Britain as the Big Bad for Europe?

The Tsar spoke up."Sir, I hate the English as much as you do." And Napoleon said, "So we have made peace

One of the less discussed features of the late 18th and early 19th centuries is the hostility towards Britain on the part of the rest of Europe. The American Revolution saw the British at war with the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, fand aced with a hostile league of neutrality led by Catherine the Great. During the Napoleonic War, Russia went to war or almost did with: Russia, Prussia, the Ottoman Empire, France, Spain, the United States of America, and Denmark. (Presumably its failure to go to war with Austria can be tied to its relative lack of a coastline).

Europeans and Americans were under no illusions; there was a real feeling that Britain was pursuing continental hegemony of its own, through control of the continent's overseas commerce. (This was one of the reasons that the Austrians weren't opposed to France keeping Flanders; it was assumed a French Scheldt would pressure Britain).

How feasible is a more savvy French republic exploiting this, and making the war appear to be a struggle against the despots of Britannia? Maybe getting the US toj oin the League of Armed Neutrality?
 
Well, the problem with the French leaders during the Revolution were, how to put this, ah, yeah : nuts. With the Republic, they were really busy with all their backstabing and the whole : "let's throw some king down their throne". With Louis XVI, they just accomplished the first one on their list. They just beheaded a king, I'm not sure the other monarchs could really say fine and call it & day. For the kings and emperor, if they didn't crush the Revolution, they risked that their own subject had the same idea and lead to a royal-killing party. Or just take the power in the name of the nation.

An alliance between the two against the British is just inconveivable.
 
The Spanish allied with the French because they knew they couldn't face a war against France and win - they relied on the alliance to keep the crown, and then Napoleon deposed the king and installed his brother anyway.

The Russians allied with France because they too didn't want to become a target, and they stood a better chance allying with Napoleon than fighting him. Then as soon as they realised how much damage the Continental System and the French alliance was doing to their economy they wasted no time on switching sides again.

Make no mistake that they all feared the French because they feared the republican upsurgance, and it was unmistakable that the French wanted to actually control Europe. Compared to them, the pesky British and their threat of bullying and even worse...paying! states to not do what ran contrary to British interests was rather small fry, especially since Britain kept paying them all their military costs in exchange for fighting the French.
 
If by 'wasted no time in switching sides' you mean 'quietly stopped observing those clauses of treaties they didn't like whilst continuing to negotiate with France in the ordinary way for the next two years and at no time in those two years concluding any formal alliance with Britain'...

Obviously most of France's allies were as much self-interested as ideological but can't the same be said about practically all the alliances on the Coalition side? They shared an interest, at times, in beating France and, um, that was more-or-less it. But as things like Armed Neutrality show, there was real hostility to Britain's belief in our maritime and commercial 'rights'.
 
All politics are local.

That's the real problem with Britain as the Big Bad. Despite the seemingly trivial width of the English Channel, Britain isn't 'local' to Europe in this context, after 1700 you're not convincing ANYONE outside of Hannover that Britain wants to conquer/occupy anything in Europe.

So while Britain did engage is numerous wars, no one could be convinced that Britain was anything but a 'temporary' problem; after the war, they'd go away, regardless of the outcome. That could not be said for Prussia/Germany, Russia, France, Austria, Spain, Italy, etc.

European resentment at Britain's mercantile and commercial success, wealth, navy, and the sheer size of the British Empire could never be translated into to true hate because it was always abstract. Britain is not local, despite a mere 25-mile wide body of water. It was 'splendidly isolated', and meant to stay that way.

So if you want a POD to make a Britain a big bad, you have to have one who imperial ambitions include the European mainland. That is, while not ASB, unlikely in the extreme. A semi-successful Napoleonic invasion maybe causing Britain to permanently occupy Calais after France is defeated? Maybe that forces a defensive reaction where the British occupy key ports on the channel and North Sea, and a rising Germany grows resentful of British domination of Bremen...

Mike Turcotte
 
All politics are local.

That's the real problem with Britain as the Big Bad. Despite the seemingly trivial width of the English Channel, Britain isn't 'local' to Europe in this context, after 1700 you're not convincing ANYONE outside of Hannover that Britain wants to conquer/occupy anything in Europe.

It's not about territory. To adapt Cmdr. Vimes' crime-fighting dictum to a geopolitical context: follow the money.

European resentment at Britain's mercantile and commercial success, wealth, navy, and the sheer size of the British Empire could never be translated into to true hate because it was always abstract. Britain is not local, despite a mere 25-mile wide body of water. It was 'splendidly isolated', and meant to stay that way.

That phrase came from perhaps a century after the period in question (and was, IIRC, posed as an absurd hypothetical in any case). At this period all powers factored Britain into their calculations and Britain took full part in the cultural life of Europe. In what sense were we separate? Sure, our power was maritime, imperial, financial; but so was the power of the Dutch Republic at its height.
 
Well, you certainly need a less agressively expansionist Republic, in any event: if they don't expand beyond, say, their 1800 bounds and swear off on the monarchy-toppling, they might well succeed in making themselves seen as a useful counterbalance to British power. It was Napoleon who came up with the Continental system, and who seemed to be determined to make himself master of Europe, and I'm assuming that this is a no Napleon/Napoleon fails to sieze power TL. It's not like the existence of Cromwell's monarch-decapitating England had been seen as an existential threat to the monarchial principle, after all: and the US was if anything a worse ideological threat, since it showed you could have a working, prospering republic on a large scale _without_ massacres.

