Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848. Adam Zamoyski
labelled the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 ‘American Sans-cullotism’ and made out that the Illuminati were planning to subvert America. In his Detection of a Conspiracy, formed by the United Irishmen, with the evident intention of Aiding the Tyrants of France in Subverting the Government of the United States of America, he identified the ‘Parisian Propagande’ as the prime mover. ‘Like Lucifer, they carry a hell about with them in their own minds; and thus they prowl from country to country,’ he warned. George Washington himself feared the French influence. This fear culminated in the passing of the Alien and Seditious Acts in 1798, which provoked the Republicans into talk of a ‘Reign of Terror’ and much beating of the drum of English liberties. On the other side of the argument, fears aroused by the tales of revolutionary violence in France entered the political discourse and public discussion, fusing with the nightmarish trope of Red Indian savages scalping or roasting alive settler families, and their echoes have even been picked up in the early campaigns of the anti-slavery movement.23
An interesting aspect of Burke’s apprehensions is that of the potential moral pollution of the English by contagion from France. This chimes with less sophisticated expressions of the view that a French invasion, or even the example emanating from France, was bound to unleash social and moral mayhem. ‘The French rulers, while they despair of making any impression on us by force of arms, attempt a more subtle and alarming warfare, by endeavouring to enforce the influence of their example in order to taint and undermine the morals of our ingenuous youth,’ warned the Bishop of Durham in a speech to the House of Lords in 1798. ‘They have sent amongst us a number of female dancers, who, by the allurement of the most indecent attitudes, and most wanton theatrical exhibitions, succeed but too effectually in loosening and corrupting the moral feelings of the people.’24
Much of the population of Britain was living in conditions of the utmost squalor, both physical and moral. London had for decades shocked foreign visitors by its poverty, dirt and immorality, and other cities were fast catching up, particularly the busy ports and the growing industrial centres, which drew in people from the countryside, tearing them away from the constraints and supports of village life, brutalising them with gruelling working conditions and leaving them defenceless in the face of urban disease and depravity.
This ‘national decadence’ in the physical as well as the moral health of the lower orders aroused fears that it might undermine the fabric of society. People such as the economist Thomas Malthus felt it might lead to the degradation of the whole nation, since there was much mixing of middle-class and even aristocratic youth with the low life of the larger cities. The consequent erosion of deference, greatly assisted by the example across the Channel, alarmed the government and the propertied classes alike.25
Religious observance had declined among Anglicans in the course of the eighteenth century, and a lukewarm Christianity verging on deism or even humanism prevailed in the higher echelons of society. This tendency was associated in the eyes of not just the Bishop of Durham with reformist views and a generally unsound attitude, both moral and political. Many advocates of reform regarded religion and ‘priestcraft’ with hostility, seeing in it an obstacle, since it kept the poor docile and blind to the ‘truth’. On the other hand, religious commitment of the wrong sort also aroused fears, and the Methodists in particular were viewed as dangerously fanatical. They preached millenarian prophecies which were inherently revolutionary, as the new Jerusalem of these mostly plebeian prophets had no room for king or aristocracy, or private property. The susceptibility of some Methodists to Antinomian concepts which liberated them from the moral law tainted the whole movement by association with licentiousness and immorality, and lurid tales circulated of their wild orgies. The prominent Methodist Robert Wedderburn, the illegitimate offspring of a Jamaican planter and a slave-girl, who stole, blasphemed, worked for a publisher of pornography and opened a bawdy house, only enhanced such an image in the public imagination.26
William Wilberforce was spearheading an evangelical revival with his writings, most notably A Practical View of Christianity, published in 1797. Hannah More had for some time been arguing that moral not constitutional reform was what the country needed, leading a kind of Christian mission against Jacobinism. A Society for the Suppression of Vice was founded in 1802. This was followed by the Bible Society, which sought to cure the evil through the evangelisation of the poor, by the Religious Tract Society and the Church Tract Society, by Sunday schools, and later by a surge in church-building in expanding cities. Others felt that the best way of thwarting the spread of revolution was by bringing assistance to the needy, and set up various relief organisations, such as the 1796 Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor. The followers of Jeremy Bentham expounded the virtues of the utilitarian approach and called for the reform of prisons and lunatic asylums; those of Thomas Spence propounded a vague form of communism. A group known as the Westminster Radicals saw education as the main motor of social and constitutional transformation, and promoted the system of free schools for the poor pioneered by the Quaker schoolmaster Joseph Lancaster.
But many preferred to see the situation in terms of good and evil, and this is much in evidence in the popular anti-Jacobin novels, large numbers of which were published in the late 1790s. These revelled in lurid descriptions of revolutionary Paris, where innocent beauty was the stock victim of coarse and lewd revolutionaries, and everything was ‘wild and licentious’, in the words of one author. ‘Order and subordination were trampled beneath the footsteps of anarchy,’ he wrote, ‘the streets were filled with terrifying spectacles; and the people seemed to be nearly frantic with the plenitude of dominion; while the excess of horror was strongly and strikingly contrasted by the vaunted display of boundless sensuality.’ In his novel The Vagabond, George Walker painted a picture of how a revolution might look in London, with ‘the rage of lust’ let loose on young ‘beauties’ more used to genteel courtship, and aristocrats floundering in their own blood ‘amidst the uproar the thunder of cannons, the whistling of bullets, the clashing of swords, the tumbling of houses, the groans of the wounded, the cries of the conquerors …’27
At the root of all this wickedness lay ‘the new philosophy’, or even just ‘philosophy’, denounced as a mess of ‘pernicious scepticisms and sophistical delusions’, pestilential doctrines combining atheism, levelling (this was titillatingly terrifying to the property-owning middle-class readership), undermining conventions, and leading women towards independence and depravity. In these novels this philosophy is propounded either by idiots or by wicked charlatans with names such as Edward d’Oyley and Judas McSerpent, usually with the purpose of getting innocent young women into bed. Even the paid or self-appointed agents of the French Revolution, whose aim is the overthrow of the English constitution, have a sideline in the seduction of virtuous women by preaching to them the new philosophy of equality and free love. ‘Can a priest muttering a few words, supersede the call of passion or give a higher zest to the affection of the heart?’ cajoles one such character. ‘In the heart are the issues of love, and where that leads, what institution of the church, what act of man, shall impede its progress? The time is passed for such superstitious restraints, and we revel in the full freedom of love, free in that as in all other respects.’28
The sense that society was somehow being attacked by a malignant disease of the mind or even of the moral sense was certainly not limited to bigots or the readers of popular novels. Thomas De Quincey remembered Barruel’s book being discussed everywhere. The papers of the Treasury solicitor include a pamphlet entitled Notes on the chief causes of the late revolutions of Europe, which delivers a critique of the Enlightenment and belabours the ‘Encyclopaedists’, lumping them together with Irish rebels, Freemasons and Illuminati. It explains the facility with which the French armies triumphed over their enemies by the fact that ‘the principles of the conquerors had been implanted in the countries which they overran long before their armies arrived there’, citing as evidence the publication of works by Paine, Campe, Paulus, Knigge and Gorani in their respective countries before hostilities commenced. It also asserts that the Grand Orient Masonic Lodge of Paris had