Reflections on the Revolution in France

Overview

The Reflections is three hundred pages and it is formally a letter, addressed to a young Frenchman who had written asking Burke’s opinion of events in his country. The correspondent was real, the letter is not one, and the device lets Burke digress, raise his voice, and write paragraphs half a page long without any obligation to be systematic. It was published in November 1790 and sold thirteen thousand copies in five weeks.

The immediate provocation was domestic. In November 1789 the dissenting minister Richard Price preached a sermon celebrating the Revolution and arguing that the English had, in 1688, established the right to choose their own governors, cashier them for misconduct and frame a government for themselves. Burke regarded that as a falsification of English constitutional history and as an invitation to import the French method, and much of the first part of the book is a reply to Price.

The politics of the author matter, because the book is usually read as if Burke were a reactionary and he was not. He was a Whig, he had spent years defending the American colonists, he had campaigned against the government’s conduct in India and led the impeachment of Warren Hastings, and he supported Catholic relief in Ireland. He had a consistent position and this was an application of it, though it cost him his party and his friendship with Charles James Fox, who wept in the Commons when Burke broke with him.

The argument

Against the English precedent. Burke begins by taking apart Price’s claim that 1688 established an elective monarchy. The Glorious Revolution, he argues, was justified precisely as a repair, undertaken to preserve an inherited constitution against a king who had broken it, and the settlement went out of its way to keep the hereditary succession intact. The English claim their liberties as an inheritance from their forefathers, an entailed estate handed down, and that form of claim is stronger than any deduction from the rights of man, because it is attached to something people already possess and will fight for.

Against abstract rights. Burke does not deny that men have rights. He denies that the real ones can be read off from a theory. The rights people actually have are conventional, the product of long compromise, and what they need from government is not a share in power but the provision of their wants, including a sufficient restraint upon their own passions. He compares the pretended rights of the theorists to rays of light entering a dense medium and being refracted out of their straight line: they are true in the abstract and unrecognisable by the time they reach the complexity of an actual society.

The partnership. The book’s most quoted passage and its real foundation. A state is not a partnership in a trade, to be dissolved at the pleasure of the parties. It is a partnership in all science, all art, all virtue and all perfection, and because those ends cannot be reached in many generations, it is a partnership between the living, the dead and the unborn. The living are trustees of an estate they did not build, and have no right to destroy it for the sake of their own theories.

Prejudice, and why reasoning is not enough. Burke uses prejudice to mean settled habit and inherited sentiment. His claim is not that these are true but that they are stores of accumulated practical intelligence, arrived at by long experience that no individual could reproduce, and that a man who acts on prejudice has his reason available in an emergency rather than having to reconstruct the world from scratch. He adds the argument that has irritated readers ever since: the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal are being stripped away, and what remains is a king as a man and a queen as a woman, which is to say, government as naked force.

The practical charges. Burke then goes through what the Assembly has actually done. The confiscation of church lands, which he regards as theft dressed as reform and the beginning of a general attack on property. The assignats, paper money issued against those lands, which he predicts will collapse in inflation. The destruction of the parlements, the nobility and the corporate bodies, which leaves no intermediate institution between the individual and the state. The reorganisation of France into equal geometrical departments, which he says treats a country as if it were a blank sheet.

And then the prediction. With every traditional authority dissolved and the currency failing, the only body with organisation and force will be the army. It will not obey an assembly it does not respect. Some popular general who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery will draw the eyes of all men upon himself, and the moment that happens the man who commands the army is the master of the whole republic.

Marie Antoinette. The set piece: Burke recalling seeing the dauphine at Versailles sixteen years earlier, glittering like the morning star, and the reflection that the age of chivalry is gone and that of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded. It is the most attacked passage in the book. Thomas Paine, in the Rights of Man, said Burke pities the plumage and forgets the dying bird. Mary Wollstonecraft, first into print with a reply within a month, pointed out that his sympathy was reserved for a queen and not for the women who had walked to Versailles because they had no bread.

How to read it

Read the letter as an argument rather than a treatise. Burke does not proceed in order and the key passages, on the partnership, on prejudice, on the army, are scattered.

Read Paine’s Rights of Man and Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men afterwards. The Revolution controversy is one of the great political debates in English and reading only one side of it is reading half of it.

Distinguish the arguments from the sentiment. Burke’s case about inherited institutions, intermediate bodies, the limits of theory and the risk of military rule is separable from his feelings about queens and chivalry, and the case is stronger than the feelings.

Weigh the predictions honestly, in both directions. He was right about the assignats, the Terror in outline, and Napoleon. He was also defending a regime of privilege, seigneurial dues and lettres de cachet, and he had remarkably little to say about why the French might have wanted rid of it.

Watch what conservatism means here. It is not opposition to change; Burke says a state without the means of some change is without the means of its own conservation. It is opposition to change made by demolition, on the basis of theory, by people who cannot know what the thing they are demolishing was doing.

Questions it raises

• Is the partnership with the dead and the unborn a reason to preserve institutions, or a way of denying the living any authority over their own arrangements?
• Burke says rights are inherited rather than deduced. What does that leave for someone who has inherited nothing?
• He was right about Napoleon. Does a correct prediction validate the reasoning behind it?
• Prejudice is defended as compressed experience. How do you distinguish the habits that carry wisdom from the ones that merely carry injustice?
• Burke defended the Americans and the Indians against the same government he defends here. Is his position consistent, and what is the principle that connects them?
• Paine said he pities the plumage and forgets the dying bird. Is that answered anywhere in the book?