The conflict between Britain and France was fought not only on battlefields but also in books, pamphlets and speeches. It took place on three levels:

• between heavy-hitting authors such as Edmund Burke and Tom Paine
• at grassroots level, between the radical societies and their loyalist enemies
• in the secret, shadowy world of conspiracy and local militias.

At first, many British people welcomed the French Revolution and its promise of liberty, equality and fraternity. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote that 'bliss was it in that dawn to be alive'. But the increasing violence of events in Paris, and especially the Terror of September 1793 (during which many people were guillotined), turned many young British radicals into conservative patriots.

• Edmund Burke
• Tom Paine
• The argument spreads
• Radical clubs
• Loyalist propaganda
• Church and king
• Spiral of violence
• Radical conspiracies
• Local militias
• The legacy

Edmund Burke
On 4 November 1789, just after the fall of the Bastille and on the anniversary of England's Glorious Revolution (which in 1688 had established a constitutional monarchy), Dr Richard Price, a dissenting minister, preached a sermon he called 'On the Love of Our Country'. In this, he proudly stated that the 1688 bloodless revolution had been based on three principles: liberty of conscience, the right to resist authority and the right to choose your ruler. This provoked Edmund Burke, a disillusioned once-radical Whig MP, to write his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which was published in 1790 and sold 19,000 copies in six months.

The crowds who overthrew the monarchy in France reminded Burke of the violent mobs of the Gordon Riots of 1780, which had destroyed property in London. So the suggestion that Britain should imitate France and reform its narrow franchise and corrupt political system infuriated him.

Afraid that revolution would lead to bloodshed, Burke argued that reason could not be applied to politics without taking human nature into account, and that traditional monarchy was necessary for a stable society.

A powerful and eloquent statement of political conservatism, Burke's book defended a British tradition of liberty and order against the threat of uncontrollable change – he stressed custom and tradition. Remove deference, he said, and force will rule. To him, the French method of tearing up the constitution and starting again from scratch on the basis of a theory of the rights of man was sheer folly.

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Tom Paine
In reply, Tom Paine – a former Norfolk corset-maker who had emigrated to America and had become a radical journalist – published The Rights of Man in 1791. A more racy and populist writer than the ponderous Burke, he argued that a republic was better than a monarchy, and that people had the right to decide for themselves what kind of government they wanted.

He advocated self-determination: the method of rule cannot be decided by one generation for all its successors, and there was no rational justification for heredity in any part of government. He advocated, with fire and wit, a thorough reform of British government, taxation and welfare provision. The Rights of Man sold 200,000 copies in six months.

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The argument spreads
The conflict between reform and conservatism spread into dozens of cheap pamphlets and discussion groups. Artists such as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank created fierce caricatures to comment on events. In Parliament, the Tory prime minister William Pitt the Younger clashed savagely with the Whig, Charles James Fox – the friend of liberty and a radical reformer.

The rights of man were also questioned from a female perspective. The feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), advocated equality of the sexes and equal opportunities in education. She married the anarchist William Godwin and died giving birth to Mary, the future author of Frankenstein.

But Godwin and Wollstonecraft's progressive ideas about the perfectibility of society were challenged. For example, in 1798 Thomas Malthus, curate of Albury, Surrey, published his Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he described famine as a positive check on population growth.

Meanwhile, Thomas Spence, the Newcastle schoolmaster, extended Paine's arguments to attack the hereditary possession of land. And the mystical William Blake wrote and painted millenarian visions of revolution.

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Radical clubs
The French Revolution also fostered the growth of radical clubs and debating societies. In 1791, the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information was set up, supported by Joseph Gales, editor of the Sheffield Register. In January 1792, the London Corresponding Society was started in a pub in the Strand by Thomas Hardy, a 40-year-old Scottish shoemaker. Membership soon numbered about 70, and activities included debates, newsletters, pamphlets and petitions. On 26 October 1795, an open-air meeting in a field near Copenhagen House, Islington, London, drew between 40,000 and 100,000 people.

Such societies spread rapidly over Britain. At first, they defended the violence of the French Revolution and rejoiced in the military success of the revolutionary armies.

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Loyalist propaganda
In response, loyalists stressed the Burkean principles of the traditional constitution, social morality and established religion, plus duty and respect for king and Church. John Bowles got treasury money for writing conservative propaganda, and in 1792 published A Protest against Tom Paine's Rights of Man. He was also a contributor to the Anti-Jacobin Review, set up in 1798 as a mouthpiece for loyalist propaganda. Other conservative newspapers included the daily Sun and True Briton.

