How convincing is Burke’s Conservative critique of revolution?

Discussion in 'Arts, Literature, and Games' started by Old Christendom, Apr 13, 2013.

  1. Old Christendom

    Old Christendom Well-Known Member

    Posts:
    476
    Likes Received:
    571
    Religion:
    Reformed
    Very much worth the read!

    "O Liberty, how thou hast been played with!"

    [​IMG]

    - Exclaimed on 8 November 1798 by Madame Roland when she mounted the scaffold, and was tied to the fatal plank, lifting her eyes to the statue of Liberty, near which the guillotine was placed.

    Burke's first public condemnation of the Revolution, provoked by praise of the Revolution by his fellow Whigs, occurred during the debate in Parliament on the Army Estimates on 9 February 1790:

    “Since the House had been prorogued in the summer much work was done in France. The French had shewn themselves the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world. In that very short space of time they had completely pulled down to the ground, their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army; their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures...[there was a danger of] an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody and tyrannical democracy[ i]”

    Burke saw the revolution as fundamentally flawed, its ideological convictions failed to take into account the complexities of human nature and how society was bequeathed. He believed that fear of God, our veneration of kings, duty to parliament and magistrates and reverence to priests; and respect to nobility[ii] were the very organic fibres of society, the natural Establishment of order and morality. Burke referred to this as "the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages[iii]” and is by definition collectively far wiser than individual reason. To Burke “Prejudice[iv]” was an inherited set of principles which gave the mind a foundation of wisdom and virtue. Society after all was a contract, to be revered and keeps us reverting to a base ‘animal’ existence, “it is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born[v].” What right then do we, the living, have to arrogantly dismiss all wisdom that has gone before, depriving it not only from ourselves but from those yet to exist?

    Burke saw inherited rights, these in England were those gained from the signing of Magna Carta, as established, liberty set in stone and impervious to the molestations of future generations. The constitutional enactment of specific established rights is protection from governmental tyranny; gradual constitutional reform enabled a country to pass from the old order to the new without violent upheaval. A nation needed to be built upon strong foundations of ancient stone not upon the shifting sands of bloody revolution. ‘Speculative’ rights were dangerously fluid, allowing them to be change by whoever was able to obtain power.

    The French revolutionaries rejected all ideas repugnant to their individual reasoning; they had no qualms in dismissing the wisdom of others particularly when in the form of tradition, “with them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one[vi].” Burke surmised this complete destruction of tradition would lead to radical innovation; the overthrow of all prescriptive rights; confiscation of property; the nobility, the family, tradition and eventually the nation[vii].

    The highly motivated, unremitting radical reform of the revolution quickly lead to the abolition of feudalism, to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the dechristianisation of France during the French Revolution, the radicalisation of the National Assembly and the rise of Maximilien Robespierre culminating in the arrest of Louis XVI and the royal family which would ultimately lead to their executions. Burke surmised that the proclamation of the rights of man over the rights of God, the bigoted philosophy of rebellion and unrepentant desire for change would lead to an armed nihilism and anarchy that in time would lead to great social evil.

    The utterly opposing Burkean and Jacobin sentiments were defined by the arrest of Queen Marie Antoinette. Burke’s philosophy and all its romantic and chivalrous notions are laid bare in his description of his encounter, “glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendour, and joy[viii]’. He dismayed in her capture and the little loyalty shown by her subjects, “I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone[ix]”. Burke was informed by an Englishman who had talked with the Duchesse de Biron that when Marie Antoinette was reading the passage she burst into tears and took considerable time to finish reading it[x]. To Burke, the arrest and incarceration of the Queen, symbolised the opposing revolutionary ideology of the Jacobins and his natural sentiments. He regarded the ungallant assault on Marie Antoinette with horror, as a cowardly attack on a defenceless woman. To the Jacobin’s she was a figure that told of a past now forbidden and so ultimately must be removed to stop any notion of nostalgia.

    In April 1791 Burke published ‘A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’ where he stated only outside intervention could reverse the revolution and this was a counter revolutionary struggle against radicals and all effort should be made to support the royalist revolt in the Vendée. He also criticised the Enlightenment itself by attacking the late French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who was seen by many as a founding father of the movement. A large personality cult had developed in revolutionary France and much of Rousseau’s ideals were now used in justification for the revolt. Burke contrasted Rousseau's theory of universal benevolence with the fact he sent his children to a foundling hospital, "a lover of his kind, but a hater of his kindred[xi]” and turned this comparison on the revolution:

    “We have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution; that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion; that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country, who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces, and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds, and wild incantations, they may regenerate the paternal constitution, and renovate their father’s life[xii]”

