The thing we now call “conservatism” in the West largely comes out of a reaction against the French Revolution and other revolutionary movements inspired by it. The Continental conservatives—e.g., Joseph de Maistre, Friedrich von Gentz, Klemens von Metternich, and Juan Donoso Cortés—embraced monarchism, often including its more authoritarian and absolutist varieties, in an effort to avoid the excesses of the French revolution. The conservatives also opposed economic liberalism in the form of free trade and bourgeois “free markets” because these were associated—wrongly in many cases—with the French revolutionaries.
In the English-speaking world, the most well-known conservative of this type is Edmund Burke. Compared to the more dogmatic and authoritarian conservatives—especially de Maistre—Burke is quite moderate. Yet, Burke was a conservative innovator in that he was one of the earliest commentators to condemn the French revolution in his 1790 pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke proved to be quite prophetic in the Reflections, even correctly predicting that the revolution would end with a military strongman taking power as did happen when Napoleon seized power with a coup in 1799.
[Read More: “What Is Conservatism?“ by Ryan McMaken.]
Burke also has become influential among American conservatives, thanks to the rise of the conservative movement in the United States in the 1950s. Up until that time, the American “Right” had been primarily the domain of laissez-faire liberalism—what we’d now call libertarianism—descended from Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and anti-imperialist schools of thought. In the fifties, Russell Kirk, followed by others of the Buckleyite movement, managed to insert Burkean conservatism into the anti-communist right. Burkean historical interpretations—especially on the French revolution—thus now remain influential in some corners of the American Right.
This can be seen, for example, in ongoing efforts within conservative publications to push the Burkean view of the revolution, as with this 2023 article in National Review, or this article from last week in the National Catholic Register. In both cases we get the usual Burkean message on the French Revolution, especially by way of contrasting the French revolution with the American one. Burke’s emphasis on defending the monarchy as the alleged guardian of religious and moral traditionalism has also struck a chord with the modern post-liberal Right which tends toward anti-capitalism and monarchist-tinged traditionalism.
Burke’s Reflections, however, receive far too much credit as reliable analysis of the revolution. This is largely because the Reflections were very correct on some matters, especially how the revolution would degenerate into a violent mess that would need a militaristic police state to finally end it.
When it comes to the actual causes of the revolution, however, Burke displays very little insight, and rather provides only some very facile explanations that tell the reader very little about the origins of the conflict. It would seem that, if avoiding a repeat of the revolution were an important goal, we’d want a nuanced and thorough understanding of its causes. On this, we cannot look to Burke.
Perhaps one of the most illuminating critiques of Burke’s reflections comes from British historian Alfred Cobban, the anti-Marxist revisionist. In his 1968 book Aspects of the French Revolution, he writes:
In so far as [Burke’s] Reflections deal with the causes of the Revolution, then, they are not merely inadequate, but misleading. ...On the American colonies he had been one of the best-informed men in England ... On the other hand, his one visit to France had left him with strong prejudices, which the information provided by emigres, especially priests, did not correct. His knowledge of France was limited and it is difficult to believe that he ever understood the pre-revolutionary situation. As literature, as political theory, as anything but history, his Reflections are magnificent.1
So, what did Burke say were the causes of the revolution? He offered two main arguments. The first was that the French people had been swept away by the radical ideologies of the French Enlightenment. These had, in Burke’s view, convinced the people of France to turn against their generally benevolent regime and overthrow all of society’s reliable and time-tested institutions. The second cause of the revolution, in this view, were the “monied interests,” by which Burke meant capitalists, the bourgeoisie, and Jews. These latter groups were fundamental in undermining the old-money economy based on agrarianism, and which supposedly was instrumental in maintaining the virtues of the French people. Moreover, we get the sense from Burke that only land was “real” property while money—and not just inflationary paper money—was necessarily false wealth. Only the landowners of the old regime were to be considered true purveyors of wealth, in this view.
In this latter claim, Burke also somewhat lays the foundation for later Marxian narratives of the French revolution in which a “bourgeois revolution” is fighting against the old “feudal” aristocracy. As such, the revolution is thus classified as a type of class conflict between the old class and the new class.
Later revisionist historians, however, have very much called this Burkean and Marxian view into question. The revisionist Cobban, for example, concluded that there is little data to support the idea that a “rising class” of monied bourgeois capitalists were responsible for the revolution. Rather, the revolution was primarily supported by a quasi-bourgeoisie of the “nobility of the robe”—the noblesse de robe—who owed their positions not to production in the marketplace, but to the purchasing of government “noble” offices from the monarch. For more than a century, the monarch had been selling access to the lower nobility as a means of raising revenue. This lower nobility would become the social class most behind the revolution, and was the class of state-appointed lawyers, judges, and bureaucrats.
