish. The re-export trade enabled by 1793 to 1815 wars in turn allowed a nascent investor-capital class of merchants to finance American industrialization. The book is thus organized around French Revolutionary Wars: The first two chapters examine American- East Indian trade prior to French Revolution and chapters 3 to 8 during French Wars, with final two chapters turning to consequences of trade for British and American economies in wars' aftermath. In practice, however, this book pushes us beyond North's thesis into new and exciting territory.First, this is a work of breathtaking scope. While historians recognize that early Americans conceptualized the East Indies as a single region, few tackle such a range of international repositories and literatures. Fichter's enviable language skills and historiographical reach manifest repeatedly in nuance with which he handles issues of global scope, such as chapter 6's contention that American trade shored up European colonialism in Batavia, Capetown, Mascarenes, and Manila during French Wars.This scope especially pays off in Fichter's analysis of American trade in Indian Ocean littoral. In 1938, Holden Furber suggested that much-maligned Jay Treaty did better than John Jay himself had ever intended by allowing Americans to operate out of British East India Company ports. Surprisingly, Americanists have been slow to build upon Furber's thesis. Fichter illuminates how Americans used this opportunity combined with their wartime neutrality to play ports off each other. Anywhere Company vessels could go Americans could follow, but many ports that welcomed American neutrals barred British vessels. If British attempted to curtail competitors carrying goods between Bengal and London, Americans stopped off at Danish port of Serampore en route. …

ALAN FORREST. The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: The Nation-in-Arms in French Republican Memory. (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, number 29.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp. vii, 276. $99.00

ALAN FORREST. The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: The Nation-in-Arms in French Republican Memory. (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, number 29.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp. vii, 276. $99.00

Alan Forrest, The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars. The Nation-in-Arms in French Republican Memory

A la suite des travaux qu’il a conduits pendant trois ans dans un seminaire de Princeton et qui ont ete publies en 2003 par l’editeur de The Legacy sous le titre The People in Arms. Military Myth and National Mobilization since the French Revolution (et dont l’auteur de ces lignes a rendu compte en 2004 dans la revue en ligne H France), Alan Forrest donne une belle et dense synthese de plus de 250 pages, consacree aux concepts de nation en armes, de levee en masse et de citoyen-soldat et surt...

‘Thy Power to Declare’: Thelwall, Coleridge and the Politics of Collaboration

Given the increasing attention paid in recent years to the subject of literary collaboration, it is odd that so little notice has been taken of the history of the word. For even a brief glance at the OED undercuts surprisingly persistent scholarly misconceptions about the history of authorship. Far from disappearing with the rise of the so-called ‘regime’ of the author as ‘solitary genius’ in the late eighteenth century, as historians of authorship still too frequently assume, collaboration first appears in English at the heart of the Romantic period, imported from France by Henry Crabb Robinson in 1801, when he wrote in his diary of ‘a body of poor students called collaborateurs who assist the more wealthy but less advanced’. A year later, Jeremy Bentham anglicised the word, referring to his French editor and translator, Stephen Dumont, as a ‘collaborator of Mirabeau’s’. Through Dumont, Bentham himself collaborated with Mirabeau, part of the long-term exchange between French and English Enlightenment thought that laid the groundwork for Romanticism. Robinson too was a collaborator, one of the tireless band of chroniclers, cataloguers and confessors who together produced Romanticism as a ‘spirit of the age’. According to the OED, the specifically political definition of the word collaboration, as ‘traitorous cooperation with an enemy’, did not arise until the 1940s, in the context of the German occupation of Vichy France. Research reveals, however, that at its very origins collaboration already carried those same wartime connotations of national shame and betrayal, by virtue of the historical moment, transnational circumstances and subversive class dynamics of its first English use. To import a French word into English in order to invert hierarchies of wealth and authority was an inescapably political act at the turn of the nineteenth century; it implied, if not outright treason, then at the very least a dangerous rapprochement between nations at war. Just such a rapprochement did, however, occur in exactly 1801–02, in the shaky lead-up to the Peace of Amiens, the all-too-brief truce in the French Revolutionary Wars which, in the words of the English Jacobin John Thelwall, ‘tranquillized, for awhile, the passions of Europe’ and ‘gave to all parties, in this country, time to recover a portion, at least, of their bewildered senses’. In that hiatus Thelwall emerged from political exile to begin his long reconciliation of working-class activism with bourgeois reform; and his friend William Wordsworth was able to cross the widening channel between the French love of his revolutionary youth and the loyal English

The legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: the nation-in-arms in French republican memory

A major contribution to the study of collective identity and memory in France, this book examines a French republican myth: the belief that the nation can be adequately defended only by its own citizens, in the manner of the French revolutionaries of 1793. Alan Forrest examines the image of the citizen army reflected in political speeches, school textbooks, art and literature across the nineteenth century. He reveals that the image appealed to notions of equality and social justice, and with time it expanded to incorporate Napoleon's victorious legions, the partisans who repelled the German invader in 1814 and the people of Paris who rose in arms to defend the Republic in 1870. More recently it has risked being marginalized by military technology and by the realities of colonial warfare, but its influence can still be seen in the propaganda of the Great War and of the French Resistance under Vichy.

Within Hostile Shores: Victualling the Royal Navy in European Waters during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

Within Hostile Shores: Victualling the Royal Navy in European Waters during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

The Hope-Barings Contract: Finance and Trade Between Europe and the Americas, 1805-1808

This article describes and analyses an extraordinary series of financial and commercial transactions made by the Anglo-Dutch consortium of Hope-Barings during the French Revolutionary Wars. Linking Spain, Britain, France, the Netherlands, the United States, and Mexico, these transactions originated in Spain’s urgent need to secure royal funds stockpiled in Mexico and rendered inaccessible by Britain’s wartime blockade of the Atlantic. In return for British acquiescence in the importation of these funds, the Spanish granted free access to the rich Mexican market for British goods and manufactures. And, extraordinarily, the prospect of such an outlet for its exports in Mexico was so attractive to the British that they in turn consented not only to the transfer of Spanish royal funds across the Atlantic, but even to their delivery to their greatest enemy, Revolutionary France; all of this, at the very height of the Napoleonic ‘Continental System’ of anti-British economic warfare. The article concludes that the Hope-Barings contract is of interest in at least three major areas. First, it helps to explain how British trade with the Spanish colonies experienced strong growth, even during a period of outright war with Spain. Secondly, it underscores the utter marginalisation of Spain from its American colonies even prior to the independence of the region, when it appears already to have been displaced as the economic metropolis. Thirdly, this case contributes to British economic history by demonstrating one major means by which Britain circumvented the Continental System, with strong growth in exports to the Americas in 1805-6 more than compensating for the fall in exports to Europe during the same years.

Documentary Sources Relating to the Work of the British Royal Navy's Victualling Board during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1815

Documentary Sources Relating to the Work of the British Royal Navy's Victualling Board during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1815

Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837 (review)

