When the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 signaled to the world that something extraordinary was taking place in France, Mary Wollstonecraft was already in a position, intellectually and socially, to respond with enthusiasm. From 1784 to 1785 she had lived in Newington Green, where she came under the influence of the Dissenting preacher Dr. Richard Price, then in his sixties, who was one of the leading radical intellectuals of the day. In 1787 she began working as a writer and translator for Joseph Johnson, a Dissenter and radical publisher whose home and bookshop at St. Paul’s Churchyard was a focal point for London Dissenters and radicals. As a kind of surrogate daughter to Johnson, Wollstonecraft became part of one of the most forward-looking intellectual circles in Britain. Members of Johnson’s circle hurried to Paris in the summer of 1789 and returned with enthusiastic accounts, hoping that a similar revolution might take place in Britain. The joy occasioned by the French Revolution’s early phase bound this circle together, as Claire Tomalin puts it, “in the certainty that they knew the truth and that it was bound to prevail.”1
The French Revolution was a drawn-out process rather than a single event. But the dramatic events of the Revolution’s early phase provoked one of the most important political debates in British history. The “Revolution Controversy” of 1789–95 was as much about the implications of the Revolution for Britain as it was about the Revolution itself. This argument was sparked off by a sermon Richard Price delivered on 4 November 1789, which was published shortly afterwards, along with a letter of congratulation to the National Assembly in Paris, as A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789). Despite England’s revolution in 1688–9, Price argued, liberty in Britain was neither secure nor complete (especially for those who, like Price himself, were Dissenters from the Church of England). In his conclusion, Price enthusiastically hailed the French Revolution and implied that Britain ought to follow its example and thereby complete the political process that had begun in England’s so-called “Glorious Revolution.”2
Edmund Burke, a Whig politician and political theorist, was relatively untroubled by the French Revolution until he read Price’s suggestion that it be imitated in Britain. He responded with a ferocious attack on Price and on the Revolution in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (published on 1 November 1790) – a text that has provoked readers ever since. Focusing on an event that took place on 5–6 October 1789 in which a crowd of Parisians marched to Versailles and forced the king and queen of France to return to Paris,3 Burke represents the Revolution as the action of a mob bent on destroying all the social and cultural values of France that had been the model for the whole of Europe. This was the inevitable outcome of a concerted campaign by radical French philosophers to undermine traditional respect for the monarchy, aristocracy, and church. The result, he predicts, will be tyranny and the destruction of France. This was not a prospect to be celebrated, nor an example to be imitated. On the contrary, French revolutionary principles ought to be treated like a disease fatal to the ancient principles of the British constitution. Burke’s attack on Price’s sermon and character was thus an attempt to repress the symptoms of revolutionary enthusiasm at work in Britain.
Burke’s Reflections stimulated a flurry of responses.4 The first of these was Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France (Johnson, 1790). The first edition was published anonymously on 29 November 1790, barely a month after Burke’s Reflections had appeared; a second, published on 18 December with her name on the title page, made Wollstonecraft instantly famous. As the full title indicates, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication is principally interested in replying to Burke, its aim being “to shew you to yourself, stripped of the gorgeous drapery in which you have enwrapped your tyrannic principles” (VRM 5:37).5 The text itself reveals that, at this stage, Wollstonecraft knew more about Burke’s writings and political conduct than about the French Revolution.
Wollstonecraft begins by associating herself with a tradition of radical British writing, echoing John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690): “The birthright of man, to give you, Sir, a short definition of this disputed right, is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact, and the continued existence of that compact” (VRM 5:9).6 Whereas Burke argued that the people of Britain already enjoy liberty as a kind of property inherited from their ancestors, Wollstonecraft refers to a different kind of birthright – those “rights which men inherit at their birth, as rational creatures” (VRM 5:14). But no government on earth has yet instituted such rights: “Liberty, in this simple, unsophisticated sense, I acknowledge, is a fair idea that has never yet received a form in the various governments that have been established on our beauteous globe” (VRM 5:9). People have been denied their birthright because existing legal systems protect the property of the few rather than promote justice for all. Wollstonecraft thus reads Burke’s celebration of English liberty as a defence of the property rights of the privileged minority: “Security of property! Behold, in a few words, the definition of English liberty” (VRM 5:14–15).
Burke’s belief in the antiquity of the British constitution and the impossibility of improving upon a system that has been tried and tested through time is dismissed as nonsense. The past, for Wollstonecraft, is a scene of superstition, oppression, and ignorance. While Burke’s politics are backward looking, Wollstonecraft’s are orientated towards the future, looking forward to the possibility that the French Revolution might establish the rights of men for the first time in history by putting radical theory into practice. Like Price, Wollstonecraft assumes that the imperfections of the system of political representation in Britain are a major defect of the British constitution. She thus looks with interest to the alternative system being introduced in France which, in theory, “appears more promising” (VRM 5:59). Rejecting Burke’s contemptuous dismissal of the National Assembly because it included in its ranks men from the middle and lower orders, she proposes that “Time may shew, that this obscure throng knew more of the human heart and of legislation than the profligates of rank, emasculated by hereditary effeminacy” (VRM 5:40). For Wollstonecraft, in short, the Revolution is a “glorious chance” to obtain “more virtue and happiness than has hitherto blessed our globe” (VRM 5:48).
