5Edmund Burke, the French Revolution and his French Critics
In 1791 the publication of an exchange of letters between Edmund Burke and Claude-François de Rivarol took place.1 At first glance their publication looked unpromising, as the Parisian editor was obliged to announce that the first of Rivarol’s letters could not be published because its author had not retained a copy of it. However, once this disappointment has been overcome, there can be no doubt as to the interest of this brief exchange for, if Burke was now hailed as the author of the celebrated Reflections on the Revolution in France, Claude-François de Rivarol was the brother of unquestionably the most brilliant and the most defamatory of all of France’s counter-revolutionary journalists, Antoine de Rivarol, author of numerous merciless diatribes against the course of the Revolution and its leaders, as well as the editor of the Journal politique national.2
Burke was not slow in getting to the point. Having thanked Claude-François de Rivarol for his ‘polite and flattering’ letter and indicated that his Reflections on the Revolution in France were intended to serve the interests of ‘this kingdom and of mankind’, he next confessed that he had read the Journal politique national (presumably Rivarol had sent it to Burke) too late for it to have informed his own account. Yet, he averred, these texts would one day be placed by the side of the annals of Tacitus. There was, Burke wrote, ‘a strong coincidence in our way of thinking’. This, however, was not all, because, as Burke indicates, Rivarol had also sent him some of his poems, most notably a poem running to over 200 lines entitled Les Chartreux.3 ‘So far as I am capable of forming any judgment upon French poetry,’ Burke commented, ‘your verses are spirited and well-turned.’ Moreover, Burke added, ‘the author possesses the art of interesting the passions, which is the triumph of that Kind of eloquence’ (Corr. 6:265).
To this we will return, but we might for the moment care to reflect upon what had brought these two figures together. Antoine de Rivarol’s early works – for example, his famous and still-read Dissertations sur l’universalité de la langue française – predate the Revolution, but they were to provide the philosophical support for what was to be the most vehement and coherent attack upon the principles of 1789. Specifically, Rivarol denied the veracity of Condillac’s sensationalist epistemology, arguing that sentiment preceded sensation, doubted that man could or should be dissected into his constituent parts, and believed that truth and wisdom were embodied in language. Of all languages, French was undoubtedly the most superior, and this for the reason that it excluded all obscurity and confusion. ‘That which is not clear’, Rivarol wrote, ‘is not French’ (Rivarol 1784, 30).4 In nature, everything was in harmony and proportion, and it thus followed that ‘the man who analyses, whether as a chemist or as a reasoner, can only … decompose and kill’.5 In Rivarol’s opinion, it was precisely this analytical spirit that inspired the philosophes and which accounted for their dangerous errors. The philosophe, Rivarol wrote, was a man who shook prejudices but did not acquire virtues, who spoke to the mind but not to the heart. And the heart was everything. Accordingly, the philosophes had mistaken resemblance between men for the equality of man. They had failed to realize that, in politics, it was not truth but ‘fixity’ that mattered. Nor could one legitimately speak of universal justice: all judgements were relative to circumstances. Likewise, it was foolish to speak of man’s natural goodness. It was not without considerable effort that men acquired a moral sense. Men therefore needed government, religion and morality to protect and elevate them. Moreover, men by nature were not solitary but social beings. It was the solitary condition that was the artificial condition.
All of these arguments were brought to bear by Antoine de Rivarol from the summer of 1789 onwards in his analysis of the Revolution contained in the Journal national politique referred to by Burke. Thus armed, he, like Burke, could argue that the Revolution was doomed to fail from its very first step. The Terror denoted not the derailing of the Revolution but its logical conclusion. This is amply demonstrated, as it is with Burke, in Antoine de Rivarol’s analysis of the Revolution’s use of the language of rights. The Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen was, according to Rivarol, nothing but a criminal and dangerous document. It was a text that ignored practice and experience, confused the savage with the social man, and mistook natural independence for civil liberty. Why, he asked, talk to citizens of rights they will never exercise? Why tell men that they are born equal when it would be honest to tell them that one is born strong and another weak? Why precede a constitution with a statement of metaphysics that earlier legislators had always had the good sense to hide within the foundations of their institutions? Furthermore, the people – the embodiment of blind fury, envy and ignorance – would not understand such a declaration of rights. In their hands, what had been formulated to defend rights would quickly become a means of attack. Having been told that they enjoyed civil equality, the people would demand absolute equality of ownership. A hatred of rank would turn into a hatred of all authority. ‘The negroes in our colonies and the servants in our houses’, Rivarol proclaimed, ‘could, with the declaration of rights in their hands, chase us from our inheritance’ (Rivarol 1808, 113).6 As for the soldier told to defend private property, he would reply that the earth belonged to all men and that he wanted his share. ‘What would you say’, Rivarol asked, ‘to this sophist armed with your declarations of rights and a gun? He would take your goods as a man of nature, enjoy them as a citizen, and defend them as a soldier’ (Rivarol 1808, 257).7 In short, if you encouraged the ignorant to believe the false idea that rights and conditions should be equal, the result would be blood, ruin, and death. Behind Rivarol’s charge that talk of natural rights in the context of a society grounded upon social and economic inequality was foolish and incautious nonsense lay the belief or awareness that civilization was only ever a fragile construction and one that could be easily swept away by the spirit of barbarism. By the same token, if Rivarol accepted that the church and the royal court were, in part, responsible for France’s ills, he remained convinced both that only a monarchy and a hereditary aristocracy, combined with the institutions of private property, the family and an established religion, could restore order and that a fetish for popular sovereignty had effectively dissolved the body politic, producing an altogether new species of revolutionary government. Blame lay with philosophy for having undermined the ancien régime and the fanatical demagogues who had voiced its principles in the National Assembly.
