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VII
The French Revolution
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A Letter to M. Depont [1789]
Early in 1773, in order to place his son in a school at Auxerre, Burke visited France. While in Paris he was well received in the salon of Madame du Deffand and in the circle of the Duchess of Luxembourg. At the rival salon of Mademoiselle Lespinasse, where the philosophes and “enlightened” wits gathered, he probably met Diderot, whose Bible of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopedia, was at last recently completed. Burke spoke with the Parisian freethinkers in religion and innovators in politics, whom he was to denounce in 1790 as “the sophisters, economists and calculators” of the new revolutionary order. After his return to England, on March 17, 1773, in his first speech in Parliament, he expressed his habitual deep distrust and fear of speculative rationalist philosophers, as men who would “degrade us into brutes.” He noted that “the most horrid and cruel blow that can be offered to civil society is through atheism,” and that “under the systematic attacks of these people, I see some of the props of good government already begin to fail; I see propagated principles which will not leave to religion even a toleration.” Although the affairs of America, Ireland, and India were to absorb most of Burke’s energy during the next fifteen years, his visit to France had convinced him that strong speculative intellectual forces in France were preparing for a great social convulsion.
Even four years before his visit to France, in his Observations on … “The Present State of the Nation” (1769), Burke had noted the serious economic problems of the French people: “Under such extreme straitness and distraction labors the whole body of their finances, so far does their charge outrun their supply in every particular, that no man, I believe, who has considered their affairs with any degree of attention or information but must hourly look for some extraordinary convulsion in that whole system: the effect of which on France, and even on all Europe, it is difficult to conjecture.” Undoubtedly, the immediate occasion for Louis XVI’s convocation of the States-General at Versailles in May 1789 was the chronic economic crises of France. But Burke was convinced that a silent revolution in philosophical principles, contrary to the principles on which European civilization had always stood, had preceded the political upheaval. There were ominous signs that the “extraordinary convulsion” he had long feared was about to overwhelm France, and even all Europe.
Although Burke was deeply apprehensive about the start of the French Revolution, it should be noted that his immediate public response to it was not hostile. When the Revolution began, he was prepared to allow events to determine the position he was to assume toward it. Burke was certainly aware that when Louis recognized a unicameral National Assembly, on June 27, 1789, in which the members voted not by corporate order but by head, that France was committed to a radically new political consitution. On July 14, angry at the dismissal of Necker, the Paris populace stormed the Bastille. This event was the prelude of much later mob violence throughout France. In August 1789, the National Assembly abolished all feudal privileges and issued a “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” the preamble to a new constitution. On October 5–6, a mob from Paris, under the leadership of the most radical demagogues, seized the royal family and brought them prisoners to Paris. To Burke, who always favored constitutional and peaceful methods of reforming serious inequities in civil society, such as existed in France, these swiftly moving events indicated that the constructive reformers were losing control of the events they had initiated. Nevertheless, as the following letter to his French friend, M. Depont, clearly reveals, up to October 1789 he still hoped that the French would establish a new social order based upon constitutional law and Natural Law, with justice and civil liberty for all its citizens.
… YOU MAY EASILY believe that I have had my eyes turned, with great curiosity, to the astonishing scene now displayed in France. It has certainly given rise in my mind to many reflections, and to some emotions. These are natural and unavoidable; but it would ill become me to be too ready in forming a positive opinion upon matters transacted in a country with the correct political map of which I must be very imperfectly acquainted….
You hope, Sir, that I think the French deserving of liberty. I certainly do. I certainly think that all men who desire it deserve it. It is not the reward of our merit, or the acquisition of our industry. It is our inheritance. It is the birthright of our species. We cannot forfeit our right to it but by what forfeits our title to the privileges of our kind. I mean the abuse, or oblivion, of our rational faculties, and a ferocious indocility which makes us prompt to wrong and violence, destroys our social nature, and transforms us into something little better than the description of wild beasts. To men so degraded, a state of strong constraint is a sort of necessary substitute for freedom; since, bad as it is, it may deliver them in some measure from the worst of all slavery—that is, the despotism of their own blind and brutal passions.
