Reflections on the Revolution in France by E. Burke

Abstract

Western philosophy saw significant developments during the Enlightenment period in the late 17th and 18th centuries, emphasising rationalism, individual experience, and influential theories of citizenship, statehood, and government. Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France analysed the French Revolution and highlighted his concerns about the upheaval, particularly in terms of inheritance, property rights, and the relationship between Church and State. The significance of inheritance and succession, the role of religion in society, and the theme of moderation and restraint were central elements in Burke's philosophical views and his analysis of the French Revolution.

Context

Revolutions

Edmund Burke's (1729–1797) political career as an MP in Westminster coincided with several revolutions. At home, the Industrial Revolution had shaken up both the economy and the social class structure. The Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain in the late 1700s and continued to about 1840. It marked the change in producing goods from home–based methods using basic machines like looms to the building of factories with steam–powered machines. All of this resulted in the mass production of goods and the transition of the farming population to urban centres. While the Industrial Revolution brought about improvements in communication and transportation, it also caused grim employment conditions for workers and slum housing for poor people. About the same time, the American colonies asserted and gained their independence from Britain. A peace treaty finally brought this rebellion to a close in 1783. However, a decade did not pass before another revolution occurred. This time it was in France.

The French Revolution

The French Revolution is commonly considered to have begun with the fall of the Bastille in Paris, on July 14, 1789.

In their first year, the revolutionaries were preoccupied with a massive reorganisation of the political-social sphere. They abolished the aristocratic hierarchy of the nobility, confiscated church property, reorganised the National Assembly, and manoeuvred King Louis XVI into an awkward position as a constitutional monarch.

During the next few years, economic and political strains caused by the Revolution steadily increased. The new government was forced to deal with counter-revolutionary rebellions at home and increasing opposition abroad. In January 1793 the Revolution's more radical wing tried, convicted, and executed King Louis XVI, sending Queen Marie Antoinette to the guillotine nine months later. From early autumn of 1793 to midsummer of 1794, the Revolution developed into a Reign of Terror, with several hundred thousand arrests and about 17,000 executions. Finally, in the late 1790s France regained a measure of stability, although not authentic civil liberty, under the rule of a new leader, Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Enlightenment 

Throughout the late 17th and 18th centuries, the Enlightenment movement stressing rationalism and individual experience had become the mainstream current of philosophy, literature, and the arts. It was directly linked to influential theories of citizenship, statehood, and government. It existed particularly in the thinking of philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke and Hume in Britain and the Encyclopedists, Montesquieu and Rousseau in France.

Burke had an ambivalent stance toward the Enlightenment. On the one hand he energetically adopted a rational, prudent approach to politics and government. He was a strong adherent of Bishop George Berkeley, a proponent of the Irish Enlightenment, who hated abstraction and valued concrete experience. On the other hand, Burke was not particularly taken with the empiricism of David Hume, one of the leading lights of the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume made his religious scepticism no secret. Burke despised both Rousseau and Voltaire, who, he suspected, were in league to abolish Christianity altogether. Burke believed religion was an essential ally of good government.

By the time Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, Neoclassicism, linked to rationalism and the imitation of ancient Greek and Roman models, was giving way to romanticism. As opposed to neoclassicism, romanticism emphasised emotion, individual experience, and the beauty of nature. The chief philosophical doctrines of the Enlightenment were coming under more and more scrutiny.

Franco-British relationships 

Burke's thoughts about the relationship between Britain and France were conditioned by a long series of tensions, links, and competition between the two countries, stretching back through most of his lifetime. Between 1756 and 1763 Britain and France fought the Seven Years' War, with combat on three continents, in order to settle their mutual rivalry for colonial domination. One part of this conflict took place in North America. Britain emerged as the victor, largely colonising North America and India.

The financial debt incurred in the Seven Years' War led to Britain imposing a series of unpopular taxes on the American colonies. These taxes motivated a colonial rebellion. Ironically, French aid to the colonies, beginning in 1778, added to long-term economic troubles in France. These economic woes fanned revolutionary fires in France in 1789.

In Reflections Burke reveals the British anxiety that social upheaval and abolition of the monarchy might spread across the English Channel to afflict England. The English had experienced their own civil war only slightly more than a century beforehand when King Charles I had been executed by rebels in 1649. Relations between the two countries were especially volatile when Burke published his pamphlet.

Modern Conservatism

Burke is still significant to the modern conservative movements in Britain and the United States. He believed firmly that the rights of man were rooted in the law and in faith, and that sudden changes were detrimental to a strong government. At the same time he warned against any government that required absolute adherence to an ideology. 

Summary

Burke begins Reflections on the Revolution in France by drawing a sharp distinction between his own views of the French Revolution and those of the Rev. Richard Price, an English Protestant dissident (a non-conformist to the doctrine of the Anglican Church). Price applauded the French Revolution and preached an influential sermon on events in France and political rights in November 1789. Burke differentiates the French Revolution from the English "Glorious Revolution" of 1688–89 in several important ways, arguing in particular that the concept of an elected monarch is to be rejected.

Burke's emphasis lies in the concept of inheritance and duly legal succession. He strongly criticises the makeup of the new French National Assembly. He discusses and rejects Price's concept of the "cashiering" (dismissing) of kings, warning that such action is nearly always accompanied by violence. He also describes in glowing terms the great English "pedigree of our liberties," extending back to the Magna Carta in 1215.

The author's main concern here is property and the rights attached to it. Burke is appalled by the French National Assembly's confiscation of all clerical property, placing these lands "at the disposal of the nation". Equally dismaying is the assembly's issuance of a new paper currency, the assignats, whose value is pegged to that of the confiscated estates.

