In recent years, Boydell and Brewer have begun to publish worthy monographs written by new and established scholars. This book is not one of them. John D. Grainger has been a military and diplomatic historian of classical antiquity for the past twenty years. There he should have stayed, for this book says very little about the Peace of Amiens or British foreign policy in the age of the French Revolution that has not been said by others: most notably John Ehrman in The Younger Pitt: The Consuming Struggle (London, 1996) and, most recently, Charles John Fedorak in Henry Addington, Prime Minister, 1801–1804: Peace, War, and Parliamentary Politics (Akron, OH, 2002).

This book may have been in press when Henry Addington came out but, of the two authors, Fedorak does a much better job in rehabilitating the reputations of a neglected prime minister and foreign secretary. Neither Addington nor Robert Banks Jenkinson, Lord Hawkesbury, were stooges of the younger Pitt, which Fedorak convincingly demonstrates from a wide range of private and official sources. Grainger, on the other hand, appears neither to have left the reading rooms of the British Library and the Public Record Office nor to have delved very deeply into their manuscript collections. He has relied instead upon published correspondence and a narrow range of state papers.

Although Grainger has read the other recently produced literature on the subject of the peace, he does not engage with any of its conceptual issues. He borrows heavily from Elizabeth Sparrow's account of Secret Service: British Agents in France, 1792–1802 (Rochester, NY, 1999) without considering its central claim: that the ideological war between Britain and France had not ended with the cessation of hostilities in 1801. He also castigates the important work done by Simon Burrows on the roles played by the press and public opinion in the breakdown of the peace in French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814 (London, 2000). Grainger dismisses Napoleon Bonaparte's anger at the negative coverage received by the consulate in the London-based English- and French-language press without considering the importance of that coverage in shaping public attitudes toward France or the ways in which Anglo-French wrangling about the press reflected changing attitudes toward the practice of diplomacy: namely, the widening of its scope from a closed-shop forum of politics to a more open arena of public debate.

Grainger sets out to explore British policy toward Napoleonic France, “so close and so great” (x), in a conventional comparative assessment of military strengths and weaknesses. While he gives careful consideration to British policy in all its domestic political contexts, not excluding Ireland, no attempt is made to assess the extent or nature of the sociopolitical and intellectual threats that postrevolutionary France was perceived to pose to Britain, or what—if anything—the Addington ministry envisaged as a functional long-term European peace settlement. While some attempt is made to place British policy into a wider cultural context by examining the printed diaries and travel narratives produced by visitors to France, this serves primarily to illustrate the intensity of British distaste for the Bonapartist regime rather than a phase in the evolution of xenophobic attitudes toward the old enemy. Public opinion, we are told, lay solidly behind the government upon the resumption of war in 1803, because so many prominent Britons disliked what they saw in Paris during the peace.

Grainger presents the conduct of international relations as a pragmatic-driven power struggle rather than a form of political communication conditioned by the social, cultural, and intellectual influences of the time. This accounts in part for Grainger's focus on the industrial and political espionage conducted by French visitors to England, a narrative that suffers from his failure to locate and consult an adequate range of French-language sources. Having also neglected to look at much in the way of French state papers, he is nevertheless prepared to pass judgment on French levels of commitment to the peace. “Good faith was what was missing in Franco-British negotiations—at least it was missing on the French side” (211).

Suffice it to say that this book was not written for an academic audience. While it would be suitable to assign to students requiring background for specialized essays, it can be safely left off most undergraduate reading lists.