Wollstonecraft’s Vindication is particularly attentive to the way that Burke manipulates conventional ideas of gender and class in the Reflections. Burke presents the events of 5–6 October 1789, for example, as revealing a stark contrast between the refined beauty of the ancien régime, embodied by Marie Antoinette, and the uncivilized barbarity of the revolutionary mob, exemplified by the way the royal family was escorted from Versailles back to Paris “amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women” (Reflections, 165). Wollstonecraft deflates Burke’s display of outraged sensibility with a precise socioeconomic description of the kind of women who participated in the Versailles march: “Probably you mean women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had had any advantages of education” (VRM 5:30). Civilized life in the monarchies of Europe consists of a mutually destructive conflict between the rich, corrupted by vice and luxury, and the poor, broken and brutalized by tyranny and poverty, and the outrages at Versailles or the confiscation of the revenues of the Catholic Church are small prices to pay for the opportunity to establish a more equitable society: “What were the outrages of a day to these continual miseries? . . . Man preys on man; and you mourn for the idle tapestry that decorated a gothic pile, and the dronish bell that summoned the fat priest to prayer” (VRM 5:58). Countering Burke’s lament that the treatment of Marie Antoinette at Versailles shows that “the age of chivalry” is dead (Reflections, 170), Wollstonecraft ridicules Burke as a “romantic” writer (in the sense associated with the “romances” of the Middle Ages in which the “age of chivalry” had been celebrated and/or invented, and which involved notions of courtly love and female delicacy that Wollstonecraft found damaging to women and men alike). By contrast, Wollstonecraft celebrates reason, virtue, and consistency of sound principles. This does not mean that she outlaws feeling. Attempting instead to distinguish between genuine feelings appropriate to the objects or events that cause them and false feelings incommensurate with their objects, she holds that to be touched with sympathy for the Revolution is a sign of humanity, while to lament, as Burke does, for the fate of the French clergy is a sign of false sensibility: “The declaration of the National Assembly, when they recognized the rights of men, was calculated to touch the humane heart – the downfall of the clergy, to agitate the pupil of impulse” (VRM 5:53).
In 1790, then, Wollstonecraft was a fully paid-up enthusiast for the Revolution. In December of that year she published a positive review in Johnson’s Analytical Review of Helen Maria Williams’s Letters Written in France, in the Summer, 1790, to a Friend in England; containing various Anecdotes relative to the French Revolution (1790). As this and other reviews suggest, Wollstonecraft used her work as a reviewer as a means of filling in her education about the French Revolution and its prehistory.7
In September 1791 Wollstonecraft began working on what was to become her most influential book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The philosophical idealism of the early phase of the French Revolution had culminated in the National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in August 1789. Despite its groundbreaking nature, the Declaration grants the political rights of citizenship only to men. Yet revolutionary enthusiasm on both sides of the English Channel led some radicals to ask why women should not have the same rights. In France, the idea of women’s rights was championed by the Marquis de Condorcet, in his Sur l’Admission des femmes au droit de Cité (1790), and by Olympe de Gouges in her Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (1791). But although the Girondins in the National Assembly were sympathetic to women’s rights, the new constitution of 1791 “excluded women from all areas of political life, conferring citizenship only on men over 25” (VRW 5:66, note). This exclusion appeared as if it were being consolidated by the Assembly’s plans for national education. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord’s Rapport sur l’instruction publique, fait au nom du Comité de constitution (1791) recommended that the Constituent Assembly introduce free national education for all the children of France of both sexes. Though this was a revolutionary proposal in its own right,8 it fell “short of Wollstonecraft’s ideal in its concurrence with Rousseau’s Emile, ou de l’Education (1762) that the education of women should be directed towards a subservient role.”9
Wollstonecraft dedicated A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to Talleyrand, seeking to influence him to institute a system of education in France in which both sexes would be educated equally to become full citizens. Between the two editions of Rights of Woman in 1792 Talleyrand, visiting London to win support for the new order in France, called on Wollstonecraft. There is no record of their meeting, but the revision Wollstonecraft made to the opening paragraph of the dedication in the second edition indicates that she did not change his mind: “Sir . . . I dedicate this volume to you; to induce you to reconsider the subject, and maturely weigh what I have advanced respecting the rights of woman and national education” (VRW 5:65). She goes on to argue that the “glorious principles” that inspired the French Revolution necessarily included the rights of women (5:65–6), reminding Talleyrand that he had almost conceded this:
Consider, Sir, dispassionately, these observations – for a glimpse of this truth seemed to open before you when you observed, “that to see one half of the human race excluded by the other from all participation of government, was a political phaenomenon that, according to abstract principles, it was impossible to explain.”
(67)
Yet Talleyrand went on to withdraw what he had seemed to concede: “If the debarring of women from public positions is a means for the two sexes of increasing their mutual wellbeing, it follows that it is a law which all societies should recognise and sanction.”10 It is this assumption, derived from Rousseau, which Wollstonecraft takes on in Rights of Woman. Thus if Rights of Woman is not actually about the French Revolution it can be seen as an attempt to steer it in a more radical feminist direction.
Wollstonecraft’s Second Vindication became a best-seller and its author one of the most famous, and infamous, women in Europe. But Rights of Woman did not have the effect in France (or in Britain) she hoped for. As we will see, the rise of the Jacobins put an end to feminist debate. And while the revolution Wollstonecraft envisages in Rights of Woman was far more radical than that achieved in either the American or the French revolutions, she imagines that it would arise peacefully out of universal education and what she twice calls a “revolution in female manners” (pp. 114, 265). Her assumption, then, was that patriarchal oppression would melt away when children of all classes and both sexes were educated together. This ignored what was perhaps the most difficult lesson that the French Revolution offered for progressives like Wollstonecraft – that the oppressive regimes of Europe would not peacefully abandon their power and had to be overthrown through violent struggle.
In the summer of 1792 Wollstonecraft and Johnson, along with the artist Henry Fuseli and his wife, planned an excursion to Paris. Wollstonecraft anticipated that the French translation of the Rights of Woman – as Défense des droits des femmes (1792) – would give her access to some of the leading spirits of the Revolution.11 The trip was canceled because of the news that “Paris was in confusion and probably dangerous” (Tomalin, Life and Death, 151). In early September “the people” of Paris butchered about fourteen hundred prisoners – priests, political prisoners, common criminals, beggars, convicts, prostitutes, royalists, ex-courtiers – on the pretext that they were “enemies to the Revolution.”12 The September Massacres made it seem as if Burke had been right about the Revolution, and many English enthusiasts began to have doubts. Others, however, attempted to rationalize the massacres as a necessary purge or as the inevitable result of repression under the ancien régime. Wollstonecraft remained optimistic and decided to visit Paris alone. In a letter of 12 November 1792 she informs William Roscoe that she has “determined to set out for Paris” and urges him not “to mix with the shallow herd who throw an odium on immutable principles, because some of the mere instrument of the revolution were too sharp. – Children of any growth will do mischief when they meddle with edged tools” (Letters, 218).
