by Edmund Burke
The first question on the people is this, Whether we are to consider the individuals now actually in France, numerically taken and arranged into Jacobin Clubs, as the body politick, constituting the nation of France? or, Whether we consider the original individual proprietors of lands, expelled since the Revolution, and the states and the bodies politick, such as the colleges of justice called parliaments, the corporations noble and not noble of balliages, and towns, and cities, the bishops and the clergy, as the true constituent parts of the nation, and forming the legally organized parts of the people of France?
In this serious concern it is very necessary that we should have the most distinct ideas annexed to the terms we employ; because it is evident, that an abuse of the term people, has been the original fundamental cause of those evils, the cure of which, by war and policy, is the present object of all the states of Europe.
If we consider the acting power in France in any legal construction of publick law, as the people, the question is decided in favour of the Republick one and indivisible. But we have decided for Monarchy. If so, we have a King and Subjects; and that King and Subjects have rights and privileges which ought to be supported at home; for I do not suppose that the Government of that kingdom can, or ought to be regulated, by the arbitrary Mandate of a foreign Confederacy.
As to the faction exercising power, to suppose that Monarchy can be supported by principled Regicides, Religion by professed Atheists, Order by Clubs of Jacobins, Property by Committees of Proscription, and Jurisprudence by Revolutionary Tribunals, is to be sanguine in a degree of which I am incapable. On them I decide, for myself, that these persons are not the legal Corporation of France, and that it is not with them we can (if we would) settle the Government of France.
Since, then, we have decided for Monarchy in that kingdom, we ought also to settle who is to be the Monarch, who is to be the Guardian of a Minor, and how the Monarch and Monarchy is to be modified and supported? If the Monarch is to be elected, who the Electors are to be: if hereditary, what order is established corresponding with an hereditary Monarchy, and fitted to maintain it? Who are to modify it in its exercise? Who are to restrain its powers where they ought to be limited, to strengthen them where they are to be supported, or to enlarge them, where the object, the time, and the circumstances, may demand their extension? These are things which, in the outline, ought to be made distinct and clear; for if they are not (especially with regard to those great points, who are the proprietors of the soil, and what is the corporation of the kingdom) there is nothing to hinder the compleat establishment of a Jacobin Republick, (such as that formed in 1790 and 1791) under the name of a Democracie Royale. Jacobinism does not consist in the having or not having, a certain Pageant under the name of a King, but
“in taking the people as equal individuals, without any corporate name or description, without attention to property, without division of powers, and forming the governmen of delegates from a number of men so constituted, in destroying or confiscating property, and bribing the publick creditors, or the poor, with the spoils, now of one part of the community, now of another, without regard to prescription or possession.”
I hope no one can be so very blind as to imagine that Monarchy can be acknowledged and supported in France upon any othe basis than that of its property, corporate and individual, or that it can enjoy a moment’s permanence or security upon any scheme of things, which sets aside all the antient corporate capacities and distinctions of the kingdom, and subverts the whole fabrick of its antient laws and usages, political, civil and religious, to introduce a system founded on the supposed Rights of the Man, and the absolute equality of the human race. Unless, therefore, we declare clearly and distinctly in favour of the restoration of property, and confide to the hereditary property of the kingdom, the limitation and qualifications of its hereditary Monarchy, the blood and treasure of Europe is wasted for the establishment of Jacobinism in France. There is no doubt that Danton and Robespiere, Chaumette and Barrere, that Condorcet, that Thomas Paine, that La Fayette, and the Exbishop of Autun, the Abbé Gregoire, with all the gang of the Syeyes’s, the Henriots, and the Santerres, if they could secure themselves in the fruits of their rebellion and robbery, would be perfectly indifferent, whether the most unhappy of all infants, whom by the lessons of the shoemaker, his governour and guardian, they are training up studiously and methodically to be an idiot, or what is worse, the most wicked and base of mankind, continues to receive his civic education in the Temple or the Thuilleries, whilst they, and such as they, really govern the kingdom.
