ABSTRACT
First published as the lead article in The Chat of the Week, New Series I, 7 August 1830, pp. 185–6; see headnote above, pp. 93–4. The second French Revolution produced widespread anxiety amongst the Tories, typified in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine by Thomas De Quincey, who was writing his own article on the 'French Revolution' at this same time, and whose heated exclamations and nervous questions are indicative of the dread with which many greeted news of the latest French insurrection. 'revolution! – French Revolution!’, he writes:
