Francophilia in English Society, 1748-1815

Book excerpt: This book examines the impact of French society on English culture in the second half of the eighteenth century. In an age when many historians suggest the inexorable rise of the middle classes was being driven forward by industrialization, the English aristocracy stood apart from the trend towards commercial respectability, and revelled in all that was best in cosmopolitan fashion and ideas. Welcoming the French Revolution as a re-enactment of 1688, they watched aghast as their world descended into the Terror, and the onslaught of Bonaparte.