Well, the French got armed transports off of Ireland OTL; a storm kept them from landing.
Oh, they could make an initial landing, but once the RN knew they were coming to Ireland, a British blockade would descend. I never said the French couldn't get an army over there, the question is how they could resupply it once it was there, hence my earlier points.
Faeelin said:
I disagree. It's not even that people are protesting that Boney couldn't land, which I mostly agree with. It's that once he lands, the British stand valiant, pick up irregular warfare, defeat him, and then have no major repurcessions.
Some possible ones: the militarization of British society and legitimizing violent. This had less than plesant consequences in Latin america.
Economic problems with a devastated southeast England.
The Irish revolt; even if the military wins....
The attitude in this thread is that Britain goes on its merry way of becoming the 19th century's superpower, when this is not at all clear.
I haven't got that impression from this thread. I agree that there will be major repercussions, economically and socially. IMO the modern British identity is essentially derived from events in the 1800s and 1810s, so changing that will dramatically change the idea of Britain. Certainly there'll be none of the quiet disdain for blatant displays of patriotism that exists in modern Britain (and pointedly not so in America or Canada, descended from earlier ideas of what it is to be English). One of us looking at the Britain of 2008 in a TL where the French invaded and were repulsed, would probably think it looked like a banana republic, with militarism and flag-waving everywhere...
As for British irregular warfare, there are two possible arguments here. One, that there was little popular resistance when the Jacobites came down in 1745. Two, that the Spanish and Portuguese seemed to pretty much pick it up out of nowhere, too, and they can't have had many more weapons or trained veteran soldiers than Britain did. I tend to the second view, arguing that the Jacobites were seen as legitimatist by many people and an avowed foreign invasion is very different indeed. Republicanism had its (few) admirers in England, if Revolutionary France had tried it; but Napoleonic France had all the negatives of Bourbon France, the old enemy, plus the impudence of a Napoleon. And the
maraude, which was one of the primary reasons behind Spanish resistance in TTL, and can only be worse considering the cornerstone of English law.