The British Origins of the French Jacobins: Radical Sociability and the Development of Political Club Networks, 1787-1793

Abstract

Approaching the Revolutionary era from a transnational perspective, this article explores the rich exchanges and collaborations between radical British and French popular societies. Both early French political and antislavery societies adapted their associational strategies from Anglo-American examples – indeed, borrowing the word ‘club’ itself to describe such organizations. Most significantly, in November 1789, correspondence from the London Revolution Society directly inspired the founding of the Paris Jacobin Club, and the integrated national network the Jacobins formed consciously built from British designs. By 1792, active experimentation proliferated in both nations as the Jacobins radicalized, and their example boomeranged to motivate the creation of a more integrated radical political network in Britain, the London Corresponding Society. Utilizing club correspondence, radical newspapers and pamphlets, and personal communications between key members, this article seeks to demonstrate the applied power of Revolutionary cosmopolitanism and transnational epistolary connections. Whereas prior scholarship of these connections has been largely limited to the French Revolution’s influence on Britain, the extent of the British influence on the early Jacobins has been virtually ignored. This account attempts to highlight the rich mutual exchanges that inspired the most radical and influential movements of the Revolutionary age.

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DOI: 10.1177/0265691414546456
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Micah Alpaugh 1793−Development of Political Club Networks, 1787 The British Origins of the French Jacobins: Radical Sociability and the
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Article
The British Origins of the
French Jacobins: Radical
Sociability and the
Development of Political
Club Networks, 1787–1793
Micah Alpaugh
University of Central Missouri, USA
Abstract
Approaching the Revolutionary era from a transnational perspective, this article
explores the rich exchanges and collaborations between radical British and French
popular societies. Both early French political and antislavery societies adapted their
associational strategies from Anglo-American examples – indeed, borrowing the
word ‘club’ itself to describe such organizations. Most significantly, in November
1789, correspondence from the London Revolution Society directly inspired the found-
ing of the Paris Jacobin Club, and the integrated national network the Jacobins formed
consciously built from British designs. By 1792, active experimentation proliferated in
both nations as the Jacobins radicalized, and their example boomeranged to motivate
the creation of a more integrated radical political network in Britain, the London
Corresponding Society. Utilizing club correspondence, radical newspapers and pamph-
lets, and personal communications between key members, this article seeks to dem-
onstrate the applied power of Revolutionary cosmopolitanism and transnational
epistolary connections. Whereas prior scholarship of these connections has been lar-
gely limited to the French Revolution’s influence on Britain, the extent of the British
influence on the early Jacobins has been virtually ignored. This account attempts to
highlight the rich mutual exchanges that inspired the most radical and influential move-
ments of the Revolutionary age.
Keywords
Cosmopolitanism, Jacobin Club, London Corresponding Society, London Revolution
Society
Corresponding author:
Micah Alpaugh, Department of History & Anthropology, University of Central Missouri, 136 Wood Hall,
Warrensburg, MO 64093, USA.
Email: micahalpaugh@gmail.com
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The London Revolution Society’s entry into French Revolutionary politics helped
inspire the creation of the Jacobin Club network. On 25 November 1789, the
French National Assembly heard the session’s President read a letter from the
British club, which ‘distaining National partialities’, declared its approbation of
France’s revolution and ‘the prospect it gives to the two first Kingdoms in the
World of a common participation in the blessings of Civil and Religious
Liberty’. By asserting the ‘inalienable rights of mankind’, revolution could make
‘the World free and happy’. The address produced a ‘great sensation’ and loud
applause in the Assembly, which wrote back to London declaring how it had seen
‘the aurora of the beautiful day’ when the two nations could put aside their differ-
ences and ‘contract an intimate liaison by the similarity of their opinions, and by
their common enthusiasm for liberty’.
1
Within a week, growing Anglophilia helped
provide the impetus for the founding of Paris’s own Socie
´te
´de la Re
´volution, which
in January 1790 finally adopted the better known title of Socie
´te
´des amis de la
Constitution, retaining the English-style nickname Club des Jacobins.
2
The late 1780s saw the rise of newly inclusive and increasingly cosmopolitan
social movements. Liberty and rights, concepts previously restricted to certain
nations and privileged groups, could increasingly be applied to anyone, anywhere.
Only low barriers existed between different movements and countries: indeed the
reduction of borders, boundaries and old hatreds appeared of great importance for
righting past abuses.
3
Antislavery, reform and Jacobin associational efforts would
readily share ideas, strategies and personnel, drawn from similar bases of support.
While radical club networks would come to stretch across much of the world over
the Revolutionary decade, the most innovative exchanges passed between old rivals
France and Britain. The antislavery movement’s growth in Britain after 1787 began
to inspire emulators in France. Dissenting Protestants, who dominated the London
Revolution Society, saw the rise in concern for universal rights as an opportunity to
push for full inclusion in British political life. Early French Jacobins created their
network in consultation with British models, whose power the ‘British Jacobins’
from 1792 onwards would seek to reapply at home. The most prominent social
movements of the age arose through transnational exchanges between radicals,
adapting freshly developing ideas and practices to new ends.
As Revolutionary historians make the Global Turn, it becomes necessary to
remove certain nationalist lenses to view aspects of the age anew. ‘Re
´volution
franc¸ aise’ itself was a far less common term at the time than ‘La Re
´volution’, a
process accelerating in one country, but possessing both older origins and universal
targets. National sentiment, by contrast, during the early Revolution seemed to
many a medieval relic of the despotic wars of kings and a concept whose time had
passed. Revolutionaries, working to abolish ‘despotism’ in France, pressed for-
ward. Why should a Revolution with universal principles not be applied univer-
sally? And where could a more visible break with the past be made than through
developing alliances between former French and British rivals? Though reaction
amongst conservatives and French fears of invasion eventually led to the
Revolutionary wars and the rise of modern nationalism,
4
trends towards greater
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cosmopolitanism, internationalism and universalism in the early Revolution appear
equally profound.
The extent to which the Revolutionaries of 1789 were inspired by international
examples has produced much debate, particularly in France. Though the
Revolution’s premier early academic historian, Alphonse Aulard, asserted that
‘England and America influenced the elaboration of republican ideas in eight-
eenth-century France’, such statements became rarer and increasingly discouraged
over much of the twentieth century.
5
Marcel Reinhard, Chair of the French
Revolution at the Sorbonne, answered the first volume of Robert Palmer’s now-
classic The Age of Democratic Revolutions in 1960 with a scathing review in the
flagship journal Annales historiques de la Re
´volution franc¸ aise, declaring the sup-
posed ‘difficulty of finding direct influence’ between eighteenth-century revolutions,
while asserting that the ‘revolutionary power of France far surpassed, from the first
step, all the other movements to which it has been compared’.
6
Only over the past
decade, largely thanks to the Caribbean-centred scholarship of David Geggus,
Laurent Dubois, Yves Be
´not, and Jeremy Popkin, has the international dimension
moved towards the centre of Revolutionary studies.
7
The growing historiographical interest in transnational history offers a major
opportunity to reassess the international trends and influences impacting the
Revolutionary age. This burgeoning field has thus far been dominated by studies
of economics and empires, but the global currents and repercussions of radical
ideas and their supporting networks may have been just as profound. Though
the study of eighteenth-century epistolary exchange has increasingly emerged as
a subfield, the existing scholarship has not explored the active transnational polit-
ical connections between early French Revolutionaries and other Atlantic radical
centres in any detail.
8
Though a large literature exists on the French Revolution’s
impact, the subject is generally contoured as a uni-directional story of the French
example, while the influences of foreign radicals upon revolutionaries in France,
and the resulting mutual dialogues, remain under-explored.
9
Studying club inter-
actions provides a major means through which to bridge connections between
centres of late eighteenth-century radicalism, illuminating the extent of cosmopol-
itanism and desired universalism which marked the age.
10
Largely unnoted in over-
arching treatments of the era is the extent to which each of the Age of Revolution’s
most prominent social movements directly corresponded with and built from prior
exemplars: colonial America’s Sons of Liberty explicitly drew inspiration from and
corresponded with radical clubs of John Wilkes-era Britain in the 1760s, early
British Parliamentary reformers borrowed methods from the Americans, and
early antislavery campaigns in both countries drew both radical activists and
club practices from preceding movements.
11
Direct correspondence between
British and French radical organizations between 1787 and 1793 would develop
reciprocal and mutually inspiring relationships driving both sides towards
integration.
Despite the clear French appropriation of the word ‘club’, the direct British link
with the founding of the Jacobin network, and the regular correspondence between
Alpaugh 595
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radical societies passing across the Channel, the connections between British and
French clubs around the time of the Revolution have been little pursued by his-
torians. Antislavery studies have almost exclusively focused upon divergences
between the two countries, and little noted the extent of their interactions and
influence.
12
In histories of the early Jacobins, Aulard mentions the London
Revolution Society’s role in the network’s founding, but does not pursue the sub-
ject further. Michael Kennedy’s three-volume history of the Jacobin network in
France only includes the relationship in a foreign policy chapter, isolated from the
club’s domestic development.
13
The most recent French studies – the Atlas de la
Re
´volution franc¸aise’s volume on Socie
´te
´s politiques, Christine Peyrard’s Les
Jacobins de l’Ouest and Michel Vovelle’s Les Jacobins – do not mention British
influences on early French clubs at all.
14
While Rachel Hammersley has described
the British ideological origins of some aspects of French Republicanism, seeing the
Paris Cordeliers Club as a key conduit, no historian has explored in depth
the active exchanges between the two countries’ political societies.
