The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12)

REMARKS ON THE POLICY OF THE ALLIES WITH RESPECT TO FRANCE. BEGUN IN OCTOBER, 1793

As the proposed manifesto is, I understand, to promulgate to the world the general idea of a plan for the regulation of a great kingdom, and through the regulation of that kingdom probably to decide the fate of Europe forever, nothing requires a more serious deliberation with regard to the time of making it, the circumstances of those to whom it is addressed, and the matter it is to contain.

As to the time, (with the due diffidence in my own opinion,) I have some doubts whether it is not rather unfavorable to the issuing any manifesto with regard to the intended government of France, and for this reason: that it is (upon the principal point of our attack) a time of calamity and defeat. Manifestoes of this nature are commonly made when the army of some sovereign enters into the enemy's country in great force, and under the imposing authority of that force employs menaces towards those whom he desires to awe, and makes promises to those whom he wishes to engage in his favor.

As to a party, what has been done at Toulon leaves no doubt that the party for which we declare must be that which substantially declares for royalty as the basis of the government.

As to menaces, nothing, in my opinion, can contribute more effectually to lower any sovereign in the public estimation, and to turn his defeats into disgraces, than to threaten in a moment of impotence. The second manifesto of the Duke of Brunswick appeared, therefore, to the world to be extremely ill-timed. However, if his menaces in that manifesto had been seasonable, they were not without an object. Great crimes then apprehended, and great evils then impending, were to be prevented. At this time, every act which early menaces might possibly have prevented is done. Punishment and vengeance alone remain,—and God forbid that they should ever be forgotten! But the punishment of enormous offenders will not be the less severe, or the less exemplary, when it is not threatened at a moment when we have it not in our power to execute our threats. On the other side, to pass by proceedings of such a nefarious nature, in all kinds, as have been carried on in France, without any signification of resentment, would be in effect to ratify them, and thus to become accessaries after the fact in all those enormities which it is impossible to repeat or think of without horror. An absolute silence appears to me to be at this time the only safe course.

The second usual matter of manifestoes is composed of promises to those who cooperate with our designs. These promises depend in a great measure, if not wholly, on the apparent power of the person who makes them to fulfil his engagements. A time of disaster on the part of the promiser seems not to add much to the dignity of his person or to the effect of his offers. One would hardly wish to seduce any unhappy persons to give the last provocation to a merciless tyranny, without very effectual means of protecting them.

The time, therefore, seems (as I said) not favorable to a general manifesto, on account of the unpleasant situation of our affairs. However, I write in a changing scene, when a measure very imprudent to-day may be very proper to-morrow. Some great victory may alter the whole state of the question, so far as it regards our power of fulfilling any engagement we may think fit to make.

But there is another consideration of far greater importance for all the purposes of this manifesto. The public, and the parties concerned, will look somewhat to the disposition of the promiser indicated by his conduct, as well as to his power of fulfilling his engagements.

Speaking of this nation as part of a general combination of powers, are we quite sure that others can believe us to be sincere, or that we can be even fully assured of our own sincerity, in the protection of those who shall risk their lives for the restoration of monarchy in France, when the world sees that those who are the natural, legal, constitutional representatives of that monarchy, if it has any, have not had their names so much as mentioned in any one public act, that in no way whatever are their persons brought forward, that their rights have not been expressly or implicitly allowed, and that they have not been in the least consulted on the important interests they have at stake? On the contrary, they are kept in a state of obscurity and contempt, and in a degree of indigence at times bordering on beggary. They are, in fact, little less prisoners in the village of Hanau than the royal captives who are locked up in the tower of the Temple. What is this, according to the common indications which guide the judgment of mankind, but, under the pretext of protecting the crown of France, in reality to usurp it?

