The Making of the English Working Class

Chapter 5 describes the English Jacobin movement and the events of the 1790s, in particular the English response to Paine’s Rights of Man and the French Revolution. Thompson explains the unprecedented and revolutionary political circumstances that developed in England between the LCS’s first meeting in January 1792 and the arrest of its principal members in May 1794. Crowds of working men gathered all over the country to proclaim the rights of man, prompting a “counter-revolutionary offensive” (107) from England’s propertied class. After French revolutionaries executed their king, proclaimed a republic, and then declared war on Great Britain in early 1793, English government authorities marshaled all available resources and used every means of intimidation, including spies and hired thugs, in an effort to silence English Jacobins. A demonstrable surge of millenarian enthusiasm, coupled with the resilience of popular societies such as the LCS in the face of official persecution, suggest that English aristocrats and their allies had good reason to suspect a general ferment within the lower class. Nevertheless, societies like the LCS struggled to withstand relentless government persecution, and their numbers dwindled as a result.

After the 1794 trial and acquittal of LCS founder Thomas Hardy and his associates on charges of treason, and the brutal winter and ensuing famine of 1795, however, those numbers swelled once more, highlighted by a June 1795 demonstration in London that drew tens of thousands.