This article aims to uncover various strands of Scottish political thought concerning the evolution of warfare and national feelings during the French revolutionary wars (1792–1802).
The impact of the French Revolution on British political thought has long formed an object of study for scholars, with much of the interest focusing on the dispute that set Edmund Burke against the Whig and radical defenders of the Revolution. The events in France after 1792, it is argued, lent added weight to Burke's devastating critique of the French philosophes, and largely discredited both the languages of republicanism and natural rights in Britain.Footnote 1 This article, however, approaches the question of the British reception of the French Revolution from a different angle: it is not directly concerned with the disputes surrounding the French political and social reforms, but rather with the contemporary perceptions and understanding of the transformations in warfare, national feeling, and international relations that marked the period. These transformations were arguably as revolutionary as the social and political upheavals of the 1790s, and have themselves been the focus of much scholarly attention; yet the contemporary reflections they attracted in Britain have remained mostly unexplored.Footnote 2 This is largely due to the fact that few English commentators truly engaged with these topics after Edmund Burke's initial warning against the dangers of the French army. Several of their Scottish colleagues, it will be suggested here, however, devoted much time and energy to such discussions, and the analyses they offered displayed common concerns derived from various specifically Scottish traditions. As such, they can be said to offer both coherent and distinctive views, which were neither directly inspired by Burke's commentary nor by the contemporary English debate on the revolutionary wars.
Here, the aim is to recover elements of this Scottish debate, by examining it in its own terms rather than in the context of the London controversy. The Scottish commentary on the revolutionary wars, it should be kept in mind, was also grounded in local concerns and traditions. Social histories of military citizenship now underline the common cultural roots (including the ancient ideals) which shaped idealizations of both citizens and soldiers throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and nowhere did notions of commercial, urban citizenship and virtuous soldiering mesh together more openly than in Scotland.Footnote 3 This article does not aspire to offer such social or cultural analysis of Scottish military discourse in the 1790s. Yet, it is suggested, recovering the specificities of the Scottish debate on the war does require putting it in its local intellectual context, and focusing on writers who did not necessarily contribute to the much more visible discussions taking place in London.
By 1789, Scotland was politically fully integrated into the British state. Unlike Ireland, it saw no large-scale popular uprisings in the 1790s, and its lord advocate Robert Dundas (nephew of Pitt's war minister Henry Dundas) enforced a severe legal repression of radicalism in 1793–4. Scotland's response to the Revolution and to the ensuing wars was, in fact, characterized by the loyalism of the political and intellectual establishment.Footnote 4 As the French Revolution was transforming the English political debate in the early 1790s, Scottish intellectual life was not as outwardly ebullient: the historians, philosophers, and political economists of Glasgow and Edinburgh who had gained fame in eighteenth-century Europe were growing old (with the exception of the younger John Millar), and Adam Smith only survived the fall of the Bastille by a year. The ‘Burke–Paine’ controversy was clearly centred in London, and the young and ambitious Scots who intervened in the debate did so from England, for a primarily English audience.Footnote 5 Yet, it will be shown, several Scottish thinkers formulated detailed discussions that built upon the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment to offer distinct analyses of the issues of war and patriotism.
The revolutionary wars, indeed, challenged Scottish Enlightenment conceptions of progress and modernity in several ways. David Hume and Adam Smith had famously developed analyses of modernity as being characterized by the rise of polite, regulated exchanges. Yet, as the French nation unleashed what many in Britain perceived to be an ancient form of patriotism, as well as a new cosmopolitan outlook based on ideology rather than national jealousy, it seemed to put in question their commerce-based analyses of modern politics.Footnote 6 Just as importantly, the French revolutionary wars revived a particularly sensitive topic in Scottish history: Andrew Fletcher had warned during the Union debate that Scotland should not prioritize its commercial development over the civic and military virtue of its citizens, and his plans for a Scottish militia had been periodically revived throughout the century.Footnote 7 The heritage of Fletcherian republicanism thus continued to infuse, to varying degrees, the Scottish Enlightenment writers' exchange-based accounts of progress. The unprecedented and overwhelming success of the new French army, and the threat posed to commercial Britain by republican France, renewed this familiar tension between commerce and virtue, and challenged the complex theoretical equilibriums formulated by the Scottish political economists and historians of civil society. These common concerns link together the writers examined in this article, primarily the historian John Millar and the Moderate ministers of Edinburgh, as well as the younger political writers James Mackintosh and Lord Lauderdale.