You have kindly said that you began to love freedom from your intercourse with me. Permit me then to continue our conversation, and to tell you what the freedom is that I love, and that to which I think all men entitled. This is the more necessary because, of all the loose terms in the world, liberty is the most indefinite. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty, as if every man was to regulate the whole of his conduct by his own will. The liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by the equality of restraint. A constitution of things in which the liberty of no one man, and no body of men, and no number of men, can find means to trespass on the liberty of any person, or any description of persons, in the society. This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice; ascertained by wise laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions. I am sure that liberty, so incorporated, and in a manner identified with justice, must be infinitely dear to everyone who is capable of conceiving what it is. But whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is, in my opinion, safe. I do not believe that men ever did submit, certain I am that they never ought to have submitted, to the arbitrary pleasure of one man; but, under circumstances in which the arbitrary pleasure of many persons in the community pressed with an intolerable hardship upon the just and equal rights of their fellows, such a choice might be made, as among evils. The moment will is set above reason and justice, in any community, a great question may arise in sober minds in what part or portion of the community that dangerous dominion of will may be the least mischievously placed.
If I think all men who cultivate justice entitled to liberty, and, when joined in states, entitled to a constitution framed to perpetuate and secure it, you may be assured, sir, that I think your countrymen eminently worthy of a blessing which is peculiarly adapted to noble, generous, and humane natures. Such I found the French when, more than fifteen years ago, I had the happiness, though but for too short a time, of visiting your country; and I trust their character is not altered since that period.
I have nothing to check my wishes towards the establishment of a solid and rational scheme of liberty in France. On the subject of the relative power of nations I may have my prejudices; but I envy internal freedom, security, and good order to none. When, therefore, I shall learn that, in France, the citizen, by whatever description he is qualified, is in a perfect state of legal security with regard to his life, to his property, to the uncontrolled disposal of his person, to the free use of his industry and his faculties: when I hear that he is protected in the beneficial enjoyment of the estates to which, by the course of settled law, he was born, or is provided with a fair compensation for them; that he is maintained in the full fruition of the advantages belonging to the state and condition of life in which he had lawfully engaged himself, or is supplied with a substantial, equitable, equivalent: when I am assured that a simple citizen may decently express his sentiments upon public affairs without hazard to his life or safety, even though against a predominant and fashionable opinion: when I know all this of France, I shall be as well pleased as everyone must be who has not forgot the general communion of mankind, nor lost his natural sympathy, in local and accidental connections.
If a constitution is settled in France upon those principles, and calculated for those ends, I believe there is no man in this country whose heart and voice would not go along with you. I am sure it will give me, for one, a heartfelt pleasure when I hear that, in France, the great public assemblies, the natural securities for individual freedom, are perfectly free themselves; when there can be no suspicion that they are under the coercion of a military power of any description; when it may be truly said that no armed force can be seen which is not called into existence by their creative voice, and which must not instantly disappear at their dissolving word; when such assemblies, after being freely chosen, shall proceed with the weight of magistracy, and not with the arts of candidates; when they do not find themselves under the necessity of feeding one part of the community at the grievous charge of other parts as necessitous as those who are so fed; when they are not obliged (in order to flatter those who have their lives in their disposal) to tolerate acts of doubtful influence on commerce and on agriculture; and for the sake of a precarious relief, under temporary scarcity, to sow (if I may be allowed the expression) the seeds of lasting want; when they are not compelled daily to stimulate an irregular and juvenile imagination for supplies which they are not in a condition firmly to demand; when they are not obliged to diet the state from hand to mouth, upon the casual alms of choice, fancy, vanity, or caprice, on which plan the value of the object to the public which receives often bears no sort of proportion to the loss of the individual who gives; when they are not necessitated