ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the broad mass of the middling and lower ranks of society. It analyses popular pro-war, anti-war and uncommitted opinion and behaviour, and the influences on public opinion. Popular pro-war opinion was stimulated by three broad categories of factors: the impact of active loyalism, direct individual profit and the influence of specific issues relating to this particular war against revolutionary France. Popular anti-war sentiment was produced mainly by the hardships of the wartime experience for ordinary people and partly, especially for the literate classes, by a simple desire, for whatever reason, to criticize the government, and it resulted in verbal and physical protests of various kinds. Professional officers might care only about the war as a stage in their careers, or for its impact on the army or navy as a whole. There were no government engravers to give a falsely optimistic view of the British military situation for public consumption, as there were in France.
