Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 English Sermons and tracts as media of debate on the French Revolution 1789–99
- 2 Interpretations of anti-Jacobinism
- 3 The fragmented ideology of reform
- 4 Radicalism, revolution and political culture: an Anglo-French comparison
- 5 Revolution, war and the nation state: the British and French experiences 1789–1801
- 6 War, revolution and the crisis of the British empire
- 7 Patriotism and the English state in the 1790s
- 8 Conservatism and stability in British society
- 9 English society and revolutionary politics in the 1790s: the case for insurrection
- Index
4 - Radicalism, revolution and political culture: an Anglo-French comparison
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 English Sermons and tracts as media of debate on the French Revolution 1789–99
- 2 Interpretations of anti-Jacobinism
- 3 The fragmented ideology of reform
- 4 Radicalism, revolution and political culture: an Anglo-French comparison
- 5 Revolution, war and the nation state: the British and French experiences 1789–1801
- 6 War, revolution and the crisis of the British empire
- 7 Patriotism and the English state in the 1790s
- 8 Conservatism and stability in British society
- 9 English society and revolutionary politics in the 1790s: the case for insurrection
- Index
Summary
‘Radicalism’ has become an established term with regard to the late eighteenth-century movement for political reform in England, whereas the term radicalisme is not normally used to designate a particular political group during the French Revolution. We are wont to speak of a radicalisation of the Revolution. But the radicals themselves we call Jacobins, sans-culottes or some other contemporaneous name. Any attempt to compare English and French radicalism in the period of the French Revolution should therefore make clear to which political currents it refers.
The term ‘radicalism’ enters the political language(s) of Europe during the opening decades of the nineteenth century. It seems to have been first used in Britain, from where it migrated to France during the 1820s and via France to Germany during the 1830s. Just like the term ‘conservative’ which appeared at about the same time, it was used to describe a particular way of dealing with the political heritage of the eighteenth-century revolution in government. Whereas the adjective ‘radical’ came eventually to be used in a politically neutral sense, the noun never lost the original semantic link with the later eighteenth-century demand to enforce the principle of government by consent without any social reservation. Uncompromising conservatives were never called radicals but found themselves, equally tellingly, labelled die-hards or ultras. A radical was someone who adhered unflinchingly to the leading principles of what Robert Palmer has named the ‘democratic revolution’ of the later eighteenth century.
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- Information
- The French Revolution and British Popular Politics , pp. 78 - 98Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991
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