7‘The climacteric event in our history’: Aspects of Burke’s Reception in France
Gérard Gengembre once termed ‘the climacteric event in our history’1 that which Burke generally regarded as occurring ‘in France’.2 Burke was not downplaying the Revolution, though. There would be ‘transmigrations … by fire and blood’ before France was restored to her true self; more radically, he anticipated Gengembre’s echo of revolutionary, tabula rasa rhetoric when he confessed his qualms about clinging to divine commands that seemed nullified by the new turn in history (Burke 1969/82 [1790], 376; 1907–10, 3:393).3 Burke’s reduction of the Revolution to mere geography, and fears of some new Revelation, have had a complex posterity. Counter-revolutionaries viewed the Revolution as null and void, while that major liberal, Tocqueville, averred that it proceeded from the ancien régime; another outstanding liberal, Chateaubriand, was closer to Burke’s possible providentialism. Burke’s repute in France could not have derived solely from the Enquiry,4 nor from either his strictly British commitments or those with Ireland or India; and his American writings would have been a mere trailblazer for Tocqueville: his fame rests on the Revolution, and his depiction as a counter-revolutionary alternative to Tocqueville suggests the nature of ongoing debates (Dumont 1984, 230–45).5
Writers in French-speaking countries were not slow in engaging with Burke’s views, as translated by Gaëtan-Pierre-Marie Dupont in 1791. Their relation with British institutions has entailed endless misinterpretations. Burke’s own position was a guarded one (Burke 1969/82 [1790]), 121–22; 1907–10 [1791], 2:551–55). His balanced views did not fall on deaf ears and – with the notable exception of Louis de Bonald – French royalists, even the ultras of the Restoration, did not rule out drawing some inspiration from Britain (Oechslin 1960, 131, 201–02). However, Georges Lavau affirmed that neither Antoine de Rivarol nor Joseph de Maistre ever considered British institutions (Lavau 1981 [1959], 483), ignoring Rivarol’s views (1989 [1789–90], 135) and the Sardinian Maistre’s complex, though not entirely negative, attitude to Britain (Col 2005, 105–16). Burke’s opinions were indeed courted, starting with the request from Charles-Jean-François de Pont that elicited the Reflections. There was also a brief correspondence in 1791 between Burke and Claude-François de Rivarol, brother of the better-known Antoine.6 In the same year, the Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, to François-Louis Thibault de Ménonville, a député to the Assemblée Constituante, contained Burke’s earliest reservations about the monarchiens, specifically Jean-Joseph Mounier and Trophime Gérard de Lally-Tollendal, who had just been praised in the Reflections (Burke 1969/82 [1790], 167–68n). Burke blamed the monarchiens for their inexperience and systematic turn of mind (1907–10 [1791], 2:547). Like many others, he chose to forget that they were committed monarchists and that their bicameralism was subservient to a strong, centralized monarchy (Griffiths 1988, 141, 144). But even that was evidence of their participation in the revolutionary blank slate, among other things because they rejected those Parlements which he stubbornly regarded as checks to royal power. Unfortunately, Burke dodged issues like the veto advocated by the monarchiens: he could have shown that such a veto gave the king an absurd level of control over the sovereign legislature, which was incompatible with his post-1688 notion that Parliament made laws that the king could reject, and that Parliament could refuse to support the king’s appointment of ministers. Those, in any case, were Burke’s ideas in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (Burke 1907–10 [1770], 1:333).7 To him, the ‘king of Great Britain … is a real king, and not an executive officer’, with ‘a more real, solid, extensive power, than the king of France was possessed of before this miserable Revolution’ (Burke 1907–10 [1791], 2:554).
The conflict with the monarchiens illustrates how usual concepts and clichés obscure, rather than clarify, issues. This is evidenced by Burke’s various fortunes in France. No matter the disappearance of monarchy, there remained a fascination with what could be salvaged of his political philosophy when France suffered its endless misfortunes, and some of that fascination could be placed to the right, even extreme right. But Burke’s influence declined in the twentieth-century interwar period, partly because Action Française never really addressed him,8 and if it had, Burke’s reputation would have fared even worse after 1944. Renewed interest developed with the Cold War and the insights of American neo-conservatism, then refocused on France in the run-up to the Revolution bicentenary. Though interest in Burke is no longer the preserve of political commitment but of allegedly disinterested academics, political preoccupations were not thrown overboard entirely: in 2000 the former French President, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, found cause to praise Burke. Interest in Burke is also apparent in subjects for the competitive examinations for teachers of English. In such emerging fields as postcolonial studies, French authors intermingle with their Anglophone counterparts. Burke, who acknowledged his indebtedness to Montesquieu (Burke 1996 [1791], 200), before mapping out ways of addressing the Revolution, remains the product of English-speaking cultures suggesting new perspectives for French scholars.
A Burkean posterity in France?
Burke’s posterity in France is so varied as to discourage exhaustive investigation. Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan and Maurice Barrès were devout readers,9 mainly owing to their fascination with his views of an organic State and, when it comes to Taine and Barrès, ‘prejudices’.10 But Barrès’s republicanism diverges from Burke’s stress on the exteriority of power. Though Burke was no Bonald and never exclusively supported the monarchical constitution, he would have been loath to theorize the exteriority of power in a republic, especially in republicanized France.11 As for Taine and Renan, their preference for Protestantism separates them from Burke: an Erastian, he held that France was a Catholic country that must be tolerant of Protestants, but he also claimed bluntly that the Reformation was an early subversion completed by the French Revolution.12 Taine and Renan were indebted to the Whig interpretation of history, down to their distrust of democratic excesses, and were accordingly attracted to Burke, but being ‘Whig’, in their case, meant a rejection of the earlier association in France of monarchy and Catholicism. They transposed Burke to another time and space, and he would have regarded their suggestions as mechanical and unsavoury innovations.
Difficulties are not allayed when one turns to those who, allowing for individual differences, were royalists with a lesser or greater stake in Catholicism. It would be easier to assess such putative posterity if Maistre, Bonald, Maurras, Chateaubriand and Tocqueville had closely discussed Burke.13 Maurras admitted him to a constellation of counter-revolutionary thinkers, all of them empiricists – ‘Renan, Taine, Balzac, Bonald, Burke, Macaulay, a few more’ (1983 [1937], 164) – but also viewed him as a mere ‘practitioner’ as against Maistre and Rivarol.14 Maistre recognized that Burke gave him ammunition against both democracy and Gallicanism.15 He did not make Burke a Catholic but, oblivious to his digs at ‘the Servant of Servants’ and ‘the Fisherman’ (Burke 1969/82 [1790], 114), considered that Burke regarded the Pope as ‘head even of those Christians who disown him’.16 Of course, Burke, who never viewed the Pope as an Antichrist, was an ideal crack shot against those Dissenters whose attacks on established Churches were just as many slurs against sundry sorts of loose women,17 but Maistre’s enthusiasm was that of an independent mind. As for Bonald’s rapturous encomium, its romanticized Burke could hardly do the latter any real service:
Burke, that eloquent and sensitive defender of the true principles of a monarchical Constitution. I dare hope that some of my thoughts, on these lofty objects, will be in unison with his profound meditations, when I remember with what forcefulness he upholds public religion, royal power, hereditary succession and social distinctions. That virtuous stranger entering the lists in that memorable joust, where all passions vied against all principles, called to mind those knights who, in tournaments of yore, hastened from distant countries, for the sake of glory, and fastened every eye on them so strong were their weapons, proud their mottoes and mighty their strokes. Never had the preserving principles of societies been attacked by such profound means as they have been in our age, never had they been defended with such genius, learning and courage.18
Others, from the liberal side, dismissed Burke’s outlook. Compassionate though he was to the man’s sorrow after the death of his son, Richard, Chateaubriand considered that Burke ignored the passage of time, and regarded his stand against the Revolution as indirectly responsible for ‘the fields of Waterloo’ and for ‘keep[ing] England’s politics in the past’. However, he mentioned the British constitutionalist’s opposition to the threats posed by the ‘new theories’, hinting that he might someday share the same ground (1973 [1849], 1:467, 473, 489–90). Charles de Rémusat identified some inconsistency in Burke who, he argued, rejected absolutism and indicted the French who ended the same absolutism.19 This is similar to Tocqueville’s dig at Burke who, allegedly, cannot see ‘that what lies before his eyes is that revolution that must precisely abolish the ancient common law of Europe’.20 The short-sighted liberal calls the Burke kettle myopic. In other places, though, Tocqueville admits that the two saw eye to eye.
