BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Francophilia to English artistic chauvinism. 22 But the underlying political and socio-economic
nature of this culture war emerges in the targeting of a Frenchified, effeminate and dissipated
Whig aristocracy by middle-class merchants and intellectuals who sought a political voice.
Newman describes the construction of an English national character featuring sincerity and
forthrightness in opposition to French guile, pretense, toadying and artfulness—an identity that
chimed with patriotic politics aimed at Sir Robert Walpole and aristocratic privilege. 23 The new
patriotism romanticized the idea of a free people under the Norman Yoke of aristocratic
corruption and found a hero-leader in William Pitt, who successfully prosecuted the Seven Years
War against France. Newman calls British Francophobia a “loose cannon,” exploited alike by
conservatives, evangelicals and radicals. In the long run, he argues, it served a secular and rather
narrow and backward-looking nationalism that eschewed revolutionary abstract universalism for
a national radical tradition that later found expression in Chartism. 24 Newman’s definition of
English cultural nationalism thus becomes culturally embellished politics—or really a case of
psychological othering, because Newman himself recognizes the paradox of an ongoing parallel
intellectual revolt against aristocratic corruption and hypocrisy within France. 25
Newman anticipated Linda Colley’s work on British identity to some extent by discerning
in anti-French stereotypes a binary opposition that galvanized English patriotism in both
22 The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740-1830 (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1987), 56-60, 86-7, 119.
23 Ibid., 129, 136, 141, 168-69. Walpole, an influential Whig politician during the early
Hanoverian decades, became the first defacto Prime Minister.
24 Ibid., 162, 169, 222.
25 Ibid., 141.
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