Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau put the word liberty into circulation decades before the Bastille fell, and Peter Ackroyd's film traces how their arguments about equality and natural rights crossed from salons into the streets of Paris. Dramatized scenes, with David Tennant, Dudley Sutton, and David Threlfall speaking the philosophers' own words, place the viewer inside the intellectual ferment that fed the French Revolution. The film then follows the same ideas across the Channel, where they reach a generation of British poets. William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth all read the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and fraternity and turned it into verse, some of it written in open sympathy with events in France before the Terror soured British opinion. Ackroyd's narration links the philosophy directly to specific poems and passages rather than treating the connection as vague inspiration. The result is a close account of how eighteenth-century political ideas moved from Rousseau's page into revolutionary Paris and then into English Romantic poetry.