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Letters Written in France
Helen Maria Williams was a poet, novelist, and radical thinker deeply immersed in the political struggles of the 1790s. Her Letters Written in France is the first and most important of eight volumes chronicling the French Revolution to an England fearful of another civil war. Her twenty-six letters recounting old regime tyranny and revolutionary events provide both an apology for the Revolution and a representation of it as sublime spectacle.
295 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1790
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About the author
Helen Maria Williams
208 books4 followersHelen Maria Williams (1761 or 1762 - 1827) was a English novelist, poet, and translator of French-language works. She was an abolitionist, religious dissenter and supported of the French Revolution. Her 1786 Poems touch on topics ranging from religion to a critique of Spanish colonial practices. She allied herself with the cult of feminine sensibility, deploying it politically in opposition to war ("Ode on the Peace," a 1786 poem about Peru) and slavery (the abolitionist "Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade," 1788)."
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December 10, 2020
I remember being in central Tripoli for Eid back in 2011. Gaddafi had just been overthrown and was in hiding, and there were still some snipers in the apartment buildings on the edge of the city, but everyone came together for a huge celebration in what had previously been called Green Square, now hastily renamed Martyrs' Square. Despite all the guns everywhere (which I hate), and the fact that I was about the only journalist there, it was an atmosphere of pure joy, and I filmed the singing of the new Libyan anthem with emotions that are hard to describe. Although later my friends told me that involvement in Libya was an imperialist folly or a proxy struggle for oil, and although these things are true to a degree, I just remember seeing people crying with happiness scrawling pro-American graffiti on the walls, men hugging me in the street and telling me tearfully what Gaddafi had done to their brother.
As Helen Maria Williams says, ‘it is very difficult, with common sensibility, to avoid sympathizing in general happiness.’ She was talking about revolutionary France in 1790, but it reminded me strongly of things that I've seen, and my worries about whether and how to detach personal emotion from wider political interpretations.
Williams was a young English poet who became one of the most famous cheerleaders for the French revolution. This book covers her earliest trip to France, when she was a crucial eyewitness at the country's first Bastille Day, the Fête de la Fédération on 14th July 1790, when tens of thousands of people – from labourers to former duchesses – marched from the ruins of the Bastille down the river to the Champ de Mars (looking empty in its pre-Eiffel tower days), cheering and singing the whole way. When it started to pour with rain, the people, undeterred, called out, ‘La révolution Françoise est cimentée avec de l'eau au lieu du sang!’
For Williams, as for many of her lefty, artistic, religiously-Dissenting compatriots, the revolution was not just welcome, it was a moment of almost millenarian advancement for humankind, and seemed to sum up generations' worth of political and moral struggle.
It wasn't just the French peasantry. Everyone was getting a slice of freedom next – women's rights! The abolition of slavery! It was all on the cards.
Are they, though?
This book is a time capsule from probably the high point of English enthusiasm for the revolution. The same month that it came out, Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, whose reactionary gloom marked the turning of public opinion in England, at least in establishment circles. In the struggle for freedom, he foresaw (self-fulfillingly, perhaps, but accurately) only violence. When Williams comes across the famous lanterne where some of the first lynchings took place after the Bastille was taken, she does find herself making excuses, though at least she is suitably horrified. ‘It is for ever to be regretted,’ she says, ‘that so dark a shade of ferocious revenge was thrown across the glories of the revolution.’ Oh, you just wait.
Williams, as it happens, stayed in France more or less for the rest of her life, and this volume of reportage was so popular that she followed it up with several more ‘Letters from France’ right through to the 1820s. So we know pretty well how she reacted to the Terror – she condemned it, while never letting go of the admirable principles which she believed had animated the revolution in the first place. This was not enough condemnation for most of her English friends, who gradually dropped her for being not anti-French enough.
Her approach here is a personal one: ‘my political creed is entirely an affair of the heart,’ she says. (This level of analysis was infuriatingly criticised in right-wing reviews as ‘good lady-like reasoning’.) She makes no political assessments beyond the broad moral ones, and illustrates the good of the revolution chiefly by means of personal stories from her French friends.
Presumably, the former comtes and marquises could have said the same to justify the ancien régime. But as with all such revolutionary fervour, in history or in contemporary politics, you have to steer a pretty tight course between careful skepticism and blind cynicism. It takes practice. From the extracts presented here from her later writings, you can already see that maturity start to develop in Williams. This edition is beautifully edited and comes with a veritable cornucopia of supporting material, from contemporary reviews to examples of Williams's poetry, to a selected anthology of the revolution debate. It's a rare eyewitness account from the heart of political upheaval, and I think it still has plenty to teach us.
As Helen Maria Williams says, ‘it is very difficult, with common sensibility, to avoid sympathizing in general happiness.’ She was talking about revolutionary France in 1790, but it reminded me strongly of things that I've seen, and my worries about whether and how to detach personal emotion from wider political interpretations.
