in his reflections on the revolution in france edmund burke

Written as an extended letter to his French correspondent, Burke’s polemic found a receptive audience in its first seventeen days, 5,500 copies of the book were sold, with a total of twelve thousand in the first month.

As he drafted his increasingly long response to Depont, Burke began to zero in on the “Jewish” location of Richard Price’s speech.īy November 1790, Burke’s response had expanded into a book-length work, Reflections on the Revolution in France. When the radical preacher Richard Price used a public meeting at the Old Jewry Meeting House in London in November 1789 to welcome this importation of French radicalism, Burke was truly horrified (an emotional response that only intensified when Price’s speech began to circulate nationally as a pamphlet). He was especially disturbed by the looming threat that Jacobinism would cross the English Channel and upset the supposed social harmonies of Britain. Depont was to be sorely disappointed.Įven before Depont’s letter, Burke was becoming increasingly uneasy about the events of the French Revolution. Burke had been a cautious sympathizer of the American Revolution a decade earlier, and Depont hoped that he would now also lend his support to the French Revolution.

In 1789, Charles-Jean-François Depont, an aristocratic French liberal, wrote to the Irish-born British politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, asking him his views of the emerging revolution in France.

In his reflections on the revolution in france edmund burke