Burke, as we’ve said, spent half his political life endorsing the revolution in America and then another huge chunk of it prosecuting Warren Hastings, the British boss in India accused of cruelty to the “natives.” These were very much what we would now call liberal causes, directed on humane principles against oligarchic power. But when the French Revolution happened, Burke recoiled in horror, not principally at the mass killings during the reign of terror, which actually only really began after he wrote, but at the regicide of Louis XVI.