Investigation into a Burkean posterity could be easily deemed irrelevant. Burke’s alliance of tradition and political liberalism was at odds with the positions of both ‘moderate and extremist counter-revolutionaries’ (Martin 1998, 100). Burke was a Whig (Martin 1998, 99), but Martin does not point out that Burke’s Whiggism had elements of Bolingbrokean Country ideology (Burke 1996 [1791], 210–11, 225, 238, 256, 259–61, 266).21 It was a nineteenth-century liberal who best sensed the complexity of Burke’s background: Rémusat pointed to the counter-revolutionary potential in British Whiggism.22 Even so, one should remember that the abyss between Burke and other counter-revolutionaries, not to mention the most conservative among French liberals, also develops from Burke’s instinctive endorsement of England’s politics, notably in that seventeenth-century revolutionary thinking endlessly posed as a restoration of alleged earlier modes marked by Parliamentary supremacy. Whether Burke’s Francophone followers grasped that much would call for a specific enquiry. Liberals were unaware of such intricacies, quite possibly because they took Britain for granted; counter-revolutionaries grunted given their mitigated diffidence towards Britain.23
Burke’s rejection of the French Revolution as inaugurating a new epoch in world history enabled him to stress England’s singularity since the mendacity of revolutionary ideals had been identified as early as the age of John Ball in 1381 (1996 [1791], 158), which allowed for a condemnation of the Civil Wars of the 1640s while praising the Glorious Revolution: that much emerged from the muddled debates of the Sacheverell trial (1710).24 Conversely, Maistre and Bonald could hardly have regarded the French Religious Wars as an opportunity for an inclusive reading of the past. They oversimplified the ancien régime, as well as the relationships between Church and State.25 Their vision, strangely enough, turned more towards a reconciling future than a restoration of the past, and Bonald – in this a true, though silent, disciple of Burke, even a forerunner of Tocqueville – agreed that the ancien régime nursed the revolutionary catastrophe.26 This reduces the customary fracture between conservatism and liberalism. As for Maurras, his balanced judgements on Jacobinism show the latter as less destructive of French traditions than liberalism:
Let others rejuvenate the grievous utopias of 1789: if one must, at all costs, find inspiration in the history of our great crisis, we prefer to turn to 1793. After all, a Danton continues a Henry IV, a Louis XI, a Philip Augustus, though miserably so, a Roland or a La Fayette could only disturb or diminish the State.27
But Maurras was just as independent as Maistre. Michel Ganzin only remarks that Maurras noted the gap ‘between English liberalism and democracy’ (Ganzin 1972, 237n.), and Pierre Boutang says nothing of Burke in his monumental biography of Maurras (1984). The latter certainly never read Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) and its advocacy of party government, and never reflected on Burke’s Bolingbrokean mention of those republican elements – to Burke, quite plausibly, this would have meant parties – that enter the composition of a true monarchy (1969/82 [1790], 229–30). Whether Bolingbroke would have agreed on parties is no foregone conclusion, obviously, and, just as obviously, Maurras would have begged to differ from Burke. Parties were just those ‘factions’ that monarchy must curb because they are ‘inherent in the city of men just as sin is in the souls of men’.28 Conversely, the Republic gives them its blessing, thus institutionalizing their endless feuds.29 Parties might be relevant to a newly born Germany or an England plagued by the vicissitudes of her national history and foreign sovereigns, but the French solution was a rejuvenation of its States General.30 Burke might have agreed, though with countless provisos. But Maurras’s interest in trade unions, at least in the early phase of Action Française, was alien to Burke’s free-trade views.31
A shared belief between Burke and the counter-revolutionaries was that one must repudiate hubristic individualism. But this did not mean absorbing the individual into the State, as shown by Maurras’s stress on trade unions, preferably guilds: a remote, and unintended, echo of Burke’s ‘little platoon’ (Burke (1969/82 [1790], 135). To royalist liberals, protection against an encroaching State was the principal task of a constitution, and they were at pains to clarify what they meant by liberalism. Tocqueville viewed himself as a ‘liberal of a new species’.32 Chateaubriand was concerned that liberalism meant ‘the risk of upsetting the lawful throne’ and jointly stressed his loyalty to the elder branch of the Bourbons and his ‘liberal opinions’ (1973 [1849], 3:142, 749).
But this matters less than the similitude between Burke’s description of James II’s faults in Reflections and that of the 1830 ordinances by Chateaubriand:
What is intolerable in the ministers’ report is the brazen claim, namely: THAT THE KING’S POWER PREEXISTS THE LAWS. What do constitutions signify then? … The first two liberties, freedom of the press and electoral freedom, were radically extirpated … by ordinances as in the days of royal pleasure.33
However, though Chateaubriand’s analyses of the ancien régime and the Restoration call to mind Burke’s Whig rendering of the Glorious Revolution, one must also pinpoint differences. Chateaubriand’s fidelity was to men, or rather lineages, not their ideas, and he rejected the monarchy of July while Burke extended the legitimacy of the Glorious Revolution to an alteration in the succession line. They agreed on the danger posed by monarchy to liberty buttressed by law. Was that liberalism? Chateaubriand’s would then be a ‘new’ liberalism, by courtesy of Tocqueville, one that partly derived from the nobiliary reaction of the eighteenth century with its belief in a beneficent genealogy of liberties suppressed by absolutism. But this was just what embarrassed Tocqueville. A customary constitution was no obstacle to centralization, which enabled him to view the ancien régime as the dialectical soil of the Revolution. However, his prudential advice to the Comte de Chambord makes it impossible to regard a text, even a constitution, as an absolute starting point, which is Burkean enough (Tocqueville’s disappointment with Chambord’s unresponsiveness may have been an element in the description of the ancien régime as preparation for the Revolution). One is on the horns of a dilemma here. To Burke, the Glorious Revolution brought the crowning touch to those positive constitutional changes that emerged even in the otherwise catastrophic era of the Stuarts (1969/82 [1790], 107–08). But to Chateaubriand and Tocqueville, the problem was to make a written constitution the foundation of a practice that was not yet in existence and that could only be defined in intaglio. They were worse off than Maistre, that ‘continental and French (linguistically speaking) continuation of the insular Burke’, or that ‘new Burke, but a rejuvenated Burke transfigured by mystical accents’,34 who endorsed Whig views when considering that sovereigns ultimately depend on opinion, thus obliquely condemning James II (Maistre 1980 [1821], 2:i, 3).35
But these are just cosmetic differences between the two sides of Burke’s posterity. Both are equally concerned with the function of time, which further blurs customary distinctions.36 When at Trinity College Dublin, Burke had been brought up in a cultural environment steeped in Thomism (Canavan 1960, 198–211). This agreed with the ancient constitution but, against such intellectual stability, there came with the French Revolution more dramatic, providentialist outlooks, whereby God directly intervened in the conduct of human affairs. Burke was not immune to such views, exaggerated as they were by Leo Strauss, but they were equally shared by the liberals and Maistre. One need only remember Chateaubriand’s apocalyptic pronouncement, in the face of rising socialism, that he will ‘boldly descend, with the crucifix in my hand, into eternity’.37 Tocqueville described the terrifying advances of the new, democratic despotism (1986 [1835 and 1840], 2: bk.iv, Ch.vi, 431–38), and wondered about
the immoderate, radical, desperate, audacious, nearly insane yet potent and efficacious character of these Revolutionaries [which] is unprecedented, so it seems to me, in the great social agitations of earlier centuries. Whence comes the novel fury? … I can feel where the unknown object lies but, try as I may, I cannot lift the veil that covers it. I can feel it as if through a foreign body which prevents me from either properly handling it or seeing it.38
That ‘unknown object’ challenged his connection between ancien régime and Revolution. While Maistre posited that the Pope should be the ultimate ruler of the world, Tocqueville placed all his hopes in a religious moralization of democracy, with a specific eye on Catholicism (1986 [1835 and 1840], 2: bk.ii, ch.xv, 200, and bk.i, Ch.vi, 48–49). The arch-Catholic Bonald, the agnostic Maurras, even Burke would not have dissented. The usual distinctions between liberals and conservatives lose much of their significance, but one has an inkling of the far more rewarding complexities offered by comparative history.
This is the permanent battle ground of the reception of Burke in France. It is a struggle between liberty and equality (and in this, both counter-revolutionaries and liberals were on the side of liberty, although they did not make it bear on the same objects) which also encompasses an ongoing conversation with Britain and the Whig interpretation of history. Burke’s specificities are those of a privileged country where elements have been felicitously balanced while they were, according to liberals, unbalanced elsewhere.39 Burke had a hand in laying such foundations, and in this he left later thinkers to think things out along the lines of France’s permanent plight. To counter-revolutionaries, Burke’s virtue lay precisely in his not being representative of his country’s political order; to liberals, his faults lay in his being rather too insular. Ultimately, Burke was a seminal inspiration who could be quickly relegated to the background.
