Размышления о Революции во Франции

By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of providence are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts, wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, molding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old or middle-aged or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.

The delighted father predicted a brilliant career for his cherished son, who was slated to go to Ireland as Chief Secretary to Fitzwilliam, the new Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Unfortunately, Richard Burke had fallen victim to the ravages of consumption, a fact which he had previously carefully concealed from his father. Burke did not know of his son's affliction until one week before Richard died on August 2, 1794. Although he survived his son almost three years, Burke was never again the same person, and his last years were plagued with sorrow and melancholy. Edmund Burke died on July 9, 1797.

He therefore redoubled his efforts to make his projected work on the French Revolution the best of which he was capable. Accordingly, he worked zealously and carefully. In November, 1790, the Reflections was published. The original edition, costing five shillings, was quickly exhausted, and within a year ten more editions appeared.

The reaction was amazing. The apathy, the amused indifference, and the positive approval with which the majority of Englishmen had previously viewed the French Revolution gave way to a new feeling of deep concern and an awakening to the potential danger. Burke's old enemy, the king, called the Reflections a very good book and recommended that every gentleman should read it. It also made a deep impression on the ruling classes throughout Europe, and a French translation was made by Louis XVI himself.

I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche--upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases. A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it, but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.

Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure --but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

To avoid, therefore, the evils of inconstancy and versatility, ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we have consecrated the state that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution, that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion, that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution and renovate their father's life.

I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause in the whole course of my public conduct. I think I envy liberty as little as they do to any other nation. But I cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect.

By way of conclusion, mention should be made of Burke's proposed plan for his work, and, secondly, a brief attempt should be made to evaluate the soundness of his ideas.

In his proposed plan for the work, he has four heads: the Church, the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the democracy. By the time he finished, the Church had received the major emphasis, whereas the democracy was omitted. The explanation for this is that he was interrupted in his writing and, when he returned to the task, he felt constrained to pass judgment on the work of the National Assembly. After having denied that the Assembly had any right to legislate at all, he went on to criticize severely their legislative, executive, judicial, military, and financial acts.

The judgment of history has largely been in Burke's favor. His assertion that the Assembly's actions through the summer of 1790 had been unfair, hasty, destructive, and unstable was rather accurate. And seldom has anyone been more prophetic than Burke when he singled out the Civil Constitution of the Clergy as a particularly iniquitous thing fraught with dire consequences for the future and when he accurately predicted the rise of a dictator ( Napoleon). Where Burke is open to considerable criticism is in his failure to recognize the social and economic evils of the Old Regime in France which cried out for correction. Here Burke was undeniably blind because of his preoccupation with the political and religious factors. But if he may be justifiably attacked on this score, he certainly is free of the taint of inconsistency still thrown at him by thoughtless people who profess to see his position on the American Revolution, on the one hand, and his stand on the French Revolution, on the other, as fundamentally irreconcilable. As Coleridge long ago observed, Burke's principles in the two revolutions are the same and the deductions are the same; the practical inferences, while almost exactly opposite in the one case from the other, are in both equally legitimate.