Edmund Burke ping.
Genetics count.
My dear late friend, Evelyn Burke, was a direct decedent of Edmund Burke. Born of her Irish father and English mother in England in 1896, she died at 103 in 1999, just short of living in 3 centuries.
An avid student of history, a sharp mind and sharper wit, a story teller extraordinaire, stubborn and intractable but with a honed sense of humor, she was a delight - as long as you didn't get on her bad side.
Her father was a ‘Queen's Life Guard” in India and England, handsome in his red coated uniform atop his black horse. she had stories of intrigue to tell of him.
When she died, at 103, she was still healthy of mind and body. She just wanted to check out. (She had married first an RAF pilot (from Canada) who was shot down over Germany. She moved to Canada with her baby boy and later to the US, marrying a Navy man. Her son grew up to fly for the RAF in WW11, and was shot down over Normandy - with ‘no issue’. the end of the Burke line in her branch.
And speaking of genes, she even looked much like Edmund.
We get not only our physical characteristics, but inner attributions from our ancestors as well.
Interesting post.
The apparent disconnect between the British statesmen who insisted on their own freedom while denying that same freedom to their fellow countrymen is actually no such thing.
British “freedom,” the most advanced of any nation on earth, did not mean freedom for all. It merely meant the freedom of the rulers to rule over their subjects. It’s just that the “rulers,” the political nation, was much larger in England than anywhere else. There were the “free men” or electors, who had started their demand for freedom with Magna Carta and finally won it in 1689 with the Glorious Revolution.
At the time of Magna Carta the “free men” were essentially the barons. By the time of our revolution this had greatly expanded, with the franchise varying by parliamentary district, but of course expansion of the franchise and full political freedom was always strenuously resisted by those who already had it, since expansion reduced their own importance and power proportionately.
The political nation of Britain did not have the least intention of sharing power with their inferiors.
Burke was one of the few members of the political class who saw that Americans did not accept that they were the inferiors of the British ruling class and had no intention of bowing to them. Our own society in 1776 was by no means truly egalitarian, but it was much more so than anywhere else on earth, as the aristocracy never came here in quantity. The “political nation” in the colonies was the majority of white men, and they would fight as fiercely to hold onto what they saw as their right to rule themselves as their equivalents in England would to hold what they saw as their right to rule over them.
The problem, to Burke, was the excesses of social revolution and what they portended to (and in time, did) destroy in France. It was clear that many Enlightenment-inspired French aristocrats felt that they could simply renounce their right to rule, put on the revolutionary cockade, and be done with it - Lafayette certainly did, and nearly paid with his life for his innocence. Not the case, and Burke stated why it was not, and in time even Paine would have to concede he had a point.
The difference is in order and the rule of law. There were, to be sure, the inevitable abuses of faction in America, farms burnt, loyalists forced to depart. But the abuses in France were more widespread and related to social class: one could be killed not for what one had done, but for what one was. And Burke's point was that for all the demonstrable abuses certain social classes also provided values that the new plans, such as they were, did not cover: not simply the functions of law-giving, but the underlying respect for law itself.
The results were graphic. A British citizen or loyalist could sue in an American court for remediation of debts incurred before and during the War of Independence, and many did. Public debts were recognized across administrations, the half-million owed to the French government that broke the Confederation government and nearly broke the French, for one. In short, while the laws changed, the rule of law remained.
Not so in France. Once the Etats-General had lost control of the thing, the law changed so kaleidoscopically on a day-to-day basis that the rule of law became force without respect - Napoleon did not succeed because the French love despots, he succeeded because he was the best alternative of the moment. And promptly declared himself Emperor. The Enlightenment, Burke had said, could lead that direction too.
This is, for modern Americans, something more than a simple conflict between historical narratives. Marx's model for revolution was decidedly the French type, the old order being completely overthrown in a frenzy of class vengeance. Its fruits were there for all the world to see in the economic, industrial, and human rights disasters that were the Communist bloc. A coming change in the form of the American government must run along the lines of the War of Independence or it will tear us all apart. Grim thoughts on this day of celebration.