Plutarch's Ghost

La Bastille occupied the center of Paris, and though it held a total of seven prisoners–four forgers, two noblemen accused of immoral behavior, and a murder suspect who in all likelihood was criminally insane–it stood as a stark reminder of monarchical oppression. The year of 1789, specifically the summer had been a tough one for the citizens of Paris: oppressively hot, a scarcity of bread, and a general annoyance with the French government, if not outright hatred. Harsh taxation made things worse, and solutions proposed by otherwise competent and popular financial advisors, such as Jacques Necker, were blithely dismissed by the monarchy of Louis XVI. Economic issues that had been percolating for decades, and the continued failure of the royal French government to credibly deal with them, were threatening to boil over. In late April, the peasantry of Paris had destroyed the factory and home of industrialist Jean-Baptiste Reveillon, who was rumored to have made statements that worker wages should be lowered. (To the contrary, he said their wages should be raised, but his statements were distorted.) The mob also raided his wine cellar, which contained over two thousand bottles; many Parisians remained smashed for weeks. The Reveillon Riot, as it was soon named, was considered by many historians to be the event that gave the Parisian mobs confidence that they could take over the city. Finally, on July 14, 1789, they mobilized. Approximately a thousand Parisians attacked that hated symbol of oppression, the Bastille. Close to one hundred lost their lives in doing so–in comparison to six to eight of the guards and their officers defending it–but the die had been cast. When told of the events of July 14th, King Louis XVI was said to have asked an adviser, “Is this a revolt?”; the advisor is said to have retorted, “No, this is a revolution.”

Jean-Paul Marat, murdered in his medicinal bathtub by Girondist sympathizer Charlotte Corday, on July 13, 1793. Painting by Jean-Louis David.

The storming of the Bastille by an angry Parisian mob was just the start of a very long, incarnadine movement in France. At first, it appeared that a constitutional monarchy was possible. But Louis and his ostentatious Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette, saw to it that this opportunity was foreclosed by scheming with outside forces to reverse the gains of the revolution. The more moderate forces of reform soon gave way to revolutionaries bent on eradicating all vestiges of the ancien regime, as well as the presence of the Roman Catholic Church, so intrinsically linked to it, from French soil. Arising from within this more radicalized movement was a lawyer, Maximillian Robespierre, of the Jacobin party. With cold ruthlessness, he and his minions would not only seek to defend the gains of the revolution but push it faster and farther than any had initially anticipated in the summer of 1789. By 1793, the revolutionaries did the unthinkable–they put king and queen to la guillotine. Worse, spurred on by the assassination of prominent Jacobin Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday in 1793, the Jacobins violently eliminated the more moderate revolutionaries, the Girondist party. By 1794, the Girondists, initially, heroes of the revolution, were heading towards the “the national razor” en masse: Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Pierre Phillipeaux. A “Cult Of Reason” replaced Roman Catholicism as the official state religion; indeed, religion itself was rendered illegal by the new French “First Republic” under Robespierre. Not content to stop there, the Jacobins renamed the days of the week, the months of the year, and the year itself. In essence, they were starting at Year Zero: a clean, complete break with everything that came before it.

The reverberations of so violent a revolution spread throughout all of royalist Europe, but none more so than in England. The English were not without their destabilizations, mind: the English Civil War (from 1642-1651) culminated in the execution of Stuart King Charles I. But the revolution was not about the destruction of the monarchical system; if anything, it strengthened it, as the conflict was, at its core, a fight to define the role of the king in relation to parliament in the governance of England, and how far both of their respective powers extended. Since defined for both, there had been intermittent, but never system-threatening, chafing between the monarchy and parliament. The Glorious Revolution of 1688–which threw out the Roman Catholic James II in place of the Protestant William Of Orange and his wife (and James II’s daughter) Mary–was mostly peaceful, and established once and for all that no Catholic would sit on the throne of England thenceforward, a prohibition that persists to this day. England had achieved something on its own that no other monarchy in Europe had so much as ventured to do: it achieved a constitutional monarchy, a balance of power between commoner, noble, and royal. Starting with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, which was the first check on abuse of power by a king (in this case, King John), through the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, England was the most stable monarchical government in Europe. It was hard-won, but in this age of Enlightenment and revolution, some felt it didn’t go nearly far enough.

