by Edmund Burke
As to France, I must observe that for a long time she has been stationary. She has, during this whole century, obtained far less by conquest or negotiation than any of the three great continental Powers. Some part of Lorraine excepted, I recollect nothing she has gained; no not a village. In truth, this Lorraine acquisition does little more than secure her Barrier. In effect and substance it was her own before.
However that may be, I consider these things at present chiefly in one point of view, as obstructions to the war on Jacobinism, which must stand as long as the Powers think its extirpation but a secondary object, and think of taking advantage under the name of indemnity and security to make war upon the whole Nation of France Royal, and Jacobin, for the aggrandizement of the Allies on the ordinary principles of interest, as if no Jacobinism existed in the world.
So far is France from being formidable to its neighbours for its domestick strength, that I conceive it will be as much as all its neighbours can do by a steady guarantee, to keep that Monarchy at all upon its basis. It will be their business to nurse France, not to exhaust it. France, such as it is, s indeed highly formidable. Not formidable, however, as a great Republick; but as the most dreadful gang of robbers and murderers that ever was embodied. But this distempered strength of France, will be the cause of proportionable weakness on its recovery. Never was a country so completely ruined; and they who calculate the resurrection of her power by former examples, have not sufficiently considered what is the present state of things. Without detailing the inventory of what organs of Government have been destroyed, together with the very materials of which alone they can be recomposed, I wish it to be considered what an operose affair the whole system of taxation is in the old states of Europe. It is such as never could be made but in a long course of years. In France, all taxes are abolished. The present powers resort to the capital; and to the capital in kind. But a savage undisciplined people suffer a rebbery with more patience than an impost. The former is in their habits and their dispositions. They consider it as transient, and as what, in their turn, they may exercise. But the terrours of the present power are such as no regular Government can possibly employ. They who enter into France do not succeed to their resources. They have not a system to reform, but a system to begin. The whole estate of Government is to be re-acquired.
What difficulties this will meet with in a country exhausted by the taking of the capital, and among a people, in a manner new principled, trained, and actually disciplined to anarchy, rebellion, disorder, and impiety, may be conceived by those who know what Jacobin France is, and who may have occupied themselves by revolving in their thoughts, what they were to do if it fell to their lot to re-establish the affairs of France. What support, or what limitations the restored Monarchy must have, may be a doubt, or how it will pitch and settle at last: But one thing I conceive to be far beyond a doubt: that the settlement cannot be immediate; but that it must be preceded by some sort of power, equal at least in vigour, vigilance, promptitude and decision to a military Government. For such a preparatery Government, no slow-paced, methodical, formal, Lawyer-like system, still less that of a shewy, superficial, trifling, intriguing Court, guided by cabals of ladies, or of men like ladies; least of all, a philosophic, theoretic, disputatious school of sophistry. None of these ever will, or ever can lay the foundations of an order that can last. Whoever claims a right by birth to govern there, must find in his breast, or must conjure up in it, an energy not to be expected, perhaps not always to be wished for, in well ordered States. The lawful Prince must have, in every thing but crime, the character of an usurper. He is gone, if he imagines himself the quiet possessor of a throne. He is to contend for it as much after an apparent conquest as before. His task is to win it; he must leave posterity to enjoy and to adorn it. No velvet cushions for him. He is to be always (I speak nearly to the letter) on horseback. This opinion is the result of much patient thinking on the subject, which I conceive no event is likely to alter.
