This is Who made our minds? my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: The Totalitarian Mind, God’s Capitalists and Confucius: the first humanist
AN ELOQUENT RESPONSE to the French Revolution issued from the Irish-born anglophile, politician and political theorist Edmund Burke (1729–1797).
Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) reached multitudes (and still does) and reinforced the prevailing British conservative opinion of the French Revolution as the disgusting regicide of a gentle king by a hysterical mob.
Burke’s celebrated work was a prolonged defence of inherited privilege, the propertied few and the monarchy. Today, his Reflections is revered as the secular Bible of the conservative movement.
Back then, however, Burke drew the withering scorn of the radical polemicist Thomas Paine. Paine had moved from America to France – clearly, he thrived in the vortex of a storm – and his contemptuous reply to Burke led to a summons for Paine’s arrest and the charge, in absentia, of seditious libel, a crime punishable by death.
Paine wisely stayed in France, where his initially warm welcome – he was granted a seat in the Legislative Assembly, even though he spoke no French – soured when Robespierre took control and Paine, a Girondin moderate, found himself condemned by the very revolutionary forces he had applauded. (He narrowly escaped the guillotine thanks to the intervention of friends and the happy serendipity of the chalk mark designating him for the chop written in error on the inner side of his cell door, so the executioner walked past it.)
The clash between Burke and Paine was not a narrow political dispute. They were lightning rods to the rival beliefs of the time. In furious contention were the meaning of liberty, the proper uses of power and the form of government that best served the aspirations of humanity. Democracy or monarchy? Rights or duties? Tradition or reform?
Gazing at revolutionary France from across the English Channel in 1791, Burke saw only ‘a coarseness and vulgarity’. ‘Their liberty is not liberal,’ he concluded. ‘Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and brutal.’
France was a ‘monstrous tragi-comic scene’ that had ‘inverted’ the moral order, he charged. The revolutionaries ‘act like the comedians of a fair, before a riotous audience . . . amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame . . .’
Burke felt as if he were living through ‘a great crisis, not of the affairs of France alone, but of all Europe . . . Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity.’
The French Revolution challenged the two traditions Burke held dear: inherited privilege and property ownership. He wished that ‘big thing’ – representative democracy – would stop bothering him and go away: ‘We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire,’ Burke protested. ‘Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers.’
There would be none of Charles Dickens’ equanimous ‘best of times, worst of times’ in Burke’s portrait of a people seized by remorseless and ‘unnatural’ anarchy. The decapitation of Louis XVI realised, to his horror, the destruction of more than a king. The very principle of succession was at stake: the hereditary ideal he revered as universal and ‘sacred’ had been dealt a mortal blow.
‘The people of England,’ Burke wrote, ‘look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown as among their rights, not as among their wrongs, – as a benefit, not as a grievance, – as a security for their liberty, not as a badge of servitude.’
The ‘fabrication’ of the new government in France filled him ‘with disgust and horror’ since it severed the present from the past. Weren’t all England’s political possessions, he cried – from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Right – ‘an inheritance from our forefathers’? ‘We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors.’
People would not ‘look forward to posterity who never look back to their ancestors’ – a sentiment that cast England’s 1688 ‘Revolution’ as the opposite: it was a ‘preserver’ of the past in the form of the coronation of a Protestant king. But how far back should one go? To those ancestors whose religious beliefs validated the present? As an Anglican, Burke’s ‘ancestors’ went back no further than Henry VIII.
Burke identified the right to ‘perpetuate’ (meaning inherit) property as the supreme virtue, because it ‘perpetuated society itself’. But very few men (and fewer women) – the ‘little platoons’ whom Burke hailed as the standard-bearers of patriotism – owned a share in their country’s wealth. England’s propertyless multitudes made a nonsense of Burke’s proposition.
As for the ‘rights of men’ trumpeted by the French Directorate, Burke dismissed the notion as an unanswerable panacea. The revolutionaries were ‘so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature’.
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It may shock the conservative faithful to be reminded of Burke’s notion of ‘human rights’ and ‘human nature’. He argued for the creation of a gargantuan nanny state that would thwart the passions and control the will to protect us from ourselves (a strong echo of the views of Hobbes): ‘the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights’. That was the opposite of the world the moderate French revolutionaries had hoped to build, which was to be open, democratic and free.
Liberals considered Burke a romantic fossil, a knight-errant yearning for Olde England, a land of chivalry, ancient virtue and loyalty to the sovereign power. Where were Burke’s gallant men when Marie Antoinette needed them most?
‘Oh! what a revolution!’ he mourned, in a famous passage. ‘I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.’
Burke’s most incisive critique of the French Revolution bemoaned the loss of religion and the gutting of the Christian soul. France would abolish faith, he warned. The people would be set adrift in a faithless moonscape of the mind. The ‘reason’ of intellectuals would supplant the spiritual solace of God. Millions would be told how to think, not how to pray.
