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By Root 2509 0

and the Vendée. At the same time many British politicians, including, of course, most of those who made up the administrations of the 1790s, feared the principles of the French Revolution, and supported Pitt’s clampdown on domestic radicalism. But a Bourbon restoration was quite another matter. Some politicians and statesmen - most notably, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Grenville, and his acolyte, William Windham - continued to believe in a ‘strategy of overthrow’ whereby peace would be restored and Jacobinism stamped out by the liberation of France, but the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Henry Dundas, and many others, distrusted such visionary schemes. While Grenville argued for a march on Paris, the sceptics favoured a colonial and economic struggle that would allow the British simply to outlast the French. Inherent in this strategy was the possibility of a compromise peace based on the restoration of the frontiers of 1792, and this in turn was strengthened by growing disillusionment with French royalism as a military and political force (and, for that matter, with its chief supporters: arrogant and overbearing, Grenville was not good at carrying opinion with him, and Windham was notorious for his lack of realism and poor judgement). Meanwhile, even the most hardline members of the Grenville faction were not fighting a war for feudalism. On the contrary, in their view France should be allowed to enjoy her own 1688 and end up as some sort of constitutional monarchy, and in most quarters even this limited goal was qualified by the recognition that any solution reached in France would have to be the work not of foreign arms, but of her own politicians.

By the beginning of 1800, then, there had emerged the basis of a more moderate position than the one encompassed by the Grenvillites. If France could be hedged about in such a way that she could not export the Revolution, she could safely be left to her own devices, thereby obviating the need for a change of regime. Whatever use was made of royalism, Britain’s aim in the Second Coalition was centred on a plan that was to form the keystone of her European policy until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. France was to be confined to the frontiers of 1792 and shut in by a series of buffer states which would be backed up by a quadruple alliance of the great powers. Thus far there was no difference from Grenville’s stategy: indeed, the scheme was in origin his. But, whereas for the Foreign Secretary, the great cordon sanitaire would set the seal on total victory, for men of a more temperate disposition it was a substitute for this end. If the regime in France proved unable to sustain itself, all well and good, but its overthrow was no longer a necessity. With the advent of Napoleon, meanwhile, a further complication emerged. On the one hand his record suggested that he was a warlord and adventurer who was no more to be trusted than his predecessors, and yet on the other there were reports that he was aping the forms of the monarchy and planning to introduce a moderate constitution that would protect men of property. Grenville claimed that Brumaire made no difference, but the Prime Minister, William Pitt, took a more flexible line than is often allowed. For the time being, Britain must be cautious: with France in control of Belgium, for example, there could be no question of peace negotiations, but the possibility of a treaty was not ruled out, and a Corsican secret agent was dispatched to Paris with the explicit brief of finding out more. As for the Bourbons, they could not be allowed to stand in the way of British national interest: nothing should be done that would bar Britain from considering whether continuing the war was more damaging to her situation than negotiating a peace settlement. To this end Pitt stressed that it was vital that no commitment should be made to the restoration of Louis XVIII per se. Indeed, the question might be asked, why should Britain fight for Louis XVIII when Louis XIV had one hundred years before been posing much the same danger to Britain