15
Through the
examination of a wide range of printed and manuscript materials relating to the
development of the club networks located in over twenty French and British arch-
ives and libraries, particularly the voluminous club correspondence circulating
both nationally and internationally, much of the relationship can be reconstituted.
Societies in Britain and France developed interactive epistolary exchanges across
countries and movements, fuelling major changes for all involved.
This article looks at how British and French radical movements were in many
respects mutually constituting, providing inspiration and examples for each other
at key junctures. British reform and antislavery club networks helped inspire the
creation of early French Revolutionary political societies between 1788 and 1790
through letters of friendship, and encouragement, corresponding regularly first
with the Socie
´te
´des amis des noirs, and then, more significantly, helping inspire
the rise of Jacobin Clubs throughout France. A new associational culture arose
which strengthened connections between both Revolutionaries across France and
with sympathizers abroad, helping to radicalize the movements involved. Though
significant differences between French and British club networks remained, in their
mutual dialogues we can see the international origins, development and aspirations
of the age’s most important social movements.
I
Well established since the Restoration of Charles II, British political societies had
by the 1780s become a mainstay of the country’s political system. Held in ‘public
houses’ or private residences, devoted to either general discussion or specific causes,
over 25,000 varied ‘clubs’ formed across the English-speaking world during the
eighteenth century.
16
Most of these organizations remained proudly local: though
exchanges of correspondence occurred, and visitors (including many French trav-
ellers) could gain temporary admission, British societies generally remained small
and restricted by divisions of class, status and gender.
17
One French observer,
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Anne-Marie du Boccage, wrote of London in 1750 that ‘men of all levels have
coteries where they impose the laws according to their own tastes’.
18
Formal pol-
itical alliances between groups remained rare, as clubs instead typically emphasized
their independence. The Wilkesite Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights,
founded in 1769, featured at its height a modest 12 affiliated societies.
19
Though
widespread petitioning campaigns occurred first in support of Wilkes, and then in
the Christopher Wyvill-led Yorkshire Association reform movement of 1779–84,
these campaigns were largely directed through electoral assemblies and corporate
structures.
20
The antislavery societies which formed and affiliated from 1787 onwards
represented a new type of social movement in Britain, bringing freestanding
organizations across every county into a concerted national political campaign.
Building from earlier Quaker and American social movements opposing the
brutalities of slavery, as well as growing interest in universal human rights,
the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade sought to achieve
its aim through publicity and organization. Society leaders spread knowledge of
colonial practices through a combination of speeches, pamphlets and newspaper
articles, and thereafter encouraged the formation of local societies to both fur-
ther diffuse knowledge and petition Parliament for political redress.
21
The
Manchester branch soon proved the most vocal, and in December 1787 spon-
sored a circular letter to ‘every principal town throughout Great Britain’, as well
as ‘every other Friend to this Cause of Humanity’, to help procure the end of
the slave trade.
22
Underscoring its commitment, the Manchester committee
reported less than two months later a total of 11,000 signatures – two-thirds
of all local men eligible.
23
Petitions from over one hundred areas arrived during
the first half of 1788, prompting the first Parliamentary debates on ending the
trade.
24
The British antislavery effort rapidly gained French adherents, even though
French political societies had only a short history before 1787. Most
Enlightenment-era salons remained closely connected with important state officials,
and usually muted direct political critique.
25
Though Wilkes had gained admirers
(and took periodic residence) in France in the 1760s, no groups there had organized
on his behalf.
26
A new variety of explicitly political discussion-groups, the ‘muse
´es’,
described by a high police official as ‘imitated from the English’, arose in 1779, and
by 1783 it became fashionable in Paris to refer to a variety of philanthropic, artistic
and literary groups as ‘clubs’.
27
The abolition campaign quickly attracted French
reformers. Within three months of the British society’s founding, the London lead-
ership accepted Jacques-Pierre Brissot and Etienne Clavie
`re’s offer to form a Paris-
based Socie
´te
´des amis des noirs, working to abolish the French traffic.In late
January 1788, the Socie
´te
´published an open address in the Comte de Mirabeau’s
recently founded Analyse des papiers anglois proclaiming the imminent success of the
British campaign, and inviting ‘all friends of humanity’ to ‘prepare this Revolution
in France’.
28
The French should join the British, an early pamphlet declared, ‘to
advance the system of peace and fraternity which must unite all peoples’.
29
Even as
Alpaugh 597
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the Analyse published detailed descriptions of the British mobilization effort, how-
ever, the response in France would be slow.
30
Early French interest also developed in American examples, though their rela-
tionship did not become as close as with the British. In 1787, a year before Brissot
and Clavie
`re founded the Socie
´te
´des amis des noirs, the two began a Socie
´te
´Gallo-
ame
´ricaine in Paris, to help the two countries ‘better understand each other’ and
build closer cultural and financial relationships.
31
Though the club did not succeed,
in May 1788 Brissot departed on a seven-month voyage to America. With letters of
introduction from both British abolitionists and the Marquis de Lafayette, from
Boston to Philadelphia he found himself received with ‘l’accueil le plus flatteur’by
both antislavery activists and older revolutionary radicals like Samuel Adams.
32
After returning to France, Brissot completed and published a three-volume account
of his trip, so the French could ‘observe men who conquered their liberty’, even
while playing an important role in the early Revolution.
33
Many during the Revolution would share his interest: Thomas Jefferson, James
Monroe and other Americans would be widely feˆ ted during their stays in France,
while an American flag flew in the Paris Jacobin Club alongside the French and
British, and word of Benjamin Franklin’s death in 1790 led to widespread public
mourning.
34
However, there were more limitations to the Franco-American rela-
tionship than the Franco-British one. Despite limited correspondence between the
Socie
´te
´des amis and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1790–91, the distance
separating the countries did not allow for efficient epistolary exchange – whereas
correspondence could pass from Paris to London as quickly as to Marseille – and
many in France did not find America’s example as applicable to their society as
that of the British.
35
In contrast to the consolidating American political system, the British in the late
1780s appeared poised for a new era of radical change. The liberating possibilities of
the antislavery movement helped reinvigorate calls for parliamentary reform.
Inspired by the campaigns of Wilkes and Wyvill against alleged infringements of
English liberties, Protestant Dissenters renewed their attempts to overturn the Test
and Corporation Acts, which restricted non-Anglicans from holding political office.
Dissenters in December 1786 adopted a similar organizational structure as the later
British antislavery movement, with a central committee in London directing instruc-
tions, diffusing publications and orchestrating petitions from the provinces.
The movement gathered force between 1787 and 1789, motivating multiple
Parliamentary attempts for repeal – the last of which failed by only 20 votes. Like
the antislavery movement, Dissenters described their movement as a struggle of
‘liberty, good sense, and humanity’ fighting ‘oppressive, dishonourable, and perni-
cious statutes’.
36
If the Dissenters had succeeded, the elimination of other restrictions
on British suffrage might well have followed. By late 1789, concurrently inspired by
the French granting of civil rights to Protestants, the Dissenters’ repeal campaign
would become the most aggressively cosmopolitan of British social movements.
Despite France’s rapid politicization during 1788 and 1789, and the advances
made by their British counterparts, in the early Revolution extra-governmental
598 European History Quarterly 44(4)
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political networks remained uncommon. Popular political societies had met state
repression throughout the crises of 1787 and 1788, which only relaxed under the
Necker ministry thereafter.
37
The Socie
´te
´des amis, despite their declared admir-
ation for Anglo-American antislavery models, remained an elite, Parisian move-
ment. In March 1788, Brissot called for a wider campaign, with a larger
distribution of antislavery writings and a newspaper which could create ‘general
enthusiasm’ and be ‘devoured with avidity by artisans, farmers and men of all
classes’.
38
Though the organization declined the venture, and in June 1789 still
rejected taking ‘la forme du club’, its members – including future Jacobins like
Brissot, Mirabeau, Lafayette, the Marquis de Condorcet, Henri Gre
´goire and
Maximillien Robespierre – became increasingly aware through such debates of
the forms and effects of Anglo-American social movements.
39
Hoping to encourage Franco-British direct action on colonial slavery, British
abolitionists sent Thomas Clarkson, their most successful political organizer, to
France in the autumn of 1789. Clarkson, expressing himself in a letter to Mirabeau
after his arrival, saw antislavery as inseparable from the French Revolutionaries’
cause of liberty, believing that without colonial reforms ‘very serious Revolutions
(if they have not already happened) will take Place there’. Pushing for abolition of
the slave trade and the ‘amelioration’ of colonial slavery, Clarkson first approached
the existing Socie
´te
´des amis.
40
The group appeared in disarray, however, with a
sparsely attended meeting limiting its objectives to lobbying minister Jacques
Necker. Clarkson also found powerful amis in the legislature unwilling to push
for immediate abolition. He did, however, remain in France for six months, lobby-
ing legislators and distributing printed material both on the horrors of the slave
trade, and the formation of the British antislavery societies themselves.
41
The direct prompting which led to the creation of the French Jacobin network,
however, came from a relatively minor group in British reform politics, the London
Revolution Society. The club, featuring prominent liberal intellectuals such as
Richard Price and Charles Stanhope, looked to build consensus for Dissenter
civil rights through mobilizing nationwide celebrations of the Glorious
Revolution’s centennial in 1788. Disastrously, however, the illness of King
George III led to the cancellation of most celebrations.
42
Inspired by the early
French Revolution, the Revolution Society’s members sent their felicitations.
Having already, on 20 July 1789, greeted news of the Bastille’s fall with a resolution
to continue correspondence with revolutionaries to help ‘the Sons of Freedom to
assert their Rights’, club members at a banquet held on 4 November 1789 adopted
an address to the National Assembly.
