Reflections on the Revolution in France

What It Is

A book-length letter, published in November 1790, cast as a reply to a young Frenchman who had asked for the author's opinion. Edmund Burke was a sitting member of Parliament with thirty years in the Commons and a career spent defending the American colonists, Irish Catholics, and the people of Bengal against the East India Company. Which is why the book bewildered his allies. The great reformer had turned on the greatest reform of the age.

It is not a treatise and has no system. It is a performance: rhetorical, sarcastic, digressive, occasionally purple, and built to make you feel something about inherited institutions before it tells you what to think about them. It sold 13,000 copies in five weeks and provoked dozens of replies, including Mary Wollstonecraft's and Thomas Paine's.

Why It Matters

This is the founding text of modern conservatism, and Burke would not have recognised the word. What he supplies is a set of arguments that have been made in every generation since, usually by people who have never read him.

Society, he says, is a partnership between the dead, the living and the unborn, not a contract that any one generation may tear up. Institutions carry practical knowledge that nobody involved can fully articulate, so demolishing them destroys more than the demolishers can see. Abstract rights are a poor instrument for governing actual people in actual circumstances. Reform should proceed by repair.

He also made, in 1790, a set of very specific predictions about how the Revolution would end. He was right, and the fact that he was right is why the book is still an argument rather than a museum piece.

He is wrong in interesting places too. He is maudlin about Marie Antoinette, unjust to the moderates of 1790, and largely silent on the misery the old regime had produced. A reader who takes him as a prophet will get less from him than one who takes him as an antagonist.

Before You Read

Around three hundred pages, eight to ten hours, and harder than the length suggests. The sentences are long, the references are to the news of 1789, and Burke assumes you know exactly who Richard Price is and what he said in a sermon at the Old Jewry. You do not. A well-annotated edition is not a luxury here.

Read it slowly, and read the great set pieces aloud. The prose is the argument; when it swells, that is Burke doing his work on you, and it is worth feeling it happen before you decide whether to resist.

Which Edition to Read

• Oxford World's Classics, edited by L. G. Mitchell — recommended. The best-edited text for a general reader. Mitchell's introduction is short, historical and fair, and — this matters more than it sounds — the notes actually identify the people Burke is savaging, without which half the book is a stranger's quarrel overheard through a wall. The cost: the annotation is compact, and Mitchell does not argue with his author. View on Amazon →
• Penguin Classics, edited by Conor Cruise O'Brien (1968). The famous edition, and O'Brien's long introduction is a piece of writing in its own right: an Irish politician and historian reading an Irish politician, with a sympathy nobody else brings. The cost: it is as much about O'Brien as about Burke, and it is combative.
• Yale University Press, edited by Frank M. Turner (2003). The text with a historical introduction and four essays by scholars who disagree about what Burke means now. The best edition for a reader who wants to see the argument continuing. The cost: the essays will date faster than Burke has.

Take Oxford to read, Penguin for O'Brien, Yale to argue. J. G. A. Pocock's Hackett edition has the sharpest scholarly introduction of the lot, and costs very little.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read Paine's Rights of Man afterwards. It was written as a direct answer, it is the better-tempered book, and the pair of them is the argument the modern world is still having.

Notice where Burke stops reasoning and starts describing. The descriptions are doing the persuading, and once you see the technique you can decide, page by page, whether you consent to it.

Do not go hunting for a doctrine. Readers who want a system come away empty-handed and irritated. What Burke has is a temperament, argued at the top of his voice — and a temperament, defended that well, turns out to be harder to answer than a system.