Reflections on the Revolution in France

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Reflections on the Revolution in France is a work of political commentary written by Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, first published on 1 November 1790. The Reflections constitute one of the best-known intellectual attacks on the French Revolution, which was then in its early stages. In the 20th century the work exerted considerable influence within both conservative and classical liberal intellectual circles, where its arguments were re-cast into a critique of Communism and other Socialist revolutionary political programmes.

1 Background
2 Arguments
3 Influence
4 Quotes
5 Notes
6 External links

[edit] Background

Edmund Burke served for many years in the British House of Commons as a representative of the Whig party, closely allied with liberal politician Lord Rockingham. During his career, Burke had vigorously defended constitutional limits to the authority of the Crown, denounced the persecution of Catholics in his native Ireland, aired the grievances of the inhabitants of Britain's American colonies, supported the American Revolution, and vigorously pursued the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal, for corruption and abuse of power. He was therefore respected by many democratic liberals in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Continental Europe.

In 1789, shortly after the Fall of the Bastille, a young aristocratic Frenchman named Charles-Jean-François Depont, who had met Burke during a previous trip to Britain, asked Burke for his impressions of the turbulent political developments in France. Burke responded with two letters to Depont. The second, much longer letter, was published several months later as Reflections on the Revolution in France.

[edit] Arguments

Burke argued that the French Revolution would end in disaster because it was founded on abstract notions that purported to be rational but in fact ignored the complexities of human nature and society. Burke held an essentially pragmatic view of politics and viewed with contempt the vision of French Enlightenment intellectuals, such as the Marquis de Condorcet, that politics could be reduced to a rigorous deductive system akin to mathematics.

As a Protestant and a Whig, Burke expressly repudiated the notion that the authority of monarchs was divinely instituted or that the people had no right to depose an oppressive government. On the other hand, he believed in the central roles of private property, tradition, and "prejudice" (by which he meant the popular adherence to values that lack a conscious rational justification) in giving citizens an interest in the well-being of their country and in maintaining social order. Burke argued for gradual, constitutional reform over revolutionary upheaval, in all but the most qualified of cases. Burke also emphasized that a political doctrine founded on abstract notions about "liberty" and the "rights of man" could easily be used by those in power to justify tyrannical measures. Instead, he called for the constitutional enactment of specific, concrete rights and liberties as a bulwark against oppression by the government.

Burke argued that people were generally individuals of "untaught feelings" and that people cherished prejudices to a "considerable degree." Each individual's intellect is limited and therefore individuals are better off by availing themselves to the "general bank and capital of nations and of ages"--general popular prejudices. Burke favoured prejudice because of its utility; prejudices, with their "latent wisdom", gave permanence to wise actions and are of "ready application in an emergency." Prejudices, Burke contends, "renders a man's virtue his habit."^[1]

The general instability and disorder after the Revolution, Burke predicted, would make the army "mutinous and full of faction." Then a "popular general" will command the allegiance of the soldiery and when that happens he will be "master of your assembly, the master of your whole republic."^[2] This prophecy was fulfilled two years after Burke's death on the 18th Brumaire.

[edit] Influence

Reflections on the Revolution in France was widely read after its publication, but much of the immediate reaction to it was very negative. Burke's critics made much of the intemperate language he used to attack the leaders of the French Revolution, his eulogizing of King Louis XVI of France and his wife, and the various factual inaccuracies concerning specific events in France and the political arrangements of that country's new constitution. Thomas Jefferson, William Hazlitt, Charles James Fox, and other liberal figures who had until then admired Burke proceeded to denounce the author of the Reflections as a reactionary. Conservative Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger initially found in Burke's book only "rhapsodies in which there is much to admire and nothing to agree with." Some observers speculated that Burke had either become mentally unbalanced or that he was secretly a Catholic and was therefore outraged by the new French government's expropriation of Church lands and other anti-clerical policies. Thomas Paine published a rejoinder to Burke in his Rights of Man, while Mary Wollstonecraft did as much in A Vindication of the Rights of Men. On the other hand, those who did admire Burke's work when it appeared tended to be genuine reactionaries, such as King George III and the Savoyard philosopher Joseph de Maistre.

The situation changed after many of Burke's predictions for the outcome of the French Revolution came true: the execution of Louis XVI and his wife was followed by the Reign of Terror during which hundreds of thousands of citizens were arrested and tens of thousands executed for political offences. The chaos and violence that followed the revolution eventually led to a reaction in which General Napoleon Bonaparte became a military dictator. Most of Burke's fellow Whigs joined him in opposition to the revolutionary government of France, and the Reflections became Burke's most significant intellectual legacy after his death in 1797.

In the 19th century, positivist French historian Hippolyte Taine echoed Burke's arguments in his monumental Origins of Contemporary France (1876–1885). Taine argued that the essential fault of the French system of government was the centralization of power. In his view, far from promoting democratic control, the French Revolution had transferred power from the aristocracy to an "enlightened" elite that proved even more illiberal. In the 20th century many Western observers found in Burke's Reflections arguments that applied as well to Socialist revolutions as they had to the French Revolution. Burke therefore became an influential figure in Western conservative and classical liberal circles. Two of the most important classical liberals of the 20th century, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, acknowledged their debt to Burke.

[edit] Quotes

"Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions."

"In my course I have known, and, according to my measure, have co-operated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business."

"I cannot [...] give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances [...] are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government) without inquiring what the nature of that government was? [...] Can I now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? [...] I should, therefore, suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with the solidity of property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too, and without them liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long.