Edmund Burke and the Reflections on the Revolution in France

Some revolutions are answered in the street, by men with pikes and proclamations. Others are answered in a country library at night, by a man at the end of his career who has decided that the cost of writing what he sees is cheaper than the cost of not writing it. The answer, in such cases, takes the form of a book, and the book outlives the friendships, the parliament, the patronage, and the man.

THE IRISHMAN AT WESTMINSTER

Edmund Burke is sixty-one years old in the summer of 1790. He was born at Arran Quay, Dublin, on the twelfth of January 1729, the second son of a Protestant attorney and a Catholic mother; schooled by Abraham Shackleton at the Quaker academy at Ballitore, then Trinity College, then the Middle Temple. He has sat for Malton in the Whig interest since 1780, and before that for Wendover and for Bristol. Thirty years on one bench. He has spoken for the American colonists against Lord North's ministry; he has spent seven years arraigning Warren Hastings before the Lords for what the East India Company has done in Bengal; he has argued, against his own party where necessary, for the relief of Irish Catholic disabilities and the relaxation of trade restrictions on his native country. The Whig friends of his old age, Fox above all, have therefore assumed him to be a natural friend of the events at Paris, since liberty is a Whig word and Burke has used it all his life. The assumption is about to be disproved at considerable length.

THE LETTER FROM PARIS

In the first week of November 1789 a packet had come through the post from a young Frenchman named Charles-Jean-François Depont, whom Burke had met three years earlier when Depont was travelling in England. The Bastille had fallen in July. The night of the fourth of August had stripped the noblesse of its feudal rights. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen had been voted on the twenty-sixth. Depont, twenty-two years old and elated, wrote to ask his older English friend whether the French had not at last assured themselves of the dignity of free men, and whether Burke would not write to confirm it. Burke wrote a short answer in November and put it aside. Through the winter of 1789 and the spring of 1790 the answer lengthened. Through the spring it became something else. By July it had outgrown the form of a private letter to a young man and become the manuscript of a book.

THE LIBRARY AT GREGORIES

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. On the desk are the most recent letter from Depont, dated the twenty-second of June; a packet of Le Moniteur that Depont has sent him to keep him abreast of the Constituent Assembly's proceedings; the August number of the English Review; the bound proofs of his Speeches at the Trial of Warren Hastings, which is to come out next month; and a draft of his answer, three hundred and twenty pages of foolscap in his own hand, with the four most recent revisions in a different ink. The candles are lit. Mrs Burke has gone up. By her note in her diary he has been writing for fourteen hours.

A SECOND OF TIME IN A LIBRARY

What is to be done with the draft is, this evening, the question. The draft can go to Depont as a private letter; it can be locked in the desk; or it can go to James Dodsley in Pall Mall and be printed. The question contains in it the political friendships of thirty years, and Burke turns it over, in the cadence of the prose he is even now still revising, while the pen rests. The question Depont put was whether these events were to be celebrated as a vindication of liberty. The honest answer takes three hundred pages because the question contains four assumptions he does not accept: that the principles of liberty are universal abstractions, the same in 1789 Paris as in 1688 London; that the constitution of a country is a contract that the present generation may rewrite from first principles, owing nothing to the dead and nothing to the unborn; that the past is a record of error to be cleared away; and that the men now running the Assembly will be the men running France in five years. They will not. The men who will run France in five years are in the next room, reading the Assembly's papers, and waiting. A society, he has come to think over these months at this desk, is 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; and what is presently being attempted at Paris is the unilateral cancellation of that partnership by the smallest party to it. If he writes a private letter, the letter goes nowhere. If he publishes a book, the book goes to every corner of Europe within six months. If he publishes a book, the Whig caucus breaks, because Fox is a Foxite first and a Whig second, and the Whigs are at this hour seventy in the hundred for the Revolution. He loses Fox. He loses Sheridan. He cannot become a Pittite. He keeps his seat at Malton only so long as Lord Fitzwilliam continues to read what he writes. The price of publishing is the political friendships of thirty years; the price of not publishing is, simply, the price of not publishing. He picks up the pen at half past nine and works through to two in the morning on the passages concerning the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which are the most contested in the manuscript. He goes to bed at two. He gets up at six.

PUBLICATION

He completes the manuscript on the twenty-third of October 1790. It goes to James Dodsley in Pall Mall on the twenty-fifth. Reflections on the Revolution in France is published as an octavo of three hundred and fifty-six pages on the first of November. It sells seven thousand copies in six weeks. By the end of 1790 it has gone through seven editions and nineteen thousand copies; by the end of 1791, thirty thousand; by 1796, sixty thousand. It is read at every court in Europe. George III, who has not previously cared for Burke, says of the book that every gentleman should read it. It is translated into French within the month by Pierre-Gaëton Dupont and read in Paris by men who, three years later, will be reading it on the way to the scaffold.

THE BENCH

The break with Fox is enacted in the chamber of the House of Commons on the sixth of May 1791, in the debate on the Quebec Bill, when Burke rises and turns the speech to the French question, and Fox, weeping, calls across the floor for the friendship of thirty years. Burke does not give it. He crosses from the Whig front bench to the Tory side and refuses Fox's hand. Sheridan has already gone. The Whig party that took up the American colonists in 1775 and arraigned Warren Hastings in 1788 dies in that hour, and a new alignment, neither Whig nor Tory in the old sense, begins to take shape behind Pitt and behind the man who has just walked across the chamber. Mary Wollstonecraft has answered him in November 1790 with A Vindication of the Rights of Men; Tom Paine answers him in February 1791 with The Rights of Man; James Mackintosh follows with Vindiciae Gallicae. None of them sells what Burke has sold. He keeps Malton because Fitzwilliam reads what he writes.

WHAT THE LIBRARY KNEW

He lives eight more years. He sees the September Massacres in 1792, the execution of Louis XVI on the twenty-first of January 1793, the Terror through 1793 and 1794, the fall of Robespierre on the ninth Thermidor, the Directory, and the first reports out of Italy of a Corsican artillery officer named Bonaparte. The men running France in 1796 are not the men of the Constituent Assembly. They are, exactly as he had thought at the desk at Gregories, the men who had been in the next room. His only son Richard, on whom every paternal hope rested, dies in August 1794, aged thirty-six; Burke does not recover. He continues to write: the Letter to a Noble Lord in 1796, the Letters on a Regicide Peace through 1796 and 1797. He dies at Beaconsfield on the ninth of July 1797, sixty-eight years old.

THE GRAVE-MARKER

The end of an old order is not always closed in the street. It is sometimes closed in a country library, by an Irishman who has spent thirty years inside an English institution he was never quite of, and who decides at sixty-one that the inheritance is worth more than the friendships. He is buried in the parish church of Beaconsfield, beside his son. By his own instructions the slab reads only Edmund Burke. The library at Gregories burned in 1813, taking the books and the marginalia and most of the unpublished correspondence with it. What survives is a first edition of the Reflections preserved in the Boston Public Library, with his own hand in the margins, correcting the second edition: the marks of a man who, by 1791, had stopped pretending the book was a private letter to a young Frenchman.