Wollstonecraft conceptualised the Terror as a failure of moral sentiment; but she also perceived it as a failure of communication. Her efforts to redress that failure mark her out, once again, as a writer profoundly influenced by her French contemporaries and her experiences in Revolutionary Paris. Eighteenth-century debates about the origins and proper use of words reached a high level of sophistication in the coterie of Dissenters and political radicals orbiting Johnson's publishing house. They would reach their apotheosis, however, in Revolutionary France, ‘where persuasion of a mass audience was crucial and an integral part of the political phenomenon’. Prolific intellectual exchange meant that British and French linguistic theories were largely interdependent, as were the rhetorical practices distinctly, if not straightforwardly, related to them, and they shaped Wollstonecraft's theory and practice of writing. A recurring theme in French Revolution – and one that has been all but neglected – is the Revolutionary obsession with language, which reached a fever pitch during the Terror. Issues of language were differently inflected according to the political situations in Britain and France, but in practice, similar rhetorical techniques were used in both nations by conservatives and radicals alike. The ideological statements that accompanied the adoption of a given style varied considerably, however, with the political allegiances of the writer or orator. In common with many British radicals, Wollstonecraft presents plain speech and writing as antidotes to the rhetorical obfuscation of the ruling classes; but when she took up residence in France, her preoccupation with the role of language in consolidating or undermining ideologies evidently deepened. Like her contemporaries on both sides of the Channel, she critiques the rhetorical gymnastics of the elite; but she was also alert to the urgent need to sustain the Revolutionary momentum despite factional disputes and transmit the guiding principles of the Déclaration des droits to an increasingly restive French populace. In several passages, she records with admiration the disarming powers of orators like Mirabeau, whose eloquent speeches often changed the course of National Assembly debates; and yet she distrusts her own pleasure. In the charged climate of the 1790s, questions of style acquired an ethical dimension and, by dint of both its associations with performance and its ability to bypass reason, eloquence carried the threat of deception.