Revolution controversy

A British debate or ‘pamphlet war’, which took place between 1790 and 1795, about the nature of the French Revolution.

The controversy began in earnest once Edmund Burke had published Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which attacked the French revolutionaries for tearing down ‘all the decent drapery’ of the ancien regime. By this, Burke meant that the French Revolution had undermined the important features that had provided society with a sense of tradition and stability (the Bourbon monarchy, the French aristocracy, and the Catholic Church) and had established a new system based on untried abstract principles such as equality and liberty. Burke’s conservative critique provoked a strong response from radical writers, including Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, all of whom defended the aims of the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft, for example, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), published a few weeks later and directly addressed to Burke, maintained that the French Revolution provided the vehicle to advance the cause of equality, freedom, reason, social justice, republicanism and women’s rights. From her perspective, Burke’s stance on the events in France revealed ‘a mortal antipathy to reason, … reverence [for] the rust of antiquity’, a belief that people should ‘remain forever in frozen inactivity’ and a conviction that ‘unnatural customs’ were ‘the sage fruit of experience.’ Over 300 pamphlets were produced during the revolution controversy but, by late 1795, the violence of the Terror and Britain’s involvement in the War of the First Coalition had sharply curtailed British sympathies for the French revolutionary cause.