Even though two of Edmund Burke’s works, A Letter to William Elliot (1795) and Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795–7), deal with the French Revolution in a more thorough and (as one would expect from their dates) more informed way, his most famous work remains Reflections on the Revolution in France. One reason is its immediacy and urgency; it was written within eighteen months of the fall of the Bastille in 1789, and is an expression of Burke’s deepest convictions about what makes for good government and public order. The fact that this impassioned and highly polemical essay counts among the founding documents of political conservatism immediately indicates its general tenor: Burke’s convictions were indeed profoundly conservative, and as the course of French history unfolded in the years after 1789 its argument came to be that of those who strove for the return of ‘legitimacy’ (which, by the end of the long wars that the kings of Europe fought against France, meant the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy to Versailles).
And this in turn alerts one to something that the title of the work does not by itself lead one to expect: that Burke’s central concern is not so much France and its revolution, as a defence of the monarchical principle in the British context. Burke felt that such a defence was necessary because proponents of radical reform in Britain were excitedly invoking the spirit of the French Revolution to argue for change at home.
The immediate prompt for Burke’s essay was the publication of a sermon delivered at the Old Jewry meeting house in London on 4 November 1789 by Dr Richard Price, the eminent Dissenting minister and educator. The sermon was entitled A Discourse on the Love of our Country, and in it Price profited from the fact that a revolution was in full swing across the Channel to remind his audience of Britain’s own revolution in 1688, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ that had ousted the Catholic King James II, placed William of Orange and Queen Mary on the throne, and established a new constitutional settlement. Price spoke of what 1688 meant for the people of Britain, as he and his fellow reformers saw it, thus: that the monarch was the people’s servant and occupied his throne by their consent, and correlatively that the people could frame their own governments for themselves by choosing them and if necessary cashiering them for misconduct.
Although Price bemoaned the fact that efforts to reform the system of parliamentary representation had stalled (first steps towards this had to wait another generation, until the Reform Bill of 1832), even so he could rejoice at ‘the favourableness of the present times to all exertions in the cause of public liberty’. Alluding explicitly to France he added,
I have lived to see the rights of men better understood than ever, and nations panting for liberty, which seemed to have lost the idea of it. I have lived to see thirty millions of people, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice, their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects … now, methinks, I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading, a general amendment beginning in human affairs, the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience.
These sentiments sparked Burke’s indignation and anxiety. ‘This doctrine,’ he fulminated, ‘as applied to the prince now on the British throne, either is nonsense and therefore neither true nor false, or it affirms a most unfounded, dangerous, illegal and unconstitutional position. According to this spiritual doctor of politics, if his Majesty does not owe his crown to the choice of his people, he is no lawful king.’ And Burke proceeded to challenge each of the claims Price made regarding the British subjects’ right to ‘frame a government’ for themselves by choosing and dismissing their governors. ‘This new and hitherto unheard of bill of rights,’ Burke wrote, ‘though made in the name of the whole people, belongs to those gentlemen and their faction only. The body of the people of England have no share in it. They utterly disclaim it. They will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes.’ By denouncing the reformist view of the 1688 Revolution Burke assumed responsibility for interpreting it in a way that would make it seem different from what was happening in France. It was a tall order. It was after all a seminal event, in which the British deposed a king, and their parliament installed another, and thereby – as representatives of the people – made themselves effectively supreme. He had to find arguments showing, despite all appearances, that William of Orange’s accession did not consist in a grant of the crown by popular election, but was in fact the very opposite: a reaffirmation of the principle of the crown’s heritability. And he argued that, anyway, if the people had ever had a pre-existing right to choose their kings, the parliament of 1688 had abjured that right for itself and all its successors for ever.
That these are implausible and, frankly, spurious arguments might be shown in any number of ways. Parliament, notionally (if the electoral system had been better) the representatives of the people, had in truth chosen a king, and in doing so had become greatly more powerful than before. It had thereby won its long struggle with monarchy in the seventeenth century. What Burke called ‘this seditious, unconstitutional doctrine’ was fact, though at that stage in the transition from monarchy to parliamentary democracy the reins of power had gone from throne to establishment and not yet to the people as such. But Price was right; what had happened in 1688 was a version of what was happening less circumstantially and disguisedly in France.
