The Counterrevolutionary Tradition

The traditional counterrevolutionary assessment of the aims and methods of the French Revolution is dominated by two thoughts: the Revolution came about through allegiance to abstract ideas; the Revolution was due to the willful acts of evil men. The root is one. Lucifer, said Edmund Burke, was the first father of Jacobins: the Revolution was a free election of evil. The lie in the heart of the revolutionary is arrogance, overweening pride. The creature confuses himself with the Creator. This is the sin against the Spirit that cannot be forgiven. Inordinate pride corrupts the revolutionary generally, but the blindness of pride shows itself especially in excessive esteem for man’s intellect. The revolutionary overrates human ability to create institutions through deliberate choice and reasoned action. Creation is the work of God and History.

In wayward unconcern, the revolutionary puts the ax to the roots of man’s social and cultural being. He is scornful of emotion and habit, impatient of genuine variety and individuality, unrecognizing of the moral obligations discharged by traditional institutions. He lacks the wisdom to comprehend the logic of history—the slow, never-repeated development of societies and cultures through experience. Rashly, the revolutionary formulates abstract principles and then presumes, by the standard of these abstractions, to pass judgment on historic faith, custom, and law. Deluded by “political messianism” (to adopt the language of Professor J. L. Talmon), the revolutionary formulates a program with the aim of (again following Talmon) “. . . total renovation . . . the idea of a society reconstructed deliberately with a view to a logical and final pattern.” Whatever does not suit his abstract principles, he consigns to the rubbish heap. And these principles range wide—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Justice, Popular Sovereignty. As the ideas are abstract, so their application must be uncompromising. Interests and desires may be compromised but never principles! Whoever violates a principle is to be denounced, harried, guillotined. The apostles of abstract ideas are the men of blood.

All this was substantially complete in 1797, when Burke died. Joseph de Maistre gave it a French tongue, Friedrich von Savigny a German one. The former contributed his gifts of imagination and literary expression, the latter a patina of scholarship. Burke towers above them both. He had qualities of imagination and judgment that imposed restraints on the articulating of inadequate basic ideas into elaborately structured absurdities. Particularly as a young man, before partisanship and oratory gained full dominion over his personality, he was capable of thoughtful skepticism and indecision, as when he wrote, “Perhaps the bottom of most things is unintelligible; and our surest reasoning when we come to a certain point is involved not only in obscurity but contradiction.” This is no mere denigration of reason for the purpose of exalting some catchpenny faith or authority. Burke always lacked sectarian rigor; he leavened his errors with inconsistency.

The American branch of the counterrevolutionary tradition had to shoulder a burden from which its British and Continental affiliates were free. It had to rescue the good name of what schoolbooks choose to call the American Revolution. Maistre united Washington and Robespierre in equal condemnation. Burke lost interest in the American colonies once they had left the British Empire. But Americans who shared the traditional counterrevolutionary outlook had a much harder problem. What were they to do about Washington and Franklin even if they could do without Jefferson and Madison? Recently they have solved that problem, to the satisfaction of both the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Knights of Columbus. They have found that, properly speaking, there never was an American revolution. In the words of one recent American historian,1 it was only a short disturbance, quite “without dogma,” a “conservative colonial rebellion,” with its major issue “a pretty technical legal problem.” Other American historians2 have joined in rejoicing that, with those events of 1761—82 put in perspective, as not a real revolution at all, “. . . American democracy . . . [appears as] . . . a majestic creation of the ages and the citadel of prescriptive right in Western Christendom.” This American historical scholarship is perhaps of a character to stimulate, in some, a generous appreciation for the short, blunt phrase of Henry Ford, “History is bunk.” But it is, at least, a special kind of bunk, where a politician’s slogan can be mistaken for the linchpin of the universe.

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The Atlantic Revolution, 1760—1800

To those whose esteem for historical writing may have been shaken but not irretrievably shattered, the new treatise3 by Professor R. R. Palmer holds out encouragement. On the general subject of the political revolutions of Europe and America in the closing decades of the 18th century, it is already, in this first volume, the most considerable treatment that has been written by an American. Among books in English, on both sides of the water, there is nothing that bears comparison with it until we go back to the Lectures on the French Revolution that Lord Acton delivered some sixty years ago. What have we gained through six decades of research?

