Many of those municipalities had been (upon system) reduced to the most deplorable indigence.
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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Such a sudden diversion of all its circulating money from trade to land must be an additional mischief.
The new landed interest connected with the new republic, and connected with it for its very being, could not have been created.
Necker, I make no doubt it was,) then what can be said in favor of those who, instead of moderate, reasonable, and general contribution, have in cold blood, and impelled by no necessity, had recourse to a partial and cruel confiscation?
But was the state of France so wretched and undone, that no other resource but rapine remained to preserve its existence?
Tell me, my Muse, what monstrous, dire offence, What crime could any Christian king incense To such a rage?
May no such storm Fall on our times, where rain must reform!
Or, if you must confiscate old landed estates in favor of the money-jobbers, why is the penalty confined to one description?
When the only estate lawfully possessed, and which the contracting parties had in contemplation at the time in which their bargain was made, happens to fail, who, according to the principles of natural and legal equity, ought to be the…
The issue of the whole was, that, what with opposition, and what with success, a violent and malignant zeal, of a kind hitherto unknown in the world, had taken an entire possession of their minds, and rendered their whole conversation…
To this system of literary monopoly was joined an unremitting industry to blacken and discredit in every way, and by every means, all those who did not hold to their faction.
Along with the moneyed interest, a new description of men had grown up, with whom that interest soon formed a close and marked union: I mean the political men of letters.
Even when the nobility, which represented the more permanent landed interest, united themselves by marriage (which sometimes was the case) with the other description, the wealth which saved the family from ruin was supposed to contaminate…
It was no less envied by the old landed interests,--partly for the same reasons that rendered it obnoxious to the people, but much more so as it eclipsed, by the splendor of an ostentatious luxury, the unendowed pedigrees and naked titles…
But the contradiction and partiality which admit no justification are not the less without an adequate cause; and that cause I do not think it difficult to discover.
The acts, however, of that dangerous power (the distinctive mark of a boundless despotism) have been alone held sacred.
The treasure of the nation, of all things, has been the least allowed to the prerogative of the king of France, or to the prerogative of any king in Europe.
It is not easy to conceive upon what rational principle the royal government should not, of the two, rather have possessed the power of rewarding service and making treaties, in virtue of its prerogative, than that of pledging to creditors…
The rest of the acts of that royal government are considered in so odious a light that to have a claim under its authority is looked on as a sort of crime.
The enemies to property at first pretended a most tender, delicate, and scrupulous anxiety for keeping the king's engagements with the public creditor.
This outrage on all the rights of property was at first covered with what, on the system of their conduct, was the most astonishing of all pretexts,--a regard to national faith.
They have, it seems, found out in the academies of the Palais Royal and the Jacobins, that certain men had no right to the possessions which they held under law, usage, the decisions of courts, and the accumulated prescription of a…
The confiscators truly have made some allowance to their victims from the scraps and fragments of their own tables, from which they have been so harshly driven, and which have been so bountifully spread for a feast to the harpies of usury.
It has opened, and will more and more open, their eyes upon the selfish enlargement of mind and the narrow liberality of sentiment of insidious men, which, commencing in close hypocrisy and fraud, have ended in open violence and rapine.
They see with horror and alarm that enormous and shameless act of proscription.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
