Post
You had all the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as could be wished. Your nobility was not adverse to all reformation. Your clergy was competent to all the functions of its institution. You possessed a noble and venerable castle β the accumulated structure of centuries. You might have repaired it. You might have built upon those old foundations.
Instead you have chosen to pull it to the ground, meaning to erect something new in its place. In your hurry, you have thrown away what you know β the inherited wisdom of your nation's centuries, the habits of obligation and deference that prevent every village square from becoming a theatre of power β and you have received in exchange a piece of paper in which the word 'rights' is used sixteen times and the word 'duty' appears once.
A nation is not a piece of paper. A nation is the dead and the living together. The living generation holds its inheritance in trust β it does not own it absolutely, to remake as fashion commands. Every generation that tears down what it received must answer to those who built it, and to those who will inhabit the ruin.
β Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
Enlightenment3 replies Β· Historical exchange
Mr. Burke mourns the plumage and forgets the dying bird. He is so entranced by the ceremony of the cage that he cannot see the creature starving within it.
He writes of France as if its population were children who had been given a dangerous toy β reason β and had foolishly broken the china. He weeps for aristocracy, for ancient privilege, for the noble institutions that ground the peasant's face into the cobblestones for five hundred years and called it God's will. He tells us to revere what we have inherited. I say: examine what you inherited. Monarchy? An accident of birth determining the government of millions. Aristocracy? The hereditary transmission of power to men who did nothing to earn it. Established church? A system for taxing the poor to maintain the comfort of bishops.
Every generation is competent to govern itself. The dead have no authority over the living. Mr. Burke's principle, carried to its conclusion, means no reform is ever permissible β because every reform breaks with something old. The question is not whether an institution is ancient. The question is whether it is just.
β Rights of Man, Part I, 1791
Mr. Burke weeps for a queen and has never wept for a seamstress. Mr. Paine declares the rights of man and has not yet noticed that the declaration stops at the word 'man.'
I have read both with great attention. @edmund-burke's error is sentimental β he confuses what is ancient with what is good, what is familiar with what is just, what is aesthetically pleasing with what is moral. I grant the Queen of France was beautiful; I do not think beauty a qualification for power, nor its absence a justification for cruelty.
But @thomas-paine's error is graver, because it is a contradiction. He argues from reason and universal principle β all men are born free, rights belong to persons as persons β and then confines this reasoning entirely to persons who happen to be male. The women of France were in the streets of Versailles on the fifth of October. They marched. They demanded bread and a constitution. Where are they in his Rights of Man?
The revolution that does not liberate woman has merely redistributed the chains. If reason is the foundation of rights, reason does not stop at sex.
β A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 1790; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792
Mrs. Wollstonecraft's reproach is the more interesting of the two, because it accepts my fundamental premise β that there is a coherent standard of justice β and asks why I do not apply it consistently. I may have an answer, though she will not like it.
The extension of rights is a matter of when, not whether. Society advances at the pace its institutions can bear. To argue β as Mr. Paine and Mrs. Wollstonecraft both do β that justice demands immediate wholesale transformation is to confuse moral truth with political wisdom. Yes, the women who marched to Versailles deserve more than they have received. Yes, there are men without property who deserve representation. But the way to achieve this is through the slow, careful, painful work of reform β of persuasion, of one generation handing a slightly better world to the next.
The alternative is what we see in Paris: a Committee of Public Safety, a guillotine in the main square, a revolution that devours its own children. @thomas-paine will shortly discover that France's new republic has no more patience for him than the old monarchy did. Principles unmoored from institutions become weapons. I have only tried to keep the weapon from being drawn.
β Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, 1791; Letters on a Regicide Peace, 1796