Academic research after the Second World War
Those were the great names of a highly conflictual era, but such eras have a knack for perpetuation. The Cold War helped retrieve Burke’s spirit against a new enemy, while leaving aside the precise conditions in which his thinking had come into being: this distorted discussion around the categories of liberalism or conservatism. That influence of the Cold War is not immediately detectable in French authors, but they mention with approval Thomistic Anglophone sources related to neo-conservatism. This is apparent in the eulogistic conservative reading of Michel Villey, whose polemical accents suggest that Burke was in fact far more cognizant of the rights of men than the revolutionaries of his and later times (1976, 130–33). This was largely owing to his updating ‘the doctrine of natural right’ and fitting it ‘to our own modern world’ (1976, 137). American neo-conservatism incurred Conor Cruise O’Brien’ displeasure.40 Subsequently, in France, Michel Fuchs’s initial irritation with Burke (1988) evolved into an attack on neo-conservatism from which he sought to salvage Burke’s reputation (1996). In earlier decades, things were perhaps less polemical. The Reflections was ‘a wonderful arsenal of weapons for all the enemies of the Spirit of the time ‒ the ahistorical, abstract, rationalistic and individualistic spirit of the time’.41 Thirty years later, Jean-Jacques Chevallier’s Burke was no ‘philosopher of History’ as against Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte or Hegel, but the founder of historicism (1993 [1979], 658). But these are mostly descriptive contributions, as is Ganzin’s hefty PhD dissertation, a scholarly account which highlights Burke’s originality, thereby exempting him from traditional French interrogations. Burke has a degree of respectability since he is not entirely conservative, let alone reactionary. While he does not mention J. L. Talmon, Ganzin regards Rousseau as the origin of ‘totalitarian democracy’ while Burke is the ‘precocious eulogist of modern parliamentarianism’: ‘With him a world dies, the eighteenth century; another one is born, the nineteenth century’.42 Clearly, this is so neat as to be simplistic.
François Crouzet, shrewdly noting that William Pitt was not so much of an ideological crusader as Burke, and that Burke’s crusade was against the Revolution, not France herself (1975/1985, 232), acknowledged something that pertains to the very title of Reflections. A few years before, he had also placed Burke among ‘the theological school of the counter-Revolution, though in the Protestant branch, with … Mallet du Pan’ and that other Genevan, Sir Francis d’Ivernois (1962/85, 522n). While Crouzet also identified Burke’s role in turning most of the Whigs to Pitt after 1792 (1975/85, 227), his focus is clearly not on Burke. Yet in these few remarks he is sure-footed and, in any case, displays little of the polemical tone which the title of his substantial collection of articles about France and England might lead readers to expect (De la supériorité de l’Angleterre sur la France: L’économique et l’imaginaire XVIIe-XXe siècle). Whatever English superiority there may have been, this is consistently balanced by careful scrutiny of the French attempt to catch up, until the Revolution and Napoleonic era put paid to this effort. Burke would not have disagreed.
Crouzet’s collection raised a few suspicious eyebrows since his assessment, largely deriving from cliometrics, challenged home-grown views opposed to the ancien régime. Here one senses something of the atmosphere surrounding the run-up to the bicentenary of the French Revolution, which was principally marked by a return to the Enlightenment for inspiration. This goes together with indictment of Burke, since his alleged irrationalism supposedly treads the dangerous path leading to German historicism and its twentieth-century continuations. Blandine Barret-Kriegel does not exactly make the connection, but she notes that Burke moves away from the Common Law and ‘the legislator’s will’ and transforms the contract into a ‘doctrine of alliance’: ‘a double alliance with God and history’. In this the nation takes precedence over the State.43 Barret-Kriegel’s book was republished in 1989, together with a later one in which her study of Burke’s ‘historicism’ immediately precedes an attack on Fichte, Brentano and Achim von Arnim’s segregation of Jews, and their Nazi-inspiring precedence of the rights of Germany over those of men (1989 [1987], 12–13). Although Burke is not bracketed with such later developments, there is more than a faint sense of implication by assimilation.44
Such readings have not displaced older debates about whether Burke was a liberal or a conservative. René Rémond has identified three nineteenth-century rights – Legitimist, Orleanist and Bonapartist – with their twentieth-century continuations as extreme-right, Giscardism and Gaullism. Rémond says little about Burke, merely noting that he was one of those eminent non-French ultra-royalists (which is pretty questionable) and pointing to his influence on French ultras who could not understand why different countries should have the same political institutions (1982, 52, 55). But if this is so, what about a few names who generally come under the liberal banner? For Pierre-François Moreau, Montesquieu and Tocqueville were so attached to the local and historical, as against natural rights theories, that they were closer to Burke than to liberalism (1978, 16). Some of these points must be taken with a pinch of salt, since Moreau leaves out Strauss’s momentous distinction between classic and modern natural right (Strauss 1971 [1953]), but he places Burke at the heart of a specific tradition that cannot be termed liberal. Had Moreau addressed Tocqueville, much new light could have been shed on Tocqueville’s flippant dismissal of Burke, and the ongoing opposition of the two thinkers could have been fruitfully revisited. Stéphane Rials and Philippe Bénéton, a few years later and apparently without heeding Moreau, were rather more hesitant respecting Burke’s position.
Rials argues that Rémond’s glaring shortcuts originate in ‘a confusion between the right and the centres of the nineteenth century’ and an obsession with ‘building up filiations between those ancient trends and today’s tendencies’.45 He also insists that the counter-revolution, embodied in légitimisme as sole real right, posits that ‘man cannot constitute’ society (Rials 1985/87, 58–59), and thence constructs a challengeable interpretation of the real essence of the counter-revolution:
In Burke, there was still room for a contract understood in a particular way. But not with Bonald who wished to break radically with the revolutionary principle whereby society is a voluntary, even artificial, authority … It is in Joseph de Maistre, a subject of the king of Savoie, that one finds, ultimately, the most coherent critique of revolutionary constitutionalism. The after-effects of modern thinking are, naturally enough, present in his writing, but they are, in many ways, not so prevalent as in Burke, the Whig, or the systematic thinker, Bonald. Never would Maistre have suggested that the sole ‘constituted’ government was the monarchy …46
In short, Burke is a poor relation of the counter-revolutionary family, because Rials does not really differentiate between the Burkean contract and revolutionary varieties of contract theory. Rials’s conception of providentialism and his rejection of human will ultimately tell us less about the intricacies of the counter-revolution than they do about specific issues in the 1980s. In fact, his genuine political right evokes the spontaneous order of free-market doctrines, as in F. A. Hayek (Rials 1985/87, 62–68) or, before him, Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’. This is not out of place in the light of Burke’s Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795) or certain remarks by Maistre:47 free trade and a minimal State have indeed contributed something to counter-revolutionary thinking. But, writing in the 1980s, when the Chicago school of economics was becoming influential in France, Rials may well have fallen prey to another, though antagonistic, version of the extended history for which he criticized Rémond.
Not long after Rials, Bénéton offered another typology that differed both from Rémond’s three rights and Rials’s sole genuine right. Of Bénéton’s two branches of conservatism, one goes as far back as Aristotle and Aquinas and springs to life with the refutation of the French Revolution by Burke, Maistre and Bonald (Bénéton 1988, 45–49). The other branch is that of the liberals but, in some variation on Rials’s exclusions, they are conservatives by default. Tellingly enough, as if to highlight the inherent difficulties in such typologies, another study by Bénéton in the preceding year gave pride of place to the liberalism of Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Élie Halévy and Raymond Aron in an identification of ‘the joint renewal of political philosophy and a classic, or neo-classic, problematic in political science’.48 Just as tellingly, those counter-revolutionaries under scrutiny in Le conservatisme went unmentioned, except for Burke and his respect for English and American liberties (Bénéton 1987, 168). Accordingly, there existed a modern means of challenging the modernity of those regimes that, in their very nature, reject counter-revolutionary theories. The year after, perhaps having realized that there were problems with his suggestion, Bénéton introduced a distinction between Burke and Tocqueville. The latter
shares many preoccupations with the author of Reflections (from whom he has probably borrowed much, though he seldom quotes him). Tocqueville fears that modern principles, those of liberalism, may be the ferment of anarchy or despotism, he is worried by the erosion of natural aristocracies, those of virtue and ability, and by the decline in the standard of morals and manners but, unlike Burke, he accepts the legitimacy of those principles whose dynamics he fears. If Burke is a liberal conservative, Tocqueville is a conservative liberal.49
Bénéton then silently excludes French liberalism from conservatism, and concentrates on a definition of a genuine conservatism proceeding from the ‘counter-revolutionary moment’. It includes ‘three fundamental critiques that conservative thinking will permanently level at modernity’. The first is ‘an epistemological critique: a just reason is exterior to the individual’ and depends on providence and ‘earlier centuries’; the second is ‘a political critique: a just power is exterior to individuals’, and ignorance of transcendence ‘paves the way for anarchy and/or despotism’; the third is ‘a sociological critique: a good society is no aggregation of individuals but a lively, orderly society’.50 Additionally, one has a ‘reaction against the universalist pretensions of revolutionary thinking’, together with attachment to ‘particularities’ and a ‘reaction against the rationalistic pretensions of revolutionary thinking’.51 This so neatly matches Burke’s views that one wonders about the relevance of Bénéton’s terse distinguo between Burke and Tocqueville: Burke could have been simply pronounced conservative. This shows how difficult it is to fit the square peg of Burke’s practical philosophy to the round hole of academic definitions, and more or less contemporary productions testify to much the same concerns, although it is from a decidedly liberal angle that Burke is assessed, praised and eventually dismissed.