Williams was a young English poet who became one of the most famous cheerleaders for the French revolution. This book covers her earliest trip to France, when she was a crucial eyewitness at the country's first Bastille Day, the Fête de la Fédération on 14th July 1790, when tens of thousands of people – from labourers to former duchesses – marched from the ruins of the Bastille down the river to the Champ de Mars (looking empty in its pre-Eiffel tower days), cheering and singing the whole way. When it started to pour with rain, the people, undeterred, called out, ‘La révolution Françoise est cimentée avec de l'eau au lieu du sang!’
For Williams, as for many of her lefty, artistic, religiously-Dissenting compatriots, the revolution was not just welcome, it was a moment of almost millenarian advancement for humankind, and seemed to sum up generations' worth of political and moral struggle.
When we look back on the ignorance, the superstition, the barbarous persecution of Gothic times, is it not something to be thankful for, that we exist at this enlightened period, when such evils are no more; when particular tenets of religious belief are no longer imputed as crimes; when the human mind has made as many important discoveries in morality as in science, and liberality of sentiment is cultivated with as much success as arts and learning; when, in short, (and you are not one of those who will suspect that I am not all the while a good Englishwoman) when one can witness an event so sublime as the French revolution?
It wasn't just the French peasantry. Everyone was getting a slice of freedom next – women's rights! The abolition of slavery! It was all on the cards.
The Africans have not long to suffer, nor their oppressors to triumph. Europe is hastening towards a period too enlightened for the perpetuation of such monstrous abuses. The mists of ignorance and error are rolling fast away, and the benign beams of philosophy are spreading their lustre over the nations.
Are they, though?
This book is a time capsule from probably the high point of English enthusiasm for the revolution. The same month that it came out, Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, whose reactionary gloom marked the turning of public opinion in England, at least in establishment circles. In the struggle for freedom, he foresaw (self-fulfillingly, perhaps, but accurately) only violence. When Williams comes across the famous lanterne where some of the first lynchings took place after the Bastille was taken, she does find herself making excuses, though at least she is suitably horrified. ‘It is for ever to be regretted,’ she says, ‘that so dark a shade of ferocious revenge was thrown across the glories of the revolution.’ Oh, you just wait.
Williams, as it happens, stayed in France more or less for the rest of her life, and this volume of reportage was so popular that she followed it up with several more ‘Letters from France’ right through to the 1820s. So we know pretty well how she reacted to the Terror – she condemned it, while never letting go of the admirable principles which she believed had animated the revolution in the first place. This was not enough condemnation for most of her English friends, who gradually dropped her for being not anti-French enough.
Her approach here is a personal one: ‘my political creed is entirely an affair of the heart,’ she says. (This level of analysis was infuriatingly criticised in right-wing reviews as ‘good lady-like reasoning’.) She makes no political assessments beyond the broad moral ones, and illustrates the good of the revolution chiefly by means of personal stories from her French friends.
[N]or could I be more convinced of the truth of any demonstration in Euclid, than I am, that, that system of politics must be the best, by which those I love are made happy.
Presumably, the former comtes and marquises could have said the same to justify the ancien régime. But as with all such revolutionary fervour, in history or in contemporary politics, you have to steer a pretty tight course between careful skepticism and blind cynicism. It takes practice. From the extracts presented here from her later writings, you can already see that maturity start to develop in Williams. This edition is beautifully edited and comes with a veritable cornucopia of supporting material, from contemporary reviews to examples of Williams's poetry, to a selected anthology of the revolution debate. It's a rare eyewitness account from the heart of political upheaval, and I think it still has plenty to teach us.
February 9, 2015
I am always interested in eyewitness accounts of cataclysmic events which is why I was drawn to the title "Letters Written In France during the Summer of 1790." These are not just some random person's correspondence to an actual friend. Helen Maria Williams was an Englishwoman who, at age 28, was already well established in literary circles. Therefore, these "letters" were always intended for publication. When they appeared, reactionaries in Britain had heard nothing but atrocity stories coming from France and the author, fully under the spell, sought to persuade her countrymen that the Revolution was the greatest thing to happen in Europe....like the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
The first volume of her writings predates the actual "Reign of Terror," so it is perhaps understandable that she would be swept up in a euphoria which sounded a bit like V.E. Day and the Fall of the Berlin Wall rolled into one. She arrived in Paris one day before the "Federation," a huge Neuremberg-type rally on the one-year anniversary of the fall of the Bastille in which 500,000 marchers paraded with banners around the Champ de Mars and the streets were all lit up. And since she had personal acquaintances who were freed from the yoke of despotic Aristocrats, for her it was proof enough of the justice of the cause.
However, this rapturous praise of what she considers to be the most momentous experiment the world has ever seen, does not wane through subsequent volumes in which she seems to make excuses for the terrible events that followed. I imagine that got pretty tiresome which is why her own countrymen were starting to regard her as a Hanoi Jane. Hence only the most important of her letters from this period are included in the appendix, such as her take on the beheading of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette; the assassination of Marat; and the subsequent executions of Charlotte Corday, Danton, Robespierre etc.