43
Writing as ‘Men, Britons, and Citizens of
the World’, the Revolution Society expressed its ‘ardent wishes that the influence of
so glorious an example may be felt by all Mankind’, until ‘Universal Liberty and
Happiness prevail’.
44
The address would make the Revolution Society famous
throughout France, and inspire ongoing correspondence between the society and
the soon multiplying number of French clubs.
45
The Jacobin network did not emerge from a vacuum, but rather from the intel-
lectual ferment and social mobilization occurring during the late 1780s. The new
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campaigns’ cosmopolitan reach – speaking in the name of broad human and/or
political rights – encouraged the development of widely applicable methods for
building support. With the rise of effective club networks in Britain, and growing
interest in the possibilities of associational life in France, early Jacobins would find
models to adapt for their own fledgling societies.
II
Despite the early Revolution’s rapidly expanding democratic sociability, until
November 1789 formal clubs did not play a major role in its political process.
The electoral districts which served a similar debating function in late 1788 and
early 1789 took governing power in July’s Municipal Revolutions, making them
less suitable for wide-ranging discussions. Among early political societies, the
Breton Club, often described as the Jacobins’ predecessor, began as a debating
society for those serving in the Estates General. Though playing a central role in
the crisis surrounding the Tennis Court Oath, it would revert to being a provincial
Breton caucus by the October Days.
46
Coalitions between radical groups were slow
to form, and the conservative Monarchiens, featuring elite adherents both in the
National Assembly and Paris society, appeared more powerful in the summer and
autumn of 1789.
47
Radical Parisian sociability then centred upon the fluid
scene at the Palais-Royal, though growing repression – particularly after the
events of August and October 1789 – decreased the area’s influence.
48
No
extra-governmental structure existed for Revolutionaries across France. The
Jacobin network’s rise appeared to represent a break not just from the Old
Regime, but also from the early Revolution, which also lacked organizations for
the cultivation and diffusion of radical opinion.
Though the early Jacobin network appears to have organized covertly in the
months following the Revolution Society’s address, the surviving sources call our
attention to the British origins of the ‘Club’. In a rare surviving founding docu-
ment, the Jacobins of Strasbourg, in their January 1790 Act of Union, described
their organization as founded on the model of the Paris Socie
´te
´de la Re
´volution,
created in turn ‘on the inspiration of that established in London’.
49
The Chronique
de Strasbourg elaborated how ‘America and England’s examples prove their util-
ity’, in making both the ‘law respected’ and governmental ministers responsive to
the populace.
50
The Jacobins of Montpellier in February 1790 declared how ‘This
town’s citizens desire to form a club’, going on to specify in their bylaws that ‘the
word ‘Club’ in English signifies an equal-paying group; the first founding principle
of a club is thus equality’. The Montauban Jacobins, in their first writings, refer to
themselves not as a Socie
´te
´, but as the Club des patriotes, while the Jacobins of
Be
´ziers chose club patriotique (the term ‘patriot’ itself being a foreign revolutionary
import).
51
Early Jacobins saw not just a common name, but a direct connection
between French and British clubs: those of Vire in their June 1790 founding bylaws
accorded voting rights not just to local club members, but to all in attendance from
other ‘Clubs patriotiques, whether French or foreign, who follow the same
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principles’.
52
The first Jacobin clubs looked outwards for both inspiration and
affiliation, seeing themselves as part of wider international trends.
Typically taking the formal name of Socie
´te
´, however, the organizations paid
homage to the French salons, scientific and literary societies which also served as
important inspirations. Certain Jacobin clubs – such as those of Cherbourg and
Albi – grew directly out of literary groups.
53
Even these types of organizations,
however, had English origins: Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclope
´die traced the
existence of formal scientific societies to the Royal Society of London, chartered by
Charles II, as the first occasion when philosophers could ‘assemble themselves to
search for truths in peace’, an arrangement spreading to France only several dec-
ades later.
54
In many respects, the goals of such societies related directly to the new
clubs, as they also looked to enlighten a greater number through diffusing specia-
lized knowledge. ‘A Patriotic Society’, declared the prospectus of the Jacobins’
Journal des Clubs, ‘is a school in which one is instructed in the science of free
government’. Sharing the results of governmental experimentation in ‘un commerce
de pense
´es’ and spreading news of advancements appeared essential for the emer-
ging New Regime’s success.
55
Balancing foreign and domestic examples, club partisans also quickly estab-
lished justifications based upon the French Declaration of the Rights of Man
and the agreed-upon portions of the forthcoming constitution. A 1790 justifica-
tion by future Paris Mayor Jean-Nicolas Pache claimed clubs to be covered by
Article XI of the Declaration, which guaranteed ‘the free communication
of thoughts and opinions’ – itself an outgrowth of Anglo-American freedoms of
speech and association. The constitution, meanwhile, would assure the ability to
‘assemble peacefully and without arms’ for political discussions.
56
Though such
exchanges had already been occurring informally, clubs offered the possibility of
institutionalization. From late 1789 – spurred by the National Assembly’s explicit
permission in December for ‘citoyens actifs’ (those men with sufficient property for
voting rights) to participate – clubs moved from the periphery to near the centre of
Revolutionary politics.
57
By the end of 1790 over 300 such societies were estab-
lished, the number climbing to over 1,200 by late 1791, and cresting at 3,500 in
the Year II.
58
Expanded political sociability through local societies, proponents held, would
both spread democratic civic virtues and strengthen the revolutionary order.
Through developing the ‘grandeur and pride which belongs to a free nation’, the
Journal des Clubs declared, associational life would help members ‘avoid extremes’
and develop more ‘unamistic’ [sic] spirit.
59
Building upon British and American
examples, the elaboration of a denser civil society appeared necessary for educating
active citizens. Yet the early Jacobins also went a step further: the same issue of the
Journal also spoke not just of diffusing principles, but also of conducting ‘surveil-
lance’, particularly against the municipal officials who had attempted to block
Jacobin expansion into their locales.
60
The Revolution would need to be defended
as well as propagated, with fraternity and vigilance both remaining enduring
Jacobin principles.
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Equally important as local cohesion would be the building of a national Jacobin
correspondence network on a model largely borrowed from preceding Anglo-
American radical club and antislavery organizations. Rapidly expanding across
France from the end of 1789 through the first half of 1790, the movement in
many ways served as a virtual twin to the large Federation gatherings drawing
hundreds of thousands across the provinces. ‘[B]y such correspondence undertaken
between Friends of the Constitution’, wrote the Jacobins of Carcassonne, ‘we can
consolidate the bases of universal patriotism’.
61
Each club entered into communi-
cation with local societies in its region, as did larger centres with each other, and all
with the Paris Comite
´de correspondance. Regional issues could thus be resolved
internally, with each society also possessing a potential national (and even inter-
national) reach. ‘By rapid correspondence’, the Jacobins of Rouen wrote, ‘we can
communicate inspirations and discoveries, mutually raising our patriotism, while
also holding ourselves on guard’ more effectively against counterrevolutionaries.
62
The Jacobin network’s strength relied as much on virtual relations developed
through letter-writing and distribution as through physical club meetings
themselves.
The Jacobins soon moved beyond the relatively limited scope of handwritten
correspondence typical of the British clubs to develop printed circulars and, soon,
newspapers publishing items from across its network. Part of the wider revolution
in print which arose in France with the coming of press freedom in 1789, clubs
increasingly received printed circulars from other societies, often from hundreds of
miles away. Even writers from small municipalities appeared well informed on
issues of common concern.
63
The first (unsuccessful) attempt at establishing a
common newspaper, the mid-1790 Journal des socie
´te
´s-patriotiques franc¸ aises, pro-
moted the advantages of wide circulation: ‘Isolated, with very few rapports
between them’, its prospectus declared, ‘patriotic societies cannot have the useful
influence on opinion that their patriotism deserves’.
64
A newspaper would serve as
facilitator. Later that year, the Jacobins’ own aforementioned Journal des Clubs
began. With the clubs lacking a common programme, discussions appeared wide
open. The paper embodied many idealistic hopes of the network: the Commercy
chapter declared in a circular how the newspaper could ‘be the depository of our
good intentions and the organ of our patriotism: it can be a mirror which brings
together all rays and reflects their light and heat’.
65
Correspondence, moving
between the largest number of clubs with the greatest possible speed, could develop
opinion and bring multifaceted Revolutionary projects and spaces together. The
Revolution could accelerate through circulating ideas faster. Never before in either
France or Britain had a general-interest club network acquired such scope
or power.
French clubs concurrently corresponded with the London Revolution Society in
progressively greater numbers. The earliest communication, from Dijon’s already-
established Club patriotique was sent on 30 November 1789 only five days after the
reading of the Revolution Society’s address in the National Assembly. ‘Why do we
worry about admitting’, the letter began, ‘that the Revolution which is operating
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today in our country is due above all to the example that England has offered us
over the last century?’ The Dijon club declared that, through their development of
constitutional government, ‘the happiness of the English has prepared that of the
universe’.
66
The Revolution Society wrote back declaring their hope for a ‘fraternal
union’ between peoples, while congratulating the French Revolutionaries on
extending ‘principles of justice and reverence for human rights’ through
‘common participation’ in politics.
67
Early addresses did not focus on the particu-
larities of each nation’s politics, but rather the similarities in what the clubs desired
to accomplish.
Over the following year 23 addresses to the Revolution Society arrived from
clubs across France, many thanking the Londoners for inspiring them to found
their clubs. The Strasbourg Jacobins declared that the ‘example of your honourable
Society has given birth to all the Amis de la Constitution’.
68
The Amiens club
referred to the Revolution Society as a ‘monument of English liberty’, which led
‘Our Revolution to look to form on your model a thousand societies animated by
the same ardour and spirit’.