I am also very apprehensive that there are other circumstances which must tend to weaken the force of our declarations. No partiality to the allied powers can prevent great doubts on the fairness of our intentions as supporters of the crown of France, or of the true principles of legitimate government in opposition to Jacobinism, when it is visible that the two leading orders of the state of France, who are now the victims, and who must always be the true and sole supports of monarchy in that country, are, at best, in some of their descriptions, considered only as objects of charity, and others are, when employed, employed only as mercenary soldiers,—that they are thrown back out of all reputable service, are in a manner disowned, considered as nothing in their own cause, and never once consulted in the concerns of their king, their country, their laws, their religion, and their property. We even affect to be ashamed of them. In all our proceedings we carefully avoid the appearance of being of a party with them. In all our ideas of treaty we do not regard them as what they are, the two leading orders of the kingdom. If we do not consider them in that light, we must recognize the savages by whom they have been ruined, and who have declared war upon Europe, whilst they disgrace and persecute human nature, and openly defy the God that made them, as real proprietors of France.

I am much afraid, too, that we shall scarcely be believed fair supporters of lawful monarchy against Jacobinism, so long as we continue to make and to observe cartels with the Jacobins, and on fair terms exchange prisoners with them, whilst the Royalists, invited to our standard, and employed under our public faith against the Jacobins, if taken by that savage faction, are given up to the executioner without the least attempt whatsoever at reprisal. For this we are to look at the king of Prussia's conduct, compared with his manifestoes about a twelvemonth ago. For this we are to look at the capitulations of Mentz and Valenciennes, made in the course of the present campaign. By those two capitulations the Christian Royalists were excluded from any participation in the cause of the combined powers. They were considered as the outlaws of Europe. Two armies were in effect sent against them. One of those armies (that which surrendered Mentz) was very near overpowering the Christians of Poitou, and the other (that which surrendered at Valenciennes) has actually crushed the people whom oppression and despair had driven to resistance at Lyons, has massacred several thousands of them in cold blood, pillaged the whole substance of the place, and pursued their rage to the very houses, condemning that noble city to desolation, in the unheard-of manner we have seen it devoted.

It is, then, plain, by a conduct which overturns a thousand declarations, that we take the Royalists of France only as an instrument of some convenience in a temporary hostility with the Jacobins, but that we regard those atheistic and murderous barbarians as the bonâ fide possessors of the soil of France. It appears, at least, that we consider them as a fair government de facto, if not de jure, a resistance to which, in favor of the king of Prance, by any man who happened to be born within that country, might equitably be considered by other nations as the crime of treason.

For my part, I would sooner put my hand into the fire than sign an invitation to oppressed men to fight under my standard, and then, on every sinister event of war, cruelly give them up to be punished as the basest of traitors, as long as I had one of the common enemy in my hands to be put to death in order to secure those under my protection, and to vindicate the common honor of sovereigns. We hear nothing of this kind of security in favor of those whom we invite to the support of our cause. Without it, I am not a little apprehensive that the proclamations of the combined powers might (contrary to their intention, no doubt) be looked upon as frauds, and cruel traps laid for their lives.

So far as to the correspondence between our declarations and our conduct: let the declaration be worded as it will, the conduct is the practical comment by which, and which alone, it can be understood. This conduct, acting on the declaration, leaves a monarchy without a monarch, and without any representative or trustee for the monarch and the monarchy. It supposes a kingdom without states and orders, a territory without proprietors, and faithful subjects who are to be left to the fate of rebels and traitors.

The affair of the establishment of a government is a very difficult undertaking for foreign powers to act in as principals; though as auxiliaries and mediators it has been not at all unusual, and may be a measure full of policy and humanity and true dignity.

The first thing we ought to do, supposing us not giving the law as conquerors, but acting as friendly powers applied to for counsel and assistance in the settlement of a distracted country, is well to consider the composition, nature, and temper of its objects, and particularly of those who actually do or who ought to exercise power in that state. It is material to know who they are, and how constituted, whom we consider as the people of France.

The next consideration is, through whom our arrangements are to be made, and on what principles the government we propose is to be established.

