Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (Routledge Library Editions: Political Science Volume 28)

F. P. Lock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135026530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is one of the major texts in the western intellectual tradition. This book describes Burke's political and intellectual world, stressing the importance of the idea of 'property' in Burke's thought. It then focuses more closely on Burke's personal and political situation in the late 1780s to explain how the Reflections came to be written. The central part of the study discusses the meaning and interpretation of the work. In the last part of the book the author surveys the pamphlet controversy which the Reflections generated, paying particular attention to the most famous of the replies, Tom Paine's Rights of Man. It also examines the subsequent reputation of the Reflections from the 1790s to the modern day, noting how often Burke has fascinated even writers who have disliked his politics.

Chapter 1

Burke’s World

Burke was not primarily a writer or a thinker, but a party politician. It was to party politics that he devoted his main talents and energies. He entered politics in 1765 as private secretary to the second Marquis of Rockingham, whom he would serve faithfully until Rockingham’s death in 1782. To the end of his own life, Burke remained loyal to what he believed to be the political ideas and ideals that Rockingham had represented. In 1790 he published his Reflections on the Revolution in France at least in part in order to recall the party to what he regarded as its true nature and direction. The book has been described as ‘his apologia for his devotion to Rockingham’.¹ Yet the Reflections is much more than a party manifesto. For, besides being a politician, Burke was also an intellectual and a brilliant rhetorician. Strongly identifying his party with the general cause of political virtue and integrity, in defending its ideals he also took upon himself the defence of the aristocratic ancien régime of Europe, the old (and in Burke’s view the ‘natural’) order of things which was threatened by the French Revolution. The Reflections remains as a memorial to that vanished order. Such was Burke’s rhetorical genius that the book has survived the social structures it was written to defend. Such was his ability to generalize that it continues to be read as a classic of conservative political thought.

The ‘world’ which Burke sought to defend in the Reflections was more than the actual society in which he lived and its particular social and political structures. It was a system of beliefs (his ‘ideology’ or ‘world picture’) through which he apprehended and understood not only his own society but also the whole course of human civilization. A comprehensive picture of this ‘world’ would involve fuller accounts of Burke’s own life, of eighteenth-century politics and society, and of the political ideas of the time than can be attempted here. The sketch which follows attempts only to illustrate some of the elements of Burke’s thought most important for an understanding of the Reflections: ‘property’, which he regarded as the foundation of politics, society and civilization; ‘the nature of things’, through which he identified his own particular values with the order of the universe; and ‘history’, the accumulated wisdom of which added the force of prescription to the power of nature in his defence of property and its political preponderance.

I

A recurrent theme in Burke’s writings from the Tract on the Popery Laws (written in 1761, though not published in Burke’s lifetime) to the Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796–7) is the social and political importance of property.² Burke might have defined man as a property-owning animal. ‘The property of France does not govern it,’ he wrote in the Reflections. ‘Of course property is destroyed, and rational liberty has no existence’ (pp. 141–2). The implied premiss is the foundation of Burke’s political thought in general, and of his critique of the French Revolution in particular: that the ‘property’ (by which Burke means mainly landed property) of a nation ought to govern it. Only government by property could provide a secure basis for ‘rational liberty’ or constitutional government. Burke could count on most of his audience accepting these truths as axiomatic, for they were the basis of contemporary politics. The political world of later eighteenth-century England was conservative, oligarchic and dominated by the power of property, especially the power of the holders of hereditary, landed property. Burke did not regard this political system as perfect. He was prepared to accept that it might need occasional minor adjustments, but he opposed any proposals that involved making fundamental changes. Burke did not himself inherit substantial landed property (and therefore the political power and influence that went with it), and did not have a direct personal interest in the preservation of the system. One of the strengths of the old order in England was its ability to absorb into its ranks ‘new’ men of talent, men like Burke himself. In the Reflections, Burke regrets that the greater social exclusiveness of France deprived it of this necessary means of strengthening the ruling class (pp. 210–11).

