Reflections on the Revolution in France

The Volume is in Very Good Condition in blue-grey paper wraps, stored in a modern archival case. Externally the wraps have peripheral fraying and toning, as well as the bulk of paper on the spine still present, with some fraying, and with the book block sound. Internally the leaves are generally clean and amply margined, generally uncut, with some scattered foxing, more concentrated on certain leaves, with toning at the extreme edges of the wider, uncut leaves.

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Reflections on the Revolution in France – Publication History

Adapted and drawn from; Todd, William. A Bibliography of Edmund Burke, Hart-Davis, 1964.

Burke worked with his printer during the summer of 1790 approving various sections of the work. With the oncoming session of parliament, however, he eventually recognised the need for haste and finished the work by September 8, 1790. He advised his representative at press, William Thomas Swift , to “move heaven and earth to get it out on the scheduled day of issue, 1 November.

So great was the demand that by December 1790 no less than 10 impressions (a – j) were printed. According to Swift the initial six impressions were produced as follows:                   Our copy is Impression D.

According to Todd: “Edition B could have been readied immediately after A and the later impressions (as I now believe) at stated intervals thereafter – perhaps every four days – with D however, following closely after its near-equivalent C. Both in timing and number these estimates accord very well, first with Walpole’s report on Monday the 8^th that ‘seven thousand copies have been taken off by the booksellers already – and a new ‘edition’ is preparing. Walpole had the news the previous Saturday, that sales had half depleted C and a new edition – or D, the first one so distinguished, was imminent.” (Impression D – our copy – was the first with ‘Second Edition’ in the title page).

Then we have Burke’s own notice on November 29^th that “the demand for this piece has been without example; they are now in sale of the 12^th thousand. (i.e., that the demand had now accounted for half of F, the first edition to be revised).

These impressions were produced with blue-grey paper wrappers, 227 x 142 mm uncut. As these were intended as temporary wraps, many copies would be the trimmed and bound for clients. Those read tended to lose their wraps quickly and so be read to death. Early uncut copies in their original paper wraps are therefore scarce to rare in the market today.

Of Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state. These views were expressed in his A Vindication of Natural Society. Burke criticized British treatment of the American colonies, including through its taxation policies. He also supported the rights of the colonists to resist metropolitan authority, though he opposed the attempt to achieve independence. Burke is remembered for his support for Catholic emancipation, the impeachment of Warren Hastings from the East India Company and for his staunch opposition to the French Revolution. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke asserted that the revolution was destroying the fabric of good society and traditional institutions of state and society, and condemned the persecution of the Catholic Church that resulted from it. This led to his becoming the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig Party, which he dubbed the “Old Whigs”, as opposed to the pro-French Revolution “New Whigs”, led by Charles James Fox. In the nineteenth century, Burke was praised by both conservatives and liberals. Subsequently, in the twentieth century he became widely regarded as the philosophical founder of modern conservatism.

In the Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke argued that the French Revolution would end disastrously because its abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignored the complexities of human nature and society. Further, he focused on the practicality of solutions instead of the metaphysics, writing “What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor”. Following St. Augustine and Cicero, he believed in “human heart”-based government. Nevertheless, he was contemptuous and afraid of the Enlightenment, led by intellectuals such as Rousseau, Voltaire, and Turgot, who disbelieved in divine moral order and original sin. Burke said that society should be handled like a living organism, that people and society are limitlessly complicated, thus, leading him to conflict with Thomas Hobbes’ assertion that politics might be reducible to a deductive system akin to mathematics.