Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

~ (Author), L. G. Mitchell (Editor) "You are pleased to call again, and with some earnestness, for my thoughts on the late proceedings in France..." (more)
Key Phrases: antient principles, public estate, primary assemblies, Revolution Society, Old Jewry, King James (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Oxford does the student and scholarly world a service by making Reflections available in an affordable edition."--Barbara B. Davis, Antioch College
"Print is clear and the price is right."--Dr. V. Lyle Haskins, Northeastern State University
"Burke's views are as pertinent today as they were 200 years ago. His comments and criticisms of the French Revolution can be applied to 20th century revolutions. It is interesting that his reflections are echoed by so many revisionist French Revolution historians in the past several years. This work allows students to evaluate the events of the revolution from a different perspective."--Professor Jeanne A. Ojala, University of Utah
"I have hoped someday to find a "Reader's Digest" version of Burke. You have produced one, a real service to the profession! Great introduction and bibliography."--Professor Brian E. Strayer, Andrews University
"The annotation of this text will be a great help to students. Mitchell's introduction is likewise clear and to the point."--Marilyn Morris, University of North Texas

Product Description

This new and up-to-date edition of a book that has been central to political philosophy, history, and revolutionary thought for two hundred years offers readers a dire warning of the consequences that follow the mismanagement of change. Written for a generation presented with challenges of terrible proportions--the Industrial, American, and French Revolutions, to name the most obvious--Burke's Reflections of the Revolution in France displays an acute awareness of how high political stakes can be, as well as a keen ability to set contemporary problems within a wider context of political theory.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (November 11, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192839780
• ISBN-13: 978-0192839787
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #77,247 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Warning to Those in Love with Unbridled Power and Vulnerable to Anything New, August 12, 2006

By	James E. Egolf "James E. Egolf, MA" (Florida) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)wrote REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE in 1789 which was four years before the rise of the fanatical Jacobins and the execution (murder)of Louis XVI. This book was not only well written but very prophetic on the tragic events that were part of the French Revolution. Burke showed historical insight and warned both the British and the French what was going to happen.

Burke cited conditions in France prior to the French Revolution. He certainly did not give a false representation of the economic and social conditions in France, but he was clear that, while not perfect, the French had advanced culture and tolerable living standards. He also warned the French that abrupt changes without recourse to tradition and legal norms were dangerous and would end in tyranny. Readers should be aware that Burke's assessment of the French political system was that the French had reasonble politcal freedom and prosperity. To destroy this political system would end in political disruption, social and political violence, lack of law-and-order, and the rise of tyrannical military leaders.

One should note Burke's assessment of the members of the French National Assembly which was vacilating and subject to the whims of any "political interest group" was serious. He suggested that military officers would be among those "pleaders" would be military officers who would be difficult to control. He also warned that when someone who understood the art of command got control of the military officers, the days of the French Republic and the National Assembly were over. The military commander would be in total control, and this is exactly what happened when Napolean I (1769-1821)started to exhibit military genius, he quickly got power by a coup d' etat in 1799 and became the French Emperor by 1804.

Burke's warnings of disaster and tragedy were fullfilled. From at least 1792 until 1815, the French were almost constantly at war with most Europeans. While the French Empire expanded beyond anything prior French monarchs ever dreamed of, the collapse of the French Empire came quickly, and the French empire was ended by 1815 at terrible cost in both blood treasure. Burke warned of these dangers, and his predictions were accurate.

Burke lived just long enough to see the rise and fall of the maniacal Jacobins which included the Reigh of Terror (1792-1794)and the execution of King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie antionette. Had Burke lived a few more years, he could have resorted to remarking, "I told you so."

Edmund Burke has been defined as a conservative which is true. However, Burke was not a reactionary. Burke realized that progress, whatever that may mean, is often slow and within the confines of historical tradition, legal norms, and established law. Burke warned his readers, to use modern parlance, against "wipe the slate clean." Burke clearly understood that to "wipe the slate clean, meant mass dislocation of men and ultimately mass executions (mass murder). Subsequent modern political revolutions vindicate this view.

