Chivalry versus Calculation

Early news of unrest in Paris did not initially disturb London. Few Britons were sympathetic to the traditional rulers of France, widely perceived as outmoded despots. Still, a prominent Irish-born Member of Parliament, Edmund Burke, felt certain that the revolutionaries would be even worse.

In the years between the American and French Revolutions, Burke devoted much of his energy to criticism of the British East India Company, the chartered monopoly that had seized political control of much of India. Lucrative opportunities for trade emerged but the Company found it more profitable to use its military power to install local nabobs who paid them off with taxes extracted from the local population. Meanwhile, the company's managers enriched themselves far more successfully than their stockholders. To Burke, this seemed a scandalous example of runaway greed, and he urged Parliament to bring it under control.¹

His efforts were largely unsuccessful, and shook his confidence in the virtues of self-interest. Few of his philosopher friends took so much interest in the ethics of empire. But rather than questioning British supremacy, Burke took refuge in the sanctity of tradition. He harkened back to an age in which a man's honor and manners counted for more than his economic interests. From this perspective the rhetoric of the French Revolution seemed even more alarming than the rape of India. Not surprisingly, he found a wider audience for his denunciations of the former. His Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings of Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event won him great acclaim.

Burke's enthusiasm for the virtues of French royalty and the glittering beauty of Marie Antoinette was less winning than his larger critique of liberal individualism. He denounced both rational selfishness and the notion that

laws should be designed anew by force of reason. He bemoaned the decline of traditional religious values, famously complaining that ‘‘the age of chivalry is gone and sophisters, economists, and calculators have taken over.”² Wher­ever Burke himself belongs in the intellectual pantheon, his Reflections represented a bold attack of the very principles of the Enlightenment.³

The elevation of reason and depreciation of tradition would tear off ‘‘all the decent drapery of life” revealing an ugly, naked species. Women, in particular, would lie exposed and defenseless. They were after all, protected by the same drapery that protected royalty. ‘‘On this scheme of things,” Burke wrote, describing the spirit of utilitarianism, ‘‘a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman, a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly.’’⁴ While not an explicit commentary on de Sade, this analysis reflected some awareness of where male individualism could lead.

Burke often resorted to patriarchal precepts reminiscent of Sir Robert Filmer. Sons were bound by their fathers’ promises of fealty.⁵ Inheritance from forefathers was the source of everything of value.⁶ In the most vivid passage of his Reflections he directly compared the state to an ailing father, and referred to the Greek myth of Peleas’s daughters, tricked into killing their own father. (Medea, in a prequel to the murder of her own sons, had assured the girls that cutting their father to bits and cooking him in a special potion would allow him to be reconstituted with eternal youth).⁷ The choice of myths seems to imply that French women were to blame.

The Reflections rallied conservative opposition and accurately foretold the chaos that would soon ensue in Paris. Published in 1790, when the French Revolution had gone no farther than establishment of a parliamentary democracy, it elicited no fewer than thirty-eight published replies, among them Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women.