The French Revolution began with the convocation of the Estates- General in May 1789 and the storming of the Bastille on 14 July. In these early months, advocates of democracy on both sides of the Channel looked forward to a peaceful Nouveau Régime made in the image of the American Republic. A sense of millennial possibility spread amongst the British Dissenters and radicals in Wollstonecraft's orbit, for whom the ‘freeborn Englishman’ had always been a preposterous fiction and democratic republicanism felt relevant and exhilarating. Monarchists and conservatives were appalled, frightened and hostile. Radical and anti-Jacobin pamphleteers waged a war that stoked paranoia in Pitt's government. Christie was a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, which promoted Paine's inflammatory Rights of Man (1791–2) in pursuit of parliamentary reform, as well as an important agent of literary exchange between Paris and St Paul's Churchyard. After 1789, he spent considerable time in Paris, fostering political and intellectual relationships with prominent figures such as Necker, Mirabeau and Abbé Sieyès. By the autumn of 1792, strong links had been forged between Johnson's circle and the Nouveau Régime administration. Following the publication of Burke's Reflections, Johnson quickly issued ripostes in the form of the Foxite Capel Lofft's Remarks on the Letter of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke, Concerning the Revolution in France (1790) and Joseph Priestley's Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (1791). Remarkably, however, the first reply to Burke came from Wollstonecraft, who until that moment had confined her politics to the subtext of novels and conduct-books, the literary province of women. With the publication of Rights of Men and, two years later, Rights of Woman, she stepped decisively into the arena of philosophy and politics. In both Vindications, she responds to intellectual currents borne across the Channel by the close connections between Parisian Revolutionaries and the intelligentsia who converged at St Paul's Churchyard. The seismic upheavals in Paris made it urgent to communicate political ideas, and theoretical positions acquired potent, even explosive significance. Wollstonecraft's writing from this period still bears the hallmarks of her earlier works: a complex and critical Rousseauism; the translation of foreign-language source material into new (often feminist) contexts; fascination with the cause and consequences of cultural differences; and a belief in the underlying commonality of human nature and the importance of philanthropy.