Anti-gallicanism

It seems to me that we have here an insight into why francophobia was such a popular and such an acceptable radical attitude in this period. Present-day historians, embarrassed by or condescending about plebeian anti-gallicanism in the eighteenth century and after, forget that it was in large part a natural continuum of the earlier widespread acceptance of Norman yoke theories […]

The image of Cobbett as “Peter Porcupine,” the indefatigable advocate of Great Britain, emerged only slowly. […] Although he believed that his greatest achievement in the 1790s was to have “untied the tongue of British attachment” in America, his remarkable political influence rested on another achievement: his revival of a robust and deeply rooted tradition of American anti-Gallicanism.

For one, anti-French sentiment was far more changeable and circumscribed than has generally been presumed […]. Insofar as anti-Gallicanism became a feature of colonial life, it was part of a much more complex cultural politics.

But Lamennais’s anti-Gallicanism is throughout an unmistakable presence: the church is not the creature of the state, which, on Gallican principles – its spurious ‘liberties’ – it could easily become.