A valuable friend of mine, who I hope will conduct these affairs so far as they fall to his share, with great ability, asked me what I thought of acts of general indemnity and oblivion, as a means of settling France, and reconciling it to Monarchy. Before I venture upon any opinion of my own in this matter, I totally disclaim the interference of foreign powers in a business that properly belongs to the Government which we have declared legal. That Government is likely to be the best judge of what is to be done towards the security of that kingdom, which it is their duty and their interest to provide for by such measures of justice or of lenity, as at the time they should find best. But if we weaken it, not only by arbitrary limitations of our own, but preserve such persons in it as are disposed to disturb its future peace, as they have its past, I do not know how a more direct declaration can be made of a disposition to perpetual hostility against a Government. The persons saved from the justice of the native Magistrate, by foreign authority, will owe nothing to his clemency. He will, and must, look to those to whom he is indebted for the power he has of dispensing it. A Jacobin faction, constantly fostered with the nourishment of foreign protection, will be kept alive.
This desire of securing the safety of the actors in the present scene is owing to more laudable motives. Ministers have been made to consider the brothers of the late merciful King, and the Nobility of France, who have been faithful to their honor and duty, as a set of inexorable and remorseless tyrants. How this notion has been infused into them, I cannot be quite certain. I am sure it is not justified by any thing they have done. Never were the two Princes guilty, in the day of their power, of a single hard or ill-natured act. No one instance of cruelty on the part of the Gentlemen ever came to my ears. It is true that the English Jacobins, (the natives have not thought of it) as an excuse for their infernal system of murder, have so represented them. It is on this principle that the massacres in the month of September 1792 were justified by a writer in the Morning Chronicle. He says, indeed, that
“the whole French nation is to be given up to the hands of an irritated and revengeful Noblesse:”
— and judging of others by himself and his brethren, he says,
“Whoever succeeds in a civil war, will be cruel. But here the emigrants flying to revenge in the cars of military victory, will almost insatiably call for their victims and their booty; and a body of emigrant traitors were attending the King of Prussia, and the Duke of Brunswick, to suggest the most sanguinary counsels.”
So says this wicked Jacobin; but so cannot say the King of Prussia nor the Duke of Brunswick, who never did receive any sanguinary council; nor did the King’s brothers, or that great body of Gentlemen who attended those Princes, commit one single cruel action, or hurt the person or property of one individual. It would be right to quote the instance. It is like the military luxury attributed to these unfortunate sufferers in our common cause.
If these Princes had shewn a tyrannic disposition, it would be much to be lamented. We have no others to govern France. If we screened the body of murderers from their justice, we should only leave the innocent in future to the mercy of men of fierce and sanguinary dispositions, of which in spite of all our intermeddling in their Constitution, we could not prevent the effects. But as we have much more reason to fear their feeble lenity than any blameable rigour, we ought, in my opinion, to leave the matter to themselves.
If however I were asked to give an advice merely as such — here are my ideas. I am not for a total indemnity, nor a general punishment. And first, the body and mass of the people never ought to be treated as criminal. They may become an object of more or less constant watchfulness and suspicion, as their preservation may best require, but they can never become an object of punishment. This is one of the few fundamental and unalterable principles of politicks.
To punish them capitally would be to make massacres. Massacres only increase the ferocity of men, and teach them to regard their own lives and those of others as of little value; whereas the great policy of Government is t
o teach the people to think both of great importance in the eyes of God and the State, and never to be sacrificed or even hazarded to gratify their passions, or for any thing but the duties prescribed by the rules of morality, and under the direction of public law and public authority. To punish them with lesser penalties would be to debilitate the commonwealth, and make the nation miserable, which it is the business of Government to render happy and flourishing.
As to crimes too, I would draw a strong line of limitation. For no one offence, politically an offence of rebellion, by council, contrivance, persuasion or compulsion, for none properly a military offence ofrebellion, or any thing done by open hostility in the field, should any man at all be called in question; because such seems to be the proper and natural death of civil dissentions. The offences of war are obliterated by peace.
Another class will of course be included in the indemnity, namely, all those who by their activity in restoring lawful Government shall obliterate their offences. The offence previously known, the acceptance of service is a pardon for crimes. I fear that this class of men will not be very numerous.