I
Scotland's experience of the French revolutionary wars was essentially a British one: by and large, Scottish commentators were divided along the same political lines as their English counterparts.Footnote 8 The discussions that were taking place in England were, indeed, characterized by their continuing focus on domestic politics, and neither the supporters nor the critics of the revolutionaries were directly interested in analysing the transformations of national and military sentiment in France.Footnote 9 Burke's Reflections did warn against the dangers of democratic armies, but his analysis was not focused on national sentiment: rather, he denounced their fanatic attachment to the idea of liberty, their easily shifting allegiances, and their tendency to lead to despotism.Footnote 10 The Tories, like Pitt, portrayed revolutionary France as merely continuing the French monarchy's eighteenth-century quest for universal monarchy.Footnote 11 The Foxite Whigs' critique of the war was primarily defined by their opposition to Pitt and their support for domestic reform. As for the radical opposition, it was on the whole much less interested in analysing the evolution of national and military sentiments than in defending democratic ideas.Footnote 12 When radicals were interested in discussing the nature of war and patriotism, like Paine and Vicesimus Knox, their argument remained centred on the cosmopolitan love displayed by the French Republic, and their conviction that war was the weapon of despotisms and incompatible with democratic systems prevented them from paying attention to the military innovation displayed by republican France.Footnote 13 In England, therefore, reflections on war and national feeling were primarily framed in political terms of ‘loyalism’ to the government, opposition to Pitt and support for domestic reform, or ‘cosmopolitan’ support for French principles.Footnote 14
This English discussion was relayed in the Scottish press, and in the enlightened circles of Glasgow and Edinburgh writers certainly took sides in the debate that opposed loyalist to reformist pamphleteers.Footnote 15 For the ‘Moderate’ conservative Whig ministers who formed the backbone of the Edinburgh Enlightenment, loyalism was a self-evident position: as their Whig allegiances were primarily linked to wholehearted acceptance of the constitutional compromise of 1688, their political stance always remained subordinate to their commitment to loyalty towards the government in London. It is therefore not surprising that they should have, as they had during the American wars, overwhelmingly sided with the government and delivered loyalist sermons in support of the war.Footnote 16
After the radical opposition was silenced in 1793, Scottish opposition to the war came primarily from the reformist Whigs who remained loyal to Fox. They struggled to establish a clear political stance in the first years of the war, but from 1796 found a voice in the pages of Lord Lauderdale's Scots Chronicle.Footnote 17 The paper printed Millar's Letters of Crito in 1796, which was dedicated to Charles James Fox and presented a classically Foxite Whig case against the war (analysed as a threat to English liberties and as a ‘crusade of kings’ determined to impose monarchy on France). The following year it printed extracts from Thomas Erskine's best-selling View of the causes and consequences of the present war with France, whose scathing critique of Pitt's diplomacy was also an attempt to strengthen ties between the Foxite Whigs and the dissenting ‘Friends of Peace’.Footnote 18
The Scottish commentary on the war against France thus appears, at first sight, to have been shaped by the lines of English politics.Footnote 19 It is in this view that Smith's early comments on cosmopolitan love have traditionally been analysed: as his 1790 additions to his Theory of moral sentiments offered a critique of Price's sermon On the love of country, they have been scrutinized for clues as to his views on ‘French principles’, and the question has been that of how politically reformist or conservative they showed him to be.Footnote 20 However, his comments can also be situated in a different context, and read as part of an ongoing philosophical discussion about the future of war and the nature of patriotism in commercial societies. This discussion was a continuation of several interconnected eighteenth-century debates.
The question of what war and patriotism would (or should) look like in the modern commercial monarchies of eighteenth-century Europe had preoccupied Smith's contemporaries long before the Revolution. The ancient ideal of citizenship, linked to the military defence of the city, no longer seemed to function in increasingly polite societies that preferred to employ costly standing armies to defend large territories. Following Montesquieu, who had already warned of the political dangers represented by standing armies in the context of commercialized Europe, several writers, including Ferguson, Mirabeau the elder, and the Abbé de Mably, had warned about the decline of citizen virtue and predicted revolutions leading to militarized despotic regimes.Footnote 21 In Scotland, David Hume's essay Of public credit (1752) had predicted that the cycle of war expenditures and debt in which Britain was trapped would soon become unsustainable, and that ‘either the nation must destroy public credit or public credit will destroy the nation’.Footnote 22 (Smith displayed a similar concern in 1776, when he wrote that national debts ‘at present oppress, and will in the long-run probably ruin, all the great nations of Europe’.Footnote 23) Hume identified several possible outcomes for the cycle of war and debt plaguing the French and British states, the most alarming of which was the ‘violent death’ of public credit (a military rout which arose from the lack of funds available to counter foreign invasions). In later years, he came to believe that any attempt to avoid this fate by declaring voluntary bankruptcy would result in despotism and the destruction of English liberties.Footnote 24
The Edinburgh political economist James Steuart shared Hume's concerns, and followed him in devising strongly pessimistic scenarios for the future of Europe. In his Inquiry into the principles of political economy (1767), he suggested that the modern system of finance had the potential to abolish England's current property-based political organization, and install in its place a Spartan military republic where all the income and production of the land would become the property of the state.Footnote 25 Then
let every man, willing to serve as a soldier, be received and taken care of; and those who either incline to be idle, or who are found to be superfluous, be sent out to the country. I ask, what confederacy among the modern European Princes, would carry on a successful war against such a people?'Footnote 26
This scenario established the conditions for a nationalized system of warfare conducted by militarized citizens, and bore much resemblance to the modes of war that emerged in Europe after the Revolution.
