Mind-Munitions

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Propaganda in the Age of Revolutionary Warfare
army commanders (including Wellington) would not allow any
civilians near the battlefields. But military news, often in great
detail, did manage to get back to the London press, prompting
complaints from Wellington and Napoleon’s celebrated remark
that ‘English papers make my best spies’. The dangers of providing
information that would be of value to the enemy were to result in
rigorous military censorship later in the century but, for the
moment, the authorities attempted to control leaks by issuing dull
official communiqués and forbidding serving officers from publishing
their letters. Yet even after the return of peace, newspapers
continued to send special correspondents to the small wars and on
military expeditions, in China and India, for example, in order to
cater for an increasingly news-hungry readership. And as virtually
the whole of Europe reeled from the shock of the 1848 revolutions,
the growing involvement of ordinary people in politics was
reflected in a press that could now report events from afar faster
than ever before.
In 1851, as Europe recovered from its recent political upheavals,
Britain basked in the glory and prestige of its imperial achievements
at the Great Exhibition held in the Crystal Palace. Such
displays of national self-advertisement had become increasingly
commonplace, but Victorian London provided the setting for the
most spectacular propaganda exhibition of the nineteenth century.
It was both a national and an international exercise in propaganda.
As Paul Greenhalgh has commented:
The Great Exhibition can… be viewed as a giant counter revolutionary
measure; indeed, from its earliest days it was conceived of as an event to
foster fear as well as pride in the minds of the British public, an immense
show of strength designed to intimidate potential insurrectionists.
This might seem startling, yet the fact remains that despite the
progress that had been made in the political representation of the
English people, much remained to be done. It is no coincidence
that The Communist Manifesto was published in London in 1848
and that historians have been grappling ever since with the question
of why, uniquely, no revolution occurred in England in that year.
But, as the Great Exhibition revealed, the Victorians were perhaps
the most effective English myth-makers since the Tudors. One of their
most important myths was that the British Army, with its tradition
dating back from Waterloo of recent memory to Agincourt and