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The spirit of total, radical innovation; the overthrow of all prescriptive rights; the confiscation of property; destruction of the Church, the nobility, the family, tradition, veneration, the ancestors, the nation – this is the catalogue of all that Burke dreaded in his darkest moments, and every item in it he would have discovered in Marxism.
‘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.’*
I shall return to this topic, in considering the relevance of Burke to the militant anti-communism of our own day. First, however – since Burke’s own attitude to the Revolution was not all at once a crusading one – it is necessary to discuss the actual development of his opinions, emotions and apprehensions about the Revolution, to the extent to which these are revealed in his surviving writings.
England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for Liberty and not knowing whether to blame or to applaud! The thing indeed, though I thought I saw something like it in progress for several years.† has still something in it paradoxical and Mysterious. The spirit it is impossible not to admire; but the old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner. It is true this may be no more than a sudden explosion.…
At no time from the beginning of the Revolution to his death could Burke have given the reassurance sought by his young correspondent, but his original reply* is far removed in tone and character from the fierce polemic of the Reflections. He emphasizes his ignorance of the actual situation and his distrust of his own judgement.
You may have subverted Monarchy, but not recover’d freedom.…
The letter concludes with praise of prudence and moderation: Prudence (in all things a Virtue, in Politicks the first of Virtues).… Believe me, Sir, in all changes in the State, Moderation is a Virtue, not only amiable but powerful. It is a disposing, arranging, conciliating, cementing Virtue… to dare to be fearful when all about you are full of presumption and confidence…
It is in January 1790 that the mood of contemplation begins to give place to one of action. A letter written to an unknown, probably in the latter half of that months‡ seems to register within itself the transition. In that letter he is more philosophical, or teleological, about the situation in France than he is ever to be again: ‘Man is a gregarious animal. He will by degrees provide some convenience suitable to this his natural disposition; and this strange thing may some time or other, assume a more habitable form.
‘I see some people here are willing that we should become their scholars and reform our state on the French model. They have begun; and it is high time for those who wish to preserve morem majorum to look about them.’ The first phase of Burke’s counterrevolutionary activity – the phase of the Reflections – was that of fighting the influence of these people in England.
It was then that Burke on 9 February 1790 for the first time took a public stand against the principles of the Revolution. The published account of his speech makes clear that his principal declared concern is the danger of infection spreading from France to England:
He was so strongly opposed to any the least tendency towards the means of introducing a democracy like theirs, as well as to the end itself, that much as it would afflict him, if such a thing could be attempted, and that any friend of his could concur in such measures, (he was far, very far, from believing they could,) he would abandon his best friends, and join with his worst enemies to oppose either the means or the end; and to resist all violent exertions of the spirit of innovation, so distant from all principles of true and safe reformation; a spirit well calculated to overturn states,
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The early, though not immediate success of the Reflections with the propertied classes – amid the growing alarm caused by the progress of the Revolution – and its effect in restoring Burke to royal favour† and in earning him a pension* in his retirement naturally led Burke’s opponents to suggest that he had – as would now be said – ‘sold out’, abandoning his real principles for praise and money. Tom Paine in Rights of Man had charged bribery; contemporary cartoons made play with the congenial theme; Marx, years afterwards was content to account for Burke’s counterrevolutionary writing in this
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He was himself one of the most notable examples of the conjuncture which he thought most redoubtable to ordered society: ability without property.
His writings on American affairs were not revolutionary; they were, rather, an attempt to prevent the development and exacerbation of a revolutionary situation. It is true that he never condemned the American Revolution, as he did the French, but then the secession of a group of colonies is not an event similar to the overthrow of the settled order of a major state, even though the word ‘Revolution’ is used about both. Burke’s
Even allowing for Burke’s unusual gifts of political foresight, an attack on the French Revolution cannot have looked, in the first half of 1790, like a promising pathway to a pension. In 1790 the French Revolution did not seem dangerous, to most Englishmen.
The period from the transfer of the king to Paris (October 1789) to his attempted escape (June 1791) is one of the quietest in the Revolution: the ‘initial tumults’ are over; constitution-making is in progress, with much talk of the English example; the principal events that were to be thought of as the ‘horrors of the Revolution’, the September massacres, execution of the King and Queen, the Reign of Terror – all are in the future.
A recent writer has summed up the situation just after the publication of the Reflections: Thus Burke had no immediate success either with Government or with Opposition. The general feeling in political circles was that Burke, though eloquent and ingenious, went too far in this opinions; too far in his total and systematic opposition to the French revolution; too far in his attack on the dissenters and reformers; too far in his apprehensions of danger to the English constitution; too far in making public scenes, and breaking friendships, on an issue that need never have been publicly debated
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‘What I most envy Burke for’, said Dr Johnson, ‘is, his being constantly the same.’†
Johnson seems to have had in his mind primarily the equable temperament which was Burke’s in his middle years, but a reader of Burke is likely to find the comment applicable in a more general sense to his work, including the Reflections.
‘I have no great opinion of that sublime abstract, metaphysic reversionary, contingent humanity, which in cold blood can subject the present time and those whom we daily see and converse with to immediate calamities in favour of the future and uncertain benefit of persons who only exist in idea.’*
Burke’s family affections were – in the eyes of some English contemporaries – excessive, in that they went out not merely to his immediate family – his wife Jane, his idolized son. Richard, his brother Richard – but also to what a modern anthropologist would call his ‘extended family’. ‘He always marched’, as Professor Copeland has said, ‘at the head of a clan.’†
They took in the country of his birth, and his mother’s co-religionists; he never ceased to struggle for concessions in Ireland, and relief for Catholics.