First, Palmer clarifies the extent to which the Western world, on both sides of the Atlantic and up to the Russian frontier, was one great society. Every country differed from all others enough so that sufficiently myopic eyes can fasten on uniqueness and make a romantic story of it. Before the polarization achieved by revolution and war, there were certainly not the same two parties everywhere; there were many. Yet most parties had reasonable facsimiles in other countries. Men debated similar political and social issues and found it not incongruous to do so in the same political language—with only the ordinary human margin of ambiguity and misunderstanding. Lord Acton knew the close tie between the American and French Revolutions, but he did not draw a political and social map of all Europe before and during the Revolution. This Professor Palmer does, selectively but skillfully. His telescope reaches Geneva, Sweden, Poland, and the Hapsburg lands, as well as more familiar scenes in America, Britain and France. He raises himself on decades of other men’s scholarship, and we see the more clearly for it.

Second, Palmer is able to give a more meaningful account than Acton could of economic interests, social allegiances, and institutional factors in political action. In this again, Palmer is the heir of decades of other men’s studies, notably those inspired in France by Jean Jaurès, Albert Mathiez, and Georges Lefebvre. But if this research has aided our comprehension of particular events, we must not exaggerate the novelty of the general views to which it leads. They are more complex than Marx. It has long been known that the French urban poor were moved by hunger and followed men who promised to relieve it. It has also long been known that ownership of property as well as access to political power was, in various ways, at issue in the French Revolution. Acton wrote: “The assault on the restricted distribution of power involved an assault on the concentration of wealth. The connection of the two ideas is the secret motive of the Revolution.” Acton understood the extent to which various bourgeois elements were able to make themselves the leaders of a nation united against its Privileged Orders. Potential cleavages between political and economic democracy were only dimly perceived. Socialism was not yet born.

Both Acton and Palmer see the original motive of that age of revolutions in fundamental conflicts over the elimination of hereditary, arbitrary privilege. What is arbitrary? All Western Europe—though not Russia—was prepared to move away from the feudal identification of property with jurisdiction. But should not a mother country, through crown or parliament, in some degree, control the affairs of its colonies? The aristocracy of France was prepared, by July 1789, to submit to equal taxation of its property and income. But should civil and miltary office be thrown open to all, without distinction of birth? Should an elected legislature be able to establish law and public policy, against the dissent of its aristocracy and king? Is it right that all vote, because all stake their lives in the body politic, or does possession of property alone constitute a stake adequate to entitle one to vote? Is inherited property also an arbitrary privilege, or is it a necessary incentive to effort and the indispensable armor of personality? Should governments be centralized, to bring the national genius and national standards to bear on the whole country, or decentralized to adjust to local variety and foster local initiative? In what degree should churches be established by law and supported from public funds? On these issues, men divided profoundly and, when they despaired of persuading, they fought.

The historian at the end of the 19th century was not behind the historian of 1959 in emphasizing the fundamental character of the conflicts that led to civil war, royalist invasion, and revolutionary imperialism. Acton said: “In the violent contradiction between the new order of things in France and the inorganic world around it, conflict was irrepressible. Between French principles and European practice there could be neither conciliation nor confidence. Each was a constant menace to the other, and the explosion of enmity could only be restrained by unusual wisdom and policy.” (Note that it is the old society that is condemned as “inorganic”; such words are stones that anyone can throw—in any direction.) But Palmer goes much farther. Acton was an advocate of balanced, limited constitutionalism, of an Anglo-Saxon model, and he saw the tragedy of the French Revolution as consisting in the inability of France to absorb and adapt Anglo-Saxon political experience. In a few decisive pages, Palmer rejects all this. Given the character of the French aristocracy, there was no place for an upper chamber. Given the character of the French monarchy, there could not be a strong executive independent of the legislature. There was no reason for federalism. Monarchy and aristocracy had to be fought; they could not be conciliated. “If the French were to carry out the principles that they shared with Americans and with men else-where in Europe . . . they would have to do so by concentrating sovereign power . . . in a single assembly. . . . They would have to take account of the wishes of peasants and workers; the Revolution . . . [could not] be only a revolution of respectable men. . . . Moderate revolution was eminently desirable, but it was not one of the possible choices.”

So the political debate is opened again, as it should be. Otherwise the historian abdicates even the limited contribution he can make to any general enlargement of understanding. Acton’s shall be, in this, the last words: “If we submit ourselves to the event, if we think more of the accomplished deed than of the suggested problem, we become servile accomplices of success and force.” But to write history properly is—in some measure—to resurrect; it is to create an awareness of meaningful alternatives; it is to relive—in some degree—the reality of choice. Professor Palmer has done the work of a historian.