Burke then focuses on the proper relationship between Church and State. He firmly endorses the establishment of the Church of England, asserting that religion is the basis of civil society. Burke also expresses his dislike of anticlericalism. This aversion led him to suspect that many leaders of the French Enlightenment, including Voltaire and Rousseau, wanted to abolish Christianity.

Burke now begins an analysis of monarchy and democracy as forms of government. He also concentrates on population and wealth as barometers of a state's well–being. His discussion of the dangers of democracy is notable. Like the American founding fathers, as recorded in The Federalist Papers (1788), Burke worried that a democratic majority might be cruelly oppressive of minorities.

The author offers his personal impressions of the French nobility and clergy. His views contrast notably with the stereotyped narrative of corruption put about by the National Assembly. For instance, he expresses fond memories of his discussions with clerical friends on his visit to France in 1773. He repeats his grave concern that the confiscation of clerical property is both unjust and unwise.

Burke maintains a sustained attack on the deficiencies of the French National Assembly. He defines one of the Assembly's critical faults as the inability to deal with difficulty or challenge. Even the election procedure for the National Assembly is open to objection. It is cumbersome, and it promotes mediocrity.

Another criticism concerns the confiscation of clerical estates. In Burke's opinion this action and the decision to issue a new paper currency have converted a great nation into an enormous gambling table. In an extended metaphor, Burke predicts that such a new arrangement in France will lead to a corrupt oligarchy. This ruling elite will, in turn, destroy not only the crown and the church but also the nobility and the people themselves.

Burke next turns his attention to the French National Assembly's arrangements for executive and judicial power in the new revolutionary government. Both sets of plans are incoherent and unlikely to result in justice and order. Burke's comments on the executive branch are especially withering. He declares that French dependence on a "degraded king" to hold the executive magistracy will never be effective.

Under the revolutionary regime, arrangements for the army are no more coherent than in the other spheres of government. Burke is gravely concerned about the relationships between the army and the crown and between the army and the National Assembly. According to an official French report, army discipline has broken down. The National Assembly's measures to restore discipline have been ineffective. Fresh, new policies are urgently needed to reinvigorate the French armed forces.

Burke devotes the concluding part of his original pamphlet to an analysis of the French revenue system. Not surprisingly, the system is showing a considerable deficit. As in his discussion of the army, Burke here relies heavily on official documents from France. During the Revolution's first year, he says, French revenue diminished by one–third. He again denounces the new paper currency, the assignats.

The final sections comprise Burke's response to criticisms registered by a member of the French National Assembly. The comments were conveyed to Burke in a letter from François–Louis–Thibault de Menonville, a deputy from Lorraine. Burke responded to Menonville in January 1791, sending an extended letter that forms an appendix to Reflections. In the letter's first section, Burke renews his attack on the confiscation of French clerical lands. He again criticises the revolutionaries' treatment of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette.

In Part 2 of his response to Menonville's criticisms, Burke renews his scathing critique of Jean–Jacques Rousseau. Burke sincerely believed Rousseau was on a dogmatic quest to abolish Christianity. He concludes his response to Menonville by praising civil liberties.

Themes

Inheritance and Succession

For Edmund Burke, the value of inheritance and succession is intimately related to the intrinsic worth of institutions. Burke begins Reflections on the Revolution in France by challenging the Rev. Richard Price's assertions about the Glorious Revolution in England of 1688–89. The Glorious Revolution resulted in the forced abdication of King James II. Contrary to Price, Burke maintains that James II inherited the throne in a thoroughly constitutional, legal mode of succession.

It is for a similar reason that Burke upholds inheritance and succession as the polar opposite to the French confiscation of ecclesiastical lands. The confiscation of church property, in Burke's opinion, is arbitrary, irrational, and abominable.

Inheritance and succession, for Burke, are concepts that are not just limited to the spheres of political power and landed property. They are also concepts that extend psychologically to a mindset of order and harmony. They are consistent with Burke's characteristic emphasis on tradition as a key element of equilibrium in society.

Religion

Burke has comparatively little to say about the specifics of religious belief to which he would subscribe. But religion as a component of society looms large in his vision of benevolent government and he approves of religion as an ally of good government. He goes so far as to define human beings as fundamentally religious creatures.

This is an issue on which political theorists have differed to a great extent. At the time that Burke wrote, the founding fathers of the US Constitution provided for a separation of Church and State. This was despite the fact that colonial Massachusetts had been established by a Puritan theocracy 150 years before. In the 1830s, the French analyst of political theory Alexis de Tocqueville applauded religion as a strong ally of democracy in his survey Democracy in America (1835–40).

Like Tocqueville, Burke regards religion as a stabilising, orderly force in society, an impulse that is naturally allied with government. Burke even defends an established church in England as an institution that is cherished by the people.

Moderation and Restraint

One of Burke's most stringent criticisms of the French revolutionary leaders is their indulgence in excess. The National Assembly's lack of restraint, he declares, is a critical fault in their failure to provide coherent leadership for their country.

Three of the  passages in Reflections illustrate this theme. Burke draws attention to the complexity and delicacy of the science of government. He points out that governmental affairs require an intimate and precise knowledge of human nature. He gives a powerful argument for the proposition that gradual reform—as opposed to catastrophic upheaval—was possible in France. He says this reform was possible even at the start of 1789. He expands his argument in favour of moderation to make the claim that it is actually self–restraint that engenders civil liberty.