Wait and See
Edmund Burke would not congratulate the French revolutionaries on their ‘liberty’ until he knew what they would do with it.
1790
King George III 1760-1820
Edmund Burke would not congratulate the French revolutionaries on their ‘liberty’ until he knew what they would do with it.
1790
King George III 1760-1820
In 1789, the French Parliament relieved King Louis XVI of his constitutional privileges, and amidst chaotic scenes proclaimed that henceforth ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ would define their Government. Some believed that France was becoming more like England, and that Louis would be retained to add, like England’s George III, regal pomp to a liberal democracy. Edmund Burke wasn’t convinced.
THE circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government) without inquiry what the nature of that government was, or how it was administered?*
Can I now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a mad-man, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic knight of the sorrowful countenance.*
When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it.
* That is, in 1780, when France was still an absolute monarchy under Louis XVI (r. 1774-1792). Burke was not a supporter of the ancien régime, but in his day as in our own there were many who wanted to see everything in black-and-white, and could not understand that it was possible to be anti-this without being pro-that. See John Buchan on Kindergarten Politics, and also Samuel Smiles on Thomas Telford’s short-lived passion for revolution in A Rush to Judgment.
* A reference to chapter twenty-two of Don Quixote (1605) by Castilian novelist Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), in which Don Quixote, the ‘knight of the sorrowful countenance’, very nobly liberates some criminals bound for slavery in the galleys. Not only do they refuse to call upon Dulcinea and tell her what a hero he has been to them, but they also rob him, stripping him down to his shirt-sleeves.