Upon this evidence, when Burke acknowledged the similarities between his and Antoine de Rivarol’s way of seeing things, there are grounds for thinking that he was being more than simply polite and one can only speculate as to how he would have reacted as he read Rivarol’s blistering prose. But what of this exchange of letters between Burke and Antoine de Rivarol’s brother, Claude-François? What light, if any, does it cast on both authors and their opinions?
Burke’s reply to Claude-François de Rivarol addresses three, slightly related, issues. The first part of his text spoke of recent events in the Low Countries and how the Emperor Leopold might set about restoring his authority. Rivarol appears specifically to have asked for Burke’s views on this matter. The context is not unimportant. The Emperor Joseph II had set about imposing a series of reforms designed to modernize and centralize the political, judicial and administrative system of the Austrian Netherlands. This also involved the secularization of the educational system and the reorganization of several religious orders. In January 1790 a popular revolt broke out against these policies, leading to the creation of the short-lived United States of Belgium. Joseph’s successor, Leopold, quickly reasserted the authority of the Habsburg dynasty, bringing the revolt to a close by December of that year. The question, in short, was whether the Emperor should seek to repress what Rivarol had called ‘monkish fury’8 by deploying a fury of his own?
In his response, we see Burke at his most moderate and pragmatic. Burke’s concern was that such fury would unleash a fury from another source that would prove even more damaging and difficult to bring to an end. This question, he wrote, was of such importance that all great statesmen should consider which of these two furies would prove more fatal to government and to the prosperity and peace of the country. Burke did not deny the reality of the despair felt by those deprived of their property and chased from their homes by violence. Nor did he question the sense of compassion that such misfortune induced in our hearts. These were feelings implanted in us by our creator and which assured our own preservation. They were, however, far removed from what Burke dismissed as ‘men’s imaginary political systems concerning governments’. In brief, if, ‘from mistaken ideas of policy’, princes wanted to ‘excite the passion of [the] multitude’ against a particular class or group of people in society – in this case, priests – they ran the risk of calling to their aid an ally still more dangerous than the enemy they wished to defeat. No doubt the Emperor had made great sacrifices. But, Burke asked, did he wish to unleash a deluge similar to that which had inundated the ‘great Monarchy’ of France? It was not a question of knowing whether the people would argue well or badly but of whether the outcome of its discussions would prove fatal to kings as to priests. Of course, the Emperor could rely upon his army, but great armies had been seduced, and the seducers were never far away. He could strengthen his frontiers but fortresses too had traitors and the ‘democratick faction’ in the Low Countries had an ‘armed ally’ close at hand.
Surely, therefore, a far better and more prudent policy dictated that security for the Emperor resided in fortifying himself in ‘the heart of his people’? It was better to repair ‘those dykes and barriers, which prejudice might rise in his favour’ than to destroy them. In brief, allegiance was best secured by cultivating affection. In the Low Countries, Burke continued, the Emperor possessed the most populous, the most cultivated and, consequently, the most flourishing country in Europe. The people were industrious, frugal, easy and obedient. What, therefore, did it matter if they remained fond of monks, attached to the sound of church bells or occasionally lit a candle? ‘A wise prince’, Burke concluded, ‘will study the genius of his people’ and will ‘indulge them in their humours’. Nor will he take away its privileges. He will act according to the circumstances and for as long as he follows ‘the practical principles of a practical policy’ he will be the ‘happy Prince of a happy people’. Moreover, he should ignore the chatter of the Condorcets and Raynals of the world, the rebukes voiced by those Burke refers to contemptuously as ‘the magpies and Jays of philosophy’ (Corr. 6:266–68).9
At this point Burke addresses his second question. The rebellion in the Austrian Netherlands, he observes, was ‘a rebellion against innovation’. When Leopold reclaimed his territory, he found everything as it had been before. Could the same be said, Burke asks, of the king of France? Even if a restoration were to take place, would he find his kingdom in the same condition? The answer was clearly no, for the simple reason that, in contrast to the revolt in the Low Countries, the rebellion in France had been ‘a revolt of innovation’. There was, Burke commented, no shortage of people eager to recommend to Leopold that he should follow a similar path, that he should create a ‘democratick party’ in order to allow him, all the better, ‘to curb the Aristocratic and the Clerical’. Burke was in no doubt as to the errors involved in this strategy.
