1. The famous purple passage reads: “A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with blood, burst into the chamber, and pierced with a hundred strokes of bayonets and poinards the bed from when this persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked.” I cite from three readily available editions of the Reflections. The first is Two Classics of the French Revolution (no editor), which contains Burke's Reflections and Paine's Rights of Man (New York: Anchor, 1989). The others are Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by Conor Cruise O'Brien (London: Penguin, 1968), and Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by J.G.A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). These are abbreviated as follows, citing the above passage: Reflections, (A), 84; (O), 164; (P), 62.

2. I have relied on two standard editions of Burke's writings, Works of Edmund Burke, Beaconsfield ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1901), 12 vols. (This appears to be the same as the Little, Brown 1869 ed.), and Edmund Burke, Works, Bohn's British Classic (London: George Bell & Sons, 1893), 8 vols. The former will be cited as the Boston, the latter as the London edition as follows: “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,” 1791, Works, Boston 4:215, London 3:115.

3. For Burke's minor writings on the French Revolution during the period 1790-94, I cite vol. 8 of a new edition of Burke that will eventually supersede the aformentioned editions: Paul Langford, general ed., Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981 —; to be completed in 12 vols.), L. G. Mitchell, ed. vol. 8, The French Revolution, 1790-1794 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). This work will be referred to as follows: “Thoughts on French Affairs,”Writings 8:386.

4. François Furet, Interpreting the Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Furet and Mona Ozouf, A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1989); Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989).

5. François Furet and Denis Richet, La Révolution Française (Paris: Fayard, 1973), reprinted from Hachette 1965-66 ed. They wrote alternate chapters, and this now well-known phrase, “le dérapage de la Révolution,” was written by Richet, pp. 125-58. For recent summaries of the interpretive controversies occasioned by the bicentennial, see Olivier Bétourné and Aglaia I. Hartig, Penser l'histoire de la Révolution (Paris: Editions La Decouverte, 1989), and Geoffrey Best, ed., The Permanent Revolution: The French Revolution and Its Legacy, 1789-1989 (London: Fontana, 1988).

6. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 24.

7. Ibid. 79, 24.

8. Ibid. 180. See Burke, “Jacobinism is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property” (“Regicide Peace,” Letter I), Works, Boston 5:309, London 5:207.

9. Interpreting, 204.

10. Furet, “Jacobinism,” in Critical Dictionary, 715.

11. For Schama on the Jacobins, see esp. Citizens, 623, 725, 785, 787, 804.

12. For Furet on the problem of “circumstances” and the related notion of an “aristocratic plot,” see Interpreting, 61-72, 53-58; Schama, “Violence was the motor of the revolution,” in Citizens, 859, also 447.

13. For summary judgments of Lafayette, see Citizens, 24-29, 870-73.

14. For Burke on financial policy, see Reflections, (A) 132, (O) 220, (P) 103; for Schama on financial policy, see Citizens, 60-71, 881. The issue of reformability is also connected with revisionist assumptions about aristocratic modernization and Jacobin anticapitalism. See Citizens, 116-117, 184-85, 785, 787, 853-54, 884. Also see Chaussinand-Nogaret, French Nobility, 84-116.

15. Citizens, 857.

16. Reflections, (A) 47-49, (O) 121-23, (P) 31-33.

17. Works, Boston 3:226, London 8:279 (“Debate on the Army Estimates,” 1790).

18. Burke discusses Rousseau in “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,” in Writings 8:312-19. For Schama on romantic sensibility and Rousseauism, see Citizens, 153, 156, 161-62, 170-71, 861, 873-75, 885-86.

19. Works, Boston 4:176, London 3:86.

20. Works, Boston 5:236, London 5:154 (“Regicide Peace,” Letter I).

21. Writings 8:264 (“Thoughts on French Affairs”).

22. Reflections, (A) 265, (O) 376, (P) 218.

23. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 294-323; Harvey Mansfield, Jr., Statesmanship and Party Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), and Selected Letters of Edmund Burke, edited by Harvey Mansfield, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). See also Mansfield's “Burke and Machiavelli on Principles in Politics,” in Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and the Modern World, edited by Peter Stanlis (Detroit: University of Detroit Press, 1967), 49-80.

24. J.C.D. Clark believes that Burke is an “unoriginal” exponent of views within a “tradition of Anglican political theology,” in English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 249. C. B. Courtney stresses Burke's indebtedness to the English common law tradition and to Ciceronian stoic natural law in his Montesquieu and Burke (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1975) reprint, 1963 Blackwell ed., 145. There is no doubt that Burke mastered these vocabularies of political communication, but what did he really think of them?

25. Strauss, Natural Right and History 323.

26. Mansfield, “Introduction,”Selected Letters, 20.

27. David Bromwich, “Burke, Wordsworth, and the Defense of History,” in A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 43-78; also note at 296: Burke's “understanding of... contingency... can make paragraphs of his writing sound like Nietzsche.”

28. Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance, 46-47, 78. The title phrase is found in Reflections, (A) 46, (O) 120, (P) 30.

29. C. B. MacPherson, Burke, Past Masters Series (New York: Hill & Wang, 1980), 72-73.

30. Bromwich and Conor Cruise O'Brien stress these Burkean sympathies. See O'Brien's “Introduction” to the Reflections.

31. Iain Hampsher-Monk, The Political Philosophy of Edmund Burke (London: Longman, 1987), 42.

32. See O'Brien's “Introduction” to the Reflections, 9-81; also his essays in The Suspecting Glance (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 33-50, 67-91.

33. Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

34. Bruce James Smith, Politics and Remembrance: Republican Themes in Machiavelli. Burke and Tocqueville (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 151.