So far as to indemnity. But where are the objects of justice, and of example, and of future security to the public peace? They are naturally pointed out, not by their having outraged political and civil laws, nor their having rebelled against the state, as a State, but by their having rebelled against the law of nature, and outraged man, as man. In this list, all the regicides in general, all those who laid sacrilegious hands on the King, who without any thing in their own rebellious mission to the convention to justify them, brought him to his trial and unanimously voted him guilty; all those who had a share in the cruel murder of the Queen, and the detestable proceedings with regard to the young King, and the unhappy Princesses; all those who committed cold-blooded murder any where, and particularly in their revolutionary tribunals, where every idea of natural justice and of their own declared Rights of Man, have been trod under foot with the most insolent mockery; all men concerned in the burning and demolition of houses or churches, with audacious and marked acts of sacrilege and scorns offered to religion; in general, all the leaders of Jacobin Clubs; — not one of these should escape a punishment suitable to the nature, quality and degree of their offence, by a steady but a measured justice.
In the first place, no man ought to be subject to any penalty, from the highest to the lowest, but by a trial according to the course of law, carried on with all that caution and deliberation which has been used in the best times and precedents of the French jurisprudence, the criminal law of which country, faulty to be sure in some particulars, was highly landable and tender of the lives of men. In restoring order and justice, every thing like retaliation, ought to be religiously avoided; and an example ought to be set of a total alienation from the Jacobin proceedings in their accursed revolutionary tribunals. Every thing like lumping men in masses, and of forming tables of proscription ought to be avoided.
In all these punishments, any thing which can be alledged in mitigation of the offence should be fully considered. Mercy is not a thing opposed to justice. It is an essential part of it; as necessary in criminal cases, as in civil affairs equity is to law. It is only for the Jacobins never to pardon. They have not done it in a single instance. A council of mercy ought therefore to be appointed, with powers to report on each case, to soften the penalty, or entirely to remit it, according to circumstances.
With these precautions, the very first foundation of settlement must be to call to a strict account those bloody and merciless offenders. Without it Government cannot stand a year. People little consider the utter impossibility of getting those who having emerged from very low, some from the lowest classes, of society, have exercised a power so high, and with such unrelenting and bloody a rage, quietly to fall back into their old ranks, and become humble, peaceable, laborious and useful members of society. It never can be. On the other hand is it to be believed, that any worthy and virtuous subject, restored to the ruins of his house, will with patience see the cold-blooded murderer of his father, mother, wife, or children, or perhaps all of these relations (such things have been) nose him in his own village, and insult him with the riches acquired from the plunder of his goods, ready again to head a Jacobin Faction to attack his life? He is unworthy of the name of man who would suffer it. It is unworthy of the name of a Government, which taking justice out of the private hand, will not exercise it for the injured by the public arm.
I know it sounds plausible, and is readily adopted by those who have little sympathy with the sufferings of others, to wish to jumble the innocent and guilty into one mass, by a general indemnity. This cruel indifference dignifies itself with the name of humanity.
It is extraordinary that as the wicked arts of this regicide and tyrannous faction increase in number, variety, and atrocity, the desire of punishing them becomes more and more faint, and the talk of an indemnity towards them, every day stronger and stronger. Our ideas of justice appear to be fairly conquered and overpowered by guilt when it is grown gigantick. It is not the point of view in which we are in the habit of viewing guilt. The crimes we every day punish are really below the penalties we inflict. The criminals are obscure and feeble. This is the view in which we see ordinary crimes and criminals. But when guilt is seen, though but for a time, to be furnished with the arms and to be invested with the robes of power, it seems to assume another nature, and to get, as it were, out of our jurisdiction. This I fear is the case with many. But there is another cause full as powerful towards this security to enormous guilt, the desire which possesses people who have once obtained power, to enjoy it at their ease. It is not humanity, but laziness and inertness of mind which produces the desire of this kind of indemnities. This description of men love general and short methods. If they punish, they make a promiscuous massacre; If they spare, they make a general act of oblivion. This is a want of disposition to proceed laboriously according to the cases, and according to the rules and principles of justice on each case; a want of disposition to assort criminals, to discriminate the degrees and modes of guilt, to separate accomplices from principals, leaders from followers, seducers from the seduced, and then by following the same principles in the same detail, to class punishments, and to fit them to the nature and kind of the delinquency. If that were once attempted, we should soon see that the task was neither infinite, nor the execution cruel. There would be deaths, but for the number of criminals, and the extent of France, not many. There would be cases of transportation; cases of labour to restore what has been wickedly destroyed; cases of imprisonment, and cases of mere exile. But be this as it may, I am sure that if justice is not done there, there can be neither peace or justice there, nor in any part of Europe.
