Selected Documents

Support for the French Revolution led to the formation of local societies for constitutional reform and universal suffrage throughout Britain. In England the London Corresponding Society emerged as a co-ordinating body for these local societies. Similar roles were played in Scotland by the Friends of the People, and in Ireland, by the United Irishmen. These three groups began to work together towards the formation of a national convention, culminating in the British Convention (held in Edinburgh) in 1793. The British Convention was forcibly closed by the government and leading members arrested and transported. The surviving associations were driven underground, and the successor organizations (the United Scotsmen and United Englishmen, which later fed into the Luddite movement) were necessarily secretive and now known mainly through reports from spies and informers. The defeat of the uprising by the United Scotsmen in 1797 and the defeat and harsh repression of the larger revolt by the United Irishmen from 1797 to 1798 combined with the defeat of the naval mutinies marked the effective end of this phase of the movement.

• Resolution of the British Society for the Revolution to the French National Assembly (1789)
• Founding document of the Manchester Constitutional Society (1790)
• Declaration of the Society of United Irishmen, Dublin/Belfast (1791)
• Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty, London (1791)
• Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information: on Thomas Paine (1792)
• Thomas Hardy on the founding of the London Corresponding Society (1792)
• Declaration of the Friends of the People, Edinburgh (1792)
• Minutes of the Scottish Convention (1792)
• Society for Political Information, Derby (1793)
• Constitutional Society of Sheffield: on Peace (1793)
• Address of the British Convention to the People of Great Britain (1793)
• United Constitutional Societies, Norwich (1794)
• London Corresponding Society: Address (1794)
• London Corresponding Society: appeal for a new Convention (undated)
• London Corresponding Society: Aid for prisoners' families (1794)
• A Narrative of the Proceedings at the General Meeting of the London Corresponding Society (1797) [Transcription in progress]
• Memoire, or, detailed statement of the origin and progress of the Irish union delivered to the Irish government (1798) [Transcription to come]