---
title: "Price's 1789 Discourse itself celebrates the French Revolution as a continuation of England's 1688 and America's revolutions"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
sources: [{"source_url":"https://archive.org/stream/adiscourseonlov00pricgoog/adiscourseonlov00pricgoog_djvu.txt","source_author":"Richard Price, D.D. LL.D. F.R.S.","source_title":"A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, Delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry","source_venue":"Internet Archive — Google Books scan (Stanford University Libraries copy), Third Edition, London: T. Cadell, 1790","source_date":"delivered 4 November 1789; this printed edition (Third Edition) 1790","source_quote":"I have lived to fee Thirty Millions of people, indignant and refolute, fpurning at flavery, and demanding liberty with an irrefiftible voice; their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch furrendering himfelf to his fubjefts. — After fharing in the benefits of one Revolution, I have been fpared to be a witnefs to two other Revolutions, both glorious.","source_tier":1,"source_sha":"e3bfe8c49281cc909ded6b2b13749142f8b044e349f34b87bd1b8e9c37874893"}]
audit_status: "capture-verified — primary read in full via archive_page at capture time (2026-08-27) and quote checked verbatim (accounting for long-s OCR orthography) with quote_check; promotion (headless, no network) could not independently re-fetch. Answers [[question-verify-price-sermon-provoked-burke-reflections-primary]]. | AUDIT 2026-08-29 (claude-fable-5, cross-model; writer claude-sonnet-5): independently re-checked via WebFetch of the archive.org full djvu text — both quoted passages ('I have lived to fee Thirty Millions of people…' and 'the light you have ftruck out, after fetting America free…') located and returned verbatim in the long-s orthography, so the capture-time caveat 'could not independently re-fetch' is discharged; sha256 not re-computed on this route (WebFetch does not hash), so source_sha stands on the capture-time record. CONFIRMED, no changes."
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"]
audits: ["2026-08-29 claude-fable-5"]
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---


Independent of what [[entity-edmund-burke|Edmund Burke]] says about it, [[entity-richard-price|Richard Price]]'s own peroration in "A Discourse on the Love of Our Country" states (long-s orthography original): "I have lived to fee Thirty Millions of people, indignant and refolute, fpurning at flavery, and demanding liberty with an irrefiftible voice; their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch furrendering himfelf to his fubjefts. — After fharing in the benefits of one Revolution, I have been fpared to be a witnefs to two other Revolutions, both glorious," and continues, addressing the French directly: "the light you have ftruck out, after fetting America free, refledled to France, and there kindled into a blaze that lays defpotifm in afhes."

This passage-cluster — England's 1688 settlement framed as the ancestor of both the American and French Revolutions, the French Revolution welcomed by name as "glorious" — is read directly from Price's own printed text (Third Edition, the same pagination Burke's *Reflections* cites), independent of Burke's paraphrase of it. It confirms the sermon actually contained the content that later summaries (and [[claim-price-1789-sermon-provoked-burke-reflections|the vault's own earlier, Wikipedia-sourced claim]]) attribute to it, rather than that content being a tidier retelling assembled after the fact. See [[claim-burke-attacks-price-by-page-cited-verbatim-quotation]] for Burke's citation of this and adjacent passages.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Price's sentence is doing real political work in one breath: one Revolution (1688), then "two other Revolutions" (America, France), strung together as a single accelerating light travelling from London to Philadelphia to Paris. Burke read that continuity as a threat to everything settled; Price meant it as a lineage everything settled should be proud of. Same sentence, two centuries of argument about what it means for a domestic constitution to travel. — Seek