It cannot be too often and too strongly inculcated, that Monarchy and property must, in France, go together; or neither can exist. To think of the possibility of the existence of a permanent and hereditary Royalty, where nothing else is hereditary or permanent in point either of personal or corporate dignity, is a ruinous chimera worthy of the Abbé Syeyes and those wicked Fools his Associates, who usurped Power by the Murders of the 19th of July, and the 6th of October 1789, and who brought forth the Monster which they called Democracie Royale, or the Constitution.
I believe that most thinking men, would prefer infinitely some sober and sensible form of a Republick, in which there was no mention at all of a King, but which held out some reasonable security to property, life, and personal freedom, to a scheme of things like this Democracie Royale, founded on impiety, immorality, fraudulent currencies, the confiscation of innocent individuals, and the pretended Rights of Man; and which, in effect, excluding the whole body of the nobility, clergy, and landed property of a great nation, threw every thing into the hands of a desperate set of obscure adventurers who led to every mischief, a blind and bloody band of Sans-Culottes. At the head, or rather at the tail of this system, was a miserable pageant as its ostensible instrument, who was to be treated with every species of indignity, till the moment, when he was conveyed from the Palace of Contempt to the Dungeon of Horrour, and thence led by a Brewer of his Capital through the applauses of an hired, frantick, drunken multitude, to lose his head upon a scaffold.
This is the Constitution, or Democracie Royale; and this is what infallibly would be again set up in France to run exactly the same round, if the predominant power should so far be forced to submit as to receive the name of a King, leaving it to the Jacobins, (that is, to those who have subverted Royalty and destroyed Property) to modify the one, and to distribute the other as spoil. By the Jacobins I mean indiscriminately the Brissotins and the Maratists, knowing no sort of difference between them. As to any other party, none exists in that unhappy country. The Royalists (those in Poitou excepted) are banished and extinguished; and as to what they call the Constitutionalists, or Democrats Royaux, they never had an existence of the smallest degree of power, consideration or authority; nor, if they differ at all from the rest of the Atheistick Banditti (which from their actions and principles I have no reason to think) were they ever other than the temporary tools and instruments of the more determined, able, and systematick Regicides. Several attempts have been made to support this chimerical Democracie Royale — the first was by La Fayette — the last by Dumourier: — they tended only to shew, that this absurd project had no party to support it. The Girondists under Wimpfen, and at Bourdeaux, have made some struggle. The Constitutionalists never could make any; and for a very plain reason; they were Leaders in Rebellion. All their principles, and their whole scheme of government being Republican, they could never excite the smallest degree of enthusiasm in favour of the unhappy Monarch, whom they had rendered contemptible, to make him the Executive Officer in their new Commonwealth. They only appeared as traitors to their own Jacobin cause, not as faithful adherents to the King.
In an Address to France, in an attempt to treat with it, or in considering any scheme at all relative to it, it is impossible we should mean the geographical, we must always mean the moral and political country. I believe we shall be in a great errour if we act upon an idea that there exists in that country any organized body o
f men who might be willing to treat on equitable terms, for the restoration of their Monarchy; but who are nice in balancing those terms, and who would accept such as to them appeared reasonable, but who would quietly submit to the predominant power, if they were not gratified in the fashion of some constitution which suited with their fancies.
I take the state of France to be totally different. I know of no such body, and of no such party. So far from a combination of twenty men (always excepting Poitou) I never yet heard, that a single man could be named of sufficient force or influence to answer for another man, much less for the smallest district in the country, or for the most incomplete company of soldiers in the army. We see every man that the Jacobins chuse to apprehend, taken up in his village, or in his house, and conveyed to prison without the least shadow of resistance; and this indifferently, whether he is suspected of Royalism or Federalism, Moderantism, Democracy Royal, or any other of the names of faction which they start by the hour. What is much more astonishing, (and if we did not carefully attend to the genius and circumstances of this Revolution, must indeed appear incredible) all their most accredited military men, from a generalissimo to a corporal, may be arrested, (each in the midst of his camp, and covered with the laurels of accumulated victories) tied neck and heels, thrown into a cart, and sent to Paris to be disposed of at the pleasure of the Revolutionary Tribunals.