    Burke’s depiction of revolutionaries as homicidal children tearing down the mechanics of constitution, and then trying to resemble the parts back into a functional machine rang true during the ‘reign of Terror’ which followed the execution of Louis XVI. Incited by conflict between rival political factions the mass executions of "enemies of the revolution" soon reached the tens of thousands, with 16,594 executed by guillotine[xiii], and another 25,000 in summary executions across France[xiv]. The guillotine became the symbol of the revolution; all the movements aspirations of liberty and suffrage perished under its blade. A contemporary of Burke’s, Joseph de Maistre, named the three main perpetrators in his own work on the reveloution, “Robespierre, Collot, Barère” and then commented, “These extremely mediocre men exercised over a guilty nation the most frightful despotism in history, and surely they were more surprised at their power than anyone else in the kingdom[xv]”, this was in agreeance with the Burkean prophecy that once the Third Estate had appointed themselves to undertake the destruction of the nobility, they would inevitably become “subservient to the worst designs of individuals in the class[xvi].” Through the use of terror and political purges as a means of mass control, the Jacobin radicals went on to established a new First Estate, in a speech Robespierre stated, “Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue[xvii]”. In his ‘Letters on a Regicide Peace’, Burke’s following description of the then new revolutionary French government is the first recorded explanation of the modern ideal of a totalitarian state:

    "Individuality is left out of their scheme of government. The state is all in all. Everything is referred to the production of force; afterwards, everything is trusted to the use of it. It is military in its principle, in its maxims, in its spirit, and in all its movements. The state has dominion and conquest for its sole objects—dominion over minds by proselytism, over bodies by arms[xviii]”
     
  2. Old Christendom

    Old Christendom Well-Known Member

    Posts:
    476
    Likes Received:
    571
    Religion:
    Reformed
    Burke saw the coming war with France long before his contemporaries; he also recognised the disorder and instability of the new republic would render the army “mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself[xix]”. He goes onto predict “the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master; the master of your king, the master of your Assembly, the master of your whole republic[xx]”. The great conclusion of the revolution in France and the vindication of Burkean thought is poetically told by Thomas Carlyle in his epic, ‘The French Revolution, A History’ in chapter VII, ‘The Whiff of Grapeshot’:

    “It is false,' says Napoleon, 'that we fired first with blank charge; it had been a waste of life to do that.' Most false: the firing was with sharp and sharpest shot: to all men it was plain that here was no sport; the rabbets and plinths of Saint-Roch Church show splintered by it, to this hour.—Singular: in old Broglie's time, six years ago, this Whiff of Grapeshot was promised; but it could not be given then, could not have profited then. Now, however, the time is come for it, and the man; and behold, you have it; and the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it, and become a thing that was[xxi]”

    Burke’s critique, conservative or otherwise, was born from genuine horror at what he witnessed during the French revolution. Critics of ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ often cite its success amongst the propertied classes, restored him to royal favour and resulting in a pension and accuse him of abandoning his liberal principles for acclaim and money. Whether this is true or not it is a minor distraction and does not have any bearing on his prophecies, history proved Burke’s prophesies right. The power vacuum left after the dissolution of the monarchy and church was filled by shrewd and manipulative men who were able to turn the mechanics of revolt into that of oppression. The reign of terror, political purges and disorder did lead to mutiny from the army, the last body of men capable of restoring order. Once the army was supreme a popular, charismatic Ceaser did establish dominance over the military and bend it to his will. Such a government would become corrupt and violent instead of protecting the rights of its citizens and in turn wage war against its geographical neighbours.

    This model of usurpation would go on to inspire Marxists, Bolsheviks and Fascists who all in their time cited Jacobin ideology as an excuse for their own embarkation to genocide.

    “That centralisation of power is the essential fault of the revolutionary French government system; that it does not promote democratic control; and that revolution transferred power from the divinely chosen aristocracy to an ‘enlightened’ heartless elite more incompetent and tyrannical than the aristocrats”

    Hippolyte Taine. Origins of Contemporary France (1876-1885)

    [ i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke
    [ii] O’Brien, Connor. (2004) Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp182
    [iii] O’Brien, Connor. (2004) Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp183
    [iv] O’Brien, Connor. (2004) Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp183
    [v] O’Brien, Connor. (2004) Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp194-195
    [vi] O’Brien, Connor. (2004) Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp184
    [vii] O’Brien, Connor. (2004) Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp10
    [viii] O’Brien, Connor. (2004) Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp169
    [ix] O’Brien, Connor. (2004) Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp170
    [x] O’Brien, Connor. (2004) Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp385, Nte63
    [xi] Stanlis, Peter. (1963) Edmund Burke: Selected Writings And Speeches, pp618
    [xii] O’Brien, Connor. (2004) Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp194
    [xiii] http://www.port.ac.uk/special/france1815to2003/chapter1/interviews/filetodownload,20545,en.pdf
    [xiv] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
    [xv] Lebrun, Richard. (2006) Joseph de Maistre Considerations on France, pp5-6
    [xvi] O’Brien, Connor. (2004) Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp135
    [xvii] Robespierre Speech to the National Convention, (5 February 1794), as quoted in The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Vol. 1 (1951) by Edward Hallett Carr, p. 154
    [xviii] http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Burke/brkSWv3c2.html
    [xix] O’Brien, Connor. (2004) Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp342
    [xx] O’Brien, Connor. (2004) Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp342
    [xxi] Rosenberg, John. (2002) Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution, A History, pp772

    Bibliography
    O’Brien, Connor. (2004) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
    Rosenberg, John. (2002) Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, A History
    Leburn, Richard. (2006) Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France
    Philip, Mark. (2008) Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense
    Scurr, Ruth. (2006) Fatal Purity, Robespierre and the Revolution