Bruce


PS - and hey, the Brits _were_ to some extent on the continent at the time: Hanover?

Bruce
 
and the US was if anything a worse ideological threat, since it showed you could have a working, prospering republic on a large scale _without_ massacres.

Different kinds of republic and different kinds of threat, though. The United States in the Napoleonic period, though it wouldn't be fair to say it was another Venice or Switzerland, was certainly not a country which let all the white men vote, whereas France was briefly a country in which people were seriously suggesting that the black men and the women should vote. When France tried to set up that sort of patrician constitutionalism earlier, in 1791, a lot of moderate opinion abroad sympathised; and of course this was the kind of set-up France actually ended up with, and the sort of thing that perfectly credible reformers in Britain were pushing for and got in 1832.

America in the age after Jacksonian democracy was a working democratic republic achieved without a home revolution, foreign war, and the attendant swing into radicalism and revolutionary dictatorship; and Europeans (like one Tocqueville) were very interested in it and alarmed by it. Between limited franchises and long distances America was no Jacobin democracy. Tom Paine, a great admirer of America and by British and even American standards quite the radical, was instantly a lily-livered moderate when he set foot in high-revolutionary France.
 
PS - and hey, the Brits _were_ to some extent on the continent at the time: Hanover?

Bruce

Not really. There was no British influence in Hanover, and Parliament wanted nothing to do with the Germans. Furthermore they placed limits on the King's ability to leave the UK to visit Hanover with the specific intent of making it hard for the King to have any influence over his territory. Indeed, if Parliament could have passed an act forcing Hanover to choose a different, unrelated king they would have, but they had no authority to mess with Hanover's inheritance laws so they couldn't.

The UK's whole strategy for Europe revolved around controlling nor enthralling no land on the continent for precisely this reason - it made them vulnerable. As an island nation they could afford to be always on the attack, never the defensive. Hanover was a liability, they wanted no part of it. Gibraltar was the only exception; they kept it because it had massive strategic value and was considered virtually impregnable.
 
Not really. There was no British influence in Hanover, and Parliament wanted nothing to do with the Germans.

This is a bit outdated, IMO. George III certainly saw himself as the rightful ruler of Hanover, and made plans to visit; and Parliament was forced to make retaining Hanover a major part of their strategy. Look at how Napoleon was able to dan

DThat phrase came from perhaps a century after the period in question (and was, IIRC, posed as an absurd hypothetical in any case). At this period all powers factored Britain into their calculations and Britain took full part in the cultural life of Europe. In what sense were we separate? Sure, our power was maritime, imperial, financial; but so was the power of the Dutch Republic at its height.

Don't forget that European foreign policy had no proble m noting that Britain was always short of troops for the continent, but had no problem dispatching thousands of men to the Caribbean, ARgentina, or India.

The Russians allied with France because they too didn't want to become a target, and they stood a better chance allying with Napoleon than fighting him. Then as soon as they realised how much damage the Continental System and the French alliance was doing to their economy they wasted no time on switching sides again.

See, this is sort of my point. There's this perception of every other nation as a passive actor, in thrall to Napoleon. Russia was Anglophobic because it coveted the Baltic regions and the Ottoman Empire, territories the British wanted England out of; it opposed Britain's economic warfare (why does everyone forget Britain was also blockading nations?) which hurt its exports as well.

Russia formed a maritime alliance to oppose Britain (twice!), once which was ended when the British played (a debatably large role) in the assassination of the Tsar.

And then there were nations like Denmark, whose capitals were bombarded; or Istanbul.

European resentment at Britain's mercantile and commercial success, wealth, navy, and the sheer size of the British Empire could never be translated into to true hate because it was always abstract. Britain is not local, despite a mere 25-mile wide body of water. It was 'splendidly isolated', and meant to stay that way.

Britain ended up at war with every mmaritime power at once during this period; and it almost ended up at war with the Russians and Prussians as well. There was a reaosn for this.
 
Different kinds of republic and different kinds of threat, though. The United States in the Napoleonic period, though it wouldn't be fair to say it was another Venice or Switzerland, was certainly not a country which let all the white men vote, whereas France was briefly a country in which people were seriously suggesting that the black men and the women should vote. When France tried to set up that sort of patrician constitutionalism earlier, in 1791, a lot of moderate opinion abroad sympathised; and of course this was the kind of set-up France actually ended up with, and the sort of thing that perfectly credible reformers in Britain were pushing for and got in 1832.

America in the age after Jacksonian democracy was a working democratic republic achieved without a home revolution, foreign war, and the attendant swing into radicalism and revolutionary dictatorship; and Europeans (like one Tocqueville) were very interested in it and alarmed by it. Between limited franchises and long distances America was no Jacobin democracy. Tom Paine, a great admirer of America and by British and even American standards quite the radical, was instantly a lily-livered moderate when he set foot in high-revolutionary France.


The most important thing I think was that the US was a minor power thousands of miles away and France was neither. The US couldn't possibly a threat while France was a clear and present one.
 
This is a bit outdated, IMO. George III certainly saw himself as the rightful ruler of Hanover, and made plans to visit; and Parliament was forced to make retaining Hanover a major part of their strategy. Look at how Napoleon was able to dan
Erm, what was Napoleon able to do?
 
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