538 Chapter XXII
after the other Continental states had left it, were badly defeated in north Italy by
the French. This defeat opened the way to the indigenous forces of revolution in
Italy. The Italian revolutions of 1796 and 1797, accompanied as they were by
French predominance, and coming in addition to similar developments in Holland
and Belgium, greatly reduced the chances for any moderate settlement of Europe’s
problems.
On the other hand, the dynamism of the British was certainly one of the factors
(along with the partition of Poland and the unexpected strength shown by the
French themselves) by which the military effort against France was greatly weak-
ened. In some ways, the British could more effectively have led an anti- French and
anti- Revolutionary alliance had their own aims been more disinterested. It was the
well- grounded fear, derived from experience, felt in Holland and Spain, that the
British would seize upon opportunities to acquire their colonies, or to impose un-
desirable trading advantages, that did as much as anything else to throw Holland
and Spain—Holland with revolution, Spain without it—into alliance with the
French Republic. Throughout the Continent there was a latent antipathy to En-
gland. The French could exploit it but did not have to create it, since it had accom-
panied the phenomenal rise of Britain and British sea power in the eighteenth
century, been confirmed in the Seven Years’ War, and somewhat glamorized by the
American struggle for independence.
Even in England, however, there were important voices on the side of modera-
tion. Pitt’s government had no patience with French republicanism, but it refrained
from recognizing the Count of Provence as Louis XVIII, and tried to persuade
him of the advantages of constitutional monarchy. Of the English popular radicals,
who were more sympathetic to French republicanism, more will be said in a later
chapter. In the governing classes there were a good many men of political sagacity
and fair- mindedness. Many of these men believed—and it was one of the signs of
a “moderate” as distinguished from a pur—that the troubles in France could be
largely attributed to the extremism of the Right. The Earl of McCartney, for ex-
ample, before going to South Africa (where his sojourn was noted in the last chap-
ter) was assigned as an unofficial British representative to the “court” of “Louis
XVIII,” which in 1796 gathered at a hotel in Verona. McCartney did not like what
he saw there of the French émigré noblemen. “It is amusing to hear them dis-
course,” he said, “on the former happiness of all social classes in France; they can-
not conceive that the lower classes should have had aspirations to improve them-
selves, or that men of talent, without other advantages of fortune, should have any
right or claim to positions of distinction.”^10 William Wickham, the British agent
in Switzerland, lost all respect for the future Louis XVIII and Charles X. “When
one has observed them as closely and as often behind the scenes as I have,” he
wrote in 1796, “one is tempted to believe that God Almighty has willed this ap-
palling revolution, among other aims, for their personal correction.”^11 Lady Elliot,
tions in the Rhineland or Holland, but it was refused. In 1799–1800 the British granted almost
£3,500,000 to finance the Second Coalition.
10 Quoted by A. Lebon, L’Angleterre et l ’ émigration française (Paris, 1882), X XIII.
11 Quoted by G. Walter, Le comte de Provence, frère du roi, “régent” de France, rot des émigrés (Paris,
1950).