Meanwhile, John Reeves' Thoughts on the English Government (1795-1800) advocated reverence for the monarch, and Hannah More's writings stressed manners, morals and religion. She published cheap tracts directed at the poorer classes and made a fortune – when she died in 1833, she was worth £30,000.

Other evangelical Christians, such as William Wilberforce, attacked the revolutionary ideas of the French Jacobins. In 1796, the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor was set up to spread morality among the labouring classes and reduce the temptation of radical ideas.

To combat the influence of the corresponding societies, Reeves launched – in November 1792 – the loyalist Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. Eventually, about 2,000 groups sprang up across the country. They published pamphlets, held demonstrations in which Paine was burnt in effigy, attacked landlords who allowed radical clubs to meet on their premises, and organised prosecutions for sedition, sometimes even packing juries to guarantee convictions.

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Church and king
Another loyalist response to radical extremism was the Church and King mobs. These began in Birmingham in July 1791, when reformers celebrating the fall of the Bastille were attacked in their meeting houses. With the connivance of local magistrates, the chemist Dr Joseph Priestley was targeted by a crowd; when the riot got out of hand, it had to be put down by cavalry.

In 1790, Manchester churchmen had formed a Church and King dining club. In reply, a Constitutional Society, founded by cotton manufacturer Thomas Walker, held a Bastille dinner in 1791. Three years later, Walker was accused of conspiracy but the case collapsed. Elsewhere, groups such as the Loyal True Blues clashed with radicals.

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Spiral of violence
The outbreak of war between Britain and France in 1793 upped the stakes. Now support for the French Revolution could be seen as treason, and government spies who infiltrated the corresponding societies reported loose talk of arming and drilling for an uprising. Parliament suspended civil rights, such as habeas corpus (which protects individuals from arbitrary arrest), and Thomas Hardy of the London Corresponding Society was arrested.

Two Scots – David Downie and Robert Watt – were tried for high treason and Watt was executed in October 1794. Then three English radicals were acquitted amid popular rejoicing. In March 1795, Richard Brothers – a millenarian prophet of doom – was thrown into an asylum because London crowds, worried by poor harvests, took him seriously.

When, in October 1795, George III was jeered by a crowd calling for bread and had the window of his coach broken, Pitt's government extended the treason laws. While Whig radicals, usually called 'Friends of Peace', petitioned against them, loyalist mobs began to attack radical speakers such as the lecturer John Thelwall, who narrowly escaped being press-ganged in Great Yarmouth and put on a ship to Siberia.

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Radical conspiracies
By 1798, some radicals in England forged links with the nationalist United Irishmen, who had plans for uprisings. In February, John Binns and four Irish radicals were arrested in Margate on their way to France. One of them was executed.

In November 1802, following the arrest of Colonel Edward Despard – one of Nelson's former comrades-in-arms – and his fellow-conspirators in a Lambeth pub, details of a shadowy conspiracy involving Ireland and the United Britons in Yorkshire emerged. Despard and six others were executed.

Still, the followers of Thomas Spence kept the idea of insurrectionary violence alive in London, even if no uprising took place. In the north, the Luddite disturbances of 1811-12 often used the imagery and language of the French Revolution.

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Local militias
In 1794, the loyalist Reeves societies began to turn themselves into local militias. Known as the 'Volunteer movement', they were part-time soldiers or yeoman cavalry who aimed to defend the country against the threat of French invasion. The Volunteers – who, by 1798, numbered about 116,000 men – attacked the principles of the Revolution.

Although most Volunteers expressed reverence for king and constitution, a few groups were quite democratic and made demands for reform. In 1800, some refused to turn out to put down food riots.

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The legacy
During the wars with France, the numbers of British radicals were small and the prosecutions for treason were few. The large number of Volunteers reminds us that radical ideas about liberty, equality and fraternity were defeated more by the innate conservatism of British society, with its faith in the virtues of the constitution, than by government repression.

Years of open war with France encouraged patriotism and a suspicion of foreign methods. Even so, the war of ideas was never decisively lost by British radicals. Theories of the rights of man (and woman) made an important contribution to the liberal and socialist philosophies of the next two centuries.

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