Curiously, the prophetic scenarios of Hume and Steuart are believed to have been somewhat forgotten in the 1790s, and at least until the early 1800s.Footnote 27 Of course, even a superficial review of contemporary comments tells us that the role played by national debt in the collapse of the French monarchy was acknowledged by many commentators in France and Britain alike in the 1790s, as it still is by modern scholarship.Footnote 28 Nevertheless, all in all, the contemporaries did not originally appeal to discourses of debt-induced collapse and military regeneration as a general framework of analysis for the events of the 1790s. Scholars identify these discourses' reappearance in public discussion only after the French revolutionary wars had ended, and with the beginning of the Napoleonic wars (1802–15).Footnote 29
This was largely because the Revolution that did take place in 1789 did not at first take the form of the militarized despotism predicted by Hume and Steuart, but that of a constitutional reform aiming towards a relative democratization of political power. In the aftermath of the Revolution, eighteenth-century discourses of debt-induced collapse continued to be invoked against the English monarchy, especially by the radical proponents of democratic reform: thus Paine referred to Smith's Wealth of nations to predict England's imminent ruin in The decline and fall of the English system of finance (1796).Footnote 30 Radical commentators such as Paine and Price had no interest in analysing the French reforms in Steuart-inspired terms of aggressive military citizenship, or in terms of Hume's ‘violent death’: instead, Price suggested an alternative outcome to the public credit dilemma presented by Hume.Footnote 31 The polite exchanges that characterized modern civil polities, he argued, were a pacifying and enlightening influence that could extinguish conflicts between men and countries, and foster a cosmopolitan love of mankind that would put an end to the cycle of war, expenses, and debt.Footnote 32
It is Price's ‘cosmopolitan’ response to Hume's fears that Smith denounced in 1790, in the additions to a new edition of his Theory of moral sentiments. Cosmopolitan love, he countered, could not stamp out the commercial jealousies and wars that plagued modern Europe, simply because it was incompatible with the moral nature of men.Footnote 33 Instead, Smith insisted on a rational conception of country love based on the psychological principle of sympathy. As the principle of sympathy determines our private affections by recommending to us our family, neighbours, and acquaintances in a concentric circle of benevolence, he argued, so the society in which we live is, ‘by nature, most strongly recommended to us’.Footnote 34 Smith concluded: ‘The love of our country seems not to be derived from the love of mankind.’Footnote 35 Therefore, in the modern world war would not be phased out by enlightened cosmopolitanism, but rather adapt to the establishment of a commercial society built upon polite exchanges – meaning it would be fought by paid standing armies, for limited commercial objectives.Footnote 36
The late eighteenth-century discussion surrounding debt, the nature of patriotism, and the conditions of modern warfare falls out of view with Smith's response to Price. Smith's comments are, in fact, usually interpreted in a different perspective: read in the context of the London pamphlet war, they are seen as a disavowal of the radical agenda and therefore as implicit condemnation of ‘French principles’.Footnote 37 Smith died in July 1790, and we cannot know what he would have thought of France's spectacular display of warlike patriotism from 1792 onward. It is clear, however, that the newly enthusiastic quality of French patriotism was viewed as a challenge to his rational understanding of national sentiment by several of his friends and colleagues. This transformation, indeed, appeared particularly striking to Scottish observers used to analysing societal change in terms of manners and sociability.Footnote 38 Several Scottish writers, it will be shown, built upon these specific queries to offer commentaries during the 1790s that focused on the contemporary transformation of war and national feeling and sought to understand its implications for modern commercial society.
II
Smith's 1790 comments can rightfully be read as a circumstantial critique of the French revolutionaries' abstract democratic principles, but they should also be taken seriously as a defence of a natural and rational conception of patriotism. For his readers, a lot was at stake in the definition of patriotism: from a British-wide point of view, it was important to reclaim the word from the reformist and radical connotations it had previously held in the eighteenth century, and offer instead an alternative view of patriotism as simple ‘love of country’.Footnote 39 In the 1790s, the violence in France also allowed loyalist writers to attach the notion of liberty to their patriotic discourse, and to present the war as a defence of Britain's exceptional prosperity and freedom. This conservative appropriation of the language of patriotism, linked to the defence of the existing social and political order, resonated particularly with Scottish writers who wrote at the end of a century marked both by the Act of Union and Jacobite rebellions. As Whigs, the enlightened writers of Glasgow and Edinburgh attached great importance to celebrating all the benefits of the constitution, and the peace and prosperity allowed by their identification with the ‘British’ nation. The constitutional Whiggism that cemented their political and national identity was based upon a rational understanding of patriotism that was directly challenged by radical cosmopolitan discourse.
It is, therefore, not surprising to see the politically conservative Moderates focusing on the ‘duty of love’ for one's country and following Smith in offering rebuttals to the cosmopolitan theories of Price and his radical friends. Blair's sermon On the love of our country, as well as Carlyle's National depravity, are exemplary of this genre in their celebration of all the benefits enjoyed by Britons.Footnote 40 Smith's ‘sympathetic’ conception of patriotism was put to good use by the Moderates in their wartime pamphlets and sermons, as their disdain for the English radicals' futile cosmopolitanism found a solid philosophical foundation in Smith's moral philosophy. Blair wrote, for instance, that ‘the wisdom of our Creator hath linked us by the ties of natural affection, first to our families and children; next to our brothers, relations, and friends; then to our acquaintances, and to the several societies and communities to which we belong’.Footnote 41 Smith's authority was also occasionally invoked in England against Hutcheson-inspired theories of universal benevolence, although this did not form the core of attacks on cosmopolitanism.Footnote 42 As the argument of limited sympathy was normally called upon on the side of loyalism, its continued use by the advanced Scottish Whigs was more unusual. Millar's posthumous additions to his Historical view of the English government, however, repeated Smith's views on the topic, while James Mackintosh's 1791 Vindiciae gallicae applied the concept of ‘sympathetic’ patriotism to Europe as a whole, in order to demonstrate that it could be extended until Europe became one single Commonwealth.Footnote 43 Even after his enthusiasm had abated, Mackintosh still maintained in 1798 that in Europe, ‘the same rules of morality which hold together men in families, and which form families into commonwealths, also link together these commonwealths as members of the great society of mankind’.Footnote 44
Thus, both reformist and conservative Scottish Whigs conceived of patriotism in the same way as Smith, that is to say, as a natural phenomenon deriving from the psychological mechanism of sympathy. By including the idea of patriotism and national love within a natural framework, this definition allowed for a deeply rational approach to the ‘love of our country’. This rational approach to national sentiment was also enriched by the British-wide understanding of ‘love of country’ as deriving from the constitutional protection of the ‘rights of Englishmen’:Footnote 45 most Moderate wartime sermons are characterized by a constant effort to underline that a country must earn and deserve its people's love. The civil and political liberties allowed by the constitution, Blair, Carlyle, and Hardy argued, benefited the people of Britain as a whole, and were therefore a rational source for the ‘love of our nation’.Footnote 46 In order ‘to show the just grounds on which it becomes us to be zealous for the welfare of that happy island’, Blair dedicated an entire sermon (preached on the occasion of war with France) to presenting Britain as the ‘seat of ‘private enjoyment and happiness’, ‘true religion’, and ‘laws, liberty, and good government’.Footnote 47 Millar and Mackintosh equally underlined that constitutional loyalty was not based upon ‘the illusions of chivalry’ or ‘the illusions of superstition’, but upon ‘reason alone’, and ‘enlightened self-interest’.Footnote 48
This view of patriotism as a natural psychological phenomenon that unified the nation in appreciation of the benefits bestowed upon it was not, in itself, particularly innovative (it was, however, incompatible with Burke's own redefinition of the notion of patriotism, away from attachment to policies or self-interest, towards a principle of ‘deep affections’).Footnote 49 More noteworthy was the fact that it was used across the political board as a theoretical framework to analyse the behaviour of the French armies. Scottish opposition Whigs and loyalists alike, indeed, were all similarly struck by what they perceived to be a fundamental transformation of French national spirit. This transformation was understood in several Scottish commentaries, after the beginning of the war, as an evolution distinct both from the conservative understanding of patriotism as preservation of political order, and from English radical cosmopolitan theories.
