Cycnos | Numéros | Volume 16.1 - Conservatismes anglo-américains XVIII^e et XIX^e siècles

Résumé :

From the very beginning of the American civil war, Conservative literati and publicists in The Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine went much further than the Parliamentary Conservative Party and its leaders in their support of the Confederate cause, felt to be the last bulwark against the “americanization”; of English institutions and the collapse of the traditional order. Till well after the end of the war they consistently depicted the Confederate struggle as a war of national liberation and the North as an exploitative power which had long fed on the South. Their main object was to demonstrate that the incompetence and later the savagery of the American Republic, its government and generals, in waging the war, the evil passions Northerners displayed, their barbaric way of warfare were all to be put down to the messianic turn of mind of the Americans and to the Union’s being an egalitarian democracy ruled by an ignorant mob and corrupt politicians. At a time of renewed radical agitation for a broadening of the franchise the defeat of the North was thus crucial to the perpetuation of England as a civilized society ruled by an aristocracy of blood, wealth and culture.

Date de publication : 2008-07-09