Reflections on the French Revolution by Edmund Burke

Burke relatively unknown prior to his involvement in the debates Chronology

May 1789: Gathering of the Estates General in Versailles June 1789: Social role organisation July 14, 1789: Storming of the Bastille, followed by Great Fear riots in countryside August 1789: Nobles surrender their traditional feudal rights, later that month, adoption of the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen Late 1789: National Assembly confiscated lands of the French Roman Catholic Church, issued bonds back by the revenue from church lands to fund the debt. The assembly undertook a vast reconstruction of local administration July 1790 Assembly issues the civil constitution of the clergy, which required clergy to take an oath of loyalty to the revolutionary government, turning the church into a department of the state. November 1790: Burke writes Reflections on the Revolution in France

(pxiv) Burke’s fundamental intention is the defence and preservation of liberal political institutions against those people who would radically transform them on the basis of theory, philosophical ideas, or what would in contemporary terms be called ideology… Consequently Burke must repeatedly define what he regards as the genuine meaning of such liberty against new definitions that rob it of its very being.”

(pxxi) Gordon riots had convinced Burke of the dangers of mob violence and anti-catholicism

(p7) “I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause, in the whole course of my public conduct.” “When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgement until the first effervescence is a little subsides, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a trouble and frothy surface.

(p15) “Unquestionably there was at the Revolution, in the person of King William, a small and a temporary deviation fromo the strict order of a regular hereditary succession; but it is against all genuine principles of jurisprudence to draw a principle from a law made in a special case, and regarding an individual person. Privilegium non transit in exemplum.” A privilege does not establish a precedent. Burke was a Whig, who supported the Glorious Revolution.

(p23) “The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried, nor go to back to those which they have found michievous on trial. They look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown as among their rights, not as among their wrongs; as a benefit, not as a grievance; as a security for their liberty, not as a badge of servitude.”

(p25) “Kings, in one sense, are undoubtedly the servants of the people, because their power has no other rational end than that of the general advantage: but it is not true that they are, in the ordinary essence (by our constitution, at least) any thing like servants; the essence of whose situation is to obey the commands of some other, and to be removable at pleasure. But the king of Great Britain obeys no other person; all other persons are individually, and collectively too, under him, and owe to him a legal obedience. The law, which knows neither to flatter nor to insult, calls this high magistrate, not our servant, as this humble Divine calls him, but ‘our sovereign Lord the King.’”

(p73) “Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor as tyet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert locality. In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails; we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals.”

(p74) “We fear God: we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliament; with duty of magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to the nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty…” “We are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them.”

Keep in mind, Burke opposes even the rational methodology of Hobbes – an absolutist. In fact, he perhaps sees the French as the epitome of the Hobbesian ideal, with the sovereignty resting on a mechanical and absolute National Assembly.

(p75-76) “This people refused to change their law in remote ages from respect to the infallibility of popes; and they will not now alter it from a pious implicit faith in the dogmatism of philosophers.”

As a conservative, Burke believes that the reformation of the 16th Century was a re-assertion of the sovereignty of the English church over that of Rome.

Burke opposes “ideology”

(p82) “Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure – but the styate ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco… to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science… a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes 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. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place.”

(p90) “But this act of seizure of property, it seems, is a judgement in law, and not a confiscation. They have, it seems, found out in the academies of the Palais Royal, and the Jacobins, that certain men had no right to the possessions which they held under law… They say that ecclesiastics are fictitious persons, creatures of the state, whom at pleasure they may destroy, and of course limit and modify in every particular; that the goods they possess are not properly theirs, but belong to the state which created the fiction…”

Here we see that the Conservativism of Burke is actually a form of liberalism, and he sees revolutionary actions as in fact the source of arbitrary tyranny of government. When precedent has no legal power, what is to stop a state from being absolute?

(p91-92) “A pension, given as a reward for service to the state, is surely as good a ground of property as any security for money advanced to the state. It is better; for money is paid, and well paid, to obtain that service. We have however seen multitudes of people under this description in France, who never had been deprived of their allowances by the most arbitrary ministers, in the most arbitrary times, by this assembly of the right of men, robbed without mercy. They were told, in answer to their claim to the bread earned with their blood, that their services had not been rendered to the country that now exists.”

(p106) Burke points to an Aristotle quote about democracy’s resemblance to tyranny.

Digression or tract about property

(p117) “Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.” (p117)

(p139) The association is illegitimate, just a “voluntary association of men, who have availed themselves of circumstances to seize upon the power of the state. They have not the sanction and authority of the character under which they first met.”

(p168) This changes in 1795 – which lasted four years, from November 1795 to November 1799. It included a bicameral legislature known as the Corps Législatif. Refer to Encyclopedia Britannica

“Your all-sufficient legislators, in their hurry to do everything at once, have forgot one thing that seems essential, and which I believe never has been before, in the theory or the practice, omitted by any projector of a republic. They have foirgot to constitute a senate , or something of that nature and character. Never, before this time, was heard of a body politic composed of one legislative and active assembly, and its executive officers, without such a council; without something to which foreign states might connect themselves; something to which, in the ordinary detail of government, the people could look up to; something which might give a bias, and steadinesss, and preserve something like consistency in the proceedings of state. Such a body kings generally have as a council. A monarchy may exist without it; but it seems to be in the very essence of a republican government. “Formation of an executive power. For this they have chosen a degraded king. This their first executive officer is to be a machine…”

(p177) “The assembly indeed promises that they will form a body of law, which shall be short, simple, clear, and so forth. That is, by their short laws, they will leave much to the discretion of the judge; whilst they have exploded the authority of all the learning which could make judicial discretion (a thing perilous at best) deserving the appelation of a sound discretion).”

(p184-186, criticism of military policy) (p186) talks about the removal of the officer class from their positions as heads of the army. Failure of democratising the army

(p188) After describing a cycle of violence, Burke rages that “Massacre, torture, hanging! These are your rights of men! These are the fruits of metaphysic declarations wantonly made, and shamefully retracted!”

(p209) Praises British constitution, a constitution built organically and through precedent.