The first question on the people is this: Whether we are to consider the individuals now actually in France, numerically taken and arranged into Jacobin clubs, as the body politic, constituting the nation of France,—or whether we consider the original individual proprietors of lands, expelled since the Revolution, and the states and the bodies politic, such as the colleges of justice called Parliaments, the corporations, noble and not noble, of bailliages and towns and cities, the bishops and the clergy, as the true constituent parts of the nation, and forming the legally organized parts of the people of France.

In this serious concern it is very necessary that we should have the most distinct ideas annexed to the terms we employ; because it is evident that an abuse of the term people has been the original, fundamental cause of those evils, the cure of which, by war and policy, is the present object of all the states of Europe.

If we consider the acting power in Prance, in any legal construction of public law, as the people, the question is decided in favor of the republic one and indivisible. But we have decided for monarchy. If so, we have a king and subjects; and that king and subjects have rights and privileges which ought to be supported at home: for I do not suppose that the government of that kingdom can or ought to be regulated by the arbitrary mandate of a foreign confederacy.

As to the faction exercising power, to suppose that monarchy can be supported by principled regicides, religion by professed atheists, order by clubs of Jacobins, property by committees of proscription, and jurisprudence by revolutionary tribunals, is to be sanguine in a degree of which I am incapable. On them I decide, for myself, that these persons are not the legal corporation of France, and that it is not with them we can (if we would) settle the government of France.

Since, then, we have decided for monarchy in that kingdom, we ought also to settle who is to be the monarch, who is to be the guardian of a minor, and how the monarch and monarchy is to be modified and supported; if the monarch is to be elected, who the electors are to be,—if hereditary, what order is established, corresponding with an hereditary monarchy, and fitted to maintain it; who are to modify it in its exercise; who are to restrain its powers, where they ought to be limited, to strengthen them, where they are to be supported, or, to enlarge them, where the object, the time, and the circumstances may demand their extension. These are things which, in the outline, ought to be made distinct and clear; for if they are not, (especially with regard to those great points, who are the proprietors of the soil, and what is the corporation of the kingdom,) there is nothing to hinder the complete establishment of a Jacobin republic, (such as that formed in 1790 and 1791,) under the name of a Démocratie Royale. Jacobinism does not consist in the having or not having a certain pageant under the name of a king, but "in taking the people as equal individuals, without any corporate name or description, without attention to property, without division of powers, and forming the government of delegates from a number of men so constituted,—in destroying or confiscating property, and bribing the public creditors, or the poor, with the spoils, now of one part of the community, now of another, without regard to prescription or possession."

I hope no one can be so very blind as to imagine that monarchy can be acknowledged and supported in France upon any other basis than that of its property, corporate and individual,—or that it can enjoy a moment's permanence or security upon any scheme of things which sets aside all the ancient corporate capacities and distinctions of the kingdom, and subverts the whole fabric of its ancient laws and usages, political, civil, and religious, to introduce a system founded on the supposed rights of man, and the absolute equality of the human race. Unless, therefore, we declare clearly and distinctly in favor of the restoration of property, and confide to the hereditary property of the kingdom the limitation and qualifications of its hereditary monarchy, the blood and treasure of Europe is wasted for the establishment of Jacobinism in France. There is no doubt that Danton and Robespierre, Chaumette and Barère, that Condorcet, that Thomas Paine, that La Fayette, and the ex-Bishop of Autun, the Abbé Grégoire, with all the gang of the Sieyèses, the Henriots, and the Santerres, if they could secure themselves in the fruits of their rebellion and robbery, would be perfectly indifferent, whether the most unhappy of all infants, whom by the lessons of the shoemaker, his governor and guardian, they are training up studiously and methodically to be an idiot, or, what is worse, the most wicked and base of mankind, continues to receive his civic education in the Temple or the Tuileries, whilst they, and such as they, really govern the kingdom.

