page_title: A Vindication of the Rights of Men
section_title: Revolution Controversy
hierarchical_section_title: A Vindication of the Rights of Men / Historical context / Revolution Controversy
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: 'De eed op de kaatsbaan’ – Jacques-Louis David, 1791
context_page_description: 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 is a political pamphlet, written by the 18th-century British liberal feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, which attacks aristocracy and advocates republicanism. Wollstonecraft's was the first response in a pamphlet war sparked by the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, a defense of constitutional monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church of England.
  Wollstonecraft attacked not only hereditary privilege, but also the rhetoric that Burke used to defend it. Most of Burke's detractors deplored what they viewed as his theatrical pity for Marie Antoinette, but Wollstonecraft was unique in her love of Burke's gendered language. By saying the sublime and the beautiful, terms first established by Burke himself in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, she kept his rhetoric as well as his argument.
context_section_description: A Vindication of the Rights of Men was written against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the debates that it provoked in Britain. In a lively and sometimes vicious pamphlet war, now referred to as the Revolution Controversy, which lasted from 1789 until the end of 1795, British political commentators argued over the validity of monarchy. One scholar has called this debate "perhaps the last real discussion of the fundamentals of politics in [Britain]". The power of popular agitation in revolutionary France, demonstrated in events such as the Tennis Court Oath and the storming of the Bastille in 1789, reinvigorated the British reform movement, which had been largely moribund for a decade. Efforts to reform the British electoral system and to distribute the seats in the House of Commons more equitably were revived.
  Much of the vigorous political debate in the 1790s was sparked by the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790. Most commentators in Britain expected Burke to support the French revolutionaries, because he had previously been part of the liberal Whig party, a critic of monarchical power, a supporter of the American revolutionaries, and a prosecutor of poor governance in India. When he failed to do so, it shocked the populace and angered his friends and supporters. Burke's book, despite being priced at an expensive three shillings, sold an astonishing 30,000 copies in two years. Thomas Paine's famous response, The Rights of Man (1792), which became the rallying cry for thousands, however, greatly surpassed it, selling upwards of 200,000 copies.
  Wollstonecraft's Rights of Men was published only weeks after Burke's Reflections. While Burke supported aristocracy, monarchy, and the Established Church, liberals such as William Godwin, Paine, and Wollstonecraft, argued for republicanism, agrarian socialism, anarchy, and religious toleration. Most of those who came to be called radicals supported similar aims: individual liberties and civic virtue. They were also united in the same broad criticisms: opposition to the bellicose "landed interest" and its role in government corruption, and opposition to a monarchy and aristocracy who they believed were unlawfully seizing the people's power.
  1792 was the "annus mirabilis of eighteenth-century radicalism": its most important texts were published and the influence of radical associations, such as the London Corresponding Society (LCS) and the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI), was at its height. However, it was not until these middle- and working-class groups formed an alliance with the genteel Society of the Friends of the People that the government became concerned. After this alliance was formed, the conservative-dominated government prohibited seditious writings. Over 100 prosecutions for sedition took place in the 1790s alone, a dramatic increase from previous decades. The British government, fearing an uprising similar to the French Revolution, took even more drastic steps to quash the radicals: they made ever more political arrests and infiltrated radical groups; they threatened to "revoke the licences of publicans who continued to host politicised debating societies and to carry reformist literature"; they seized the mail of "suspected dissidents"; they supported groups that disrupted radical events; and they attacked dissidents in the press. Radicals saw this period, which included the 1794 Treason Trials, as "the institution of a system of TERROR, almost as hideous in its features, almost as gigantic in its stature, and infinitely more pernicious in its tendency, than France ever knew."
  When, in October 1795, crowds threw refuse at George III and insulted him, demanding a cessation of the war with France and lower bread prices, Parliament immediately passed the "gagging acts" (the Seditious Meetings Act and the Treasonable Practices Act, also known as the "Two Acts"). Under these new laws, it was almost impossible to hold public meetings and speech was severely curtailed at those that were held. British
caption: Tennis Court Oath (1791) by Jacques-Louis David
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