The French Revolution was the greatest challenge to political authority and social order that the European world had experienced since the Reformation. So confident were the revolutionaries of their vision of the future that they not only wished to refashion politics but sought the regeneration of mankind. They coined the, far from innocent, label of ancien régime to consign the past to oblivion. The history of the medieval and early modern world was dismissed as a catalogue of errors, crimes and bigotry.1 The world was now liberated from the tyrannical forces of tradition and superstition. It did not take long for opposition against this totalising vision of political and social order to coalesce. As Darrin McMahon has stated: ‘the revolution did not need to invent its enemies. They were there from the outset, and their presence exerted a powerful influence on the dynamics of the revolutionary process.’2 The counter-revolutionaries of the 1790s were the direct heirs of the counter-enlightenment of the eighteenth century.