Tea at Trianon: Burke’s Revolutionary Reflection

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, December 19, 2025

Burke’s Revolutionary Reflection

From The New Criterion:

When did Burke become the Burke that Russell Kirk recognized as the “first conservative of our time of troubles”? Historians agree that this image sharpened after the French Revolution. In this telling, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) led to Burke’s falling out with the radical Whig Charles James Fox, and then, in 1791, to a split between Old Whigs (Burkean, proto-conservative) and New (Foxite, pro-radical). British Nineteenth-century liberalism and conservatism descend from this division. Both were chastened by the French Revolution, the Terror, and the Napoleonic Wars. Like almost all Europeans, British liberals and conservatives were skeptical about the American experiment’s prospects. English radicalism was suppressed by William Pitt the Younger in the Napoleonic emergency, and though it resurfaced after 1815, it never regained its momentum.

I suggest that Burke’s recoil from the implications of radical Whiggery began earlier, during the American Revolution. Its pivotal episode was not the mob breaking into the Tuileries Palace in 1790 and chasing Marie Antoinette from her bed. It was the events that Herbert Butterfield called “the revolution we escaped”: the Gordon Riots of June 1780. They remain the biggest riots in British history. The Whig split of 1791 over the French Revolution was also preceded by a Whig split in 1782, as Lord North’s government collapsed amid defeat in America. The reaction against English radicalism began in 1780, then accelerated after 1789.

Burke began writing the Reflections in late 1789, after the fall of the Bastille. He resumed work in early 1790, after reading A Discourse on the Love of Our Country. The Discourse transcribed a speech that Richard Price, a Dissenting minister and radical Whig, had delivered to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain at the meeting house in Old Jewry, by the Bank of England. In his 1776 pamphlet Civil Liberty, Price had justified the American Revolution as the heir to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and also as a millenarian portent. He now made the same argument about the French Revolution. The sack of the Tuileries, which inspired Burke’s chivalric effusions, happened six months later, in October 1790. The Reflections were published in November. (Read more.)