35. J.G.A. Pocock, “The Political Economy of Burke's Analysis of the French Revolution,” in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 209; also his “Introduction” to the Reflections, vii-lvi, and “Burke and the Ancient Constitution: A Problem in the History of Ideas,” in J.G.A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1972).

36. Hampsher-Monk, The Political Philosophy of Edmund Burke, 15.

37. Burke wrote an earlier letter to Depont, the “Gentleman in Paris” of the dedication, in November 1789. Two recent accounts of the writing of the Reflections are L. G. Mitchell, “Introduction” to vol. 8 of The Writings of Edmund Burke, 1-32; and F. P. Lock, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: George Allen, 1985), 31-61.

38. Writings 8:364.

39. Thomas Copeland, general ed., The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, vol. 6: July 1789-December 1791, edited by Alfred Cobban and Robert Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 10.

40. Writings 8:12.

41. Works, Boston 3:220-21, London 8:275 (“Debate on the Army Estimate”). Also see Writings 8:329 (“Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,” 1791).

42. These notions are further articulated in the “Letters on a Regicide Peace.” See Pocock's discussion in the “Introduction” to Reflections, xxxvi-xxxviii, and in Virtue, Commerce and History, 205-8, also see my part 4.

43. Correspondence 6:24-26.

44. Schama, Citizens, 853-54.

45. Reflections, (A) 264, (O) 375, (P) 217.

46. Works, Boston 3:226, London 8:279.

47. Reflections, (A) 47, (O) 121, (P) 31.

48. Reflections, (A) 78-99, (O) 157-81, (P) 57-75. This repeated motif defines the crucial moment in the Revolution for Burke; the pages framed by this motif are concerned with form and authority.

49. Reflections, (A) 33, (O) 106, (P) 19.

50. Reflections, (A) 45, (O) 119, (P) 29.

51. Reflections, (A) 48, (O) 122-23; (P) 31-32.

52. Reflections, (A) 46, (O) 121, (P) 30.

53. Reflections, (A) 47, (O) 122, (P) 31.

54. Works, Boston 5:373; London 5:253-54.

55. Works, Boston 5:373-75, London 5:254-55. The passages discussed in the preceding three paragraphs of the text are found on these pages from “Regicide Peace,” Letter II.

56. Works, Boston 5:367-67, London 5:256.

57. Correspondence 6:81.

58. Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 398.

59. Correspondence 6:80-87. Also see “Appeal from the New Whigs to the Old,” in Works, Boston 4:211-12, London 3:113. The passage is more complex and ambivalent than it appears. Burke evidently considered inserting this portrait of Montesquieu into the Reflections. See Correspondence 6:341n, where a passage that could only be the one now in “The Appeal” is assumed by French Laurence to be a part of the Reflections.

60. Correspondence 6:80-81.

61. Correspondence 9:49, in June 1796.

62. See, for instance, “Abridgment of English History,” in Works, Boston 7:293, 315-16, London 6:281, 297.

63. Works, Boston 11:207. This passage is not in the London, Bohn edition.

64. Reflections, (A) 21-22, (O) 92, (P) 9. The Revolution is both “out of nature” and “monstrous.” This motif in Burke reappears in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is essentially about the Revolution. She was fascinated with Burke's description of the fleeing Marie Antoinette.

65. Montesquieu, Esprit des lois, 14:3 (various editions). For an English translation, see Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, edited and translated by Anne Cohler, Basia Miller, and Harold Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 14:3.

66. Works, Boston 5:367, London 5:249. For Robespierre on Montesquieu's “virtue,” see Bernard Manin, “Montesquieu,” in The Critical Dictionary, 730-31.

67. Writings 8:338.

68. Works, Boston 5:175.

69. Writings 8:488 (“Remarks on the Policy of the Allies,” 1793).

70. Writings 8:341-43 (“Thoughts on French Affairs,” 1791).

71. Writings 8:343.

72. Works, Boston 7:331, London 6:308 (“Abridgment of English History”).

73. Reflections, (A) 63, (O) 140, (P) 44.

74. Reflections, (A) 122-24, 170, 210; (O) 209-11, 264, 311; (P) 95-96, 136, 170.

75. Reflections, (A) 100, (O) 183, (P) 76.

76. Reflections, (A) 91, (O) 171, (P) 68. The famous passage follows, as the fruit of private reasoning: “In the groves of their academy... you see nothing but the gallows.”

77. Reflections, (A) 92, (O) 173, (P) 69.

78. Reflections, (A) 90, (O) 171, (P) 67.

79. Writings 8:346 (“Thoughts on French Affairs”). For Burke's views on the monied and landed interests in the Reflections, (A) 122-23, (O) 209-11, (P) 95-96.

80. Writings 8:347.

81. Writings 8:365.

82. Reflections, (A) 206, (O) 306, (P) 167.

83. Reflections, (A) 227ff., (O) 331ff., (P) 185. With your army, “you have the wolf by the ears.”

84. See notes 8 and 10.

85. Writings 8:344, 346. See the contrast of country and urban styles in the Reflections, (A) 210-11, (O) 311-13, (P) 170-71.

86. Works, Boston 5:240, London 5:157.

87. Reflections, (A) 178, (O) 273, (P) 142.

88. Works, Boston 5:209.

89. Ibid., 196-97.

90. Ibid., 213.

91. Ibid., 217.

92. Ibid., 215.

93. Writings 8:480 (“Remarks on the Policy of the Allies”).

94. Works, Boston 5:241, 242, 243, 294; London 5:158, 159, 196; “Regicide Peace,” Letter I.

95. Works, Boston 5:240, London 5:157.

96. Works, Boston 6:100-1, London 5:425, “Regicide Peace,” Letter IV, 1797.

97. Reflections, (A) 46, 265; (O) 120, 376; (P) 30, 218.

The Skeptic's Burke

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