The Burke-Paine Debate on the French Revolution

Summary

The Burke-Paine debate is the exchange between Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (November 1790) and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (Part I, March 1791; Part II, February 1792), the most famous controversy among the many British pamphlets provoked by the French Revolution. This entry is a guide to the debate as a whole; it has no text of its own, and the two books are in the library separately with their full texts. The occasion was a sermon preached on November 4, 1789, by the Dissenting minister Richard Price to the Revolution Society in London, which hailed events in France and claimed that the Revolution of 1688 had given the British people the right to choose their governors, cashier them for misconduct, and frame a government for themselves. Burke, writing in the form of a long letter to a young Frenchman, Charles-Jean-François Depont, denied that 1688 established any such right. He argued that English liberties were an entailed inheritance from ancestors, held by prescription, and that a state must reform in order to preserve itself but never tear up its foundations for an abstract theory. He set the real rights of men, which are the advantages of civil society under law, against the metaphysical rights claimed in Paris, and described society as a partnership of the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. He mourned the treatment of the royal family in the October Days of 1789, defended the established church and the habits he called just prejudice, and predicted that the Revolution would end in disorder and military rule. Paine answered, in plain and combative prose, that every generation is as free as the one before it, that no Parliament could bind posterity forever, and that the rights of man come from the equal creation of all men, not from charters or precedent. Civil rights, he argued, are natural rights exchanged for security; a constitution is the act of a people forming a government, written and prior to it, and England had none in that sense. He mocked hereditary government, retold the fall of the Bastille, and accused Burke of pitying the plumage while forgetting the dying bird. Part II set out the representative system and proposed public provision for the poor, the aged, and the education of children, funded by reduced taxes on necessities and a graduated tax on large estates. Rights of Man sold in great numbers; Paine was tried for seditious libel in absentia and convicted in December 1792. Burke's later Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) carried on the argument with his own party.

Top Lessons

• Inheritance or consent: what makes a government legitimate

  Burke held that a people's liberties and institutions are legitimate because they have been received, tested, and improved over generations; Paine held that only the consent of the living can make a government rightful. Each argument meets the other at the same point, the authority of the past over the present, and answers it oppositely.

• Abstract rights and practical wisdom

  Burke compared a debate about abstract rights to a debate about a man's abstract right to food or medicine, when the real question is how to obtain and administer them. Paine replied that without a clear principle of rights, every existing abuse can claim the sanction of precedent. The exchange is a classic case of reasoning from circumstances against reasoning from first principles.

• Reading a revolution while it is happening

  Burke wrote in 1790, before the king's flight, the Terror, or Napoleon, and predicted disorder ending in military rule; Paine wrote in 1791 and 1792 expecting the representative system to spread across Europe. Both arguments were tested by events neither had yet seen. The debate shows how much political judgment depends on forecasting the consequences of principles.

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