It cannot be too often and too strongly inculcated, that monarchy and property must, in France, go together, or neither can exist. To think of the possibility of the existence of a permanent and hereditary royalty, where nothing else is hereditary or permanent in point either of personal or corporate dignity, is a ruinous chimera, worthy of the Abbé Sieyès, and those wicked fools, his associates, who usurped power by the murders of the 19th of July and the 6th of October, 1789, and who brought forth the monster which they called Démocratie Royale, or the Constitution.

I believe that most thinking men would prefer infinitely some sober and sensible form of a republic, in which there was no mention at all of a king, but which held out some reasonable security to property, life, and personal freedom, to a scheme of tilings like this Démocratie Royale, founded on impiety, immorality, fraudulent currencies, the confiscation of innocent individuals, and the pretended rights of man,—and which, in effect, excluding the whole body of the nobility, clergy, and landed property of a great nation, threw everything into the hands of a desperate set of obscure adventurers, who led to every mischief a blind and bloody band of sans-culottes. At the head, or rather at the tail, of this system was a miserable pageant, as its ostensible instrument, who was to be treated with every species of indignity, till the moment when he was conveyed from the palace of contempt to the dungeon of horror, and thence led by a brewer of his capital, through the applauses of an hired, frantic, drunken multitude, to lose his head upon a scaffold.

This is the Constitution, or Démocratie Royale; and this is what infallibly would be again set up in France, to run exactly the same round, if the predominant power should so far be forced to submit as to receive the name of a king, leaving it to the Jacobins (that is, to those who have subverted royalty and destroyed property) to modify the one and to distribute the other as spoil. By the Jacobins I mean indiscriminately the Brissotins and the Maratists, knowing no sort of difference between them. As to any other party, none exists in that unhappy country. The Royalists (those in Poitou excepted) are banished and extinguished; and as to what they call the Constitutionalists, or Democrates Royaux, they never had an existence of the smallest degree of power, consideration, or authority, nor, if they differ at all from the rest of the atheistic banditti, (which from their actions and principles I have no reason to think,) were they ever any other than the temporary tools and instruments of the more determined, able, and systematic regicides. Several attempts have been made to support this chimerical Démocratie Royale: the first was by La Fayette, the last by Dumouriez: they tended only to show that this absurd project had no party to support it. The Girondists under Wimpfen, and at Bordeaux, have made some struggle. The Constitutionalists never could make any, and for a very plain reason: they were leaders in rebellion. All their principles and their whole scheme of government being republican, they could never excite the smallest degree of enthusiasm in favor of the unhappy monarch, whom they had rendered contemptible, to make him the executive officer in their new commonwealth. They only appeared as traitors to their own Jacobin cause, not as faithful adherents to the king.

In an address to France, in an attempt to treat with it, or in considering any scheme at all relative to it, it is impossible we should mean the geographical, we must always mean the moral and political country. I believe we shall be in a great error, if we act upon an idea that there exists in that country any organized body of men who might be willing to treat on equitable terms for the restoration of their monarchy, but who are nice in balancing those terms, and who would accept such as to them appeared reasonable, but who would quietly submit to the predominant power, if they were not gratified in the fashion of some constitution which suited with their fancies.

No individual influence, civil or military.I take the state of France to be totally different. I know of no such body, and of no such party. So far from a combination of twenty men, (always excepting Poitou,) I never yet heard that a single man could be named of sufficient force or influence to answer for another man, much less for the smallest district in the country, or for the most incomplete company of soldiers in the army. We see every man that the Jacobins choose to apprehend taken up in his village or in his house, and conveyed to prison without the least shadow of resistance,—and this indifferently, whether he is suspected of Royalism, or Federalism, Moderantism, Democracy Royal, or any other of the names of faction which they start by the hour. What is much more astonishing, (and, if we did not carefully attend to the genius and circumstances of this Revolution, must indeed appear incredible,) all their most accredited military men, from a generalissimo to a corporal, may be arrested, (each in the midst of his camp, and covered with the laurels of accumulated victories,) tied neck and heels, thrown into a cart, and sent to Paris to be disposed of at the pleasure of the Revolutionary tribunals.

