On the essays shelf:
Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France
is one of the great political tracts in existence. Like Tom Paine (who wrote Rights of Man
as a sort of blistering REPLY to Burke’s critique), Burke was engaged in the revolutionary upheaval of that era, and his views are not easily put into a little box. It’s not a mystery why Burke is a conservative hero. (Example from the text.) Reflections is one of the best articulations of classical conservatism that I’ve ever read, and had a huge impact on me when I first read it, back in college. I’ve read it many many times since then. Reflections seems to morph and change, depending on where you, the reader, are at in your own life and intellectual development.
The whole thing started as a “letter” written to a young friend in France who wanted Burke’s opinion on the revolution. What began as a brief reply obviously changed into something much more elaborate. I am always finding new things in it. I have read much more of Burke, and have a collection of his writings that I dip into often, but, of course, Reflections is what he is most known for. One of the things to keep in mind about Burke’s critique of the French Revolution is that he was mainly fearful of that revolutionary fervor spreading to England. He was a champion (sort of) of the American colonies’ bid for independence, and was horrified at what he saw going down in France, a classic and terrible example of how NOT to do a revolution. He thought that the violence he was watching unfold came from the idealogical fervor of the main authors of the revolution, their desire to pull down the pillars of society until all was in flames. The thought of that kind of revolution was terrifying to Burke, and he was correct to be terrified. Many of the leading intellects of the day were swept up in the events in France, Thomas Jefferson being the most obvious example. Jefferson was so pro-French-Revolution that one of his many “breaks” with John Adams came because of it. His famous quote about the “tree of liberty” needing to be watered with the “blood of patriots and tyrants” was a clear statement of his beliefs, their ferocious ideology. Abigail Adams was so horrified by something he wrote in a letter to her in 1787 (“I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.”) that she recoiled from him entirely. What was going down in France had NO similarities to what happened in America. But very few people could discern that at the time. One has to remember how news traveled relatively slowly, and getting a full picture of events was often challenging, even with people on the ground in France. Edmund Burke, however, saw which way the wind was blowing, saw that the revolution had turned into something monstrous and self-defeating, saw that it would “eat its own,” and refused to get swept away in the glorious feeling overtaking the globe at that particular time. “Equality” is no great shakes when your entire country is in flames.
There are a couple of moments of spooky prescience in Reflections. He predicts a Napoleon will rise out of the ashes.
I read Reflections often (I just re-read it early this year). I find it a welcome clear-headed clear-thinking draught.
The following review of Reflections, written by Christopher Hitchens, appeared in the Atlantic in April of 2004. It’s a pretty huge essay, and beautifully examines Burke’s various attitudes, and where he was coming from in Reflections, how he was misinterpreted (or not), and just how good an analysis it really was. Hitchens references Conor Cruise O’Brien’s massive biography of Burke (The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke
) -which I have not read. I lost a couple of readers when I mentioned I had read Conor Cruise O’Brien’s autobiography, one person leaving in a huff, but not before sending me a blistering email. I guess I hadn’t been condemning enough. I get that O’Brien is a divisive figure. But … what … I shouldn’t read what he had to say for himself? Or I should only talk about it in a condemnatory way? Stop it. The man intersected with every major Irish figure in the 20th century. So, duh, of course I’m gonna read what he wrote. Hitchens makes me curious about O’Brien’s Burke biography.
There are many parts to Hitchens’ essay. I love the section where he goes into how Tom Paine and Edmund Burke basically were speaking to one another, and what that conversation entailed. But here’s an excerpt from an earlier part in the essay, where Hitchens talks about what it is like to read Reflections today.
Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, ‘Edmund Burke: Reactionary Prophet’, by Christopher Hitchens
Three questions will occur to anybody considering the Reflections today. Was it a grand and prophetic indictment of revolutionary excess? Was it the disdainful shudder of a man who despised or feared what at one stage he described as the “swinish multitude”? And did it contain what we would now term a “hidden agenda”? The answer to all three questions, it seems to me, is a firm yes. Let us take the two most celebrated excerpts of Burke’s extraordinary prose. The first is the prescient one:
It is known; that armies have hitherto yielded a very precarious and uncertain obedience to any senate, or popular authority; and they will least of all yield it to an assembly which is only to have a continuance of two years. The officers must totally lose the characteristic disposition of military men, if they see with perfect submission and due admiration, the dominion of pleaders; especially when they find that they have a new court to pay to an endless succession of those pleaders; whose military policy, and the genius of whose command, (if they should have any), must be as uncertain as their duration is transient. In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things. But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master, the master (that is little) of your king, the master of your Assembly, the master of your whole republic.
This is almost eerily exact. Even in the solitary detail in which it does not body forth the actual coming of Napoleon Bonaparte (who did not emerge until well after the execution of King Louis), it takes care to state that the subordination of existing monarchy would be the least of it. There is only one comparable Cassandra-like prediction that I can call to mind, and that is Rosa Luxemburg’s warning to Lenin that revolution can move swiftly from the dictatorship of a class to the dictatorship of a party, to be followed by the dictatorship of a committee of that party and eventually by the rule of a single man who will soon enough dispense with that committee.
Contrast this with Burke’s even more famous passage about the fragrance and charisma of Marie Antoinette:
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphins, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, – glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendour and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
One has read this passage very many times (I shall never forget the first time I heard it read out loud, by a Tory headmaster), and its meaning and majesty appear to alter with one’s mood and evolution. “The unbought grace of life” is a most arresting phrase, however opaque, just as “the cheap defense of nations” remains unintelligible. The gallantry, and the appeal to chivalry, can sometimes seem like “the last enchantments of the Middle Age,” breathing with an incomparable melancholy and resignation. Alternatively, the entire stave can be held to rank with the most preposterous and empurpled sentimentality ever committed to print – not to be rivaled until the moist, vapid effusions that greeted the death of Diana Spencer, also in Paris, in a banal traffic accident.
The latter view, or something very like it, was the one expressed by Burke’s friend and confidant Philip Francis, to whom he had sent the draft and the proofs. The friendship more or less ended when Francis replied,
In my opinion all that you say of the Queen is pure foppery. If she be a perfect female character you ought to take your ground upon her virtues. If she be the reverse it is ridiculous in any but a Lover, to place her personal charms in opposition to her crimes. Either way I know the argument must proceed upon a supposition; for neither have you said anything to establish her moral merits, nor have her accusers formally tried and convicted her of guilt.
The gash that this inflicted on Burke was not a shallow one: He had admired Philip Francis ever since the latter took an active part in the defense of the rights of India and the consequent impeachment of Warren Hastings. Francis, moreover, was one of the most feared and skillful pamphleteers of the day, writing excoriating letters under the pseudonym “Junius” – whose identity Burke was one of the few to guess. (I can’t resist pointing out here that Rosa Luxemburg wrote her most famous pamphlet under the same nom de guerre. I do so not to make a connection that hasn’t been observed before but because “Junius” is taken from Lucius Junius Brtutus, not the Shakespeareean regicide but the hero and founder of the Roman republic.) Not content with taunting Burke about his emotional spasm over Marie Antoinette, Francis urged him in effect to give up the whole project; and when it was finally published in spite of this advice, he wrote Burke a letter in which he coupled “the Church” with “that religion in short, which was practiced or professed, and with great Zeal too, by tyrants and villains of every denomination.” This English Voltaireanism had the effect of spurring Burke to an even more heated defense of the alliance of religion with order and property. To him, the alleged “deism” of the revolutionaries was a shabby mask for iconoclastic atheism. Nor did he care much for the then fashionable chatter about liberty and “rights.” As he stated early in the Reflections,
Am I to congratulate an highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic knight of the sorrowful countenance.
In other words, Burke was quite ready to anticipate, or to meet any charge of quixotism. This did not prevent Thomas Paine from responding that “in the rhapsody of his imagination, he has discovered a world of windmills, and his sorrows are, that there are no Quixotes to attack them.”
