The French Revolution

As Charles Dickens famously began his A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” (http://www.literature.org/authors/dickens-charles/two-cities/book-01/chapter-01.html). At the time of the French Revolution, the general outlook was subject to much interpretation. Depending on one’s source, one could think that the French nation was on the brink of one of the greatest eras in history or that the Revolution and its aftermath signaled the downfall of human values, and that such dangerous corruption would be likely to spread and wreak havoc in other nations as well. It seems one’s point of view was largely determined by the class of citizens with which one identified. If one sided with the aristocracy, Edmund Burke was the author in whom one would find confirmation of one’s beliefs. However, Burke was not the sole authority on the matter; nor was he infallible, as both Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine critically argued on the side of the Revolution for the rights of the commoners.

Edmund Burke, writing for the wealthy and educated citizens of England, holds to lofty ideals and uses flowery language to make his points. He writes for the aristocrat, who has the time to ponder such lofty ideals, and for whom retaining of property is a prime goal. The fact that perhaps the common people have equal rights as the aristocracy is a foreign concept to Burke. He agrees that everyone has rights, but states that the lower class “has not a right to an equal dividend in the product of the joint stock…” (51). Burke is all for primogeniture and the entailment of property, “It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires” (49). Indeed, he even goes as far as to state that it is in “symmetry with the order of the world” (49). He views such a law as the “natural” order of things. He ignores the fact that the commoners’ suffering might have been lightened by their obtaining rights more equal to those of nobles. He characterizes those who arrested the King and Queen as “a band of cruel ruffians and assassins” (51). He sees the Revolution as a personal attack on the French royalty rather than a liberation or even as an ideological movement.

Burke idealizes King Louis IV and his family, portraying their arrest and execution as a tragedy. Burke mourns the loss of such fine people, noting

“…the exalted rank of the persons suffering, and particularly the sex, the beauty, and the amiable qualities of the descendant of so many kings and emperors, with the tender age of the royal infants, insensible only through infancy and innocence of the cruel outrages to which their parents were exposed, instead of being a subject of exultation, adds not a little to my sensibility on that most melancholy occasion” (51).

Not only is the monarchy’s arrest portrayed as a tragedy in the common usage that is a repulsive and sorrowful event, but also in the sense that tragedy reveals man’s potential. It takes a fall for the hero to realize the height to which he had formerly risen. For Burke, that pinnacle from which the heroic royal family and other wealthy landed citizens fell is an idealization of the aristocracy and pseudo-feudal society. Burke mourns, even more than the loss of the royal family, a loss of tradition. “The age of chivalry is gone,” Burke notes, and “the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever” (52).

Mary Wollstonecraft has no sympathy for Edmund Burke’s ill-fated aristocracy or ideals. Instead, she argues for the common man. Burke was all for entailment of property, while Wollstonecraft takes the opposite view. She is against primogeniture, “Property…should be fluctuating, which would be the case, if it were more equally divided amongst all children of a family; else it is an everlasting rampart, in consequence of a barbarous feudal institution, that enables the elder son to overpower talents and depress virtue” (60). In other words, all Burke’s talk of property and its being “natural” is moot because it does not address the needs of the lower classes. How can something be “natural” and just if it does not apply equally? In fact, Wollstonecraft believes Burke to be all talk. She defines the term “romantic” as being “false, or rather artificial, feelings” and accuses him of writing in “sentimental jargon” (61). The greater crime than the arrest of the aristocracy and the fall of Burke’s ideals, she believes, is the abuses of the poor, “Man preys on man; and you mourn*** for the empty pageantry of a name…” (64).

Thomas Paine joins Ms. Wollstonecraft in rightfully bashing Mr. Burke for ignoring the commoners in his analysis of the French Revolution. Pain argues that all men are equal, “all of one degree” (69). He attacks Burke’s elevation of the aristocracy, “The romantic and barbarous distinction of men into Kings and subjects, though it may suit the conditions of courtiers, cannot that of citizens; it is exploded by the principle upon which Governments are now founded” (70). Paine especially attacks Burke’s cherished ideal of tradition. He emphatically states, “It is the living, and not the dead, which are to be accommodated” (65). Like Ms. Wollstonecraft, he also assails Burke’s flowery language and lofty paragons. He dismisses Burke’s work as an untruthful “spouting rant of high-toned exclamation” (68).

The most convincing arguments, it appears, are those of Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. Edmund Burke’s appeal to the aristocracy is not a wide appeal. In addition to alienating readers, his lofty idealizations can be cheesy and overdone. Mary Wollstonecraft garners emotional support by talking about the poor. She seems very practical, talking about real people instead of empty notions. Even more rational is Thomas Paine, who writes in a very straightforward manner and concentrates on the people of the present and not the people of the past.


* Unless otherwise noted, page numbers refer to The Longman Anthology of British Literature.