Beethoven, himself under police surveillance as a potential revolutionary, wrote to a friend in Bonn that there was much talk of revolution in Vienna, but concluded that ‘as long as the Austrians have brown beer and sausages, they’ll never revolt’. Nonetheless, the struggle against ‘wild democratic aspirations’ and ‘revolutionary leanings’ did not let up – and brought ideology into every sphere. In Pergen’s view, economic development represented a danger, since it disrupted the desired calm and often involved contact with foreigners. He therefore imposed restrictions on trade and brought in legislation inhibiting the building of factories, in order to prevent the expansion of the urban working class. The numbers of journeymen allowed to become masters and thereby acquire the right to settle in the larger towns were also restricted, for the same reason.7
By the end of 1794, most European powers had accepted that the Revolution in France could not be crushed by military means and that, after the fall of Robespierre, it no longer posed an immediate threat. They were therefore prepared to recognise the French Republic and make peace with it. Austria was not. ‘The Directory in Paris pursues with an unheard-of energy the consummation of its projects to destroy Europe,’ Thugut explained. He stressed the sophistication of the ‘secret manoeuvres that they employ to seduce and to corrupt the multitude’ and warned that ‘a deplorable catastrophe will inevitably envelop all the thrones’ unless it was crushed. Austria would fight on. Saurau commissioned the words for a national anthem from Lorenz Leopold Haschka, a former Jesuit and member of the Illuminati, now a police informer. The music, composed by Joseph Haydn, is today better known as that of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles’.8
The only other power which had not come to terms with the French Republic was Britain. It was the only European state to have, in the shape of the Channel, a clear line of defence against ‘contagion’, which should not in any case have posed the same problem as it did for the others. Systems of government such as the Austrian denied not just the mass of the people and the middle classes, but most of the nobility any say in how things were run. They were predicated on the principle that the monarch and his chosen advisers knew best, and the rest of society should not trouble their heads with anything other than their private concerns. Such systems had everything to fear from the French example.
Britain had been inoculated by its long tradition of representative government, imperfect as it was. The right to think, question and publish views on the governance of the country had been practised by significant sections of the population for decades. The calling of the French Assembly of Notables in 1787 and of the Estates General in 1789 had been followed with interest, largely because the system of representation at Westminster, with its restricted franchise and ‘rotten boroughs’ at the disposal of major landowners, was crying out for an overhaul. Many felt that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which had brought William of Orange to the British throne needed to be built upon: the Society for Constitutional Information, founded in 1780, and the London Revolution Society hoped to mark the upcoming centenary by reforming the constitution. The prime minister himself, William Pitt the Younger, made two attempts at improving the system, without success. The calling of the Estates General in France, followed by the fall of the Bastille, had as a result been welcomed by the majority of the articulate population of the British Isles. Political tourists trooped off to Paris to breathe the air of liberty and returned discussing constitutional issues. In March 1790 a group of Whigs brought a moderate Bill for reform before the House of Commons.
While they may have taken heart from what was happening in Paris, the advocates for reform in England were firmly rooted in a home-grown political tradition defined by the Glorious Revolution, Magna Carta and mythical rights supposedly enjoyed by their Anglo-Saxon forebears. Several of the founders of the Norwich Revolution Society had witnessed the fall of the Bastille and the first days of the Revolution, but while they applauded the ends, they baulked at the very un-English means, and were disgusted by the sight of heads being paraded on pikestaffs. Over the past century Englishmen of all classes had defined themselves in contrast to the French, who were viewed with a rich mixture of mistrust, contempt and fear.
Some did have more radical designs. Thomas Spence, a Newcastle schoolmaster who had moved to London, voiced the view that all land should be held in common. William Godwin advocated the abolition of property and government, which placed him in the same camp as the Illuminati. Thomas Paine, the first part of whose Rights of Man was published in March 1791, was a republican, and some members of the various constitutional societies wanted to see monarchy ‘ripped up by the roots’. Others, such as the Welsh minister Richard Price, while stopping short of republicanism, derided the notion of Divine Right and saw the king as little more than the highest civil servant. Implicit in the thinking of many of these was the notion of a right to resistance to the abuse of power by the king, in effect the right to revolt, but, as many pointed out, this was well within the spirit of 1688. Most of the would-be reformers wanted to see only a rationalisation of parliamentary procedure and an extension of the franchise.9
The parliamentary elections in the summer of 1790 went off peacefully. In May 1791, only three months before the Austro-Prussian declaration of Pillnitz, Pitt, who felt that the events in France were the internal affair of that country and adopted a policy of guarded neutrality, told the Commons that he saw ‘no danger’ in the large number of pamphlets calling for reform of one kind or another, and that ‘he could not think the French Revolution or any of the new constitutions, could be deemed an object fit for imitation in this country by any set of men’.10
This did not reassure Burke. In his Reflections he set out to convince those who had given way to what he called ‘a juvenile warmth’ in welcoming the Revolution in France. Chiming with the Emperor Francis’s view of the great ‘swindle’, he argued that they had fallen for the ‘delusive plausibilities’ of the arguments of the ‘sophisters, oeconomists and calculators’ aimed at the established Church, the monarchy and ‘the manners of gentlemen’. He challenged those agitating for reform, disputing their contention that they were acting in the spirit of 1688, and fiercely attacked the likes of Price. He maintained that the English constitution was perfect in all essentials, and praised the ‘sullen resistance to innovation’ and the ‘cold sluggishness of our national character’ which he saw as both its inspiration and its safeguard. There was certainly nothing cold, sluggish or traditionally English about his own attitude. As the novelist Fanny Burney remarked, whenever the subject of reform came up, his face would assume ‘the expression of a man who is going to defend himself from murderers’. He also liked to equate the desire for change with the ‘ferocious dissoluteness in manners’ he saw in France, making a connection between reform and immorality.11
Dissenters of every kind, be they Methodists, Wesleyans, Catholics or Jews, were generally associated with reform, as they had been campaigning throughout the 1780s for the repeal of the Test Act which placed civil disabilities on all those outside the Anglican Church. In one impassioned diatribe the Birmingham scientist and Unitarian theologian Dr Joseph Priestley had used an unfortunate metaphor, of laying gunpowder under the old edifice of error and superstition, and this was fastened on, leading to his being accused of plotting to blow up Anglican churches. Burke denounced Priestley and his ilk as revolutionaries whose real aim was not the repeal of the Test Act, but the overthrow of the English constitution.
Priestley and a number of prominent citizens, many of them Dissenters, used to meet at Birmingham’s city library to discuss anything from science to theology. In July 1791, on the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, they held a celebratory dinner. And although they dined under a portrait of the king, toasting