69
Aix-en-Provence’s Jacobins credited the London
society with ‘believing in the idea of establishing these societies which multiply in
France today’.
70
The Jacobins of La Rochelle, a town with a long history of
Catholic-Protestant infighting, now declared that the English and French would
‘follow the same principles... carrying the flame of philosophy into regions that
superstition and despotism still cover in shadows’.
71
In attempting to break with
the past and establish broad new fraternal alliances, numerous French clubs
appeared both cognizant of the British origins of their associations, and attempted
to develop contact further.
The ideal of an integrated patriotic national club network for both fraternal
mobilization and spreading intelligence was of recognized British origin. The
French system would seek to build upon this model. Beyond simple recognition,
French clubs also sought both instruction from and collaboration with their British
counterparts. The Montpellier Jacobins entered into active correspondence with
London less than a month after their founding, generating excited correspondence
from across their region. ‘We can only applaud’, wrote the Jacobins of Marseille to
Montpellier on 1 October 1790, ‘your project of corresponding with the friends of
the Revolution in England, and with foreigners in Paris. We owe our union to these
close-knit brothers who before us conquered their liberty. We have asked for affili-
ation and correspondence ourselves’.
72
With the British having become exemplars
for hundreds of French clubs, an active exchange of letters and ideas held great
promise for the still-fledgling network. ‘We hope you can procure for us’, Nimes’
Jacobins wrote to Montpellier two weeks later, ‘a me
´moire on the constitutional
organization of patriotic societies’ from London, asking also for any correspond-
ence received.
73
Though the relationship had limitations – very little overt ‘radical
Whig’ or ‘Commonwealthman’ ideology appears to have passed the Channel, and
the Jacobins’ knowledge of how British clubs actually functioned remained partial
– the early French clubs appeared hungry for information on earlier associational
models, and adapted many aspects of British societies for their own ends.
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Despite the Revolution Society members’ exertions in the ongoing campaign for
the Test and Corporation Acts repeal, the club welcomed the French correspond-
ence, responding to each address. In July 1790, writing to the Lille Jacobins, the
Londoners declared themselves ‘pleased to feel the respect shown in the Addresses
received from the Societies... on a plan similar to theirs’, and solicited further
exchange, ‘Convinced that the spirit of freedom is rapidly advancing across
Europe’.
74
With French clubs, like that of Lorient, denouncing ‘religious differ-
ences’ as among the Old Regime ‘prejudices which often divide nations’, the
Dissenters reportedly accepted French financial contributions for their repeal
effort.
75
Given the extent to which the Revolution Society publicized the exchanges
in Britain, especially around their annual Bastille Day banquets, they appeared
sincere in believing the British–French clubs relationship to be mutually beneficial.
With the failure of the Dissenters’ repeal campaign, however, and intensifying
attacks from both British Francophobe conservatives and the Anglican Church,
the Revolution Society began to retreat politically. Responding to the Jacobins of
Vire on 5 April 1791, the Society chastised their correspondents for having ‘con-
templated with more attention the excellencies of our Constitution than its deficits’,
going on to say that having ‘entirely emancipated yourselves... you will soon feel
the superiority of your present government to ours’.
76
After a period of appren-
ticeship, the Jacobin clubs now appeared to hold greater promise. By 1791, fledg-
ling French societies increasingly modelled themselves on clubs in their own
network instead of foreign examples. The Jacobins also talked less of their
British origins, some now omitting British precedents from club primers and
bylaws altogether.
77
Even among Anglophiles, the British example remained partial, and certain
illiberal aspects of the Jacobins continued to diverge from prior precedents.
Though British clubs had traditionally guarded against both ‘counterrevolu-
tionary’ Jacobite sympathizers and encroachments from powerful ministers of
the king, the French clubs developed defensive apparatuses on a level which
would have been unsuitable for the relatively stable British political scene.
Already in early 1791, the Jacobins of Lyon warned in a circular of ‘shadowy
plots against the friends of liberty’, while those of Paris declared the network
should ‘inspire universal terror in the enemies of public good’.
78
Vigilance
became one of the network’s central functions. A second divergence appeared in
the Jacobins’ intolerance of rival clubs not adhering to their program, in contrast to
the heterogeneous British club scene. Counterrevolutionary clubs did exist: the
Paris-based Club des impartiaux attempted to institute a network bringing together
‘all those who are enemies of anarchy and demand the return of legitimate author-
ity’, while the so-called Amis de la paix successfully established clubs in 23 different
towns over 1790–91.
79
One provincial Jacobin club proposed raising a deputation
of twelve thousand to present a petition to the National Assembly calling for the
dissolution of the Club monarchique.
80
Though clubs commonly remained private
in Britain, Jacobins refused to countenance such a practice. If ‘not open to all
citizens’, the Jacobins of Confolens warned the National Assembly in April
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1791, ‘shady conspiracies will form there’.
81
The Jacobins also railed against the
existence of the centre-left Socie
´te
´de 1789,Cercle social and Club des Feuillants
over the same period.
82
Free association, many Jacobins declared, could be too
destructive if applied to the wrong purposes.
The Anglo-French fraternal movement would be tested – though in certain
respects strengthened – by the Nootka Sound crisis, which recurrently threatened
to bring France and Britain to war in 1790 and 1791. Though National Assembly
deputies of many persuasions (including some members of the Jacobins) urged
intervention to uphold French international ‘honour’, the prospect of France enter-
ing a conflict on the side of Spain to uphold the Bourbon ‘Family Compact’ led
opposing radicals to denounce dynastic interests and agitate for peace.
83
The
Bordeaux Jacobins led the effort, declaring to Paris’s Jacobins in July 1790 ‘our
general view that all means to ensure peace be pursued’. Brissot’s Patriote franc¸ ais
published their letter, declaring that ‘all constitutional clubs, throughout France,
should make such resolutions’.
84
The radical Parisian press increasingly made dis-
tinctions between British popular sentiments and their government’s policies.
85
‘The enlightened English’, wrote Re
´volutions de Paris, ‘do not want a war,
on the contrary they desire an alliance with [France], for the peace of Europe
and the universe’.
86
Bordeaux’s Jacobins successfully called upon the London
Revolution Society to speak against renewed war rumours in 1791.
87
Radicals
strongly declared they would not be swayed by the national rivalries of the past.
The Revolution Society pursued an enhanced relationship directly with the
French National Assembly, albeit with mixed results. During the first Nootka
crisis on 21 July 1790 the Assembly read a letter from the London club calling
for the two nations to ‘learn to see each other as equals, and love each other as free
men, equals and brothers’, inaugurating a new era of peace. The response was
generally favourable. Charles de Lameth called for the Assembly to reply, believing
‘that this could help Europe remain at peace’. Conservative Louis de Foucauld,
counter-asserted that ‘a socie
´te
´particulie
`re cannot be in correspondence with a
National Assembly’, and, furthermore, called attention to the ‘two nations [as]
unfortunately rivals’. At this point, however, he was drowned out by cries of
‘No!’ The motion to correspond with the Revolution Society passed.
88
The legis-
lature maintained their prudence nine days later, however, after a 14 July
Revolution Society toast arrived, calling for ‘an alliance between the two first
kingdoms of the world’, and the ‘union of philosophy and politics which honour-
ably distinguishes our age’. With the society overstepping its bounds, Lameth’s
calls to send a new complimentary response failed.
89
Earlier eighteenth-century
legacies of mistrust and Anglophobia could be rekindled.
The new Revolution Society addresses created a sensation among many radicals,
however, and Limoges’s Jacobins headed a campaign towards establishing an inter-
national alliance between the two networks. In an October 1790 circular distributed
across France, the club asserted how ‘all nature will retake its rights’. To ‘prove to
the whole world how the French desire to unite all peoples’, the Limoges society
called for local clubs to petition Paris’s Jacobins to open discussions with the
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Revolution Society for ‘establishing the means to realize this sublime plan’.
Simultaneously with the alliance, a proclamation would be published ‘declaring
to all peoples our pacific intentions, and views for the happiness of the world’.
90
At
least 27 local clubs fully adhered, several speaking of it as a strategy to ensure
‘universal peace’, and oppose ministerial intrigues in both countries.
91
The Paris
Jacobins, however, likely fearing conservative reaction, did not pursue the plan.
Correspondence between local Jacobin Clubs and the Revolution Society con-
tinued at an increasing clip, with 47 addresses – more than twice as many as in 1790
– arriving from 35 different French clubs during 1791. This was not a one-time
formality for many, as nine groups from the previous year wrote again and the
same number sent multiple addresses. The letters, which in 1790 expressed fascin-
ation with the British model, had by the following year fallen into repetitive for-
mulas of felicitation.
92
Yet hopes of a broad alliance continued. The Tours
Jacobins, for example, wrote to London of how ‘humanity’ would ‘make us
Compatriots with all the peoples of the earth’.
93
With inaction in Paris, however,
little progress was made.
The British example continued to be discussed, and used as a positive precedent
in debate. With the Jacobin clubs’ future threatened following their role in the
events leading to the July 1791 Champ-de-Mars massacre, radicals called upon
British analogies to justify their continuance. Brissot illustrated the utility of
intra-systemic dissent through the example of British opposition to the slave
trade: ‘does a single man in the English Parliament rise to contest the societies’
right to deliberate, which is to say, thereby offering their opinion on the laws?
Certainly not.’ An important distinction existed, whereby ‘all citizens are forced
to obey the law, [but] all have the liberty to deliberate and offer their opinions
about the laws’.
94
The clubs survived the reaction.
