The Anti-Jacobin, or, Weekly Examiner was an English newspaper founded by George Canning in 1797 and devoted to opposing the radicalism of the French Revolution. It lasted only a year, but was considered highly influential, and is not to be confused with the Anti-Jacobin Review, a publication which sprang up on its demise. The Revolution polarized British political opinion in the 1790s, with conservatives outraged at the killing of the king Louis XVI of France, the expulsion of the nobles, and the Reign of Terror. Great Britain went to war against Revolutionary France. Conservatives castigated every radical opinion in Great Britain as "Jacobin" (in reference to the leaders of the Terror), warning that radicalism threatened an upheaval of British society. The Anti-Jacobin sentiment was expressed in print.[1] William Gifford was its editor. Its first issue was published on 20 November 1797 and during the parliamentary session of 1797–98 it was issued every Monday.[2]
The Anti-Jacobin was planned by Canning when he was Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He secured the collaboration of George Ellis, John Hookham Frere, William Gifford, and some others. William Gifford was appointed working editor.
Canning founded it, in his words, "...to be full of sound reasoning, good principles, and good jokes and to set the mind of the people right upon every subject."[3] One of Canning's biographers described its purpose as to "...deride and refute the ideas of the Jacobins, present the government's point of view on the issues of the day and expose the misinformation and misinterpretation which filled the opposition newspapers."[3] In its first issue Canning said he and his friends:
...avow ourselves to be partial to the COUNTRY in which we live, notwithstanding the daily panegyrics which we read and hear on the superior virtues and endowments of its rival and hostile neighbours. We are prejudiced in favour of her Establishments, civil and religious; though without claiming for either that ideal perfection, which modern philosophy professes to discover in the more luminous systems which are arising on all sides of us.[4]
Canning set out his "most serious, vehement and effective onslaught in verse" on the values of the French Revolution in a long poem, New Morality, published in the last issue of the Anti-Jacobin (No. 36, 9 July 1798). Canning considered these values as "French philanthropy" that professed a love of all mankind whilst eradicating every patriotic impulse. He described anyone in Great Britain who held these values as a "pedant prig" who "...disowns a Briton's part, And plucks the name of England from his heart...":
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No – through th'extended globe his feelings run | |
To publicise the Anti-Jacobin, Canning paid the cartoonist James Gillray to publish plates themed on the Anti-Jacobin's principles, and some believe that twenty Gillray plates were the fruit of this arrangement.[6]
William Pitt the Younger, the Prime Minister, also contributed to the newspaper.[7]
The Anti-Jacobin estimated that its total readership was 50,000. They multiplied the regular weekly sale of 2,500 by seven (arriving at 17,500) because that was the average size of a family—and added 32,500 based on the assumption that many readers lent their copies to their poorer neighbours.[8]
- ^ Gregory Fremont-Barnes, ed. The Encyclopedia of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: A Political, Social, and Military History (2006) vol. 1 pp. 41–42
- ^ Wendy Hinde, George Canning (1973), p. 59.
- ^ a b Hinde, p. 58.
- ^ Hinde, p. 60.
- ^ Wendy Hinde, Op. cit., p. 61.
- ^ Hinde, p. 60. Draper Hill, Gillray (1965), p. 68.
- ^ Hinde, p. 63.
- ^ Hinde, p. 65.