At first many English people were intoxicated by the ideas of the French Revolution, which began in AD 1789. The Whig leader, Charles James Fox (1749-1806), was among politicians who welcomed it. The writer Mary Wollstonecraft went to France and wrote a Vindication of the Rights of Women(1792), arguing that the revolutionary principles of liberty and equality applied to women as well as men.

There was a widespread feeling that English society and government were oppressive and corrupt. Radical artisans in London and northern and Midlands towns, fired by the ideas of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man(1791-2), formed debating and corresponding societies to discuss them. All this alarmed the establishment. When war with France came in 1793, the Prime Minister, William Pitt, introduced repressive legislation. He suspended Habeas Corpus(the law that prevents people being imprisoned without trial) in 1794 and 1798, and passed acts against treason, sedition and the forming of corresponding societies. Public meetings were banned and radicals arrested.

People turned against the Revolution during the Terror, when so many were guillotined, and patriotism caused others to renounce their views once Britain was at war with France. However the philosophical effects of the Revolution were both long-lasting and far-reaching.