Those were the years accompanying the bicentenary celebrations. In François Furet’s view Burke created a lasting divide within European history, with England and France as ‘antagonistic, irreconcilable figures’ (1986, 57). He also drew from Tocqueville in order to pinpoint Burke’s originality, since Tocqueville’s identification of the French Revolution’s universalism is what Burke regards as the lie of the Revolution from as early as September 1789, when the monarchiens were defeated (Furet 1986, 60–61).52 Furet’s article is an articulate rendering of Burke’s tenets. Its distinctive observation is that, according to Burke, time ‘is not simply cumulative’ but also offers ‘instances of a sudden dissolution of age-old achievements’; in this, Burke’s ‘traditionalism’, with its awareness that time is what men make of it, differs from nineteenth-century historicism.53 However, the final paragraphs are largely indebted to Rémusat’s reproaches and Furet, who admits that French liberals may not have been so alien to Burke as counter-revolutionaries were, concludes that ‘two hundred years after Reflections, it seems to me that today’s democracy goes on feeding from the two traditions that he contrasted, though it has never managed to reunite them’.54 Those ‘two traditions’ are ‘the English liberal tradition’ as against ‘the legacy of 1789’ illustrated by ‘Benjamin Constant, Mme de Staël and Guizot’ (Furet 1986, 66). Furet’s Burke, clearly separated from the comparatively sterile counter-revolution, is our contemporary because his intervention in the French arena has forever made a common European history impossible. This makes Burke a maverick liberal exposing all that, in the liberal tradition, regards universalism as unavoidable in spite of its accompanying havoc. What ultimately differentiates Rémusat and Furet is that the latter’s perception of Burke stresses the stimulating gadfly, not his alleged impasses.
In 1988, Bernard Cottret’s La Glorieuse Révolution d’Angleterre: 1688 was both a contribution to the tercentenary of the Glorious Revolution and, more indirectly, the bicentenary of the French Revolution. Accordingly, it gave Burke pride of place, since Cottret sensed that Richard Price, far from pointing to the hallowed events of the Glorious Revolution, was in fact enthusing about the execution of Charles I. Accordingly, regicide might always follow whenever revolutions did not abide by the moderate settlement of 1688 (Cottret 22).55 Burke retained the historicism that is apparent in Locke’s preface to the Two Treatises of Government, though obviously he left out Locke’s central ‘theory of natural right’ (Cottret 2013 [1988], 206, 222). This echoes an earlier book in which Burke’s analysis of the Glorious Revolution closely reflected the ‘conservative’, even ‘oligarchic’ turn given to the Glorious Revolution in opposition to Locke’s views (Cottret and Martinet 1987, 17). The originality of Burke’s attitude to political parties is stressed since he was the first to ‘defend their existence on principle’ (Cottret and Martinet 1987, 76), insisting on their reconciliation of ‘national’ and ‘particular’ interests (Cottret 1992b, 191), and Present Discontents was Burke’s exorcism of Bolingbroke’s ghost (Cottret 1992b, 496).
Philippe Raynaud’s contribution to Stéphane Rials’s La déclaration de 1789 is a classic account of what induced Burke, relying on the principles of 1688–89, to indict the French declaration of the rights of man. It accepts Leo Strauss’s view that Burke differed from ‘the classic tradition’, and identifies Burke as both a counter-revolutionary and a liberal who was ultimately entangled in his conservative reading of the Glorious Revolution: the latter, as he refused to accept, was an act of Parliamentary sovereignty. This was Burke’s limit, since the rationality of his history came short of that universality later noted by Hegel and based on the ‘abstraction of the rights of man – and their declaration’ (1988, 158–59, Raynaud’s emphasis, here and elsewhere).
The year after, Raynaud produced an introduction to Reflections in which he aptly identified the ironical purpose of Vindication of Natural Society (1756, 1757). There, Burke attacked English radicalism and upheld a Christian and aristocratic order, but Raynaud regarded the whole as supportive of a nascent ‘liberal English society’, which is rather more debatable (1989, xvi–xix). In the tradition of Strauss, Raynaud also viewed the Enquiry as an instance of irrationalism (1989, xixn.). But he sensed that Burke’s so-called liberal moves were based, as in the American case, on ‘the continuity of English history’ (1989, xxi) and that he consistently opposed ‘the ideal of a complete rationalization of politics, or the belief in a universal right to participate in public affairs’.56 Raynaud also gives a learned account of the main strands of Reflections and occasionally reflects on related subjects, such as the monarchiens whose ‘project’ was ‘infinitely more “voluntaristic”’ than Burke’s (1989, lv). Then he launches into a typology of Burke’s ‘divided posterity’, listing readings from neo-conservatism and its French disciples like Michel Villey (1989, lvi–lvii), the radically anti-constructivist tradition of Friedrich Hayek (1989, lvii–lviii) and Hannah Arendt’s phenomenology (1989, lix–lx). His Burke is much more than just a politician with a philosophical background.57 He focuses on Aristotelianism and late Thomism to explain Burke’s views on the rights of man and mentions Burkean economics, but suggests that Burke was a conservative, not a reactionary, rather than locate Burke between liberalism and conservatism (1989, lxxiii–lxxiv). He also addresses ‘the unity of Burke’s œuvre’ (1989, lxxviii–lxxxii), the controversy with Paine, German criticism of the Enlightenment (though without any disturbing insinuations) and returns to the old debate about conservatism and liberalism, finally deciding that no ‘satisfactory position’ can be founded on Burke – though the same can be said of Hegel and Tocqueville. Yet the latter two were keenly aware of the ‘truth’ of the foundation of democracies on equality and autonomous individuals (1989, civ). Burke deserves reading because of his perception of ‘human finitude’ (1989, cv), but Raynaud’s teleological outlook pronounces him wrong in the name of some form or other of liberalism, since there was, after all, so little of modernity about him. Raynaud’s articulate liberal French reading ultimately comes with an air of dismissive authority supported by the return of Enlightenment thinking in French academia.
Burke’s Reflections and Paine’s Rights of Man were on the Agrégation syllabus in 1988–9, and against this background Michel Fuchs and Jacques Sys published contributions in BSÉAA XVII–XVIII, both in 1988.58 Refusing to limit Burke to utilitarianism, Sys argues that Burke allies theory and practice and that the two combine in ‘the construction of human nature (both in a theological and teleological sense)’.59 Accordingly, History is two-fold, partly ‘horizontal’ and local, partly ‘vertical’; ‘nature and super-nature, necessity and grace’ are thus indissolubly related.60 With this Aristotelian Burke, ‘the state of nature’ is a ‘state of society’ where ‘man is closest to his archetype, closest to human nature’ conceived as ‘animal rationale’.61 A few years later, Sys’s ‘Edmund Burke ou le goût de l’horreur’ was heavily indebted, beyond the Reflections itself, to the Enquiry, and more precisely to its considerations about darkness, awe and deformity that provide so much of the imagery, even bestiary, in A Letter to a Noble Lord (1796) and Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796–7). Sys addresses Burke’s uneasiness with analogy, since ‘the moral laws that preside over the future of those moral ensembles, nations, are always unknown to us’ while those governing ‘the laws of physical nature’ are more accessible to us.62 This is a ‘Kantian’ Burke, one that is marked by ‘theological rationalism’, but there is another Burke closer to the darker aspects of Christianity, including a vengeful God. Faced with the possibility that current evil should become good, that ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘eschatological’ thinker is fascinated with the ‘positivity of negativity’ (1991, 99). In a word, his pessimism is closer to ‘the Jewish apocalyptic tradition’, even to the ‘dualism’ of the early stages of ‘the theology of Judeo-Christianity’, than to ‘the Christian optimism’ in Saint John’s Revelation (1991, 100–01).
