Having arrived at the end of the 1790s with a deeply politicized and contested representation of society centred around a ‘middle class’, we can turn our attention once more to the divergent commentaries on the social origins of the French Revolution which opened our discussion of this turbulent decade. By now, the task of explaining their twists and turns dissolves almost effortlessly. To be sure, their explication has to do only obliquely with the events in France. That the relevant context for the language of these commentaries was the volatile political situation in Britain is underscored by a comparison with a different genre of writing on the French Revolution, namely those detailed historical works which purported to be primarily descriptive (though not without opinions), and which by tenor and by form (often running more than a thousand pages) were not intended as passionate polemical interventions in the political debate. Whereas in the more explicitly political commentaries the English terms ‘middle class’ or ‘middle rank’ were almost always substituted for the French term bourgeoisie (with little concern for possible shifts in meaning), this was hardly ever the case in the more explicitly historical ones, wherein the French terminology was invariably retained.

During the initial wave of optimism unleashed by the French Revolution, it made perfect sense for moderates (and future Friends of Peace) such as Mackintosh and Vaughan, repulsed by Burke but also not too keen on Paine, to portray the Revolution as a deed of the ‘middle class’.