Properly speaking, the Jacobins were a radical revolutionary club established in Paris in 1789 who take their name from the Dominican friary on the Rue St. Jacques where they held meetings. However, the term was subsequently applied indiscriminately to all proponents of revolutionary movements, especially those outside France.

Even as late as the 1860s the European monarchies and Ancien Régimes of Imperial Russia, Austro-Hungary, and the Holy Roman Empire regarded the French Republic with suspicion, fearing its radicalism threatened the elite in all countries across Europe. In the early years of the French Revolution there had been an assumption that it must fail; or rather, the aristocratic classes of those nations could not imagine any society functioning without their guidance and rule. But once startled by the rise of Buonoparte and the turning of France under its Little Caesar into a meritocratic and functioning state, Russia, Austria-Hungary and occasionally Prussia sought to destroy Buonoparte and return the Bourbon monarchy to the French throne either through direct military action or by fomenting dissent within France itself or in her American colonies. Fortunately, they failed and the names of the battles where Buonoparte outfought them resound through history.

Though one must disapprove of some of Buonoparte’s actions, his tactical genius forged the modern world and even I, a Tory with a love for our own dear royals, thank him, for where France led other nations would follow and to oppose La Révolution, is, as Jean-Paul Saint-Pierre, head chef of the Fatted Calf in Devizes, once said to me, to oppose humanité.

Of course, what Jean-Paul Saint-Pierre does not like to admit is that Buonoparte eventually became more Roman than the Roman emperors on whom he modelled himself and was deposed by his own Grande Armée when it tired of his ambitions and petty obsessions and exiled to the Canadian island of Miquelon where he died of pneumonia in 1837. But the republic he left behind flourished, retaining all that had been gained in the revolutionary years and acquiring stability and peace. Not only had France proved that a stable, functioning society had no need for an aristocratic elite, but meritocracy had promoted capable and inventive men to the fore and France had become too powerful to be weakened by less socially advanced nations.

But as I say, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century there remained throughout Europe a lingering suspicion that France had ambitions to extend the revolution beyond its borders and any group espousing democratic views was liable to be accused of spying or insurrection. Thus, the very success of France became something of a handicap for those like the Chartists, Larrikers, Labour Societies, and so on, who took inspiration from their French “brothers;” hence the use of “Jacobin” to describe anyone arguing for ‘French’ ideas like democratic rights and universal suffrage. Indeed, it is striking how even today people can be discouraged from a patently good idea simply by someone labelling it as ‘foreign.’