ABSTRACT
Studies in recent years have demonstrated that in the early 1790s both state institutions and the loyal press on the one hand and the radical reform movement on the other created a highly complex web of various efforts to establish simplified ideological patterns of exclusion and inclusion. Suspicion was sufficient to justify prevention, and conspiracy theories prospered (Pfau). Going all the way from the Edinburgh Trial of 1793 to the unjustified accusations of high treason in 1794, the state tried everything to criminalize those in favour of reforms.1 From a republican (and in many cases American or British left-wing) perspective this was described as a history of victimizing the reformers and their legitimate goals. Conversely, from the perspective of dominant British historiography, the radicals have been described as a danger for the monarchy, or too early in their strife for democratization and too close to the ideas from which the French Revolution was said to have emerged. Regardless of the political preferences of historians, the successful oppression of the radicals after 1795 made it inevitable to consider them as victims of the politics of Pitt and his Home Secretary, Dundas. Since the radicals never openly attacked the government using violence, ‘opinion had to be the main object of repression’ (Cobban, 21).
