Women's Travel Writings in Revolutionary France, Part II

Stephen Bending

Part II Volume 4 A Sketch of Modern France (1798) 'By a Lady', though equally possibly by its putative editor, Christopher Lake Moody, the epistolatory Sketch of Modern France relates travel through that country in the turbulent years of the Directory, where the slogan 'liberty or death' names a real and urgent choice. Volumes 5-7 Anne Plumptre, A Narrative of a Three Years' Residence in France, 1802-5 (1810) Plumptre's Narrative combines a cosmopolitan travel narrative of southern France in the early 1800s with reflections on the 1790s, anecdotes from the Revolution, of the fall of Robespierre and a lengthy defence of Napoleon against the accusations of his English critics, looking back on the revolutionary period before the Terror as a moment of high ideals and now defeated aspirations.