History is resorted to for other acts of indemnity in other times. The Princes are desired to look back to Henry the Fourth. We are desired to look to the Restoration of King Charles. These things, in my opinion, have no resemblance whatsoever. They were cases of a civil war; in France more ferocious, in England more moderate than common. In neither country were the orders of society subverted; religion and morality destroyed on principle, or property totally annihilated In England the Government of Cromwell was to be sure somewhat rigid, but for a new power, no savage tyranny. The country was nearly as well in his hands as in those of Charles the Second, and in some points much better. The laws in general had their course, and were admirably administered. The King did not in reality grant an act of indemnity; the prevailing power, then in a manner the nation, in effect granted an indemnity to him. The idea of a preceding Rebellion was not at all admitted in that convention and that parliament. The Regicides were a common enemy, and as such given up.
Among the ornaments of their place which eminently distinguish them, few people are better acquainted with the history of their own country than the illustrious Princes now in exile: but I caution them not to be led into errour by that which has been supposed to be the guide of life. I would give the same caution t
o all Princes. Not that I derogate from the use of history. It is a great improver of the understanding, by shewing both men and affairs in a great variety of views. From this source much political wisdom may be learned; that is, may be learned as habit, not as precept; and as an exercise to strengthen the mind, as furnishing materials to enlarge and enrich it, not as a repertory of cases and precedents for a lawyer: if it were, a thousand times better would it be that a Statesman had never learned to read — vellem nescirent literas. This method turns their understanding from the object before them, and from the present exigencies of the world, to comparisons with former times, of which after all, we can know very little and very imperfectly; and our guides, the historians, who are to give us their true interpretation, are often prejudiced, often ignorant, often fonder of system than of truth. Whereas if a man with reasonable good parts and natural sagacity, and not in the leadingstrings of any master, will look steadily on the business before him, without being diverted by retrospect and comparison, he may be capable of forming a reasonable good judgment of what is to be done. There are some fundamental points in which nature never changes — but they are few and obvious, and belong rather to morals than to politicks. But so far as regards political matter, the human mind and human affairs are susceptible of infinite modifications, and of combinations wholly new and unlooked for. Very few, for instance, could have imagined that property, which has been taken for natural dominion, should, through the whole of a vast kingdom, lose all its importance and even its influence. This is what history or books of speculation could hardly have taught us. How many could have thought, that the most complete and formidable Revolution in a great empire should be made by men of letters, not as subordinate instruments and trumpeters of sedition, but as the chief contrivers and managers, and in a short time as the open administrators and sovereign Rulers? Who could have imagined that Atheism could produce one of the most violently operative principles of fanaticism? Who could have imagined that, in a Commonwealth in a manner cradled in war, and in an extensive and dreadful war, military commanders should be of little or no account? That the Convention should not contain one military man of name? That administrative bodies in a state of the utmost confusion, and of but a momentary duration, and composed of men with not one imposing part of character, should be able to govern the country and its armies, with an authority which the most settled Senates, and the most respected Monarchs scarcely ever had in the same degree? This, for one, I confess I did not foresee, though all the rest was present to me very early, and not out of my apprehension even for several years.