Gengembre’s topical, and at times partisan, book considers that Burke acknowledged no other rights of man than mere biological needs (1989, 27).63 To Gengembre, Reflections has ultimately little of the supernatural element that is so apparent in Maistre, given Burke’s attachment ‘to a human history’ (1989, 33). This is sound enough, even though Gengembre leaves out later texts like Thoughts on French Affairs, with Burke’s acute perception of God’s intervention displacing ancient beliefs. But there are more debatable perspectives, such as when Gengembre, commenting on Burke’s claim that ‘our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world’ (Burke 1969/82 [1790], 120), wonders whether this borders on theocracy, concluding in the negative since ‘the English model cannot be exported’ (1989, 54, also 196). The connection is tenuous indeed. Gengembre also considers that Church and State are not in a relation of interdependence in Burke, which is dubious.64 More convincing is his comment that
the Burkean God permits the social contract and a consensual legislation since the latter refers to his supreme law. It is the God of classic natural right, where authority, the course of History and a problematic of progress combine. Half-way between divine right and secularization, Burke’s position presents itself as a kind of compromise.65
Reflections is also indebted to the ‘troubadour genre’ with its importance of chivalry as a metaphor of the contract between ‘the visible and invisible world’ and as ‘continuity’ (1989, 234). This is a Romantic reading of Burke, but Gengembre is closer to the point when noting how Burke’s denunciation of the ‘monied interest’ shows him at his most Tory, not Whig, indicting ‘a mafia of speculators’ that has seized power (1989, 270). All in all, the book contains perceptive insights but hovers between academic research and underlying political resentment that tries both to connect the counter-revolution with, and disconnect it from ongoing events in France in the late nineteen eighties. Burke emerges relatively unscathed.
Far different from Gengembre’s study are a handful of articles by Franck Lessay published in the same year. These provide an alternative to some points made by Raynaud relating to Burke on reason. Lessay addresses Burke’s alleged anti-rationalism (1989a, 68) and acknowledges that Burke’s was a ‘prudential empiricism with a conservative turn’ and marked ‘theological presuppositions’ which are a limit to the importance of history, not to mention historicism, in Burke (1989a, 73). To put it differently, the nation is indeed a ‘rock’ that breaks ‘abstract political typologies’, but societies are also ‘metahistorical’ and Burke’s background is ultimately Augustinian (1989a, 76). This matches the conservatism of eighteenth-century Whiggism, but the latter is modified by contract theory with its claims for reason (1989a, 78, 79). Such reason is obviously not the same as the one celebrated in Paris in 1793, but it cannot be ignored (Lessay 1989a, 82). Though Lessay does not mention Strauss, his analyses are a useful corrective to some of the shaky points in Natural Right and History. ‘Penser la révolution anglaise’, a transparent allusion to Furet’s Penser la Révolution française, largely focuses on An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, specifically Burke’s quotations from the Sacheverell trial, and insists that the Whig managers’ declarations were hardly different from what Tories, ‘barring the Jacobites of the conservative trend of the time’, could have put across; in other words, Locke had disappeared altogether (1989b, 588). In this, Burke’s social contract was clearly a conservative one, which enabled him to turn to ‘myth’ rather than ‘history’ respecting the ancient constitution (1989b, 589–90). Similar considerations emerge from ‘Du bon usage du contrat social’, where Lessay avers that ‘society itself, through its existence and duration, is a contract’ (1993, 116). Burke’s specific view, with its theological anchorage, does not connect with ‘the contract of classic theory’ (1993, 117).66 Lessay then engages on a scholarly discussion of Hobbes, Filmer, Locke and Rousseau and the managers of Sacheverell’s trial the better to return to Burke, and also Paine, in order to conclude that Kant’s view of the contract as distinct from a historical fact, with, however, its ‘indubitable (practical) reality’, could have been shared by Burke and Paine:
that “indubitable practical reality” … was incorporated in their respective doctrines on the constitution. That it should have received a different formulation from that of contractarian philosophy signified the end of an epoch. But that its trace remained more than present demonstrates that the positivity of the concept had not been exhausted.67
Lessay also published ‘La raison dans le droit: Philosophie et Common Law selon Blackstone’, where Burke’s presence is rather less detectable than in his earlier articles although he builds on Blackstone’s account of the social contract by making it a synonym of society and relating it to ‘eternal society’ (1994, 214).68
A monumental La Révolution française highlights Burke’s practical influence on, for instance, the Quiberon expedition in 1795 (Meyer and Corvisier 1991, 1: 654) and, more generally, the accuracy of his views on French bellicosity in the face of Pitt’s initial pacifism (Meyer and Poussou 1991, 2:866, 1276). It also draws attention to Burke’s awareness of the Parisian assertion of central control counteracting the ‘extreme decentralization’ of the early revolution (Meyer and Poussou 1991, 2:1173). Classically enough, Burke is identified as ‘an archetype of the liberal as well as the conservative’ (Meyer and Poussou 1991, 2: 1253). Later research does not turn its back on the fascination exercised by Burke’s writings on the Revolution. Patrick Thierry insists that Rousseau’s prudential considerations about ‘national character’ in Poland or Corsica might have elicited Burke’s approval, although in Letter to a Member of the National Assembly he chose to focus on Rousseau’s ‘concerted’ action ‘on the economy of passions’ (1994, 131).69 This is an ‘Arendtian’ Burke whose biased portrait of Rousseau is in fact already evocative of Robespierre’s hypocritical sincerity and sentimentalism (1994, 134). Pascal Dupuy pinpoints some limits in Burke’s knowledge of revolutionary developments, since he was not really aware of the federalists and viewed the Jacobins as just some indistinct group, shattered by ‘the violent jolts of the same incarnate ideology’ – implicity, that of Robespierre (1995, 334–35). As for Pierre Besses’s ‘Edmund Burke, prophète de la Terreur’, it gives a thorough account of Gengembre’s book before launching into a detailed study of Letter to a Member of the National Assembly with a specific focus on Burke’s quarrel with the monarchiens, concluding that Burke’s England was characterized by a repressive law rather than by army or police repression. All in all, Burke’s prophecies are just the wishful thinking of one who lamented the contribution of Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse to the ruin of the nobility.70 Antoine Capet’s emphasis is on the elitism that colours the British outlook on monarchy, bringing together Burke, Walter Bagehot and Stanley Baldwin and stressing the evolution of the elite, from Burke’s ‘natural aristocracy’ (Burke 1996, 156) to Bagehot’s plutocracy and Baldwin’s insistence on governmental responsibility matched by the need for the people to ‘be worthy of good governors’ (Capet 1995, 9–21). More recently, Antoine Compagnon’s Burke provides a backdrop for an exploration of those French-speakers who may be more or less related to him, but little of substance can be gleaned about Burke himself (2005, 24, 51, 52, 53, 69). In a nutshell, Burke is mostly envisaged as a proto-‘anti-modern’, which is convincing enough, but the asperities of his thinking are rather watered down and much seems to derive from what is least convincing in Strauss.
Burke’s Irishness
The variety of French approaches to Burke in recent decades testifies to a rather clear predominance of more or less liberal outlooks, countered by the influence of J. C. D. Clark’s studies of politics and religion. Although no clear trend emerges, it is notable that those authors who come under the anglicist tag – among them Bernard Cottret, Franck Lessay, Michel Fuchs, François Piquet, Jacques Sys and Antoine Capet – have mainly shunned the time-honoured enquiries into Burke’s liberalism or conservatism, a question that, conversely, is generally addressed by their colleagues in history, philosophy or politics departments. Unsurprisingly, French anglicists are far more akin to their counterparts on the other side of the Channel, or Atlantic: a fuller comprehension of the forms and meanings of Whiggism makes it somewhat irrelevant to wonder about Burke’s place in the formation of home-grown French views. Therefore, it would be rather pointless to decide whether Burke’s views on the slave trade are illustrative of his liberalism or conservatism.71 As for interest in Burke’s ‘Irishness’, a salient feature of French academia at the moment, it may lead to just as dangerous a dead end.
