Reflections on the Revolution in France
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Reflections on the Revolution in France is a work of political commentary written by 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.
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[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's beliefs were built on the foundation of a collection of philosophies originating primarily in the western world that ranged from philosophers such as St. Augustine, Cicero, all the way back to Plato. His brilliantly elegant yet practical and complex philosophy reflected his belief that Government Policy and Mandate should be first and foremost grounded in the human heart. Throughout most of his later career he worked to undermine France's Jacobin cause which modern day Liberalism, Socialism and Marxism are founded upon. He viewed with contempt and, above all, fear the celebrated French Enlightenment led by intellectuals, such as Rousseau, Voltaire, Turgot, et cetera whom, unlike Burke, did not believe in a divine moral order or the concept of original sin. Burke argued that society should be approached as a living organism; and people and society were almost limitlessly complicated and intricate. Burke abhorred Thomas Hobbes's more recently originated assertion 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. However, much to his colleagues' lack of understanding, 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 or were used by those in power (or who aspire for 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 professed that people possessed "untaught feelings" which he refers to as "prejudices" that were cherished to a "considerable degree." The greater a prejudice proved to behove them, he explained, the more they cherished it. He argued that each individual's moral estimation is limited and therefore people are better off availing themselves to the "general bank and capital of nations and of ages"--Prejudice, 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] Most of the fellow members in The House of Commons did not agree with Mr. Burke and consequentally, his popularity in the House declined. The Whig Party became increasingly divided as the French Revolution continued and split into major factions, the New Whigs and the Old Whigs. Burke was the founder of the latter and never turned down an opportunity to debate with fellow House members regarding French Jacobinism. After trying to help ease the Irish Protestant grip of power in Ireland over the Catholic majority, Burke was voted out of the House of Commons in tremendous debt with feelings of himself a failure. Burke did however receieve a large pension and paid off his debts later on. Burke later began to adopt children from france and Ireland which he believed was right to rescue from Government oppression. Before he died, he gave orders to his family to bury him secretly because Edmund believed if the Jacobinists prevailed in England, his grave would be a target for disturbance and desecration. Unknown to him, Edmund Burke did not have to worry about a Jacobin takeover of Britain. He was proven correct and the National Assembly fell two years after Burke's death on the 18th Brumaire only France to be succeeded by Napoleon Bonoparte.
[edit] Influence
Reflections on the Revolution in France was widely read after its publication. Some of the British did not exactly approve of Burke's treatment of Britain's old enemy nor were many ecstatic on his treatment of the French's Royal Family. Enemies of his in England speculated that Burke had either become mentally unbalanced or that he was secretly a Catholic (Burke being half-Anglo, half-Celt)and was therefore outraged by the new French government's expropriation of Church lands and other anti-clerical policies. Thomas Paine, an English philosopher who, although more moderate, was a disciple of France's doctrines published a rejoinder to Burke in his Rights of Man, while Mary Wollstonecraft did as much in A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Burke's work against the French in particular became popular with English Reactionaries such as King George III and the Savoyard philosopher Joseph de Maistre. His Reflections... later became known as the definitive words and foundation of Anglo-Christian Conservatism throughout the West. Moreover, Burke is recognized as the Master and Father of Anglo-Christian Conservatism.
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. 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 cold-hearted, incompetent and tyranical than the last. 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] Quotations
- "Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions."
- "The only thing that is necessary for Evil to succeed is for Good men to do nothing."
- "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."
- "The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial, positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience. This it is which makes the constitution of a state, and due distribution of its powers, a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill. It requires a deep knowledge of human nature and human necessities, and of the things which facilitate or obstruct the various ends which are to be pursued by the mechanism of civil institutions."
- "On the principles of [any] mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons-so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place."
- By [the] unprincipled facility of changing the state as often and as much and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken; no one generation could link with the other; men would become little better than the flies of a summer."
- "To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely."
- "A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views."
- "Society is indeed a contract. [...] It is a partnership [...] not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."
[edit] Notes
[edit] External links