Indeed, the core of the Scottish writers' discussion of this evolution was their analysis of the French armies as displaying a new sort of national sentiment, whose source was no longer rational, but rather enthusiastic. In England, the loyalists (including Burke) pointed to ‘cosmopolitanism’ as the enemy, and their attacks on French principles and radical cosmopolitanism were phrased in terms of criticism of ‘equal indifference to all’ or selfishness. While they picked upon the notion of enthusiasm and its negative connotations, they tended to use it solely to discuss ‘French principles’, and to attach it to universalist and cosmopolitan discourses. Burke, indeed, saw French patriotism and radical universal benevolence as being of the same nature.Footnote 50 He certainly found the enthusiasm of the French Revolution distasteful and dangerous, but it was in his view the enthusiasm of ‘dogma’, of misguided ideas of absolute rights and democratic principles. For him, French enthusiasm was not patriotic, but ultimately cosmopolitan, cold, and selfish.Footnote 51
In Scotland, however, the question of cosmopolitanism in general, and of the French cosmopolitan outlook in particular, was largely irrelevant in the context of Smithian moral philosophy. Therefore, the loyalist and reformist commentators' analysis of French national sentiment offered a different perspective on the question: they focused not on cosmopolitanism, but rather on the nature of French enthusiasm, and its links with patriotism.
In enlightened Britain, the term ‘enthusiasm’ was traditionally charged with strong negative connotations, which largely derived from the experience of the English Civil War.Footnote 52 From a Scottish perspective, it was also charged with additional political and historical relevance. The Scottish Enlightenment critique of enthusiasm was tied to its central tenet of political moderation, as well as to its project for a new ‘science of man’ and society.Footnote 53 In the mid-eighteenth century, Hume had thus warned against the dangers of enthusiasm, arguing that such species of ‘false religion’ rejected ‘human reason, and even morality … as fallacious guides’.Footnote 54 In the 1790s, the same argument was repeated at the pulpit by the Moderates, who equally condemned French and anti-revolutionary ‘enthusiasm’ in principle. Thus, Carlyle attacked French enthusiasm in his 1794 sermon National depravity, but also wrote in the last years of his life that if Burke's predictions had ended up vindicated, it was ‘in Spite of the High Enthusiastic Strain of Eloquence in which they [were] Involv'd’.Footnote 55 The irrational enthusiasm of the French mob, however, seemed particularly threatening in the context of the 1792 riots that saw effigies of Dundas burned in Edinburgh. The Moderate writer Thomas Hardy, author of the successful 1793 pamphlet The patriot, thus offered a more sustained indictment of French ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘fanaticism’. For Hardy, ‘enthusiasm’ was indeed the force at the root of the French revolutionaries' national spirit. This new national spirit, Hardy argued, could not be called patriotism, because it was no longer bound to rational religion.Footnote 56 By abandoning religion and ‘[laying] their country in ruins’, the French had ‘[destroyed] the springs of patriotism’. Worse even, they had replaced its godly source with ‘the enthusiasm of a principle imperfectly understood [liberty], but deriving strength even from mystery’:Footnote 57 Hardy therefore identified the new national spirit of the French as a species of religious mysticism, or, more specifically, pagan fanaticism. The closest parallel case in history was the fanaticism and push for conversion of early Islam.Footnote 58 Indeed, ‘the operation of the principle is the same, whether false religion or false politics inspire it; it is disease, the madness of the human mind, when it breaks the ties of reason, of order, and of subordination’.Footnote 59 The new national spirit of the French was not longer true patriotism, but rather a species of fanaticism, an irrational impulse that ‘[gave] the name of patriotism to mischief’.Footnote 60
If Burke had, as underlined by Pocock, displaced the notion of enthusiasm from a religious to a political perspective, Hardy feared it had been displaced from the sphere of religion to the sphere of national sentiment.Footnote 61 Yet, Hardy still optimistically asserted that this unnatural new national spirit would eventually be subdued by traditional military tactics and classic British patriotism, and Carlyle equally asserted at the pulpit that the best response to war was to ‘Meet this unavoidable toil, with the spirit & Resolution of Britons.’Footnote 62
But others, while sharing Hardy's analysis of the novel nature of the national spirit displayed by the French, were not so certain of Britain's ability to prevail upon it. The reform-minded Thomas Somerville, who after 1792 had come to support the war against France and denounce the ‘fictitious patriotism’ of the revolutionaries in France, feared that the French threat had not been assessed adequately.Footnote 63 ‘That immense nation is armed and set loose upon the world’, he wrote in 1793, yet ‘all fear of danger is asleep’ in Britain.Footnote 64
In England, the Foxite Whigs often adopted a similarly pessimistic stance in the following years, by pointing out France's supposed superior resources and tactical advantages, as well as the motivational power of the perspective of political liberty.Footnote 65 The pamphlets of Millar and Lauderdale further developed this last line of argument by highlighting the newly enthusiastic nature of French national spirit, especially in the context of warfare: when discussed in relation to national defence, enthusiasm was more easily presented as a positive notion, and they effected this notional shift by arguing that the rational root of French patriotism had not been replaced by enthusiasm, but merely been enhanced by it. The pamphlets of Millar, Mackintosh, and Lord Lauderdale all characterized the new national spirit of the French armies as uniting the strength of fanaticism and enthusiasm, and the power of reason.Footnote 66 For Mackintosh, invading France would reignite the principle of ancient fanaticism (only this time ‘sanctioned by virtue and reason’) and ‘animate patriotism’, so that foreign forces would be met by ‘the enthusiasm of a nation’.Footnote 67 Millar's and Lauderdale's commentaries, however, went beyond the political need to present the enthusiastic national spirit of the French in a positive light. They both viewed the French transformation of national spirit and warfare as the most significant element to come out of the events of the 1790s, and identified in France what they interpreted as a distinctly un-selfish brand of enthusiastic, or fanatic, attachment to the nation. If Britain insisted on continuing the war, they warned, it could not come out victorious without adapting its own tactics to France's societal evolution, and integrating some elements of this new, modern form of patriotism. In the case of Lauderdale, this analysis was directly based upon Hume's and Steuart's scenarios of ‘Armageddon’.Footnote 68
