Burke's own preface: a private letter predates Price's sermon by a month, but reading the printed sermon is what Burke says prompted the published Reflections

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Edmund Burke's preface states that Reflections "had their origin in a correspondence between the Author and a very young gentleman at Paris, who did him the honour of desiring his opinion" on the French Revolution — the young gentleman was Charles-Jean-François Depont — and that "An answer was written some time in the month of October, 1789," before Richard Price's sermon on 4 November 1789. Read alone, this would undercut the claim that Price's sermon "provoked" Reflections: the letter that became the book's literary form was already underway.

But the published book's own opening narrates a second, distinct trigger. Burke writes: "I sent for an account of their proceedings, which had been published by their authority, containing a sermon of Dr. Price, with the Duke de Rochefaucault's and the Archbishop of Aix's letter, and several other documents annexed. The whole of that publication... gave me a considerable degree of uneasiness." Burke states directly that reading the printed sermon itself — not a report about it — is what moved him from private unease to the extended, page-cited public rebuttal documented in claim-burke-attacks-price-by-page-cited-verbatim-quotation.

The two facts are not in tension once separated by function: the October letter to Depont supplied the occasion and the epistolary form Burke chose to publish in; the November reading of Price's printed sermon is what Burke's own account credits with escalating that private letter into the attack the published book became. "Directly provoked" holds for the content and structure of the published Reflections — see claim-price-1789-sermon-provoked-burke-reflections — with the documented nuance that its literary vehicle predates the provocation by about a month.