The people’s souls, Burke prophesied, would thirst for the return of the sacred teaching of the ancient church. His most prescient observation was that the godless state would devour the revolution: ‘They preferred atheism to a form of religion not agreeable to their ideas. They succeeded in destroying that form; and atheism has succeeded in destroying them.’
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To these charges, Thomas Paine responded with a fusillade of denunciations, jokes, scorn and libels, some of them sound. If Burke’s chief complaint, Paine argued, was that a vicious French mob had violently deposed ‘a mild and lawful Monarch’, then Burke was ‘ignorant of the springs and principles of the French Revolution’:
‘It was not against Louis the XVIth, but against the despotic principles of the government, that the nation revolted,’ Paine wrote. ‘These principles had not their origin in him, but . . . many centuries back; and they were become too deeply rooted to be removed . . . by anything short of a complete and universal revolution.’
The distinction between the personal and the political was crucial, because where the English had revolted against the personal despotism of Charles I and James II (of England), the French had revolted against ‘the hereditary despotism of the established government’.
Paine scorned Burke’s reverence for inherited privilege, and reserved a special loathing for the divine right of kings, which the Restoration had re-established. He accused Burke of setting up ‘a sort of political Adam, in whom all posterity are bound for ever’:
‘[A] certain body of men, who existed a hundred years ago, made a law; and that there does not now exist in the nation, nor ever will, nor ever can, a power to alter it. Under how many subtilties [sic], or absurdities, has the divine right to govern been imposed on the credulity of mankind! . . .’
‘Immortal power is not a human right,’ Paine thundered. ‘The parliament of 1688 might as well have passed an act to have authorized themselves to live for ever . . .’
‘Government,’ he concluded, ‘is for the living, and not for the dead . . . [and] the living only that has any right in it.’ Yet ‘Mr Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living’.
Paine then hurled a succession of ad hominem blows that thrilled his fans but damaged his case:
Not one glance of compassion, not one commiserating
reflection . . . has [Burke] bestowed on those who lingered out the most wretched of lives, a life without hope, in the most miserable of prisons . . . He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird. Accustomed to kiss the aristocratical hand that hath purloined him from himself, he degenerates into a composition of art, and the genuine soul of nature forsakes him.
Burke’s Reflections, Paine concluded, was ‘darkness attempting to illuminate light’.
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The two British thinkers were joined by a third view of the French Revolution, that of a mind many had supposed buried by the Enlightenment, and yet here it was, freshly exhumed, brushing off the soil and walking again.
This was the mind of Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), a French monarchist, writer and devout Catholic, who nursed throughout his life a burning hatred of the Sodom in which he found himself obliged to live.
De Maistre’s beliefs were those of the most punitive theocrat and glacial reactionary. Even in his day De Maistre was dismissed as a relic of the Spanish Inquisition, a medieval Hobbesian for whom the Bible, the faggot and the hangman’s noose were the solutions to the moral rot he imagined all around him.
Out of intellectual fashion for 200 years, De Maistre has enjoyed something of a revival among the conspiracy theorists and theocrats of our time, who share his fetish for the executioner, his love of violent retribution, his faith in miracles and superstition, and his hatred of science, liberty, equality, human rights and democracy – indeed, the entire legacy of the eighteenth century. The ideals of the Enlightenment so revolted him he wanted to destroy the very ‘thought of the 18th century’.
Émile Faguet, a French author and reputedly ‘the most fair-minded critic’ of De Maistre, described him as ‘a furious theocrat’ and ‘a dark figure out of the Middle Ages . . . part inquisitor, part executioner’.
The author Victor Hugo, priest Félicité de La Mennais, critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve and philosopher Isaiah Berlin echoed Faguet: De Maistre was the last gasp of the feudal mind. He lived by all that was sacred, miraculous and sulphurous. According to Berlin, he was ‘born out of his time, an unbending, self-blinded die-hard pouring curses upon the marvellous new age whose benefits he was too wilful to see, and too callous to feel’.
Characters like De Maistre, who shock the sensibilities of the establishment, tend to pop up at what seem the least likely moments in history, when fashionable intellectuals had thought them dead and gone. One thinks of Stefan Zweig and his circle’s astonishment at the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the mortifying spectacle of Donald Trump to American liberals.
It fell to the diabolical zeal of De Maistre to call for the restoration of the French monarchy, the destruction of the seedlings of democracy and the silencing of the ridiculous notion of the ‘rights of man’:
‘Now what distinguishes the French Revolution,’ he wrote, ‘and makes it an event unique in history is that it is radically bad . . . What a horrible assemblage of baseness and cruelty! What profound immorality! What absence of all decency!’ He continued: ‘There is a satanic quality to the French Revolution that distinguishes it from everything we have ever seen or anything we are ever likely to see in the future . . .’
