Burke · 1790
Edmund Burke and the Reflections on the Revolution in France
On the first of November 1790 the London publisher James Dodsley issued a octavo volume of three hundred and fifty-six pages, written by Edmund Burke, Member of Parliament for Malton, on the subject of the political experiments then in progress at Paris. The book had been written over the spring and summer of 1790 in answer to a letter from a young French acquaintance, Charles-Jean-François Depont, who had asked Burke whether the events of the previous year should be celebrated. Burke had at first been thought, by the Whig friends of his old age, likely to be sympathetic to the Revolution; he had spent thirty years on the Whig side of the House on the side of America in the 1770s and on the side of the Indians against Warren Hastings in the 1780s. The book changed the impression. By the end of 1790 it had sold nineteen thousand copies in seven editions; by the end of 1791, thirty thousand; by 1796, sixty thousand. *Reflections on the Revolution in France* is, by every careful judgment, the founding text of modern political conservatism in the English-speaking world. Burke was sixty-one years old. He had eight years to live. He spent five of them broken from the Whig caucus and taking the political-philosophical argument the book had begun out across Europe.
It is the late evening of the third of August 1790, in the library at Gregories, the small farm at Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire that he has rented and is in the process of buying with money he does not entirely have. He is sixty-one years old. He is Edmund Burke, Member of Parliament for Malton in the Whig interest, born at Arran Quay, Dublin, on the twelfth of January 1729, the second son of a Protestant attorney and a Catholic mother, schooled at the Quaker school at Ballitore, Trinity College, Dublin, called to the bar at the Middle Temple, in his thirty-fourth year in the House of Commons, and in his thirteenth month of working over the long answer to a question that a young man at Paris had put to him in October of last year.
On the desk in front of him are: the most recent letter from Depont, dated the twenty-second of June; a packet of Le Moniteur newspapers Depont has sent him to keep him abreast of the Constituent Assembly's proceedings; the August number of the English Review; the bound volume of his Speeches at the Trial of Warren Hastings, which has been at the printer since June and is to come out next month; and a draft of his answer to Depont, three hundred and twenty pages of foolscap in his own hand, with the four most recent revisions in a different ink.
He has, in the spring, been pressed by Charles James Fox in the House to declare himself for or against the French settlement. He has, in the summer, watched the Constituent Assembly abolish the noblesse, abolish the parlements, dissolve the religious orders, and put through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. He has, this evening, by Mrs Burke's note in her diary, been writing for fourteen hours.
He thinks: the question Depont put to me was: are these events to be celebrated as a vindication of the principles of liberty? The answer I have to give him takes three hundred pages because the question contains four assumptions that I do not accept.
He thinks: the assumption that the principles of liberty are universal abstract principles, the same in 1789 Paris as in 1688 London. They are not.
He thinks: the assumption that the constitution of a country is a contract that can be re-written from first principles by its present generation. It is not.
He thinks: the assumption that the past is a record of error to be cleared. It is the inheritance of usable practice without which the present generation has nothing to govern with.
He thinks: the assumption that the people who are running the Assembly are the people who are going to be running France in five years. They are not. The people who will run France in five years are not in the Assembly. They are in the next room. They are reading the Assembly's papers and waiting.
He thinks: if I write to Depont a private letter saying these things, the letter goes nowhere. If I publish it as a book, it goes to every corner of Europe within six months. If I publish it as a book, the Whig caucus will turn on me, because Fox is a Foxite first and a Whig second, and the Whigs are seventy per cent for the Revolution at this hour. I lose Fox. I lose Sheridan. I keep Pitt at a distance because I cannot be a Pittite. I keep my seat at Malton, but only because Lord Fitzwilliam is the patron and Fitzwilliam reads what I write.
He thinks: the price of writing this book is the political friendships of thirty years. The price of not writing it is what I think the price of not writing it is.
He picks up the pen at half past nine. He works through to two in the morning on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy passages, which are the most contested in the manuscript. He goes to bed at two. He gets up at six. He completes the manuscript on the twenty-third of October. The book goes to James Dodsley on the twenty-fifth and is on sale on the first of November.
Reflections on the Revolution in France sold seven thousand copies in the first six weeks. The Whig caucus broke as Burke had foreseen; the formal break with Fox came in the chamber of the House of Commons on the sixth of May 1791, in a speech in which Burke, leaving the front bench, walked across to the Tory benches and refused Fox's hand. He held the seat at Malton with Fitzwilliam's continuing patronage and continued to write on the French question through 1791, 1792 and 1793. Mary Wollstonecraft answered the Reflections with A Vindication of the Rights of Men in November 1790; Tom Paine answered it with The Rights of Man in February 1791. The book has remained, by general assent, the foundational text of modern Anglo-American conservative political thought, and the reference-text of every careful argument since against the impatience of revolutionary first principles. Burke survived to see the September Massacres in 1792, the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, the Terror in 1793–94, the Thermidorian reaction, the Directory, and the rise of Bonaparte. He died at Beaconsfield on the ninth of July 1797, sixty-eight years old. He is buried in the parish church of Beaconsfield. The grave-marker, by his own instructions, says only Edmund Burke. The library at Gregories burned in 1813 with most of the books and the marginalia and the unpublished correspondence. The first edition of the Reflections with his own marginalia for the second edition is the volume preserved in the Boston Public Library; it has the marks of a man who, by the time of the third edition in 1791, had stopped pretending the book was a private letter to a young Frenchman.