Though Britain and France were on the brink of war, Wollstonecraft left for Paris on the 8 December 1792, intending to stay for about six weeks to write an account of the Revolution for English readers. The Paris she discovered was different from what she may have expected. The open hearted euphoria reported by Williams had disappeared in the aftermath of the Massacres. Spending Christmas alone in the town house of a French family, Wollstonecraft wrote a letter to Johnson on 26 December full of mixed and disturbed impressions raised by a glimpse of Louis XVI being escorted through the streets to be tried for treason:
About nine o’clock this morning, the king passed by my window, moving silently along (excepting now and then a few strokes on the drum, which rendered the stillness more awful) through empty streets, surrounded by the national guards, who, clustering round the carriage, seemed to deserve their name. The inhabitants flocked to their windows, but the casements were all shut, not a voice was heard, nor did I see any thing like an insulting gesture. – For the first time since I entered France, I bowed to the majesty of the people, and respected the propriety of behaviour so perfectly in unison with my own feelings. I can scarcely tell you why, but an association of ideas made the tears flow insensibly from my eyes, when I saw Louis sitting, with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach going to meet death, where so many of his race have triumphed. My fancy instantly brought Louis XIV before me, entering the capital with all his pomp, after one of the victories most flattering to his pride, only to see the sunshine of prosperity overshadowed by the sublime gloom of misery. I have been alone ever since; and, though my mind is calm, I cannot dismiss the lively images that have filled my imagination all the day. – Nay, do not smile, but pity me; for, once or twice, lifting my eyes from the paper, I have seen eyes glare through a glass-door opposite my chair, and bloody hands shook at me. Not the distant sound of a footstep can I hear. My apartments are remote from those of the servants, the only persons who sleep with me in an immense hotel, one folding door opening after another. – I wish I had even kept the cat with me! – I want to see something alive; death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy. – I am going to bed – and, for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle.
(Letters, 227)
Overcoming the gothic horror of this early experience, Wollstonecraft’s contacts with Williams, Paine, Thomas Christie, and Madame Roland enabled her to meet and become friends with a number of the Girondin leaders. British radicals found the Girondins more congenial than the Jacobins: they were mostly middle-class lawyers and writers, “believers in religious toleration, sympathetic towards women’s advancement, deeply concerned with social questions” (Tomalin, Life and Death, 172). Their philosophical heritage – Voltaire, d’Alembert, Rousseau – had imbued them with an admiration for English political institutions; indeed, they were sometimes referred to as the “English” party. Moving in such circles gave Wollstonecraft direct access to the current of ideas released by the Revolution. Tomalin suggests that during the Revolution’s early phase (from 1789 to early 1793) Paris was the scene of a short-lived sexual and social revolution. Unmarried mothers, as Tomalin explains, “were to be assisted and not shamed, and divorce [was to be] easily and sensibly arranged” (168). Women such as Olympe de Gouges were given the opportunity to address the National Assembly. Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, which attacked traditional Christian attitudes to sexual behavior, was circulated in manuscript. In the community of expatriate radicals, Wollstonecraft was surrounded by couples whose relationships broke with traditional mores. Wollstonecraft’s own attitudes towards sexuality underwent a revolution as she witnessed the political revolution around her. She would shortly live out the theory.
Louis XVI was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. This shocked the expatriate radicals in Paris, some of whom had attempted to persuade the French to vote for mercy. The king’s execution on 21 January 1793 cast a gloom over the expatriates. On 1 February 1793 war was declared between Britain and France, adding to the sense of pessimism and danger. Correspondence between the two nations was cut off and many of Wollstonecraft’s letters home during this period were not posted. As Robespierre and the Jacobins gained control the Revolution began to deviate from the liberal dreams of the Girondins and the British radicals. By the end of February, as Tomalin puts it, Wollstonecraft “was to see not only shops plundered but the presses of unpopular journalists destroyed: it was scarcely the freedom she or Godwin had in mind when they praised the Revolution” (Tomalin, Life and Death, 182).
During these unstable times, Wollstonecraft began what she intended to be a series of letters, in the manner of Helen Maria Williams, “on the present character of the French nation” (15 February 1793).13 It seems as if the reality of the Revolution has already displaced her radical dreams:
I would I could first inform you that, out of the chaos of vices and follies, prejudices and virtues, rudely jumbled together, I saw the fair form of Liberty slowly rising, and Virtue expanding her wings to shelter all her children! I should then hear the account of the barbarities that have rent the bosom of France patiently, and bless the firm hand that lopt off the rotten limbs. But, if the aristocracy of birth is levelled with the ground, only to make room for that of riches, I am afraid that the morals of the people will not be much improved by the change, or the government rendered less venal.
(PCFN 6:444)
These melancholy reflections on the French Revolution challenge Wollstonecraft’s earlier optimism: “I cannot yet give up the hope, that a fairer day is dawning on Europe, though I must hesitatingly observe, that little is to be expected from the narrow principle of commerce which seems every where to be shoving aside the point of honour of the noblesse” (445). As things stand, the taints of the ancien régime seem to have been carried over into the new order:
For the same pride of office, the same desire of power are still visible; with this aggravation, that, fearing to return to obscurity after having but just acquired a relish for distinction, each hero, or philosopher, for all are dubbed with these new titles, endeavours to make hay while the sun shines.
(PCFN 6:446)
Life in Paris under siege became difficult. Moves towards totalitarian terror included the establishment in March 1793 of the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Committee of Surveillance, and the Committee of Public Safety. Foreigners were put under surveillance and had to produce six witnesses in support of their respectability before they could be issued with a certificate of residence. Wollstonecraft considered leaving for Switzerland but could not obtain the appropriate passport. Then, “[o]n 12 April all foreigners were prohibited formally from leaving the country. The expatriates who remained, trapped in this uncomfortable situation, drew together anxiously” (Tomalin, Life and Death, 184). Under these circumstances, Wollstonecraft met and began a sexual relationship with Gilbert Imlay, an American businessman and writer, disdaining the necessity for the traditional institution of marriage. Wollstonecraft moved to a house in Neuilly, then a tiny country village northwest of Paris, where Imlay’s visits allowed them to enjoy a kind of honeymoon (they never married). Wollstonecraft began work on a “a great book”, as she described it to her sister, which was to become An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (Letters, 231). Meanwhile, life in Jacobin Paris had become nightmarish: festive revolutionary parades in the daytime were followed by nights of police raids in search of the republic’s “enemies,” including the English. Robespierre joined the Committee of Public Safety in July and the Terror got under way.14 Marie Antoinette and the leaders of the Girondins were executed in October, followed by Madame Roland and others in November. In the same month, all the English still in Paris were arrested, including Helen Maria Williams.
