A war of ideas

the long version

This book offers a wide-ranging exploration of the attitudes of various groups of British people to the conflicts which followed the French Revolution: the government, their supporters and their opponents inside and outside Parliament, women, churchmen, and the mass of British public opinion. It presents the debate in England and Scotland provoked by the war both as the sequel to the French Revolution and as a distinct debate in itself. The author argues that contemporaries saw this conflict as one of the first since the wars of religion to be significantly shaped by ideological hostility as well as by strategic interests.