Edmund Burke

Burke was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1729 his mother was a Catholic and his father was a member of the Church of Ireland.  Burke was brought up and remained a practicing Anglican.  He went to Trinity College Dublin and having graduated rejected a career in the law for life of a writer.  He published a treatise entitled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1757 he also attempted a history of England from Julius Caesar’s invasion.

Burke was elected to the House of Commons in 1765. He argued in parliament: for the increase in free trade of corn, a loosening of restrictions on trade in Ireland, increased Catholic rights.  He also spoke out against the death penalty and against the unrestricted power of kings.  During his time in Westminster he is perhaps most famous for his views on the grievances of the American colonies.  He believed the American colonists should be granted more say over their taxation as any attempt to subdue them by force was bound to fail thanks to the distance and character of the colonists themselves.

When the French Revolution broke out Burke was not initially vehemently opposed to it.  This changed however when Louis XVI was forced by a Parisian mob to return to the capital.  Events from across the channel and the support the Revolution met in Britain compelled Burke to publish Reflections on the Revolution in France  on 1 November 1790. It was an immediate best-seller. By the end of 1790, it had gone through ten printings and sold approximately 17,500 copies.

His argument was that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which many British thinkers saw as being a precursor and similar to the French Revolution was merely a reaffirmation of traditional English rights and privileges which stretched back to Magna Carta and beyond.  The French Revolution however was to his mind bringing about the destruction of all the traditional Gallic values which were entrenched through the church and the sanctity of property and embracing new, disturbing and untested ideas.

Burke’s work created a stir in British political circles and led to Thomas Paine publishing his Rights of Man as a response to Burke.  He was not the last as Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Men and  James Mackintosh wrote Vindicia Gallicae.  This did not stop Burke however who would go on to state that military intervention might be needed to reverse the revolution in France.  He would fall out with many in the Whig Party most notably Charles Fox leader of the Party.  Throughout his remaining years in parliament he condemned the British government's lack of intervention in the revolution and their lack of support for the emigres and royalists in the vendee.

Burke died in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, on 9 July 1797.

Edmund Burke on the French Revolution and the church and nobility.  Taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, London (2004) p222

Perhaps persons, unacquainted with the state of France, on hearing the clergy and the noblese were privileged in point of taxation, may be led to imagine, that previous to the revolution these bodies had contributed nothing to the state.  This is a great mistake. They certainly did not contribute equally with each other, nor either of them equally with the commons.  They both however contributed largely.  Neither nobility nor clergy enjoyed any exemption from the duties of custom, or from any other of the other numerous indirect impositions, which in France as well as here, make so very large a proportion of all payments to the public.  The noblesse paid the capitation.  They also paid a land tax, called the twentieth penny, to the height sometimes of three, sometimes of four shillings in the pound; both of them direct impositions of no light nature and no trivial produce.

Edmund Burke on Necker and the situation of French finances.  Taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, London (2004) p234

Mr Necker’s book published in 1785, contains an accurate and interesting collection of facts relative to public economy and to political arithmetic; and his speculations on the subject are in general wise and liberal.  In that work he gives an idea of the state of France, very remote from the portrait of a country whose government was a perfect grievance, an absolute evil, admitting no cure but through the violent and uncertain remedy of a total revolution.  He affirms, that from the year 1726 to the year 1784, there was coined at the mint of France, in the species of gold and silver, to the amount of about one hundred millions of pound sterling.

Edmund Burke on the church.  Taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, London (2004) p252-253

When my occasions took me into France, towards the close of the late reign, the clergy, under all their forms, engaged a considerable part of my curiosity.  So far from finding…. The complaints and discontents against that body, which some publications have given me reason to expect, I perceived little or no public or private uneasiness on their account.  On further examination, I found the clergy in general, persons of moderate minds and decorous manners; I include the seculars, and the regulars of both sexes.  

Tom Paine on Edmund Burke. Taken from the Rights of Man, Penguin, London (1983) p58-59

When the French Revolution broke out, it certainly afforded to Mr Burke an opportunity of doing some good, had he been disposed to it; instead of which, no sooner did he see the old prejudices wearing away, then he immediately began sowing the seeds of a new inveteracy, as if he were afraid that England and France would cease to be enemies. That there were men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations, it is shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country, make it their study to sow discord, and cultivate prejudices between nations it becomes the more unpardonable.

Edmund Burke on Louis XVI and the National Assembly.  Taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, London (2004) p125-126

Remember that your parliament of Paris told your king, that in calling the states together, he had nothing to fear but the prodigal excess of their zeal in providing for the support of the throne.  It is right that these men should hide their heads.  It is right that they should bear their part in the ruin which their counsel had brought on their sovereign and their country.  Such sanguine declarations tend to lull authority asleep; to encourage it rashly to engage in perilous adventures of untried policy; to neglect these provisions, preparations, and precautions, which distinguish benevolence from imbecility; and which no man can answer for the salutary effect of any abstract plan of government or of freedom.  For want of these, they have seen the French rebel against a mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage and insult, than ever any people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper, or the most sanguinary tyrant.  Their resistance was made to concession; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at an hand holding out graces, favours, and immunities.

