1790

                    REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE

                                by Edmund Burke

                        REFLECTIONS

                            ON

                  THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE

                        IN A LETTER

                 INTENDED TO HAVE BEEN SENT

                   TO A GENTLEMAN IN PARIS

                          [1790]

    IT MAY NOT BE UNNECESSARY to inform the reader that the
following Reflections had their origin in a correspondence between the
Author and a very young gentleman at Paris, who did him the honor of
desiring his opinion upon the important transactions which then, and
ever since, have so much occupied the attention of all men. An
answer was written some time in the month of October 1789, but it
was kept back upon prudential considerations. That letter is alluded
to in the beginning of the following sheets. It has been since
forwarded to the person to whom it was addressed. The reasons for
the delay in sending it were assigned in a short letter to the same
gentleman. This produced on his part a new and pressing application
for the Author's sentiments.

    The Author began a second and more full discussion on the subject.
This he had some thoughts of publishing early in the last spring; but,
the matter gaining upon him, he found that what he had undertaken
not only far exceeded the measure of a letter, but that its importance
required rather a more detailed consideration than at that time he had
any leisure to bestow upon it. However, having thrown down his first
thoughts in the form of a letter, and, indeed, when he sat down to
write, having intended it for a private letter, he found it difficult
to change the form of address when his sentiments had grown into a
greater extent and had received another direction. A different plan,
he is sensible, might be more favorable to a commodious division and
distribution of his matter.

DEAR SIR,

    You are pleased to call again, and with some earnestness, for my
thoughts on the late proceedings in France. I will not give you reason
to imagine that I think my sentiments of such value as to wish
myself to be solicited about them. They are of too little
consequence to be very anxiously either communicated or withheld. It
was from attention to you, and to you only, that I hesitated at the
time when you first desired to receive them. In the first letter I had
the honor to write to you, and which at length I send, I wrote neither
for, nor from, any description of men, nor shall I in this. My errors,
if any, are my own. My reputation alone is to answer for them.

    You see, Sir, by the long letter I have transmitted to you, that
though I do most heartily wish that France may be animated by a spirit
of rational liberty, and that I think you bound, in all honest policy,
to provide a permanent body in which that spirit may reside, and an
effectual organ by which it may act, it is my misfortune to
entertain great doubts concerning several material points in your late
transactions.

    YOU IMAGINED, WHEN YOU WROTE LAST, that I might possibly be
reckoned among the approvers of certain proceedings in France, from
the solemn public seal of sanction they have received from two clubs
of gentlemen in London, called the Constitutional Society and the
Revolution Society.

    I certainly have the honor to belong to more clubs than one, in
which the constitution of this kingdom and the principles of the
glorious Revolution are held in high reverence, and I reckon myself
among the most forward in my zeal for maintaining that constitution
and those principles in their utmost purity and vigor. It is because I
do so, that I think it necessary for me that there should be no
mistake. Those who cultivate the memory of our Revolution and those
who are attached to the constitution of this kingdom will take good
care how they are involved with persons who, under the pretext of zeal
toward the Revolution and constitution, too frequently wander from
their true principles and are ready on every occasion to depart from
the firm but cautious and deliberate spirit which produced the one,
and which presides in the other. Before I proceed to answer the more
material particulars in your letter, I shall beg leave to give you
such information as I have been able to obtain of the two clubs
which have thought proper, as bodies, to interfere in the concerns
of France, first assuring you that I am not, and that I have never
been, a member of either of those societies.

    The first, calling itself the Constitutional Society, or Society
for Constitutional Information, or by some such title, is, I
believe, of seven or eight years standing. The institution of this
society appears to be of a charitable and so far of a laudable nature;
it was intended for the circulation, at the expense of the members, of
many books which few others would be at the expense of buying, and
which might lie on the hands of the booksellers, to the great loss
of an useful body of men. Whether the books, so charitably circulated,