section_path: Biography/The fall of the Jacobins and An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution
section_name: The fall of the Jacobins and An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution
paragraph_text: The fall of the Jacobins and An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution
  
  In July 1794, Wollstonecraft welcomed the fall of the Jacobins, predicting it would be followed with a restoration of freedom of the press in France, which led her to return to Paris. In August 1794, Imlay departed for London and promised to return soon. In 1793, the British government had begun a crackdown on radicals, suspending civil liberties, imposing drastic censorship, and trying for treason anyone suspected of sympathy with the revolution, which led Wollstonecraft to fear she would be imprisoned if she returned.
  
  The winter of 1794–95 was the coldest winter in Europe for over a century, which reduced Wollstonecraft and her daughter Fanny to desperate circumstances. The river Seine froze that winter, which made it impossible for ships to bring food and coal to Paris, leading to widespread starvation and deaths from the cold in the city. Wollstonecraft continued to write to Imlay, asking him to return to France at once, declaring she still had faith in the revolution and did not wish to return to Britain. After she left France on 7 April 1795, she continued to refer to herself as "Mrs. Imlay", even to her sisters, in order to bestow legitimacy upon her child.
  
  The British historian Tom Furniss called An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution the most neglected of Wollstonecraft's books. It was first published in London in 1794, but a second edition did not appear until 1989. Later generations were more interested in her feminist writings than in her account of the French Revolution, which Furniss has called her "best work". Wollstonecraft was not trained as a historian, but she used all sorts of journals, letters and documents recounting how ordinary people in France reacted to the revolution. She was trying to counteract what Furniss called the "hysterical" anti-revolutionary mood in Britain, which depicted the revolution as due to the entire French nation's going mad. Wollstonecraft argued instead that the revolution arose from a set of social, economic and political conditions that left no other way out of the crisis that gripped France in 1789.
  
  An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution was a difficult balancing act for Wollstonecraft. She condemned the Jacobin regime and the Reign of Terror, but at same time she argued that the revolution was a great achievement, which led her to stop her history in late 1789 rather than write about the Terror of 1793–94. Edmund Burke had ended his Reflections on the Revolution in France with reference to the events of 5–6 October 1789, when a group of women from Paris forced the French royal family from the Palace of Versailles to Paris. Burke called the women "furies from hell", while Wollstonecraft defended them as ordinary housewives angry about the lack of bread to feed their families. Against Burke's idealised portrait of Marie Antoinette as a noble victim of a mob, Wollstonecraft portrayed the queen as a femme fatale, a seductive, scheming and dangerous woman. Wollstonecraft argued that the values of the aristocracy corrupted women in a monarchy because women's main purpose in such a society was to bear sons to continue a dynasty, which essentially reduced a woman's value to only her womb. Moreover, Wollstonecraft pointed out that unless a queen was a queen regnant, most queens were queen consorts, which meant a woman had to exercise influence via her husband or son, encouraging her to become more and more manipulative. Wollstonecraft argued that aristocratic values, by emphasising a woman's body and her ability to be charming over her mind and character, had encouraged women like Marie Antoinette to be manipulative and ruthless, making the queen into a corrupted and corrupting product of the ancien régime.
  
  In Biographical Memoirs of the French Revolution (1799) the historian John Adolphus, F.S.A., condemned Wollstonecraft's work as a "rhapsody of libellous declamations" and took particular offense at her depiction of Louis XVI.