Reflections on the Revolution in France

by Edmund Burke

IT MAY NOT BE UNNECESSARY to inform the reader that the following 

Reflections had their origin in a correspondence between the Author and a 

very young gentleman at Paris, who did him the honor of desiring his 

opinion upon the important transactions which then, and ever since, have so 

much occupied the attention of all men. An answer was written some time in 

the month of October 1789, but it was kept back upon prudential 

considerations. That letter is alluded to in the beginning of the following 

sheets. It has been since forwarded to the person to whom it was addressed. 

The reasons for the delay in sending it were assigned in a short letter to 

the same gentleman. This produced on his part a new and pressing 

application for the Author's sentiments.

The Author began a second and more full discussion on the subject. This he 

had some thoughts of publishing early in the last spring; but, the matter 

gaining upon him, he found that what he had undertaken not only far 

exceeded the measure of a letter, but that its importance required rather a 

more detailed consideration than at that time he had any leisure to bestow 

upon it. However, having thrown down his first thoughts in the form of a 

letter, and, indeed, when he sat down to write, having intended it for a 

private letter, he found it difficult to change the form of address when 

his sentiments had grown into a greater extent and had received another 

direction. A different plan, he is sensible, might be more favorable to a 

commodious division and distribution of his matter.

Dear Sir,

You are pleased to call again, and with some earnestness, for my thoughts 

on the late proceedings in France. I will not give you reason to imagine 

that I think my sentiments of such value as to wish myself to be solicited 

about them. They are of too little consequence to be very anxiously either 

communicated or withheld. It was from attention to you, and to you only, 

that I hesitated at the time when you first desired to receive them. In the 

first letter I had the honor to write to you, and which at length I send, I 

wrote neither for, nor from, any description of men, nor shall I in this. 

My errors, if any, are my own. My reputation alone is to answer for them.

You see, Sir, by the long letter I have transmitted to you, that though I 

do most heartily wish that France may be animated by a spirit of rational 

liberty, and that I think you bound, in all honest policy, to provide a 

permanent body in which that spirit may reside, and an effectual organ by 

which it may act, it is my misfortune to entertain great doubts concerning 

several material points in your late transactions.

YOU IMAGINED, WHEN YOU WROTE LAST, that I might possibly be reckoned among 

the approvers of certain proceedings in France, from the solemn public seal 

of sanction they have received from two clubs of gentlemen in London, 

called the Constitutional Society and the Revolution Society.

I certainly have the honor to belong to more clubs than one, in which the 

constitution of this kingdom and the principles of the glorious Revolution 

are held in high reverence, and I reckon myself among the most forward in 

my zeal for maintaining that constitution and those principles in their 

utmost purity and vigor. It is because I do so, that I think it necessary 

for me that there should be no mistake. Those who cultivate the memory of 

our Revolution and those who are attached to the constitution of this 

kingdom will take good care how they are involved with persons who, under 

the pretext of zeal toward the Revolution and constitution, too frequently 

wander from their true principles and are ready on every occasion to depart 

from the firm but cautious and deliberate spirit which produced the one, 

and which presides in the other. Before I proceed to answer the more 

material particulars in your letter, I shall beg leave to give you such 

information as I have been able to obtain of the two clubs which have 

thought proper, as bodies, to interfere in the concerns of France, first 

assuring you that I am not, and that I have never been, a member of either 

of those societies.

The first, calling itself the Constitutional Society, or Society for 

Constitutional Information, or by some such title, is, I believe, of seven 

or eight years standing. The institution of this society appears to be of a 

charitable and so far of a laudable nature; it was intended for the 

circulation, at the expense of the members, of many books which few others 

would be at the expense of buying, and which might lie on the hands of the 

booksellers, to the great loss of an useful body of men. Whether the books, 

so charitably circulated, were ever as charitably read is more than I know. 

Possibly several of them have been exported to France and, like goods not 

in request here, may with you have found a market. I have heard much talk 

of the lights to be drawn from books that are sent from hence. What 

improvements they have had in their passage (as it is said some liquors are 

meliorated by crossing the sea) I cannot tell; but I never heard a man of 

common judgment or the least degree of information speak a word in praise 

of the greater part of the publications circulated by that society, nor 

have their proceedings been accounted, except by some of themselves, as of 

any serious consequence.

Your National Assembly seems to entertain much the same opinion that I do 

of this poor charitable club. As a nation, you reserved the whole stock of 

your eloquent acknowledgments for the Revolution Society, when their 

fellows in the Constitutional were, in equity, entitled to some share. 

Since you have selected the Revolution Society as the great object of your 

national thanks and praises, you will think me excusable in making its late 

conduct the subject of my observations. The National Assembly of France has 

given importance to these gentlemen by adopting them; and they return the 

favor by acting as a committee in England for extending the principles of 

the National Assembly. Henceforward we must consider them as a kind of 

privileged persons, as no inconsiderable members in the diplomatic body. 

This is one among the revolutions which have given splendor to obscurity, 

and distinction to undiscerned merit. Until very lately I do not recollect 

to have heard of this club. I am quite sure that it never occupied a moment 

of my thoughts, nor, I believe, those of any person out of their own set. I 

find, upon inquiry, that on the anniversary of the Revolution in 1688, a 

club of dissenters, but of what denomination I know not, have long had the 

custom of hearing a sermon in one of their churches; and that afterwards 

they spent the day cheerfully, as other clubs do, at the tavern. But I 

never heard that any public measure or political system, much less that the 

merits of the constitution of any foreign nation, had been the subject of a 

formal proceeding at their festivals, until, to my inexpressible surprise, 

I found them in a sort of public capacity, by a congratulatory address, 

giving an authoritative sanction to the proceedings of the National 

Assembly in France.