All was not well in England during the outbreak of the French Revolution. The French Revolution certainly had its sympathizers, not the least of which were those “republican” types who sought to emulate the complete overthrow of the entire monarchical system and replace it with a system of governance that abolished all forms of hereditary rule. A very real threat to the British system, this. Into this fray jumped one of the greatest writers and orators in British history, if not Western Civilization. A member of the House Of Commons representing the City of Bristol, England, his name was Edmund Burke. Burke took it upon himself to stymie the spread of this most dangerous republican revolution from spreading across the English Channel and can claim–if not fully, then certainly to a very large extent–credit for having done so. In essence, Burke arguably was responsible for saving the British government, and in a wider sense, preserving the concept that traditions, precedents, and social relationships mattered more than the individual liberties and “natural rights” advocated by many political philosophers of the day. Quoth Burke, “Society is indeed a contract. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes 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.”

The Right Honorable Gentleman From Dublin

Edmund Burke was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1729. His father was a successful attorney in the Anglican (Church of Ireland) faith. His mother, a Roman Catholic woman from County Cork, allowed Edmund to be brought up in his father’s denomination. Given the time, it isn’t beyond reason to surmise that both parents realized that Edmund’s future would be considerably brighter if he stayed on the “right” side of Anglo-Irish society–his formative years being under the Protestant Ascendancy. Thus, he was brought up in the predominant faith of the British ruling class. (Burke’s sister, Juliana, was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith; clearly, there were differing future concerns afoot for each child. As it would turn out, his political enemies would accuse him of secret Catholic sympathies throughout his political career as a member of Parliament.) He attended Trinity College in Dublin in 1744 through 1748, an exclusively Protestant establishment at the time; it would remain so until close to the turn of the 18th century. At his father’s behest, he pursued a degree in law but soon dropped it, devoting himself to writing. Through his writings he found himself in the orbit of political figures and prominent intellectuals; in turn, he entered the political arena in 1765, as an MP representing the English city of Bristol. His “maiden speech” to his constituents was one for the ages, according to William Pitt the Elder (one of the more noteworthy Prime Ministers in British history), who exclaimed, “[He had] spoken in such a manner as to stop the mouths of all Europe”. But it was his speech in 1774 to the electors of the City of Bristol that encapsulated Burke’s thinking on all matters of government, and in a wider sense, society as a whole:

Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. [1]

Burke was a Whig, a member of the progressive party in the House of Commons; he would remain both a Whig and an MP for the next twenty-nine years. Members of Parliament, similar to members of the United States Congress, are rarely noteworthy in history; indeed, many prime ministers and presidents are historically non-entities as well. But in the case of Burke, he expounded with all force of intellect on all matters big and small within the British Empire: India, Ireland (and the rights of Catholics within it), and America, specifically in Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents in 1770. One would think, given his pedigree, that Burke would shy away from all these things, being of Irish stock, and worse (in the eyes of his predominantly Anglo-Saxon/Anglican colleagues), the son of a Roman Catholic mother, which in turn led to suspicions of disloyalty to the crown. But to Burke it mattered not: fair was fair, and he used his considerable intellectual gifts, voiced through his articulate speeches and writings, to give notice of them. On India, he vehemently disliked how the Governor-General, Warren Hastings, governed the colony. Calling Hastings “the governor-general of iniquity”[2], whose heart was “gangrene to the core”[3], Burke attacked his corruption in report after report, eventually securing an indictment against Hastings in 1788 through the House of Commons. (The House of Lords would overrule, however, and Hastings was acquitted by that upper chamber.) Regarding Ireland, Burke wrote, “that in Ireland particularly the Roman Catholic religion should be upheld in high respect and veneration.” That there was British discrimination against the indigenous Irish in their homeland, particularly of those who paid their obeisance to the Latin church, was undoubted, but it particularly rankled Burke, whose family connections were profoundly Irish-Catholic. To publicly announce this in the House of Commons, despite the inherent political risks to his career prospects, ranked Burke up there with the great crusaders for fairness and decency of the ages. But Burke’s courage stretched even further, for he was an open advocate for the Americans during the rebellion in America. As Burke saw it, the cry of “no taxation without representation” was a legitimate one, as there was indeed taxation without redress for the Americans. Their rights as Englishmen were being trampled. His speech to the House of Commons stated as much:

In order to prove that the Americans have no right to their liberties, we are every day endeavouring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage over them in debate, without attacking some of those principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed their blood. [4]

To understand Burke is to understand that even though he was a progressive of his day, his primary goal in these criticisms of British policy towards its colonies (Ireland, India, America) was to maintain them as colonies through the discontinuation of harsh, punitive, and ultimately offensive policies, replacing them with more benign, moderate rule from London. The change was imperative to maintain the status quo; Burke had no interest in severing these pieces of the British Empire from the mother country per se. Only through an enlightened change of policy could these colonies be maintained, as Burke saw it, and the present policies concerning all three would only result in their disconnection from Great Britain. (As it was, Ireland gained Free State status in 1922, and severed all ties to the crown in 1937; India gained full independence in 1948; America gained its sovereign republican status in 1782.) And so it was no stretch for his contemporaries to assume that Burke would’ve supported the revolt of the people of France against their oppressive monarchy and its retrograde governance. But Burke was–at his core–a traditionalist, if not conservative. And the French Revolution was anything but conservative.

