Select Works of Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke

Englishman could aver that Church and State were ideas inseparable to the English mind. The French ecclesiastic might fairly claim as private property the estates on which his order had thriven unchallenged ever since France had been a nation: no reader of Selden could think the argument applicable to the Church of England. “When once the Commonwealth,” says Burke, “has established the estates of the Church as property, it can, consistently, hear nothing of the more or the less.” Such has been the claim of the clerical party in every country of the Western world: and there is not one in which it has been accepted. There is not one in which lawfulness of the secularization of Church property has not by this time been practically admitted. Burke’s argument is confuted by each successive step of that long series of unwillingly enforced reforms which has enabled the English Church to stand its ground. In reading Burke’s account of the Church of England, we must bear in mind the peculiar circumstances of his education. Burke was the son of an Irish Catholic and an Irish Protestant. He was educated by a Quaker: and by trustworthy testimony² he valued no Christian sect above another, and believed in his heart that no one then existing represented Christianity in its normal or final shape. Stoutly as he had opposed the famous Latitudinarian petition a few years before, Burke was in all religious matters liberal to a degree which trespassed on what would now be called rationalism. His picture of the Church is really painted from the outside: and, though a country squire of a quarter of a century’s standing, it is from the outside that he conducts his defence of the Establishment.

      [xlviii] It would be impossible to follow Burke’s impatient and stormy career over the whole broad field of his “Reflections.” A minute criticism of such books defeats its own object. Burke is here an advocate and a rhetorician. Though an attitude of discursiveness and informality, admitting of striking and rapid change, is of the essence of his method, there are many isolated passages in which this is less apparent than usual, and these passages have historical value. Armed with the twofold knowledge of history and of human nature, it was impossible for Burke not to hit the mark in many of his minor observations on the course of events in France. His description of the growth of the monied interest, of the hostility of the Paris literary cabal to the Church, and of the coalition of these two elements for its destruction,¹ stands forth as a bold and accurate outline of an actual process. His retrospect of the past glories of France² is no mere exercise in declamation: and his observations on the government of Louis XVI³ prove that he had studied antecedent events perhaps as accurately as to an Englishman was possible. Those observations are illustrated by the circumstances which attended the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. A mild and constitutional régime, as Burke concluded, predisposes to revolution: if this régime is rudely interrupted, or its sincerity rendered doubtful, a revolution is certain. No monarch has a harder part to play than a king of France. Under Louis XVI, Charles X, Louis Philippe, and Louis Napoleon, the French people have abundantly proved themselves to be the same. But few would now draw from the fact the conclusion which was drawn by Burke. An unusual show of “patriotism,” such as Burke praised in the government of Louis, affords unusual matter of suspicion: and the causes of a restless jealousy for liberty, which Burke had exposed so admirably in his speech on American Conciliation, operated as surely in the nascent freedom of France as in the ripe liberty of America. Burke was equally correct in auguring an alteration in the internal balance of power in France from the changes introduced into the army. The substitution of a popular for a merely mercenary force has always been a measure necessary to secure great political reforms: and it leads, as Burke pointed out, to the ascendancy of popular generals. There is nothing astonishing in this. When the old bonds of loyalty are [xlix] as thoroughly worn out as they have proved to be in France, military genius, allied with civil prudence, necessarily becomes the head of all authority: and the rise of Bonaparte proved the truth of Burke’s surmise.¹ Burke applied his knowledge of France and French policy with good effect in turning from domestic to colonial policy.² The history of Hayti amply verified all that he foretold would follow on the assertion of the rights of men in the French colonies. Hayti asserted its right to a constitution and free trade: and as the colonists rose against the Government, the negroes rose on the colonists. Ten years later, and Burke might have written a telling conclusion to the tale which he sketched out: for when Republican France had defeated the whole of Europe, she was herself beaten by the despised negroes of the plantations. Such were the consequences of what Burke called “attempting to limit logic by despotism.” Among Burke’s historical forecasts none is more remarkable than that which relates to the organisation throughout Europe of secret political societies.³ Contemporary critics laughed the argument to scorn; but its accuracy is testified by the history of liberal movements all over Catholic Europe and America. Thirty years more, and the world rang with the alarm. It was by the aid of these secret organisations that Mexico and South America threw off the yoke of the priesthood. We know the history of similar clubs in Spain, Italy, and Switzerland between 1815 and 1848: and the great power for attack provided by these means justifies the hostility with which the Catholic Church still regards all secret organisations.

      Perhaps the great merit of Burke’s view of the changes in France consisted in his perception of their actual magnitude, and of the new character which they were likely to impress upon French policy. He was right in supposing that revolutionised France would become the centre of a revolutionary propaganda, and that success would transform the representatives of French liberty into the tyrants of Europe. Burke knew well how often vanity and ambition become leading motives in national action. He rightly guessed that their appetite would not be satiated by mere internal successes, and that the conquest of France by its own ambitious citizens would be only the first [l] in a series of revolutionary triumphs. Burke rightly judged that the spirits of the old despotism and of the new liberty were quite capable of coalescing. Under the Revolution and the Empire, France was as much a prey to the lust of empire as in the days of Louis the Fourteenth. The illusions of the days of the Grand Monarque have subsisted indeed down to our own times, not only undiminished, but vastly heightened by the events of the period which was just opening. France has not increased in physical resources so fast as her neighbours: and her comparative weight in Europe has therefore been diminishing. In proportion as this fact has been made plain, the French people have resented it: and until very recently the mass of the people probably believed themselves to be a nation as powerful in the world for good or evil as in the days of the First Empire. In England, the country of all the world, whatever else may be alleged against it, where illusions are fewest, this attitude on the part of her near neighbour has always been conspicuous.

      On the general question of the great political principle involved in the present volume the reader may safely take it for granted that it was neither true in itself nor natural to Burke, who was employing it merely for purposes of what he believed to be legitimate advocacy. Burke’s real belief is contained in the following passage from his “Address to the King” (1776): “The revolution is a departure from the antient course of descent of the monarchy. The people, at that time, entered into their original rights; and it was not because a positive law authorized what was then done, but because the freedom and safety of the subject, the origin and cause of all laws, required a proceeding paramount and superior to them. At that ever remarkable and instructive period, the letter of the law was suspended in favour of the substance of liberty. . . . Those statutes have not given us our liberties; our liberties have produced them.” Coleridge says that on a comparison of Burke’s writings on the American War with those on the French Revolution, the principles and the deductions will be found the same, though the practical inferences are opposite; yet in both equally legitimate, and in both equally confirmed by results.¹ This estimate is coloured by the natural sympathy of political partisanship. Burke was always Conservative in his instincts: [li] but it is undeniable that he thought the present a legitimate occasion for shifting his ground. The historical value of the “Reflections” is thus unequal in the different parts. In characterising English political instinct and doctrine, it falls back on a vanishing past; it repudiates that which possessed life and growth. It represents the sentimental rather than the intellectual side of its author’s character: and hence it will be used by posterity less as an historical document than as a great literary model. Burke, in a higher degree than any other Englishman, transferred to his writings the force and vigour which properly belong to speeches; and there is scarcely a single rhetorical device which may not be learned from his pages. The art of