Those officers, on the other hand, who, by carrying their point through an interest in the Assembly, feel themselves to be at best only second in the good-will of the crown, though first in that of the Assembly, must slight an authority…
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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Those officers who lose the promotions intended for them by the crown must become of a faction opposite to that of the Assembly which has rejected their claims, and must nourish discontents in the heart of the army against the ruling…
They must soon perceive that those who can negative indefinitely in reality appoint.
But the municipalities affect a sovereignty, and will command those troops which are necessary for their protection.
You cannot deliberate on the confusion of the army of the state, without disclosing the worse disorders of the armed municipalities.
You cannot propose a remedy for the incompetence of the crown, without displaying the debility of the Assembly.
From my heart I pity the condition of a respectable servant of the public, like this war minister, obliged in his old age to pledge the Assembly in their civic cups, and to enter with a hoary head into all the fantastic vagaries of these…
But I should question whether all this civic swearing, clubbing, and feasting would dispose them, more than at present they are disposed, to an obedience to their officers, or teach them better to submit to the austere rules of military…
It is no less than this:--The king has promulgated in circular letters to all the regiments his direct authority and encouragement, that the several corps should join themselves with the clubs and confederations in the several…
You unite to the force of the legislative power that of opinion, still more important." To be sure, the army can have no opinion of the power or authority of the king.
To fill up the measure of all these horrors, the commandants of places have had their throats out under the eyes and almost in the arms of their own soldiers.
What incomprehensible spirit of delirium and delusion has all at once led them astray?
Those against whom it is not in my power to withhold the most grievous complaints are a part of that very soldiery which to this day have been so full of honor and loyalty, and with whom for fifty years I have lived the comrade and the…
Compelled by my duty to give you information of these excesses, my heart bleeds, when I consider who they are that have committed them.
Entire regiments have dared to violate at once the respect due to the laws, to the king, to the order established by your decrees, and to the oaths which they have taken with the most awful solemnity.
But what is the principle of its discipline? or whom is it to obey?
The able arrangement of this part is the more difficult, and requires the greater skill and attention, not only as a great concern in itself, but as it is the third cementing principle in the new body of republics which you call the French…
Has more wisdom been displayed in the constitution of your army than what is discoverable in your plan of judicature?
If they wish to give to this tribunal any appearance of liberty and justice, they must not evoke from or send to it the causes relative to their own members, at their pleasure.
These if they submit to, they leave no ground of law to the subject.
As you have changed all things, you have invented new principles of order.
The person whom you call king ought not to have this power, or he ought to have more.
This practice soon broke in upon the tenor and consistency of the laws; it abated the respect of the people towards them, and totally destroyed them in the end.
It would be a means of squaring the occasional decrees of a democracy to some principles of general jurisprudence.
Those parliaments had furnished, not the best certainly, but some considerable corrective to the excesses and vices of the monarchy.
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