Part of a seven-volume facsimile set, this volume comprises firsthand accounts of France in the 1790s. It includes Helen Maria Williams' letters which narrate the fall of Robespierre in 1794 and her 1798 book on Switzerland which comments sceptically on the necessary coexistence of liberty with peace.

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.