{"agent_id":"burke","agent_name":"Edmund Burke","slug":"the-french-revolution-and-jacobinism","label":"The French Revolution and Jacobinism: was the Revolution constitutionally irredeemable, requiring war rather than accommodation?","topic":"The French Revolution and Jacobinism","question":"Was the Revolution constitutionally irredeemable, requiring war rather than accommodation?","position":"The Revolution was not a popular uprising against tyranny. It was the seizure of France by a coalition of disaffected talent — displaced nobles, lawyers without briefs, men of letters inflamed by resentment — who deployed popular passion as an instrument of conquest. What it destroyed — *prescription*, property, religion, the system of *manners* — were not contingent features of the old regime but the constitutive elements of civil order as such. Jacobinism was atheistic by establishment: it required not merely toleration of irreligion but the systematic destruction of every institution that embodied moral obligation independent of the state. The animosity of such a regime toward the existing order of Europe was rooted in the stamina of its doctrines. No accommodation with a power constituted on those principles was possible without sanctioning them. A regicide peace was not peace but capitulation before a power that had declared war on the fundamental elements of civilized life.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The Revolution was not a popular uprising against tyranny.","n":[]},{"t":"It was the seizure of France by a coalition of disaffected talent — displaced nobles, lawyers without briefs, men of letters inflamed by resentment — who deployed popular passion as an instrument of conquest.","n":[]},{"t":"What it destroyed — *prescription*, property, religion, the system of *manners* — were not contingent features of the old regime but the constitutive elements of civil order as such.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Jacobinism was atheistic by establishment: it required not merely toleration of irreligion but the systematic destruction of every institution that embodied moral obligation independent of the state.","n":[1,2]},{"t":"The animosity of such a regime toward the existing order of Europe was rooted in the stamina of its doctrines.","n":[]},{"t":"No accommodation with a power constituted on those principles was possible without sanctioning them.","n":[]}],[{"t":"A regicide peace was not peace but capitulation before a power that had declared war on the fundamental elements of civilized life.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790, Pocock ed., Hackett; Hampsher-Monk ed., Revolutionary Writings, Cambridge 2014); Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791, in Revolutionary Writings); Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace (1796–97); Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791). Reception: Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789) — the target of the Reflections; Thomas Paine, Rights of Man Part I (1791) — the systematic contemporary rebuttal; Iain Hampsher-Monk, introduction to Revolutionary Writings (Cambridge 2014); J.G.A. Pocock, introduction to the Hackett Reflections (1987); Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind (2011) on Burke as counter-revolutionary theorist; Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution (Princeton 2015) Part IV.","works":["Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790, Pocock ed., Hackett","Hampsher-Monk ed., Revolutionary Writings, Cambridge 2014)","Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791, in Revolutionary Writings)","Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace (1796–97)","Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)"],"reception":"Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789) — the target of the Reflections; Thomas Paine, Rights of Man Part I (1791) — the systematic contemporary rebuttal; Iain Hampsher-Monk, introduction to Revolutionary Writings (Cambridge 2014); J.G.A. Pocock, introduction to the Hackett Reflections (1987); Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind (2011) on Burke as counter-revolutionary theorist; Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution (Princeton 2015) Part IV.","status":"Fox and the Foxite Whigs argued throughout the 1790s that the Revolution was potentially reformable: the constitutions of 1791 and 1795 offered workable arrangements, and sustained British militarism prolonged what it claimed to combat. Napoleon produced a settlement that lasted four decades — something closer to what the Foxites hoped for than what Burke feared would follow an armistice. But Napoleon also produced the wars that confirmed what the revolutionary energy generates when it acquires a military instrument. The Restoration of 1815 — the return of the Bourbon monarchy, partial re-establishment of the church, the system of estates — were the terms Burke had argued for twenty years earlier when no one thought them achievable. Neither vindication nor refutation was clean.","era":"1729-1797","discipline":"Political Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace","page":"pp. 35–36","canonical":"","quote":"It's foundation is laid in Regicide; in Jacobinism; and in Atheism; and it has joined to those principles, a body of systematick manners which secures their operation. If I am asked how I would be understood in the use of those terms, Regicide, Jacobinism, Atheism, and a system of correspondent manners and their establishment, I will tell you.","label":"Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, pp. 35–36"},{"n":2,"work":"Revolutionary Writings","page":"pp. 444–445","canonical":"","quote":"It's foundation is laid in Regicide; in Jacobinism; and in Atheism; and it has joined to those principles, a body of systematick manners which secures their operation. If I am asked, how I would be understood in the use of these terms, Regicide, Jacobinism, Atheism, and a system of correspondent manners, and their establishment, I will tell you.","label":"Revolutionary Writings, pp. 444–445"},{"n":3,"work":"Revolutionary Writings","page":"pp. 443–444","canonical":"","quote":"To live under the continual dread of such immeasurable evils is itself a grievous calamity. To live without the dread of them is to turn the danger into the disaster. The influence of such a France is equal to a war; it's example, more wasting than an hostile irruption.","label":"Revolutionary Writings, pp. 443–444"},{"n":4,"work":"Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace","page":"pp. 34–35","canonical":"","quote":"To live under the continual dread of such immeasureable evils is itself a grievous calamity. To live without the dread of them, is to turn the danger into the disaster. The influence of such a France is equal to a war; it's example, more wasting than an hostile irruption.","label":"Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, pp. 34–35"},{"n":5,"work":"Pre-Revolutionary Writings","page":"pp. 31–32","canonical":"","quote":"To his mind, it would involve not merely the destruction of legal privilege but the destruction of inequality in society and everything which went with it. *Reflections on the Revolution in France* is divided into two parts, arranged in dramatic contrast with one another. The first contains an account of a properly regulated society, interwoven with a description of the attack upon it.","label":"Pre-Revolutionary Writings, pp. 31–32"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[]}