They have lately found a way of giving a sort of ubiquity to the supreme sovereign authority, which no monarch has been able yet to give to any representation of his.
Edmund Burke
The Public Record
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
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If a father of a family should show any disposition to resist or to withdraw himself from their power, his wife and children are cruelly to answer for it.
Multitudes of all ages and sexes are actually imprisoned.
At Paris, and in most other towns, the bread they buy is a daily dole,--which they cannot obtain without a daily ticket delivered to them by their masters.
Numbers scarcely credible have been executed, and their property confiscated.
Two persons cannot meet and confer without hazard to their liberty, and even to their lives.
The other description--the oppressed--are people of some property: they are the small relics of the persecuted landed interest; they are the burghers and the farmers.
All their principles and their whole scheme of government being republican, they could never excite the smallest degree of enthusiasm in favor of the unhappy monarch, whom they had rendered contemptible, to make him the executive officer…
It cannot be too often and too strongly inculcated, that monarchy and property must, in France, go together, or neither can exist.
On them I decide, for myself, that these persons are not the legal corporation of France, and that it is not with them we can (if we would) settle the government of France.
As to the faction exercising power, to suppose that monarchy can be supported by principled regicides, religion by professed atheists, order by clubs of Jacobins, property by committees of proscription, and jurisprudence by revolutionary…
If so, we have a king and subjects; and that king and subjects have rights and privileges which ought to be supported at home: for I do not suppose that the government of that kingdom can or ought to be regulated by the arbitrary mandate…
The next consideration is, through whom our arrangements are to be made, and on what principles the government we propose is to be established.
It is material to know who they are, and how constituted, whom we consider as the people of France.
The affair of the establishment of a government is a very difficult undertaking for foreign powers to act in as principals; though as auxiliaries and mediators it has been not at all unusual, and may be a measure full of policy and…
It supposes a kingdom without states and orders, a territory without proprietors, and faithful subjects who are to be left to the fate of rebels and traitors.
This conduct, acting on the declaration, leaves a monarchy without a monarch, and without any representative or trustee for the monarch and the monarchy.
So far as to the correspondence between our declarations and our conduct: let the declaration be worded as it will, the conduct is the practical comment by which, and which alone, it can be understood.
It appears, at least, that we consider them as a fair government de facto, if not de jure, a resistance to which, in favor of the king of Prance, by any man who happened to be born within that country, might equitably be considered by…
It is, then, plain, by a conduct which overturns a thousand declarations, that we take the Royalists of France only as an instrument of some convenience in a temporary hostility with the Jacobins, but that we regard those atheistic and…
If we do not consider them in that light, we must recognize the savages by whom they have been ruined, and who have declared war upon Europe, whilst they disgrace and persecute human nature, and openly defy the God that made them, as real…
What is this, according to the common indications which guide the judgment of mankind, but, under the pretext of protecting the crown of France, in reality to usurp it?
On the contrary, they are kept in a state of obscurity and contempt, and in a degree of indigence at times bordering on beggary.
But the punishment of enormous offenders will not be the less severe, or the less exemplary, when it is not threatened at a moment when we have it not in our power to execute our threats.
Punishment and vengeance alone remain,--and God forbid that they should ever be forgotten!
Politicians like Edmund Burke