Coordination also continued across movements in the antislavery effort. French
newspapers – particularly Brissot’s Patriote franc¸ ais – printed notices of the abo-
lition of slavery in northern American states and British Parliamentary debates on
ending the slave trade, leading some to pronounce a negotiated end to the Atlantic
trafficking immanent.
95
Though the Jacobins did not directly adopt the massive
petitioning campaigns used in British movements, in March and April 1791, 15 of
their affiliates brought the first wave of French abolitionist petitions before the
National Assembly. On 24 March Riom’s Jacobins called for the granting of rights
to slaves as part of a ‘universal regeneration’, which alone could bring ‘peace and
tranquillity to our colonies’.
96
The Lyon Jacobins wrote on 20 April to the Socie
´te
´
des amis des noirs declaring that they ‘burn to unite our efforts to yours to ensure
victory’.
97
Only the 1791 Saint-Domingue uprising and the retreat of the antislav-
ery cause from mainstream politics thereafter halted momentum towards an alli-
ance between Jacobins and the international campaign against slavery.
Revolutionary though the early Jacobins were, they remained interested in pre-
cedents, examples and potential alliances. The integrated national networks of
Anglo-American radical politics served as a central inspiration for French designs.
While the growth of the French clubs in many respects responded to the unique
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conditions of the early–mid Revolution, British societies offered Jacobins import-
ant models for local, national and international cohesion, showing them methods
for applying egalitarian principles and cosmopolitan hopes to concrete political
situations. Although a full alliance between the two networks would prove elusive,
and the initial British–French tutelary relationship declined as the Jacobins became
better established, dialogue between club networks in both countries would accel-
erate again in 1792.
III
As the Revolution radicalized in France, thereby surpassing easy parallels with
Britain’s constitutional order, the relationship between the clubs changed.
Increasingly, France became the avant-garde, and Britain the country which
began adopting the other’s examples. In 1792, a new British radical network –
the London Corresponding Society – arose, agitating for widespread political
reform through a French-style associational model. Though the history of the
‘English Jacobins’ has usually been characterized as the spread of French
Revolutionary ideas in Britain, this account highlights the extent to which the
movement developed in active dialogue with its French counterparts, who declared
the new British organization a potential partner for international change. Only the
coming of war in early 1793 halted the growing convergence between British and
French radical networks.
Despite their astounding gains in the late 1780s, the British antislavery and
Dissenting movements failed to deliver legislative results. Indeed, both causes –
which initially responded enthusiastically to the Revolution – would soon be cas-
tigated for their French associations. The antislavery effort continued to see French
Revolutionaries as a potential partner in abolishing the slave trade. Despite
Clarkson’s unsuccessful 1789 trip, the following year the London committee still
reported ‘a reasonable hope that the spirit of humanity will at length abolish the
Slave Trade in that Empire’.
98
In 1792, as legislation for gradually abolishing the
trade passed the House of Commons but stalled in the Lords, the London com-
mittee continued writing to the moribund Socie
´te
´des amis des noirs hoping to
stimulate parallel action, even as they faced growing condemnation for doing so
from Burkean conservatives.
99
Antislavery support retreated for over a decade
thereafter.
Dissenters, particularly through the Revolution Society, loudly proclaimed their
relationship with French Revolutionaries. Though declining an invitation to par-
ticipate in Paris’s 1790 Feˆ te de la Fe
´de
´ration, the society helped organize 14 July
celebrations throughout Britain.
100
The Revolution Society banquet in London,
advertised as an opportunity to ‘testify their common Joy at an Event so important
in itself, and which is likely to promote the general Liberty and Happiness of the
World’, drew 670 participants, including a deputation from the Nantes Jacobins.
101
Emphasizing French progress in liberty appeared a strategy to pressure Parliament
to keep up in expanding British rights. ‘We can assure you’, reported the Nantes
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deputation, ‘that the people of London are at least as enthusiastic for the French
Revolution as the people of France’.
102
The Dissenters’ campaign for political rights faltered against increasing oppos-
ition from Anglicans. Church of England clergy mounted a counter-campaign
against the repeal of the Test & Corporation Act, declaring the Church ‘in
danger’. Popular conservative mobilization helped spark the 14 July incidents of
1791.
103
The most serious occurred in Birmingham, where a crowd forcibly dis-
persed the local Bastille Day banquet, which had featured toasts asking for the
Rights of Man to be extended to ‘all nations’, and for ‘the people of England to
never cease to remonstrate till their parliament becomes a true national represen-
tation’. Rioters sacked the property of Revolutionary supporters, including the
house, library and laboratory of famed scientist Joseph Priestley.
104
As the
Dissenters’ movement withered, the Revolution Society – which had never substan-
tially extended its membership into the wider community – ceased to be a major
political force, opening a space for the growth of new organizations to advance
radical reforms.
The lack of a radical British club network with the Jacobins’ power or scope
recurrently led to calls for new associations in Britain. The radical Francophile
newspaper The Argus in November 1790 declared ‘frequency of communication’ to
be the key to the rival Whigs’ political networks, while the ‘want of system in
operation, of unanimity in the plan of measures, has hitherto been one of the
principal reasons why the endeavours of former Oppositions have been ineffectual’.
Closer affiliation appeared necessary for radical interests to ‘bring their united
efforts to bear in the same direction’ to stimulate political action.
105
The publica-
tion of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man in 1791 also stimulated the idea that a
national corresponding network could come to replace government itself. ‘If we are
asked what government is’, Paine orated at a radical London club that August, ‘we
hold it to be nothing more than a National Association’, for promoting the greatest
possible liberty.
106
Given the dissatisfaction among radicals with the British gov-
ernment, proposals for new associations moved forward.
The London Corresponding Society, founded in January 1792, attempted to
adapt a Jacobin-style network to Britain. In the spirit of international cooperation,
Covent Garden shoemaker Thomas Hardy and Maurice Margarot, a multinational
radical just arrived from Paris, served as founders. Looking to reform the election
laws which made Parliamentary representation highly unequal, and establish uni-
versal manhood suffrage through abolishing property restrictions, the movement
involved wide sectors of the population in building a broad club network to elab-
orate radical politics.
107
Whereas earlier reform societies had been largely elite-
based, the Corresponding Society featured primarily artisans, labourers and
shopkeepers.
108
Following earlier networks’ example of diffusion through correspondence, the
London Corresponding Society spread its Jacobin-influenced founding principles
and affiliated clubs throughout the British Isles. According to Hardy, ‘Several
thousands of the first printed Address and resolutions were distributed gratis
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throughout the Nation’, and also reprinted in the Argus.
109
The society’s first cir-
cular declared man ‘entitled to Liberty’, and resolved ‘to keep a watchful eye on the
Government’, echoing Jacobin vigilance.
110
Soon multiplying in numbers, the
London branch split into autonomous cells: ‘Members entered so quickly that it
was found expedient to divide the society into separate bodies’, Hardy recounted,
with each group sending a delegate for meetings of the society’s general commit-
tee.
111
By November the society would boast 26 divisions in London, still increas-
ing ‘much every week’. Within months, the Corresponding Society had expanded
into 14 cities, many of which also quickly boasted multiple cells.
112
The new British radical network’s first deputation to France came from
Manchester, the growing industrial city already at the forefront of the parliamen-
tary reform and antislavery movements. James Watt (son and namesake of the
steam engine innovator) and author Thomas Cooper arrived at the Paris Jacobins
on 13 April 1792, just a week before the declaration of war between France and
Austria. Assuring the Paris club that ‘there are men all around who take a lively
interest in your cause, the cause not only of the French, but of humankind’, the
Englishmen orated that ‘the time has come to abolish all national prejudice, and
embrace as brothers all free men, no matter what country they come from’.
Whereas the London Revolution Society had only maintained occasional corres-
pondence with the Paris leadership, this deputation now asked for ‘friendly cor-
respondence’ to ‘establish the important principles of universal liberty, the only
means to establish an empire of peace and happiness for men on a solid and
unshakable basis’. In contrast to their coolness towards a Revolution Society alli-
ance the previous year, the Paris Jacobins now responded by taking an ‘unbreak-
able oath’ to support the Manchester club, and sent the address to all their
provincial affiliates.
113
A common movement working across national lines increas-
ingly seemed attainable.
The Corresponding Society used exchanges with France to bring its developing
network together, generating publicity and adhesion to a common programme. On
11 October 1792, the London central committee, declaring the international situ-
ation to be ‘calling upon us to countenance, at this juncture, the French Nation’s
arduous struggle against despotism and Aristocracy’, asked all the society’s
branches to declare full support for the French war cause. Enclosing to each affili-
ate a proposed address to the National Assembly, the leadership requested either
adhesion, or their objections in writing.
114
The resulting address quickly arrived
before the French National Convention on 7 November, declaring the society’s
‘duty to assist and help by all their means the defenders of the Rights of Man’.
115
Supporting the French Revolution became a prerequisite for inclusion in British
radical politics.
The new British deputation arrived at the Convention on 28 November, pro-
claiming the British movement’s programme and connections with French
Revolutionaries. Whereas ‘before the epoch of your Revolution’, British societies
engaged to spread liberty, now ‘the success of your efforts ensures to virtuous men
that their efforts will not be without recompense. Parallel societies now form in all
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parts of England’. The French legislators applauded. ‘Following France’s exam-
ple’, the address concluded, ‘revolutions will become easy. It would not be extra-
ordinary if in a short time you received felicitations from a National Convention of
England’.
116
Describing France as a clear exemplar and applicable model for
Britain, the deputation broadcast both the French origins of their radicalization
and their plans for change at home. The French legislators responded enthusias-
tically, urging British radicals to ‘filter useful information through all branches
of the social tree’, in hope of a future ‘eternal alliance’ between free peoples.
