These statues in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris lost their heads in the Reign of Terror (1793-1794), which followed on the French Revolution of 1789. Weak-minded members of the public, whipped up into a frenzy by demagogues hiding behind fair-seeming slogans such as ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’, took them for French monarchs and decapitated them — touchingly emulating their betters, who had guillotined Louis XVI on January 21st, 1793, in the Place de la Concorde. In fact they were statues of Kings of Judah, from the Old Testament. As Burke told Francis Russell (1765-1802), 5th Duke of Bedford, by no means everyone who supported the French Revolution acted out of malice. Many were simply weak and ignorant. He left the pro-revolutionary Duke to decide into which category he fell.
Part 1 of 2
THERE is a manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding, that is, a marked distinction between change and reformation.
The former alters the substance of the objects themselves; and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the accidental evil, annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand.
Reform is, not a change in the substance, or in the primary modification, of the object, but, a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and, if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was.*
* Burke did not think the French monarchy needed no reform. “I am no stranger to the faults and defects of the subverted government of France” he wrote; “[...] there was no question but that abuses existed, and that they demanded a reform.” But the French public had been bounced into a project which went much further than they anticipated. “Men have been sometimes led by degrees,” he reminds us, “sometimes hurried, into things of which, if they could have seen the whole together, they never would have permitted the most remote approach.” It was, in fact, a situation very similar to that in Russia in 1917.
Précis
In 1796, Edmund Burke was stung into writing to the Duke of Bedford about the recent revolution in France. He made a sharp distinction between Reform, which focuses on some specific grievance and at worst does no harm, and Change, which is a reckless fumbling about in the dark of abstract theory and has far-reaching consequences none can foresee. (58 / 60 words)
Part Two
‘The Festival of the Supreme Being’, by Pierre-Antoine Demachy (1723–1807), painted in 1794. The festival and the related Cult of Reason were intended to replace traditional Christianity throughout France — where hundreds of clergy had been executed, and dozens of churches ransacked and demolished by the mob — and to unite the public behind calls for systemic change. Burke reminded the pro-revolutionary Duke of Bedford that unlike reform, change does not target the public’s justifiable grievances, but indulges an arrogant elite’s selfish passion for relentless socio-economic experiment. Reform, he argued, may not get the baby entirely clean but at least it doesn’t throw her out with the bath-water.
ALL this, in effect, I think, but am not sure, I have said elsewhere. It cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, to innovate is not to reform. The French revolutionists complained of everything; they refused to reform anything; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all unchanged. The consequences are before us, — not in remote history; not in future prognostication: they are about us; they are upon us.
They shake the public security; they menace private enjoyment.* They dwarf the growth of the young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they stop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country. Our business is interrupted; our repose is troubled; our pleasures are saddened; our very studies are poisoned and perverted, and knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance, by the enormous evils of this dreadful innovation.
* In 1793 members of the French National Convention, exhilarated by the assassination of Louis XVI and convinced of their moral superiority, had declared war on Great Britain, and were now eagerly spreading war through the Low Countries, Italy, Spain and Portugal as a progressivist crusade. European colonial policy was affected as far away as India, and at home the British Government was panicked into a clumsy clamp-down on pro-French sympathy. Travel and trade became increasingly difficult, fear and suspicion grew and many friendships were badly strained. It particularly hurt Burke because he was quite the Francophile. See The Cradle of Our Race.
Précis
Burke said that he hoped it would one day be proverbial, that to innovate is not to reform: the French, he said, he been given the opportunity to reform their State but had chosen innovation instead, pursuing it with a relentless determination which no one young or old, in town or country, at home or abroad, was able to escape. (60 / 60 words)
