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Reflection on the Revolution of France

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Reflections on the Revolution in France is a political pamphlet written by the Irish statesman Edmund Burke and published in November 1790. One of the best-known intellectual attacks against the French Revolution, Reflections is a defining tract of modern conservatism as well as an important contribution to international theory. Above all else, it has been one of the defining efforts of Edmund Burke's transformation of "traditionalism into a self-conscious and fully conceived political philosophy of conservatism".

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The pamphlet has not been easy to classify. Before seeing this work as a pamphlet, Burke wrote in the mode of a letter, invoking expectations of openness and selectivity that added a layer of meaning. Academics have had trouble identifying whether Burke, or his tract, can best be understood as "a realist or an idealist, Rationalist or a Revolutionist". Thanks to its thoroughness, rhetorical skill and literary power, it has become one of the most widely known of Burke's writings and a classic text in political theory. In the 20th century, it influenced a number of conservative intellectuals, who recast Burke's Whiggish arguments as a critique of Bolshevik programmes.

Background
Burke served in the House of Commons of Great Britain, representing the Whig party, in close alliance with liberal politician Lord Rockingham. In Burke's political career, he vigorously defended constitutional limitation of the Crown's authority, denounced the religious persecution of Catholics in his native Ireland, voiced the grievances of Britain's American colonies, supported American Independence and vigorously pursued impeachment of Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of British India, for corruption and abuse of power. For these actions, Burke was widely respected by liberals in Great Britain, the United States and the European continent. Earlier in his career, Burke had championed many liberal causes and sided with the Americans in their war for independence. Thus, opponents and allies alike were surprised at the strength of his conviction that the French Revolution was "a disaster" and the revolutionists "a swinish multitude".

Soon after the fall of the Bastille in 1789, the French aristocrat Charles-Jean-François Depont asked his impressions of the Revolution and Burke replied with two letters. The longer, second letter, drafted after he read Richard Price's speech A Discourse on the Love of Our Country in January 1790, became Reflections on the Revolution in France. Published in November 1790, the work was an instant bestseller as thirteen thousand copies were purchased in the first five weeks and by the following September had gone through eleven editions. According to Stephen Greenblatt in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, "part of its appeal to contemporary readers lay in the highly wrought accounts of the mob's violent treatment of the French king and queen (who at the time Burke was writing were imprisoned in Paris and would be executed three years later, in January and October 1793)" and Reflections has become the "most eloquent statement of British conservatism favoring monarchy, aristocracy, property, hereditary succession, and the wisdom of the ages".

Burke wrote that he did not like abstract thinking, that freedom and equality were different, that genuine equality must be judged by God and that liberty was a construct of the law and no excuse to do whatever one would like. He was not comfortable with radical change and believed that the revolutionaries would find themselves further in trouble as their actions would cause more problems. In his opinions, the revolutionaries did not understand that "there are no rights without corresponding duties, or without some strict qualifications".

With his view of what he believed would happen to the revolutionaries, one can see why Burke did not like change. Men cannot handle large amounts of power. "When men play God", Burke said, "presently they behave like devils".

Arguments
In the Reflections, Burke argued that the French Revolution would end disastrously because its abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignored the complexities of human nature and society. Further, he focused on the practicality of solutions instead of the metaphysics, writing: "What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor". Following St. Augustine and Cicero, he believed in "human heart"-based government. Nevertheless, he was contemptuous and afraid of the Enlightenment, inspired by the writings of such intellectuals such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, who disbelieved in divine moral order and original sin. Burke said that society should be handled like a living organism and that people and society are limitlessly complicated, leading him to conflict with Thomas Hobbes' assertion that politics might be reducible to a deductive system akin to mathematics.

As a Whig, Burke expressly repudiated the belief in divinely appointed monarchic authority and the idea that a people have no right to depose an oppressive government. However, he advocated central roles for private property, tradition and prejudice (i.e. adherence to values regardless of their rational basis) to give citizens a stake in their nation's social order. He argued for gradual, constitutional reform, not revolution (in every case, except the most qualified case), emphasizing that a political doctrine founded upon abstractions such as liberty and the rights of man could be easily abused to justify tyranny. He saw inherited rights, restated in England from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Right, as firm and concrete providing continuity (like tradition, prejudice and inheritable private property). By contrast, enforcement of speculative abstract rights might waver and be subject to change based on currents of politics. Instead, he called for the constitutional enactment of specific, concrete rights and liberties as protection against governmental oppression.

In the phrase, "[prejudice] renders a man's virtue his habit", Burke defends people's cherished, but untaught, irrational prejudices (the greater it behooved them, the more they cherished it). Because a person's moral estimation is limited, people are better off drawing from the "general bank and capital of nations and of ages" than from their own intellects.

Burke predicted that the Revolution's concomitant disorder would make the army "mutinous and full of faction" and then a "popular general", commanding the soldiery's allegiance, would become "master of your assembly, the master of your whole republic". Although he may have been thinking of Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, Napoleon fulfilled this prophecy on the 18th Brumaire, two years after Burke's death.

Most of the House of Commons disagreed with Burke and his popularity declined. As the French Revolution broke into factions, the Whig Party broke in two, namely the New Whig party and the Old Whig party. As founder of the Old Whigs, Burke always took the opportunity to engage in debate with the New Whigs about French Jacobinism.

After trying to loosen the Protestant minority's control of Irish government, he was voted out of the House of Commons with a great pension. He later adopted French and Irish children, believing himself correct in rescuing them from government oppression. Before dying, he ordered his family to bury him secretly, believing his cadaver would be a political target for desecration should the Jacobins prevail in England.

To support or color his arguments, Burke uses several Latin quotations, the sources of which he does not cite. The bulk appear to come from Virgil or Horace. However, the following quotation from Cicero's De Senectute 83 is employed to underline the ludicrous idea, in his view, of placing soldiery in a state at a perfectly equal status as the rest of the citizenry: "Si isti mihi largiantur ut repueriscam, et in eorum cunis vagiam, valde recusem!"

An approximate translation is the following: "If they should grant to me that I might become a child again, and that I might wail in their cradle, I would vigorously refuse

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