In the ancient principles and conduct of the club, so far at least as they 

were declared, I see nothing to which I could take exception. I think it 

very probable that for some purpose new members may have entered among 

them, and that some truly Christian politicians, who love to dispense 

benefits but are careful to conceal the hand which distributes the dole, 

may have made them the instruments of their pious designs. Whatever I may 

have reason to suspect concerning private management, I shall speak of 

nothing as of a certainty but what is public.

For one, I should be sorry to be thought, directly or indirectly, concerned 

in their proceedings. I certainly take my full share, along with the rest 

of the world, in my individual and private capacity, in speculating on what 

has been done or is doing on the public stage in any place ancient or 

modern; in the republic of Rome or the republic of Paris; but having no 

general apostolical mission, being a citizen of a particular state and 

being bound up, in a considerable degree, by its public will, I should 

think it at least improper and irregular for me to open a formal public 

correspondence with the actual government of a foreign nation, without the 

express authority of the government under which I live.

I should be still more unwilling to enter into that correspondence under 

anything like an equivocal description, which to many, unacquainted with 

our usages, might make the address, in which I joined, appear as the act of 

persons in some sort of corporate capacity acknowledged by the laws of this 

kingdom and authorized to speak the sense of some part of it. On account of 

the ambiguity and uncertainty of unauthorized general descriptions, and of 

the deceit which may be practiced under them, and not from mere formality, 

the House of Commons would reject the most sneaking petition for the most 

trifling object, under that mode of signature to which you have thrown open 

the folding doors of your presence chamber, and have ushered into your 

National Assembly with as much ceremony and parade, and with as great a 

bustle of applause, as if you have been visited by the whole representative 

majesty of the whole English nation. If what this society has thought 

proper to send forth had been a piece of argument, it would have signified 

little whose argument it was. It would be neither the more nor the less 

convincing on account of the party it came from. But this is only a vote 

and resolution. It stands solely on authority; and in this case it is the 

mere authority of individuals, few of whom appear. Their signatures ought, 

in my opinion, to have been annexed to their instrument. The world would 

then have the means of knowing how many they are; who they are; and of what 

value their opinions may be, from their personal abilities, from their 

knowledge, their experience, or their lead and authority in this state. To 

me, who am but a plain man, the proceeding looks a little too refined and 

too ingenious; it has too much the air of a political strategem adopted for 

the sake of giving, under a high-sounding name, an importance to the public 

declarations of this club which, when the matter came to be closely 

inspected, they did not altogether so well deserve. It is a policy that has 

very much the complexion of a fraud.

I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as 

any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and perhaps I have given 

as good proofs of my attachment to that cause in the whole course of my 

public conduct. I think I envy liberty as little as they do to any other 

nation. But I cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to anything 

which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the 

object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and 

solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some 

gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle 

its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are 

what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to 

mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; 

yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on her 

enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government) without inquiry 

what the nature of that government was, or how it was administered? Can I 

now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in 

the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am 

seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting 

restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the 

enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a 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.

When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at 

work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild 

gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose; but we ought to suspend our 

judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the 

liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of 

a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture 

publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really 

received one. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver, and 

adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should, 

therefore, suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France until I 

was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, 

with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an 

effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with 

the solidity of property, with peace and order, with civil and social 

manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too, and without them 

liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue 

long. The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they 

please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk 

congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints. Prudence would 

dictate this in the case of separate, insulated, private men, but liberty, 

when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare 

themselves, will observe the use which is made of power and particularly of 

so trying a thing as new power in new persons of whose principles, tempers, 

and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations where 

those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the 

real movers.

ALL these considerations, however, were below the transcendental dignity of 

the Revolution Society. Whilst I continued in the country, from whence I 

had the honor of writing to you, I had but an imperfect idea of their 

transactions. On my coming to town, I sent for an account of their 

proceedings, which had been published by their authority, containing a 

sermon of Dr. Price, with the Duke de Rochefoucault's and the Archbishop of 

Aix's letter, and several other documents annexed. The whole of that 

publication, with the manifest design of connecting the affairs of France 

with those of England by drawing us into an imitation of the conduct of the 

National Assembly, gave me a considerable degree of uneasiness. The effect 

of that conduct upon the power, credit, prosperity, and tranquility of 

France became every day more evident. The form of constitution to be 

settled for its future polity became more clear. We are now in a condition 

to discern, with tolerable exactness, the true nature of the object held up 

to our imitation. If the prudence of reserve and decorum dictates silence 

in some circumstances, in others prudence of a higher order may justify us 

in speaking our thoughts. The beginnings of confusion with us in England 

are at present feeble enough, but, with you, we have seen an infancy still 

more feeble growing by moments into a strength to heap mountains upon 

mountains and to wage war with heaven itself. Whenever our neighbor's house 

is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own. 

Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too 

confident a security.

Solicitous chiefly for the peace of my own country, but by no means 

unconcerned for yours, I wish to communicate more largely what was at first 

intended only for your private satisfaction. I shall still keep your 

affairs in my eye and continue to address myself to you. Indulging myself 

in the freedom of epistolary intercourse, I beg leave to throw out my 

thoughts and express my feelings just as they arise in my mind, with very 

little attention to formal method. I set out with the proceedings of the 

Revolution Society, but I shall not confine myself to them. Is it possible 

I should? It appears to me as if I were in a great crisis, not of the 

affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than Europe. 

All circumstances taken together, the French revolution is the most 

astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. The most wonderful 

things are brought about, in many instances by means the most absurd and 

ridiculous, in the most ridiculous modes, and apparently by the most 

contemptible instruments. Everything seems out of nature in this strange 

chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together