When Wollstonecraft realized she was pregnant she moved back to Paris, Imlay having registered her at the American embassy as his wife, to give her the protection of US citizenship. With the Terror going on around her, and amidst “a round of prison visits and all too frequent news of the execution of her friends,” Wollstonecraft continued working on An Historical and Moral View (Tomalin, Life and Death, 210). Wollstonecraft then followed Imlay to Le Havre, where she finished her book and gave birth to her baby. In a letter written in March 1794 to her sister Everina (which was not posted), Wollstonecraft reflects upon her situation:
It is impossible for you to have any idea of the impression the sad scenes I have been a witness to have left on my mind. . . . death and misery, in every shape of terrour, haunts this devoted country – I certainly am glad that I came to France, because I never could have had else a just opinion of the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded.
(Letters, 250–1)
The Terror ended in July 1794 with the fall and execution of Robespierre. Imlay returned to Paris in August and, clearly tiring of his companion, proceeded to London on business. Wollstonecraft returned to Paris, predicting in a letter to Imlay that the restoration of the freedom of the press “will overthrow the Jacobins” (Letters, 264). But that winter was the coldest of the century. Most of Wollstonecraft’s energy between September 1794 and the Spring of 1795, after she had delivered the manuscript of An Historical and Moral View to Johnson, was taken up with sheer survival, caring for her child and grappling with her feelings of abandonment (see Letters, 262–81). In a letter to Imlay written from Paris on 19 February 1795 Wollstonecraft resists the idea of returning to England: “Why is it so necessary that I should return? – brought up here, my girl would be freer” (Letters, 280). Despite the horrors of the Revolution, Wollstonecraft seems to have felt more optimistic about post-Terror France than about a British state at war against France and against British radicals (as witnessed by the Treason Trials of the Autumn of 1794, in which Thomas Hardy, John Thelwall and John Horne Tooke were tried for high treason; although they were acquitted, this did not stop the British government’s “reign of terror” against radicalism). Wollstonecraft’s letter reads like a farewell to Imlay, but Imlay’s emotional power over her is revealed by the fact that her next letter to him is written from Le Havre on 7 April en route to England. Thus ended Wollstonecraft’s direct experience of the French Revolution.
An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect it has Produced in Europe (1794) was presented as “Volume the First,” but no further volumes appeared and only one edition was produced in Wollstonecraft’s lifetime. As far as I am aware, there was not a second edition until the Pickering edition of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1989.15 Perhaps the main reason for this neglect is that the revival of interest in Wollstonecraft has been primarily in her feminist writings.16 What’s more, if a reader wished to find out what happened in the French Revolution, modern histories would be more helpful.17 Narrative was not her strong point, and her history is loaded with day-to-day detail and moral reflections. Yet there is a case for suggesting that An Historical and Moral View was Wollstonecraft’s best work. It was important in 1794 to present an accurate history of the Revolution to counteract the increasing counter-revolutionary repression and hysteria in Britain. Wollstonecraft did this through drawing on journals, records, and documents then available in Paris and London. Equally important, An Historical and Moral View records Wollstonecraft’s own struggle to hold on to radical principles despite the Terror. While many radicals abandoned the faith, Wollstonecraft minutely analyzed the Revolution in order to discover how it went wrong and what lessons could be learned from it. In doing this, she was a pioneer for the many radicals faced with similar crises. Like Wordsworth after her, Wollstonecraft abandoned the idea that social progress could be brought about through changing the political system. But unlike him and others, Wollstonecraft retained – but only just, and only at times – her belief that a just society would emerge from the Revolution in which the rights of men, and of women, would be the origin and end of government. In so arguing, Wollstonecraft offers one of the most profound discussions of revolutionary politics to emerge out of the Revolution Controversy.
In her Preface, Wollstonecraft foregrounds how the Revolution poses a problem of interpretation. An adequate understanding of the Revolution “requires a mind, not only unsophisticated by old prejudices, and the inveterate habits of degeneracy; but an amelioration of temper, produced by the exercise of the most enlarged principles of humanity.” In addition, given the vicissitudes of the Revolution, “it becomes necessary to guard against the erroneous inferences of sensibility” because “reason beaming on the grand theatre of political changes, can prove the only sure guide to direct us to a favourable or just conclusion.” The Revolution is represented as a dramatic spectacle containing so many terrible scenes that it requires a special kind of mind to interpret it correctly. It is crucial to reach a just conclusion about the Revolution because it involves the most important question about humanity – whether human nature and society are irrevocably fallen and corrupt or have the potential to become as elevated as the dreams of “the most enlightened statesmen and philosophers” (HMV 6:6). Wollstonecraft is clear about her own position, stressing that the notion of “original sin” is a superstitious fabrication upon “which priests have erected their tremendous structures of imposition, to persuade us, that we are naturally inclined to evil” (HMV 6:21–2). The fact that the civilizations of the past have repeatedly fallen back into barbarism does not mean that this is inevitable, but rather that rule by hereditary riches and rank is intrinsically unstable.
The task Wollstonecraft sets herself in An Historical and Moral View is to trace the origin and progress of the French Revolution in order to find causes for optimism and signs of progress amongst the folly and carnage. One way she does this is to differentiate the theoretical principles that originally animated the Revolution from the disastrous way they were put into practice. She also attempts to convince herself and her readers that, from a long-term perspective, the Revolution can be seen as merely one episode, apparently chaotic but actually progressive, within a larger history of humanity’s gradual but inexorable development towards reason and liberty.18 Yet the main text of An Historical and Moral View follows the Revolution’s historical progress so minutely that it only reaches the end of 1789, never fully confronting the most violent phases of the Revolution. Only by restricting herself to 1789 can Wollstonecraft produce an analysis that supports her progressive optimism.
