Reflections on the Revolution in France

Summary

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in London in November 1790, is cast as a long letter to a young Frenchman, Charles-Jean-François Depont, who had asked Burke's opinion of events in Paris. Its immediate occasion was the sermon A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, preached by the Dissenting minister Richard Price on 4 November 1789 to the Revolution Society at the meeting-house in the Old Jewry, and the society's address of congratulation to the French National Assembly. The library text is the Reflections alone, from volume 3 of the Nimmo edition of Burke's Works. Burke first answers Price's claim that the Revolution of 1688 gave the English a right to choose their own governors, to cashier them for misconduct, and to frame a government for themselves. Reading the Declaration of Right and the Act of Settlement, he argues that 1688 was a narrow act of necessity meant to preserve the ancient constitution and the hereditary succession. From Magna Carta to the Petition of Right, the English have claimed their liberties as an entailed inheritance from their forefathers, so that the state, like a family estate, may be improved without being torn down. He then turns to France. The National Assembly, he says, is dominated by provincial lawyers and obscure clergy without experience of great affairs, and it governs by abstract rights of man instead of the real rights that civil society secures, such as justice, the fruits of one's industry, and instruction in life and consolation in death. Government is a contrivance of practical wisdom, a matter for experience rather than metaphysics. The most famous pages describe the October Days of 1789, when a crowd invaded Versailles and the royal family was taken to Paris, and recall Burke's sight of Marie Antoinette as dauphiness years before; he laments that the age of chivalry is gone and with it the manners that softened power. Burke defends prejudice, meaning settled affection with its reason inside it, and the English establishment of the Church, which he describes as consecrating the state. Society is a contract, but a partnership in all virtue between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. He condemns the confiscation of Church lands and the paper money of assignats issued against them. The second half examines the new constitution in detail: the geometrical division of France into departments, the three bases of representation, the reduced executive, the new judicature, the army and the finances, and predicts disorder and military rule. He closes by describing himself as a man who wishes to preserve consistency by varying his means. The book was answered at once by Mary Wollstonecraft and in 1791 by Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, and it became a founding text of modern conservatism.

Top Lessons

• Liberty received as a family inheritance

  Burke argues that the English never claimed their freedom as an abstract right but as an inheritance passed down from Magna Carta to the Declaration of Right. Treating liberty like an estate held in trust makes each generation a steward rather than an owner, bound to receive and to hand on.

• The real rights of men in society

  Burke does not deny that men have rights; he denies that abstract rights can be applied to government without prudence. The rights that matter are the advantages civil society actually secures: justice, the fruits of labour, protection, instruction and consolation. Government is judged by how it supplies human wants, not by the purity of its theory.

• Affection begins in the little platoon

  Public spirit, Burke says, grows outward from love of the small groups to which we belong, the family, the neighbourhood, the order or profession, toward love of country and of mankind. A politics that dissolves these attachments in the name of the nation weakens the very affections it needs.

• Manners as the drapery of life

  In the lament for Marie Antoinette, Burke argues that chivalry, reverence and courtesy are not ornaments but supports of civilized life: they make power gentle and obedience free. Strip them away and only calculation and force remain.

• Reform in order to conserve

  Burke is not against all change. He insists that a state without the means of change cannot preserve itself, and he praises the English for correcting their constitution in 1688 while keeping its principles. Prudent reform repairs the building; revolution pulls it down to build from a plan.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The Reflections is not about medicine, but Burke argues by medical analogy throughout, and his images are useful to a historian of medicine. He treats the state as a body with distempers that need remedies, and opposes the experienced physician, who cures disorders by known methods, to the empiric or quack, who promises to regenerate the whole constitution by a new theory. The language of madness also recurs: the opening asks whether one should congratulate a madman who has escaped from the restraint of his cell, and later pages speak of delirium and frenzy. These are eighteenth-century commonplaces about confinement and insanity, written a few years before the York Retreat and Pinel's reforms in Paris, and they show how naturally a politician of 1790 thought of the mad as people to be restrained for their own good. Any connection to psychiatry is an analogy in Burke's rhetoric, not a medical argument.

• Opening pages, on congratulating France

  Burke asks whether he should felicitate a madman escaped from the protecting restraint of his cell on his restoration to light and liberty.

• On the real rights of men

  Abstract rights compared with a right to food or medicine; Burke would call in the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics.

• On the Assembly's new constitution

  The physician of the state who, not content to cure distempers, undertakes to regenerate constitutions; the Assembly's members likened to empirics.