Thucydides and the British reaction to the French Revolution

ABSTRACT

The ancient Athenian historian Thucydides’ account of the civil and interstate wars of classical Greece proved particularly illuminating for British commentators writing at the time of the French Revolution (1789–99). However, despite a growing scholarly interest in Thucydides’ Nachleben in historical and political thought, little has been said on this period of his reception. This paper aims to address that gap. It suggests that, while Thucydides remained something of a minority interest, a curious mix of historians, journalists and political commentators turned to his History to explore the possibility that it might illuminate contemporary events. They were particularly interested in Thucydides’ account of the stasis on Corcyra (modern Corfu), and its role in spreading instability, civil strife and war throughout Greece. These commentators used Thucydides to think through the similarities and differences between ancient and modern iterations of political violence and sometimes appropriated his language to existing political vocabularies and categories of thought. This resulted in innovative interpretations of Thucydides’ text that emphasized the affinities between stasis in Antiquity with the idea of civil war, sedition, political instability and decline and fall in the contemporary world. It also led to the emergence of nuanced ideas of the lessons and warnings that could be drawn from Greek history as presented by Thucydides and how they could be applied to the turbulent politics of the 1790s.

KEYWORDS:

• Stasis
• Thucydides
• French Revolution
• historiography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Often radicals in Britain supported the American Revolution but remained critical of the bloody revolutions of Antiquity. See Verhoeven, Americomania and the French Revolution Debate.

2. Claeys, “The French Revolution Debate”; and Claeys, Thomas Paine.

3. Hampsher-Monk, “British Radicalism and the Anti-Jacobins.”

4. On the anti-Jacobins see: de Montluzin, Anti-Jacobins; and Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel.

5. Verhoeven, Americomania and the French Revolution Debate, 321.

6. Philp, “Talking about Democracy”; and Philp, Reforming Ideas in Britain, 15.

7. Morley, “Thucydides and the Historiography of Trauma.”

8. Earley, The Thucydidean Turn.

9. Th. 1.22.

10. Harloe and Morley, “Introduction,” 13.

11. Morley, Thucydides and the Idea of History, 199, endnote 24.

12. For a brief biography of Mitford see Worth, “Mitford, William (1744–1827).” The first volume of his history was printed in 1784 and the fifth and final in 1810.

13. On Mitford’s historiographical achievements, see Cooper, “Is Mitford’s History That Bad?”; Murray, “A Lost School of History”; and Macgregor Morris, “Navigating the Grotesque.”

14. Urbinati, Mill on Democracy, 35; and Whedbee, “Making the Worse Case Appear the Better,” 605.

15. Urbinati, Mill on Democracy, 35.

16. Gish, “In Defence of Democracy,” 66.

17. Roberts, Athens on Trial; and Demetriou, George Grote on Plato.

18. See in particular Grote’s (1826) review of Clinton’s Fasti Hellenica, which is really an attack upon Mitford and his political interpretation of Greek history. Cf. Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece; and Turner, The Greek Heritage, 193–4, 203–7.

19. The first brief defence of Mitford is made by Cooper, “Is Mitford’s History That Bad?” For more recent engagements see Demetriou, George Grote on Plato; MacGregor Morris, “Navigating the Grotesque,” 267–83, 285–90. Cf. Sachs, “The Ends of Empire” for a recent analysis of Mitford’s view of Greek decline from a romantic perspective.

20. Morley, Thucydides and the Idea of History, 17.

21. Anon., “Domestic Literature,” 218.

22. Mitford, A History of Greece, 2.1–2.

23. Th. 3.68.

24. Mitford, A History of Greece, 1.252.

25. Ibid., 256.

26. Mitford, A History of Greece, 1.258. 1.261; and Th. 3.85.

27. Mitford, A History of Greece, 1.262. Strabo 7.8.9 fragments).

28. Mitford, A History of Greece, 2.2. ‘The Peloponnesian War was truly a civil war; it was less a contest between Lacedaemon and Athens than between the oligarchal and democratical interest throughout the Grecian commonwealths.’

29. Armitage, Civil Wars, 38–9.

30. Cf. Price, Thucydides and Internal War, 3–5 who argues, I believe convincingly, that Thucydides undertook his historical project to show to contemporaries that the Peloponnesian War was in fact a stasis, which Price translates as ‘internal war.’

31. Mitford, A History of Greece, 2.3.

32. Mitford, A History of Greece, 2.3 footnote.

33. Mitford, A History of Greece, 2.5.

34. Ibid., 2.5.

35. Saunders, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848–1867, 11.

36. Thornton, The Politician’s Creed, v.

37. Thornton, The Politician’s Creed, 272–3. The passage continues: ‘– You would imagine, that he still labours with a thought greater than he can find words to communicate. – And he concludes his pathetic description with an observation, which is at once refined and solid. – “In these contrasts, says he, those who were the dullest and most stupid, and had the least foresight, commonly prevailed: for being conscious of this weakness, and dreading to be overreached by those of greater penetration, they went to work HASTILY, WITHOUT PREMEDITATION, BY THE SWORD AND PONIARD, AND THEREBY GOT THE START OF THEIR ANTAGONISTS, WHO WERE FORMING FINE SCHEMES AND PROJECTS FOR THEIR DESTRUCTION”.’