To convince her readers that the Revolution is indeed ushering in “the approaching reign of reason and peace” (HMV 6:17) Wollstonecraft needs to account for why the Revolution went wrong, salvage its principles from the wreckage, and somehow show that it is a necessary moment in the evolution of human freedom. Strikingly, Wollstonecraft hardly even hints that the Revolution may have gone astray because of its failure to set up a proper system of education for women or because it has not enabled women to take up full civil rights. The argument of The Rights of Woman makes no appearance here. Instead, An Historical and Moral View argues that the origin of most of the Revolution’s ills can be traced to the degeneracy of the French national character. Given that Wollstonecraft rejects the possibility that human nature is intrinsically degenerate, she suggests that “the frivolity of the french character” has arisen from the particular conditions prevailing in France, and especially from their habits, education, and manner of living (HMV 6:230). But the primary corrupting influence derives from the political and cultural system of the ancien régime. The central paradox of the Revolution, in fact, is that while the Revolution was made necessary by the degeneration of the national character under the ancien régime, the degenerate nature of the national character made it unlikely that the French would be able successfully to carry out a Revolution.
For Wollstonecraft, the feudal system of the ancien régime meant that the majority of the people were little better than the slaves of the aristocracy. This material slavery was reinforced by the spiritual and intellectual slavery produced by the superstitions of Roman Catholicism. The aristocracy in turn was reduced to moral slavery by the corrupt absolutism of the royal court at Versailles. Influenced by Rousseau’s critique of modern European civilization, Wollstonecraft argues that the common feature of all aspects of life under the ancien régime was an all-pervasive theatricality that eroded common sense and sound principles:19
Their national character is, perhaps, more formed by their theatrical amusements, than is generally imagined: they are in reality the schools of vanity. And, after this kind of education, is it surprising, that almost every thing is said and done for stage effect? or that cold declamatory extasies blaze forth, only to mock the expectation with a show of warmth?
(HMV 6:25)
The ancien régime was theatrical through and through. Under Louis XIV, even wars “were . . . theatrical exhibitions” (HMV 6:26). The theatricality of Versailles had a corrupting influence on Marie Antoinette: “A court is the best school in the world for actors; it was very natural then for her to become a complete actress, and an adept in all the arts of coquetry that debauch the mind, whilst they render the person alluring” (HMV 6:74). Brought up at Versailles, the king’s character exhibited weakness and a “criminal insincerity” (HMV 6:171) fatal for him and for the Revolution (HMV 6:74). The general theatricality of the old order in France contaminated the whole nation. Animated by appearance rather than substance, by feelings rather than reason, by ceremony and dress rather than strength of character, the French have no character in the moral sense of the word: “Thus a frenchman, like most women, may be said to have no character distinguishable from that of the nation” (HMV 6:230).
It was a commonplace in eighteenth-century Britain to claim that the old order of France exhibited a fatal combination of political tyranny and luxury. But Wollstonecraft uses this analysis to explain both why the Revolution was necessary and inevitable, and why it went wrong. Yet this analysis does not explain how the French were able to overthrow the old order and attempt to build a new political system based on the ideals of the rights of man. Wollstonecraft accounts for this in part by suggesting that the ordinary people of France somehow escaped the corruption that tainted the higher orders. While admitting that “[s]everal acts of ferocious folly have justly brought much obloquy on the grand revolution, which has taken place in France,” she yet claims that she feels “confident of being able to prove, that the people are essentially good” (HMV 6:46).
The advance of reason allowed the common people of France to understand their own dignity and the most advanced political principles. Having been slaves for centuries, the people began to ask “the most important of all questions – namely, in whose hands ought the sovereignty to rest?” The realization that political sovereignty ought to derive from the people led to “the universal demand of a fair representation, to meet at stated periods, without depending on the caprice of the executive power” (HMV 6:39). Thus the most important human agency of the Revolution was the people – by which, at times, she means the “twenty-five millions of centinels” that comprised the whole population (HMV 6:39). With the states-general in session, “the whole nation called [with one voice] for a constitution, to establish equal rights, as the foundation of freedom” (HMV 6:53). Thus the Revolution can be seen as the collective action of a whole nation awakening to political consciousness as the largest electorate in history (HMV 6:68).
The virtue of the French nation was most impressively demonstrated in the destruction of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 and in the defense of Paris against the king’s forces.20 In these events, political theory became a living reality:
there was, in fact, an inconceivable solemnity in the quick step of a torrent of men, all directing their exertions to one point, which distinguished this rising of the citizens from what is commonly termed a riot. – Equality, indeed, was then first established by an universal sympathy; and men of all ranks joining in the throng.
(HMV 6:88)
The way the whole population prepared for the attack of the armed forces assembled outside Paris exhibited a new consciousness in a nation rising to its own defense:
Thus was the nation saved by the almost incredible exertion of an indignant people; who felt, for the first time, that they were sovereign, and that their power was commensurate to their will. This was certainly a splendid example, to prove, that nothing can resist a people determined to live free; and then it appeared clear, that the freedom of France did not depend on a few men, whatever might be their virtues or abilities, but alone on the will of the nation.
(HMV 6:100)
These were the glorious days of the Revolution, unproblematic for most radicals. Wollstonecraft’s challenge is to wring optimism out of subsequent events in which the people could no longer be figured as a virtuous nation shaking off its chains. The second chapter of Book V is devoted to the events of 5–6 October 1789, beginning with the entertainment at Versailles of the king’s bodyguards, rumors about which aroused fears in Paris that the old order was about to begin a new attack on Paris and the Revolution. Such rumors, and the lack of bread, set the people of Paris in motion:
The concourse, at first, consisted mostly of market women, and the lowest refuse of the streets, women who had thrown off the virtues of one sex without having power to assume more than the vices of the other. A number of men also followed them, armed with pikes, bludgeons, and hatchets; but they were strictly speaking a mob, affixing all the odium to the appellation it can possibly import; and not to be confounded with the honest multitude, who took the Bastille. – In fact, such a rabble has seldom been gathered together; and they quickly showed, that their movement was not the effect of public spirit.
