Victorian political thought on France and the French

"This book is a contribution to British intellectual history, focusing on the growing reflection among political thinkers in the course of the nineteenth century on issues of nations and nationhood. It is at least as much about 'Englishness' and 'Britishness' as it is about France. It attempts to chart developments in cross-cultural mutual perceptions, comparisons, exchanges and misunderstandings, the extent and varieties of ethnocentrism, and the role of intellectuals in such phenomena. France was Victorian Britain's significant 'other', the foreign country par excellence, a mirror through which Britain (or 'England', as the Victorians themselves would put it) could define, scold, or - more often - congratulate itself. Thus, by scrutinizing the major Victorian political thinkers' perceptions and representations of France, this book shows how comparisons with the country on the other side of the Channel, its politics, civilization, and the French 'national character' contributed to nineteenth-century Britain's self-definition. It offers a valuable addition and, in several cases, a corrective to studies depicting the Victorian world-view through attitudes towards non-European colonized peoples and the Irish (the latter being an issue closely related to attitudes towards 'Celtic' France and therefore extensively discussed in this book). While the utterances on France of several other figures are also examined, the main focus is on Walter Bagehot, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, Lord Action, Thomas Carlyle, Nassau William Senior, James Fitzjames Stephen, William Rathbone Greg, Thomas Babington Macaulay, John Morley, and Frederic Harrison and his fellow-Comtists."--Jacket.