Compromising connexions again: an ambitious Irish adventurer in eighteenth-century England would, if guided by pure calculation, have avoided these topics: it did not help Burke to be caricatured in the garb of a Jesuit, or to have it said – by Wilkes – that his oratory ‘stank of whiskey and potatoes’.
Yet the span is great: between the ruined Irish Catholics and the owners of the wealth of England there is a chasm for Burke’s affections to bridge.
The significance of Burke’s quarrel with Dissenters in his writings on the Revolution† goes much deeper than the specific quarrel over party politics. It was natural that Dissenters – and ordinary English Protestants generally – should welcome the early stages of the French Revolution because they saw in them the overthrow of Popery.
But Burke was not English, although he often wrote and spoke in the character of an Englishman.
I am attached to Christianity at large; much from conviction: more from affection.’*
Nothing could be more foreign to Burke’s habitual way of thinking, writing and feeling than to be more attracted to something ‘at large’ than to his own subdivision of it. If
Richard Burke, Jr – who often expressed his father’s thought with indiscreet vehemence – wrote, at the time when the Reflections were being composed, a vivid warning to Lord Fitzwilliam, whose agent he was: ‘Think
when you walk the streets of Peterborough that they lie under the stones and that they will come out of the rotten tenements you have purchased of Mr Parker to lord it over the lord of those tenements. What will then become of the persuasive eloquence, the moderating concessions and the temporizing expedients of Mr Fox?’*
‘We regarded as the great Evil of the time,’ he wrote to Dr Hussey in December 1796, ‘the growth of Jacobinism,
‘those who, without any regard to religion, clubb all kinds of discontents together, in order to produce all kinds of disorders’.†
Yet, where the Irish Catholics were concerned, he makes a unique allowance, if not for a legitimate kind of Jacobinism, at least for a kind rooted in human nature; the two categories are, in Burke’s mind, very close together. ‘That Jacobinism,’ he wrote to Hussey, which is Speculative in its Origin and which arises from Wantonness and fullness of bread may possibly be kept under by firmness and prudence… But the Jacobinism which arises from Penury and irritation, from scorned loyalty and rejected Allegiance, has much deeper roots. They take their nourishment from the bottom of human Nature…
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Whence, then, comes the tremendous emotional force that animates not only the misleadingly named Reflections but all his writings on the Revolution, up to and including the fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace, left unfinished at his death?
These writings – which appear at first sight to be an integral defence of the established order – constatute in one of their aspects – and this to Burke not the least important – a heavy blow against the established order in the country of Burke’s birth, and against the dominant system of ideas in England itself.
If members of the ascendancy in Ireland were wiser, he says, they would not lay stress upon the origin of their property in confiscation.
Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.
Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government) without enquiry what the nature of that government was, or how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and
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I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies;
The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risque congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate insulated private men; but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power; and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions, they have little or no experience, and in situations where those
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Sollicitous chiefly for the peace of my own country, but by no means unconcerned for your’s, I wish to communicate more largely, what was at first intended only for your private satisfaction.
All circumstances taken together, the French revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. The most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous; in the most ridiculous modes; and apparently, by the most contemptible instruments.
They saw nothing in what has been done in France, but a firm and temperate exertion of freedom; so consistent, on the whole, with morals and with piety, as to make it deserving not only of the secular applause of dashing Machiavellian politicians, but to render it a fit theme for all the devout effusions of sacred eloquence.
On the forenoon of the 4th of November last, Doctor Richard Price, a non-conforming minister of eminence, preached at the dissenting meeting-house of the Old Jewry, to his club or society, a very extraordinary miscellaneous sermon, in which there are some good moral and religious sentiments, and not ill expressed, mixed up in a sort of porridge of various political opinions and reflections: but the revolution in France is the grand ingredient in the cauldron.
If, however, any of the gentlemen concerned shall wish to separate the sermon from the resolution, they know how to acknowledge the one, and to disavow the other. They may do it: I cannot. For my part, I looked on that sermon as the public declaration of a man much connected with literary caballers, and intriguing philosophers; with political theologians, and theological politicians, both at home and abroad.
Those who quit their proper character, to assume what does not belong to them, are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave, and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs, on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite.
Therefore if you follow their rule, the king of Great Britain, who most certainly does not owe his high office to any form of popular election, is in no respect better than the rest of the gang of usurpers, who reign, or rather rob, all over the face of this our miserable world, without any sort of right or title to the allegiance of their
For, if you admit this interpretation, how does their idea of election differ from our idea of inheritance? And how does the settlement of the crown in the Brunswick line derived from James the first, come to legalize our monarchy, rather than that of any of the neighbouring countries?
the legal conditions of the compact of sovereignty are performed by him (as they are performed) he holds his crown in contempt of the choice of the Revolution Society, who have not a single vote for a king amongst them, either individually or collectively; though I make no doubt they would soon erect themselves into an electoral college, if things were ripe to give effect to their claim.
Lest the foundation of the king’s exclusive legal title should pass for a mere rant of adulatory freedom, the political Divine proceeds dogmatically to assert, * that by the principles of the Revolution the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights, all which, with him, compose one system and lie together in one short sentence; namely, that we have acquired a right 1. ‘To choose our own governors.’
