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), Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in an effort to advance arguments for the current aristocratic government. However, by December 1795, after the Reign of Terror and the War of the First Coalition, few still supported the French cause. Most Britons celebrated the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and believed that Kingdom of France should be curtailed by a more democratic form of government. The themes articulated by those responding to Burke would become a central feature of the radical working-class movement in Britain in the 19th century and of Romanticism. Alfred Cobban calls the debate that erupted 'perhaps the last real discussion of the fundamentals of politics' in Britain. Many writers responded to defend the French Revolution, such as Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Because he had supported the American Patriots in their rebellion against Great Britain, Burke's views sent a shockwave through the British Isles. A pamphlet war began in earnest after the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which defended the House of Bourbon, the French aristocracy, and the Catholic Church in France. The Revolution Controversy was a British debate over the French Revolution from 1789 to 1795.

Edmund burke on the french revolution