In general, Burke wrote, a politics based upon civil discord is perilous for the prince and fatal for his subjects. The maintenance and permanence of orders and a genuine understanding between all the parties that make up government offered a better – indeed, the best – chance of peace and tranquillity. Corporations with a permanent existence and an hereditary nobility were the best protectors of monarchical succession. Without this system of orders and institutions, hereditary monarchy could not survive. Yet, in creating a ‘democratic royalty’, this was exactly what had been brought into existence in France. The monarchy alone rested upon the hereditary principle. All other institutions were elective. And thus the monarchy was an anomaly, was in blatant contradiction with all the sentiments and ideas of the people. In brief, the intricate web of self-regulating institutions and practices, around which ties of duty, friendship, loyalty and reciprocity had been enacted and formed, had been ruthlessly stripped away, leaving the hereditary monarchy exposed and ready to fall. The monarchy of France, Burke concluded, ‘is a solitary, unsupported, anomalous thing’ (Corr. 6:268).
The third aspect of Burke’s reply is arguably the most intriguing. It concerns his response to Rivarol’s poem, Les Chartreux. The subject of Rivarol’s poem is that of two young lovers, one of whom, Eugénie, disguises herself as a man so as to follow her lover into the cloisters of a monastery. Burke takes the intended moral of the tale to be that isolation from the affections and relationships found in society ‘makes the heart cold and unfeeling.’ Burke is not entirely convinced by this, commenting that the ‘greatest crimes’ usually have their source not ‘from a want of feeling for others’ but in our ‘over sensibility for ourselves and an over indulgence to our own desires’. Such solitary beings as the Chartreux, he continued, whilst they were less touched by the sympathies which softened our manners, were ‘less engaged in the passions which agitate the mind’. In summary, austerity, while it hardened the heart, gave less nourishment to crime. ‘In my experience,’ Burke explained, ‘I have found that those who were the most indulgent to themselves were … less kind to others’ and certainly less so than those who ‘lived a life nearer to self-denial’. Indeed, he went on, ‘I have observed that a luxurious softness of manners hardens the heart at least as much as an overdone abstinence’. Thus, he did not agree with what he took to be Rivarol’s view that the only love worth its name was that professed by ‘Phaedras’ or by ‘ancient or Modern’ versions of ‘Eloyses’. ‘Ladies’ should not pursue ‘their lovers into convents of Carthusians, nor follow them in disguise to camps and slaughterhouses’ (Corr. 6:269–70).
Beneath this plea for a moderation of the passions, however, lay a broader point, and one that related directly to the fate of contemporary France. It was, Burke observed, in the nature of the poet to choose subjects intended to ‘excite the high relish arising from the mixed sensations which will arise in that anxious embarrassment of the mind’ found where ‘vices and virtues meet near their confines’. In Paris, he went on, he sensed that philosophers shared the instincts of the poets, that they were ‘naturally led by a desire of flattering the passions’. What, Burke commented, might be allowed in a poet could not be indulged in a philosopher. Through a mixture of hatred and scorn, they had succeeded in exploding what Burke termed ‘that class of virtues which restrain the appetite’. In their place they had substituted a virtue they called humanity or benevolence. By this expedient, Burke observed, ‘their morality has no idea in it of restraint, or indeed of a distinct settled principle of any kind’. He concluded:
When their disciples are thus left free and guided only by present feeling, they are no longer to be depended upon for good or evil. The men who to day, snatch the worst criminals from justice, will murder the most innocent persons to morrow. (Corr. 6:270).
What was the nature of Rivarol’s response to Burke? Broadly speaking, he agreed with Burke’s analysis of the best course of action to be taken in the Low Countries. ‘This odious and disruptive sect’10 of the philosophes, he conceded, was best dealt with by ‘firm and wise’11 government than by bayonets. A sound administration of the finances – as, he admitted, had not been the case in France – would take away the pretexts for their complaints and deprive them of a receptive audience, leaving them with nothing better to do than drown themselves in metaphysics and their love of the universe. The ‘thousand-headed hydra’12 of democracy must not be replaced by the ‘hydra of aristocracy’13 intent on devouring the people. Revenge was to be avoided. Yet there could be no doubt as to Rivarol’s loathing of the philosophes. ‘A philosophe’, he wrote, ‘knows that personal interest is the motive behind everything, that love of ourselves is the first law of nature’14 and therefore that it was ‘madness to be a good son, a good father, a good friend and a subject citizen’.15 The philosophe, he concluded, ‘is a true savage at the heart of society’16 (Lettre de M. Burke 1791, 19).