Further expanding on Cobban’s view is economic historian George Taylor who has shown that Burke’s view is unsupported by the empirical evidence on the state of the French economy in the late eighteenth century. Taylor notes that the mercantile class in France at that time was still quite small and nothing like it was in England at the same time. Taylor concludes the economic realities were contrary to the Burkean-Marxian contention that there was significant conflict between the economic and social interests of the old upper nobility and the lower “bourgeois” nobility. Moreover, there was no fight against feudalism in this period. Feudalism had died out centuries earlier, a casualty of centralization under the French state. What was still called “feudalism” in the eighteenth century—by both conservatives supporters and liberal critics—was largely an arm of the central state’s royal power.
Did the Enlightenment Thinkers Cause the Revolution?
As Lord Acton showed in the nineteenth century, the leading theorists of the French Enlightenment were not supporters of political freedom, and it’s a shame they have come to be associated, in many cases, with the ideology we now call classical liberalism. That is, there is no reason for us laissez-faire liberals to hold in high esteem the theorists of the so-called Enlightenment. Yet, in spite of what we may think about the likes of the Enlightenment writers, Burke’s attempt to lay blame for the revolution strictly on eighteenth-century Enlightenment intellectuals runs into many problems.
For example, discontent with the monarchy did not appear out of nowhere, or without reason, in the eighteenth century. As related by Murray Rothbard in his history of economic thought, France had been convulsed by a series of revolts and civil wars during much of the seventeenth century. Much of this was in opposition to the French monarchy’s continued efforts to centralize more political power in France and to further expand both absolutism and mercantilism at the expense of property owners and taxpayers. For Rothbard, the revolution was nearly inevitable once it became clear that Turgot—and other reformers who tried to rein in the state’s power and financial profligacy—had failed. The state’s pursuit of relentless war and state opulence had driven it to the brink of bankruptcy, and this required new taxes. New taxes required the king to call the Estates-General, this set off a race for political power that lit the match of revolution.
In other words, much of the reinvigorated opposition to the crown that appeared in the 1780s was a continuation of these ongoing grievances over spending, taxation, monopoly, and centralization. Moreover, as shown by Taylor and Colin Lucas, among others, the jockeying for power among members of the Estates-General, and in the local parlements, was motivated by the usual, run-of-the-mill politics of privilege common in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe. The fact that the main proponents of the revolution—i.e., the noblesse de robe and its upper class allies—used Enlightenment slogans from Rousseau, Voltaire, et al, hardly proved that the real cause of the conflict originated with philosophers of the 1770s.
Ideology is never irrelevant, of course, but as historian Ralph Raico notes, ideology always exists within the context of historical realities that either work with, or work against, ideological claims. Specifically, Raico writes that no ideology is developed in a vacuum, and that ideology comes “into existence and develop[s] over time, in close interaction with social reality. People saw society as it operated around them, they reflected on it, they distilled their ideas—that is, they went to a higher stage than what they saw prevalent in the society of their time, but it was a matter of a constant interaction.”
Burke would have us believe that “social reality”—i.e., the facts of taxes, economic conditions, and political power—had little to do with the formation of the French revolutionary movement. That is, in the Burkean view, we cannot look to exploitive taxation, government monopolies, or a thoroughly inefficient agricultural sector (distorted by countless government regulations) for an explanation of why many French residents raged against the crown. Indeed, Burke suggests in the Reflections that the state of the French constitution was, to use Cobban’s words, were “nearly as good as could have been wished.” Moreover, Burke suggests that the economic situation, while not perfect, was generally not worthy of any withering attacks from critics. Thus, in sense, Burke had to argue that an ideological storm was the overwhelming cause of the revolution. After all, if the state of politics and economics were so generally wonderful, as Burke suggested, the only possible cause was an ideological fever totalyl divorced from actual conditions. Or, as Cobban put it, Burke’s sanguine view of the monarchy and the French state suggested that the people should have been quite content, and ”there was much that was plausible in this, but if it represented the whole story even the contemporary reader was bound to ask why there was a revolution at all.”
A more nuanced and less philosophical view of the revolution is likely to reveal that the causes were many, and that deep-seated resentments held by the Paris sans-culottes mob against the ruling class is what really fueled murderous rampages that like that at the Bastille in 1789. After all, most of the victims were hardly members of the ruling class—i.e., prostitutes and petty criminals—and it’s unlikely the mob targeted these hapless nobodies because of something the public was reading in the pages of the Encyclopédie. Moreover, the idea that Enlightenment philosophy united the mob with the leaders of the Revolution is belied by the fact that after the Bastille massacre, the ruling-class revolutionaries immediately set to work strengthening local militias—i.e., the “National Guard”—to crack down on the lawless mob and restore order for the sake of property owners. We could note that the French revolution was, following the initial collapse of royal power, was really a series of coups that whipsawed the country between regimes of extreme populism and mundane authoritarianism, and finally ending with a military proto-dictatorship. It was never a single movement fomented by a coherent ideology.
