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The emergence and decline of the radical movement from 1780 to 1850 not only reflects the social conditions of Britain during the transition period, but also provides an excellent illustration of the social and political changes in Britain during this period.
The development of the radical movement interacted with the political development of Britain during the period, and the radical press was a barometer of radical change in Britain. The study of the radical press and the public opinion of the newspapers and periodicals related to the radical movement can well reflect the democratization process of British politics during this period.
The struggle of press and public opinion at the beginning of the radical movement
The radical movement that accompanied the French Revolution was initially supported by many British people, who believed that Britain should also carry out reforms like France, and with the development of the radical movement, the radicals gradually reached a consensus, they were determined to educate the public in order to enlighten the public's awareness of political rights, so as to promote parliamentary reform.
In such a situation, the radicals actively promoted and organized political discussions, invested a lot of money in creating publications and distributing propaganda materials. For example, the famous London News Agency, between January 1794 and January 1795, they managed to publish an eight-page weekly magazine The Political Man, which lasted for 4 issues.
With the creation of the radical press, it provided propaganda power to support the French Revolution and spread the ideas of radical reform. In October 1789, the Kent Gazette published a speech "To the British Freeholders", hoping that the example of the French Revolution would lead to domestic reforms.
The article states: "A nation on the European continent, which has always been despised by us for its despicable enslavement, now proclaims the inalienable rights of human beings and the establishment of freedom on the broadest possible basis. It's scary to consider that in our land of hereditary freedom there are still laws that are aversion to common sense and common rights. ”
The Sheffield Chronicle also declared: "Twenty-six million of our compatriots broke the shackles that bound them, and the fallen yoke of slavery was instantly abandoned." And it is predicted that the government of the future will not be a conspiracy of the few against the many, but will promote the common good of the masses.
The development of radical movements made the ruling class feel threatened from the beginning, and with the violent tendencies of the French Revolution, the market for radicalism became smaller and smaller among the British people. For example, the Morning Post and the Morning Chronicle both supported revolutionary ideas to varying degrees in the initial phase, but began to retreat when the French Revolution began to show violent excesses.
At the same time, numerous pro-government conservative publications began to attack the French Revolution against the parliamentary reforms advocated by the radical movement. The radicals in England were portrayed as demagogues and ambitious protesters jealous of the glory and privileges that the aristocratic ruling class deserved.
The parliamentary reforms demanded by the radicals were portrayed as the first steps towards the demise of the monarchy and aristocracy, while their attacks on political privileges were seen as a prelude to threats to private property and the entire social hierarchy. They believe that radicals go to great lengths to promote equality for all, not only to plunder the rich, but also to destroy the poor completely.
Conservative forces see the threat posed by the "British Jacobins" as very real and designed to provoke a strong reaction among readers. In December 1792, Le Monde reflected the country's fears of a possible domestic uprising, declaring that despite the government's propaganda and repressive actions and the association of loyalists, the rebellion lurked in many parts of the great city.
Clive Amesley notes that this widespread belief in domestic revolution caused "extreme fear" in 1792-17933. Some newspapers, such as the London Chronicle, reported in detail the "revolutionary plan" of the British Jacobins, which included the destruction of the House of Lords, the Cavalry Guard, St. James's Palace and the Court.
In addition, conservative propagandists describe Britain as the most prosperous country on earth, with its citizens enjoying freedom, property, and peace and security under a system of equality, justice and the rule of law. They claim that true freedom is based on the security of life and property. In Britain, poor and rich are equal before the law and can safely preserve their property.
The propertied elite took its responsibilities seriously and provided security for the hardworking poor. Conservative propaganda is not satisfied with merely demonstrating the many practical benefits of the existing political system, or simply to show how those benefits are achieved, but it also destroys the moral and intellectual basis of the doctrine of natural rights to which radicals appeal.
Conservative thinkers do not accept the concept of natural equality and reject the idea that all people should have the right to vote. Conservative theorists insist that government needs to protect private property, preserve the social hierarchy of nature, and curb man's selfish and fanatical nature.
During the controversy, conservatives also actively created publications attacking radicals and promoting conservative political ideas, most notably the Anti-Jacobin newspaper founded by George Canning, William Gifford, and John Hookman in July 1797, and later replaced by the Anti-Jacobin Review, which was published until 1821.
There was also a more successful conservative propaganda publication among the lower classes, founded by Hannah More, who in 1791, with the support of the Bishop of London, published the very successful book Rural Politics.
For conservative propaganda, political caricatures and cartoons both absorbed the well-educated public and were an important means of propaganda to the lower classes. Satire painters such as Isaac Crookshank, James Gilray, Thomas Rowlandson, and many others explicitly praised the British Constitution and wanted to protect it from outside attacks and internal subversion.
Many conservative publications in the propaganda war against radical publications were either written by or directly encouraged by political elites. Not only that, the government also subsidized the propaganda offensive of conservative publications by giving subsidies to newspapers and periodicals, and the subsidies were even included in the government budget, gradually forming a "subsidy system" in propaganda funds.
In London, like the famous Anti-Jacobin Review, founded in 1789, it was founded with direct government funding, in 1792 the government funded the creation of The Sun, and in 1793 the government sponsored the daily newspaper "The Real British". During the same period, they were also involved in the founding of the journal British Review.
The development of the radical press and its role
Three different trends emerged in the nineteenth-century press industry, starting with the emergence of a large number of radical newspapers; This was followed by the growth of influential bourgeois newspapers in pursuit of economic interests: finally, weekly and weekend newspapers appeared and became important reading for the lower classes.
In this series of changes, the emergence of radical newspapers and periodicals had an important impact on the newspaper industry and social politics at that time. The radical press targeted the interests of ordinary people, which was a relatively special kind of political independence at a time when the newspaper industry began to transform into a commercial model.
These radical presses sought to challenge the existing political order and incite revolutionary change, and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was fully aware of its destructive intentions with regard to the status quo, arguing that "radicalism is subversion, total excision and overthrow, substitution, not another order of one form of government, but the total destruction of the status quo".
The legacy of this radicalism, expressed in printless press journalism, is a reorganization of the language of political analysis that has had a huge effect on creating a sense of working-class identity. At the same time, the audience of publications began to decline in the society of that time.
Many people used to think that all newspaper readers came from a relatively homogeneous middle class, so newspaper owners and contributors were not interested in targeting the reading poor, and most newspapers and periodicals were tailored to this assumption. The lower classes satisfied their reading needs through non-standard publications such as ballads, pamphlets, almanacs, etc.
However, under the pressure of foreign political and social events and domestic conditions, after experiencing the pressures of unemployment and urbanization in the early industrial revolution, the readership was increasingly classified and politicized. The press began to show readers in two ways, the market as an economic purpose and the social class as a political end.
In the early 19th century, newspaper journalism rediscovered political controversies unprecedented in scale since the English Civil War some two hundred years ago. Raymond Scholams wrote: "The 19th century brought me a new kind of fighting political journalism."
At the end of the 18th century, numerous events led to the growth of radical ideas in the British media in the early 19th century, and the scope of press news discourse entered a non-reading polemical mode. Since its inception as an equalist, the Declaration of Independence of 1776 was a clear clarion call to insist that Britain "not provide any representative taxation."
Building on Wilkes' tradition of political writing with his The North Britons, an important figure in the propaganda war leading up to the American Revolution was British immigrant Thomas Paine, who created what Smith called "popular radical journalism."
Because of the political environment between Britain, the United States, and France, Paine produced extensive debate journalism, including his three major publications, Common Sense, Human Rights, and The Age of Reason.
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