On the moral to be drawn from the experience of the two lovers, there was no such agreement. There was, Rivarol responded, no merit in solitude. Celibacy, retirement, inaction, were crimes against nature. It was in the midst of society that ‘gentle sympathy’17 was nurtured and bore fruit, where relationships and lines of affection of limitless kinds united the human race in an ‘immense marriage’18 of the heart. ‘I have always noticed’, Rivarol remarked, ‘that the most dreadful man is the man without family, and I have also noticed that, in the national assembly, the most criminal sedition monger was either a bachelor or a bad husband, which amounts to the same thing’(Lettre de M. Burke 1791, 25).19 The philosophes on this account were all monks: they had neither affections, nor fathers, nor children. ‘The first law of nature’, Rivarol concluded, ‘is to live for yourself; but the first law of society is to live for others’(Lettre de M. Burke 1791, 25).20
In the ideas of both of the Rivarol brothers, we can see a prefiguration of what were to become the central themes raised by theorists of counter-revolution in France from the 1790s onwards. The Revolution was a conspiracy organized and led by the philosophes. It was the expression of atheism and of individualism. It was an act of providence and a display of divine displeasure with a sinful France. All republics, all political systems resting upon the claims of popular sovereignty, were doomed to collapse. Rights could only be granted if reciprocal duties were acknowledged. Only a restored and purified monarchy could put an end to anarchy.
From this perspective – that is to say, from the perspective of the Rivarol brothers – there was much to be admired in Burke’s account of the Revolution. Above all, he had seen the frightening originality of the events that were unfolding and, from the outset, had seen the spirit of innovation and of philosophy that would drive the Revolution forward towards its cataclysmic and destructive conclusion. Yet, we should acknowledge the limits to the admiration felt by the French and other counter-revolutionaries for Burke, limits that were to become more obvious in the writings of Joseph de Maistre (a Savoyard) and Louis de Bonald (a Frenchman).
We know that Joseph de Maistre read Burke’s Reflections soon after it appeared in French in November 1790 (a matter of weeks after its publication in English).21 In a letter to his friend Henri Costa de Beauregard, dated 21 January 1791, he not only praised ‘the admirable Burke’ but indicated that the Reflections had reinforced and confirmed his own ‘anti-democratic and anti-gallican ideas’.22 Moreover, Maistre cited Burke in his first counter-revolutionary publication, his Lettres d’un royaliste savoisien of 1793, specifically referencing the Burkean argument that neither society nor government could be rebuilt upon abstract, metaphysical principles.
Yet, when Maistre published his now-famous Considerations on France in 1797 Burke received only one mention and this was only to add to Maistre’s mockery of the number of laws produced by France’s revolutionary National Assembly (Maistre 1974, 100). Maistre’s attitude towards the Revolution had clearly hardened in the interim and, from his new position, he found Burke’s argument both troubling and ambiguous. For example, in his Réflexions sur le protestantisme, published in 1798, Maistre defended Burke against the criticism levelled at him by Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man (citing Burke as ‘this great patriot, this great writer, this celebrated prophet’ [Maistre 2007, 325])23 but he also cast doubt on Burke’s ‘ingenious’ hypothesis that in 1688 James II had committed an act of ‘voluntary abdication’.24 In effect, Burke stood accused of allowing the principles of popular sovereignty and rebellion in through the back door (Maistre 2007, 315). This hinted at deeper reasons explaining Burke’s limited appeal to French counter-revolutionaries. After all, Burke was a Protestant and Protestantism, in the words of Maistre, was ‘a religious enemy of the French’, a religion that could only lead to anarchy (Maistre 2007, 315).25 Nor, more obviously, did such writers share Burke’s appreciation of traditional English liberties or his attachment to representative institutions. Least of all were they prepared to accept the exemplary character and role that Burke attributed to English history. This place was to be held by France as the eldest daughter of the church. The true counter-revolution, Maistre believed, would only commence when England reconverted to Catholicism (Maistre 2007, 1114).
So Burke was largely to fade from view in subsequent counter-revolutionary histories. Indeed, as François Furet has remarked, Burke was absent from most French histories of the Revolution written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (2007, 902–15).26 This is not unduly difficult to understand. As we know, for Burke the Revolution of 1789 amounted to a sudden and spontaneous eruption of evil into the European body politic. By contrast, for most French commentators the Revolution was far from being the result of accidental forces and had its roots deep within centuries-old developments of French (and European) history. This, for example, was the view of the writer-politician François Guizot. It was also that of Madame de Staël. Accordingly, Burke, apart from a few minor asides, is absent from her monumental Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution. She cites Burke on the recall of her father, Jacques Necker, to government and remarks on how, having ‘attained a great ascendant over his countrymen’, Burke contributed to public indignation against France, but that is about it (Stael [1818] 2008, 387).