III
When Lauderdale published his Letters to the peers of Scotland (1794), he was a rising Whig politician, an enthusiastic supporter of Fox and of the French Revolution, and the only Whig peer in Scotland. The work's reformist politics had a long-lasting effect on his career – he could not be re-elected in 1796 or in 1802, and consequently spent much of the following ten years writing about political economy. He did not return to the Lords until the coalition ministry of Grenville and Fox in 1806, thanks to the protection of the latter. The Letters offered sharp criticism of Pitt's internal and external politics, and a Foxite appeal for parliamentary reform in England. The work also offered, more strikingly, an analysis of the Revolution based upon both Hume's and Steuart's narratives of debt and state collapse. This led Lauderdale to identify the new egalitarian outlook of the French, and the resulting new relations created between the individual and the nation, as the major and most consequential element of the Revolution. It created, he believed, a new form of patriotism, which was not the moderate and rational patriotism of the British, based upon the benefits of the constitution, but rather an enthusiastic, all-encompassing national sentiment, based upon personal identification with the nation.
In his analysis of the events in France, Lauderdale pointed to Hume's scenario of debt-induced collapse, only to insist that it did not truly apply to the French Revolution: not only had the further increase of national debt after the American Revolution ‘[thrown] ridicule on the limited ideas’ of Hume's essay on public credit, but his predictions were not adapted to France, precisely because he had been thinking of England first, that is to say of a nation possessed of free institutions, in which the burden of public debt would be fairly distributed.Footnote 69 (Lauderdale's limited defence of Britain's aristocratic system was here clearly closer to the reformist Whigs' discourse than to radical arguments.)Footnote 70 Had Hume considered the case of a country riddled with inequality, ruled by privileged financiers and idle aristocrats, and whose government was already weakened by absurd political and economic privileges, ‘then he would probably have formed to himself a very different conclusion’.Footnote 71 Looking at France's ‘body of nobility isolated from the rest of the state’ instead of Britain's aristocracy ‘every where connected with the community’, he would not have predicted the ‘violent death’ of the nation and invasion by a foreign conqueror, but rather national anger directed at the government.Footnote 72 In truth, Lauderdale concluded, the government of France had not succumbed to any of Hume's pessimistic scenarios: it ‘died a natural death, without exciting the lamentations of any … the necessity of change [brought] about the revolution’.Footnote 73 The beneficiaries of France's political and economic unequal system were blamed for the financial disaster, and the principle of political equality was established in response to their previous mismanagement. The country being thus administered directly by an egalitarian nation, the setting for Steuart's ‘farce’ was, for Lauderdale, established: a state whose property was identified to that of the nation, and a nation who identified with, and worked for, the state. In fact, Lauderdale argued, Britain ‘[engaged] with a nation more emphatically in the situation [Steuart] describes, than it was possible for man antecedently to imagine could have existed’.Footnote 74
For Lauderdale, Hume's analysis of the violent death of public credit had been based upon the flawed assumption that the financial difficulties of a debt-burdened state would only make it easy prey for a foreign power. He had not imagined the possibility that the nation itself could overthrow its weakened government. Yet, this was the root cause of France's novel situation: the nation, having taken political and financial control of the state, now possessed a strong natural interest in its preservation and military defence. Had the rulers of Britain considered the state of French affairs in this view, Lauderdale insisted, they would have known not to engage in a war with France. Quoting Steuart, he asked, ‘what combination, among the modern European princes, would carry on a successful war against such a people?’ The French nation as a whole, and not merely its army, was focused on the war effort: ‘Theirs was a government’, Lauderdale pursued, ‘whose means of expenditure were alone to be estimated by the extent of the property of the nation, and the number of whose warriors could alone be limited in our imaginations by the number of which the community consisted.’Footnote 75 By contrast, ‘Ours was a government that, in estimating its resources, could not totally lose sight of the happiness and prosperity of the people over which it ruled’:Footnote 76 the contest could not be equal, and it was no wonder that practical, civilized Europe should ‘[lie] prostrate at the feet of French Enthusiasm’.Footnote 77
What singled out Steuart's text as prophetic, in Lauderdale's view, was that it had presented militarized citizenship not as a tool for regeneration, but rather as a threat. Ideas of militarized citizenship were not, indeed, particularly innovative in themselves; in fact they had often been presented in the eighteenth century as a healthy antidote both to ballooning public spending, and to the risk of despotism. Ferguson, Rousseau, and Mably had championed this ideal of military virtue, while the comte de Guibert had advocated the militarization of French society as a means to offset the political and financial drawbacks of standing armies in his 1772 Essai général de la tactique. Steuart's scenario, conversely, did not present the idea of an army of citizens as a solution to the cycle of debt and war he denounced. His depiction of a modern Spartan political economy, in which all activities would be directed towards the war effort of the nation, underlined both the cost for the citizens themselves (the ‘enslaved’ peasants), and for the rest of the world, unable to ‘defend itself against the attack of such an enemy’, thus reviving fears of universal dominion.Footnote 78 Thus, Lauderdale believed that Steuart's scenario had not only warned against the political dangers of state collapse, but had also identified the mechanisms that could lead to a new system of warfare that saw entire nations battle in ‘total’ economic, political, and military confrontations.