De Maistre preached the primacy of instinct, superstition and prejudice. He rushed to the aid of the miraculous, the ignorant and the irrational. He applauded original sin as the only psychological truth about our vile species. He denounced every form of lucidity and scientific insight, and the very possibility of progress.
Human beings, he preached, ‘unless clamped with iron rings and held down by means of the most rigid discipline, [were] likely to destroy themselves’. He believed the king derived his authority from God, not from the people he ruled.
Man was a natural born killer, who needed muzzling like a dog, De Maistre concluded. His words sound more terrifying in French:
‘Il tue pour se nourrir, il tue pour se vetir, il tue pour se parer, il tue pour attaquer, il tue pour se défendre, il tue pour s’instruire, il tue pour s’amuser, il tue pour tuer: roi superbe et terrible, il a besoin de tout, et rien ne lui resiste.’ (‘He kills to feed himself, he kills to dress himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to learn, he kills to amuse himself, he kills to kill: superb king and terrible, he needs everything, and nothing can resist him.’)
The spectacle of the Reign of Terror turned De Maistre into the ‘implacable enemy of everything that is liberal, democratic, high-minded, everything connected with intellectuals, critics, scientists’, according to Berlin.
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Like most arch-enemies, however, De Maistre and the Jacobins had much in common. They shared a totalitarian impulse to erase the past – or the bits of the past they detested. De Maistre himself advocated ‘terror’ – by the church and the state – making him a Robespierre of the theocracy he cherished. The political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon observed that, while opposite in belief, both Voltaire and De Maistre moved in the ‘hard, cold, dry, lucid, toughminded tradition of French thought’.
De Maistre shared the extremism of the Jacobins’ methods. Both despised the weakness of the king and loathed the liberals who fluttered about the court:
‘[W]hen there is a vacuum, somebody must enter it,’ he wrote. ‘The King failed dismally. King Louis XVI and his miserable liberal advisers . . . were simply human dust, weak, optimistic, reformist . . . the Jacobins did at least do something. At least they killed somebody. They set up guillotines . . .’
De Maistre raged against Voltaire and Rousseau, the devils incarnate of the ‘Enlightened’. He condemned as ‘the opposite of the truth’ Rousseau’s ‘mad’ pronouncement that ‘man was born free and everywhere he is in chains’.
On the contrary, De Maistre wrote, men were born in chains – chained to sin, misery, guilt, a lifetime of penance and their despicable nature. Only the church, the monarchy and slavery would save us from ourselves, De Maistre believed. Those were the only durable institutions.
True to his word, this consummate diplomat advised the Russian tsar not to liberate the serfs: ‘[W]hy, then your country will be plunged into the most vicious revolution,’ he wrote. ‘It will go from barbarism into anarchy.’
Only unrelenting punishment – torture, terror and death – would save post-revolutionary France, De Maistre believed. The French were a people lost to God, their king and their Christian consciences. ‘The only way to get people to live in societies at all is to stop them from questioning,’ he said, ‘and the only way in which you can stop them from questioning is by terror.’
The irony of all this was not lost on De Maistre. He wrote of hangmen with leery admiration, and applauded the executioner who crushed a man’s body on the wheel as having done his job well:
‘[A]ll greatness, all power, all social order depends upon the executioner . . . Take away this incomprehensible force from the world, and at that very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears.’
We’re left contemplating a mind that revelled in cruelty, the breaking of bones, the gurgling of the garrotted, the sadistic meditation on the torture of his enemies. As La Mennais despaired, ‘It is as if all [De Maistre’s] works were written from the scaffold.’
Next Thursday, 5th September 2024: The Totalitarian Mind
Selected sources and further reading:
Berlin, I. (11 October 1990) ‘Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism’, The New York Review of Books.
Berlin, I. (1965) ‘Two Enemies of the Enlightenment: The Second Onslaught – Joseph de Maistre and Open Obscurantism’, The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library.
Bernstein, S. (Spring 1945) ‘English Reactions to the French Revolution’, Science & Society, 9(2), pp. 147–71.
Burke, E. (2009) Reflections on the Revolution in France, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.
Burke, E. (2015) The Collected Works of Edmund Burke, Oxford: PergamonMedia.
Cone, C. (June 1945) ‘Pamphlet Replies to Burke’s “Reflections”, The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, 26(1), pp. 22–34.
Maistre, J. de and Lebrun, R.A. (ed. and transl.) (2006) Considerations on France, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Maistre, J. de and Lively, J. (transl.) (1971) The Works of Joseph de Maistre, New York: Shocken Books.
Paine, T. (1945) The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine – Vol. 2 (1779–1792): The Rights of Man, New York: The Citadel Press.
Paine, T. (2009) The Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press.