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The Revolutionary Crowd in France, 1787—95

In the tragedy of revolution, as conceived by the counterrevolutionary tradition, there are scenes of crisis when the furies take over. These are the terror-filled days ruled by “the mob.” Burke, as always, set the tone. In his rapt imagination, the crowd of women bringing the royal family to Paris from Versailles consists of “. . . the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abased shape of the vilest of women,” and their male associates are “. . . a band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with . . . blood.” It took nearly a century, the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, and another self-conscious exponent of the wisdom of history to surpass Burke’s invective. In the 1870’s, Hippolyte Taine, taking his stand against the revolutionary madmen who would refashion society by intention and design, achieved a richness of expletives that might have astounded even Burke. For Taine, the revolutionary crowds of 1789—90 are, first of all, brigands and bandits, then smugglers, forgers, vagabonds, beggars, fugitives from justice, foreigners, men with hideous faces, loose women, the lowest dregs of society.

Contemporary witnesses understood that the crowds of the French Revolution were quite differently composed than Burke or Taine imagined. The crowds also had objectives more specifically related to the particular problems of their day than a general appetite for destruction or a vague aspiration to usher in the reign of the messiah. But it was not until 1932 that Professor Georges Lefebvre, in a thoughtful essay entitled Revolutionary Crowds, posed the problem in a way that has been productive for historical investigation. It has taken another quarter century for Lefebvre’s suggestions to yield substantial studies. In France, the leading figure in these studies is Albert Soboul, but we now have also, in English, an extremely valuable book4 from the same collaboration.

Mr. Rudé does not confuse historical investigation with the totality of knowledge, and he does not attempt to insinuate a political docrine under the guise of an historical explanation. Yet even the eleven small pages of his Appendices, in which he tabulates the participants in various revolutionary crowds, contribute more to our understanding of the French Revolution than do most many-volumed histories. He finds the revolutionary crowds characteristically composed quite differently from the National Assembly or the Jacobin Club. There the dominant elements were the professions, the commercial class, and, in early days, the liberal aristocracy. The crowds are predominantly a cut lower: small shopkeepers, workshop masters, individual craftsmen, wage earners, and women without hats. The wage laborer is always in a minority, and it is only rarely that he comes out to demonstrate for wage demands. More frequently he is led into crowd action by his employer. There is some looting, but it is by no means universal. The crowd itself sometimes takes summary action against mere pilfering.

Most often the crowd is moved to action by its need for bread, by high prices and scarce supplies. Robespierre and his colleagues of the Mountain enjoyed the support of the crowd when they were associated with a successful policy of price control and assured rations. They lost what was to Robespierre personally perhaps a decisive element in popular support when they sponsored wage control—and wage reductions. Political ideas came to the crowd, for the most part, from that middle-class leadership which dominated the National Assembly and the Clubs. The crowd also took a hand repeatedly in shifting dominance from one middle class leadership to another—and never without an admixture of its own distinctive objectives. But it would be vain, as it is necessarily inaccurate, to attempt to summarize, in a page, all the content of Rudé’s rich little volume. It deserves to be read.

What Rudé warns against most (and in this explicitly rejecting the position of Professor Talmon) is the view that the course of the revolution can be understood as determined by the impact on leaders or followers of abstract ideas, “political messianism,” and plans for “total renovation.” On the contrary, “. . . the revolutionary leaders themselves, though steeped in the ideas of the new philosophy, relied upon precedent and, far from following a consistent program of total renovation, stumbled from one political expedient to another—in which process the exigencies of war, the needs of social conciliation, and the absence of any traditions of political experience all played their part.”

The violence and injustice are not gone. There is plenty of innocent blood—as elsewhere in the past and present. The soundest judgment is perhaps again that of Acton. “The Revolution will never be intelligibly known to us until we discover its conformity to the common law, and recognize that it is not utterly singular and exceptional, that other scenes have been as horrible as these, and many men as bad.”

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Edmund Burke and the Counterrevolutionary Tradition

The contrary idea, that no other scenes of human history have been as horrible as those of the French Revolution and no other men as bad, was Edmund Burke’s most gross bequest to his followers. In 1796, he was still writing about those “. . . nefarious monsters [who] destroyed their country for what was good in it . . . parricides of their country, called the revolutionists, and constitutionalists, of France; a species of traitors, of whose fury and atrocious wickedness nothing in the annals of the frenzy and depravation of mankind had before furnished an example. . . .”

