When groups advocating democratic reform in Britain grew and prospered after revolution in France in the 1790s, William Pitt’s government responded with a ruthless programme of repression. Centred on prosecutions for seditious language and High Treason, the loyalist offensive was nourished throughout by anti-gallican, anti-republican propaganda. Tom Paine was burnt in effigy the length and breadth of the country, reformers beaten up by gangs of loyalist thugs, conservative tracts widely distributed, and the market for caricature prints flooded with anti-democratic cartoons.
This talk digs into some of this loyalist propaganda to see what made it tick. And we’ll take a particularly close look at the political caricatures of the artist James Gillray, who, despite taking money from the government to make cartoons for the Anti-Jacobin magazine, was never entirely won over by the state. Were the British democrats of the1790s defeated by legal onslaught and mob violence? Or had they already lost the battle of ideas in a cleverly orchestrated propaganda war?
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