Reflections on the Revolution in France

Contents

1. Note to the Reader 2 min 2

   Burke explains how the book began. A very young gentleman in Paris asked his opinion of events in France; a first answer, written in October 1789, was held back and later sent, and a second, fuller reply outgrew the measure of a letter. Burke kept the form of a personal address all the same.

2. 1 Dr. Price and the Revolution of 1688 59 min 19

   Burke opens by disowning the two London clubs, the Constitutional Society and the Revolution Society, that had congratulated the French National Assembly, and by refusing to praise liberty in the abstract before seeing how it is combined with government, property and order. He then attacks Richard Price’s sermon of 4 November 1789, likening it to the preaching of Hugh Peters in 1648, and rejects Price’s claim that 1688 gave the English a right to choose their governors. From the Declaration of Right and the Act of Settlement he argues that the Revolution confirmed hereditary succession, departing from it only out of necessity.

3. 2 An Entailed Inheritance 34 min 13

   Burke answers Price’s other two claims, a right to cashier kings for misconduct and a right to frame a government. The Revolution of 1688 was a necessary war, not a precedent; Parliament secured liberty through ministerial responsibility and impeachment, not by making the king a servant. From Magna Carta to the Declaration of Right, the English have claimed their liberties as an entailed inheritance from their forefathers, a policy Burke calls wisdom that follows Nature. France could have rebuilt on its old estates; instead it despised its past and, in time of peace, ruined its laws, revenue, church and credit.

4. 3 The National Assembly and the Rights of Men 59 min 19

   Burke explains France’s choice by the composition of the National Assembly: a doubled Third Estate dominated by obscure provincial lawyers, joined by poor country curates and by nobles who betrayed their own order. A state, he argues, must represent its property as well as its ability; property is by nature unequal, and numbers are no title to rule. Turning to Price’s call to seize the times, he exposes the English radicals’ contempt for their own representation, and sets out the real rights of men: rights within civil society, settled by convention and judged by experience rather than metaphysics.

5. 4 The Sixth of October 43 min 18

   Burke condemns the habit of making revolution the daily bread of politics and turns to Price’s rapture at a king “led in triumph”, comparing it to Hugh Peters’s triumph over Charles I. He describes the National Assembly as captive to the Paris clubs and galleries, then narrates the invasion of Versailles on 6 October 1789 and the royal family’s forced journey to Paris. His lament for the queen leads to the famous passage on the end of the age of chivalry and the moral imagination that softened power, and to the prediction that power without such sentiments will rule by terror.

6. 5 English Feeling and Prejudice 29 min 12

   Burke explains why he grieves where Price exults: pity and awe at fallen greatness are natural, and a politics that celebrates the humiliation of Louis XVI, a king of concessions, has lost the moral sense even a theatre audience keeps. He assures his French correspondent that the English radicals are a noisy handful, “grasshoppers under a fern”, and that the English still revere God, kings, priests and nobility. He defends prejudice, inherited opinion carrying latent reason, against the “private stock of reason”, warns against importing the French model, and announces that he will examine the English establishments: church, monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.

7. 6 The Church Establishment 35 min 11

   Burke presents the established Church as the first of English prejudices: religion consecrates the state, reminds every holder of power, including a sovereign people, that power is a trust, and forbids each generation to destroy its inheritance. Society is a contract, but a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn, not a trading partnership dissolvable at will. He describes how the English church shapes education, insists that its estates be held as property and not as a Treasury pension, defends rich bishops as teachers of the great, and condemns the French Assembly’s confiscation of Church property, which he says has rallied the English to their own church.

8. 7 The Confiscation of the Church’s Property 46 min 19

   Burke attacks the seizure of the French Church’s lands. He rejects the argument that ecclesiastics are fictitious persons, insists that the citizen’s property comes before the state creditor’s claims, and explains the confiscation by an alliance of a new moneyed interest, grown up with the royal debt, and the political men of letters against the nobility through the Church. He contrasts Henry VIII’s formalities, uses Necker’s budget to argue that no such sacrifice was necessary, notes the offer of the clergy that was refused, and follows the scheme into assignats, the abolition of the parlements and the sale of the lands on credit.