As no individuals have power and influence, so there are no Corporations, whether of Lawyers or Burghers existing. The Assembly called Constituent, destroyed all such institutions very early. The Primary and Secondary Assemblies, by their original constitution, were to be dissolved when they answered the purpose of electing the Magistrates; and were expressly disqualified from performing any corporate act whatsoever. The transient Magistrates have been almost all removed before the expiration of their terms, and new have been lately imposed upon the people, without the form or ceremony of an election: these Magistrates during their existence are put under, as all the Executive Authorities are from first to last, the popular Societies (called Jacobin Clubs) of the several countries, and this by an express order of the National Convention: it is even made a case of death to oppose or attack those Clubs. They too have been lately subjected to an expurgatory scrutiny, to drive out from them every thing savouring of what they call the crime of Moderantism, of which offence however few were guilty. But as people began to take refuge from their persecutions — amongst themselves, they have driven them from that last asylum.
The State of France is perfectly simple. It consists of but two descriptions — The Oppressors and the Oppressed.
The first have the whole authority of the State in their hands, all the arms, all the revenues of the publick, all the confiscations of individuals and corporations. They have taken the lower sort from their occupations and have put them into pay, that they may form them into a body of Janisaries to overrule and awe property. The heads of these wretches they never suffer to cool. They supply them with a food for fury varied by the day — besides the sensual state of intoxication from which they are rarely free. They have made the Priests and people formally abjure the Divinity; they have estranged them from every civil, moral, and social, or even natural and instinctive sentiment, habit, and practice, and have rendered them systematically savages, to make it impossible for them to be the instruments of any sober and virtuous arrangement, or to be reconciled to any state of order, under any name whatsoever.
The other description, the Oppressed — are people of some property; they are the small reliques of the persecuted Landed Interest; they are the Burghers and the Farmers. By the very circumstance of their being of some property, though numerous in some points of view, they cannot be very considerable as a number. In cities the nature of their occupations renders them domestick and feeble; in the country it confines them to their farm for subsistence. The National Guards are all changed and reformed. Every thing suspicious in the description of which they were composed is rigorously disarmed. Committees, called of Vigilance and Safety, are every where formed; a most severe and scrutinizing Inquisition, far more rigid than any thing ever known or imagined. Two persons cannot meet and confer without hazard to their liberty, and even to their lives. Numbers scarcely credible have been executed, and their property confiscated. At Paris and in most other towns, the bread they buy is a daily dole — which they cannot obtain without a daily ticket delivered to them by their Masters. Multitudes of all ages and sexes are actually imprisoned. I have reason to believe, that in France there are not, for various state crimes, so few as twenty thousand actually in jail — a large portion of people of property in any State. If a father of a family should shew any dispositions to resist, or to withdraw himself from their power, his wife and children are cruelly to answer for it. It is by means of these hostages; that they keep the troops, which they sorce by masses (as they call it) into the field — true to their colours.
Another of their resources is not to be forgotten. — They have lately found a way of giving a sort of ubiquity to the supreme Sovereign Authority, which no Monarch has been able yet to give to any representation of his.
The Commissioners of the National Convention, who are the Members of the Convention itself, and really exercise all its powers, make continual circuits through every province, and visits to every army. There they supersede all the ordinary Authorities civil and military, and change and alter every thing at their pleasure. So that in effect no deliberative capacity exists in any portion of the inhabitants.
Toulon, republican in principle, having taken its decision in a moment under the guillotine, and before the arrival of these Commissioners, Toulon, being a place regularly fortified, and having in its bosom a navy in part highly discontented, has escaped, though by a sort of miracle; and it would not have escaped, if two powerful fleets had not been at the door to give them not only strong, but prompt and immediate succour, especially, as neither this nor any other sea-port town in France can be depended on, from the peculiarly savage dispositions, manners, and connexions among the lower sort of people in those places. This I take to be the true state of things in France; so far as it regards any existing bodies, whether of legal or voluntary association, capable of acting or of treating in corps.
