The French Revolution and Jacobinism: was the Revolution constitutionally irredeemable, requiring war rather than accommodation?

Edmund Burke, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

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.¹² 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.³⁴

Sources

1. 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.

   Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, pp. 35–36

2. 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.

   Revolutionary Writings, pp. 444–445

3. 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.

   Revolutionary Writings, pp. 443–444

4. 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.

   Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, pp. 34–35

Where the argument is made

• 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)

How the argument was received

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.