The work of the politician and philosopher irlando-British Edmund Burke Réflexions on the Revolution of France (in English Reflection one the Revolution in France ) was published for the first time on November 1st, 1790. The author devotes to it to a criticism French revolution, which then had just started. The work exerted a considerable influence, in particular in the preserving mediums and liberal; the arguments of Edmund Burke were re-used thereafter against the political proposals claiming Communisme and Socialisme.

Context

Edmund Burke sat since many year already with the House of Commons, within the left whig, and was strongly related to Lord Rockingham. During its parliamentary career, it had defended with strength the constitutional limitations with the royal authority, denounced the persecution of the Irish catholics, supported the claims of the inhabitants of the British colonies in America, supported the American Révolution, and claimed that the governor-general of Bengal, Warren Hastings, is dislocated of his functions for corruption and abuse of authority. He thus enjoyed a great reputation in the democratic and liberal mediums with the the United Kingdom, the the United States and in continental Europe.

In 1789, shortly after the Storming of the Bastille , a French noble young person, Charles-Jean-François Depont, who had become acquainted with Burke during a voyage in Great Britain, had required of Burke which were its impressions on the political upheavals which France knew. Burke answered Depont by two successive letters; the second, much longer than the preceding one, was published a few months later under the title Reflections one the Revolution in France .

Contents

For Burke, the French revolution must be necessarily completed by a disaster, because it rests on abstract concepts, certainly rationally founded, but which were unaware of the complexity of the human nature and the company. It considers the policy from a pragmatic point of view, and mistakes the idea of certain philosophers of the Lights, like the marquis de Condorcet, according to which the policy could be reduced with a rigorous system, similar to mathematics, in which one could reason in a deductive way.

Anglican and whig, Burke rejects the concept of divine Droit, as that which would like that the people do not have the right to deposit a government which would be made guilty of oppression. In addition, he believes in the central role of the Private property, the Tradition and the Préjugé S (i.e. the adhesion of the people to values without conscious justification rational), which make it possible to interest the citizens in the prosperity of their country and the maintenance of the social order. He decides in favor of gradual reforms, within the framework of a constitution. Burke insists on the fact that political doctrines founded on abstract concepts like the Liberté or the Human rights can be easily used by those which hold the capacity to justify tyrannical measurements. He pleads on the contrary for the inscription in a constitution of rights and freedoms specific and concrete, making it possible to make stopping with governmental oppression.

For Burke, the individuals are especially determined by innate feelings, and are firmly attached to their prejudices; capacities of reasoning of the individual being limited, and it is thus preferable to refer of them “to the funds universal nations and times” - i.e. the prejudices. It defends the prejudices because of their utility; it make it possible to determine the action to be taken quickly in the critical situations. At the man, the prejudices “make virtue a practice”.

The instability and the general disorder which follow the Revolution, predict Burke, will make the army inclined mutiner and to play a part in the political quarrels. A general popular, able to be made like and obey of his soldiers, could make himself “main quickly of your assembly, Master of your very whole Republic”. Shortly after the death of Burke, Bonaparte was to carry out this prophecy at the time of the Coup d'etat of the 18 brumaire.

Influence

The Réflexions were read much, at once after their publication, but most of the immediate reactions were negative. One reproached in particular Burke his lack of moderation in the reproaches which he addresses to the leaders of the French revolution, his panegyric of the king Louis XVI and his wife, but also several factual inaccuracies about certain events and of the new political organization of the country. Thomas Jefferson, William Hazlitt and Charles James Fox, as well as other liberals, who hitherto supported Burke, is reflected to stigmatize it like reactionary. Preserving the Prime Minister William Pitt saw in the work only “rhapsodies where one finds much to admire, and nothing with what one can agree” According to certain observers, Burke would have been suddenly reached a mental imbalance; others have advanced that it would secretly have converted with Catholicism, and would thus have been shocked by the expropriation of the ecclesiastical goods and various anticlericals measurements taken by the new government. Thomas Paine wrote in answer to Burke its work the Human rights , and Mary Wollstonecraft made in the same way in its Défense of the human rights . Among those which continued to admire Burke, one finds almost only personalities manifestly reactionaries, like the king George III and the philosopher Joseph de Maistre.

The situation developed however after number of the predictions made by Burke had been carried out: execution of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, and introduction of the Terreur, during which hundreds of thousands of citizens were stopped arbitrarily, and several thousands of them carried out for political reasons. It is finally the coup d'etat of Napoleon Bonaparte and the introduction of a military dictatorship which put an end to chaos and violence. The majority of Whigs joined in Burke in the opposition to the French revolutionary government, and with its death, the Réflexions seemed its principal political legacy.

At the 19th century, the historian positivist Hippolyte Taine echoed the arguments of Burke in his Histoire of the origins of contemporary France , appeared between 1876 and 1885. For Taine, the principal defect of the political system and administrative French was the excessive centralization of the capacity. From its point of view, instead of making progress the democratic control of the institutions, the French revolution had made only transfer the capacity from an aristocracy to an elite which wanted to be enlightened, and appeared in fact even less liberal. At the 20th century, several Western observers found in the Réflexions arguments applicable to the socialist revolutions; Burke thus became a reference obliged in the preserving mediums and liberal traditional. Two of the principal figures of liberalism at the 20th century, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, recognized their debt towards him. For the American essay writer Russell Kirk, with several of the Lettres written by Burke in its last years the Réflexions represent “the charter of conservatism”.

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