117
The Jacobins sent the address throughout their network, declaring the Revolution
‘va faire le tour du monde’.
118
Given the quick spread of the antislavery, Dissenter
and Jacobin networks, another similar groundswell appeared possible.
Many French Jacobins, still enamoured with possibilities of British alliances and
looking for all available help to combat the Austrian invasion, in turn pursued
interactions with the radical British clubs. ‘Generous Republicans’, wrote the
Jacobins from the threatened town of Laon in December after receiving British
arms and supplies, ‘the philanthropic gift you present France’s warriors announces
your enthusiasm in the sacred cause they defend’. Soon, they declared, ‘France and
England shall form a Treaty of Union as lasting as the course of the Seine and the
Thames’.
119
Less-threatened areas also concurred: ‘How glorious will it be for
France & England to form a confederation for the destruction of Tyrants’, asked
the Jacobins from the Provenc¸ al town of Apt. ‘[S]oon will they become our allies’,
declared Maˆ con’s Jacobins.
120
Though the Convention responded to a martial
address received from a radical society at Newington (near Dover) on November
10 by urging English adherence to neutrality, the Society of Constitutional
Information’s shipment of a thousand pairs of boots to Dunkerque led the
French War Minister to thank them for helping to ‘propagate Universal Liberty’
abroad.
121
Throughout 1792, strict nationalism appeared less salient than the
Revolution’s international potential.
War between Britain and France, however, though long considered a possibility,
arrived quickly. Word of Louis XVI’s 21 January execution immediately led to the
British government expelling the French ambassador, and on 1 February the
French National Convention pre-emptively declared war. While acknowledging
strong support among the British ‘people’, Brissot and other Convention members
in favour of the conflict nevertheless declared their differences with George III and
Parliamentary conservatives irreconcilable.
122
Despite growing Anglo-French fra-
ternal sentiment, such feelings were trumped by widespread fear of international
aristocratic conspiracy. Some also declared a successful French campaign could
lead to radical regime change in Britain: one French pamphlet viewed the rise of
British popular societies as presaging the British monarchy’s overthrow, which
would enable future ‘social happiness’ and ‘eternal peace’ between the two
nations.
123
Not surprisingly, however, such rhetoric placed British radicals in an
untenable position at home.
The radical clubs in Britain encountered serious opposition from conservative
organizations, whose support skyrocketed with the coming of the French war.
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The Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and
Levellers, founded in November 1792 by conservative judge John Reeves, rapidly
created a nationwide association to rally patriotic opinion in favour of the conflict
and against radical clubs. Taking over London’s Crown and Anchor Tavern for
their headquarters, where the Revolution Society had earlier held Bastille Day
banquets, the society used many of the same strategies as their radical brethren
in creating a provincial club network.
124
By September, 386 loyalist affiliates were
formed throughout the kingdom, with members instructed to disrupt radical net-
works’ meetings and correspondence.
125
Though claiming to be a temporary
response to the international crisis, their continued meetings into 1794 and
beyond led one radical writer to note how ‘The affiliated Jacobin Clubs of the
French Provinces have been made the model of the Reevesian Associations...
Every man is called upon, more palpably than in France, to declare the
Constitution glorious and unreformable’.
126
Despite its initial development as a
radical platform, the club network model offered a template independent of specific
political cause, and surprising rhetorical and strategic similarities abounded
between radical and Tory organizations.
The Corresponding Society’s network remained far looser than that of the
French Jacobins. Adhesion by provincial societies to any measure proposed by
London remained voluntary. Though claiming a similar radical orientation, no
common programme amongst the clubs would develop. Of course, such a situation
presented benefits for the societies’ resisting governmental repression through
plausible deniability of involvement in any specific action, since the network gen-
erally did not enjoy the degree of elite support it did in France. Government spies
deeply infiltrated the radical networks, and would bring their leaders to trial on
treason charges in 1794.
127
British government and politics did not allow for the
development of a fully unified popular movement.
Only the coming of war in early 1793 stopped the elaboration of vibrant British–
French club exchanges. Associational network models unknown in Europe six
years earlier came to play a central role in radical politics. Moving beyond
single-issue antislavery and repeal campaigns, British radicals applied the new
club model to a general French-style campaign for political change and shocked
their political system. Behind a strong egalitarian ethos, and escaping the isolation
which had limited earlier club models, radical corresponding societies networked
towards an unprecedented collective power.
IV
Against a historiography which has largely approached each club network in iso-
lation, the connections between British and French movements demonstrate the
utility of a transnational approach for understanding some of the Revolutionary
era’s most important social movements. British antislavery and radical reform
societies elaborated a new model for political action. Quickly, interactions between
radical British and French political clubs helped stimulate the rise of new
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associational cultures across the two nations. By associating and educating diverse
populations on issues of common concern, clubs appeared as both an ideal enact-
ment of new egalitarian values and an effective method of organization for advo-
cating practical reforms.
The growing dialogues between radicals achieved their greatest influence with
the rise of general interest political clubs after 1789. The London Revolution
Society’s encouragement helped develop an ideal of political sociability and cor-
respondence in France which motivated the founding and spread of the Jacobin
Clubs. The Jacobins, in turn, surpassed the cohesion of earlier British examples and
broadened radical networks’ advocacy from the pursuit of specific interests to
overarching general concerns. Exchanges of information and inspiration across
countries and causes drove each radical network forward. While club networks
in both countries developed in ways befitting their specific political circumstances,
and though rising nationalism would eventually derail many of their cosmopolitan
goals, French and British radicals between 1787 and 1793 regularly sought inter-
national interactions, and learnt important strategies from each other. The associ-
ational ideal and inclusive reach of Revolutionary era clubs advanced in turn with
societies’ willingness to look outwards.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to G. Matthew Adkins, Suzanne Desan, Talissa Ford, Jan Goldstein, Philippe
Minard, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, April Shelford, David Torrance and audiences at the
Mount Allison University Faculty Research Workshop, University of Pennsylvania
Humanities Forum and French Historical Studies for their comments on earlier drafts.
This project benefitted from a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of
Pennsylvania Humanities Forum.
Notes
1. The Correspondence of the London Revolution Society in London, with the
National Assembly, with Various Societies of the Friends of Liberty in France and
England (London 1792), 3; M. L. Lacaste et al., eds, Archives parlementaires:
recueil complet des de
´bats le
´gislatifs et politiques des chambres franc¸ aises (Paris 1867–),
Vol. 10, 257.
2. Michael L. Kennedy, ‘The Foundation of the Jacobin Clubs and the Development of the
Jacobin Club Network, 1789–1791’, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 51, no. 4 (1979),
701; Alphonse Aulard, La Socie
´te
´des jacobins: recueil de documents pour l’histoire du club
des Jacobins de Paris (Paris 1889–97), Vol. 1, xvi.
3. On intellectual origins see, among others, Marc Belissa, Fraternite
´universelle et inte
´re
ˆt
national (1713–1795): Les cosmopolitiques de droit des gens (Paris 1998) and Sankar
Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton, NJ 2003).
4. David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800
(Cambridge 2003), and The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Invention of
War as We Know It (Boston, MA 2007).
612 European History Quarterly 44(4)
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5. Alphonse Aulard, Histoire politique de la Re
´volution franc¸ aise: origines et de
´veloppement
de la De
´mocratie et de la Re
´publique (1789–1804) (Paris 1913), 19.
6. Marcel Reinhard, ‘Review of Robert R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions’,
Annales historiques de la Re
´volution franc¸ aise, 32 (1960), 220–3. Studies of French
Revolutionary influence abroad, however, remained more palpable. See Jacques
Godechot, La grande nation: l’expansion de la France re
´volutionnaire dans le monde,
1789–1799 (Paris 1956).
7. David Geggus and Norman Fiering, eds, The World of the Haitian Revolution
(Bloomington, IN 2009); Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave
Emancipation in the French Carribean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, NC 2004); Yves Be
´not,
La Re
´volution franc¸ aise et la fin des colonies (Paris 2004); and Jeremy Popkin, You are
All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge 2010).
8. Sarah M. S. Piersall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century
(Oxford 2008); Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca, NY
2009).
9. On the French Revolution’s impact in Britain, see especially Gregory Claeys, The French
Revolution Debate in Britain: The Origins of Modern Politics (New York 2007); Clive
Emsley, Britain and the French Revolution (New York 2000); Jennifer Mori, Britain in
the Age of the French Revolution, 1785–1820 (New York 2000).
10. On the period preceding the French Revolution, see Sophia Rosenfeld, ‘Citizens of
Nowhere in Particular: Cosmopolitanism, Writing and Political Engagement in
Eighteenth-Century Europe’, National Identities, Vol. 4, no. 1 (2002), 25–43, and
Margaret Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in
Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia, PA 2006).
11. See, for example, Pauline Mayer, ‘John Wilkes and American Disillusionment with
Britain’, William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 3, no. 20 (1963), 373–95; David Brion
Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY 1973).
12. Davis, Problem of Slavery, esp. 94–5; Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery:
British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (Oxford 1987), esp. 52–5; Robin
Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (London 2011), esp. 171–3. French stu-
dies have been even more polarizing, with Jean-Daniel Piquet’s L’e
´mancipation des noirs
dans la Re
´volution franc¸ aise (Paris 2002) alluding to British origins and connections in
only one line (p. 48), while Jean-Paul Barlier, in La Socie
´te
´des amis des noirs, 1788–1791
(Paris 2010), entitles his comparative section ‘France-Angleterre: des marches politiques
diffe
´rentes’ (66).
13. Aulard, Socie
´te
´des Jacobins; Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French
Revolution: The First Years (Princeton, NJ 1982), 4, 24–41; idem,The Jacobin Clubs
in the French Revolution: The Middle Years (Princeton, NJ 1988), 123–60; idem,The
Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: 1793–1795 (New York 2000), 196–238.
