In 1789, Charles-Jean-François Depont, an aristocratic French liberal, wrote to the Irish-born British politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, asking him his views of the emerging revolution in France. Burke had been a cautious sympathizer of the American Revolution a decade earlier, and Depont hoped that he would now also lend his support to the French Revolution. Depont was to be sorely disappointed.

Even before Depont’s letter, Burke was becoming increasingly uneasy about the events of the French Revolution. He was especially disturbed by the looming threat that Jacobinism would cross the English Channel and upset the supposed social harmonies of Britain. When the radical preacher Richard Price used a public meeting at the Old Jewry Meeting House in London in November 1789 to welcome this importation of French radicalism, Burke was truly horrified (an emotional response that only intensified when Price’s speech began to circulate nationally as a pamphlet). As he drafted his increasingly long response to Depont, Burke began to zero in on the “Jewish” location of Richard Price’s speech.

By November 1790, Burke’s response had expanded into a book-length work, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Written as an extended letter to his French correspondent, Burke’s polemic found a receptive audience; in its first seventeen days, 5,500 copies of the book were sold, with a total of twelve thousand in the first month. King George III is said to have seen in Burke’s Reflections “a good book, a very good book; every gentleman ought to read it.” At the University of Oxford there were debates about awarding an honorary degree to Burke, “in consideration of his very able Representations of the True Principles of our Constitution Ecclesiastical and Civil.” The Times praised the book as an antidote to “all those dark insidious minds” who would wish to “level” the “manly” British constitutional order. The popular historian Edward Gibbon tasted in the Reflections “a most admirable medicine against the French disease.” Even Pope Pius VI praised Burke. Reflections on the Revolution in France has since come to be seen as the founding text of modern conservatism. It is also a markedly racist and antisemitic text.