Burke posed as ‘an Englishman’ (Burke 1996 [1791], 20), but his contemporaries had their jibes at the ready.72 Ironically enough, they foreshadowed the recent polemics about a Hibernian Burke. J. C. D. Clark recently dismissed this discussion as an anachronistic product of ‘Celtic nationalism’ (Burke 2001, 25), quite plausibly hinting at O’Brien’s depiction of Burke as a maverick who, in his permanent uneasiness in Britain, obliquely vented an Irishman’s frustration in his counter-revolutionary writings (Burke 1969/82, 37). Then came, though not from an Irish vantage point in spite of similar conclusions, Isaac Kramnick’s Burke as a bourgeois ‘radical’ pandering to an aristocracy to which he was a defiant servant.73 O’Brien’s introduction was followed by a more sustained exploration of Ireland as the heart of Burke’s thinking.74 François Piquet highlights Burke’s ‘quasi blasphemous’ treatment of Henry VIII in Letter to a Noble Lord (1993, 5) and, after O’Brien, the relevance of Ireland and Jacobitism to a proper understanding of Burke’s complexities (Piquet 1993, 6). Burke is aware that talent should be given its due but might, ‘after too long humiliation’, ‘question the fragile edifice of 1688’ (Piquet 1993, 8): Piquet does not mention Kramnick, but this captures the gist of the latter’s book although there are no psychoanalytical quagmires. At about the same time, Fuchs’s analysis of Burke’s positions on America included an account of Ireland’s specificity in Burke’s eyes; there, emancipation can only be achieved ‘progressively and in agreement with England’ (1992, 110).75
However, there is much more in Fuchs, whose vision of Burke as a man of the Enlightenment would never have been endorsed by O’Brien despite his opposition to neo-conservatism.76 One intriguingly elliptical passage in Fuchs might suffice as an illustration. Quoting Burke’s savage outburst, in Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792), that ‘a man is certainly the most perfect Protestant who protests against the whole Christian religion’ (Burke 1907–10, 3: 313), he comments: ‘Such ideas obviously imply a rationalistic mind tending to reduce religion to its psycho-sociological aspects. They might seem to have been lifted from Bossuet, without the faith’ (Fuchs 1996, 79–80). Just as unfortunately, Fuchs, who in some respects follows O’Brien, in fact relegates him to the background, considering that in The Great Melody, O’Brien exaggerated Richard Burke’s – Edmund’s father – conversion to the Church of Ireland in order ‘to follow his profession’ as attorney (1996, 17 and n.). He also makes a mere passing reference to O’Brien’s views on Burke’s intricate religious views in his introduction to Reflections (Fuchs 1996, 19n.). Yet Fuchs’s is a most challenging book whose discussion of the important debates of the time – political, religious, aesthetic, even humanitarian – consistently connects Ireland and the Enquiry. However, there is another disquieting passage:
Ireland, as a principle of explanation, accounts naturally for Burke’s rationalist belief, for his reforming passion, and supplies a key to his “inconsistencies”. It may not be a pattern after which to fashion oneself but it is a far more powerful influence than Thomas Aquinas, Cicero and sundry other fathers of culture who are sometimes said to have given shape, form and substance to Burke’s personality. Ireland’s is a tortured culture, a powerful matrix of character, a shaping factor that has the ability to blend the most heterogeneous elements into a more or less coherent whole which has the coherence of an enduring passion. (Fuchs 1996, 308–09)
By then the book is nearing its end, and Fuchs downplays all that he also says, not on Aquinas himself – whose influence he dismisses as it ties up with those supposedly unsuccessful disciples of Strauss, namely Peter Stanlis and Russell Kirk (1996, 284) – or Aristotle, not regarded as a highly illuminating source of Enquiry (1996, 149), but on Cicero. Indeed, he refers to Philip Francis’s Letter missive to Holland of June 1812 in which Francis writes that Burke viewed Cicero as ‘the model, on which he laboured to form his own character, in eloquence, in policy, in ethics and in philosophy’.77 Fuchs mentions Juvenal on ‘Roman gluttony depriving the provinces of the necessaries of life’, associating that view with Burke’s remark on ‘the appetite of England resulting in the greatest misery for the greatest number in Ireland’ (1996, 34). He points to the influence of Horace, Virgil, Milton and Pope on Burke’s juvenile poetry (1996, 49). Accordingly, his concluding identification of Ireland as a matrix may not do full justice to the ‘most heterogeneous elements’ also alluded to. Yet there are perceptive passages on Burke’s indebtedness to Swift whom he discovered at Trinity College Dublin (1996, 34); his being ‘the strange result of cross-breeding between Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, becoming a Gulliver, fascinated by the former while being full of compassion for the latter’, always trying ‘to reconcile the English Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos of all types, Irish, American or Indian’ (1996, 39); his Houyhnhnm-like ‘sense of literary conventions and his admiration for a thought well expressed’ while being ‘a Yahoo to the core’ (1996, 59)78 and, finally, the influence of Swift on Vindication of Natural Society. But Burke, Fuchs adds, reaches beyond Swift since ‘instead of a satire in a closed circuit, self-satisfied with its own hackneyed moral commonplaces, Burke … offers us an open-structured satire in the manner of Mandeville where the message never takes definitive form’ (1996, 145–46).79 Fuchs also avers that:
rejected or suspected by the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms, Burke, the Irish Gulliver, did not sink into the madness of his English forebear, he simply recognised that his task was impossible, because the self-interest of England was the only standard of English policy. (1996, 303)
But, unlike O’Brien, Fuchs never pauses to wonder whether Burke was exactly the same kind of Irishman as, for instance, Jonathan Swift, of the Church of Ireland (Burke 1969/82 [1790], 41n.). This may be because his Enlightenment Burke is separated from the Catholic substratum that O’Brien unearthed; Fuchs’s is a Romantic perception which Burke would hardly have endorsed. Fuchs also follows O’Brien, without naming him, on the French Revolution, before drifting into rather more challengeable considerations:
This latter event enabled [Burke] to give free rein to the ‘repressed’ feelings about Ireland that slumbered within him and to sing, for instance, the praise of old Catholic France with impunity to the bemused members of the Revolution Society in London! It also shaped his attacks on the English reformers whom he did not hesitate to reproach with having a selective sympathy, thus anticipating Cobbett’s reaction to the English members of the anti-slavery movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century: you extend your charity abroad only so that you may close your eyes to what takes place in your own country. (1996, 310)
Fuchs’s mention of ‘impunity’ makes short shrift of Burke’s political isolation and the spate of caricatures of him as a Jesuit, not to mention Paine’s insinuations about his crypto-Catholicism, at a time when the Gordon Riots were still a recent feature of political life. As for the Cobbett parallel, it is lame at best, since in 1792 Burke submitted his Sketch of a Negro Code to Henry Dundas. One is just as uneasy about Fuchs’s characterization of what, to him, makes Burke a man of the Enlightenment, as shown by his account of Burke’s objection to George Berkeley’s idealism. To him, the dismissal was owing to Burke’s indebtedness to the sensualist, Locke (Fuchs 1996, 159–60), but Fuchs forgets that Burke’s reliance on the senses in order to establish the reality of the outside world can be just as easily related to Aquinas’s realism, to which, incidentally, Locke too was indebted.80 In short, disconnecting Burke from a classical and Christian environment, in order to throw into relief Ireland’s centrality and Burke’s rationalism, reads rather like a failed undertaking.
Fuchs’s book enjoyed a mixed reception in the English-speaking world.81 The reasons behind the aborted conversation must be left to speculation. Of note is that Gibbons, contrary to Fuchs, identified Burke’s anti-colonialism as ultimately conservative, based as it was on group beliefs and habits and, as such, irreducible to Enlightenment individualism.82 But it is telling that all such postcolonial studies should leave out Burke’s classic anchorage and some significant features of Irishness, including Jacobitism, in his formative years.83 Jacobitism is intriguingly left aside by Fuchs, yet it is much more valuable in shedding light on Ireland than the Enlightenment with which he associates Burke. Was it incompatible with Fuchs’s blend of Marxism and postcolonialism? More thorough French engagement is called for in order to follow on from Fuchs, while leaving out his blind spots.
This must be an uphill battle, when one takes into account Clark’s view of Burke as a typical Whig because Whig Britain was an ancien régime. With this independent return to Rémusat, French interrogations about Burke as conservative or liberal are made irrelevant since they fail to grasp why Burke could instinctively be what he was within a system that was irreducible to French experience. Concepts of a later currency tend to obscure rather than clarify things. But it is telling that Fuchs, who tried not to think along such anachronistic lines, devised other embarrassing perspectives. These, and other dead-ends are still common in the English-speaking world itself. Biographers may argue that Burke remained more or less the same throughout his career, contrary to his critics of the 1790s who regarded him as a turncoat.84 Nonetheless, there remains a vague suggestion that something happened after the American crisis or Pitt’s coming to office,85 even though Burke’s allegedly liberal causes – Ireland, India, the slave trade –went on occupying much of his time when he was also engaged against the French Revolution. As for O’Brien’s one-volume biography, it mapped out dangerous territory, and the rasher Fuchs reduced Burke’s Irishness to sympathy for the oppressed (which obviously cannot be ruled out), ignoring the fact that Burke’s Irishness was also indebted to a ruling power anchored in a classical European heritage.86 Postcolonial approaches need major correctives in order to attain a balanced assessment of Burke that can incorporate the countless complexities which make up Burkean unity. Otherwise, new stumbling blocks will have been merely substituted for unexamined Whig history or Burke’s so-called liberalism. Burke may not have had any real posterity in France, but his reception there is not about to end.
