Part 2: The French Revolution's Contribution to Democracy

Today's Concept of the Political Left and the Political Right Literally Came From the First English Debate About the French Revolution

Part 2: The French Revolution’s Contribution to Democracy

Figuratively and Literally on the Left is Thomas Paine, Figuratively and Literally on the Right is Edmund Burke. Their Debates Over the French Revolution Created Today’s Political Left and Right.

The Great Democratic Debate of Constitutional Monarchy v. Republic: Edmund Burke v. Thomas Paine

Burke and Paine were not so much historians of the Revolution as actual participants. Edmund Burke was a legendary MP who deeply influenced Britain’s foreign policy towards Revolutionary France while the Reign of Terror was happening. Thomas Paine not only sparked the American Revolution with Common Sense, but later joined the French Revolution and ended up in a Paris prison during Terror, spared from the guillotine only by a clerical error inside the prison and was released in the general amnesty following the Thermidorian Reaction against Robespierre.

Their vicious, public debate about the French Revolution is, literally, where the political terms “Left” and “Right” come from. Inside the first French National Assembly after the Tennis Court Oath, the more radical, anti-monarchy members sat to the left of the President’s chair, and the more traditional members sat to the right. This physical description was used to shorthand the basic dispositions of Burke and Paine.

Edmund Burke is widely considered the Founding Father of Conservatism, Thomas Paine the Founding Father of Progressivism. So, yes, the fundamental dispositions of today’s politics is directly born out of contemporaneous analyses of the French Revolution. For more, I highly recommend the indomitable Stephen West’s Philosophize This! episode “Are You Left or Right?”

Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke is still today a primary source for British Tories and American Republicans. He believed that virtue is the foundation for society, that institutions–religious, government, business, and otherwise–were necessary for the “moral stability” of the nation. So, for Burke, social change must be incremental, that radicalism is per se immoral and indefensible, no matter what ideals or material conditions the radicals advocate for.

To this end, Burke actually supported America’s grievances against King George III and Parliament, opposing the use of force in the colonies. Burke did not support American independence, but he did propose a resolution to allow the Americans to elect their own Parliamentary representatives and create a General American Assembly. Burke sympathized with the Americans because he saw British policy as incredibly disruptive to their established patterns of taxation and governance. The policy wasn’t conservative.

As for the French Revolution, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was the defining intellectual argument against the Revolution–so much so that Louis XVI himself had it translated into French. Today, it’s regarded as the founding document of conservatism, arguing for traditionalism, in all its forms, as the political philosophy that facilitates national virtue:

Society is indeed a contract…but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee…to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence…It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection….it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Burke’s preferred governance is gradual reform under a Constitutional order based on traditional principles, held together by a king and administered by an aristocratic elite. Revolution in the name of “abstractions” like “liberty” and “rights” are too speculative, and so will be defined by the regime of the day to justify its inevitable tyranny. Only rights that are “inherited,” justified by “antient” constitutions and established by tradition, can form the basis of a virtuous nation.

Engraving (1851) of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s “The Club,” Where Edmund Burke (Front Center, Red Coat) and the Boys Agree That National Stability Is Only Protected When the King Asserts His Godly Command to Rule Over the Rabble.

Thomas Paine

Reflections sparked a “pamphlet war,” first with legendary feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of the future Frankenstein author Mary Shelley), who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France. Basically, she called Burke a sexist, aristocratic toady for the King and the Church of England. Wollstonecraft extended these arguments two years later in her seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Second, Burke prompted a two-volume response by Mary Wollstonecraft’s acquaintance, who ran in the same intellectual circles as her future husband William Godwin, the Englishman turned American Thomas Paine. Yes, that Thomas Paine, whose The Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution is one of the founding documents of modern progressivism.