The Storming of the Bastille in English Newspapers

Abstract

Discussions of English responses to the French Revolution usually concentrate on the “pamphlet controversy” between such texts as Burke’s Refl ections on the Revolution in France, Paine’s The Rights of Man, and Wollstonecraft’s Vindications.1 The earliest texts most contemporary critics mention are Burke’s seminal Refl ections, which “precipitated a debate over the French Revolution that has continued for two centuries,” and Richard Price’s Discourse on the Love of our Country, which was delivered on 4 November 1789.2 As Stephen Prickett correctly asserts, these “descriptions and images of the French Revolution debate conditioned the ways in which observers actually perceived those events.”3 At the same time, “descriptions and images of the French Revolution,” or at least of individual events that constituted it, were available to British citizens several months before November 1789. The fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, in particular, elicited many reactions in England in such media as print, caricature, and drama. For instance, in August 1789 “a ‘Bastille war’ took place in London as managers of the minor theatres staged rival representations of the events of the Fourteenth of July.” 4 All three dramas were favorably disposed to the storming of the Bastille. On August 31st, the Sadler’s Wells Theater in London put on a play with the title Gallic Freedom; or, Vive la Liberte. Two weeks previously (17 August), the Royal Grove Amphitheatre under the direction of Philip