Burke made his career in a social and political milieu composed largely of men of substantial independent property: in the House of Commons, which he entered in 1765 and of which he remained a Member until his retirement in 1794.³ In 1765–6 he acted as private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, then First Lord of the Treasury; and for two brief periods (from March to July 1782, and from April to December 1783) he held the non-Cabinet position of Paymaster-General of the Forces. For the rest of the time – that is, for most of his career – Burke was out of office, usually in opposition to the administration of the day. The primacy of the Commons in this period should not be exaggerated. The king was still the chief executive of the government. His wishes about personnel and policies had always to be taken into account and were often decisive. Most Cabinet ministers were still peers, and the House of Lords retained significant political influence. The Commons was usually in session for less than half the year; the business of government went on all the time. It was, nevertheless, a golden age for the House of Commons, and particularly for the rank-and-file MP, for the government had in practice to secure the approval of the Commons for its policies without having at its disposal the means of buying or coercing that support. The majority of ordinary MPs came from the landed gentry.⁴ They were not deeply divided on ideological or religious issues, as they had been between 1680 and 1720. They were not disciplined by strong parties, as their modern counterparts are. They were accountable to ‘public opinion’ only in a very restricted sense. They prized their political independence. They were able to maintain this autonomy, either because they virtually owned their seats or because (as was particularly the case with Members who sat for the English and Welsh counties) they represented the class of country gentlemen on whose approval or acquiescence, in the last resort, the survival of every administration depended. It was therefore a golden age for parliamentary oratory. Votes were to be won, opinions to be influenced and a select audience impressed by speeches in Parliament. Although the attempt to prevent the publication of parliamentary proceedings collapsed in the early 1770s, and thereafter debates were more fully and more widely reported, in Burke’s time the primary audience was still the Members in the chamber itself. Burke was one of the great speakers of his day, and he owed his position in politics primarily to this talent.

Burke, like his great predecessors in political oratory Demosthenes and Cicero, was a ‘new man’. As such, he was unusual, though not exceptional, in eighteenth-century politics. Whereas the great majority of rank-and-file MPs came from the landed gentry, the ‘new men’ (often successful lawyers) were disproportionately represented among the major politicians and ‘men of business’.⁵ The political ladder could always be climbed by men of ability. Burke never tried to conceal the fact that he was a ‘new man’, although he was sensitive on the subject and he disliked information about his family and origins becoming public (Corr., 2:129–31). He thought that ‘new men’ had a particular kind of obligation to society, and it was one that he himself tried conscientiously to discharge. On 2 April 1770, Burke made a notable speech in the House of Commons, defending himself from an oblique attack by Sir William Bagot (a country Tory). In this speech he gloried in being a ‘Novus Homo’, and valued himself ‘only on his Industry, not his Abilities’ (a typically Burkian ploy). He defended the social utility of ‘rising merit stamp’d with Virtue’ which would ‘indeed seek to rise, but under the wings of establish’d Greatness’. Such merit should be encouraged, because if ‘precluded the just and constitutional roads to Ambition, they will seek others’ (reported by William Burke to William Dennis, letter of 3 and 6 April 1770: Corr., 2:128). Here Burke’s argument is that ‘new men’ (like himself) should be encouraged to join the establishment, to prevent their being tempted to subvert it. More than twenty years later, at a time when he thought his party (which had always been self-consciously an ‘aristocratic’ party, in the best sense of the word) was deserting its principles, he wrote an interesting letter to his fellow-Member for Malton, William Weddell, in which he outlined how he thought a ‘new man’ ought to behave in politics. Although he is speaking specifically of those who joined the Rockingham party, his remarks clearly reflect what he thought the best course of action for all such men to adopt. He distinguishes several kinds of ‘new men’. Some have themselves made large fortunes. Others are younger sons of good families. A third group are like Burke himself, a man ‘wholly new in the Country’, who ‘aimed to illustrate himself and his family by the services he might have the fortune to render to the publick’. These ‘new men’, of whatever kind, should support ‘aristocratick principles, and the aristocratick Interests connected with them’ (31 January 1792: Corr., 7:53).