to call for contributions to be estimated on the conscience of the contributor, by which the most pernicious sorts of exemptions and immunities may be established—by which virtue is taxed and vice privileged, and honor and public spirit are obliged to bear the burdens of craft, selfishness, and avarice; when they shall not be driven to be the instruments of the violence of others from a sense of their own weakness, and from a want of authority to assess equal and proportioned charges upon all, they are not compelled to lay a strong hand upon the possessions of a part; when, under the exigencies of the state (aggravated, if not caused, by the imbecility of their own government, and of all government), they are not obliged to resort to confiscation to supply the defect of taxation, and thereby to hold out a pernicious example, to teach the different descriptions of the community to prey upon one another; when they abstain religiously from all general and extrajudicial declarations concerning the property of the subject; when they look with horror upon all arbitrary decisions in their legislative capacity, striking at prescriptive right, long undisturbed possession, opposing an uninterrupted stream of regular judicial determinations, by which sort of decisions they are conscious no man’s possession could be safe, and individual property, to the very idea, would be extinguished; when I see your great sovereign bodies, your now supreme power, in this condition of deliberative freedom, and guided by these or similar principles in acting and forbearing, I shall be happy to behold in assemblies whose name is venerable to my understanding and dear to my heart an authority, a dignity, a moderation, which, in all countries and governments, ought ever to accompany the collected reason and representative majesty of the commonwealth.
I shall rejoice no less in seeing a judicial power established in France correspondent to such a legislature as I have presumed to hint at, and worthy to second it in its endeavors to secure the freedom and property of the subject. When your courts of justice shall obtain an ascertained condition before they are made to decide on the condition of other men; when they shall not be called upon to take cognizance of public offenses whilst they themselves are considered only to exist as a tolerated abuse; when, under doubts of the legality of their rules of decision, their forms and modes of proceeding, and even of the validity of that system of authority to which they owe their existence; when, amidst circumstances of suspense, fear, and humiliation, they shall not be put to judge on the lives, liberties, properties, or estimation of their fellow-citizens; when they are not called upon to put any man to his trial upon undefined crimes of state, not ascertained by any previous rule, statute, or course of precedent; when victims shall not be snatched from the fury of the people to be brought before a tribunal, itself subject to the effects of the same fury, and where the acquittal of the parties accused might only place the judge in the situation of the criminal; when I see tribunals placed in this state of independence of everything but law, and with a clear law for their direction, as a true lover of equal justice (under the shadow of which alone true liberty can live) I shall rejoice in seeing such a happy order established in France, as much as I do in my consciousness that an order of the same kind, or one not very remote from it, has long been settled, and I hope on a firm foundation, in England. I am not so narrow-minded as to be unable to conceive that the same object may be attained in many ways, and perhaps in ways very different from those which we have followed in this country. If this real practical liberty, with a government powerful to protect, impotent to evade it, be established, or is in a fair train of being established in the democracy, or rather collection of democracies, which seem to be chosen for the future frame of society in France, it is not my having long enjoyed a sober share of freedom, under a qualified monarchy, that shall render me incapable of admiring and praising your system of republics. I should rejoice, even though England should hereafter be reckoned only as one among the happy nations, and should no longer retain her proud distinction, her monopoly of fame for a practical constitution, in which the grand secret had been found of reconciling a government of real energy for all foreign and all domestic purposes with the most perfect security to the liberty and safety of individuals. The government, whatever its name or form may be, that shall be found substantially and practically to unite these advantages will most merit the applause of all discerning men.
But if (for in my present want of information I must only speak hypothetically) neither your great assemblies, nor your judicatures, nor your municipalities, act, and forbear to act, in the particulars, upon the principles, and in the spirit that I have stated, I must delay my congratulations on your acquisition of liberty. You may have made a revolution, but not a reformation. You may have subverted monarchy, but not recovered freedom….
