No More Philanthropy

Abstract

In October 1793 subjects of George III who were living in France were targeted by a far-reaching arrest decree. Co-drafted by Maximilien Robespierre, this measure led to the great majority of the British and Irish population there being open-endedly imprisoned. Britons thus became the experimental objects of punitive revolutionary legislation which far outstepped the treatment of enemy subjects more widely. The remainder of the Terror saw no abatement, and in many ways further acceleration, of anti-British polemic and action. Ultimately, though, the history of the treatment of the British in France may be revealing not just in providing an index of the Terror’s dynamic sweep and policy extremism but also in highlighting its outer limits and even its overreach.