Revolution Controversy

The Revolution Controversy was a British debate over the French Revolution, lasting from 1789 through 1795. A pamphlet war began in earnest after the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which surprisingly supported the French aristocracy. Because he had supported the American colonists in their rebellion against England, his views sent a shock-wave through the country. Many writers responded, defending the revolution in France, among them Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Alfred Cobban calls the debate that erupted "perhaps the last real discussion of the fundamentals of politics" in Britain. The themes articulated by those responding to Burke would become a central feature of the radical working-class movement in Britain in the nineteenth century and of Romanticism. Most Britons celebrated the storming of the Bastille in 1789, believing that France's monarchy should be curtailed by a more democratic form of government. However, by December 1795, after the Reign of Terror and war with France, there were few who still supported the French cause.

Responding in part to a sermon defending the French Revolution given by the Dissenting clergyman Richard Price entitled A Discourse on the Love of our Country (1789), Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in an effort to advance arguments for the current aristocratic government. Because Burke had previously been part of the liberal Whig party, a critic of monarchical power, a supporter of the American revolutionaries, and a critic of government graft in India, most in Britain expected him to support the French revolutionaries. When he failed to do so, it shocked the populace and angered his friends and supporters. Burke's book sold 30,000 copies in two years. The Reflections defended "the aristocratic concepts of paternalism, loyalty, chivalry, the hereditary principle" and property.

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