Burke was himself no stranger to frenzy, as both the evidence of his contemporaries and the corpus of his literary remains abundantly testify. On his emotional and imaginative personality, there have recently been several books. Interesting to specialists is the first volume5 of a new, scholarly edition of his correspondence. Of less service is the curious book6 by Mr. P. J. Stanlis; it adds to the documentation of American academic politics in the 20th century more than to our understanding of the 18th. Of substantial value is the extended political biography7 by Professor Carl B. Cone; it does not plumb Burke’s lows or scale his highs, but works quietly with the integrating theme of the dominance in Burke of the active party politician.

Burke’s mind was rhetorical rather than philosophical. No great name has left us more bombast. He can invoke Nature or God at convenience, to lend authority to a commonplace, to round a paragraph or fill a peroration. I suggest that anyone who fails to see this unphilosophical character of Burke’s mind, at first glance, try the following exercise. Place any volume of Burke’s next to Henry Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics. Then turn to Sidgwick’s pages 80 to 83, in which the author works with the thesis that the idea of action according to Nature provides no criterion of right conduct. Now turn to Burke and compare those pages with anything to be found in all of Burke’s writings. It is impossible to resist the conclusion that, in Burke, we are not reading a thinker really grappling with problems that are difficult for him too, and to which he is giving his best thought; we are following a speaker, or man of letters, who has found an occasion to make brilliant remarks, to display his command of language, or to defend a partisan cause.

The legend of Burke’s political wisdom dies hard. Yet he failed to understand, and grapple with, every major political problem of his time. Professor Alfred Cobban well said of Burke’s politics, “. . . as a working system it was dead before it was expounded.” He has written something of weight on the theory of political parties, but he gave the best years of his life, not to any broad party affiliation, but to the trivial faction of the Rockingham Whigs. He met the enlarged demands of the common man with total denial, worship of hereditary political privilege, and fierce defense of the absolute rights of property and contract. He makes a parade of religion, but his was the coarse Christianity that has no difficulty in distinguishing between justice and charity. To concern over the concentration of wealth, he replied “. . . the monopoly of capital is . . . a great benefit, and a benefit particularly to the poor.” Opposing protection of farm labor he wrote “. . . in the case of the farmer and the laborer, their interests are always the same, and it is absolutely impossible that their free contracts can be onerous to either party.” Against a proposal to limit profits, he advanced the authority of Heaven: “But who are to judge what [the employer’s] profit and advantage ought to be? Certainly no authority on earth.” He was no mere traditionalist where the claims of property were involved; he attacked traditional taxation for poor relief as an offense against Nature. He was involved in the affairs of India at several stages in his career, but few would now contend that he made any constructive contribution to Indian affairs. His sympathy for the aspirations of America and Ireland was quite limited, and he never conceded anything to their demands for self-government. On the contrary, his program was the permanent retention of the right of a British Parliament, dominated by a hereditary aristocracy, to “bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever.” The more closely we study his career, the less we are inclined to admit his title to be regarded as a considerable statesman.

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Burke has been much appreciated by professional historians. They have thought he gave due importance to their kind of knowledge. But he had not the temper of a great historian. His human sympathies were not wide, and he allowed emotional storms to destroy his balance of judgment. Lecky, who saw in Burke the greatest of British political thinkers, wrote of “. . . paroxysms of passion which indicated a mind profoundly and radically diseased.” Burke never made a controlled, serious effort to understand an enemy—whether he was named Maximilien Robespierre or Warren Hastings. He was of those who study the past primarily to deify the present Above all, he lived in a little universe, where God had labored mightily to create the Constitution of Great Britain. If we are in search of a great conservative historian, we had better turn our eyes to Tocqueville—no friend of mere innovation and more religious than Burke. Tocqueville could write: “. . . the more I study the world as it was, and the more I see in detail of the world as we have it today, the more I am impressed by the incredible differences one finds not only in the laws, but in the principles behind the laws . . . and I can well believe that what we call necessary institutions are often only customary institutions, and that . . . the field of possibilities is much wider than the men who live in the bonds of any one particular social organization are able to imagine.” Burke could not have written that.