The Revolution Comes To France

“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 liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, on the recovery of his natural rights?”–Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, pg. 151

The storming of La Bastille, July 14th, 1789.

It didn’t take Burke long to detect an insidious radicalism within the fervor of the French Revolution. By February 1790, a mere seven months after the storming of the Bastille, and a full three years before the insanely genocidal Reign of Terror, Burke started to speak up. His opening salvo was fired specifically at Welsh political philosopher, preacher, and pamphleteer Richard Price. In a speech titled “Discourse on the Love of Our Country”, Price stated that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was merely the precursor to the French Revolution of 1789, in that the former was necessary to pave the way for the republican one to come. Price hoped that the revolution in France would make its way to the shores of England. He was not alone in this sentiment. Charles James Fox, Whig MP and a colleague of Burke concurred, stating that the French Revolution was “greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!”[5] The Whigs, being the party of progress, largely embraced Fox’s sentiment, and eventually the party would soon break into two factions over the revolution, with Burke standing with the “Old Whigs”, Fox with the “New Whigs”. Burke addressed this schism early on: “[They] would abandon their best friends, and join [their] worst enemies to oppose either the means or end; and to resist all violent exertions of the spirit of innovation, so distant from all the principles of true and safe reformation; a spirit well calculated to overturn states, but perfectly unfit to amend them.”[6] To put this into more modern parlance, Burke loathed the idea of tearing down the current system in place of some revolutionary experiment with inevitable, unforeseen results. He much preferred employing retro-fits to the present one, which was well-suited, in his mind, to embrace them. It would be an argument he’d make again and again for the rest of his days and would be the cornerstone of his broadsides against the French Revolution, mainly in his tract Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Historian Niall Ferguson speculates, probably correctly, that Burke was ahead of virtually every prominent British (Fox, Price) and American (Jefferson, Paine) intellectual in predicting the murderous turn the French Revolution would take for one simple reason: he’d read The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

If the American Revolution could claim Englishman John Locke and his philosophical stance as its guiding spirit, then Rousseau was that for the French Revolution. To Burke, it was a recipe for pure mob rule, expressed in the sentiment that the only abiding law is that of the people, or “general will”. And there it was, that phrase, “the general will”, clearly stated in the founding document of the first French Republic, the Declaration of the Rights of Man:

• Law is the expression of the General Will.
• No one shall be disquieted on account his opinions, provided their manifestations do not disturb public order established by law. 
• Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity, legally determined, shall demand it.

[All italics/bold Niall Ferguson]

In essence, every right can be taken away if the mob deems it counter-revolutionary, meaning no one had any rights at all if the “general will” deemed it so. The caveats italicized –according to Ferguson–put Burke into a state of intense discomfort. In his speech to Parliament on February 1, 1790, he stated:

The French [have] rebel[led] against a mild and lawful monarch with more fury, outrage, and insult than every any people has been known to rise against the illegal usurper or the most sanguinary tyrant. Their resistance was made to concession…their blow was aimed at a hand holding out graces, favours, and immunities…They have found their punishment in their success: laws overturned; tribunals subverted; industry without vigour; commerce expiring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence; and, to crown all, the paper securities of new, precarious, tottering power…held out as a currency for the support of an empire. [7]

Louis XVI, at this point known as by his non-royal name, Louis Capet, shortly before meeting his end under the “national razor”.

Burke was just getting started. With “astonishing prescience”, in the words of Ferguson, Burke stated that, “at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows”. Burke was only wrong about the last word, for it would be the guillotine that would “do in” more than sixteen thousand French “enemies of the revolution”; in all, forty thousand would lose their life. Burke further stated that the revolution would progress to a “mischievous and ignoble oligarchy”, and inevitably, to a military dictatorship. Burke was right on all counts, and predicted all this in 1790-91, a full two years before the Reign of Terror, approximately nine years before Napoleon would assume tyrannical powers in 1799, and eleven years before he crowned himself emperor, in 1801.

