Paste your essay in here…Ranu Kunwar
Dr. Anjana Sharma
Writing Revolution: Public and Private in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain
Short Paper
Burke on Revolution and the Specter of the Bourgeoisie in Reflections on the Revolution in France
The French Revolution (1789-99) was a period of social and political upheaval, which resulted in radical changes in France. The system of absolute monarchy, with feudal privileges for the aristocracy and the Christian clergy, underwent a change to a new form of government based on the principles of Enlightenment and inalienable rights. The interplay of the intensification of the struggles between the existing orders, political tension, prospering commerce and the beginnings of industrialization, resulting in the rise of new social groups, and the impact of ideas articulated by Rousseau, Voltaire, among many others, contributed to the coming of the revolution. Through a discussion of Burke’s assessment of the French Revolution as articulated in his letter to one French gentleman, which came to be known as Reflections on the Revolution in France, this paper will look into the Burkean notions of liberty and tradition, and revolution, and suggest that Burke’s position in the Reflections doesn’t essentially make him an anti-revolutionary. Engaging with the nuances of Burkean idea of revolution, this paper suggests that Burke in his rejection of the Revolution as “unnatural” (Burke 126), and as an act of disruption and destruction of ancient order, where he incessantly favors tradition over creative innovation of revolution, advocates for a different principle underlying revolutions in general. This, however, does not imply that the Burkean idea of revolution can be understood as a subspecies of the genus of "revolution". Rather, this paper suggests that the French Revolution is a decisive moment in history that marks an epistemological shift with respect to the idea of revolution. In its second half, the paper will enquire into the nature of the revolution in France. Engaging with Burke’s practical criticism of the French National Assembly in the Reflections, this paper will question the extent to which the Revolution was rooted into the dominant intellectual current of the time.
Since the publication of the letter in 1790, many have commented on Burke’s counter-revolutionary stance in the Reflections as a strategic position which restored him to royal favor and earned him a pension (Introduction 19). Regardless to what extent these allegations against Burke can be sustained, this paper does not seek to engage with the debates surrounding Burke’s “motive” behind his “counter-revolutionary” writing in Reflections. The horror of the Revolution, as articulated by Burke, prompts him to produce this extensive and exhaustive piece of writing on the Revolution in order to check its influence into the minds of the Englishmen. What interests us is the fact that through Reflections, Burke laid down the foundation for political conservatism, the rhetoric of which has not essentially changed even three centuries later. Burke feared that the philosophy of the French Revolution was already in the process of penetrating the English consciousness. To him, this infiltration could be sensed in the sermons of Richard Price, an eminent dissenting preacher, delivered during the various proceedings of the Society for Revolution at the Old Jewry in England. Price in his deliverance of a speech on the “Discourse on the love of our Country” to the members of the society on 4 Nov 1789, shortly after the Fall of the Bastille in France, equated the Glorious Revolution of 1688 with the Revolution in France. The publication of the speech in the form of a pamphlet included letters and acknowledgments from eminent members of the newly formed French National Assembly, which highlighted a close association between the English and the French, with the Revolution Society acting as a mediator between the French National Assembly and England. Therefore, very early in his letter, Burke sets off to separate the two revolutions: The Glorious Revolution and the Revolution in France, which according to him had been wrongly confounded together by the members of the Revolution Society (Burke 100). The Glorious Revolution, as Burke rightly points out to some extent, was not a revolution. The prototype of revolution was laid out by France in 1789, where revolution was presented as a break, a rupture. Thus, Burke writes that the Revolution of 1688 was not a destruction of order, but on the contrary, it worked towards the establishment of order in the face of total chaos. He refuses to see the events of 1688 as a rupture in the social and political order of England because according to him, the central principle behind the Revolution of 1688 was the preservation of tradition and the old law of the land (105). According to Burke, the fundamental principle of the Revolution of 1688 can be found in the Declaration of Right- which was “an act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for settling the succession of the crown” (qtd. in Burke 100). Certainly, the succession of the crown by William of Orange was a “small and temporary” (101) deviation, but Burke stresses on the fact that the Bill of Right was indeed drawn from the old law of hereditary succession. This Bill, which came into existence because of a compromise between the Whigs and the Tories, thus, itself is the proof that the Revolution of 1688 indeed saw a combined effort to preserve the old law of hereditary succession on the principles of which the new statue law was made. The Revolution of 1688 then becomes a revolution that was made, not to abolish or destroy the common law, but a revolution that was made to preserve the same.
Burke’s reactionary position vis-a-vis the French Revolution, as opposed to his contradictory stance on the Revolution in America, has been much debated. On the one hand, he despised the Revolution in France because it radically destroyed the old order in France, on the other hand, in the American Revolution Burke saw the restoration of traditional rights of the Americans and thus spoke for the revolution in this case. However, Jeff Spinner in his essay “Constructing Communities: Edmund Burke on Revolution” suggests some inconsistencies in this popular explanation and further argues that since Burke recognised that the war in America and the British Policy in America threatened England’s old order, he contended that the tension in American should be quickly resolved (Spinner 398). Nevertheless, the two seemingly contradictory positions indeed speak of a unified ideology behind Burke’s idea of revolution
Going back to Burke’s efforts to separate the two revolutions, that is the Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution, on the basis of the principles that governed them, exposes what Burke feared the most about the Revolution. As is evident, the events of 1688 had already begun to be interpreted differently by the members of the Revolution society, who according to Burke, chose to see the Declaration of Right, as a “deviation from the constitution” (Burke 107). An emulation of a similar revolution in England was feared by Burke because it demanded not just a change in governance but a complete change, one that would require a complete destruction of the established institutions. Before the Revolution, the French society was divided into different orders: the church, the nobility, and the third estate consisting of the bourgeoisie and the common people. It was the first two estates that generally enjoyed many privileges. Despite their small representation of the whole population, they held a large chunk of the land in France, fiscal privileges, right of jurisdiction and even seats in the parliament, the lawmaking body. The two institutions- the church and the nobility mattered a lot to Burke. They were seen as the reservoir of tradition and custom. Thus, Burke despised the seizure and destruction of these two institutions during the Revolution since it was a radical break from the past. However, if we lay aside Burke’s passionate defense of tradition over change that disrupts the current social order, what valuable in his extensive criticism of the French National Assembly, are his remarks on the workings of the National Assembly which unwittingly raises plausible concerns regarding the nature of the Revolution.