38. On Payne Knight’s life and his role in British debates over aesthetics see Messmann, Richard Payne Knight and the essays in the collected volume edited by Clarke and Penny, The Arrogant Connoisseur.

39. This information is taken from Payne Knight’s ONDB entry, Stumpf-Condry and Skedd, “Knight, Richard Payne (1751–1824).”

40. Payne Knight, The Landscape, 73 footnote. ‘The revolution that has taken place in France is an event quite new in the history of civilised man, and therefore all conjectures concerning the ultimate consequences of it, must be vague and unsatisfactory. The expulsion of the highest orders of society by the lower frequently happened in the little republics of Greece; but those revolutions were upon too small a scale to afford any analogies, by which we may judge of the present great convulsion.’

41. Payne Knight, The Landscape, 73 footnote.

42. Bardsley, “Cursory Remarks, Moral,” 20–1.

43. Hobbes, The History of the Peloponnesian War, 204; William Smith, The History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.283 was the only English language translator of Thucydides in the eighteenth century.

44. A thought which occurred again after the First World War, Cf. Abbott, Thucydides, 8. ‘Fundamentally things have not changed – indeed, cannot change except in details “while,” to quote another pregnant phrase of Thucydides, “human nature remains the same” (III.82). The life of mankind is made up of a few great points, which steadily reappear; for human actions are governed by laws as fixed and regular as those which rule in the physical world.’

45. See note 4 above.

46. Mowbray, Remarks on the Conduct of Opposition During, 55–6.

47. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 317–18.

48. Mackintosh, An Historical Sketch of the French Revolution, 1.

49. Long, The Antigallican, 61. ‘The massacre was more extensive, but in other respects not unlike the massacre of Avignon. The murderers there were not excepted from the general amnesty, because their crimes, it was pretended, were occasioned by the enormities of Aristocracy. The nobles and the common people of Corcyra having been long at variance, the dispute was at length terminated by the massacre of the noble families. The Athenians rejoiced because it obliged Corcyra to seek their alliance.’

50. Long, The Antigallican, 62.

51. Ibid.

52. Long, The Antigallican, 62. ‘When future historians shall recite the massacres of France, and the extenuations even justifications of these murders in the National Assembly, and in public prints, posterity will find, that the Corcyrean people were far exceeded in cruelty and wickedness by France, where a whole people have thrown aside the milk of human kindness, and like their rulers, delight in persecution and torments.’

53. Anon., The Progress of Delusion, 1–2.

54. Anon., The Progress of Delusion, 16–17. ‘A democratic sedition is said to have happened about two thousand years ago, in the island of Corcyra. By what means, is thus related: Men of desperate fortune, or large debt, or ambition beyond their station, or avarice without riches, or with private jealousies, or at personal enmity against the rich and powerful; in short, all those, who had more to gain than lose, or rather imagined they had more to gain than lose in a general scramble, raised a clamour against the government of Corcyra … It was then (says the Historian) that each leader in declamatory harangues and speeches, accommodated to the prevailing humour of the populace, held forth “equality of power among the citizens,” a more temperate form of aristocracy, and every other state expedient of the day; but in reality was only personally struggling for the acquisition of power and of riches, through plunder, massacre, and desolation.’

55. Anon., The Progress of Delusion,15.

56. Mackintosh, An Historical Sketch of the French Revolution.

57. See Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, 27 fn. 11, who traces the, in his view erroneous, attribution back to the British Library but does not explain why he thinks that it is wrong, and nor does Plassart, The Scottish Enlightenment, 70–98, mention the Historical Sketch in her insightful discussion of Mackintosh’s intellectual project. Although O’Brien mentions the Historical Sketch in passing as a work by Mackintosh, An Historical Sketch of the French Revolution, 193.

58. For a discussion of Mackintosh’s place in Scottish reactions to the French Revolution see Plassart, The Scottish Enlightenment, 85–94.

59. Plassart, The Scottish Enlightenment describes in detail the history of Mackintosh’s changing attitude to the Revolution.

60. Mackintosh, An Historical Sketch of the French Revolution, 535.

61. Ibid., 536.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid., 537.

64. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric, 3.45.

65. Hobbes, The History of the Peloponnesian War, 14.

66. Plassart, The Scottish Enlightenment.

67. Philp, Reforming Ideas in Britain, 10.

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Notes on contributors

Ben Earley

Ben Earley completed his PhD on the reception of Thucydides in eighteenth-century Britain at the University of Bristol as part of Prof. Neville Morley’s AHRC funded project: Thucydides: Reception, Reinterpretation and Influence. Ben then completed post-doctoral fellowships at the FU Berlin and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he researched the reception of Thucydides in early twentieth-century thought on international relations and politics, focusing on the links among trauma following the Great War, the decline of the British Empire and the emergence of the discipline of International Relations. This project resulted in the monograph The Thucydidean Turn: (Re)Interpreting Thucydides’ Political Thought Before, During and After the Great War. Ben would like to thank Prof. Stephen Hodkinson for encouraging him to submit this paper to The European Review of History and the anonymous reviewers who provided many helpful comments and feedback.