by Edmund Burke
You pay me the compliment to suppose me a foe to tyranny and oppression; and you are, therefore, surprised at the sentiments I have lately delivered in parliament. I am that determined foe to tyranny, or I greatly deceive myself in my character, and am an idiot in my conduct. It is because I am such a foe, and mean to continue so, that I abominate the example of France for this country. I know that tyranny seldom attacks the poor,—never in the first instance. They are not its proper prey. It falls upon the wealthy and the great, whom, by rendering them objects of envy, and otherwise obnoxious to the multitude, they the more easily destroy; and when they are destroyed, that multitude which was led to that ill work by the arts of bad men, is itself undone for ever. I hate tyranny, at least I think so; but I hate it most of all where most are concerned in it. The tyranny of a multitude is but a multiplied tyranny. If, as society is constituted in these large countries of France and England,—full of unequal property, I must make my choice (which God avert) between the despotism of a single person, or of the many, my election is made:—For, in the forty years of my observation, as much injustice and tyranny has been practised in a few months by a French democracy, as by all the arbitrary monarchs in Europe. I speak of public, glaring acts of tyranny. I say nothing of the common effects of old abusive governments, because I do not know that as bad may not be found from the new. This democracy begins very ill; and I feel no security that what has been rapacious and bloody in its commencement, in its final settlement will be mild and protecting. They cannot, indeed, in future rob so much, because they have left little that can be taken. I go to the full length of my principle. I should think the government of the deposed King of France, or of the late King of Prussia, or the present Emperor, or the present Czarina, none of them, perhaps, perfectly good,—to be far better than the government of twenty-four millions of men all as good as you, (and I do not know any body better,)—supposing that those twenty-four millions would be subject, as infallibly they would, to the same unrestrained, though virtuous impulses; because, it is plain, you would think every thing justified by your warm good intentions; you would heat one another by your common zeal; counsel and advice would be lost on you; you would not listen to temperate individuals; and you would be infinitely less capable of moderation than the most heady of those princes.
What have I to do with France, but as the common interest of humanity, and its example to this country engages me? I know France, by observation and inquiry, pretty tolerably for a stranger; and I am not a man to fall in love with the faults or follies of the old or new government. You reason as if I were running a parallel between its former abusive government and the present tyranny. What had all this to do with the opinions I delivered in parliament, which run a parallel between the liberty they might have had, and this frantic delusion? This is the way by which you blind and deceive yourself, and beat the air in your argument with me. Why do you instruct me on a state of case which has no existence? You know how to reason very well. What most of the newspapers make me say, I know not, nor do I much care. I don’t, however, think they have thus stated me. There is a very fair abstract of my speech printed in a little pamphlet, which I would send you if it were worth putting you to the expense.
To discuss the affairs of France and its revolution, would require a volume,—perhaps many volumes. Your general reflections about revolutions may be right or wrong; they conclude nothing. I don’t find myself disposed to controvert them, for I do not think they apply to the present affairs; nay, I am sure they do not. I conceive you have got very imperfect accounts of these transactions. I believe I am much more exactly informed concerning them.
I am sorry, indeed, to find that our opinions do differ essentially,—fundamentally, and are at the utmost possible distance from each other, if I understand you or myself clearly on this subject. Your freedom is far from displeasing to me,—I love it; for I always wish to know the full of what is in the mind of the friend I converse with. I give you mine as freely, and I hope I shall offend you as little as you do me.
I shall have no objection to your showing my letter to as many as you please. I have no secrets with regard to the public. I have never shrunk from obloquy, and I have never courted popular applause. If I have ever met with any share of it—non rapui sed recepi. No difference of opinion, however, shall hinder me from cultivating your friendship, whilst you permit me to do so. I have not wrote this to discuss these matters in a prolonged controversy. I wish we may never say more of them; but to comply with your commands, which ever shall have due weight with me.
I AM,
MOST RESPECTFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY YOURS,
EDM. BURKE.
To Chevalier de la Bintinnaye
In this interesting letter of March 1791 to an acquaintance in France, who ultimately emigrated to England, Burke is clearly critical of Louis XVI. He bears some responsibility for the “astonishing scene” that is France, but surely his “safe and languid domination” was no justification for the excesses of the revolutionaries.
