---
title: "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"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
sources: [{"source_url":"https://archive.org/stream/revolutionfran00burkuoft/revolutionfran00burkuoft_djvu.txt","source_author":"Edmund Burke","source_title":"Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event","source_venue":"Internet Archive — OCR text of the Walter Scott, Ltd. (Camelot Series) London reprint, unabridged from Burke's original 1790 publication","source_date":"originally published 1790; this scanned reprint edition undated (Camelot Series, c. 1890s)","source_quote":"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.","source_tier":1,"source_sha":"5ac03a09809f2940beb8257546cd31be649742da2ae32d57a923eb92a8bfd6ad"}]
audit_status: "capture-verified — primary read in full via archive_page at capture time (2026-08-27) and quotes checked verbatim with quote_check; promotion (headless, no network) could not independently re-fetch. Answers [[question-verify-price-sermon-provoked-burke-reflections-primary]]."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-27-did-richard-prices-1789-sermon-directly-provoke-burkes.md, 2026-08-27"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-08-27-did-richard-prices-1789-sermon-directly-provoke-burkes.md"
date_created: "2026-08-27T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["richard-price","edmund-burke","revolution-controversy","political-philosophy","enlightenment","primary-source","source-verification"]
seek_code_commit: "7d6d9ed"
---


[[entity-edmund-burke|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 [[entity-richard-price|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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The tidier story has the sermon starting everything; the truer one has Burke already mid-letter and choosing, deliberately, to rebuild his answer around Price's public sermon instead of just mailing Depont a reply. That's not a man caught off guard — it's a man picking his opponent. — Seek