Where Burke was exceptional was in his self-consciousness on the subject of his origins. This was, perhaps, because he never acquired the landed wealth that would have made him feel at home in a world of landed gentry. He acquired an estate, but it was always heavily mortgaged, and by 1795 his debts amounted to £30,000 (Corr., 8:292). It was only in his last years, after the award of a pension in 1794, that he enjoyed financial security. He could not easily forget that he was an outsider. Sometimes he was fiercely defiant about it, proud of the extent to which he owed his position to his abilities: the best example of this is in the Letter to a Noble Lord (1796: Works, 5:110–51). Francis Russell, fifth Duke of Bedford, had succeeded to his dukedom in 1771 at the early age of 5. In the 1790s he was one of the most prominent of the Whig radicals who had followed Fox rather than Burke when the party split on the issue of the French Revolution. His vast family fortunes had been founded on large grants from the Crown in the reign of Henry VIII. Yet in November 1795 he had spoken in the House of Lords against the modest pension of £3,000 a year awarded to Burke at the close of a laborious political career. In a withering attack on the Duke as a parasite living off the ‘derivative’ merits of his ancestors, yet presuming to criticize a pension given for ‘original and personal’ services to the state (Works, 5:130), Burke seems to call into question the justice of hereditary honours with political influence. This was far from Burke’s actual purpose in the pamphlet. The Duke’s real sin, in Burke’s view, was not his inherited wealth, derived as it was from the dubious merit of his ancestor’s toadying to Henry VIII, but his radical politics. Burke has no objection to vast and undeserved inheritances, provided that the inheritors behave with a proper sense of responsibility towards the defence of the system that has given them their wealth. Such Burke believed the aristocratic members of his own party to be. He was not blind to their faults and limitations. They often appeared strangely indifferent to their own best interests. They were difficult to rouse into action. Yet their well-being was vital to the interests of society at large.

Burke expresses his aristocratic ideal in a letter written in November 1772 to the Duke of Richmond, a descendant of one of Charles II’s natural sons. Richmond would later espouse radical politics, but at this time he was a respectable member of Rockingham’s party. In this letter Burke contrasts men of ‘great families and hereditary Trusts’, who (if they do their duty) are ‘the great Oaks that shade a Country’, with people like himself, who ‘creep on the Ground’ and ‘belly into melons that are exquisite for size and flavour’ yet are ‘but annual plants that will perish with our Season and leave no sort of Traces behind us’ (Corr., 2:377). Burke was writing to Richmond to remind him of his political responsibilities as a great lord, a burden which the Duke was inclined to neglect. Tactfully, Burke finds an excuse for the indolence of the aristocratic heads of his party and explains his own eagerness: as a ‘new man’ he has only a season to prove himself before he disappears into oblivion. Although the letter to Richmond and the Letter to a Noble Lord appear to present opposing attitudes to the status of the ‘new man’ and the principle of inheritance, behind their different rhetorical stances both letters really support the same aristocratic principle. The ‘new man’ should know his own place and duties, and the man of inherited position should know and respect his. A duke’s dabbling in radical politics is as unnatural and absurd as an upstart’s boasting of his forebears. As so often with Burke’s writings, it can be misleading to isolate particular statements from their specific historical and rhetorical contexts.

Burke had an unusually clear and specific sense of his audience. Though an effective if not a prolific pamphleteer, he was primarily a speaker in the House of Commons; until the publication of the Reflections in 1790, this was his most important forum. There he was used to speaking directly to his audience, not through the disembodied persona of a pamphleteer. Burke’s major set speeches were published, of course, and they were intended to reach a much wider public. However, his ordinary contributions to debate (which were frequent) were addressed primarily to the Members present, not to the public which might read more or less garbled accounts of them in the press. His characteristic rhetorical stance was determined by his sense of this audience. As a speaker in the Commons, he would inevitably have been conscious of his lack of independent weight. In 1792, even one of Pitt’s Cabinet ministers could lament that the government needed to have ‘some acres added to our abilities’.⁶ Independence, based on ‘acres’ or substantial landed property, was a quality much prized in the Commons. Burke never enjoyed it. He entered Parliament as Member for Wendover, a constituency of about 150 electors (the inhabitant householders) controlled by Lord Verney.⁷ In 1774, Burke was elected as Member for Bristol, which (with about five thousand voters) was the third largest urban constituency in the country. Although this was a personal triumph for Burke, the circumstances of his election were peculiar and (as he soon came to realize) would not be repeated at the next election. For six years, however, Burke did sit as a Member for a genuinely ‘open’ or popular constituency. In the event, this proved in many ways an embarrassment; Burke had not one but many political masters. He disliked the burden of purely local constituency business but, more important, he disliked the pressure to take a narrowly local view of national political issues. In popular constituencies Members were too much at the mercy of their electors. In 1780 he withdrew from the contest in Bristol when it became clear that he had no chance of being elected. He was returned instead for Lord Rockingham’s (later Lord Fitzwilliam’s) pocket borough, Malton in Yorkshire, for which he sat until his retirement from Parliament in 1794. For most of his career, then, if what Burke said in Parliament carried weight, it was not because of his own standing but because he was known to speak on behalf of Lord Rockingham. Burke was not, of course, simply a hired servant; but he did receive financial assistance from Rockingham. It was therefore seemly for him to adopt a deferential rhetoric, sometimes as a defence mechanism, designed to anticipate aspersions on his integrity. But it was more than this, for it also suited Burke’s social position as an outsider and as a modest defender of the old order, and also his typical rhetorical stance of intellectual humility. The superiority of ancient wisdom is a recurrent theme in the Reflections. Burke restates it at the very end of the book (pp. 375–6). He returned to it in his next published work, the Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), where he contrasts the wisdom that comes from reading ‘authors of sound antiquity’ with the pernicious influence of Rousseau, ‘the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity’ (Works, 2:541, 536).

