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With the coming of the French Revolution in 1789 and its attack on monarchy, the landed aristocracy, the religious establishment and religion itself, and especially with the coming of the sans culottes and the First French Republic and its 'Terror' in 1793-94, fear of revolution swept the British establishment. Sensing revolution everywhere, successive Tory governments, rooted in the alliance of the Church of England, the landed aristocracy and the monarchy, practised a consistent and harsh policy of repression. Neither the fear nor the repression eased with the arrival of, or indeed, with the departure of, Napoleon who, as Emperor from 1804 to 1815, seemed determined to conquer Britain by means of revolutionary propaganda, economic blockade and/or military invasion.As the revolution and then Napoleon swept across Europe, French research mathematicians such as J. L. Lagrange and S. P. Laplace, and French textbook writers such as S. F. Lacroix, made .it obvious that British mathematicians who adhered to the geometrically oriented fluxional mathematics and dot notation of Newton had become anachronisms. The more powerful abstract and generalized analysis developed on the Continent had become the focus of mathematicians and the language of the physical sciences. This mathematical transmutation fused with social revolution. 'Lagrange's treatises on the calculus were written in response to the educational needs of the Revolution', recounts Ivor Grattan-Guinness, and Lagrange, Laplace and Lacroix were intimately involved with the educational and scientific reorganizations of the earlier revolutionaries and Napoleon. 1 Thus, French mathematics became associated with revolutionary France.This confluence of social and mathematical revolution washed into the heart of Cambridge University because the main purpose of the Cambridge mathematics curriculum, as the core of a liberal education, Cambridge's raison d'etre, was to produce
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