Three Classic Critics of the Revolution: A Bastille-Day Meditation (Part II)

(What follows is a meditation on Bastille Day, a national holiday celebrated in France on July 14 to commemorate the Storming of the Bastille. The first part, on the horror and violence that ensued after the Storming, is here.)

The Franco-Kantian Enlightenment, the ideological foundation of the French Revolution, and the revolution itself, had an early and formidable critic in Edmund Burke. As early as 1790, before the Terror started in earnest, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke challenged the reasoning underlying the proclamation of abstract human rights. He rejected its claim to universality, its notions of natural law, its individualism.

Rejecting the revolutionary project of a radical reconstruction of the social order, preferring empiricism to idealism, Burke upheld the English concept of rights gradually acquired over the course of history and valid for a given society at a given time. To this day, his Reflections remain a defining tract of British conservatism as a self-conscious, fully conceived political philosophy.

While Burke is known to every properly educated person in the English-speaking world, the philosopher, writer, diplomat, and prophet of the counterrevolution, Joseph de Maistre, is not. Maistre (1753-1821) was not a liberal, like Burke. In fact, he wanted “a counter-Revolution, which would not be a contrary revolution but the opposite of the Revolution.” For Maistre, the Revolution was the unfortunate, if logical, culmination of a godless century that idolized individual achievement at the expense of divine order and tradition. Taking a pessimistic view of history, he insisted that the individual should be subordinate to his community and society, to authority, and to Providence.

Falsely accused by Isaiah Berlin of being a forerunner of fascism, Maistre wanted to see France’s return to the unwritten laws and to divine revelation while at the same time admitting the tragically irreversible nature of the Revolution. Novelist Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, now forgotten but popular in the Third Republic, memorably called Maistre a “prophet of the past.” Uncompromisingly anti-modern, Maistre remains to this day the emblematic figure of the counterrevolution. Thanks to him more than any other man, the concept of counterrevolution in France has developed an imagery hostile to the whole of the modern world since the Reformation. To him, the Revolution was an irredeemably bad event, the only merit of which was to punish France for its action in the service of the Enlightenment.

Hippolyte Taine’s 1875 magnum opus, The Origins of Contemporary France, was significant because its author—an immensely respected historian, literary critic, and philosopher—could not be dismissed as a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary. This gave him a credibility with the “modern France” of the early Third Republic that was denied to other authors hostile to the Revolution, such as Maistre. Exasperated by the country’s chronic instability and horrified by the Paris Commune, Taine did not content himself with denouncing the Terror. He attacked the very principles of 1789, both abstract human rights and sovereignty of the people.

Taine’s criticism of the focus of the revolutionaries on abstractions—which led them to believe that society can be transformed by the reign of reason once it has broken with prejudices—sounds eminently Burkian. Indeed, Taine’s criticism of the Revolution is inseparable from his praise of liberal England, which, in his view, knew how to reform everything without abandoning its constitutional legacy and knew that political freedom—which adapts to privileges and prejudices—is in fact “the fruit of accepted inequality and tolerated disorder.”

A conservative liberal, Taine had little in common with the prophets of the counterrevolution. In Maistre, he saw above all a defender of the Pope and of the Vatican, whose power and closed-mindedness were for Taine one of the major causes of French misfortune. By contrast, Taine explained, England knew how to give itself a form of religion compatible with the freedom of the individual and the scientific spirit. Aloof from the Catholic counterrevolution, Taine is no less distant from the subsequent Action Française of Charles Maurras, which saw itself as the heir to royalist France.

Taine did not seek to restore the monarchy but wished (without believing in its practicality) to see in France a parliamentary regime modeled after Westminster. However hostile he may have been to the Revolution and, ultimately, to the left, Taine was not a man of the far right and did not belong to the “classic” counterrevolutionary tradition. He belongs to the narrow lineage of conservative liberals who ultimately rejected the essentials of French political culture as a whole.