14. Jean Boutier, Philippe Boutry and Serge Bonin, Atlas de la Re
´volution franc¸ aise, Vol. 6:
Les socie
´te
´s politiques (Paris 1992); Christine Peyrard, Les Jacobins de l’Ouest (Paris
1996); Michel Vovelle, Les Jacobins: De Robespierre a
`Cheve
`nement (Paris 2001); Patrice
Higonnet, in Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution (Cambridge
1998), isolates the exchanges to a page (253–4).
15. Rachel Hammersley, French Revolutionaries and English Republicans: The Cordeliers
Club, 1790–1794 (Rochester, NY 2005) and The English Republican Tradition and
Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and Moderns (Manchester 2010). She
Alpaugh 613
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only mentions the Revolution Society correspondence in the second volume, when dis-
cussing the Glorious Revolution’s centennial (157–9).
16. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational
World (Oxford 2000), 2.
17. Eighteenth-century French travel writers often described British club life: see Faujas de
Saint-Fond, Travels in England, Scotland and the Hebrides (London 1799), Vol. 1, 6–8
(voyage undertaken before 1789); Henri Descremps, Le Parisien a
`Londres ou Avis aux
franc¸ ais qui vont en Angleterre (Amsterdam 1789), Vol. 2, 70.
18. Anne-Marie du Boccage, Lettres de Madame du Boccage, contenant ses voyages en
France, en Angleterre, en Hollande et en Italie (Dresde 1771), 25.
19. Vale
´rie Capdeville, L’a
ˆge d’or des clubs londoniens (1730–1784) (Paris 2008), 346.
20. See Ian Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform (London 1962).
21. British Library ADD MSS 21254, ‘Minute Books of the London Abolition
Committee’; J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Antislavery: The Mobilization
of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade (Manchester 1995); Leo d’Anjou, Social
Movements and Cultural Change: The First Abolition Campaign Revisited (New York
1996).
22. Public Advertiser, January 10, 1788 (letter of 27 December 1787); Roger Anstey, The
Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (London 1975), 263–5.
23. Public Advertiser, February 12, 1788. Drescher, 70.
24. Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress & Accomplishment of the Abolition
of the African Slave Trade, by the British Parliament (London 1808) Vol. 1, 491;
Drescher, 74–6.
25. Antoine Lilti, Le monde des salons: sociabilite
´et mondanite
´a
`Paris au XVIIIe sie
`cle
(Paris 2005).
26. Jonathan Conlin, ‘Wilkes, the Chevalier D’Eon and ‘‘the Dregs of Liberty’’: An Anglo-
French Perspective on Ministerial Despotism, 1762–1771’, English Historical Review,
Vol. 120, no. 489 (2005), 1251–88.
27. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French
Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY 1993), 233, 262; Josephine Grieder, Anglomania in France,
1740–1789: Fact, Fiction and Political Discourse (Geneva 1985), 26–7.
28. Analyse des papiers anglois, January 31–February 1, 1788.
29. Discours sur la ne
´cessite
´d’e
´tablir a
`Paris une Socie
´te
´pour concourir, avec celle de
Londres, a
`l’abolition de la traite & de l’esclavage des Ne
`gres (Paris 1788). Leading
British abolitionist Granville Sharp reciprocated to Brissot that ‘we consider our plan
as extending to the whole world’. Sharp Papers, Gloucestershire Record Office D 3549
13-1-B35.
30. Analyse,February 1–5 and February 12–15, 1788.
31. Etienne Clavie
`re and Jacques-Pierre Brissot, ‘Prospectus de la Socie
´te
´Gallo-
Ame
´ricaine’, in De la France et des Etats-Unis: ou de l’importance de la re
´volution de
l’Ame
´rique pour le bonheur de la France, des rapports de ce royaume et des Etats-Unis, des
avantages re
´ciproques qu’ils peuvent retirer de leurs liaisons de commerce (London 1787),
340–1.
32. Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Nouveau voyage dans les Etats-Unis de l’Ame
´rique Septentrionale,
fait en 1788 (Paris 1791), Vol. 1, 51, Vol. 2, 10. Eloise Elley, Brissot de Warville: A Study
in the History of the French Revolution (Boston 1915), 77–9.
33. Brissot, Nouveau voyage, Vol. 1, i.
614 European History Quarterly 44(4)
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34. Philipp Zeiche, Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution
(Charlottesville, VA 2010). On the flag, see Patriote franc¸ ais, February 21, 1792. On
Franklin’s death, see Abbe
´Fauchet, Eloge civique de Benjamin Franklin, prononce
´,le21
juillet 1790 (Paris 1790), and Discours du comte de Mirabeau, dans la se
´ance du 11 juin,
sur la mort de Benjamin Francklin (Paris 1790).
35. Pennsylvania Historical Society, Microfilm , Series 2, Reel 11, nos. 36, 62, 63. No cor-
respondence from American societies was found in the Jacobin archives consulted for
this project. No early French political clubs, meanwhile, appear to have cited the exam-
ple of contemporary Dutch organizations. See Simon Schama, Patriots & Liberators:
Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780–1813 (New York 1977).
36. Letter the First Addressed to the Delegates from the Several Congregations of Protestant
Dissenters who met at Devizes on September 14, 1789 (Salisbury 1790), 34.
37. Avis aux franc¸ ais sur les clubs (Paris 1791), 9.
38. Transcribed Socie
´te
´des amis des noirs meetings register, ‘Se
´ance du 4 mars 1788’, in
Marcel Dorigny and Bernard Gainot, eds, La Socie
´te
´des amis des noirs, 1788–1799:
contribution a
`l’histoire de l’abolition de l’esclavage (Paris 1998), 77–8.
39. ‘Assemble
´e du Comite
´tenue le 16 juin 1789’, in ibid., 230.
40. Huntington Library, MSS CN 53.
41. Clarkson, History of the Rise, 124–64.
42. Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age
of the French Revolution (London 1979), 85; Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of
Country (London 1789), 41–44; J. E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-War
Liberalism in England, 1793–1815 (Cambridge 1982), 14.
43. Correspondence of the Revolution Society,42
44. Ibid., 2.
45. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London 1790); A Letter to the
Right Honourable Edmund Burke, in reply to his ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France,
etc,’ by a Member of the Revolution Society (London n.d.).
46. Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the First French National
Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, NJ
1996), 123–9, 206–7.
47. Ibid., 185–8. The Monarchiens were influenced by British models as well, desiring
to bring a bicameral legislature to France. Hammersley, English Republican
Tradition, 155.
48. Micah Alpaugh, ‘The Politics of Escalation in French Revolutionary Protest: Political
Demonstrations, Nonviolence and Violence in the Grandes journe
´es of 1789’, French
History, Vol. 23, no. 3 (Fall 2009), 336–59.
49. Friedrich Karl Heitz, Les socie
´te
´spolitiques de Strasbourg pendant les anne
´es 1790 a
`
1795: extraits de leurs proce
`s-verbaux (Strasbourg 1863), 2.
50. Chronique de Strasbourg, No. X.
51. Archives de
´partementales de la Tarn-et-Garonne, L 402 2, Register entry of September
9, 1790; AD He
´rault L 5532, letter of May 7, 1790.
52. Re
`glement pour la Socie
´te
´des amis de la Constitution, e
´tablie dans la ville de Vire le 6 juin
1790 (n.p. 1790), 5.
53. Archives municipales de Cherbourg 2 1 112 2. In April 1790, the club remained the
Socie
´te
´litte
´raire des amis de la Constitution de Cherbourg. On the Albi club, see
Kennedy, First Years, 320.
Alpaugh 615
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54. Denis Diderot and Jean Rond d’Alembert, eds, L’Encyclope
´die, ou Dictionnaire raisonne
´
des sciences, des arts, et des me
´tiers (Neuchaˆ tel 1752–4), Vol. 15, 259. On the relation-
ships between eighteenth-century French and British cultural organizations, see Ann
Thompson, Simon Burrows and Edmond Dziembowski, eds, Cultural Transfers: France
and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford 2010).
55. Journal des Clubs, undated prospectus, 6.
56. Jean-Nicolas Pache, Observations sur les socie
´te
´s patriotiques (n.p. 1790), 2.
57. Atlas de la Re
´volution franc¸ aise, Vol. 6, 9.
58. Ibid., 34.
59. Journal des Clubs, 1–2.
60. Ibid., 33.
61. AD He
´rault, L 5539 unnumbered, letter of 18 September 1790.
62. AD Tarn-et-Garonne, L 388 unnumbered. Printed circular of 20 March 1791.
63. Kennedy notes how large societies sent correspondence to hundreds of locales, with the
Toulouse branch circulating material to 272 other Jacobin clubs by September 1791.
First Years, 20–1
64. AD Tarn-et-Garonne, L 236 unnumbered. Journal des socie
´te
´s-patriotiques franc¸aises ,
prospectus.
65. Ibid. Printed circular, undated.
66. Correspondence, 12.
67. Ibid., 16. Undated.
68. Ibid., 60. Letter of 27 August 1790.
69. Ibid., 82. Letter of 16 September 1790.
70. Ibid., 87. Letter of September (undated), 1790. On 4 November 1790 the society noted
correspondence from 19 societies: the Jacobins of Aix-en-Provence, Alais, Amiens, Calais,
Chaˆ lon-sur-Saoˆ ne, Cresey, Cherbourg, Dijon, Lille, La Rochelle, Lorient, Montargis,
Montpellier, Nantes, Paris, Pontoise, Strasbourg, Toulouseand Vire, along with additional
correspondence fromNıˆ mes, Clermont-Ferrand and Langon (ibid., 105, 109, 111, and 112).
