‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’: How Revolutions Eat Their Young
A review of ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’, by Edmund Burke; James Dodsley, 1790.
The embryo and basis of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was the author’s friendship with a young Frenchman. Burke was a Whig; a supporter of the American War of Independence; a critic of King George III; and (having been born to a Catholic mother) a possible Catholic sympathiser. So when this friend sent him a letter, asking for his view on the events underway in France, he took it almost as read that his English counterpart would give them his blessing. He was mistaken. Burke’s response, written and sent in 1790, a year after the Revolution had started, was so damning of the project, so sure the whole thing would go pear-shaped, and so thorough in its study of freedom and tyranny, society and government, that it ran to nearly 400 pages. Reflections on the Revolution in France, a keystone text in political conservatism, is, in short, a letter that got well out of hand.
Burke’s target, to begin with, is the ‘revolutionary party’ in England — those, like the Revolution Society and its leader, Dr. Richard Price, who have lauded the upheaval in France as a triumph of equality and justice. Burke claims the Society, named not for the French but the Glorious Revolution of 1688, wrongly portray the events of 1688 as radical. When James II, a Catholic, became King in 1685, he was well-liked by the public (if not the Whigs who, during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679 to 1681, had tried and failed to stop him). But when in 1688 he had a son, so creating the prospect of a Catholic dynasty, a religious question became a constitutional one. William of Orange, who was married to James’s Protestant daughter, Mary, soon invaded, and the King fled. For Burke, this boiled down to a return to the proper state of things, not a revolt against the ruling order. In the debate on the Army. Estimates in February 1970, he wrote:
What we did was in truth and substance, and in a constitutional light, a revolution not made but prevented. We took solid securities; we settled doubtful questions; we corrected anomalies in our constitution, we made no revolutions, no alterations at all. We did not impair the monarchy. Perhaps it might be shown that we strengthened it very considerably. The nation kept the same ranks, the same orders, the same subordinations.”
So for Burke, the Glorious Revolution was basically conservative, shoring up that which had been threatened by both Cromwell and James. And he claims the Society has got the revolution across the Channel wrong, too. Its zeal rests on a misunderstanding not so much of the revolution itself, but of the nature of political society. For in a political society, writes Burke, continuity, tradition and gradual change — in other words, all those things being swept away in France — are the key to stability and unity. Such a society is not a contract between its living members only, but a partnership between the living, the dead and the yet-to-be-born. The one who inhabits it owes it to his forebears to carry on their project and add to the common fund of social capital — the institutions, customs, values, and web of relations from which trust and loyalty flow, and are the lifeblood of a working society. He owes it equally to his successors to hold that capital in trust: not to waste it so it may be passed on.
Society is not a contract between its living members only, but a partnership between the living, dead and yet to be born.
For Burke, it is thanks to the peculiarities of England, and not some commitment to abstract rights, that the English people enjoy a degree of freedom. The Englishman’s liberty is the fruit of lasting social order, which institutions like the common law, the Church of England and the monarchy have conserved over centuries. This is a ‘well-ordered’ liberty: for Burke, true liberty is not the unrestricted freedom to do as we please, but a liberty tempered by tradition and aimed at the common good. As James Orr, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge, has put it, ‘limits are liberating’. Hence why Burke warns his youthful friend that in his countrymen’s pursuit of an abstract kind of liberty — a fiction dreamt up by men like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Burke disliked — they will wind up tearing down the social artifice that makes true liberty possible. ‘The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please,’ writes Burke, ‘we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.’ Here he foreshadows the Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez-Dávila: ‘Liberty is not an end, but a means. Whoever mistakes it for an end does not know what to do once he attains it.’
The central thrust of Burke’s argument is a sentiment that arguably forms the basis of all conservative thinking. It is one that, in the words of Sir Roger Scruton, ‘all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.’ And it may not be evident to us that something is ‘good’. Traditions, which for Burke express practical wisdom, collected across society through the ages—solutions to the problems that arise in any large group of people — may seem arbitrary or even unjust at first glance. But to abolish them is to risk the problems they solve re-emerging. Such prudence, particularly when dealing with circumstances that are far from perfect, wins us few friends. But Burke puts it like this: ‘Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security.’ For what is bad, Burke reminds us, can always get worse. Revolution in Egypt produced military dictatorship. After the Russian Revolution, the number of dead each year climbed from thousands to tens of millions. The tyranny of Islamic theocrats replaced the rule of the Shah in Iran. ‘Like Saturn,’ wrote the essayist Jacques Mallet du Pan, ‘the Revolution devours its children.’
‘Good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.’
And so it was with the French Revolution. Burke foresees blood, chaos, and the arising of a military dictatorship to keep order. He was right: in 1793, the Reign of Terror — a term he coined — started with the killing of the King and then the mass executions of thousands, including many nuns and clergy, in a supposed purge of counter-revolutionary elements. By 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte was First Consul of the Republic; by 1804, he had crowned himself Emperor of the French. So Burke was far-sighted. But he was also contentious. Most of Europe backed the Revolution, believing it was time the inept, dishonest rulers of France got their comeuppance. Some of Burke’s rivals in England claimed he had gone mad, and Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine swiftly published pamphlets in defence of the revolutionaries.
Many have said that as a work of history, the Reflections is flawed. Burke was not close enough to events on the ground to understand the exact order in which events unfolded. He drew on sources that were, at best, patchy or incomplete. But as a work of political philosophy, as a polemic, and as a work of rhetoric, the Reflections is a powerful document which sets out clearly why and how brutal upheaval, however worthwhile the cause in whose name it is done, most often brings about the reverse of what it means to. The striving for freedom, equality and justice leads instead to savagery, cruelty and tyranny. And that is why it is such an important book. ‘As literature, as political theory, as anything but history,’ writes the conservative historian Alfred Cobban, ‘[the] Reflections is magnificent’.