That Burke was largely ignored by nineteenth-century authors of accounts of the Revolution is further confirmed if we refer to Hippolyte Taine’s multi-volumed Les Origines de la France contemporaine, penned after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Unlike many of his countrymen, Taine saw no redeeming features in the Revolution. It was bad from start to finish. Moreover, in Burkean fashion, he saw it as an outbreak of ‘spontaneous anarchy’, fuelled by the theories of the philosophes (and Rousseau in particular). Yet, if Taine cites Burke as ‘the ablest theorist of political liberty’ on the other side of the Channel and refers to the Reflections as ‘a work which is a prophecy and a masterpiece’ (Taine [1876] 2002, 1:141), he makes no further use of Burke’s text or ideas.
As for writers broadly sympathetic to the Revolution, they found it hard to disguise their contempt for Burke. Jules Michelet, one of the towering figures of French intellectual life in the mid-century, called Burke ‘the noisy Irish trumpet’27 and referred to his ‘infamous book, wild with rage, full of lies and cheap insults’.28 Burke, he averred, had taken his ideas on the Revolution from those who had fled France and gone into exile: from this, he had concluded that France was a country unfit for liberty and that its ‘harebrained and violent people’ were easily turned to crime.29 Burke’s ‘furious and foul’ book, Michelet wrote, was so full of anger that ‘the author forgets on each page what he has just written’.30 In it was to be found nothing but ‘abuse and contradiction’.31 The Reflections, he concluded, was a call to return to the ‘spectacular governments of the middle ages, to the politics of the miracle’ (Michelet [1847–53] 1979, I, 341–55).32
There was however another group of French writers whom we might have expected to have expressed admiration for Burke: those liberals who, from bitter experience, came to appreciate the perils of political utopianism. But here too there were a series of problems. One of the very first responses to Burke’s fulminations against the Revolution came from Antoine-Louis Destutt de Tracy. Indeed his text M. de Tracy à M. Burke was published some seven months before the publication of the Reflections and was largely a commentary on what Destutt de Tracy admitted to be only extracts from a speech made by Burke to the House of Commons in February 1790.33 In essence, Destutt de Tracy’s charge was that Burke revealed ‘a great ignorance of the principles and operations of the French National Assembly’34 and that he had failed to understand the spirit of the Revolution. Burke was wrong to see the Revolution as a sudden ‘collapse’35. Rather it was the result of a ‘gradual’36 decline and a ‘long despotism’.37 Only when all these misfortunes had reached their apogee did France begin the restoration of its liberty. Burke had misjudged ‘the remarkable patriotism by which every province of the French empire has hastened to renounce every privilege, feeling that there are none to be compared to liberty or any private distinction as valuable as general union’ (1790, 4).38 More critically still, if Destutt de Tracy accepted the legitimacy of Burke’s argument that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had only been a ‘restoration’,39 he countered that such was the parlous state of France that it needed a ‘complete revolution’40. What, he asked sarcastically, did Burke believe that the French should have preserved of ‘the ancient order of things’?41 Its old privileged orders and redundant aristocracy? Nor did Destutt de Tracy accept that France’s ‘greatest mistake’42 was that it had not sought to copy the English constitution ‘exactly’.43 Certainly, he replied, there were ‘things admirable and admired’ in England’s constitution but was France also to imitate its faults? Should France emulate parliamentary corruption and the press gang? Nor did Destutt de Tracy intend to apologize for the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. ‘If our declaration of rights is nonsense’, he concluded, ‘our conduct is an excellent commentary upon it. It was at the moment when America busied herself with such nonsense that it became invincible to the whole force of England’ (1790, 14).44
Burke, in other words, did little to dent Destutt de Tracy’s initial optimism that, with the help of public education and a good dose of patriotism, the Revolution would succeed both in fostering liberty and producing moderate representative government ‘founded on morality and the desire of making mankind happy’ (1790, 4).45 There was therefore relatively little to be learned from him.
