ABSTRACT
In 1792, destiny for British artisans and working men as well as for Parisian sans-culottes was notable, less for literary controversy or commemorative anniversaries, than for the spread of Painite radicalism, the advent of the first French republic and the triumph of English conservatism. English working-class radicalism came of age at a time when French liberty and independence were both threatened by a Continental counter-revolutionary coalition, but its development was soon arrested by a rapidly growing reaction, fuelled by revulsion from the September Massacres. It was this French dimension of English radicalism, rather than its Painite overtones, which allowed the conservative Alarmists' to brand those who were prepared to fraternize with the French with the evocative label of English Jacobins'. The whole tone of the journal was Painite, in its scurrilous attacks on the Crown, the aristocracy and the House of Commons and in its unrestrained admiration for the French revolution.