The French, Lauderdale suggested in the Letters, related to their nation in an entirely new way. Traditional patriotism was, for Lauderdale as for most Scottish writers, rational and built upon self-interest: as previously underlined, the love of the country was equated to the love of the constitution that allowed for increased wealth and liberty.
by the wealth and happiness enjoyed at home, it was … certain fundamentally to establish the love of our constitution in the heart of every man. For ‘Perish our commerce, let our constitution survive!’ involves a paradox that it would be treating your understanding with contempt to investigate.Footnote 79
The French challenged the traditional understanding of patriotism by embracing this paradox. Their patriotism was not rational, in the sense that it was not dependent upon the nation's ability to make them happy and prosperous. The new national feeling displayed by the French was, rather, based upon the individual's direct identification with the nation, and the will to keep it whole and united: the citizens that formed the French army were willing to sacrifice their lives, because ‘they [were] only offering a part to preserve the rest’.Footnote 80
Radical, Whig, and Tory commentators had it all equally wrong, Lauderdale argued, when they interpreted French enthusiasm in terms of ancient republican virtue, cosmopolitan love, or ideological fanaticism. If enthusiasm had traditionally been understood (in Pocock's formulation) as ‘the mind's identification with the idea in it’,Footnote 81 the idea identified was now that of the nation. The enthusiasm of the French troops, Lauderdale insisted, was very much the manifestation of their self-recognition as a united nation fighting for its survival. Neither were these troops a mere throwback to the mindless fury of ancient barbarians; rather, they were animated by this new form of national feeling:
on the long run, I rather apprehend, it will be found that those furious and undisciplined hordes of Sans Culottes are simply large, alert and disciplined armies, and that their fury is the effect of courage, combined with a love of, and a sense of duty to, their country.Footnote 82
Their enthusiasm, Lauderdale insisted, was a national enthusiasm.
Had it not been encouraged by Tory foreign policy, Lauderdale lamented, Steuart's ‘farce’ could still have been stopped short in its tracks by internal feuds. But the identification of the French with their nation, and the identification of the nation with the revolutionary state, was completed when they were attacked by foreign nations, thus giving them ‘a common cause in which with enthusiasm they [united]’, and ‘the habit and taste for military enterprise’. Once this unification was complete, and the new nature of French national feelings firmly established, Lauderdale concluded, it was too late to reverse the process: ‘we have at last learned, that which we at first ought to have known – that the revolution of France is a revolution of opinion; that the war we are conducting is not against armies, but an armed nation’.Footnote 83 Lauderdale ultimately advocated the end of the war, not only out of party loyalty or sympathy for ‘French principles’, but also because it could not, he believed, be won without drastically transforming British politics and society: ‘If war is to be prosecuted, to make it successful French means must be pursued.’ Britain must turn itself into an armed nation, individual property must become ‘public stock’, the Constitution must be replaced by a Committee of Public Safety.Footnote 84 The only way to triumph over the French, Lauderdale feared, was to imitate them.
Ironically, Lauderdale did get, more than ten years later, to negotiate peace with France, when he was sent to Paris in August 1806 to conclude a peace treaty with Napoleon. Napoleon attacked Prussia within a month of Lauderdale's arrival, and the mission quickly failed. Lauderdale's 1794 text remains, however, more than the straightforward Foxite pamphlet it is usually (not inaccurately) considered to be. Building upon a Scottish discourse that understood the notion of enthusiasm as a threat to its rational and sympathy-based understanding of national feeling, as well as upon Hume and Steuart's discussions of state collapse and revolution, it put forward an original and powerful commentary of the revolutionary war based upon the transformation of the French society and nation.
This was all the more significant as contemporary commentators in Europe were slow to identify the transition taking place under their eyes.Footnote 85 An uncharacteristically perceptive analysis was Mallet du Pan's Considérations sur la nature de la révolution de France (1793), which warned that it would be a fatal mistake to consider the present war as an ‘ordinary war’, opposing Power to Power.Footnote 86 The work predicted, six years before the generalized conscription of 1799, that the war would necessitate the ‘universal enrolment’ of men whose individual interests would be organically linked to that of the Revolution, thus turning the war into a clash between whole societies.Footnote 87 But even Mallet du Pan still conceived this ‘army of citizens’ in terms of ancient warfare, rather than as an essentially modern evolution, as illustrated by his painting of France as a Spartan non-commercial republic, surviving exclusively on agriculture and the products of foreign invasions.