Reviewed by: Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837 Jeremy Black Nick Harding, Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837 (Woodbridge: Boy-dell and Brewer, 2007). Pp. ix, 292. $105.00. It is a great pity that the high price of this book, a price all-too-typical of this publisher, will discourage many purchasers, because Dr. Harding takes forward in a distinctive fashion what is a recently very crowded field. Over the last two years, a number of works have argued the case variously for Britain’s European identity in the eighteenth century and for the values of interventionist diplomatic and military policies. The most prominent studies on the subject are Andrew Thompson’s Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756 (2006), Tony Claydon’s Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 (2007), Brendan Simms’s Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (2007), Stephen Conway’s “Continental Connections: Britain and Europe in the Eighteenth Century,” History (2005), and Marie Peters’s “Early Hanoverian Consciousness: Empire or Europe?” English Historical Review (2007). Although obviously traversing a lot of recently covered ground, Harding takes the argument forward in two ways: first chronologically, and second conceptually. The first might seem a minor point, but is in fact important as most work on the subject stops in the second half of the eighteenth century, for example, with the accession of George III in 1760 or with Britain’s entry into the French Revolutionary Wars in 1793. It is particularly useful to see coverage up to the end of the Union of the Crowns in 1837 because, as Harding correctly points out, Hanover’s connection to Britain appeared strong after the post-Napoleonic restoration of the dynasty to Hanover. Never before had a member of the British royal family served as governor. Moreover, the discussion of Hanover by the British public, for example by William Cobbett, enables Harding to make instructive points about British attitudes. There was criticism, in 1832, of the reduction of the powers of the local Estates in Germany. [End Page 587] The conceptual dimension is also instructive. Harding argues the case for a link that was closer than personal union and sees this tie as forwarding Britain’s commitment to Europe. Indeed, the two are linked in an account of a composite-polity with an imperial set of interests and, indeed, ideology that was European as much as maritime. The focus of the discussion is intellectual history, specifically textual, and Harding, interestingly, suggests that, differences notwithstanding, there were parallels between the countries, not least with what he terms equivalent discourses of imperial dependency and supremacy. Harding also argues that historians’ search, in the nineteenth century, for the origins of the nation-state led them, in the case of Hanover and Britain, to emphasize an interpretation of their relationship in terms of the personal union, over interpretations that might stress political convergence. He suggests that the current decline of the nation-state provides an opportunity to rehabilitate the discourses of transnational integration. It is a great pity that Harding does not develop this perspective further, as it is of particular interest from a historiographical perspective, indeed as is the pulse of scholarship referred to at the outset of the book. The extent to which there is a “space” for scholarship outside of current concerns arises as an important issue. My own work on the impact of Hanoverian concerns on British foreign policy, summarized in Continental Commitment: Britain, Hanover and Interventionism, 1714–1793 (2005), leads me to take a very different view of the policy dimensions. For example, Harding asserts that “a study of Britain’s relationship to Hanover during the 1740s confutes the commonplace that contemporary grand strategy distinguished between transoceanic empire and the European continent” (145). This statement, unfortunately, like most of his book, is based on a very thin reading of governmental sources on foreign and military policy, let alone a consideration of the controversial question of the applicability of the concept of strategy. My major concern, however, is different. I am worried about how texts are selected by Harding and others, including me, in an attempt...

Prologue to Scottish Domination of Northern Whaling: The Role of the French Revolutionary War, 1793–1801

Prologue to Scottish Domination of Northern Whaling: The Role of the French Revolutionary War, 1793–1801

A Catholic Eton? Newman’s Oratory School : Paul Shrimpton’s Book and Catholic Education Then and Now

