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SCOTTISH PERSPECTIVES ON WAR AND PATRIOTISM IN THE 1790s*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2014

ANNA PLASSART
ANNA PLASSART*
Affiliation:
Christ Church, University of Oxford
*
Christ Church, St Aldates, Oxford OX1 1OPanna.plassart@chch.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

The article examines Scottish discussions surrounding the French revolutionary wars in the early and mid-1790s. It argues that these discussions were not built along the lines of the dispute that set Burke against the English radicals, because arguments about French ‘cosmopolitan’ love for mankind were largely irrelevant in the context of Smithian moral philosophy. The Scottish writers who observed French developments in the period (including the Edinburgh Moderates, James Mackintosh, John Millar, and Lord Lauderdale) were, however, particularly interested in what they interpreted as France's changing notion of patriotism, and built upon the heritage of Smithian moral philosophy in order to offer original and powerful commentaries of French national feeling and warfare. They identified the ‘enthusiastic’ nature of French national sentiment, and the replacement of traditional patriotism with a new form of relationship between the individual and the nation, as the most significant and dangerous element to come out of the French Revolution.

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The Historical Journal , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 107 - 129
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Julian Hoppit, Phil Withington and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the SSFH Annual Conference in 2012 and the Voltaire Foundation in 2013. I am also grateful to Gareth Stedman Jones for his encouragement and comments.

References

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2 Paul Schroeder has thus argued that ‘in this era more real change occurred in the arena of international politics than can be demonstrated in other areas of politics and society from other more celebrated revolutions – the French, the so-called Atlantic, the Industrial, the Napoleonic, or those of 1830 and 1848’. Schroeder, Paul, The transformation of European politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1996), p. viGoogle Scholar.

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27 Sonenscher, Before the deluge, pp. 23–4. In Steuart's case at least, the publication of Smith's Wealth of nations, which overshadowed Steuart's own works of political economy, might bear some of the responsibility.

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39 This process had been facilitated by the American war. Dinwiddy, John, ‘England’, in Dann, Otto and Dinwiddy, John, eds., Nationalism in the age of the French Revolution (London, 1988), pp. 55–7Google Scholar. See also Cunningham, Hugh, ‘The language of patriotism, 1750–1914’, History Workshop Journal, 12 (1981), pp. 8–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 9–10; Colley, Linda, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, 1992), pp. 336–7Google Scholar.

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49 Radcliffe, ‘Burke, radical cosmopolitanism, and the debates on patriotism in the 1790s’, p. 320.

50 Ibid., pp. 320, 326.

51 Ibid., p. 321. Mee, Jon, ‘Anxieties of enthusiasm: Coleridge, prophecy, and popular politics in the 1790s’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 60 (1997), pp. 179–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 184.

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56 ‘Patriotism, as a moral principle attaching itself to political society, depends, like every other moral principle, on its relation to religion. The Creator of man has bound the social to the divine virtues, and made our devotion and our reverence to himself the groundwork of our duties to our brethren and to our country.’ Hardy, The patriot, p. 36.

57 Ibid., pp. 38, 55.

58 Ibid., p. 57.

59 Ibid., p. 56.

60 Ibid., p. 48.

61 Pocock, ‘Enthusiasm: the antiself of Enlightenment’, p. 27.

62 Hardy, The patriot, p. 57; Carlyle, ‘Sermon delivered the Sunday after the French Convention declared war [Feb.?] 24th, 1793’, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MSS 23850, fo. 2.

63 Somerville, The effects of the French Revolution, 51; idem, Observations on the constitution and present state of Britain (Edinburgh, 1793), p. 45.

64 Somerville, The effects of the French Revolution, p. 59.

65 See Macleod, ‘The Scottish opposition Whigs and the French Revolution’, p. 97.

66 Maitland Lauderdale, James, earl of, Letters to the peers of Scotland (London, 1794), p. 279Google Scholar; Millar, John, Letters of Crito, on the causes, objects, and consequences, of the present war (Edinburgh, 1796), p. 82Google Scholar.

67 The italics are Mackintosh's. Mackintosh, ‘Vindiciae gallicae’, p. 157.

68 The expression is Sonenscher's.

69 Lauderdale, Letters to the peers of Scotland, pp. 46, 86–7.

70 Ibid., pp. 105–6.

71 Ibid., p. 48.

72 This was a Montesquieu-inspired distinction. Ibid., p. 106.

73 Ibid., p. 109.

74 Ibid., p. 89.

75 Ibid., pp. 84–5.

76 Ibid., p. 84.

77 Ibid., p. 257.

78 Ibid., p. 260.

79 Ibid., p. 81.

80 Ibid., p. 279.

81 Pocock, ‘Enthusiasm: the antiself of Enlightenment’, p. 26.

82 Lauderdale, Letters to the peers of Scotland, pp. 279.

83 Ibid., pp. 115–16.

84 Ibid., p. 257.

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94 Ibid., p. 82.

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98 Merolle, ed., Letters of Crito, p. 28.

99 Ibid., pp. 46–7.

100 Millar, Historical view, iv, pp. 259–60.

101 Merolle, ed., Letters of Crito, p. 25. See also ibid., pp. 28–9.

102 Lauderdale, Letters to the peers of Scotland, p. 279.

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