This trio—Burke, Maistre, and Taine—developed three distinct lines of criticism of the French Revolution in the first century after the fall of the Bastille. For those curious, it may be rewarding to look into the criticism of the Revolution articulated in the first half of the 20^th century by Charles Maurras, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt.

Image: Edmund Burke (From Levan Ramishvili / via Flickr, in the Public Domain)

Comments (4)

Reason freed from the bounds of revelation leads to the kind of disorder and death seen in the French Revolution. It inevitably is wielded by the most powerful over other people.

But I don’t see how individualism was the problem in France. It sounds more like class consciousness was a bigger factor that led to the violence. You were either a part of the Revolution or not with those in the Revolution executing those who weren’t. Rousseau was all about subjecting the will of individuals to the desires of the group or more precisely the desires of the one who ruled the group.

https://thecrosssectionrmb.blogspot.com/

July 18, 2022 RMB Reply

A very important piece. Even if not all of today’s pathologies owe their fundamental origin to the French Revolution, we can certainly see them exhibited much more clearly and plainly in that period. The Revolution is the historical moment when rejection of authority becomes normative.

It is also worth noting that the irrelevance and uselessness of Con Inc. can be directly related to its lack of interest in the Revolution — and in counter-revolutionary thought. At this point how many “conservatives” even know who Burke is, I wonder?

July 19, 2022 JD Salyer Reply

Yes. This is certainly a worthwhile piece, because it points to a great need for a deeper philosophical and historical understanding of the false philosophical pathologies that pervade modern political practice and thought. And I agree with Mr. Salyer’s suggestion that most “conservative thinkers” these days are stupidly incurious about these all-important and deeper matters.

In the 18th Century, the Italian philosopher Vico, in critiquing a misapplication of Descartes’ rationalist method, identified a philosophical pathology he called “the barbarism of reflection.” Around the same time, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, in his Treatise on Human Nature, spoke of the “barbarism of refinement”, whereby those essential elements of evolved custom and tradition and “common life” needed to anchor and inform prudential reason and political practice are wrongly abstracted or refined out by a deracinated reason that denies the authority of custom and its embedded understanding of right and wrong. To expose this pathology, Hume sketched out a dialectic of true and false philosophy to explain that pathology’s origin. In his Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (1998), Donald Livingston critically restates Hume’s dialectic and examines its application up through 20th Century political thought and practice. Note that Vico and Hume, decades before the French Revolution, identified the false philosophical forces — which had already been at work, for example, in the English Civil War of the previous century — that would in time culminate in the Revolution in France, in American’s French Revolution “Civil War” of the 1860s, in the Bolshevik Revolution, in the catastrophically bloody 20th Century, and in much else, including our fundamentally dysfunctional abstract-barbaric politics of today.

But what real conservatives need in the 21th Century is a clear and concise distillation essay both on these “rationalistic” pathologies and on viable conservative counter-measures. This is perhaps a task for the philosopher of our age. Oakeshott tried this in his essay “Rationalism in Politics” (1947). The problem is that Oakeshott was an academic writing for a more strictly academic audience. But his important speech was never “translated” into more accessible and usable form and language. An author is needed now who can clearly and even more deeply re-state the pathology speech conservatives (and the world) now so desperately need.

July 19, 2022 Winston McCuen Reply

Everyone knows the name of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety. Most every historian overlooks the role of the Marquis De Sade who was on the Committee of Cashier. It was De Sade and this committee that issued the Letters of Cashier, which were their name for arrest warrants. Considering that sadistic attitudes of the man at the top, it is any wonder why these mass atrocities occurred. One other factor that does not seem to be considered concerning the cannibalisms was the vast eruption of a volcano around the time of the start of the French Revolution somewhere in Iceland. According to Wikipedia was the volcano that caused the loss of the lives of 5 million people. It does not specify how cause their deaths, but may have disrupted the weather and caused a famine.

August 11, 2022 Matthew Gilmartin Reply

Three Classic Critics of the Revolution: A Bastille-Day Meditation (Part II)

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