In the Theater of Counterrevolution

Loyalist Association and Conservative Opinion in the 1790s

Datos Bibliográficos

ID10067699
AutoresKevin Gilmartin (autor de correspondencia)
Año2002
Volumen41
Número3
Páginas291-328
Fecha de publicación2002-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of British Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-9371 • E-ISSN: 1545-6986
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1086/341151
OpenAlexW2152349839
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6
Referencias citadas41

Conservative movements have generally played a negative role in accounts of the history of political expression in Britain during the period of the French Revolution. Where E. P. Thompson and others on the Left tended to identify radicalism with the disenfranchised and with a struggle for the rights of free expression and public assembly, conservative activists have been associated with state campaigns of political repression and legal interference. Indeed, conservatism in this period is typically conceived in negative terms, as antiradicalism or counterrevolution. If this has been the view of hostile commentators, it is consistent with a more sympathetic mythology that sees nothing novel about the conservative principles that emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. They represent an establishment response to alien challenges. Even where conservatives set about mobilizing the resources of print, opinion, and assembly in a constructive fashion, the reputation for interference has endured. John Reeves's Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers is a useful case in point, since it managed in its brief but enterprising history to combine fierce anti-Jacobinism with the later eighteenth century's rising tide of voluntary civic activism. The association came together at the Crown and Anchor Tavern when a group of self-professed “private men” decided “to form ourselves into an Association” and announced their intentions through the major London newspapers in November and December of 1792. The original committee then called on others “to make similar exertions in their respective neighbourhoods,” forming energetic local associations that would be linked by regular correspondence with the central London committee. In this way, the loyalist movement grew with astonishing speed

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