Readers may wonder why Burke expressed support for the American Revolution but strongly opposed the French Revolution. A careful examination of these revolutions provides the answer. The American "revolutionaries" were arguing for their "Rights of Englishmen" which had a long tradition in Great Britain. Henry II (1154-1189) started the use grand juries. The English had the right of trial by jury by the time of Edward I (1272-1307). The fact is the American colonists wanted to rules of common law and long established legal traditions to apply to them. The British wanted to rule the American colonists with administrative law using clever bureaucrats, as Burke would probably have called them, rather than use British Constitutional Law and the Common Law which many American colonists demanded. The French, on the other hand, wanted to replace a weak monarch with "clever bureaucrats" which Burke knew very well could not work in France.

Readers should note that Thomas Paine (1737-1809)wrote a response to Burke's REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION titled THE RIGHTS OF MAN. While Paine's views were different than those of Burke's Paine's book was just as brilliant as Burke's. Readers should read both works if they want exposure to profound political thought and excellent writing. This is much preferred to the current political nonsense that is pushed by media talking heads and journalists who cannot think or write. Burke and Paine were well read men and offered readers history lessons as well as politcal lessons.

Edmund Burke's REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE is highly recommended regardless of one's political persuasion. This book is not a light read and takes time. However, one will be better informed and wiser for doing so. Again, this reviewer suggests the reader should read Thomas Paine's THE RIGHTS OF MAN to draw comparisons and contrasts.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The finest writing ever in English prose!, January 13, 2006

By	Robert A. Williams "libertarian" (Oberlin, OH United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This small title is actually a letter that the author wrote to a friend in France. When Edmund Burke wrote this letter about the French Revolution (where the king was overthrown and beheaded by the masses aka Jacobins), English scholars agree that the result was the finest piece of prose in the English language; only a few poets have succeeded in writing something finer. Whether you agree with Burke's interpretation or not is not the point; he penned the finest piece of literature ever in the English language.

As a historian and social commentator, Burke is a "structural functionalist" decades before that term was dreamed up. He recognizes that the French are not only creatures of their culture, but prisoners. And to compare them to the English colonists and other insurgents in the American colonies who revolted against the British government is to compare apples and oranges. Whereas the Yankee revolution of 1776 was Biblically-inspired and the propaganda for rebellion preached from the pulpits, the French were railing AGAINST the Catholic Church for keeping people ignorant and in their Dark Age.

Burke says the French Revolution is a revolution without its moorings, without the necessary principles to guide individual behavior, and without the maintenance of institutions that long provided stability and security. What the French philosophes were writing was mere balderdash, says Burke. Without their traditions, customs, and institutitions that had slowly brought the French out of barbarity and into a civilized manner of living, Burke saw in revolution a rapid decline and fall of the French people into a visciousness of dog-eat-dog.

In short, Burke saw the French Revolution as lacking virtue and descending into terrorism; whereas the Yankee Revolution was virtuous and grew into a democracy.

Whether you agree with Burke or not, and I do not, his writing in this letter to a friend is the finest example of English writing to be found and should be read by everyone simply for that reason alone.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Burke's evils of the French Revolution, December 3, 2008

By	Michael A Neulander "Political Philosophy" (VA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This was required reading for a graduate course in the history of the French Revolution. In Burke's book Reflections on the Revolution in France, he penned a diatribe against the evils of the French Revolution, believing that there was a pernicious cabal of philosophes and politicians joined by money-jobbers whose aim was to topple not only the old regime in France, but to export their "plague" throughout Europe. Thus, Burke astutely understood and abhorred the influence that Radical Enlightenment ideas had on the French Revolution. One instantly detects, in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, a conservative philosophy by which he not only understood his own society, but the entire human civilization. Much of his work was an appeal to a politically conservative notion of a "created order" of the world, which from this reading seemed to be universal to all European nations. This reader sensed that Burke's Reflections were written as a warning to the rest of Europe not to follow the model of change embodied in the French Revolution, and to adopt the steady reforms that took place in England.

