To say that Britain intervened against France in the wars of the Coalition (1793-1815) purely to try and weaken France's government is quite a bold, and perhaps even spurious, assertion. Firstly, it is hard to claim that Absolutism had necessarily weakened France; the most absolute of France's kings, Louis XIV, famous (possibly apocryphally), for declaring 'l'etat c'est moi', had seen France occupy a pre-eminent position across Europe, a position which had largely been retained by his successors, Louis XV & XVI, although the latter's poor leadership eventually prompted the revolution.

Moreover, Revolutionary France's government hardly needed 'weakening'. In the first three years of the Republic, food shortages and inflation were rampant, the army was fragmenting and poorly led, and the government instituted a mass terror to silence its political opponents, before being overturned in 1795 to form a new government, the Directory.

However, it would not be inaccurate to say that a weakened France benefited Britain. Britain, both before and prior the Revolution, had sought to balance power within Europe, thereby preventing a continental hegemony by any one nation. Interventions in the War of Spanish Succession and the Crimean War are excellent examples of this policy, as they were designed to curtail the power of those nations that could thus threaten Britain, and Revolutionary France, as both a recent antagonist and a colonial rival, would seem to be such a target, particularly as the radical revolutionary politics of the era also threatened to overturn the political status quo.

However, this is where the accuracy in the claim ends. Although it is true that at the time Britain was one of the few countries to possess established, sovereign parliamentary institutions, it would be a stretch to claim that it was a highly progressive democracy. The franchise remained restricted largely to the landed elite, the voting systems were highly corrupt, and the vote would only be extended to even a significant portion of the general public a few decades after the end of the Coalition Wars. If anything, the Revolution was rejected by Britain for being too radical, not because it was a challenger to a British hegemony over 'superior' democratic institutions, but because it threatened the stability of Britain's own political structure, and perhaps even more crucially, the French had also toppled, and then executed, their own monarch. Britain had initially looked on the revolution with some interest, but the increasing violence and radicalism of the movement, followed by the violent overthrow and execution of a monarch saw public opinion shift from lukewarm to outraged. Edmund Burke, an outspoken MP and thinker, is at once an exemplar and a factor in this shift in public opinion; originally merely interested in 1789, within the year he was publishing his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which thoroughly denounced the revolutionary government, and which found much favour, indicated by its wide circulation. These feelings were indeed only to be further intensified by the accession of Napoleon I to the throne as Emperor, partially by providing a persona for the British public to direct their revulsion at, but also by the latter's seeming vendetta against Britain.

Indeed, it is far easier to see Britain's involvement in the Wars of the Coalition as prompted more by reaction and defence (as well as a healthy dose of colonial opportunism) than any pernicious attempt to undermine France, which could actually be seen to have been doing that effectively itself, having declared war on not only Britain and the Netherlands in 1793, despite already being engaged with Prussia, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Naples, Sardinia, and a number of other states. The political upheaval of the revolution and the hostility of the French state towards Britain, which posed not only a political, but also economic and military threat to the established order, can be seen as far more compelling reasons for continued British participation in the Coalition Wars, the aims of which remained largely the containment of France and the restoration of the Bourbons, although it would be false to claim that Britain did not seek imperial advantage nor an increase in its territories from a victorious war against France (as did in fact happen).

I have offered a general bibliography regarding the Coalition Wars from the British perspective below. Although predominantly more concerned with the actual fighting of the war, there is also discussion of policy-making, the numerous coalitions of course seeing changing policy and membership as time went on, and political realities shifted.

Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837, (London: Yale, 1992)

Collins, Bruce, War and Empire: The Expansion of Britain, 1790-1830 (Harlow: Pearson, 2010)

Connelly, Owen, The Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1792-1815 (London: Routledge, 2006)

Duffy, Michael, ‘World-Wide War and British Expansion, 1793-1815’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. by Peter James Marshall, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 2, pp. 184-207

—‘War, Revolution and the Crisis of the British Empire’, in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. by M. Philp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 118-45

Hall, Christopher, British Strategy in the Napoleonic War, 1803-1815 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992)

Harvey, Robert, The War of Wars: The Epic Struggle Between Britain and France, 1789-1815 (London: Constable, 2006)

Mackesy, Piers, ‘Strategic Problems of the British War Effort’, in Britain and the French Revolution, 1789-1815, ed. by H.T. Dickinson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 147-164

Schroeder, Paul W., ‘The Collapse of the Second Coalition’, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 59, 2, (June, 1987), 244-290

Smyth, Jim, The Making of the United Kingdom, 1660-1800, (Harlow: Longman, 2001)