Wollstonecraft travelled to Paris in the winter of 1792. She had arranged to stay with a wealthy French couple, but on her arrival, she discovered they had left for the country. Alone in the empty house, she watched from her window as Louis XVI was driven to his trial at the Convention. The streets were silent apart from the ominous beat of a drum. In theory a republican, Wollstonecraft wept. That night, she was haunted by the spectacle of ‘Louis sitting, with more dignity than [she] expected from his character, in a hackney coach, going to meet death’. Feeling isolated and shaken, she wrote to Johnson: ‘I want to see something alive; death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy. – I am going to bed – and, for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle’. This tension between conviction and feeling is not confined to Wollstonecraft's private letters; it also runs through French Revolution, reflecting the contingency and subjectivity of her philosophical and moral view. Halldenius rightly rejects the commonplace that Wollstonecraft ‘was not a systematic thinker’, but goes too far when she claims that finding the ‘core concept of [Wollstonecraft’s] politics and morality’ will demolish critiques of its ambiguity. While many apparent inconsistencies can be resolved through a fuller understanding of Wollstonecraft's philosophy, it does not do to downplay the literariness of her texts. Like Rousseau, she did not deal purely in rational analysis, but instead invoked multiple genres and discourses to articulate her arguments, drawing attention to apparent inconsistencies and acknowledging the effects of emotional response. French Revolution exemplifies this approach.

In the months following Louis’ trial, Wollstonecraft's homesickness ebbed and flowed. She was tempted by a seat in a carriage bound for England – and yet she refused it. She knew she was at the vanguard of epoch-forming events. ‘I certainly am glad that I came to France’, she later wrote to Everina, ‘because I never could have had else a just opinion of the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded’. As part of the cosmopolitan circle of radical expatriates surrounding White's Hotel, she socialised with leading members of the Gironde political faction, including Brissot, and other European intellectuals. She declared her intention of visiting Helen Maria Williams often, ‘because I rather like her, and I meet french company at her house’.