Although she abhorred the new despots as much as the old despots, in her view they were never representative of the true Revolutionary spirit (this volume does not get to Napoleon). Although I found the writer to be intelligent but naïve, a lot of this stuff sounds eerily similar to the United States in the 1960s where the most radical revolutionaries came from the upper classes (the SDS and the Weathermen), and the generation gap was so extreme that parents were literally at war with their children (all this while soldiers were off fighting a foreign war).
The first volume of her writings predates the actual "Reign of Terror," so it is perhaps understandable that she would be swept up in a euphoria which sounded a bit like V.E. Day and the Fall of the Berlin Wall rolled into one. She arrived in Paris one day before the "Federation," a huge Neuremberg-type rally on the one-year anniversary of the fall of the Bastille in which 500,000 marchers paraded with banners around the Champ de Mars and the streets were all lit up. And since she had personal acquaintances who were freed from the yoke of despotic Aristocrats, for her it was proof enough of the justice of the cause.
However, this rapturous praise of what she considers to be the most momentous experiment the world has ever seen, does not wane through subsequent volumes in which she seems to make excuses for the terrible events that followed. I imagine that got pretty tiresome which is why her own countrymen were starting to regard her as a Hanoi Jane. Hence only the most important of her letters from this period are included in the appendix, such as her take on the beheading of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette; the assassination of Marat; and the subsequent executions of Charlotte Corday, Danton, Robespierre etc.
Although she abhorred the new despots as much as the old despots, in her view they were never representative of the true Revolutionary spirit (this volume does not get to Napoleon). Although I found the writer to be intelligent but naïve, a lot of this stuff sounds eerily similar to the United States in the 1960s where the most radical revolutionaries came from the upper classes (the SDS and the Weathermen), and the generation gap was so extreme that parents were literally at war with their children (all this while soldiers were off fighting a foreign war).
July 31, 2017
Read for university.
September 20, 2019
Actual rating: 2,5
September 8, 2022
surprisingly good considering it was for an essay
October 2, 2022
Joyful, if naive, in an engaging way
January 14, 2014
I have a particular fondness for travel narratives of this kind, where politics, individual experience and geography collide in the most interesting ways. They're like being led through history by a friend, who's eager to show you everything. You just have to make sure you understand that they have their own agenda!
So Helen Maria Williams begins her work at a Mass at Notre Dame, Paris, on the eve of the Festival of Federation, celebrating the early stages of the French Revolution (before the guillotine comes out). And she finds a lot to celebrate. She visits the ruins of the Bastille, the Palace of Versailles, the theatres of Paris and imparts her own opinion on the benevolence of the new regime (the National Assembly), as well as going further back into the terrible situation that led to the Revolution.
About half way through this eyewitness account is interrupted by the history (with an 'air of romance') of the du Fossé family. This serves as a fable for the French Revolution, in which a husband and wife must overcome a tyrannical father intent on bending them to his will. It's a story of young love triumphing against rigid patriarchy, and it's effectively told (though factual, they appear more as 'literary characters').
With that concluded, she returns to briefly relay her leaving of France (she will return, however, and writes many more series of Letters) and tries to combat the disparaging opinions held by the English over the new political situation of their neighbours. Williams' is an unapologetic sympathiser of the new regime, for which along with her sex, she came in for a great deal of criticism. Nonetheless, her Letters were widely read at the time, offering a first-hand, 'behind enemy lines' account of events that captured the attention of Europe during this time.
So Helen Maria Williams begins her work at a Mass at Notre Dame, Paris, on the eve of the Festival of Federation, celebrating the early stages of the French Revolution (before the guillotine comes out). And she finds a lot to celebrate. She visits the ruins of the Bastille, the Palace of Versailles, the theatres of Paris and imparts her own opinion on the benevolence of the new regime (the National Assembly), as well as going further back into the terrible situation that led to the Revolution.
About half way through this eyewitness account is interrupted by the history (with an 'air of romance') of the du Fossé family. This serves as a fable for the French Revolution, in which a husband and wife must overcome a tyrannical father intent on bending them to his will. It's a story of young love triumphing against rigid patriarchy, and it's effectively told (though factual, they appear more as 'literary characters').
With that concluded, she returns to briefly relay her leaving of France (she will return, however, and writes many more series of Letters) and tries to combat the disparaging opinions held by the English over the new political situation of their neighbours. Williams' is an unapologetic sympathiser of the new regime, for which along with her sex, she came in for a great deal of criticism. Nonetheless, her Letters were widely read at the time, offering a first-hand, 'behind enemy lines' account of events that captured the attention of Europe during this time.
September 20, 2025
So glad my fields reading brought me to Helen Maria Williams! Her deeply personal interpretations of political events are fascinating. The editorial materials in this edition are quite useful, too.
2021: re-read: used this heavily to expand the Wikipedia article on her letters; really got major value from the editorial materials, especially the overviews of the later volumes.
2021: re-read: used this heavily to expand the Wikipedia article on her letters; really got major value from the editorial materials, especially the overviews of the later volumes.
April 29, 2015
Fascinating, nicely written work from a too-little known writer
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews