Pamela Clemit

Burke, Reflections On The Revolution In France

A necessary step towards understanding the place of Edmund Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in France in the broader debate on the Revolution is to recognize that Burke was not an orthodox apologist for monarchy. He was, as Richard Pares called him, a high and dry anti-monarchist. Having written and spoken steadily in defence of aristocratic society, Burke had long opposed democracy in the sense of the word that implies popular sovereignty, or active participation by the people in government. He wished to keep the King in the British constitution, not, as his earlier writings make clear, for sentimental reasons but rather as an offset against the possibility of ministerial aggrandizement. France he considered as less prepared than England for modern liberty; it was a place, to him, unimaginable without a king and queen. These views are consistent in Burkes thought from 1770 through 1791. Yet there are tensions and contradictions in his thinking, too, which emerge under the pressure of events in 1788–90; and these have a place in an honest rendering of the subtlety, the richness and the peculiar understanding of political prudence that come together in the Reflections , his first full-length reaction to the Revolution in France.

The Political Context

The French Revolution began with the astonishing events of 1789, but it has to be seen as an intense and profound process that changed and developed dramatically over the following decade and more. Its political and social experiments changed a great many aspects of French life, and these changes also had a major impact on all of Frances neighbours, including Great Britain. The Revolution led to a bitter dispute across Europe about the French principles of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’, and, because the French revolutionaries sought to export these principles to the rest of Europe, it helped to provoke a war that posed an enormous challenge to France and all its neighbours. The French Revolution and the French Revolutionary war were the most discussed issues in British politics and the British press. The Revolutionary debate of the 1790s in Britain had a profound influence on the political, religious and cultural life of the country, while the French war produced almost unprecedented economic and social strains, and forced Britain to make a huge military, naval and financial effort to counter French ambitions. For a great many Britons the 1790s were a decade of crisis that polarized British society into the friends and enemies of the French Revolutionary cause. To understand the nature of this crisis, we need to appreciate the ideological disputes in Britain about French Revolutionary principles, to explore how these disputes encouraged Britons to support or oppose these principles, and to examine how these disputes strengthened the party of government, and seriously undermined the opposition in Parliament.

Paine, rights Of Man

The first part of Thomas Paines Rights of Man burst on to the political scene in March 1791. It was an immediate sensation, being far and away the most popular of the replies to Edmund Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). It was followed almost exactly twelve months later by a second part, which was soon bound with the first and sold in cheap editions throughout the country. Alarmed at the success of the book, and especially concerned that it was being made available to people of the vulgar sort who could not correct for themselves as they read, the government issued a Royal Proclamation against seditious writing, and the Attorney General prepared a case to try Paine for seditious libel. The trial, originally set for July 1792, was deferred until November, by which time Paine had been elected to the French National Convention and had taken up residence in France. In his absence he was found guilty and outlawed; he never returned to his native country. On the face of it, Paine’s Rights of Man replies to Burke’s Reflections . It differs from the host of other pamphlets published in response to Burke by its success in reaching and communicating to a wide audience (with Paine actively promoting its cheap circulation through the auspices of the Society for Constitutional Information) and by the radicalism of its principles. Scholars have appropriately raised questions as to how far the ‘Debate on France’, or the ‘revolution controversy’, as it has more latterly come to be known, really is an exchange of ideas or a discussion of principles, rather than being a process of assertion and counter-assertion of principles that do not systematically engage with those of the other side.

Burke And Paine: Contrasts

The confrontation between Burke and Paine in the 1790s has been called ‘probably the greatest joust in the lists of political philosophy that Great Britain ever witnessed’. This comment by a modern political historian echoes Burkes metaphor of chivalric combat, memorably applied in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to prospective defenders of the French royal family but then used in an ironic sense by his antagonists to characterize Burkes own crusade against the forces of revolution in Britain. Those forces took many shapes, especially in Burkes increasingly paranoiac imagination, but his most dangerous and influential adversary was undoubtedly Paine, and the quarrel between them was seen by contemporary observers, as it is today, as a paradigm of the whole Revolution controversy. Not only did Burke and Paine stake out the two fundamental alternatives in any revolutionary situation – to support radical change or to oppose it – but they did so in terms that transformed the nature of political discourse, altering its language and forms. Within months of the publication of Paines reply to the Reflections , the two parts of Rights of Man (1791, 1792), pamphlets were appearing with titles like Paine and Burke Contrasted, or An Address to the Inhabitants of Great Britain (1792), wording indicative both of the self-consciousness of the Revolution debate (it was, in part, a polemic on polemic itself) and of the extent to which the war of ideas had become personalized. Reading Burke and Paine, and choosing between them, was a defining experience of the 1790s, and the Burke–Paine binary helped to shape the dualistic mindset of literary Romanticism as it did the broader political culture of post-1789 Britain.

A Pastoral Romance, From the Ancient British: Godwin's Rewriting of Comus

Godwin is steadily rising in reputation, both as philosopher and as novelist. Over the last few years several biographies have appeared; his ideas have been analysed; and his best-known works, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and Caleb Williams (1794), have received considerable scholarly attention.1 Now his post-revolutionary novels are being recognized as the fictions of an intellectual who was impressive in his own right, not merely because of his association with Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Yet William Godwins early novels are still almost completely neglected. In this context Imogen (1784) is of special interest as the first of Godwins mature novels, and as a significant addition to the intellectual fiction of the Romantic period. Imogen: A Pastoral Romance, From the Ancient British was the last of three novels produced by Godwin in the winter of 1783 and 1784 and the one over which he took the most trouble.2 The title alone signals

Popular radical culture

This chapter approaches the British radical movement in the 1790s as a cultural and not simply a political phenomenon. Inspired by events in France in 1789, many Britons certainly hoped that their country would become a more enlightened nation, even if opinions differed as to what might constitute enlightenment. Across these differences, there persisted an aspiration to participate in a new literary and political culture, especially among many of those who had previously been excluded. Over the previous few decades the spread of print culture, the rise of literacy, and the development of a tessellation of societies, clubs and urban entertainments had produced what might be termed a popular enlightenment across Britain and Ireland. Debating clubs and newspapers habituating those excluded from the franchise to the discussion of political and public matters fed into the official meetings and penumbra of debating clubs and other groups surrounding the London Corresponding Society and its older and more respectable ally the Society for Constitutional Information. Given the focus of this Companion on writing about the French Revolution, my account of radical culture will have an emphasis on print, but on print as part of this larger aspiration to social and political participation represented by the interacting careers of a selection of radical writers and publishers. Circulation was central to the meaning of writing in this context (and key to whether it was prosecuted or not), and printers, booksellers and readers were as important as writers. Without wishing to overlook the importance of the English provinces, not to mention the quite distinctive responses to the French Revolution in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, this chapter concentrates on the formation of a radical culture in London, partly out of the exigencies of space and partly because the capital and its bookshops, newspapers and coffee houses acted as such a magnet for many of those wishing to rewrite the republic of letters.

Readers respond to Godwin: Romantic republicanism in letters

Robert Darnton proposed a new relationship between the reader and the printed word in eighteenth‐century France, prompted by Rousseaus attempts to direct the readers of his works. After reading La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Darnton argued, readers in all walks of life wrote to its author to confess their feelings just as they took him to be confessing to them. This collapsing of the traditional barriers between writer and reader, and between reader and text, was not unique to Rousseau. Godwins An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) also provoked a flood of letters. Godwin invited readers to embark on a journey of intellectual discovery and self‐exploration. Readers responded by writing to tell him how his book had led them to revaluate their lives, and to engage him in debate on moral and philosophical questions. This essay explores the reading community brought into being by Political Justice. Drawing on Godwins unpublished correspondence, it shows that reform‐minded men and women read Political Justice not just as a speculative treatise but as a guide to living. Such an investigation contributes to the history of Romantic republican mentalities, which transcend the boundaries of social class, gender, and nation.

The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown's American Gothic (review)

history and anthropology. But, in the short run, Darntons sensitivity as a reader of culture would be complemented by a similar talent that had mastered the rhetorical and narrative strategies of early modem novelists. The result could be the ideal book: an historically and culturally sophisticated analysis of the whole circuit of communication, from the collection of rags for paper to the refinement of linguistic and rhetorical techniques that produced books that made the times tremble.