ABSTRACT
The wars against revolutionary France provoked many very practical responses from the British people. British battle-lines over the French Revolution had largely been drawn before the outbreak of war in February 1793 and they remained little altered by it in the 1790s. The Friends of Peace continued to oppose the war in the 1800s on grounds of religion and morality, but they were also much more successful than they had been in the 1790s in harnessing the economic discontent of industrial and manufacturing interests, in the north and Midlands of England particularly. General public opinion in the 1790s was moved by similar considerations of defensive or economic interests, but there is also substantial evidence of a debate for and against the war in that decade which was motivated by political opposition to and sympathy for the revolutionary regime in France. Ideological warfare was clearly not the only aspect of Britain's struggle against France in the 1790s.
