Editing William Pitt the Younger (section)

====Ideological struggle====
[[File:William Pitt the Younger 2.jpg|thumb|upright|right|William Pitt by [[Gainsborough Dupont]] in the [[Burrell Collection]], Glasgow]]
Throughout the 1790s, the war against France was presented as an ideological struggle between French republicanism vs. British monarchism with the British government seeking to mobilise public opinion in support of the war.{{sfn|Evans|2002|p=57}} The Pitt government waged a vigorous propaganda campaign contrasting the ordered society of Britain dominated by the aristocracy and the gentry vs. the "anarchy" of the French revolution and always sought to associate British "radicals" with the revolution in France. Some of the writers the British government subsidized (often from Secret Service funds) included [[Edmund Burke]], [[William Cobbett]], [[William Playfair]], [[John Reeves (activist)|John Reeves]], and [[Samuel Johnson]] (the last through the pension granted him in 1762).<ref>Arthur Aspinall, ''Politics and the Press'' (London: Home & Van Thal, 1949) available at the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/politicspressc170000aspi</ref><ref>{{cite journal|author-first1=Jennifer |author-last1=Mori|title=Languages of Loyalism: Patriotism, Nationhood and the State in the 1790s|journal=The English Historical Review|date=February 2003|url=https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article-abstract/118/475/33/473630?login=false|volume=119|number=475|pages=33–58 |doi=10.1093/ehr/118.475.33}}</ref>{{sfn|Evans|2002|p=59}} 

Though the Pitt government did drastically reduce civil liberties and created a nationwide spy network with ordinary people being encouraged to denounce any "radicals" that might be in their midst, the historian [[Eric J. Evans]] argued the picture of Pitt's "reign of terror" as portrayed by the Marxist historian [[E.P. Thompson]] is incorrect, stating there is much evidence of a "popular conservative movement" that rallied in defence of King and Country.{{sfn|Evans|2002|p=58}} Evans wrote that there were about 200 prosecutions of "radicals" suspected of sympathy with the French revolution in British courts in the 1790s, which was much less than the prosecutions of suspected Jacobites after the rebellions of 1715 and 1745.{{sfn|Evans|2002|p=59}} 

However, the spy network maintained by the government was efficient. In [[Jane Austen]]'s novel ''[[Northanger Abbey]]'', which was written in the 1790s, but not published until 1817, one of the characters remarks that it is not possible for a family to keep secrets in these modern times when spies for the government were lurking everywhere. This comment captures well the tense, paranoid atmosphere of the 1790s, when people were being encouraged to report "radicals" to the authorities.{{sfn|Irvine|2005|p=93}}