No corporations of justice, commerce, or police.As no individuals have power and influence, so there are no corporations, whether of lawyers or burghers, existing. The Assembly called Constituent, destroyed all such institutions very early. The primary and secondary assemblies, by their original constitution, were to be dissolved when they answered the purpose of electing the magistrates, and were expressly disqualified from performing any corporate act whatsoever. The transient magistrates have been almost all removed before the expiration of their terms, and new have been lately imposed upon the people without the form or ceremony of an election. These magistrates during their existence are put under, as all the executive authorities are from first to last, the popular societies (called Jacobin clubs) of the several countries, and this by an express order of the National Convention: it is even made a case of death to oppose or attack those clubs. They, too, have been lately subjected to an expurgatory scrutiny, to drive out from them everything savoring of what they call the crime of moderantism, of which offence, however, few were guilty. But as people began to take refuge from their persecutions amongst themselves, they have driven them from that last asylum.

The state of France is perfectly simple. It consists of but two descriptions,—the oppressors and the oppressed.

The first has the whole authority of the state in their hands,—all the arms, all the revenues of the public, all the confiscations of individuals and corporations. They have taken the lower sort from their occupations and have put them into pay, that they may form them into a body of janizaries to overrule and awe property. The heads of these wretches they never suffer to cool. They supply them with a food for fury varied by the day,—besides the sensual state of intoxication, from which they are rarely free. They have made the priests and people formally abjure the Divinity; they have estranged them from every civil, moral, and social, or even natural and instinctive sentiment, habit, and practice, and have rendered them systematically savages, to make it impossible for them to be the instruments of any sober and virtuous arrangement, or to be reconciled to any state of order, under any name whatsoever.

The other description—the oppressed—are people of some property: they are the small relics of the persecuted landed interest; they are the burghers and the farmers. By the very circumstance of their being of some property, though numerous in some points of view, they cannot be very considerable as a number. In cities the nature of their occupations renders them domestic and feeble; in the country it confines them to their farm for subsistence. The national guards are all changed and reformed. Everything suspicious in the description of which they were composed is rigorously disarmed. Committees, called of vigilance and safety, are everywhere formed: a most severe and scrutinizing inquisition, far more rigid than anything ever known or imagined. Two persons cannot meet and confer without hazard to their liberty, and even to their lives. Numbers scarcely credible have been executed, and their property confiscated. At Paris, and in most other towns, the bread they buy is a daily dole,—which they cannot obtain without a daily ticket delivered to them by their masters. Multitudes of all ages and sexes are actually imprisoned. I have reason to believe that in France there are not, for various state crimes, so few as twenty thousand³³ actually in jail,—a large proportion of people of property in any state. If a father of a family should show any disposition to resist or to withdraw himself from their power, his wife and children are cruelly to answer for it. It is by means of these hostages that they keep the troops, which they force by masses (as they call it) into the field, true to their colors.

Another of their resources is not to be forgotten. They have lately found a way of giving a sort of ubiquity to the supreme sovereign authority, which no monarch has been able yet to give to any representation of his.

The commissioners of the National Convention, who are the members of the Convention itself, and really exercise all its powers, make continual circuits through every province, and visits to every army. There they supersede all the ordinary authorities, civil and military, and change and alter everything at their pleasure. So that, in effect, no deliberative capacity exists in any portion of the inhabitants.

Toulon, republican in principle, having taken its decision in a moment under the guillotine, and before the arrival of these commissioners,—Toulon, being a place regularly fortified, and having in its bosom a navy in part highly discontented, has escaped, though by a sort of miracle: and it would not have escaped, if two powerful fleets had not been at the door, to give them not only strong, but prompt and immediate succor, especially as neither this nor any other seaport town in France can be depended on, from the peculiarly savage dispositions, manners, and connections among the lower sort of people in those places. This I take to be the true state of things in France, so far as it regards any existing bodies, whether of legal or voluntary association, capable of acting or of treating in corps.