Then the question to be really asked here is as to what extent was the Revolution and the revolutionaries rooted in the dominant intellectual current of the time, represented by the Enlightenment, without undermining the complexity of what either represented. The ideas of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, and those of many others were being widely disseminated among the aristocratic and middle class. Meanwhile, such terms as "citizen", "nation", "social contract", "general will" and the "rights of man" were entering into a common political vocabulary. The opening of the political atmosphere in 1789 fostered liberal ideas associated with the Enlightenment, particularly under political clubs. This political liberalism, the rationality that ran through the Enlightenment, the belief in the enjoyment of inalienable natural rights by all men, freedom of thought and expression was reflected in the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen. The secularization of politics, by removal of the Church from the arena of political life, the opening of clerical posts to election, may be rooted in the thought of the philosophes, Voltaire particularly. This has been agreed upon by scholars like George Lefebvre, who believed that the Enlightenment was the ideology of the Bourgeoisie. Its emphasis on utility, rationalism, individualism, and merit were the obvious products of Bourgeoisie mentality and they seemed to have spread as the Bourgeoisie rose in the 18th century.
In the Reflections, Burke is concerned with translating political convictions into action and thus, speaks extensively on the workings of the National Assembly and its corrupt legislative practices. Burke had two major issues with the National Assembly. First, he believed that “the new system of municipal and regional governments had created tremendous economic spoilage for the members of the National Assembly” (Selinger 45) and second, he believed that no stable form of political relationships can be formed within the Assembly (45). This, Burke foreboded, would lead to violent uprisings in future in France. Burke’s discontent with the composition of the National Assembly and its proceedings after the Fall of the Bastille such as, the confiscation of lands that belonged to the church and the attack on the Royal Family, is at one level purely on ideological grounds since he passionately supported hereditary monarchy and the state church. However, there is another dimension to Burke’s attack on the National assembly. William Selinger observes that Burke’s attack on the National Assembly proceeds through the Assembly’s two particular and most important actions: confiscation of church property and attack on the royal family, to bring to notice the threatening sovereignty of the Assembly and at the same time the powerlessness of this legislative body (58). Thus, at another level, Burke condemns the National Assembly’s confiscation of church land to pay off the debt of the country, on the grounds that this decision was motivated by the “moneyed interests” in France (63) since the elite financial class in France benefitted the most by the manner of the auctioning of those confiscated lands. Turning the rhetoric of the National Assembly against itself, Burke further argues that the Assembly’s claim of the monarchy being illegitimate which formed a ground for declaring all treaties made under their governance as void, could easily have been extended to declare the national debt, which was bound by similar legal engagement, as equally void (63). To Burke, this was an evidence of the essential powerlessness of the body in general and an indication that the actual power lay at the hands of the self-interested bourgeois classes.
The Fall of Bastille had saved the National Assembly from being dissolved and enabled it to change the feudal regime, the main purpose of its creation. It was able to adopt equality of taxation, legal punishment, admission of all to public office, among other reform measures. Thus, the assembly in principle was able to achieve the legal unity of the nation by the destruction of the feudal regime and aristocratic domination over rural areas. This way the assembly had been able to pave the way for a discussion of a declaration of rights. The political victory for the Third Estate was enforced by popular pressure, through revolts that broke out in the towns and the countryside. The Fall of Bastille on July 14 saved the National Assembly from dissolution and later in October, the march of Parisian women to Versailles exerted pressure on Louis XVI to return to Paris and accept the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, firmly establishing the Revolution. However, most of the modern historians have looked upon the French Revolution as a Bourgeoisie Revolution, both in terms of the origin and the outcome of the revolution. They believed that despite the role played by the common people were soon to be abandoned by the revolutionary government, which assumed all power and prevented a genuine people’s democracy from coming into existence. It was the bourgeoisie, which had replaced the aristocracy as the ruling elite.
At this point, the contestations surrounding the debate on the origins of the Revolution cannot be overstated as it continues to raise issues regarding the nature of the Revolution. Many historians have declared the Revolution as a “Bourgeoisie Revolution”, prominent among them is Georges Lefebvre, who claims that the origins of the Revolution can be traced back to the rise of the bourgeoisie and 1789 when this class took power. However, the Revolution as a class struggle has been equally criticised on the grounds that the term “bourgeoisie” was too broad and ambiguous at that point of time. At this juncture, Burke’s criticism of the Nation Assembly and his insight into the proceeding of this legislative body proves to be of great value.
Works Cited
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin, 2004.
Lefebvre, George. The French Revolution. Taylor & Francis, 2005.
O’Brien, Conor Cruise, Introduction. Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke, Penguin, 2004, pp. 9-82.
Selinger, William. “Patronage and Revolution: Edmund Burke's ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ and His Theory of Legislative Corruption.” The Review of Politics, vol. 76, no. 1, 2014, pp. 43–67. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43670937.
Spinner, Jeff. “Constructing Communities: Edmund Burke on Revolution.” Polity, vol. 23, no. 3, 1991, pp. 395–421. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3235133.