So I leave them their dead Robespierre, either to gibbet his memory, or to deify him in their Pantheon with their Marat and their Mirabeau.
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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The assurance of a stable peace, grounded on the stability of their system, proceeds on this hypothesis,--that their hostility to other nations has proceeded from their anarchy at home, and from the prevalence of a populace which their…
It is to delude ourselves, to consider the state of France, since their Revolution, as a state of anarchy: it is something far worse.
Never were the views and politics of any government pursued with half the regularity, system, and method that a diligent observer must have contemplated with amazement and terror in theirs.
Their state is not an anarchy, but a series of short-lived tyrannies.
We do not call a republic with annual magistrates an anarchy: theirs is that kind of republic; but the succession is not effected by the expiration of the term of the magistrate's service, but by his murder.
Every new magistracy, succeeding by homicide, is auspicated by accusing its predecessors in the office of tyranny, and it continues by the exercise of what they charged upon others.
I defy any person to show any other law,--or if any such should be found on paper, that it is in the smallest degree, or in any one instance, regarded or practised.
In all their successions, not one magistrate, or one form of magistracy, has expired by a mere occasional popular tumult; everything has been the effect of the studied machinations of the one revolutionary cabal, operating within itself…
France has no public; it is the only nation I ever heard of, where the people are absolutely slaves, in the fullest sense, in all affairs, public and private, great and small, even down to the minutest and most recondite parts of their…
The helots of Laconia, the regardants to the manor in Russia and in Poland, even the negroes in the West Indies, know nothing of so searching, so penetrating, so heart-breaking a slavery.
That the war has succeeded ill in many cases is undoubted; but then let us speak the truth, and say we are defeated, exhausted, dispirited, and must submit.
But let us not conceal from ourselves our real situation, whilst, by every species of humiliation, we are but too strongly displaying our sense of it to the enemy.
Every other ground of stability, but from military force and terror, is clean out of the question.
Thousands of those hell-hounds called Terrorists, whom they had shut up in prison, on their last Revolution, as the satellites of tyranny, are let loose on the people.
The whole of their government, in its origination, in its continuance, in all its actions, and in all its resources, is force, and nothing but force: a forced constitution, a forced election, a forced subsistence, a forced requisition of…
They differ nothing from all the preceding usurpations, but that to the same odium a good deal more of contempt is added.
In fact, a coalition, begun for the avowed purpose of destroying that den of robbers, now exists only for their support.
If evil happens to the princes of Europe from the success and stability of this infernal business, it is their own absolute crime.
They endured time enough for treaties which benefited themselves and have done infinite mischief to our cause.
If you trouble yourself at all with their constitutions, you are certainly more concerned with them after the treaty than before it, as the observance of conventions is of infinitely more consequence than the making them.
Can anything be more palpably absurd and senseless than to object to a treaty of peace for want of durability in constitutions which had an actual duration, and to trust a constitution that at the time of the writing had not so much as a…
There is no way of accounting for such discourse in the mouths of men of sense, but by supposing that they secretly entertain a hope that the very act of having made a peace with the Regicides will give a stability to the Regicide system.
This will not clear the discourse from the absurdity, but it will account for the conduct, which such reasoning so ill defends.
What a roundabout way is this to peace,--to make war for the destruction of regicides, and then to give them peace in order to insure a stability that will enable them to observe it!
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