James Mackintosh’s Vindiciae Gallicae

This volume presents the fully annotated text of James Mackintosh’s Vindiciæ Gallicæ (1791), with an extensive editor’s introduction, and an appendix that includes the significant substantive revisions that Mackintosh made to Vindiciæ Gallicæ in the late summer of 1791.

James Mackintosh’s Vindiciæ Gallicæ (1791) was a brilliant reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Charles-Alexandre de Calonne’s De l’état de la France. Whig Opposition leader Charles James Fox rated it as the finest defence of the French Revolution. This edition offers an extensive editor’s introduction, a fully annotated text of the first edition of Vindiciæ Gallicæ and an appendix that includes the significant substantive revisions that Mackintosh made to Vindiciæ Gallicæ in the late summer of 1791.

EDMUND GARRATT was educated at the University of Sussex and at Darwin College, University of Cambridge. His research interests lie in Eighteenth-century Literature and History. He has published essays on James Mackintosh, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb. He currently lives and works in Cambridgeshire.

Introduction * The publication of James Mackintosh’s Vindiciæ Gallicæ (1791) * The Scottish underpinning of Vindiciæ Gallicæ * Mackintosh’s ‘philosophical’ history of the French Revolution * The defence of the National Assembly * The violence of the French Revolution * The defence of the new French Constitution of 1791 * The defence of the principles of 1688 * Mackintosh’s revision of Vindiciæ Gallicæ * Note on the Text * Selected Reading * Vindiciæ Gallicæ * Appendix