Much of the British political elite welcomed the French Revolution, which they saw in terms of France belatedly catching up with Britain's own Glorious Revolution of 1689.
One man who did not join in the cheers was the Anglo-Irish MP, Edmund Burke (1729–97). Orator, writer, political theorist and philosopher, Burke had been well known for his support for the colonies during the American Revolution. So why had he changed his mind when the revolution was French?
Crucial to this pessimism was Burke's interest in the 'sublime'. As a young man, he had defined it in a pioneering essay – A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) – as 'a sort of delightful horror … a tranquillity tinged with terror' that we get from the contemplation of darkness, danger and death. Violence and terror might also, he said, exert a powerful and dangerous attraction – if the restraining bonds of custom and tradition were cut.
It was this insight that enabled Burke to grasp, long before anyone else, the enormity of the French Revolution – and it turned him from a politician to a prophet.
In 1789, Burke had been asked his opinion of the revolution by a young French aristocrat Charles-François Depont. He had replied with two letters; the second, much longer one was published several months later, in 1790, as Reflections on the Revolution in France.
The revolution was then barely a year old, yet the Bastille had fallen, absolutism and feudalism had been abolished and the Rights of Man declared. However, the execution of the king and the revolutionary wars that would convulse Europe for more than 15 years and would lead to the deaths of millions, still lay in the future. Yet Burke foresaw them all.
He correctly identified the governing principle of the French Revolution as an inhuman, abstract reason that thought it could – and should – remodel society, politics, even humanity itself from scratch. This levelling reason saw history, habit and tradition as mere obstacles to progress that, like any human opposition, should be destroyed in a joyous, all-consuming bonfire of the vanities.
For Burke, history and tradition were the foundations of civilisation and habit the thing that made us human. From time to time, they might need reform, but it was reform that should preserve, not destroy, their essence. Monarchy, as the supreme embodiment of history and tradition, thus became a test case. Was it the key obstacle to the new world, as the French maintained, or was it the guarantor of stability and freedom, as the British had decided in 1689 and, Burke predicted, would conclude once again?
When he had written the Reflections in 1790, he had been a voice crying in the wilderness. But, over the next few years, public opinion swung, increasingly strongly, in his direction.
The first reaction of George, prince of Wales, to the Reflections was, to Burke's immense hurt, to dismiss it as 'a farrago of nonsense' and the work of a turncoat (although his father George III was favourably impressed by it). But as the killing in France increased, the prince changed his mind. The execution of Louis XVI, he wrote to his mother, Queen Charlotte, had filled him with 'a species of sentiment towards my father which surpasses all description'.
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 Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke, 1790
www.constitution.org/eb/rev_fran.htm
Online version of this treatise by Edmund Burke.
Reflections on the Revolution in France
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflections
_on_the_Revolution_in_France
Wikipedia article that gives the background to this work of political commentary, its arguments and its influence.
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