Far from being a united ideological movement of murderous radicals, the French revolution was more often a dangerous and unstable partnership between the property-owning upper-level revolutionaries, and the mob of propertyless proto-communists, who provided manpower. The worst excesses of the revolution came when the radicalism of the Paris Commune escaped from the constraints imposed by the noblesse-de-robe revolutionaries. This radicalism, however, was likely motivated at least as much by a desire for political score-settling as by too many coffeehouse discussions about the smut found in Rousseau’s Confessions.
Practical realities were constantly interfering with whatever theoretical dreams the most ideologically motivated revolutionaries were conjuring. This is why the Reign of Terror was followed by the Thermidor Reaction and its own “White Terror” campaign of payback against the Commune radicals. Yes, ideology is always a key factor, but the political killings and riots of the revolution can easily be seen as the result of perceived expediency in the moment. Or, as Cobban put it: “[t]he actions of the revolutionaries were most often prescribed by the need to find practical solutions to immediate problems, using the resources at hand, not by pre-conceived theories.”
What Set the Revolution into Motion?
What were the immediate causes of the French revolution? As we have seen above, the vanguard of the revolution was the noblesse de robe, and the specific event that set the revolutionary fervor in motion was the calling of the Estates General in 1789. This all came after years of fiscal instability, calls for more taxes, and numerous failed attempts at reform. Due to all of this, and not merely the writings of anti-regime Enlightenment skeptics, the monarchy’s prestige had sunken to a dangerously low level.
It was not the mere calling of the Estates General into session that was the trigger, however. It was the way the Estates General was to be organized that set fire to powder. As Lucas points out, representation and membership in the Estates General was to be enforced according to the rules used for the 1614 Estates General, more than 150 years earlier. This had the effect of excluding a large number of wealthy, privileged lower nobility who had thought they had entered the second estate when they, or their ancestors, had bought their way into a privileged position vis-a-vis the French monarchy. Yet, when the composition of the new Estates General were laid down, these “nobles” found themselves palmed off into the third estate, where these now effectively former nobles knew their political influence was likely to be greatly curtailed. At the same time, the old upper nobility, the noblesse de épée, was scheming to end or greatly curtail the practice of selling positions in the nobility in exchange for revenue for the crown. The lower nobility and politically connected upper bourgeoisie—now cut off from privilege in new ways—responded with the sort of extreme alarm we might expect in such cases. After all, France was not a land where hard work often paid off in the absence of state-approved privilege. Official positions of privilege within the state machine mattered a lot. It was known that the first and second estates were going to vote to declare themselves exempt from new taxes, meaning the tax burden would fall on the third estate. The fact that the third estate—now swollen with many members of the lower nobility—was far more numerous than the members of the first and second estates was a major point of contention and paralyzed the Estates General. Eventually, the third estate broke off and set itself up as the “real” legislature of France triggering a revolutionary constitutional crisis.
As Raico notes, the later French classical-liberal exploitation theorists understood this to be the real key factor in the igniting of the revolution. Raico writes that the third estate
revolt[ed] against the aristocracy because the aristocracy and the French monarchy had limited access to government positions and civilian and military bureaucracies in the church, and so on. The third estate was kept out of those and had to crush the power of the privileged orders in order to get those jobs. That’s a possible and fruitful interpretation of the revolution, I believe.
Yes, these revolutionaries wanted a new constitution, but not, as Burke would have us believe, because they were so enamored of some pie-in-the-sky ideology about total equality. Indeed, it has been amply shown that most of the third estate in 1789 had little concern for equality for the masses. Rather, as Raico and Lucas note, the third estate wanted access to the privileges of the ruling class. Most members of the third estate—and later, the national assembly—were property owners and were certainly not interested in making the urban poor or rural peasants into “equals” and thus political rivals.
Contrary to Burke, this was not a revolution guided by mere “theory.” And, as we know from the data compiled by economic historians, this was not a revolution of the “monied” mercantile class seeking to overthrow “feudalism” in order to impose “rootless” ways of bourgeois capitalists.
Burke was either unaware of all this or found it inconvenient to his narrative. Thus, Cobban concludes:
as far as the explanation offered in the Reflections for the outbreak of the Revolution, for the moment it must be enough to say that no serious student could today accept Burke’s views on the influence of eighteenth-century writers without the most extensive qualifications. The other revolutionary element that Burke detected in French society was the monied interest. Unfortunately, whether because of lack of detailed knowledge, or because money, after all, was property, and to present the Revolution as a civil war between two forms of property was hard in keeping with his plan, Burke made no attempt to follow up his argument.2