Notes
1‘l’événement climatérique de notre histoire’ (Gengembre 1989, 7).
2See the very title of Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Col (2001, 229–36). My translations throughout of French originals.
3For brief remarks on the latter passage, from Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), see Col (2012a, 98), against Strauss who viewed it as an example of Burke’s historicism (1971 [1953], 317–19).
4On the latter, see Saint Girons (1990; 1998) and Halimi (2008). Burke’s Irishness is addressed via the Enquiry in Fuchs (1996).
5The phrase, ‘les prodiges du sacrilège’ (the prodigies of sacrilege), comes from Burke (1969/1982 [1790], 359).
6The latter’s wife, Louise, née Mather-Flint, translated An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.
7On the French situation, see Burke (1969/1982 [1790], 321–25).
8A new translation of Reflections by Jacques d’Anglejan was published for the Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, related to Action Française, in 1912, but this does not amount to much.
9See Ganzin (1972, 350–412). These pages also include analyses of Maistre.
10See Ganzin (1972, 383, 387) on Taine and Barrès; Savinel (1987, 326) on Barrès. On Burke’s conception of ‘prejudice’, see Burke (1969/82 [1790], 183) and Col (2001, 218–27).
11See Burke’s insistence on ‘a power out of themselves’ (1969/82 [1790], 151). At the most, in Remarks on the Policy of the Allies, he preferred a property-based republic over a ‘Democracie Royale’ that sanctioned disruptions to property (1907–10 [1793], 3:417).
12On toleration of Protestants in a restored monarchy in France, see Burke’s Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1907–10 [1793], 3:444–45); on Reformation and revolution, see Burke’s Thoughts on French Affairs (1907–10 [1791], 3:350–52).
13For Tocqueville’s royalism, see a letter of 1852 to the Comte de Chambord in which he offered fruitless theoretical and practical suggestions for a Restoration of the elder Bourbon branch (Rials 1984/1987).
14See Col (1998a, 92).
15Letter from Maistre to Joseph-Henry Costa, 21 January 1791, in Maistre (1992, 79).
16‘le chef des chrétiens même qui le renient’ (Maistre 1928 [1819], 1:302n.).
17Maistre (1928 [1819], 2:203), quoting from Burke’s speech of 2 March 1790 in the debate on the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts.
18‘Burke, ce défenseur éloquent et sensible des vrais principes de la Constitution monarchique. J’ose croire que quelques-unes de mes pensées, sur ces grands objets, se trouveront à l’unisson de ses méditations profondes, lorsque je me rappelle avec quelle force il défend la religion publique, le pouvoir royal, la succession héréditaire, les distinctions sociales. Ce vertueux étranger venant rompre une lance dans cette joute mémorable de toutes les passions contre tous les principes a rappelé ces chevaliers qui, dans les anciens tournois, accouraient des pays lointains, attirés par le désir de la gloire, et fixaient tous les regards par la force de leurs armes, la fierté de leurs devises et la force de leurs coups. Jamais les principes conservateurs des sociétés n’avaient été attaqués par des moyens aussi profonds qu’ils l’ont été de nos jours, jamais ils n’avaient été défendus avec autant de génie, de connaissance et de courage’ (Bonald 1864 [1796], 441) in Ganzin (1972, 346–47). I use ‘stranger’ instead of ‘foreigner’ in accordance with eighteenth-century usage.
19Rémusat, ‘Burke, sa vie et ses écrits’, Revue des deux mondes, January–February 1853 and March–April 1853, in Raynaud (1989, xcvi).
20‘que ce qu’il a sous les yeux, c’est la révolution qui doit précisément abolir cette ancienne loi commune de l’Europe’ (Tocqueville 1967/86 [1859], Pt.1, Ch.5, 81).
21These references are to my own editorial notes.
22See an extract from Rémusat’s ‘Burke, sa vie et ses écrits’, in Fierro and Liébert’s notes (Burke 1989, 778).
23See, for instance, Maistre’s jibe at Britain for paying with ‘torrents of blood’ (‘des flots de sang’) for the ‘privilege to be the most heavily taxed nation in the world’ (‘privilège d’être la nation la plus imposée de l’univers’): Maistre (1928 [1819], 1:172).
24See Burke (1996 [1791], 86–120).
25See Bonald (1988, 53). That ‘agitation’ was just ‘superficial’ under the monarchy is something of an understatement. See also Maistre (1928 [1819]); for the complex history of the dedication to the Pope, Pius VII, see Maistre (1966 [1819], viii–xxxiv).
26See Bonald on Louis XVI’s unconstitutional responsibility in doubling the Tiers État (1966 [1796], 125–26); see also Burke (1907–10 [1791], 2:550–51).
27‘À d’autres de renouveler les utopies funestes de 1789: s’il faut à tout prix chercher l’inspiration dans l’histoire de notre grande crise, nous préférons aller à 1793. Après tout, un Danton continue un Henri IV, un Louis XI, un Philippe-Auguste, même s’il les continue misérablement, un Roland ou un La Fayette ne put rien que troubler l’État ou le diminuer’ (Maurras 1933, 5:162).
28‘inhérents à la cité des hommes, comme le péché à l’âme des hommes’ (Maurras 1933, 5:87).
29Maurras (1933, 5:87). First published in Action française, 22 June 1915.
30See Col (1998a, 100).
31However, Chapman suggests that the heyday of industrialization might have led Burke to revise his positions (1967, 80).
32‘Un libéral d’une espèce nouvelle’: Tocqueville, letter to Charles Stoffels, 24 July 1836, in Lamberti (1983, 103).
33‘Ce qui n’est pas tolérable dans le rapport des ministres, c’est cette prétention effrontée, à savoir: QUE LE ROI A UN POUVOIR PRÉEXISTANT AUX LOIS. Que signifient alors les constitutions? … Les deux premières libertés, la liberté de la presse et la liberté électorale, étaient radicalement extirpées … par des ordonnances comme au temps du bon plaisir’ (Chateaubriand 1973 [1849], 3:160–61). Article 14 of the Charter granted the king considerable leeway, via regulations and ordinances, to enforce laws and to protect the State. Chateaubriand had been alarmed as early as 1816, in a post-scriptum to La Monarchie selon la Charte: article 14 could be used by ministers to impose their views, thus nullifying the whole of the Charter; see Clément (1987, 154).
34‘suite continentale et française (par la langue) de Burke l’insulaire’ ; ‘un nouveau Burke, mais un Burke rajeuni et transfiguré par un accent mystique’ (Chevallier 1993 [1979], 663).
35James II lacked ‘adroitness’ (Maistre 1989 [1797], 187).
36Col (1998b) also addresses the issue of the social contract: remote traces can be discovered in Bonald and Maurras, while they are far less conspicuous in the liberal camp, though they would have been anticipated there.
37‘je descendrai hardiment, le crucifix à la main, dans l’éternité’ (Chateaubriand 1973 [1849], 3:737).
38‘le caractère immodéré, radical, désespéré, audacieux, presque fou et pourtant puissant et efficace de ces Révolutionnaires-ci n’a pas de précédent, ce me semble, dans les grandes agitations sociales des siècles passés. D’où vient cette rage nouvelle? … Je sens où est l’objet inconnu, mais j’ai beau faire, je ne puis lever le voile qui le couvre. Je le tâte comme à travers un corps étranger qui m’empêche soit de le bien toucher, soit de le voir’, Tocqueville, letter to Louis de Kergorlay, 16 May 1858, in Furet (1978, 256n).
39Confirmation on the counter-revolutionary side is in Maistre’s Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques (n.d. [1814], 246–47).
40See O’Brien’s edition of Burke (1969/82, 56–67).
41‘ce merveilleux arsenal, où devaient puiser leurs armes tous les ennemis de l’Esprit du siècle ‒ de l’anhistorique, abstrait, rationaliste et individualiste esprit du siècle’ (Chevallier 1970 [1949], 156).
42‘démocratie totalitaire’; ‘précoce chantre du parlementarisme moderne’; ‘avec lui un monde meurt, le XVIIIe siècle; un autre naît, le XIXe’ (Ganzin 1972, 419–20).
43‘la volonté du législateur‘; ‘doctrine de l’alliance‘; ‘double alliance avec Dieu et avec l’histoire’ (Barret-Kriegel 1989 [1979], 181).
44Far worse slurs connecting Burke with Herder, ‘Barrès, Maurras and Spengler’, and ‘the various Fascist movements’, even the Holocaust, appear in Sternhell (2006, 253, 558).
45‘une confusion entre la droite et les centres au XIXe siècle’; ‘vouloir établir des filiations entre ces courants anciens et les tendances actuelles’ (Rials and Bluche 1983/87, 41).
