Cannon smoke bisects Robert Ker Porter's Buonaparte Massacreing Fifteen Hundred Persons at Toulon [sic] (c. 1803), severing the bewildered revolutionary soldiers above from the grieving people below. In its emphasis on distress and division Porter's picture amounts to a visual argument that the gap in French society is not, as might be supposed, between the people and the forces of the ancien régime, but between the people and the Revolution itself. As the dead lover and unfortunate mother at the bottom of the picture suggest, the mode of government fractures romance and prevents the reproduction of family and polis. Yet the missing term here is nation. Toulon had been delivered to the British navy by Baron d'Imbert on 1 October 1793. The omission of the Anglo-Spanish and counter-revolutionary forces allows Porter to imply that radicalism causes the people's distress. Porter's painting reflects the way that the rhetoric of revolution brought the political importance of the people to the fore. It also suggests how, during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, this idea would be tested and exploited in the service of nation and empire. In the historical novel, in particular, the focus on the ‘masses’ and their legal and electoral rights was complicated by a narrative of nationhood in which romance and history jostled uneasily.

In the ‘General Preface to the Waverley Novels’ Scott states that, along with the editorship of QueenHoo Hall (1808), it was ‘the extended and well-merited fame of Miss Edgeworth’ that led him to recollect the unfinished manuscript that became Waverley. Scott's remarks inadvertently support the assumption that the national tale precedes the historical novel. This assumption, albeit carefully nuanced, can, for example, be traced in Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism. Although she acknowledges that ‘in eighteenth-century Ireland, Scotland, and Wales nationalist antiquarians edited, explicated, and promoted their respective bardic traditions’, her examination of the role of the historical novel in the development of the tale effectively begins with Scott. In such accounts, tales by Edgeworth and Owenson make use of stadial history, a use that Scott is then seen to transform and develop. However, in the 1790s, historical novelists had adopted a probing approach to nascent national identity, in part by manipulating mainstream historiographical tropes.