Select Works of Edmund Burke: Letters on a Regicide Peace

1. Background Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was a political theorist and British statesman who was a member of the House of Commons and a major figure in the Whig party. He is best known for his oratory and for being an "advocate of political prudence and compromise." He was sympathetic with the concerns expressed by American statesmen prior to the American Revolution and was famous for pleading the cause of the American colonists in British Parliament and for his speech to the House of Commons on conciliation with the American colonies. He urged England to "leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself. I am not going here into the distinctions of rights, nor attempting to mark their boundaries; I hate the very sound of them ... Leave the Americans as they anciently stood, and these distinctions, born of our unhappy contest, will die along with it." Burke continually lobbied for a more equitable treatment of the American colonists, but did not feel that their concerns were being adequately addressed by the English Parliament. When the Revolutionary War ultimately broke out, he did not give it his express support, but he did approve of the resulting conservative republic based on time-tested principles and natural law. Burke's view of the French Revolution was wholly different. He attacked the French Revolution for having cast off the first principles that hold together societies: piety, custom, tradition, and continuity with the past. All of these ground society in a sense of justice and of necessary authority. The French Enlightenment instead pushed "claims of abstract right upon metaphysical premises, and [endeavored] to govern the commonwealth by notions of perfection." In response to the French aristocrat Charles-Jean-François Depont, who asked Burke to share his impressions of the Revolution, Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France in late 1789, just months after the fall of the Bastille at the beginning of the Revolution. Burke's Reflections, a thorough assessment of the events of the day, became after it was published in 1790 one of the best-known intellectual attacks against the French Revolution. In the twentieth century, it influenced conservatives, who re-cast Burke's arguments to apply to the then-contemporary challenges threatening liberty, such as communism. 2. The Text a. Introduction In his Reflections, Burke fiercely opposed the French Revolution and the French Jacobins. He predicted that the Revolution, which was based on an unreal and distorted view of human nature, would end disastrously. The "legislators who framed the ancient republics ... were obliged to study human nature" (¶ 342), because any polity cannot be firmly established without an accurate understanding of men and of their habits. The French Revolutionaries, in contrast, led by Rousseau, Turgot, and other philosophes, ignored the biblical teachings on man's sinful nature and cast all of their faith on his perfectibility and abilit

This was required reading for a graduate course in the history of the French Revolution. In Burke's book Reflections on the Revolution in France, he penned a diatribe against the evils of the French Revolution, believing that there was a pernicious cabal of philosophes and politicians joined by money-jobbers whose aim was to topple not only the old regime in France, but to export their "plague" throughout Europe. Thus, Burke astutely understood and abhorred the influence that Radical Enlightenment ideas had on the French Revolution. One instantly detects, in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, a conservative philosophy by which he not only understood his own society, but the entire human civilization. Much of his work was an appeal to a politically conservative notion of a "created order" of the world, which from this reading seemed to be universal to all European nations. This reader sensed that Burke's Reflections were written as a warning to the rest of Europe not to follow the model of change embodied in the French Revolution, and to adopt the steady reforms that took place in England. Burke found no social redeeming value in the French Revolution and when he wrote Reflections, the worst of the "reign of terror" had yet to come. In fact, if one used Georges Lefebvre's notion of "four acts" to the Revolution, Burke poured out all his criticism against the first two acts, the aristocratic and bourgeois revolts. This reader found Burke's long sections on British history used to buttress his case; that change should have come to France within a more staid social order as either ignorant of the complex socio-economic and political factors that led up to the Revolution, or as a naïve belief that that the French people were so culturally close to the English that they should both react in similar fashion to socio-political upheaval. Burke delivered a literary "tongue lashing" to the French for how easily they turned their backs on their socio-political traditions. "You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you" (31). This reader found Burke's argument on this point a little disingenuous. He lectured how Britain's "Glorious Revolution" in 1688 should have been the model for reform. However, he barely mentioned the bloody English Civil War that Cromwell staged, including the regicide of Charles I. In addition, one's impression of Burke's information is that he had received a very narrow view of the history leading up to the Revolution and its opening days, which seemed confined to correspondence from a small circle of friends. Burke had high praise for the First and Second Estates. His opinion of the nobles he knew was that they were, "...for the greater part composed of men of high spirit, and of a delicate sense of honou