John Oswald of Edinburgh -- the intensely democratic poet, soldier, political and satiric journalist, and author of A Constitution for the Universal Commonwealth -- lectured in London, agitated in the Paris Jacobin Club, and died in battle on the Vendee in September 1793. He was vividly remembered by his contemporaries as a revolutionary activist in France and England, but he has been virtually ignored by modern scholars. After extensive archival research, David Erdman has written an account of Oswald that sheds new light on a crucial area of British and French history and on major political and literary figures, including Paine, Fitzgerald, and Wordsworth. To pursue Oswald's career is to move into the center of British-French revolutionary organization at the blissful if anxious dawn of the era of militant democracy -- and of English romantic poetry. - Jacket flap.