Edmund Burke on Louis XVI and the National Assembly.  Taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, London (2004) p129-131

Judge, Sir of my surprise, when I found that a very great proportion of the Assembly (a majority, I believe, f the members who attended) were composed of practitioners in the law.  It was not composed of distinguished magistrates, who had given pledges to their country of their science, prudence, and integrity; not of leading advocates, the glory of the bar; not of renowned professors in universities; - but for the most greater part, as it must in such a number, of the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members of the profession……  From the moment I read the list I saw distinctly, and very nearly as it has happened, all that was to follow…..Who could doubt but that, at any expense to the state, of which they understood nothing, they must pursue their private interests, which they understood but too well.

Edmund Burke on Louis XVI and the National Assembly.  Taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, London (2004) p161

The Assembly, their organ, acts before them the farce of deliberation with as little decency as liberty.  They act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience; they act amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame, who, according to their insolent fancies, direct, control, applaud, explode them; and sometimes mix and take their seats amongst them; domineering over them with a strange mixture of servile petulance and proud presumptuous authority.

Tom Paine discusses the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Burke’s opposition to it. Taken from the Rights of Man, Penguin, London (1983) p68-69

While I am writing this, there are accidentally before me some proposals for a declaration of rights by the marquis de Lafayette to the National Assembly, on the 11th of July 1789, three days before the taking of the Bastille; and I cannot but remark with astonishment how opposite the sources are from the Gentleman and Mr Burke draw their principles.  Instead of referring to musty records and mouldy parchments to prove that the rights of the living are lost, “renounced and abdicated forever,” by those who are now no more, as Mr Burke has done, M. de Lafayette applies to the living world, and emphatically says, “Call to mind the sentiments which Nature has engraved in the heart of  every citizen, and which take a new force when they are solemnly recognised by all :- For a nation to love liberty, it is sufficient that she knows it; and to be free, it is sufficient that she wills it.”  How dry, barren, and obscure, is the source from which Mr Burke labours! And how ineffectual, though gay with flowers, are all his declamation and his arguments, compared with these clear, concise, and soul animating sentiments! Few and short as they are, they lead on to a vast field of generous and manly thinking, and do not finish, like Mr Burke’s periods, with music in the ear, and nothing in the heart.

Wollstonecraft on the National Assembly and Edmund Burke’s reaction to it.  Taken from A Vindication of the Rights of Man, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2008) p40

Time will only show whether the general censure, which you afterwards qualify, if not contradict, and the unremitted contempt that you have ostentatiously displayed of the National Assembly, by founded on reason, the offspring of conviction, or the spawn of envy.  Time may shew, that this obscure throng knew more of the human heart and of legislation than the profligates of rank, emasculated by hereditary effeminacy.

Edmund Burke on the events of the 5th to the 6th of October 1789.  Taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, London (2004) p164-165

History will record, that on the morning the 6th of October 1789, the king and queen of France, after a day of confusion, alarm, dismay and slaughter, lay down, under the pledged security of public faith, to indulge nature in a few hours of respite, and troubled melancholy repose.  From this sleep the queen was first startled by the voice of her centinel at her door, who cried out to her, to save herself by flight- that this was the last proof of fidelity he could give- that they were upon him, and he was dead.  Instantly he was cut down.  A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman but just time to fly almost naked, and through ways unknown to the murderers had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of the king and husband, not secure of his own life for a moment.

The king, to say no more of him, and tis queen, and their infant children (who once would have been the pride and hope of a great and generous people) were then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses.  Thence they were conducted into the capital of their kingdom.  Two had been selected from the unprovoked, unresisted, promiscuous slaughter, which was made of the gentlemen of birth and family who composed the king’s body guard.  These two gentlemen, with all the parade of an execution of justice, were cruelly and publickly dragged to the block, and beheaded in the great court of the palace.  Their heads were stuck upon spears, and led the procession; whilst the royal captives who followed in the train were slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the vilest of women.  After they had been made to taste, drop by drop, more than the bitterness of death, in the slow torture of a journey of twelve miles, protracted to six hours, they were under a guard, composed of these very soldiers who had thus conducted them through this famous triumph, lodged in one of the old palaces of Paris, now converted into a Bastille for kings.

Edmund Burke on Marie Antoinette.  Taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, London (2004) p169-170

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision.  I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, - glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour, and joy. Oh! What a revolution! And what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers.  I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.  But the age of chivalry is gone.  That of sophisters, economists and calculators, has succeeded.  The glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.

Edmund Burke on the French Revolution and the church.  Taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, London (2004) p204-205

The robbery of your church has proved a security to the possessions of ours.  It has roused the people. They see with horror and alarm that enormous and shameless act of proscription.  It has opened, and will more and more open their eyes upon the selfish enlargement of mind, and the narrow liberality of sentiment of insidious men, which commencing in close hypocrisy and fraud have ended in open violence and rapine.  At home we behold similar beginnings.  We are on guard against similar conclusions.

Edmund Burke on the creation of the Departments by the Constituent Assembly.  Taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, London (2004) p314-315

It is boasted, that the geometrical policy has been adopted, that all local ideas should be sunk, and that the people should no longer be Gascons, Picards, Bretons, Normans but Frenchmen, with one country, one heart, and one assembly.  But instead of being all Frenchmen, the great likelihood is, that the inhabitants of that region will shortly have no country.  No man was ever attached by a sense of pride, partiality, or real affection, to a description of square measurement.  He never will glory in belonging to the Checquer, No 71, or any other badge-ticket.