Eventually settling in Paris with her mother and two sisters, Williams hosted a Parisian salon that was frequented by many of Europe's most important politicians, artists, writers, and thinkers, including J. P. Brissot, Madame Roland, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and Alexander von Humboldt.".

Helen Maria Williams was a poet, novelist, and radical thinker deeply immersed in the political struggles of the 1790s. Her Letters Written in France is the first and most important of eight volumes chronicling the French Revolution to an England fearful of another civil war. Her twenty-six letters recounting old regime tyranny and revolutionary events provide both an apology for the Revolution and a representation of it as sublime spectacle.

Helen Maria Williams (1761-1827), English poet, novelist, and chronicler of the French Revolution, here vividly recounts her experiences in France during the Terror. Arrested in the fall of 1793, Williams records with passion and sorrow the degeneration of the Revolution into chaos and murder. She sketches the colorful personalities of her friends and acquaintances (Madame Roland, Charlotte Corday, Georges-Jacques Danton) and enemies (Maximilien Robespierre, Louis-Antoine de St. Just, Jean Paul Marat), while all the time displaying her enduring optimism that Revolution would eventually succeed in liberty and justice for people everywhere.

How the Radical Enlightenment inspired and shaped the French Revolution Historians of the French Revolution used to take for granted what was also obvious to its contemporary observers—that the Revolution was shaped by the radical ideas of the Enlightenment. Yet in recent decades, scholars have argued that the Revolution was brought about by social forces, politics, economics, or culture—almost anything but abstract notions like liberty or equality. In Revolutionary Ideas, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment restores the Revolution’s intellectual history to its rightful central role. Drawing widely on primary sources, Jonathan Israel shows how the Revolution was set in motion by radical eighteenth-century doctrines, how these ideas divided revolutionary leaders into vehemently opposed ideological blocs, and how these clashes drove the turning points of the Revolution. In this compelling account, the French Revolution stands once again as a culmination of the emancipatory and democratic ideals of the Enlightenment. That it ended in the Terror represented a betrayal of those ideas—not their fulfillment.