A similar stance is found in the writings of Benjamin Constant. The first reference to Burke by Constant is found in a letter to Isabelle de Charrière dated 10 December 1790. Constant was just twenty-three years old at the time and, as we know, Reflections on the Revolution in France had appeared in French scarcely two weeks previously. ‘I occupy myself at present’, Constant wrote, ‘with reading and refuting the book by Burke against the French Levellers. There are as many absurdities as lines in this famous book … He defends the nobility, the exclusion of radicals, the establishment of a dominant religion, and other things of this nature.’46 ‘I have already written much’, he added, ‘on this defence of abuses’47 (Constant 1996, 140).48 Despite Constant’s hopes to the contrary, nothing of substance came of this refutation but, as Steven Vincent has written, it is clear that Constant, with time, came to identify ‘Burke with those who rejected principles in favour of arbitrary rule’ (Vincent 2013, 120).49 As Constant was later to write in one of his most important pamphlets of the 1790s, Des Réactions politiques [1796], Burke maintained that ‘some axioms, metaphysical truths, are able to be politically false, preferring to these axioms motives, prejudices, memories, weaknesses, all things vague, indefinable, fluctuating’ (Constant 1988, 142).50
There was a more fundamental issue. For both Destutt de Tracy and for Constant, Burke’s account of English liberties as being rooted in long-established traditions and institutions seemed to preclude the possibility of liberty ever being properly established in France. Revolutions, as they came to see, might well be bad things with terrible human costs but one had occurred and what mattered was that the good things it announced had to be consolidated and protected in whatever new polity might emerge. It was for this reason that French liberals, unlike Burke, were prepared to make a distinction between the spirit of 1789 – the spirit of liberty – and the spirit of 1793 – the spirit of equality. In France liberty could not be restored: it had to be created. Condemning the Revolution in its entirety, as Burke had done, made no sense.
What of the monarchiens, those men such as Jean-Joseph Mounier, Lally-Tollendal, and others, who wished not only to preserve the French monarchy but to reform it along something like the English model?51 Surely here there was a meeting of minds with Burke? Again this was unfortunately not to be the case. Burke quoted Lally-Tollendal at length in a footnote to Reflections on the Revolution in France, commenting that the Frenchman was ‘one of the most honest, intelligent and eloquent members of the National assembly’ (Works 2:346), but by the time that Burke wrote his A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly in May 1791 he was prepared to blame anyone who had had a hand in the Revolution, no matter how well-intentioned they might have been. This included the now-exiled and defeated monarchiens.52 ‘As to Mr Mounier and Mr Lally’, Burke wrote,
I have always wished to do justice to their parts, and their eloquence, and the general purity of their motives. Indeed, I saw very well from the beginning, the mischiefs which, with all these talents and good intentions, they would do their country, through their confidence in system. (Burke 1992, 60)
They were ‘young and inexperienced’, lacked moderation, ‘entertained dangerous visions … publicly advertised for plans and schemes of government, as if they were to provide for the rebuilding of an hospital that had been burned down’. The result of their actions, Burke proclaimed, was ‘to unchain the fury of rash speculation amongst a people’. To their credit, the monarchiens had not ‘carried mistake into crime’, standing back on ‘the brink of the gulph of guilt and public misery’ but ‘their early rashness ought to be remembered to the last moments of their lives’ (Burke 1992, 60–61).
How could the poor monarchiens reply to such withering criticism? Clearly stunned to find that someone he had presumed to be a friend was in fact an adversary, Lally-Tollendal responded on at least two occasions.53 Burke, he argued, was ‘cruelly mistaken’, that he and his colleagues of ‘the moderate party’ were in no way responsible for the misfortunes that had befallen France. Nor did they deserve to be censured for supporting the doubling of the number of deputies of the Third Estate in 1789 as it had been a political necessity. Moreover, there was nothing inevitable about the outcome of this decision. What, he countered, did Burke mean by system? If, he wrote, ‘a man devoid of all personal ambition … seeking to connect what was, what is, with what ought to be, wished to lead France on the basis of its own principles towards the perfection of constitution that has placed England in a position of greatness and of previously unknown prosperity’ was a man of system, then he readily admitted to being ‘systématique’ (Lally-Tollendal 1792, 13–14).54 What Burke failed to appreciate was that the monarchiens had sought to save the monarchy and to preserve liberty and that they had endeavoured to pursue a middle course of action that would protect the tranquillity of the realm. Lally-Tollendal also argued that foreign intervention into France – a policy supported by Burke – would only make things worse.
Burke was unmoved. ‘I have just received Mr Lally’s Book’, he wrote to the Abbé de la Bintinaye on 3 August 1792. ‘It is not worthy of an answer.’ ‘As to his schemes of the British Constitution for France’, Burke continued,
it is not to know either France or England, or indeed any thing of mankind or of human Affairs. I am sure He knows nothing of our constitution, as it stands, and full as little of the process by which it has been made, and the manner by which it produces its effects.
‘This worthy Gentleman’, Burke concluded, is ‘the very surface of superficiality’ (Corr. 7:166–67).