Burke in fact gets into a tangle in trying to refute the inferences drawn by Price from the 1688 settlement. He acknowledges that ‘they who led the Revolution [of 1688]’ charged James II with ‘having broken the original contract between king and people’ – so, there was such a contract, even if implicit, and breaking it gave the people a right to cashier the monarch. Again, Burke inadvertently strengthens Price’s case by acknowledging that the statutes enacted by the 1688 parliament established that ‘the whole government would be under the constant inspection and active control of the popular representative and of the magnates of the kingdom’ and that ‘the next great constitutional act, that of the 12th and 13th of King William [established] the further limitation of the crown and better securing the rights and liberties of the subject’. Here again, Price’s inferences are supported rather than refuted, though the subjection of the crown to the popular will was then, as in Price’s own day, still indirect – and the implication of Price’s praise for the French Revolution, as his hearers would have understood (and certainly Burke did), is that it shows how the process could be more comprehensively realised.
In short, you might characterise Burke’s famous Reflections on the Revolution in France as an act of political special pleading. He summed up his own conservatism by extolling what he saw as a characteristic and guiding British attitude: ‘A politic caution, a guarded circumspection, a moral rather than a complexional timidity were among the ruling principles of our forefathers in their most decided conduct.’ It was to defend this approach that he undertook his constitutional reinterpretation of Britain’s own revolution, by rewriting the history of 1688 to turn it from a revolution into a shining example of politic caution and guarded circumspection.
Given that Burke’s chief aim was to dampen the French-inspired ardour of reformers in Britain, he could not restrict himself to refuting Price’s inferences from what happened in 1688; he had to put his case into the context of contemporary events in France, and compare them with an idealised British way of doing things, either directly or by implication. In the bulk of the Reflections Burke therefore describes and attacks what was happening in France, praises the ancient practices of the English, waxes poetic over the charms of Marie Antoinette, criticises the fecklessness of the Assembly in Paris not least over financial affairs, surveys historical examples from Roman times to the recent past, glances at the shortcomings of French agriculture and commerce, bemoans the degeneracy of France’s nobility, and in general ranges to and fro over everything his expansive mind saw as relevant to decrying the example then being set by the revolution. But his chief target throughout is the set of principles and hopes enunciated by the Old Jewry sermon.
Burke’s hostility to the ideas expounded by Price had a mixed set of roots, ranging from a deep dislike of democracy, then widely perceived by ruling elites as no better than mob rule (‘ochlocracy’) with all the ignorance, depravity and anarchy that this implied, to a shocked sentiment of chivalry at the incivilities to which Queen Marie Antoinette had been subjected by French crowds. Price alluded to both points in the Preface to the Fourth Edition of his sermon, where he had an opportunity to respond to Burke’s attack: ‘But what candour or what moderation,’ asked Price, ‘can be expected in a person so frantic with zeal for hereditary claims and aristocratical distinctions as to be capable of decrying popular rights and the aid of philosophy in forming governments, of lamenting that the age of chivalry is gone, and of believing that the insults offered by a mob to the Queen of France have extinguished for ever the glory of Europe?’ This conflict of views between Burke and Price is the pivot on which the Reflections turn. Price was not the only one to answer Burke’s answer to Price; even more famously, Thomas Paine did likewise, in his The Rights of Man.
It should not be forgotten that in the 1790s, fearful of what events in France portended, the British government enacted a number of highly illiberal laws, suspending habeas corpus, outlawing political reform organisations, prosecuting radicals for sedition and treason, and going to war partly out of fear that the contagion of revolution would spread. (The other reason was to grab French overseas possessions while France itself was distracted by internal turmoil.) The efforts and hopes of reformers were quashed for a generation; illiberal and reactionary government persisted (with only a brief break in the form of the Ministry of All Talents with Charles James Fox among its leaders in 1806) until 1832. Burke was on the winning side of this period of reaction and oppression, and indeed might be considered its chief intellectual architect.
For all its diversity of content, the Reflections is nevertheless a political classic – and also a literary one. The great essayist William Hazlitt was emphatically opposed to Burke’s political outlook, but greatly admired both the excellence of his writing and the power of his mind; he described Burke’s style – the style both of his prose and his thought – as ‘forked and playful as the lightening, crested like the serpent’. In an age of strongly partisan politics such generosity in recognising the qualities of an opponent was most unusual, for party sentiment coloured every judgement. No two thinkers could hold views so utterly different; Hazlitt was a lifelong supporter of the French Revolution’s founding principles. But Hazlitt’s recognition of Burke’s literary and intellectual talents even across the bitter political divide of the time is a striking testimony to Burke’s powers, and reminds one why he is still worth reading today.