Lauderdale's analysis, conversely, put France's military transformation in the context of its evolving societal structure and sociability, which allowed him to portray the new relations between nation and state in France as part of a process of historical change, not simply as a resurgence of the past. While Hume's and Steuart's predictions both offered Lauderdale useful frames of analysis for understanding the first few years of the French Revolution, in his view they also suffered from their too-narrow financial perspective: faced with the reality of France's collapsed state and regenerated society, Lauderdale pointed out that the most momentous consequences of the ‘Armageddon’ he observed did not lie in the realm of political economy, but rather in the transformation of the moral links that tied the citizens to each other and to the nation. This was a view shared by his friend Millar.
By 1793, John Millar and Adam Ferguson remained the only two major Scottish historians of civil society still in activity. Strikingly, they both offered detailed commentaries on the revolutionary wars and the transformation of the French army. These commentaries continued a previous ongoing discussion: both Hume and Smith had influentially argued that the polite manners characteristic of commercial society were preferable to the traditional ideal of civic virtue, which had led their colleagues to reflect on the advantages and disadvantages linked to the replacement of citizen armies by standing armies in modern Europe.Footnote 88 Ferguson, who had always remained attached to the Scottish tradition of republican civic virtue, doubted whether Smith's preference for commerce and standing armies could still be justified when England was suffering heavy losses, both financial and military, in the wars against France.Footnote 89 His analysis, as expounded in his personal correspondence and several posthumous essays, was shaped by his deep distrust of democracy and populism; as such it was largely constructed as a comparison with the last days of the Roman Republic. While he placed the French army's new democratic structure at the heart of his commentary, he thus continued to analyse the events in France in terms of resurgence rather than innovation.
Millar's commentary, if it contained a similar mix of admiration and horror at the French reinvention of citizen warfare, was, however, much more closely in line with the diagnosis of his friend and ‘favourite pupil’ Lord Lauderdale – this is hardly surprising, given the two men's ‘frequent and unreserved communication of sentiment’ in the period, according to Millar's nephew and first biographer.Footnote 90 Millar's commentary was laid out shortly after the publications of the Letters to the peers of Scotland. In a repressive political climate that had seen his friend Lauderdale pay a high political cost for his indictment of the war (and his own son John forced to emigrate to America), one should not wonder why Millar chose to present his own thoughts in a series of anonymous letters published in 1796 by the Whig Scots Chronicle, known as the Letters of Crito (some elements of his critique, albeit less directly controversial, can also be found in the posthumous additions to his Historical view).Footnote 91
Millar was a well-known reformist Whig and admirer of Fox. Like his friend Lauderdale, he had welcomed the French Revolution and joined the Friends of the People, and together they remained some of the rare Scottish voices who refused to join the growing loyalist consensus in the mid-1790s. Like the Letters to the peers of Scotland, the Letters of Crito can be read as a straightforward presentation of the Foxite arguments against the war led by Pitt. Beyond his political engagement for the reformist cause, however, Millar's commentary was equally concerned with the deep transformation of national sentiment he observed in France. Following the analysis of Lauderdale, Millar recognized that Steuart's and Hume's scenarios of debt-induced collapse had not played out in the French case. He certainly acknowledged the accessory role of France's national bankruptcy in the Revolution as well as denouncing the cost of the war for Britain; yet he was more concerned with the instrumentalization of British foreign policy for the financiers' profit than with the threat of state collapse in Britain.Footnote 92 And like Lauderdale, he identified the main consequence of France's collapse not in the rise of a Spartan new system of political economy, but rather in the evolution of French ‘national spirit’, and in the new relation created between the individual and the nation.
Millar was deeply perplexed by the species of violence exhibited by the French, which he viewed as a challenge to his conception of societal development. In the Letters of Crito, he underlined that the violence that erupted during the Revolution was uncharacteristic of civilized societies, or ‘inconsistent with the character of a polished nation’.Footnote 93 France was a modern, polished nation, which nevertheless displayed elements characteristic of the first stages of military organization. It had, he wrote in an echo of Lauderdale's formulation, ‘become an armed nation’, as it was ‘capable, by a simple requisition, of bringing into the field such multitudes as resemble the swarms which, in a rude state of society, issued from the northern parts of Europe, to overwhelm the provinces of the Roman Empire’.Footnote 94
Millar was not, of course, the only commentator to compare the French army to ancient ‘swarms’. But instead of offering an interpretation phrased in terms of ‘resurgence’ or ‘reappearance’, Millar (like Lauderdale) identified major innovations that suggested the French army should be viewed as a novel, rather than as an ancient, phenomenon. The French soldiers' ardour in battle was not, he insisted, the blind violence of the barbarian following a charismatic war leader. In ancient times, barbarians ‘[caught] from each other the contagion of sympathetic feelings, [and were] often prompted by an enthusiastic fervor, to exalt [the leader's] dignity, to promote his enjoyments, and to favour his pursuits’.Footnote 95 The French soldiers' behaviour could not be accounted for in such a simple way: they remained, Millar underlined, citizens of an opulent and commercial nation. Millar had described, in his Distinction of ranks, how individual domination evolved into habitual societal privilege over centuries, and predicted that inherited aristocratic prerogatives would in turn be gradually undermined by democratic principles in modern society.Footnote 96 While similar Scottish-inspired accounts were used by the radicals to counter Burke's praise of aristocracy in the 1790s, Millar's democratic prediction was also vindicated beyond his own beliefs.Footnote 97 What held the French army together, in his view, was not the barbarian's instinctive admiration for brute strength and charisma, and it was no longer the civilized man's habitual regard for inherited privilege. With no respect left for artificial aristocratic rank, the French soldiers fought as a modern democratic unit. They displayed the desperate courage of a people defending not only its liberty, but also its very existence as a nation.Footnote 98 If their ‘enthusiastic fervor’ appeared similar to that of ancient barbarians, the mechanisms that governed it were novel. It was not directed towards charismatic leaders or generals, but rather towards the nation itself.