A Catholic Eton? Newman’s Oratory SchoolPaul Shrimpton’s Book and Catholic Education Then and Now Leo Chamberlain OSB (bio) Father Ambrose St. John, John Henry Newman’s closest friend, who was brought in to head the new Oratory School that was in a crisis brought about by the resignation of the first headmaster and much of the tiny staff, wrote in his diary for Saturday, February 1, 1862, “Opened school. Disorder before school in Schoolroom. Very bad attendance in Chapel. Not more than 28 boys.”1 If founding a new school is never an easy thing to do, the ambition to found a Catholic public school that would be “Eton minus its wickedness, and plus the inculcation of the Catholic faith” in the mid-nineteenth century, was awe-inspiring.2 The ambition was as great as the resources available to meet it were scant. Paul Shrimpton’s book unravels the story with scholarly care and much insight into both the realities of the world of nineteenth-century Catholics and the educational practice and ideals. It thus raises historical questions of abiding interest to those concerned with Catholic education today; but equally, because of the concern with the relationship of the secular and religious in education, the book has importance for anyone who wants to think about education beyond the utilitarian acquisition of what are now called skills. The author is himself a teacher, [End Page 68] and his own experience shows in the judgments he makes, notably of John Henry Newman himself. Newman was the natural contact for fellow converts. Two of them, Serjeant Edward Bellasis3 and James Hope-Scott, were his close supporters on the school project and close personal friends as well as shrewd and wise advisers. They were adamant over the need for a school that would do what, in their view, the Catholic colleges could not do: compete academically with the best Protestant schools. Even so, after all the difficulties he had met in the project to found a university in Dublin, and on top of all kinds of troubles in England, one might wonder why he took it on. The answer surely is that, as one of the most learned of Newman scholars pointed out long ago, he was not a theoretician who became a man of action on occasion, but temperamentally always a man of action whose written work stemmed from the urgency of all he tried to do— whether as a founder of the Oxford Movement or the setting up first of his informal community at Littlemore and then of the Oratory. This was so above all in his educational and pastoral activity in Dublin, in Birmingham, and, so sadly and meanly to be prevented, in his proposed return to Oxford with the Oratory. He had, as Paul Shrimpton writes, “a remarkably hard-nosed practical judgement,”4 or as Ian Ker writes, referring to the way Newman coped as an old man in 1875 with the death at fifty-nine of his follower and friend Ambrose St. John, “a sheer masculine toughness.”5 The story is easily summarized. After the Catholic Relief Act of 1791 and the French Revolutionary War of 1792, Catholic institutions that had been on the Continent since the persecution had started in the sixteenth century returned or were refounded in England, and a number established or reestablished schools or colleges. The colleges of the secular clergy were both seminaries and schools, and included Oscott and Ushaw; the colleges of the Benedictines and Jesuits included Stonyhurst (the most successful for many years), Downside, and Ampleforth. But the need for an alternative had been moot for some time: the converts and some [End Page 69] others had criticisms of the colleges. After he returned from Dublin in 1858, Newman responded to his friends’ wishes and after a year’s intense activity, the first seven young boys arrived at the Oratory in Birmingham to begin their schooling. The school grew but entered a crisis in 1862 because its first headmaster, the Oratorian Father Nicholas Darnell, fell into disagreement with the dame, Mrs. Wootten. She was a key figure in Newman’s plans. Darnell demanded complete overall control of the...

George III: America's last king

The sixty-year reign of George III (1760--1820) witnessed and participated in some of the most critical events of modern world history: the ending of the Seven Years' War with France, the American War of Independence, the French Revolutionary Wars, the campaign against Napoleon Bonaparte and battle of Waterloo in 1815, and Union with Ireland in 1801. Despite the pathos of the last years of the mad, blind, and neglected monarch, it is a life full of importance and interest. Jeremy Black's biography deals comprehensively with the politics, the wars, and the domestic issues, and harnesses the richest range of unpublished sources in Britain, Germany, and the United States. But, using George III's own prolific correspondence, it also interrogates the man himself, his strong religious faith, and his powerful sense of moral duty to his family and to his nation. Black considers the king's scientific, cultural, and intellectual interests as no other biographer has done, and explores how he was viewed by his contemporaries.Identifying George as the last British ruler of the Thirteen Colonies, Black reveals his strong personal engagement in the struggle for America and argues that George himself, his intentions and policies, were key to the conflict.

Nelson's Women: Female Masculinity and Body Politics in the French and Napoleonic Wars

British women’s participation in public life expanded significantly in the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when women served as crucial actors in the home front’s battles of ideas and political loyalties. But as war with Revolutionary France escalated, and British women were enjoined by conservatives to refrain from politics, some responded by enacting a ‘female masculinity’ that demonstrated that neither patriotism nor masculine values were ever solely the product of male bodies and their effects. The impact of this ‘female masculinity’ on perceptions of gender is traced in popular political culture and in attitudes towards Admiral Horatio Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton, two controversial figures of the day. Their unconventional gender performances and their representation illuminated a larger shift in the valences of body politics, from the universal and neo-classical forms of the eighteenth-century public sphere to the fragmented and individuated images of nineteenth-century modernity.