Several years later another of the monarchiens, Pierre-Victor Malouet, visited Burke in London. Burke, he wrote, was everything he expected him to be, ‘agreeable, luminous, eloquent, passionate, strongly attached to the constitution of his country’.55 But, he wrote, ‘the unjust criticisms’56 Burke had directed against his friend, Lally-Tollendal, brought a coldness to their conversation. Burke, he concluded, ‘had the ideas of a French aristocrat’ (Malouet 1874, 2:259–62).57
To conclude, I wish briefly to consider whether Burke was read with more or less perspicacity as the years passed on from the French Revolution controversy. Here we might consult one of the most famous of all writers on the French Revolution.
Following the lead given by Charles de Rémusat,58 Alexis de Tocqueville read the complete corpus of Burke’s writings on the Revolution in the English original, taking extensive notes. This Tocqueville did as part of his preparations for the writing of The Old Regime and the Revolution / L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856).59 From this close reading, according to Robert T. Gannett (2003), Tocqueville judged that Burke had identified four essential causes of the Revolution: its antireligious character, its anarchic quality, its propagandism, and its rejection of the old European constitution.60 In each case, Tocqueville conceded, Burke’s analysis had a certain plausibility – Burke had been right, for example, in seeing the Revolution as ‘a revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma’ – but equally in each case he had mistaken appearance for reality, had seen only the accidental causes of the Revolution rather than its fundamental cause.
This, Tocqueville conceded, was not surprising given the unprecedented nature of the event but Burke, he commented, ‘does not realize that what stands before his eyes is the revolution which will abolish the old common law of Europe; he does not understand that this is its sole purpose’ (Tocqueville 1998, 107). Burke, in short, like so many of his contemporaries, had been mesmerized by events. He had not seen what was right before his eyes.
By this point in time Tocqueville’s own historical inquiries had convinced him that the dominant characteristic of French history was the inexorable march towards equality and thus the cause of the Revolution lay in the centuries-long struggle to secure the replacement of aristocratic, feudal institutions with ‘a more uniform and simple social and political order which had equality of conditions for its base’. It followed that the Revolution was ‘least of all an accident’ (1998, 106).
However it was because this process had largely been achieved by the absolute monarchy that resistance to the Revolution had been impossible. When the Revolution broke out, according to Tocqueville, there were not ‘ten men who had the habit of acting in common in an orderly way’ (1998, 243). The monarchy had sealed its own fate. Once again, in Tocqueville’s view, ‘Burke did not understand very well the condition in which the monarchy he regretted had left us to our new masters’ (1998, 243).
As Tocqueville remarks in his own famous text: ‘It is surprising that what seems so easy to discern today remained so entangled and veiled to the most clairvoyant eyes’: namely, that the Revolution was ‘the sudden and violent climax of a task to which ten generations had contributed’ (1998, 106). Thus, Burke’s unapologetic defence of the old order, of its institutions and its manners, could have no purchase upon a French society long-accustomed to the uniformity and administrative centralisation of the absolute monarchy. For all Burke’s pleading, there could not have been a return to old traditions, a recovering of ancient liberties. The sad irony, of course, is that Tocqueville was writing these words under the Second Empire of Napoleon III where all semblance of public liberty had been crushed and trampled underfoot. To that extent, Burke, not Tocqueville, had the last laugh.
Is Burke still seen in this light in France? Arguably not. The entry on Burke in François Furet and Mona Ozouf’s A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution makes the point that ‘recently’ Burke ‘has found his way back into the good graces of French scholars’ (Gengembre 1989, 916). An example of this would be Patrice Guennifey’s La Politique de la Terreur (2000). Why might this be the case? The short answer is that scholars like Furet (who had a huge influence on a generation of French historians) came to implicate the French Revolution in the totalitarian nightmare of Europe’s twentieth century. From this perspective, the violence of the Terror was not an accident but something intrinsic to the whole project of revolution. And this, as we know, was precisely what Edmund Burke had believed.
Notes
1Lettre de M. Burke … (1791). The text of Burke’s letter, written in English, can be found in Corr. 6:265–70; to Claude-François Rivarol [1 June 1791].
2Journal politique national (1808).
3Les Chartreux, trans. The Carthusians.
4‘Ce qui n’est pas clair, n’est pas Français’ (all translations into English are the author’s own unless otherwise indicated).
5‘l’homme qui analyse, soit comme chimiste, soit comme raisonneur, ne peut que … décomposer et tuer.’
6‘Les nègres, dans nos colonies, les domestiques dans nos maisons, peuvent, la déclaration des droits à la main, nous chasser de nos héritages.’
7‘Que diriez-vous à ce sophiste armé de votre déclaration des droits et un fusil? Il prendra votre bien comme homme de la nature, il en jouira comme citoyen, et le défendra comme soldat.’
8‘furie monacale’.
9To Claude-François Rivarol [1 June 1791].
10‘Cette secte odieuse et perturbatrice’.
11‘ferme et sage’.
12‘hydre à mille têtes’.