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Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event: in a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris 1790
Under pressure from the Paris mobs, late in 1789 the National Assembly was forced to move from Versailles to Paris. More than three hundred of the more moderate deputies who had been present at Versailles failed to appear in Paris. Thus, leadership in the National Assembly passed into the hands of those deputies who were most eager for a complete and swift reform of France. A group of these deputies soon organized a private club called the Société des Amis de la Constitution. They met frequently at an old church previously occupied by Dominican monks in the Rue St. Honoré, nicknamed the Jacobins, and the society became known as the Jacobin Club. Individuals with no legal standing in the National Assembly were admitted into the Jacobins, and became prominent in its affairs. In order to facilitate the reforms and programs initiated in the Paris club, throughout the provinces of France an estimated sixty-eight hundred local Jacobin clubs were established, with perhaps a million members, who were kept informed through an extensive system of correspondence and newspapers of the determinations and policies made in Paris. Before long the superior organization and energy of the Jacobins dominated the National Assembly, which proceeded by edicts to demolish the entire traditional legal, political, religious, and social structure of France. It was at this point that Burke became convinced that the French Revolution was a destructive and evil force, aimed not at reforming economic and political inequities, but at founding French and European society anew, upon a basis of a priori, speculative Cartesian rationalism.
So long as the French Revolution confined itself to the internal affairs of France, Burke’s convictions of its folly remained private. But his distrust was intensified into alarm when Englishmen began to express their strong approval of events across the Channel, and held up the National Assembly as a model to be followed by Britain. On February 9, 1790, during the debates in Parliament on budget estimates for the army, Burke reviewed all the violence that had characterized the French Revolution since June 1789. He pointed out particularly the measures which had subverted prescriptive property and established religious institutions. To follow the French example in Britain, Burke warned his countrymen, would end in the destruction of civil liberty under English constitutional law.
Burke’s first concern for England grew out of an event that occurred on November 5, 1789. November 4, 1788 was the centennial date of the landing in England of the Prince of Orange, which act marked the triumph of the bloodless Revolution of 1688, which forced the abdication of James II. An association called the Revolution Society, composed of Protestant dissenters and Anglican Whigs, and including even some peers and members of Parliament, met annually in London on November 5 to celebrate the memory of the Revolution of 1688. The speaker in 1789 was the famous dissenting minister, Dr. Richard Price, whose sermon, “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country,” praised the French Revolution as an extension of the principles of the English Revolution of 1688. Price’s sermon was the red rag that drew Burke into the arena to do battle with the French Revolution. Burke had throughout his life admired the Revolution of 1688 as the most perfect example of a sound and constitutional method of making important changes in civil society. From his constitutional point of view, even the American Revolution differed strongly from the French Revolution, because the rebellion originated from the desire of the Colonies to preserve unimpaired their traditional constitutional rights as transplanted Englishmen, not from a desire to originate a new order of society. Nothing could be more false and mischievous than Dr. Price’s confusion of the bloodless and constitutional events of 1688 with the violent and arbitrary innovations of the French Revolution. Burke’s reply to Price’s sermon was the origin of his most famous and influential work, which grew and developed for a year, until it was published in November 1790—the Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event.
IT MAY NOT BE unnecessary to inform the reader that the following Reflections had their origin in a correspondence between the author and a very young gentleman at Paris, who did him the honor of desiring his opinion upon the important transactions which then, and ever since have, so much occupied the attention of all men. An answer was written some time in the month of October, 1789; but it was kept back upon prudential considerations. That letter is alluded to in the beginning of the following sheets. It has been since forwarded to the person to whom it was addressed. The reasons for the delay in sending it were assigned in a short letter to the same gentleman. This produced on his part a new and pressing application for the author’s sentiments.
The author began a second and more full discussion on the subject. This he had some thoughts of publishing early in the last spring; but the matter gaining upon him, he found that what he had undertaken not only far exceeded the measure of a letter, but that its importance required rather a more detailed consideration than at that time he had any leisure to bestow upon it. However, having thrown down his first thoughts in the form of a letter, and, indeed, when he sat down to write, having intended it for a private letter, he found it difficult to change the form of address, when his sentiments had grown into a greater extent and had received another direction. A different plan, he is sensible, ...