46‘Chez Burke, il y avait encore une place pour le contrat entendu d’une façon particulière. Pas chez Bonald qui veut rompre absolument avec le principe révolutionnaire qui tend à faire de la société une instance volontaire et plus encore artificielle … C’est chez Joseph de Maistre, sujet du roi de Savoie, que l’on trouvera, en fin de compte, la critique la plus conséquente du constitutionnalisme révolutionnaire. Chez lui, les séquelles de la pensée moderne, bien qu’elles ne soient naturellement pas inexistantes, sont à bien des égards moindres que chez Burke – le whig – ou Bonald – l’homme de système. Ce n’est pas chez Maistre que l’on verrait avancer l’idée que le seul régime “constitué” est la monarchie …’ (Rials 1987, 16–17). The final remark is a dig at Bonald. Respecting Burke’s particular acceptation of the contract, see Burke (1969/82 [1790], 194–95), and Franck Lessay’s analyses below.
47See Burke (1994 [1795]); Maistre (n.d. [1814], 222–24.
48‘renouveau à la fois de la philosophie politique et de la problématique classique ou néo-classique en science politique’ (Bénéton 1987, 9).
49Tocqueville ‘partage nombre des préoccupations de l’auteur des Réflexions (auquel il a probablement beaucoup emprunté, s’il ne le cite guère). Tocqueville redoute que les principes modernes, ceux du libéralisme, soient le ferment de l’anarchie ou du despotisme, il s’inquiète de l’effacement des aristocraties naturelles, celles de la vertu et des talents, du déclin de la qualité des mœurs et des manières. Mais à la différence de Burke, il admet la légitimité de ces principes dont il redoute la dynamique. Si Burke est un conservateur libéral, Tocqueville est un libéral conservateur’ (Bénéton 1988, 26–27).
50‘trois critiques fondamentales que la pensée conservatrice ne cessera de faire à la modernité’; ‘une critique épistémologique: la raison juste est extérieure à l’individu’; ‘des siècles précédents’; ‘une critique politique: le juste pouvoir est extérieur aux individus’; ‘ouvrir la voie à l’anarchie ou/et au despotisme’; ‘une critique sociologique: la bonne société n’est pas un simple agrégat d’individus, elle est une communauté vivante et ordonnée’ (Bénéton 1988, 46–47).
51‘réaction contre la prétention universaliste de la pensée révolutionnaire’; ‘particularités’; ‘réaction contre la prétention rationaliste de la pensée révolutionnaire’ (Bénéton 1988, 48–49). Bonald alone is unconcerned with particularities given his ‘theologico-sociological universalism’ (‘universalisme théologico-sociologique’): (Bénéton 1988, 48).
52Furet does not mention the later fracture between Burke and the monarchiens.
53‘n’est pas tout uniment cumulatif’; ‘des exemples de dissolution subite de l’œuvre des siècles’ (Furet 1986, 64–65).
54‘Deux cents ans après les Réflexions, il me semble que la démocratie contemporaine continue à se nourrir aux deux sources qu’il a opposées, sans jamais être parvenue à les réunir’ (Furet 1986, 66).
55Regicide as permanent revolutionary potential also appears in Cottret (1992a, 114).
56‘l’idéal d’une rationalisation complète de la politique, ou … l’idée d’un droit universel à la participation aux affaires publiques’ (Raynaud 1989, xxii).
57Raynaud does say that ‘[m]ore than a philosopher, Burke is a politician’ (1989, xix), but the drift of his introduction conflicts with this statement.
58Fuchs will be mentioned elsewhere. One can also cite Sys (1987) and Halimi (1989).
59‘la construction de la nature humaine (au double sens théologique et téléologique’ Sys (1988, 69).
60‘nature et surnature, nécessité et grâce’ Sys (1988, 76).
61‘l’homme est au plus près de son archétype, au plus près de la nature humaine’: Sys (1988, 82). See Burke (1996 [1791], 156).
62‘les lois qui président au devenir des ensembles moraux que sont les nations nous sont toujours inconnues’: Sys (1991, 98). This refers to Burke (1907–10 [1796–97], 5:153).
63The book bears the marks of the rise of Front National, though it acknowledges that the counter-revolution ‘is in no manner pre-Fascist’ (323), and indicts Pope John Paul II’s positions on Eastern Europe and South America (331 n.13).
64See Burke (1969/82 [1790], 190, 198).
65‘Le Dieu burkéen autorise le contrat social, et permet une législation consensuelle, puisque rapportée à sa loi suprême. Il s’agit d’un Dieu du droit naturel classique, où se combinent autorité, sens de l’Histoire et problématique du progrès. À mi-chemin du droit divin et de la laïcisation, la position burkéenne se donne comme une sorte de compromis’ (Gengembre 1989, 122–23).
66Paine ‘paradoxically … reaches the same conclusion as Burke: the social contract is the specific constitution of a given country’: ‘paradoxalement, Paine en arrive à la même conclusion que Burke: le contrat social, c’est la constitution propre à un pays donné’ (Lessay 1993, 118).
67‘Cette “réalité pratique indubitable” … était incorporée à leurs doctrines respectives de la constitution. Le fait qu’elle y reçût une formulation différente de celle de la philosophie contractualiste marquait la fin d’une époque. Que sa trace y fût, cependant, mieux que présente manifestait que la positivité du concept n’était pas épuisée’ (1993, 128).
68See Burke (1969/82 [1790], 195).
69The title of Thierry’s article, ‘Le Socrate malsain de l’Assemblée nationale’, is a faulty translation of Burke’s ‘the insane Socrates of the National Assembly’. There is a better translation (‘Socrate dérangé’) on p. 133, since ‘malsain’ means ‘unwholesome’. Thierry misses all that is stiflingly programmatic in Rousseau’s views of ‘national character’.
70Cf. Besses (1997, 13–27) and Émile V. Telle (1991).
71See Col (2009b).
72See, for instance, O’Brien in Burke (1969/82, 23–24).
73See Kramnick (1977). This Marxist-cum-psychoanalytical interpretation bewildered one of its most sympathetic French readers: ‘Kramnick attributes to Burke a multifarious repressed unconscious (homosexual, sadistic, masochistic: why stop short of all the other fascinating possibilities?), but these are sheer hypotheses: see his The Rage of Edmund Burke, an otherwise extremely intelligent book’ (Fuchs 1996, 266n.).
74See O’Brien (1992).
75On Burke and Ireland, see also Le Gros (1993).
76See O’Brien’s reading of the Vindication of Natural Society in the light of a combination of anti-Enlightenment and Irish Catholic preoccupations (1992, 448–51).
77Philip Francis, Letter missive to Lord Holland, June 1812 (London, 1816), in Fuchs (1996, 33–34).
78O’Brien’s Burke, tellingly enough, was writing ‘in the persona of an Englishman – which is in itself a cause of confusion’ since he was ‘in fact Irish to the marrow of his bones’ (Burke 1969/1982, 41).
79Whether there was something ‘hackneyed’ in Swiftian satire is best left to Fuchs’s discretion.
80For Fuchs, Burke could not have afforded to attack Berkeley because it ‘would have drawn upon him the anathema of Christian orthodoxy’. James Beattie had done so ‘in the name of a robust Christian commonsense with no qualms about using the reduction ad absurdum’, but he was not Irish nor ‘young and vulnerable’. Conversely, Burke used ‘the established discoveries of science in his time’ and an oblique method: ‘He could thus confront Berkeley while avoiding the critical point at which orthodoxy would have been lying in wait for him’ (1996, 160–61). That Berkeley was an exemplar of orthodoxy, which Fuchs seems to doubt given his remark about Beattie, is another issue, and the points lack total clarity.
81Clark does not mention Fuchs. Gibbons has a few favourable comments – see Gibbons (2003, 7, 241, 264, 78) – but Deane merely refers to Fuchs in a note on Burke’s Irish background (2005, 185).
82Fuchs’s book came too early to benefit from Clark’s observation that the expressions ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘the Age of Enlightenment’ appeared in the late nineteenth century only (2000, 9 and note). Gibbons uses the customary shortcuts, though he does not yield to their most glaring anachronisms.
83Gibbons alone focuses on the relevance of Burke’s maternal Jacobitism, which brings him close to O’Brien’s Great Melody, adding Lord Lovat’s execution in 1747 as a key to the Enquiry; see Gibbons (2003, 25) and Enquiry, i, xv, 93–94.
84Fuchs (1988) was still more or less espousing Painean views. His book of 1996, based on the centrality of Ireland, offers a far more unified perspective on Burke.
85See the divisions within Cone (1957, 1964) and Lock’s two-volume biographies. Bromwich’s recent volume (2014) is due to be followed by another, taking over from the post-American years, which means the same neat, and potentially deceptive, division.
86For recent examinations of Burke and Ireland, see Col (2009a) and (2012b).