Reflections on the Revolution in France is a work of political commentary written by Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, first published on 1 November, 1790. The Reflections constitute one of the best-known intellectual attacks on the French Revolution, which was then in its early stages. In the 20th century the work exerted considerable influence within both conservative and classical liberal intellectual circles, where its arguments were re-cast into a critique of Communism and other Socialist revolutionary political programs.

Background

Edmund Burke served for many years in the British House of Commons as a representative of the Whig party, closely allied with the liberal politician Charles Watson-Wentworth, Marquess of Rockingham. During his career, Burke had vigorously defended constitutional limits to the authority of the Crown, denounced the persecution of Catholics in his native Ireland, aired the grievances of the inhabitants of Britain's American colonies, supported the American Revolution, and vigorously pursued the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal, for corruption and abuse of power. He was therefore respected by many democratic liberals in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Continental Europe.

In 1789, shortly after the Fall of the Bastille, a young aristocratic Frenchman named Charles-Jean-François Depont, who had met Burke during a previous trip to Britain, asked Burke for his impressions of the turbulent political developments in France. Burke responded with two letters to Depont. The second, much longer letter, was published several months later as Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Arguments

Burke argued that the French Revolution would end in disaster because it was founded on abstract notions that purported to be rational but in fact ignored the complexities of human nature and society. Burke held an essentially pragmatic view of politics and viewed with contempt the vision of French Enlightenment intellectuals, such as the Marquis de Condorcet, that politics could be reduced to a rigorous deductive system akin to mathematics.

As a Protestant and a Whig, Burke expressly repudiated the notion that the authority of monarchs was divinely instituted or that the people had no right to depose an oppressive government. On the other hand, he believed in the central roles of private property, tradition, and "prejudice" (by which he meant the popular adherence to values that lack a conscious rational justification) in giving citizens an interest in the well-being of their country and in maintaining social order. Burke argued for gradual, constitutional reform over revolutionary upheaval, in all but the most qualified of cases. Burke also emphasized that a political doctrine founded on abstract notions about "liberty" and the "rights of man" could easily be used by those in power to justify tyrannical measures. Instead, he called for the constitutional enactment of specific, concrete rights and liberties as a bulwark against oppression by the government.

Influence

Reflections on the Revolution in France was widely read after its publication, but much of the immediate reaction to it was very negative. Burke's critics made much of the intemperate language he used to attack the leaders of the French Revolution, his eulogizing of King Louis XVI of France and his wife, and the various factual inaccuracies concerning specific events in France and the political arrangements of the new constitution in that country. Thomas Jefferson, William Hazlitt, Charles James Fox, and other liberal figures who had until them admired Burke proceeded to denounce the author of the Reflections as a reactionary. Even conservative Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger initially found in Burke's book only "rhapsodies in which there is much to admire and nothing to agree with." Some observers speculated that Burke had either become mentally unbalanced or that he was secretly a Catholic and was therefore outraged by the new French government's expropriation of Church lands and other anti-clerical policies. Thomas Paine published a rejoinder to Burke in his Rights of Man, while Mary Wollstonecraft did as much in Answer to Reflections on the Revolution in France and later in Vindication of the Rights of Women. On the other hand, those who did admire Burke's work when it appeared tended to be genuine reactionaries, such as King George III and the French philosopher Joseph de Maistre.

The situation changed after many of Burke's predictions for the outcome of the French Revolution came true: the execution of Louis XVI and his wife was followed by the Reign of Terror during which hundreds of thousands of citizens were arrested and tens of thousands executed for political offenses. The chaos and violence that followed the revolution eventually led to a reaction in which General Napoleon Bonaparte became a military dictator. Most of Burke's fellow Whigs joined him in opposition to the revolutionary government of France, and the Reflections became Burke's most significant intellectual legacy after his death in 1797.

In the 19th century, positivist French historian Hippolyte Taine echoed Burke's arguments in his monumental Origins of Contemporary France (1876-1885). Taine argued that the essential fault of the French system of government was the centralization of power. In his view, far from promoting democratic control, the French Revolution had transferred power from the aristocracy to an "enlightened" elite that proved even more illiberal. In the 20th century many Western observers found in Burke's Reflections arguments that applied as well to Socialist revolutions as they had to the French Revolution. Burke therefore became an influential figure in Western conservative and classical liberal circles. Two of the most important classical liberals of the 20th century, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, acknowledged their debt to Burke.

Quotes

• "In my course I have known, and, according to my measure, have co-operated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business."
• "Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions."
• "The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded."

External links

• Text of Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke