The Revolution Controversy is a British debate over the French Revolution, lasting from 1789 through 1795.
A pamphlet war begins in earnest after the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which surprisingly supports the French aristocracy.
Because he had supported the American colonists in their rebellion against England, his views send a shock-wave through the country.
Many writers respond, defending the revolution in France, among them Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.
The themes articulated by those responding to Burke will become a central feature of the radical working-class movement in Britain in the nineteenth century and of Romanticism.
Most Britons celebrate 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 are few who still support the French cause.