... THE REST was to show, from the actual state of France, (as well as I was able to enter into its condition,) the utter impossibility of a counterrevolution from any internal cause. You know, sir, that no party can act without a resolute, vigorous, zealous, and enterprising chief. The chief of every monarchical party must be the monarch himself;—at least, he must lend himself readily to the spirit and energy of others. You have a well-intentioned and virtuous prince; but minds like his, bred with no other view than to a safe and languid domination, are not made for breaking their prisons, terrifying their enemies, and animating their friends. Besides, in a wife and children, he has given hostages to his enemies. If the king can do nothing in his situation, the wonder is not great. It is much greater, on all appearance, that not one man is to be found in the numerous nobility of France, who to great military talents adds any sort of lead, consideration, or following, in the country or in the army. To strengthen itself, the monarchy had weakened every other force. To unite the nation to itself, it had dissolved all other ties. When the chain which held the people to the prince was once broken, the whole frame of the commonwealth was found in a state of disconnexion. There was neither force nor union any where, to sustain the monarchy, or the nobility, or the church. As to great and commanding talents, they are the gift of Providence in some way unknown to us. They rise where they are least expected. They fail when every thing seems disposed to produce them, or at least to call them forth. Your sole hope seems to me to rest in the disposition of the neighbouring powers, and in their ability to yield you assistance. I can conjecture nothing with certainty of this, in either of the points. But at present I see nothing that in the smallest degree looks that way. In the mean time the usurpation gathers strength by continuance, and credit by success. People will look to power, and join, or, at least, accommodate themselves to it. I confess I am astonished at the blindness of the states of Europe, who are contending with each other about points of trivial importance, and on old worn-out principles and topics of policy, when the very existence of all of them is menaced by a new evil, which none of the ancient maxims are of the least importance in dissipating. But in all these things, we must acknowledge and revere, in silence, a superior hand. In the spirit of this submission I, however, am so far from blaming every sort of endeavour, that I much lament the remissness of the gentlemen of France. Their adversaries have seized upon all the newspapers which circulate within this kingdom, and which from hence are dispersed all over Europe. That they are masters of the presses of Paris, is a thing of course. But surely, the oppressed party might amongst them maintain a person here, to whom they might transmit a true state of affairs. The emissaries of the usurpation here, are exceedingly active in propagating stories which tend to alienate the minds of people of this country from the suffering cause. Not one French refugee has intelligence or spirit enough to contradict them. I have done all which the common duties of humanity can claim from one who has not the honour of being a su
bject of France. I have duties and occupations at home, public and private, which will not suffer me to continue longer with my thoughts abroad. But if any gentleman from France would undertake such a task, with proper materials for it, he should have my best advice. The expense of such a person stationed here would not be great; and surely, reduced as the noblesse of France not expatriated are, enough remains to them to do this and more. If their avarice, or their dissipation, will afford nothing to their honour or their safety, their case is additionally deplorable....
To William Weddell, Esq.
Burke wrote to his fellow member of Parliament on January 31, 1792, reviewing the reasons for deserting his Whig friends in Parliament. It boiled down to “this French dirt-pie.” His “old Whig” principles lead him “to detest the French Revolution.”
... NOW LET me say a word to you, on what would not have been so proper to say to the public, as it regards the particular interests of the party, and my conduct towards them and their leader, Mr. Fox.
As to the party which has thought proper to proscribe me on account of a book which I published on the idea, that the principles of a new, republican, frenchified Whiggism, were gaining ground in this country, I cannot say it was written solely with a view to the service of that party. I hope its views were more general. But I am perfectly sure this was one of the objects in my contemplation; and I am hardly less sure, that (bating the insufficiency of the execution) it was well calculated for that purpose; and that it had actually produced that effect upon the minds of all those at whose sentiments it is not disrespectful to guess. Possibly it produced that effect without that exception. Mr. Montagu knows, many know, what a softening towards our party it produced in the thoughts and opinions of many men in many places. It presented to them sentiments of liberty which were not at war with order, virtue, religion, and good government; and though, for reasons which I have cause to rejoice that I listened to, I disclaimed myself as the organ of any party, it was the general opinion that I had not wandered very widely from the sentiments of those with whom I was known to be so closely connected. It was indeed then, and it is much more so now, absolutely necessary to separate those who cultivate a rational and sober liberty upon the plan of our existing constitution, from those who think they have no liberty, if it does not comprehend a right in them of making to themselves new constitutions at their pleasure.
The party with which I acted had, by the malevolent and unthinking, been reproached, and by the wise and good always esteemed and confided in, as an aristocratic party. Such I always understood it to be, in the true sense of the word. I understood it to be a party, in its composition, and in its principles, connected with the solid, permanent, long-possessed property of the country; a party which, by a temper derived from that species of property, and affording a security to it, was attached to the ancient tried usages of the kingdom; a party, therefore, essentially constructed upon a ground-plot of stability and independence; a party, therefore, equally removed from servile court compliances, and from popular levity, presumption, and precipitation.