As to the oppressed individuals, they are many; and as discontented as men must be under the monstrous and complicated tyranny of all sorts, with which they are crushed. They want no stimulus to throw off this dreadful yoke: but they do want (not Manifestoes, which they have had even to surfeit, but) real protection, force and succour.
The disputes and questions of men at their ease, do not at all affect their minds, or ever can occupy the minds of men in their situation. These theories are long since gone by; they have had their day, and have done their mischief. The question is not between the Rabble of Systems, Fayetteism, Condorcetism, Monarchism, or Democratism or Federalism, on the one side, and the fundamental Laws of France on the other — or between all these systems amongst themselves. It is a controversy (weak indeed and unequal on the one part) between the proprietor and the robber; between the prisoner and the jailor; between the neck and the guillotine. Four-fifths of the French inhabitants would thankfully take protection from the Emperor of Morocco, and would never trouble their heads about the abstract principles of the power by which they were snatched from imprisonment, robbery, and murder. But then these men can do little or nothing for themselves. They have no arms, nor magazines, nor chiefs, nor union, nor the possibility of these things within themselves. On the whole therefore I lay it down as a certainty, that in the Jacobins, no change of mind is to be expected — and that no others in the territory of France have an independent and deliberative existence.
The truth is, that France is out of itself — The moral France is separated from the geographical. The master of the house is expelled, and the robbers are in possession. If we look for the corporate people of France existing as corporate in the eye and intention of public Law, (that corporate people, I
mean, who are free to deliberate and to decide, and who have a capacity to treat and conclude) they are in Flanders, and Germany, in Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and England. There are all the Princes of the Blood, there are all the Orders of the State, there are all the Parliaments of the kingdom.
This being, as I conceive, the true state of France, as it exists territorially, and as it exists morally, the question will be, with whom we are to concert our arrangements; and whom we are to use as our instruments in the reduction, in the pacification, and in the settlement of France. The work to be done must indicate the workmen. Supposing us to have rational objects, we have two principal, and one secondary. The first two are so intimately connected as not to be separated even in thought; the re-establishment of Royalty, and the re-establishment of Property. One would think it requires not a great deal of argument to prove, that the most serious endeavours to restore Royalty, will be made by Royalists. Property will be most energetically restored by the antient proprietors of that kingdom.
When I speak of Royalists, I wish to be understood of those who were always such from principle. Every arm lifted up for Royalty from the beginning, was the arm of a man so principled. I do not think there are ten exceptions.
The principled Royalists are certainly not of force to effect these objects by themselves. If they were, the operations of the present great Combination would be wholly unnecessary. What I contend for is, that they should be consulted with, treated with, and employed; and that no Foreigners whatsoever are either in interest so engaged, or in judgment and local knowledge so competent, to answer all these purposes as the natural proprietors of the country.
Their number for an exiled party is also considerable. Almost the whole body of the landed proprietors of France, ecclesiastical and civil, have been steadily devoted to the Monarchy. This body does not amount to less than seventy thousand — a very great number in the composition of the respectable classes in any society. — I am sure, that if half that number of the same description were taken out of this country, it would leave hardly any thing that I should call the people of England. On the faith of the Emperor and the King of Prussia, a body of ten thousand Nobility on horseback, with the King’s two brothers at their head, served with the King of Prussia in the campaign of 1792, and equipped themselves with the last shilling of their ruined fortunes and exhausted credit. It is not now the question how that great force came to be rendered useless and totally dissipated. I state it now, only to remark, that a great part of the same force exists, and would act if it were enabled. I am sure every thing has shewn us that in this war with France, one Frenchman is worth twenty foreigners. La Vendee is a proof of this.
