Mary Wollstonecraft’s Enlightened Historical Narrative: Her Rational (Re)view on the French Revolution

Antal, Éva (2025) Mary Wollstonecraft’s Enlightened Historical Narrative: Her Rational (Re)view on the French Revolution. KELET-KÖZÉP-EURÓPAI TÖRTÉNELMI TANULMÁNYOK, 3 (1). pp. 93-113. ISSN 30040981

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Abstract

In A Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790), Mary Wollstonecraft ardently justified the French Revolution, reacting to Edmund Burke’s criticism of the event in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). However, having visited France in the 1790s, she rationalised her previous zeal about her radicalism in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect it has produced in Europe (1794). In the View, history is presented as a coherent narrative of progress, and the event of the revolution, despite its inevitable causes, is criticised in the moral-philosophical framework. Being an Enlightened thinker, Wollstonecraft re-evaluated her previous ideas, examining them on a large scale in the process of (hu)man development towards virtue. In my paper, I will trace the recurrent characteristics of the narrative, focussing on theatricality, immaturity, and the clash of conflicting forces, while presenting the utopian (female) voice of a philosophical historian.

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