(HMV 6:196–7)
These events prompted Burke to condemn the whole Revolution as the barbarous work of “a band of cruel ruffians and assassins” (Reflections, 164). In Rights of Men Wollstonecraft retorted that Burke’s “furies from hell” were ordinary fishwives. Here, however, she accepts Burke’s account of the event while nonetheless trying to maintain that it was perpetrated by “a set of monsters, distinct from the people” (HMV 6:206). But the worst aspect of this episode was the response of the National Assembly, which failed to reassert its authority by properly investigating it and punishing the offenders:
At this moment the assembly ought to have known, that the future respectability of their laws must greatly depend on the conduct they pursued on the present occasion; and it was time to show the parisians, that, giving freedom to the nation, they meant to guard it by a strict adherence to the laws, that naturally issue from the simple principles of equal justice they were adopting; punishing with just severity all such as should offer to violate, or treat them with contempt. . . . Yet, so contrary was their conduct to the dictates of common sense, and the common firmness of rectitude of intention, that they not only permitted that gang of assassins to regain their dens; but instantly submitted to the demand of the soldiery, and the peremptory wish of the parisians – that the king should reside within the walls of Paris.
(HMV 6:209)
By giving in to the Parisians’ demands, the members of the Assembly “surrendered their power to the multitude of Paris.” This enabled the Jacobins, with their base in the popular clubs, to take over the Revolution: “It is in reality from this epocha . . . that the commencement of the reign of anarchy may be fairly dated” (HMV 6:212).
Wollstonecraft attempts to cope with the fact that the “dawn” of July quickly merged into the dark days of early October by differentiating the heroic citizens who stormed the Bastille from the ferocious mob, controlled from behind the scenes by high-ranked conspirators, who broke into Versailles. Her problem is that the heroic nation of the early days seemed to disappear or degenerate into the mob. In order to account for this she overrides her earlier suggestion that the nation (the people) somehow avoided the taint of the national character:
The character of the french, indeed, had been so depraved by the inveterate despotism of ages, that even amidst the heroism which distinguished the taking of the Bastille, we are forced to see that suspicious temper, and that vain ambition of dazzling, which have generated all the succeeding follies and crimes. . . . The morals of the whole nation were destroyed by the manners formed by the [previous] government.
(HMV 6:123)
Wollstonecraft thus admits that the French susceptibility to theatricality had contaminated the people in general – especially the people of Paris (HMV 6:228). By training the people to be moved by theatre the ancien régime prepared them to be swayed by the demagogues that the Revolution unleashed (HMV 6:133). Indeed, the Revolution itself has now degenerated into a paltry theatricality:
If a relish for the broad mirth of fun characterize the lower class of english, the french of every denomination are equally delighted with a phosphorical, sentimental gilding. This is constantly observable at the theatres. The passions are deprived of all their radical strength, to give smoothness to the ranting sentiments, which, with mock dignity, like the party-coloured rags on the shrivelled branches of the tree of liberty, stuck up in every village, are displayed as something very grand and significant.
(HMV 6:25–6)
Related to their love of the theatre and theatrical effect is the French susceptibility to enthusiasm, which “hurries them from one extreme to another” (HMV 6:27). As a consequence, the people of France, especially Parisians, were liable to sway, or be swayed, in any direction, pushed and pulled by stage managers on all sides – the popular orators, the National Assembly, the court party, and so on (HMV 6:105). Far from being the virtuous heroes depicted earlier, the people now exhibit the worst qualities of the national character:
These sudden transitions from one extreme to another, without leaving any settled conviction behind, to confirm or eradicate the corroding distrust, could not be seen in such a strong light any where as at Paris, because there a variety of causes have so effeminated reason, that the french may be considered as a nation of women . . . so passive appears to be their imagination, it requires to be roused by novelty; and then, more lively than strong, the evanescent emotions scarcely leave any traces behind them.
(HMV 6:121)
The disastrous symptoms of the national character can also be detected in the leaders of the National Assembly. Echoing Burke’s criticism in the Reflections, Wollstonecraft suggests that the National Assembly itself became a profane theatre in which the delegates played to the gallery:
three parts out of four of the time, which ought to have been employed in serious investigation, was consumed in idle vehemence. Whilst the applauses and hisses of the galleries increased the tumult; making the vain still more eager to mount the stage. Thus every thing contributing to excite the emotions, which lead men only to court admiration, the good of the people was too often sacrificed to the desire of pleasing them.
(HMV 6:156)
One of the ways the Assembly sacrificed the people’s good to the desire of pleasing them was by introducing a political constitution that was too advanced for the stage of political and moral development that the French had reached. The French were not yet politically mature enough to continue with a single chamber without the checks and balances needed in any society that falls short of moral perfection (HMV 6:161–2). The Assembly ought instead to have arranged for all future legislatures to be divided into a house of representatives and a senate, “for certainly no people stand in such great need of a check” as the French (HMV 6:165). In proceeding so precipitately, the Assembly revealed their ignorance of the national character and of the stage of political progress that had been reached in France. As a result, the Assembly introduced a political constitution “most improper for the degenerate society of France” and thereby gave the enemies of the Revolution the chance of mocking this ideal system as impossibly utopian (HMV 6:162).
But although the Revolution went astray when the National Assembly made itself subject to the people, this does not mean that the people are not sovereign or that government ought not to be responsive to its will; instead, it means that the relationship between representative government and sovereign people ought to assume its proper form only when the people have developed political maturity and reason:
The will of the people being supreme, it is not only the duty of their representatives to respect it, but their political existence ought to depend on their acting conformably to the will of their constituents. Their voice, in enlightened countries, is always the voice of reason. But in the infancy of society, and during the advancement of the science of political liberty, it is highly necessary for the governing authority to be guided by the progress of that science; and to prevent, by judicious measures, any check being given to it’s advancement, whilst equal care is taken not to produce the miseries of anarchy by encouraging licentious freedom.
(HMV 6:210)
Political reform, then, must be adjusted to the level of political development in the whole nation. The National Assembly, driven by a nation that thought itself more enlightened that it actually was, introduced too much liberty too soon (HMV 6:96).
Wollstonecraft’s sustained examination of the impact of the French national character on the progress of the Revolution leads her to conclude, in the final chapter, that the people of France were “NOT PROPERLY QUALIFIED FOR THE REVOLUTION” (HMV 6:223). Although the ancien régime made the revolution necessary, even inevitable, it also made the people of France unfit to carry it out (HMV 6:230). But while the Revolution could not change the national character overnight, its achievements will bring about a gradual and beneficial change in that character:
A change of character cannot be so sudden as some sanguine calculators expect; yet by the destruction of the rights of primogeniture, a greater degree of equality of property is sure to follow . . . As a change also of the system of education and domestic manners will be a natural consequence of the revolution, the french will insensibly rise to a dignity of character far above that of the present race; and then the fruit of their liberty, ripening gradually, will have a relish not to be expected during it’s crude and forced state.
(HMV 6:231)
And despite the National Assembly’s blunders, Wollstonecraft still believes that “[t]he foundation of liberty was laid in the declaration of rights” (HMV 6:162). In this act, at least, the Assembly made an epochal contribution to the march of human progress:
it was an honour worthy to be reserved for the representatives of twenty-five millions of men, rising to the sense and feeling of rational beings, to be the first to dare to ratify such sacred and beneficial truths – truths, the existence of which had been eternal; and which required only to be made known, to be generally acknowledged.
(HMV 6:221)
Furthermore, the “many constitutional principles of liberty” that have been established in France will “greatly accelerate the improvement of the public mind, and ultimately produce the perfect government, that they vainly endeavoured to construct immediately with such fatal precipitation” (HMV 6:172).
In An Historical and Moral View, then, Wollstonecraft assumes that the theoretical principles of the rights of man are eternally true, unwaveringly asserting that humanity is on a teleological journey towards moral, intellectual, and political perfection. Yet her analysis of the origins and progress of the French Revolution yields incompatible conclusions. On one hand, the French introduced reforms too quickly and consequently lost control of the Revolution; on the other, it may be that violence is necessary to overthrow corrupt political systems in order to be able to introduce just ones. The Revolution thus raises two sets of questions and two sets of answers:
1st. If, from the progress of reason, we be authorized to infer, that all governments will be meliorated, and the happiness of man placed on the solid basis, gradually prepared by the improvement of political science[,] . . . if every day extending freedom be more firmly established in consequence of the general dissemination of truth and knowledge: it then seems injudicious for statesmen to force the adoption of any opinion, by aiming at the speedy destruction of obstinate prejudices; because these premature reforms, instead of promoting, destroy the comfort of those unfortunate beings, who are under their dominion, affording at the same time to despotism the strongest arguments to urge in opposition to the theory of reason. Besides, the objects intended to be forwarded are probably retarded, whilst the tumult of internal commotion and civil discord leads to the most dreadful consequence – the immolating of human victims.
(HMV 6:45–6)
But the history of the Revolution also leads Wollstonecraft to contemplate that which, in her two Vindications, was unthinkable – the possibility that the revolutionary violence may have been a necessary means of overthrowing a political order that could have been removed in no other way:
But, 2dly, it is necessary to observe, that, if the degeneracy of the higher orders of society be such, that no remedy less fraught with horrour can effect a radical cure; and if enjoying the fruits of usurpation, they domineer over the weak, and check by all the means in their power every humane effort, to draw man out of the state of degradation, into which the inequality of fortune has sunk him; the people are justified in having recourse to coercion, to repel coercion. And, further, if it can be ascertained, that the silent sufferings of the citizens of the world under the iron feet of oppression are greater, though less obvious, than the calamities produced by such violent convulsions as have happened in France . . . it may be politically just, to pursue such measures as were taken by that regenerating country . . .
(HMV 6:46)
This would appear to justify, in certain circumstances, the violent overthrow of tyranny. Wollstonecraft also seems willing, at times, to excuse the ongoing violence in France (ibid.). Indeed, she concludes An Historical and Moral View by exonerating the revolutionary violence she had criticized throughout, invoking the long standing metaphor of the body politic:
Thus had France grown up, and sickened on the corruption of a state diseased. But, as in medicine there is a species of complaint in the bowels which works it’s own cure, and, leaving the body healthy, gives an invigorated tone to the system, so there is in politics: and whilst the agitation of it’s regeneration continues, the excrementitious humours exuding from the contaminated body will excite a general dislike and contempt for the nation; and it is only the philosophical eye, which looks into the nature and weighs the consequences of human actions, that will be able to discern the cause, which has produced so many dreadful effects.
(HMV 6:235)
Wollstonecraft finally figures herself, then, as one of those few observers with a philosophical eye, a physician of the state capable of seeing the dreadful effects of such purges as a reason to be optimistic for the body politic’s future well being.
The domestic happiness Wollstonecraft hoped for by joining Imlay in England failed to materialize. By June of 1795 she was traveling with her one-year-old daughter and their maid to Scandinavia on a business trip for Imlay that would result in her most popular book, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). This journey to three countries at various stages of pre-revolutionary development allowed her to reassess the Revolution, her characterization of the French, and the efficacy of revolution itself as a means of promoting progress. Her attention to political and social progress in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark reveals that she is still pursuing what she refers to as her “favourite subject of contemplation, the future improvement of the world” (SR 6:338).
Although Wollstonecraft admits, in the opening letter, that she is still suffering from “the horrors I had witnessed in France, which had cast a gloom over all nature” (SR 6:247), her observations of the people of Scandinavia in Letter III suggest to her that the French Revolution is beginning to have potentially beneficial effects in other countries. Thus she believes that she can detect positive stirrings in Sweden:
the french revolution has not only rendered all the crowned heads more cautious, but has so decreased every where (excepting amongst themselves) a respect for nobility, that the peasantry have not only lost their blind reverence for their seigniors, but complain, in a manly style, of oppressions which before they did not think of denominating such, because they were taught to consider themselves as a different order of beings.
(SR 6:255)
While admitting that the Revolution has caused her deep trauma, then, Wollstonecraft seems able to look forward with some optimism to further revolution on a European-wide scale.