Burke found no social redeeming value in the French Revolution and when he wrote Reflections, the worst of the "reign of terror" had yet to come. In fact, if one used Georges Lefebvre's notion of "four acts" to the Revolution, Burke poured out all his criticism against the first two acts, the aristocratic and bourgeois revolts. This reader found Burke's long sections on British history used to buttress his case; that change should have come to France within a more staid social order as either ignorant of the complex socio-economic and political factors that led up to the Revolution, or as a naïve belief that that the French people were so culturally close to the English that they should both react in similar fashion to socio-political upheaval. Burke delivered a literary "tongue lashing" to the French for how easily they turned their backs on their socio-political traditions. "You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you" (31). This reader found Burke's argument on this point a little disingenuous. He lectured how Britain's "Glorious Revolution" in 1688 should have been the model for reform. However, he barely mentioned the bloody English Civil War that Cromwell staged, including the regicide of Charles I. In addition, one's impression of Burke's information is that he had received a very narrow view of the history leading up to the Revolution and its opening days, which seemed confined to correspondence from a small circle of friends. Burke had high praise for the First and Second Estates. His opinion of the nobles he knew was that they were, "...for the greater part composed of men of high spirit, and of a delicate sense of honour....They were tolerably well bred; very officious, humane, and hospitable" (115-116). Not the impression one is left with after viewing the movie Dangerous Liaisons! In describing his personal contacts with the French clergy, he noted that, "I received a perfectly good account of their morals, and of their attention to their duties" (123).

Burke essentially observed a "cabal" that planned the opening of the Revolution to include a pronouncement of aristocratic intentions to abolish feudalism, the National Assembly's adoption of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man," and the confiscation of Church property. Burke blamed two evils for the old regimes' demise. First, he blamed the philosophes whose atheistic literature he believed provided the influential ideas necessary to set the Revolution in motion. "The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion" (94). "Writers, especially when they act in a body, and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind" (95). Second, he blamed the doubling of the Third Estate's representation in the National Assembly who were led by an overabundance of undistinguished lawyers and whose ambitions were to grab the reins of power. Burke described these men as "the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members of the profession" (36). Burke also ascribed to this cabal; the desire to reorder society through the confiscation of property, which he decried in his Reflections. "I see the confiscators begin with bishops, and chapters, and monasteries; but I do not see them end their" (128). Thus, Burke found that the pernicious cabal of philosophes and politicians were too enamored of the "new religion" of enlightenment science and had no respect for tradition or the wisdom of religion. "They conceive very systematically, that all things which give perpetuity are mischievous" (75).
Alexis de Tocqueville noted how Burke misjudged the Revolution. "At first he thought it meant that France would be weakened and virtually destroyed" (94). Burke also feared that this "irrational" revolution would infest his own countrymen similar to a plaque. "If it be a plague, it is such a plague that the precautions of the most severe quarantine ought to be established against it." (76).

Burke was no stranger to enlightened ideas. After all, he had been a supporter of American and Irish liberty. Burke was a Conservative Enlightenment figure, defending "reason" with tradition and religion. However, what Burke, was condemning in its earliest form is what we now recognize as ideology. And what he understood with great foresight is the power of modern intellectuals, acting as a literary clerisy, to produce it. Thus, Burke found that the pernicious cabal of philosophes and politicians were too enamored of the "new religion" of enlightenment science and had no respect for tradition or the wisdom of religion. "They conceive very systematically, that all things which give perpetuity are mischievous" (75).

Recommended reading for anyone interested in political philosophy, enlightenment history, and the French Revolution.