Reflections on Burns and the French Revolution

This paper revisits Burns’s reactions to the French Revolution and its implications for British domestic reform through review of three crucial contexts which shaped his responses: the character and trajectory of Scottish reform politics in the early 1790s; loyalist volunteering in the mid-1790s; and the town of Dumfries where Burns came to live in late 1791. It re-examines and sheds new light on the tricky political balancing act in which Burns was compelled to engage in order to keep his post in the Excise service and avert potential local hostility to someone who clearly privately stood well outside the prevailing political consensus in Dumfries after late 1792. Closer attention to these contexts and the character of political rhetoric and discourses in the 1790s brings into sharper focus Burns’s likely political views at this moment.