Such was the general opinion of the substance and original stamina of that party. For one, I was fully persuaded that the spirit, genius, and character of that party ought to be adopted, and, for a long time, I thought was adopted, by all the new men who in the course of time should be aggregated to that body; whether any of these new men should be a person possessed of a large fortune of his own creating; or whether the new man should be (though of a family long decorated with the honours and distinctions of the state,) only a younger brother, who had an importance to acquire by his industry and his talents;—or whether the new man should be (as was my case) wholly new in the country, and aimed to illustrate himself and his family by the services he might have the fortune to render to the public. All these descriptions of new men, and more, if more there are, I conceived, without any formal engagement, by the very constitution of the party, to be bound with all the activity and energy of minds animated and awakened by great hopes and views, to support those aristocratic principles, and the aristocratic interests connected with them, as essential to the real benefit of the body of the people, to which all names of party, all ranks and orders in the state, and even government itself, ought to be entirely subordinate. These principles and interests, I conceived, were to give the bias to all their proceedings. Adhering to these principles, the aspiring minds that exalt and vivify a party, could not be held in too much honour and consideration: —departing from them, they lose more than they can gain. They lose the advantages which they might derive from such a party, and they cannot make it for the purposes for which they desire to employ it. Such a party, pushed forward by a blind impulse, may for some time proceed without an exact knowledge of the point to which it is going. It may be deluded; and, by being deluded, it may be discredited and hurt; but it is too unwieldy, both from its numbers and from its property, to perform the services expected from a corps of light horse.
Against the existence of any such description of men as our party is in a great measure composed of,—against the existence of any mode of government on such a basis, we have seen a serious and systematic attack attended with the most complete success, in another country, but in a country at our very door. It is an attack made against the thing and against the name. If I were to produce an example of something diametrically opposite to the composition, to the spirit, to the temper, to the character, and to all the maxims of our old and unregenerated party, something fitted to illustrate it by the strongest opposition, I would produce—what has been done in France. I would except nothing. I would bring forward the principles; I would bring forward the means; I would bring forward the ultimate object. They who cry up the French revolution, cry down the party which you and I had so long the honour and satisfaction to belong to. “But that party was formed on a system of liberty.” Without question it was; and God forbid that you and I should ever belong to any party that was not built upon that foundation. But this French dirt-pie,—this its hateful contrast, is founded upon slavery; and a slavery which is not the less slavery, because it operates in an inverted order. It is a slavery the more shameful, the more humiliating, the more galling, upon that account, to every liberal and ingenuous mind. It is, on that account, ten thousand times the more destructive to the peace, the prosperity, and the welfare, in every instance, of that undone and degraded country in which it prevails.
My party principles, as well as my general politics and my natural sentiments, must lead me to detest the French revolution, in the act, in the spirit, in the consequences, and most of all, in the example. I saw the sycophants of a court, who had, by engrossing to themselves the favours of the sovereign, added to his distress and to the odium of his government, take advantage of that distress and odium to subvert his authority and imprison his person; and passing, by a natural progression, from flatterers to traitors, convert their ingratitude into a claim to patriotism, and become active agents in the ruin of that order, from their belonging to which they had derived all the opulence and power of their families. Under the auspices of these base wretches, I had seen a senseless populace employed totally to annihilate the ancient government of their country, under which it had grown, in extent, compactness, population, and riches, to a greatness even formidable; a government which discovered the vigour of its principle, even in the many vices and errors, both of its own and its people’s, which were not of force enough to hinder it from producing those effects. They began its destruction by subverting, under pretexts of rights of man, the foundations of civil society itself. They trampled upon the religion of their country, and upon all religion;—they systematically gave the rein to every crime and every vice. They destroyed the trade and manufacturers of their country. They rooted up its finances. They caused the greatest accumulation of coin, probably ever collected amongst any people, totally to disappear as by magic; and they filled up the void by a fraudulent, compulsory paper-currency, and a coinage of the bells from their church
es. They possessed the fairest and the most flourishing colonies which any nation had perhaps ever planted. These they rendered a scene of carnage and desolation, that would excite compassion and remorse in any hearts but theirs. They possessed a vast body of nobility and gentry, amongst the first in the world for splendour, and the very first for disinterested services to their country: in which I include the most disinterested and incorrupt judicature (even by the confession of its enemies) that ever was. These they persecuted, they hunted down like wild beasts; they expelled them from their families and their houses, and dispersed them into every country in Europe; obliging them either to pine in fear and misery at home, or to escape into want and exile in foreign lands; nay, (they went so far in the wantonness of their insolence,) abrogated their very name and their titular descriptions, as something horrible and offensive to the ears of mankind.