Wollstonecraft’s encounter towards the end of her journey with the indolence and ignorance of the Danes under an absolute monarch prompts her into making some intriguing adjustments to her assessment of the French national character. In Letter XIX, she confesses, “I believe I should have been less severe in the remarks I have made on the vanity and depravity of the french, had I travelled towards the north before I visited France.” To “balance the account of horrors” in France, she now suggests that the common people of France have displayed “more virtuous enthusiasm . . . during the two last years” than those of any other nation (326). In the following letter, she even wonders whether the French love of theater is not far preferable to the immoderate love of alcohol that characterises the “common people . . . both in England and the northern states of Europe” and that impedes their “moral improvement” (SR 6:327).
Further complicating the account of the Revolution that emerges in the Short Residence is Wollstonecraft’s encounter with French émigrés in Hamburg and Altona. She admires the way “[m]any emigrants have met, with fortitude, such a total change of circumstances as scarcely can be paralleled, retiring from a palace, to an obscure lodging, with dignity.” She contrasts this fortitude with the “insolent vulgarity” of the men of commerce: “Still good-breeding points out the gentleman; and sentiments of honour and delicacy appear the offspring of greatness of soul, when compared with the grovelling views of the sordid accumulators of cent. per cent” (SR 6:340). While this may be part of Wollstonecraft’s attack on Imlay’s involvement with commerce, it also indicates that Wollstonecraft is beginning to think that the men of birth of the ancien régime were morally better than the men of commerce who have replaced them.
In an Appendix, Wollstonecraft offers general reflections on revolution and human progress:
An ardent affection for the human race makes enthusiastic characters eager to produce alteration in laws and governments prematurely. To render them useful and permanent, they must be the growth of each particular soil, and the gradual fruit of the ripening understanding of the nation, matured by time, not forced by an unnatural fermentation. And, to convince me that such a change is gaining ground, with accelerating pace, the view I have had of society, during my northern journey, would have been sufficient, had I not previously considered the grand causes which combine to carry mankind forward, and diminish the sum of human misery.
(SR 6:346)
The conclusion Wollstonecraft draws from her northern journey, then, confirms her sense that revolution, even hurried reform, results from a mistaken attempt to accelerate progress beyond its natural pace. While the ardent affection of enthusiastic characters leads them to make premature alterations in laws and government, it would be better simply to allow the general progress of Europe to stimulate home grown reforms that are suited to the particular soil of each nation. The example of the French Revolution has not dampened Wollstonecraft’s optimism about the inevitability of gradual human improvement, but it has convinced her that revolution is not the best means of encouraging such improvement.
1. Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 130. For accounts of Wollstonecraft’s experience in the Dissenting circles of Newington Green and St. Paul’s Churchyard, see 44–63 and 89–109. The most recent and extensive biography of Wollstonecraft is Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: a Revolutionary Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000).
2. Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), in Richard Price: Political Writings, ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 176–96. For Wollstonecraft’s review of Price’s sermon in the Analytical Review of December 1789, see AR 7:185–7.
3. For an account of the events at Versailles on 5–6 October 1789, see Simon Schama, Citizens: a Chronicle of the French Revolution (London and New York: Penguin, 1989), 456–70.
4. See Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London and New York: Penguin, 1968). For extracts from some of the most important of the texts in this pamphlet war, see Marilyn Butler, ed., Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
5. For discussions of Rights of Men as a reply to Burke, see Tom Furniss, “Gender in Revolution: Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft,” Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution ed. Kelvin Everest (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991), 65–100, and Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 164–96.
6. See John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (1690), 95–7, John Locke: Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960, 1988), 330–2.
7. See AR 7:322–4, 375–8, 383–5, 390–3, 415–16.
8. See Carol H. Poston, ed., Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Norton, 1988), 3n2.
9. See VRW 5:65 nb.
10. Talleyrand, Rapport, translated in VRW 5:67n.
11. See Wollstonecraft to Everina Wollstonecraft (London, 20 June 1792), Letters, 213.
12. See the unflinching account in Schama, Citizens, 631–9.
13. William Godwin published this introductory letter, which Wollstonecraft never added to, in his edition of the Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). See PCFN 6:443–6.
14. For a detailed account of the Terror, see Schama, Citizens, 726–847.
15. A facsimile of the first edition was published in 1975. See Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect it has Produced in Europe, introduction, Janet Todd (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975).
16. Exceptions include: Vivien Jones, “Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams,” Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780–1832, eds. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 178–99; Harriet Devine Jump, “‘The Cool Eye of Observation’: Mary Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution,” Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, ed. Kelvin Everest (a revised version of this essay appears in Harriet Devine Jump, Mary Wollstonecraft: Writer [New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994], 90–110); Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: the Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Macmillan, 1992), 149–70; Jane Moore, Mary Wollstonecraft (Plymouth: Northcote House and the British Council, 1999), 48–60. In her introduction to the special number of Women’s Writing devoted to Mary Wollstonecraft Janet Todd claims that the contributors were self-consciously attempting to shift attention to Wollstonecraft’s relatively neglected late writings, including An Historical and Moral View. See Janet Todd and Marie Mulvey Roberts, eds., Women’s Writing, Special Number: Mary Wollstonecraft: A Bicentennial 4/2 (1997), 139–41. Speculating about the relative neglect of An Historical and Moral View, Ashley Tauchert’s contribution develops a feminist psychoanalytical reading designed to “rescue it from oblivion”; see “Maternity, Castration and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution,” Women’s Writing, 4/2, eds. Todd and Mulvey Roberts 173–99 (189).
17. The most impressive and detailed recent account of the French Revolution, which concentrates on the period Wollstonecraft wrote about and the period during which she lived in France, is Schama’s Citizens. A more succinct account of the events of the whole Revolution can be found in Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution (London and New York: Penguin, 1980).
18. See Jane Rendall, “‘The grand causes which combine to carry mankind forward’: Wollstonecraft, History and Revolution,” in Women’s Writing, 4/2, eds. Todd and Mulvey Roberts, 155–72.
19. For a brief discussion of Rousseau’s critique of the theatre in Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles (1758), see Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 110. Dart’s whole chapter – “Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and aesthetic education” (99–138) – is extremely interesting in terms of Wollstonecraft’s response to the French Revolution.
20. For an account of these events, see Schama, Citizens, 369–425.