Reflections on . . . the first half of Edmund Burke's REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE (1789)

I have been focusing on my QUEER THEORY minor field, reading ALL OF Abelove, Barale, and Halperin's "The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader," I fear to the detriment of my LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY BRIT LIT major field. Uh oh! Comp field guilt!

So, in an effort to gradually become more systematic in my comps studying, I went and took the VERY FIRST text on my major field list, Edmund Burke's REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE (1789) out of the library. Burke's text is as meandering and repetitiive as it is important; from what I remember of my "Marriage and Nation in 19th Century Britain" class, his Conservativism, primarily his ideas about inheritance, bubble up in some "great estate" books like Persuasion. So, here are some passages I am find illuminating, that is to say "quotable-for-the-purposes-of-orals" . . .

1. Burke doesn't like the idea of a people's natural right to form their own government. Consequently, sorry Jean Valjean, "revolution bad." Unless of course, its the revolution that established the government Burke is writing under, then its a completely different story. To wit . . .

The principles of the Revolution of 1688 . . . are . . . found . . . in the statute called the Declaration of Right. In that most wise, sober, and considerate declaration . . . not one word is said, nor one suggestion made, of a general right "to choose our own governors; to cashier them for misconduct; and to form a government for ourselves. (163) 

2.  Revolution should only happen when absolutely necessary in maintaining the succession of the already existing crown and existing order because, Burke says, the rights of the individual subject are bound up with the constancy of that order.

This Declaration of Right (The Act of the 1st William and Mary) is the corner-stone of our constitution . . . It is called "an act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for settling the succession of the crown." You will observe, that these rights and this succession are declared in one body, and bound indissolubly together. (163) 

And, in a way, his logic holds: if the social body has a right to determine their government, a new government that is, at will, then the rights of subjects protected by that government are also being overturned or put in danger.  

3. Also, when change or revolution does occur, it should be circumscribed. Individuals in power can change, but the offices they hold and they structures they fill, should remain constant. The system needs to be preserved.

Though a king may abdicate for his own person, he cannot abdicate for the monarchy. By as strong, or by a stronger reason, the house of commons cannot renounce its share of authority. The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender. The constituent parts of a state are obliged to hold their public faith with each other, and with all those who derive any serious interest under their engagements. (169) 

It is far from impossible to reconcile . . . the use both of a fixed rule and an occasional deviation; the sacredness of an hereditary principle of a succession in our government, with a power of change in its application in cases of extreme emergency . . . the change is to be confined to the peccant part only; to the part which produced the necessary deviation. (169) 

4. The idea of succession, it turns out, is a trope of inheritance. As such, the king's right to his crown guaranteeing continuity of station is cut from the same cloth as a first born son's right of primogeniture to father's land. This leads to an interesting supporting argument as to the law . . .

On this principle the succession of the crown has always been what it now is, an hereditary succession by law: in the old line it was a succession by common law; in the new by statute law operating on the principles of common law, not changing the substance, but regulating the mode, and describing the persons. (169) 

For Burke, succession is inheritance, inheritance is law, and law operates on a strict rule of stare decisis.

5. But not everything is so elegantly parallel and continuous. The rule of the law, for instance, stops short of the crown.

Kings, in one sense, are undoubtedly the servants of the people, because their power has no other rational end than that of the general advantage; but it is not true that they are, in the ordinary sense . . . any thing like servants . . . The Great kind obeys no other person. (179) 

6. For Burke, the "natural" right to representation in government the Revolutionists are pumping is specular and opportunistic, a made up idea that operates as a pre-text for those "heated with their particular religious theories" to vindicate those theories with bloodshed and disorder. (216) Burke is a skeptic who believes Revolution asserts a social order no more legitimate than the one existing presently and, indeed, less legitimate because the one existing presently . . . you know . . . exists presently.

Far am I from denying in theory . . . the real rights of men . . . Men have a right to live by . . . [the beneficent rule of]; they have a right to justice . . . They have a right to the fruits of their industry . . . They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents . . . But as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual out to have in the management of the state, that I must deny  to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society . . . It is a thing settled by convention. [my italics] (218)

7. Inheritance, succession, convention, constitution . . . These are the watch words for Burke.

8. Interesting note: I am reading an edition that is all-foot-noted and stuff . . . And, apparently, Burke's sense of constitution was a lot more holistic and organic than an American like myself, who thinks of a "constitution" as a program-like document for a system of government, would assume. Instead, Burke has an almost Bourdieu-ish sense of the word; it includes all the offices and practices and conventions of a state, really how things operate, as opposed to any discrete document. Though, as his example of the Declaration of Right would attest, Burke's working definition of a constitution doesn't preclude such a document. For Burke, the document is more a distillation or a re-application of the constitution, than the constitution itself.