The broader argument, more than the French Revolution itself, was what a society should be. Burke opened up a front in the war of ideas with his tract, Reflections on the Revolution in France, which brought to the fore arguments that, to some extent, are still being played out the world over: tradition versus a sharp break from the past; Monarchy versus pure republican democracy; the laws and customs of generations past versus re-writing all existing laws to accommodate the living, and only the living. Historian Yuval Levin summed up the debate more succinctly: “What authority should the character of the given world exercise over our sense of what we would like it to be?” The ideal make-up of a society should not be, according to Burke, based on the individual rights of man, based on the assumed, inherent characteristics that he possessed “pure reason”, translated to mean that men can act rationality to both his and his fellow man’s benefit. To Burke, if one “leave[s] a man to his passions…you leave a wild beast to a savage and capricious nature”[8]. It is only the bonds of community, tradition, and respect for authority, both temporal and metaphysical, that bind a society together peacefully, in Burke’s mind:

We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty. [9]

To Burke, the central insidious characteristic of the French Revolution pertained to its adherence that the past had nothing to inform the living and that all previous social and governmental structures required razing because of this. In his opinion, the godlessness of the French Revolution would lead to licentiousness, theft, murder, and–worst of all, chaos. All of Burke’s prophecies made in 1790-91 in Reflections–much to the chagrin of those that advocated for the French Revolution and all its ideals–would be realized in full by 1799, when Napoleon assumed absolute power:

Napoleon Bonaparte, “The Gravedigger of the Revolution”.

In the weakness of one kind of authority, and the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself…but the moment in which that event shall happen the person who really commands the army is your master…the master of your whole republic. [Emphasis mine][10]

CONCLUSION

Burke certainly had detractors, both during his life and after–Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were particularly critical, as was Karl Marx, several decades later–but none could discount his prophetic skills when it came to the French Revolution. He had it dead-to-rights–predicting the Reign of Terror, the ineffectiveness of the Directory, and the military coup d’etat of Napolean, anywhere from three to ten years in advance of all these events occurring. But the wider reason that Burke remains an important political philosopher, as one who advocated for slower modifications to already existing societal and/or governmental structures, can be seen in the movements that occurred in the 20th century that took the Year Zero approach. The October Revolution in 1917, which brought the Bolsheviks to power and birthed the Soviet Union, serves as a primary example. In that revolution, the old societal structure was entirely thrown out as well: religious, financial, governmental, legal. The result was the deaths of tens of millions, the collapse of Russian society, and the inevitable rise of another strongman in the person of Josef Stalin. Similar things occurred in the communist revolutions of China, Cambodia, Cuba, and Vietnam. Starting at Year Zero, discarding all that came before it, inevitably led to chaos, loss of life, loss of property, loss of the ties that bind neighbor to neighbor, and family to family. Burke perhaps had a considerably more romantic view of king and country than it deserved–Thomas Paine’s glib zinger about the concept of hereditary monarchy being an assumption, “as absurd as a hereditary mathematician, or wise-man, and as ridiculous as a hereditary poet-laureate”[11] remains an indisputable conclusion. But monarchies, to Burke’s mind, existed to maintain order, above all else. And while England–and after its union with Scotland in 1707, Great Britain–could counter bad kings with restraining parliaments, no parliamentary restraint existed in France at the time of revolution. (The Estates General, the French equivalent of a parliament, had not gathered since 1614. Louis XVI called them together in 1787, two years before the outbreak of the revolution. It failed to accomplish anything of note and did nothing to stem le deluge that would soon overwhelm them all in the summer of 1789.) So perhaps nothing could have been done to save the ancien regime, though Burke thought a successful retro-fit possible. That stated, his writings in Reflections on the Revolution in France still resonate, and still serve as a warning to those seeking to completely upend those existing societies, long in place and gradually altered over time, in place of a radical rewriting of all rules, laws, and customs. In Burke’s case, at the very least, he served as a herald to history on the perils to taking this direction. In the words of Christopher Hitchens, “Edmund Burke understood before anyone else that revolutions devour their young—and turn into their opposites”.[12]

Footnotes

[1] The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. 6 vols. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854–56.

[2] The History of the Trial of William Hastings, Esq., Late Governor General of Bengal Before The High Court of Parliament in Westminster Hall, pg 476.

[3] Ibid.

[4] The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, 22 Mar. 1775 6 vols. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854–56.

[5] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Charles James Fox (1749-1806) Mitchell, Leslie (2004). Retrieved 8 March 2008.

[6] The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Speech on the Army Estimates 1790, Vol. III, pg. 209-81.

[7] Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke, pg. 190

[8] The Works and Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Volume 8, pg. 186

[9] Reflections, pg. 132

[10] Reflections, pg. 323

[11] The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine, published 1792, pg. 41

[12] Reactionary Prophet–Edmund Burke, book review in The Atlantic, April 2004, by Christopher Hitchens

References

The following three books served as invaluable resources regarding the subject written about in this article:

• Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event, Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Conor Cruise O’ Brien, Pelican Books, 1968
• Civilization, The West and the Rest, Niall Ferguson, Penguin Books, 2011
• The Great Debate–Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, by Yuval Levin, Basic Books, 2014