71. Ibid., 98. Letter of 2 October 1790.
72. AD He
´rault, L 5543 8. Letter of 1 October 1790.
73. Ibid., L 5545, unnumbered. Letter of 14 October 1790.
74. Correspondence, 40.
75. Ibid, 52; Re
´volutions de Paris, February 6–13, 1790. Rights for British Catholics were
reportedly also under Parliamentary consideration: Le nouvelliste national, journal de
Toulouse, January 13, 1790.
76. Correspondence, 86.
77. This could occur fairly quickly: ‘quatre mois environ’ after the Jacobins of Tulle’s estab-
lishment, their Qu’est-ce que les Cloubs, ou expose
´simple & fidelle des principes & de la
conduite de la Socie
´te
´des Amis de la Constitution e
´tablie a
`Tulle, adresse
´a
`tous les hommes
de bonne foi & qui aiment la ve
´rite
´(Brive 1790) omitted discussion of the British case. See
also the Jacobins of Vannes’s February 1791 founding documents (Archives de
´partemen-
tales du Morbihan L 1530 1), referencing only preceding French Jacobin examples.
78. AD He
´rault, 5542, unnumbered. Circulars of 11 January and 3 March 1791; AM
Cherbourg 2 I 121 1.
79. Club des impartiaux, prospectus (ca. February 1790); Paul R. Hanson, ‘The Monarchist
Clubs and the Pamphlet Debate over Political Legitimacy in the Early Years of the
French Revolution’, French Historical Studies, Vol. 21, no. 2 (1998), 301.
616 European History Quarterly 44(4)
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80. Archives municipales de Nantes I2 C2: Letter from Jacobins of Aurillac to those of
Nantes, 1 February 1791.
81. BM Poitiers 142/1 S19, unnumbered. Printed circular, 21 April 1791.
82. Journal de la Socie
´te
´de 1789, prospectus. The Paris branch repeatedly ordered pro-
vincial societies not to affiliate or correspond with outside organizations: Archives
de
´partementales du Haut-Vienne, L 822 21, 40 and 48.
83. Howard V. Evans, ‘The Nootka Sound Controversy in Anglo-French Diplomacy’,
Journal of Modern History, Vol. 46 (1974), 635; Hamish Scott, ‘A Model of Conduct
from the Age of Chivalry? Honor, International Decline and the End of the Bourbon
Monarchy’ and Thomas E. Kaiser, ‘The Austrian Alliance, the Seven Years’ War and
the Emergence of a French ‘‘National’’ Foreign Policy, 1756–1790’, in Julian Swann
and Joel Fe
´lix, eds, The Crisis of the Absolute Monarchy: France from the Old Regime to
Revolution (Oxford 2013), 167–204.
84. Patriote franc¸ ais, 22 July 1790.
85. Re
´volutions de Paris, 24–31 July 1790; 24 May–4 June 1791.
86. Ibid., 24–31 July 1790.
87. Patriote franc¸ ais, 9 August 1791.
88. Archives parlementaires, Vol. 17, 229.
89. Ibid., 412.
90. AD He
´rault, L 5542, unnumbered; BM Poitiers, MSS 141 S18 39; AD Tarn-et-
Garonne, L 236, unnumbered.
91. Kennedy, Jacobin Clubs: First Years, 237. Archives de
´partementales du Haut-Vienne,
L 829, Seine-Infe
´rieure no. 3, letter from Montevilliers Jacobins to Limoges Jacobins of
30 October 1790; L 828, Pas-de-Calais no. 4, letter from Arras Jacobins to Limoges
Jacobins of 17 November 1790; Archives de
´partementales du Morhiban L 2000 14,
Lorient Jacobin register, 1 November 1790.
92. In Correspondence, 115–275. Addresses can be found from Aix-en-Provence (thrice),
Arras, Auxerre, Bayonne, Bergerac, Bordeaux (twice), Bourges, Brest, Chartres,
Cherbourg, Clermont-Ferrand, Cognac, Le Havre, Honfleur, Hye
`res, Grenoble, Lille
(twice), Limoges, Lisieux, Marennes, Marseille (twice), Nantes (thrice), Nimes,
Orle
´ans, Paris (thrice), Poitiers, Rennes, Rouen, Saint-Servan, Saintes, Strasbourg
(twice), Toulouse, Tours (twice),Valence and Versailles, as well as addresses from the
youth societies affiliated with the Toulouse and Paris clubs.
93. Correspondence, 132. Letter of May 2, 1791. On broader French–British exchanges in
1791–92, see Kennedy, Middle Years, 151–5.
94. Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Discours sur l’utilite
´des socie
´te
´s patriotiques et populaires, sur la
ne
´cessite
´de les maintenir et de les multiplier par-tout (Paris 1791), 3 and 5.
95. Patriote franc¸ ais, 2 February 1790; 13 April 1790, 6 May 1790; Bulletin de
Bordeaux, 30 January 1790; Re
´volutions de Paris, 6–13 February 1790; 12–19
February 1791.
96. Adresse de la socie
´te
´des amis des noirs, a
`l’Assemble
´e nationale, a
`toutes les Villes du
Commerce, a
`toutes les Manufactures, aux Colonies, a
`toutes les Socie
´te
´s des Amis de la
Constitution (Paris 1791), 170.
97. Ibid.
98. British Library, ADD MSS 21256 6.
99. Ibid., 61.
100. Price, 306. Letter of 2 July 1790.
Alpaugh 617
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101. Anniversary of the Revolution in France (London 1790); AM Cherbourg 2 1 124 1,
Letter from Stanhope to Jacobins of Cherbourg, 16 August 1790.
102. Journal de Bordeaux, 6 October 1790.
103. Thomas Walker, A Review of Some of the Political Events which have Occurred in
Manchester, During the Last Five Years (London 1794), 11–15; Herbert S. Skeats,
History of the Free Churches of England, 1688–1891 (London 1891), 494–5.
104. Huntington Library, HM 847: W. Hutton, ‘A Narrative of the Dreadful Riots in
Birmingham, July 14, 1791’; Patriote franc¸ ais, 26 and 27 July 1791.
105. The Argus, 8 November 1790.
106. Thomas Paine, Address and Declaration to the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty
(London n.d.), 5.
107. Mary Thale, ed., Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792–
1799 (Cambridge 1983), 5.
108. George Woodcock, ‘The Meaning of Revolution in Britain’, in Ceri Crossley and Ian
Small, eds, The French Revolution and British Culture (Oxford 1989), 18.
109. Thale, 8; Lucyle Thomas Werkmeister, A Newspaper History of England, 1792–1793
(Lincoln 1967), 72. Each local affiliate commonly advertised their formation in two or
more London papers.
110. Thale, 10.
111. Ibid., 9.
112. NA TS 11/959 unnumbered.
113. Discours de MM. Cooper and Watt, De
´pute
´s de la socie
´te
´constitutionnelle de
Manchester, prononce
´a
`la socie
´te
´des amis de la Constitution, se
´ante a
`Paris, le 13
avril 1792 (Paris 1792), 2–5.
114. NA TS 11/952/3496; Scott, 159–60.
115. ‘Adresse de plusieurs Socie
´te
´s en Angleterre a
`la Convention Nationale. Lue dans la
Se
´ance du 7ie
`me novembre 1792’, in Adresses, &c., &c., &c. (London 1792), 12–15.
116. ‘De
´putation de la part de la Socie
´te
´constitutionnelle de Londres, admise a
`la
Convention nationale de France, le 28ieme novembre, 1792’; Ibid., 23; on the attempt
to form a British Convention, see Kenneth R. Johnston, ‘The First and Last British
Convention’, Romanticism, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2007) 99–132.
117. University of Reading Special Collections, Turner 263 195, handwritten minutes.
118. AD He
´rault, L 5527, unnumbered.
119. NA TS 11/952/3496; Scott, 173.
120. Scott, 176.
121. ‘Adresse de la Socie
´te
´de Newington, a
`la Convention nationale, date
´e du 31ie
`me
Octobre, 1792. Lue dans la Se
´ance du 10ieme Nov 1792’; Reading, ibid., 194.
122. Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Expose
´de la conduite de la nation franc¸ aise, envers le peuple
anglais, et des motifs qui ont amene
´la rupture entre la Re
´publique franc¸ aise & le Roi
d’Angleterre (Paris 1793).
123. Expose
´historique des motifs qui ont amene
´la rupture entre la Re
´publique franc¸ aise et
S.M. Britannique (Paris 1793).
124. Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers /
Crown and Anchor Tavern, Strand. November 10, 1795 (London 1795).
125. Association Papers. Part 1 (London 1793), 1–2; David Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the
English State in the 1790s’, in Mark Philip, ed., The French Revolution and British
Popular Politics (Cambridge 1991), 154; K. Gilmartin, ‘In the Theater of
618 European History Quarterly 44(4)
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Counterrevolution: Loyalist Association and Conservative Association in the 1790s’,
Journal of British Studies, Vol. 41, no. 3 (2002), 291–328.
126. Daniel Stuart, Peace and Reform, Against War and Corruption (London 1794), 18–19.
127. An Account, and NA TS11/952/3496, Scott.
Author Biography
Micah Alpaugh is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central
Missouri. His first book, Non-violence and the French Revolution: Political
Demonstrations in Paris, 1787–1795, is forthcoming from Cambridge University
Press in early 2015. He is currently attempting a broad study of the interconnec-
tions between the principal social movements of the revolutionary north Atlantic,
‘Protest in the Age of Democratic Revolutions: America, Britain, Ireland and
France, 1765–1795’.
Alpaugh 619
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