As to the oppressed individuals, they are many, and as discontented as men must be under the monstrous and complicated tyranny of all sorts with which they are crushed. They want no stimulus to throw off this dreadful yoke; but they do want, not manifestoes, which they have had even to surfeit, but real protection, force, and succor.

The disputes and questions of men at their ease do not at all affect their minds, or ever can occupy the minds of men in their situation. These theories are long since gone by; they have had their day, and have done their mischief. The question is not between the rabble of systems, Fayettism, Condorcetism, Monarchism, or Democratism, or Federalism, on the one side, and the fundamental laws of France on the other,—or between all these systems amongst themselves. It is a controversy (weak, indeed, and unequal, on the one part) between the proprietor and the robber, between the prisoner and the jailer, between the neck and the guillotine. Four fifths of the French inhabitants would thankfully take protection from the emperor of Morocco, and would never trouble their heads about the abstract principles of the power by which they were snatched from imprisonment, robbery, and murder. But then these men can do little or nothing for themselves. They have no arms, nor magazines, nor chiefs, nor union, nor the possibility of these things within themselves. On the whole, therefore, I lay it down as a certainty, that in the Jacobins no change of mind is to be expected, and that no others in the territory of France have an independent and deliberative existence.

The truth is, that France is out of itself,—the moral France is separated from the geographical. The master of the house is expelled, and the robbers are in possession. If we look for the corporate people of France, existing as corporate in the eye and intention of public law, (that corporate people, I mean, who are free to deliberate and to decide, and who have a capacity to treat and conclude,) they are in Flanders, and Germany, in Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and England. There are all the princes of the blood, there are all the orders of the state, there are all the parliaments of the kingdom.

This being, as I conceive, the true state of France, as it exists territorially, and as it exists morally, the question will be, with whom we are to concert our arrangements, and whom we are to use as our instruments in the reduction, in the pacification, and in the settlement of France. The work to be done must indicate the workmen. Supposing us to have national objects, we have two principal and one secondary. The first two are so intimately connected as not to be separated even in thought: the reëstablishment of royalty, and the reëstablishment of property. One would think it requires not a great deal of argument to prove that the most serious endeavors to restore royalty will be made by Royalists. Property will be most energetically restored by the ancient proprietors of that kingdom.

When I speak of Royalists, I wish to be understood of those who were always such from principle. Every arm lifted up for royalty from the beginning was the arm of a man so principled. I do not think there are ten exceptions.

The principled Royalists are certainly not of force to effect these objects by themselves. If they were, the operations of the present great combination would be wholly unnecessary. What I contend for is, that they should be consulted with, treated with, and employed; and that no foreigners whatsoever are either in interest so engaged, or in judgment and local knowledge so competent to answer all these purposes, as the natural proprietors of the country.

Their number, for an exiled party, is also considerable. Almost the whole body of the landed proprietors of France, ecclesiastical and civil, have been steadily devoted to the monarchy. This body does not amount to less than seventy thousand,—a very great number in the composition of the respectable classes in any society. I am sure, that, if half that number of the same description were taken out of this country, it would leave hardly anything that I should call the people of England. On the faith of the Emperor and the king of Prussia, a body of ten thousand nobility on horseback, with the king's two brothers at their head, served with the king of Prussia in the campaign of 1792, and equipped themselves with the last shilling of their ruined fortunes and exhausted credit.³⁴ It is not now the question, how that great force came to be rendered useless and totally dissipated. I state it now, only to remark that a great part of the same force exists, and would act, if it were enabled. I am sure everything has shown us that in this war with France one Frenchman is worth twenty foreigners. La Vendée is a proof of this.