Noblesse oblige. Much is pardoned an aristocracy that displays generosity. But Burke was not a generous man. His moral sensitivity was also not above the commonplace. His leading Parliamentary role in matters concerning India went hand in hand with personal and family speculations in East India stock and compensated representation of particular Indian interests. He denounced every sort of “placeman” named by the King but saw nothing wrong in taking £30,000 (about $750,000 in today’s values, according to Professor Cone) from Lord Rockingham for political services to the Rockingham Whigs. His conduct of the Warren Hastings prosecution had every element of McCarthyism except the television camera. Of Irish birth, his most active campaign regarding Ireland was to set aside a threatened tax on absentee landlords living out of Ireland; five such landlords, who had annual Irish rentals of £66,000 (say $1,650,000), were among his sponsors, and they met the bills of the campaign. The limits of his religious tolerance were those of Robespierre; atheists are never to be tolerated. Marxians have been quite wrongly credited with introducing intemperate manners and extreme language into European politics; they could go to school with Burke.

And, above all, there is the question of blood. Even before the deposition of the King, Burke had proclaimed: “If ever a foreign prince enters into France, he must enter it as into a country of assassins. The mode of civilized war will not be practiced; nor are the French, who act on the present system, entitled to expect it.” Hitler invented nothing. Here a century and a half before World War II, Burke enunciates the full doctrine of the Untermensch, who has no claim to consideration as a human. It appears that the rude men of blood are to be found not only under the banners of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and not only among the advocates of totalitarian democracy. They seem comfortable also under the banners of God, King, and Country, and among the advocates of no kind of democracy at all.

Art reaches for style, thought for system, both for adequacy to the subject. Burke achieved style. His speech and writing convey the personality—emotional, imaginative, intellectually inventive, often uncontrolled, sometimes wildly partisan, occasionally feverishly disordered. His thought contains limited systematizing structures, rather than true hard-earned coherence. First comes the directing hand of Providence and, immediately derivative, the binding authority of Natural Law. Contemporary Roman Catholic scholars have particularly emphasized this first level in Burke’s thinking. But it is only the conventional preamble for Burke. It was a minor oversight when Gierke omitted Burke entirely from the history of Natural Law and the Theory of Society.

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A second, interwoven strand in Burke’s thinking might be called the traditional utilitarian. This appeals to “expediency” or utility against all that it chooses to call abstract ideas, and it will not stay for an answer when asked, “Expedient for what?” or “Useful to what end?” It prides itself on operating with a “political reason” that can weigh, measure, and decide without asking such questions. The Victorians (Lecky, Stephen, Morley) valued this second element in Burke’s thinking to such a degree that they seem sometimes hardly to distinguish Burke from Bentham. The distinguishing mark lies in the guide to expediency or utility. This is the third, most characteristic, level of Burke’s mind (though not one to which he adheres at at times).

But how are we to know what is expedient? From “prejudice” and “prescription,” Burke answers. These are the safe guides. Providence works through nature and history. The collective wisdom of mankind is embodied in established views and established institutions. The individual mind, however keen, is less worthy of reliance. Take care! If we allow our questions to drive too deep, we shall find no peace. We shall attain no generally accepted answers, but we shall destroy the foundations on which we stand.

Burke has been charged with being the proponent of casual compromise and unfinished thought, who urges the differences in every situation and every problem and shrinks from the common denominator and the underlying principle. In his best mind, he might have accepted the charge. For him, the roots of morality and government are too tender and obscure for harsh light and rough debate. Let government stand on traditional Majesty and Power, property on Prejudice and Prescription. Choice and consent are foundations too variable and fragile. The social contract cannot wisely be denounced and formed again each day. Better that it should be conceived as the eternal chain of the dead, the living and the unborn. In like spirit, Walter Bagehot will emphasize, two generations later, that stability in government and business depends on “deference” and “confidence.” Without these forces of stability, an orderly daily life becomes impossible, alike in Whitehall and in Lombard Street.

Appreciation of the great customary stabilizers is very far from the whole of a moral or political philosophy. It is equally far from the whole requirements of moral and political conduct. But it is surely an appreciation worth learning. Burke and his followers have helped us to learn that lesson.

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1 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics, chapter III.

2 R. J. S. Hoffman and P. Levack, Burke's Politics, Introduction, p. XXXV.

3 The Age of the Democratic Revolution. A Political History of Europe and America, 1760—1800 (Vol. I), Princeton University Press, 534 pp., $7.50.

4 George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution, Oxford University Press, 239 pp., $5.60.

5 T. W. Copeland, (ed.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke (Vol. I), University of Chicago Press, 375 pp., $8.00.

6 Edmund Burke and the Natural Law, University of Michigan Press, 311 pp., $5.75.

7 Burke and the Nature of Politics (Vol. I), University of Kentucky Press, 415 pp., $9.00.

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