Today, the storming of the Bastille is seen as a victory for democracy.ĭavid Bromwich: But for Burke, it was an event that turned toward violence, and it ended up with the heads of a couple of officials on pike. This day is remembered in France as Bastille Day and is celebrated every 14th of July.
This event kicked off a decade-long uprising known as the French Revolution. The rebels stormed the Bastille, freed its prisoners, slaughtered its governors, and seized the weapons and ammo. On July 14th, 1789, the National Assembly gathered outside the Bastille, a prison fortress that was rumored to contain weapons and ammunition. Louis XVI set up military forces around Paris to control this new assembly. Meanwhile, aristocratic society continued to live their luxurious lifestyles while the rest of the country suffered.Ī new group of dissatisfied citizens formed an organization called the National Assembly. France was also experiencing food shortages and a nationwide economic depression. He was in debt and was taxing the poor to raise money. Against this background the Reflections was read by contemporaries as a summing-up of his practical wisdom about statesmanship, but also as the climatic literary achievement his earlier and occasional writings had seemed to defer.Zachary Davis: In France in 1789, many Parisians were fed up with their king, Louis XVI.
This may explain Goldsmith's half-jocular criticism in Retaliation, that Burke was one ‘Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind, / And to party gave up what was meant for mankind’. His Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757 and with added materials in 1759, did more than any other book to initiate the broad discussion of taste in relation to morals which preoccupied the philosophical literature of Europe in the later eighteenth century, and it led his admirers to hope for a literary fulfilment that his career, so impressive in other ways, could never supply in a traditional sense. A description of him by Richard Pares as ‘a high and dry anti-monarchist’ is the fairest short characterization that has been offered by a historian. From 1765, Burke had also served as private secretary to Lord Rockingham, and after his patron's death in 1782 he remained a chief strategist of the Rockingham party, whose command was inherited by Charles James Fox. He had served as a member of the House of Commons since 1765, where he was known for his leadership of the opposition to the American war, his plan for the reform of the king's budget, his committee reports on the conduct of the East India Company, and his substantial share in managing the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal. Edmund Burke was already a famous politician and moral philosopher when his Reflections on the Revolution in France was published in 1790.
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