13‘hydre de l’aristocratie’.
14‘Un philosophes sait que l’intérêt personnel est le mobile de tout, que l’amour de nous-mêmes est la première loi de la nature.’
15‘de la folie à être bon fils, bon père, bon ami et sujet soumis’.
16‘un vrai sauvage au milieu de la société’.
17‘douce sympathie’.
18‘immense mariage’.
19‘J’ai toujours remarqué dans le monde que l’homme la plus atroce est l’homme sans famille, et j’ai aussi remarqué dans l’assemblée nationale que les factieux les plus criminels étaient ou célibataires ou mauvais époux, ce qui revient au même.’
20‘La première loi de la nature est celle-ci, vis pour toi-même, mais la première loi de la société est de vivre pour autrui.’
21See Jean-Louis Darcel, Intro. to Maistre ([1794] 1992, 79–85).
22See Richard A. Lebrun, Intro. to Maistre (1974, 5).
23‘ce grand patriote, ce grand écrivain, ce prophète célèbre’.
24‘abdication voluntaire’.
25‘une religion ennemi des Français’.
26This is a view echoed by Gérard Gengembre, who wrote that ‘French historians from Thiers to Lefebvre have shown little interest in Burke’ (1989, 916).
27‘la bruyante trompette irlandaise’.
28‘livre infâme, insensé de rage, plein de calomnies, de basses insultes’.
29‘un pays indigne de la liberté, un people étourdi, violent, qui, par faiblesse de tête, tournait aisément au crime’.
30‘l’auteur oublie à chaque page ce qu’il vient de dire dans l’autre’.
31‘injure et contradiction’.
32‘aux merveilleux gouvernements du Moyen Age, aux politiques de miracle’.
33Destutt de Tracy (1790). For a commentary on this text see Welch (1984, 20–22).
34‘une grande ignorance des opérations & des principes de l’Assemblée Nationale Française’.
35‘chute’.
36‘graduelle’
37‘long despotisme’.
38‘l’étonnante patriotisme par lequel toutes les Provinces de l’Empire Français se sont empressées de renoncer Privilège, sentant qu’il n’y a en a pas de comparable à la Liberté, ni de distinction particulière qui vaille l’union générale.’
39‘restauration’.
40‘révolution entière’.
41‘ancien ordre des choses’.
42‘plus grand tort’.
43‘exactement’.
44‘Si notre déclaration des Droits est un galimathias, notre conduite en est une excellente commentaire. C’est à l’instant où l’Amérique s’est occupée de pareil galimathias, qu’elle est devenue invincible à toutes les force de l’Angleterre.’
45‘fondé sur la morale & le désir du bonheur des hommes’.
46‘Je m’occupe à présent à lire et à refuter le livre de Burke contre les Levellers français. Il y a autant d’absurdités que de lignes dans ce fameux livre … Il défend la noblesse et l’exclusion des sectaires et l’établissement d’une religion dominante, et d’autres choses de cette nature.’
47‘J’ai déjà beaucoup écrit sur cette apologie des abus.’
48For her part, Isabelle de Charrière responded that she ‘had not been able to read’ Burke (1996, 153): ‘Ici on a Burke que je n’ai pas pu lire.’ For a discussion of Charrière’s views on Burke see Courtney (1993, 431–33).
49See also Philippe Raynaud, ‘Préface’ to Constant (1988, 21–26).
50‘des axiomes, métaphysiquement vrais, peuvent être politiquement faux, préfèrent à ces axiomes des considérations, des préjugés, des souvenirs, des faiblesses, touts choses vagues, indéfinissables, ondoyantes.’
51On the monarchiens, see Griffiths (1988) and Craiutu (2012, 69–109).
52In a letter to Burke dated 7 August 1791, François de Menonville described both Mounier and Lally-Tollendal as ‘honest’ men but also as men ‘guilty of great, Errors, of dangerous errors’ that could not be excused by their ‘good intentions’. This might explain Burke’s change of heart (Corr. 6:166–67).
53See Lally-Tollendal (1791, 1792).
54‘un homme dénué de toute ambition … cherchant à lier ce qui a été, ce qui est, et ce qui doit être, voulait conduire la France par ses propres principes à ce perfectionnement de constitution qui a placé l’Angleterre dans un état de grandeur et de prospérité inconnu avant elle.’
55‘bon, lumineux, éloquent, passionné, fort attaché à la constitution de son pays’.
56‘préventions injuste’.
57‘les idées d’un aristocrate français’.
58Rémusat published two long articles entitled ‘Burke: Sa vie et ses écrits’ in the January and February 1851 editions of the Revue des Deux Mondes.
59See ‘Quatre jugements sur Burke’, in Tocqueville (1953, 338–42).
60The argument developed below draws heavily upon Gannett (2003, 57–77).