ABSTRACT
By 1798, the war with France had reached a curious stalemate. Britain had asserted her naval supremacy and greatly extended her overseas empire. France had become the hegemon in western continental Europe and controlled not only the Low Countries but much of northern and central Italy. Her political authority and military prowess exceeded anything achieved on the continent by the Bourbons. Despite its record of chronic internal political instability and repeated fratricidal bloodletting, the French government was absorbed in extensive administrative and political reorganization within the territories it had acquired or over which it asserted control. French power and the preoccupation Austria and Prussia felt for Poland meant that Britain by 1798 was as isolated and strategically threatened as she had been in 1779–80, confronting a continental European coastline in enemy hands from the southern North Sea to southern Italy and the three leading continental navies, of France, Spain and the Netherlands, combined – at least potentially – against her own. Yet France had few means with which to threaten Britain. The only, however distantly, viable option was to do in reverse what British strategists had urged in 1793–94: send small expeditionary forces to galvanize and strengthen internal discontent to the point of open rebellion. Those French generals and politicians who advocated direct intervention in the United Kingdom focused their attentions upon Ireland. No invasion of Ireland would, however, work unless it supplemented rebellion of the sort which had broken out in parts of France in 1793–94.
