Trimmer's views of the French "philosophes" were shaped by Abbé Barruel's "Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism" (1797–98) (she extracted large sections from this text into the "Guardian" itself) but also by her fears of the ongoing wars between France and Britain during the 1790s. Trimmer emphasized Christianity above all in her writings and maintained that one should to turn to God in times of trial. As children's literature scholar M. Nancy Cutt argues, Trimmer and writers like her "claimed emphatically that the degree of human happiness was in direct proportion to the degree of submission to the divine Will. Thus they repudiated the moralists' view that learning should exalt reason and work to the temporal happiness of the individual, which was governed by the best interests of society." Trimmer and her allies contended that French pedagogical theories led to an immoral nation, specifically, "deism, infidelity and revolution".