Mirage of the Moderates 537
- Spain in the next year even signed an alliance with the Republic. Prussia
embarked on a policy of neutralism that lasted for eleven years. The King of Prus-
sia accepted the Batavian revolution as he did the French. No government except
the British objected with any vigor to the French incorporation of Belgium. The
Austrians were willing enough to be rid of their former Austrian Netherlands if
compensated elsewhere. Dutch affairs, after the Batavian revolution, were in the
hands of men who, while lacking enthusiasm for the French control of Belgium,
saw in Great Britain the principal menace both to the new regime in Holland and
to the preservation of the Dutch colonial empire.
It was Britain that kept the war going against France. For this fact various rea-
sons can be seen. Though England was by no means the most conservative country
in Europe, it was a country in which the virtues of an aristocratic society had been
elaborated explicitly, and in which conservatism had become something of a phi-
losophy of history and of society. Some Englishmen, in their way, in arguing
against the American revolution, or against reform of the British and Irish Houses
of Commons or the granting of equal civic rights to Dissenters, had made an ide-
ology of conservatism even before the Revolution in France. Englishmen of this
same kind, in 1795 and 1796, preferred to see in the war with France a great ideo-
logical struggle. They found “Jacobins” everywhere, even in South Africa and India,
and to Morton Eden, the British envoy at Vienna, it seemed that even the Aus-
trian chancellor, Thugut, who was certainly very much opposed to the French Rev-
olution, was a “Jacobin” because insufficiently energetic against France.
England also at this time, with the industrial revolution setting in, was in a
phase of rapid growth in its trade and overseas empire. For this reason also it could
not readily accept peace with France, especially with a France that had been its
chief commercial competitor for a hundred years, and which if successful might
close the Continent to British exports. It is certainly too much to see in the Anglo-
French war of the 1790’s an essentially commercial conflict waged in the respective
interests of French and British merchants.^7 Too much else was at stake. But the
fact that Britain was not in a passive or defensive phase, but was on the contrary
highly dynamic, had important and somewhat paradoxical consequences.
On the one hand, it kept the hostilities going. The British could afford abundant
outlays of money. By 1797, some eighty thousand pounds sterling had been paid to
the royalists of northern France alone, to foment resistance against the Paris gov-
ernment.^8 As early as the end of 1794 the British treasury had paid £1,225,000 to
Prussia, over a million to the smaller German states, and £350,000 to Sardinia, to
keep them in the field against France. In 1795 and 1796, through guarantees of
loans on which in the end it had to pay, the British government contributed over
five millions to Austria.^9 But the Austrians, thus enabled to remain in the war
7 As in E. Dejoint, La politique économique du Directoire (Paris, 1951).
8 Windham’s report to Pitt, Dropmore papers, III, 363. Windham remarked that the French
royalists could not exist as a party without British money. The Princess of Orange had said the same
of the Dutch Orangists, p. 417 above.
9 Great Britain, House of Commons, Sessional Papers for 1900, Vol. XLVII, No. 180, “Loans and
advances to foreign states since 1792”; J. H. Clapham, “Loans and Subsidies in Time of War,” Eco-
nomic Journal, X XVII (1917), 495–501. In 1796 an offer of £300,000 was made to Russia, for opera-