If the French did not quite display the behaviour characteristic of the ‘rude’ stages of society, the notion of enthusiasm itself, understood as a psychological phenomenon propagated in large groups by the medium of sympathy, nevertheless remained central to Millar's analysis of the French army. It was, indeed, central to his understanding of historical change: great transformations in society were often, he believed, brought about by the enthusiasm of small or larger groups – in the Historical view, the notion of enthusiasm plays a major part in explaining the mechanisms that led to the English Civil War and Cromwell's rule, both in terms of religious enthusiasm, and in terms of the levellers' enthusiastic love of freedom. Millar thus identified a shift in the mechanisms of historical change, in the fact that ‘the late important revolutions in America, and in France, unlike those in preceding periods, [had] not been dictated, or promoted, by any religious enthusiasm’.Footnote 99 The American and French Revolutions were built upon principles of reason, not upon ‘enthusiastic’ behaviours. This signalled, for Millar, a clear improvement, and a mark of the progress of society. It was, therefore, both remarkable and worrying to see enthusiasm come back in the forefront after 1789, in the context of the war: as society progresses, he had argued in the Historical view, the advances of commerce should transform sociability. Interpersonal ties, friendships, and loyalties should become ‘cool and sober, breathing no ardour of enthusiasm’.Footnote 100 In France, however, a war threatening the very existence of the nation had reactivated interpersonal and national feelings based upon this all-consuming, all-sacrificing enthusiasm. The reappearance of enthusiasm in France, and its incarnation in the military sphere, was both a mark of the unnatural development of French affairs after the beginning of the war, and an explanation for the success of the French arms: ‘by the impulse of that determination [to avoid extermination], they were exalted to a pitch of heroic enthusiasm, which rendered them superior to all the nations of the earth’.Footnote 101 Like Lauderdale, Millar thus identified an evolution in national sentiment that transformed the rules of warfare, and made the French army (or the French nation) virtually invincible.
Of course, the assessment of the French army as being inspired both by the instinct of self-defence and love of liberty was also the more general advanced Whig answer to those who accused the revolutionaries of promoting their ‘fanatical’ love of democracy abroad, and it is no coincidence that Millar and Lauderdale were both prominent reformist Whigs: thus Lauderdale also assessed the French army as being an example of patriotism exacerbated by the rational love of liberty, as opposed to ‘fanaticism’.Footnote 102 However, the similarities between Lauderdale and Millar went deeper than a mere defence of the French love of liberty as being a positive, rational force: they both analysed French warfare as a direct product of a profound transformation of French sociability and of the nature of French national spirit, from being based upon the reasonable and rational criteria characteristic of commercial nations, to the enthusiastic spirit characteristic of earlier stages of society. Crucially, this enthusiasm was also enthusiasm for the nation, its unity and survival, not merely abstract enthusiasm for principles of liberty or rights. As Lauderdale and Millar were writing in the mid-1790s, it appeared unclear to them whether this evolution of French national spirit could still be contained, or whether the continuation of war would ensure it would grow and spread to the rest of Europe.
IV
There were historical and political reasons for the Scots to be especially concerned with national feeling, its development in modern Europe, and its role in the French revolutionary wars: these questions resonated strongly with philosophers who were traditionally interested in the nature of sociability and the role of manners, and continued to debate the place of civic virtue in an increasingly commercial world. For many enlightened writers in Scotland, Adam Smith's moral philosophy provided the theoretical basis for a sympathy-based understanding of love of country as a limited psychological phenomenon that unified countrymen in rational appreciation of the shared benefits they enjoyed.
This article has argued that Scottish commentators built upon this specific context to offer powerful analyses of the French wars and of French patriotism, which were not built along the lines of the dispute that set Burke against the English radicals. The resulting discussion has remained in the shadow of the passionate debate that raged in 1790s England; yet it was both insightful and original. Analysing France's post-1792 display of enthusiastic patriotism from the perspective of Smithian moral philosophy, both Millar and Lauderdale were quick to identify a major shift in the nature of French national sentiment that seemed to contradict directly the rational conception of patriotism they shared with Smith, Mackintosh, and the Moderate writers. Long before nineteenth-century commentators returned to the writings of Hume and Steuart to re-interpret the French Revolution, Lauderdale built upon their discussions of national collapse and militarized society to offer perceptive discussions of the nature of the revolutionary wars, and of their impact on European society. Like him, Millar identified the transformation of French national feeling and warfare as the most fascinating, and dangerous, element to come out of the Revolution.
In the political shift that saw the old French motto (‘un roi, une foi, une loi’) replaced by ‘la Nation, la loi, le roi’, most noticed by contemporaries and scholars alike has been the shift in sovereignty from ‘king’ to ‘nation’. It is, indeed, seen to illustrate a new concept of the nation as the product of a will to unite and of self-determination, rather than a geographical, political or linguistic unit.Footnote 103 But equally significant, from Millar's and Lauderdale's perspective, was the replacement of ‘faith’ with ‘nation’: the new national spirit of the French was shaped by the ‘enthusiasm’ of national unity and liberty. Such modern enthusiasm was a new factor on the European scene, and they wondered anxiously what its long-term consequences would entail. The concerns they expressed about the novel nature of France's national spirit and its possible diffusion in Europe were overshadowed in the 1790s by the strident debate between critics and supporters of the French Revolution in England – yet their commentary was, the following decades would show, no less prophetic than Burke's.