9. 8 The Old Monarchy and the Nobility 36 min 18

   Burke denies that absolute democracy is a legitimate form, since majorities can oppress minorities, and asks whether the French monarchy was really beyond reform. The cahiers of 1789 asked for reform, not destruction; population, coinage and the country’s roads, ports, manufactures and learning show a government that did not crush its subjects, and the monarchy erred by too much openness to innovation. He contrasts the poverty and unemployment of revolutionary Paris, defends the French nobility as honourable and not oppressive landlords, admits faults such as the exclusion of rich commoners, and calls nobility “the Corinthian capital of polished society”.

10. 9 The Clergy and the Church Lands 1 h 0 min 18

    Burke defends the French clergy as moderate and learned, from his own visit, and condemns punishing them for the crimes of their predecessors, as the revival of the St Bartholomew massacre on the Paris stage was meant to do. Vices are the causes of public evils, names and institutions only their pretexts. He attacks the elective, salaried clergy of the new constitution, the doctrine that a legislature may override prescription, and the spread of French principles abroad, warns that public debt breeds confiscation, and argues that monasteries and church estates could have been reformed and used, since their surplus is spent better than that of the speculators who replace them.

11. 10 Territory, Population and Contribution 47 min 11

    Burke turns from what the Assembly destroyed to what it built. He denies it any lawful title, calling it a voluntary association that seized power, and contrasts the slow, compositional reform of a true lawgiver with the Assembly’s haste and love of abolition. He then dissects the electoral constitution: eighty-three geometrical departments and three “bases” of representation, by territory, population and direct contribution. The tax qualifications for voters, electors and deputies contradict the rights of man, he argues, while weighting districts by wealth protects no rich individual. The result is a set of contradictory principles caged together, with no reference to human passions and interests.

12. 11 Paper Money and Paris 39 min 14

    The new local republics, Burke argues, will be held together only by three cements: the confiscation with its paper currency, the supremacy of Paris, and the army. Electors three removes from their deputies cannot know or control them, unlike British virtual representation. The assignats will turn land into a speculative commodity and France into a gaming table, ruin the peasant paid in depreciating paper, and transfer power to an urban oligarchy of money-jobbers, club agitators and land speculators. Paris, compact and organised, will dominate the dismembered provinces, but a love of country cannot grow from geometric squares, and the arrangement cannot last.

13. 12 The Legislature, the King and the Courts 33 min 11

    Burke examines the sovereign Assembly, the king and the courts. A single chamber without a senate has no internal check, and its successors will be worse. The king is reduced to a degraded executor of others’ orders, without patronage, honour or the right of peace and war, and his ministers to responsible servants of two masters. Burke defends the abolished parlements, venal but independent, as a check like the Athenian Areopagus, and condemns elective local judges, the Châtelet’s trials under mob pressure, and a projected state tribunal that may become an instrument of tyranny.

14. 13 The Army 42 min 14

    Quoting the war minister La Tour du Pin’s report of June 1790 on mutinies, Burke argues that soldiers taught the rights of man will not stay obedient instruments. Fraternising with civic clubs will dissolve discipline further; officers will court the Assembly and the ranks; and the army will end by obeying some popular general who will become master of the republic. The government must rule by force, yet its own principles justify colonial rebellion, peasant refusal of rents, and tax revolts like that of Lyons. Burke imagines the peasants’ reply, turning the Assembly’s logic against all landed property, and dismisses the municipal National Guard as another source of calamity.

15. 14 Finance, and a Conclusion 54 min 17

    Burke tests the Assembly as a finance minister would be tested. Revenue has fallen by a third; the salt tax and others were condemned yet ordered paid, then refused; the patriotic contribution and gifts yielded little. English bank paper is valuable because it is voluntary and convertible, while the assignats are forced on creditors, depreciate, and rest on Church lands whose net value was never shown. He compares the scheme unfavourably with John Law’s and mocks Bailly’s Paris. The letter closes with his creed: liberty needs wisdom, order and respect for property, and change should preserve, in the spirit of the British constitution.