In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke famously calls the Revolution ‘the most astonishing’ event ‘that has hitherto happened in the world’, culminating in his equally famous (non-)depiction of it as a ‘monstrous tragi-comic scene’ in which ‘the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind’. As Mary Wollstonecraft registers in her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794), Burke's mixed, fragmented, and fluctuating rhetorical strategy replicates his view of the Revolution as an ‘insolent and bloody theatre’ of ‘continually shift-ing’ scenes of ephemeral sensation, offering a series of impressionistic and ‘glowing picture[s] of some interesting moment’ that are either ‘exaggerated’ or dissociated from a longer, stadial history of human development. To put this point differently, Wollstonecraft ties both the text's passional language and its non-coherence at the level of narrative signification with its own loss of authority, so that Burke's rapid and disjointed succession of afflicting scenes—in particular the melodramatic tableaux of the National Assembly and the attempted violation of Marie Antoinette during the October Days—are as ahistorical as any painting (or stage set) that captures only a single, discontinuous moment in time.

Wollstonecraft's overriding sense that Burke's Reflections works via emotional effect rather than rational contiguity is the starting point for this chapter's examination of the role of feeling in the emergent historiography of the French Revolution in 1790s Britain. While Reflections can be understood within a variety of historical traditions from sentimentalism to stadial theory, I situate Burke's text within his understanding of changing regimes of feeling, outlining the ways in which he embeds his analysis of political rights within the practical context of contending human passions, and ties revolutionary action to unsocial feelings. Burke's insight that political obedience rests ‘on something more than relational calculation’ was, of course, enormously important to the period's affective ‘interweaving of private sentimental and public politics’. However, his understanding of feeling in Reflections is ultimately a regulatory or disciplinary one, producing passive political subjects rather than any kind of agential political force. In representing the Revolution (and the feelings, beliefs, and judgments that underpin it) as a ‘non-event’ or aberrant ‘lapsus naturae’, Burke's emotional economy of primary French ‘sensations’ and secondary or acculturated English ‘sentiments’ relegates the actors of the revolutionary present to a non-existent temporality and subjugates their lived experience to a predetermined and illusory past.