Burke’s major talents, and therefore his usefulness to his party and his political patrons, were rhetorical rather than administrative. His first positions were as private secretary to William Gerard Hamilton, MP and minor office-holder, for whom Burke worked from about 1758 or 1759 to 1765, and subsequently to Lord Rockingham. These posts involved research assistance as well as more purely administrative tasks. Burke’s extensive reading, and the years which he devoted mainly to writing (about 1756 to 1765) made him a formidably well- informed man when he entered seriously into politics in 1765. He had written, or attempted to write, books on subjects as diverse as aesthetics, history, law and religion. He had contributed articles on contemporary history, as well as a wide range of book reviews, to the Annual Register.⁸ While his entry into public life must have reduced the time he had available for general reading, he would always be exceptionally well briefed on the questions of the day and on the background issues that they raised. When he entered Parliament his talents as a debater and (especially) as an orator were more fully revealed; and he also proved an able pamphleteer. His subordinate position in his party meant that he was rarely consulted in the formulation of policy; his primary role was to defend it. His entry into politics from the world of literature and ideas gave him an unusual (and, again, an outsider’s) perspective on politics. Burke’s speeches excelled in combining the general and the particular: in appealing both to principle and to expediency, in illustrating the general statement with detailed information. His rhetoric was always practical, for in eighteenth-century politics rhetoric had an immediate utility. In the House of Commons there was a large body of independent opinion to be won. These independents would tend to support any reasonably competent government. For most of his career, Burke spoke for the opposition. This had some obvious disadvantages. It meant that he expected to lose, and consolation would come from the size of the minority vote that had been mustered. In the long run, as Burke’s correspondence shows, this was disheartening. It also meant that he was rarely able to choose his own ground. But there were compensating advantages. The government, being responsible for the execution of policy, would make most of the mistakes. The opposition could often take a lofty stand, confident that it would not be called upon to translate its policies into actions.

Speaking in Parliament was important, yet only a small minority of Members possessed the talents and temperament necessary to make any figure there. About half the Members never spoke at all. The number of regular contributors to debate was about forty. In debates on major issues there were usually between twenty and thirty speeches. Between 1766 and 1784, Burke is recorded as having made over six hundred speeches.⁹ Almost as soon as he entered Parliament, he became a major speaker. Burke’s great speeches are certainly self-consciously rhetorical in a grand manner. The effect that Burke typically aimed at, however, was neither the sense of effortless mastery of the younger Pitt, nor the impassioned emotional appeal of Charles Fox. Burke’s rhetoric was deferential. He claimed attention either as the spokesman of more important friends and interests or because his researches had given him information which might help to enlighten the House. The persona he adopted was that of a well-informed man of principle. High-sounding generalizations supported by a wealth of detailed illustration are characteristic of Burke’s great speeches. His rhetorical strategy in the Reflections follows the same pattern.

At this period the parliamentary opposition comprised a number of distinct parties and groups, as well as many independent Members. Burke was a member of one of the most closely knit of these groups, the party led by the Marqu...