"A cultural revolution is total and irrevocable, affecting every aspect of the individual and society as well as politics and government."

The French Connection

How the Revolution, and two thinkers, bequeathed us ‘right’ and ‘left.’

"Almost as an aside, Burke introduces a still more provocative note into the debate. Even some of his admirers (at the time and since) have been embarrassed by his paean to Marie Antoinette, who had been abused by the mob that stormed Versailles. Paine responded with one of his most memorable lines: “He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.” But it is more than the queen Burke eulogizes and Paine reviles. It is the idea of chivalry that Burke associates with her that he sees as the true victim of the revolution. “The age of chivalry is gone,” he bemoans.

It was this [chivalry] which, without confounding ranks, had produced a noble equality, and handed it down through all the gradations of social life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force, or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination, vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners.

But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivery nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own imagination, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. 

The passage is worth quoting at length because it is too often dismissed, as Burke had anticipated, as a rhetorical extravaganza—“ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated.” But it is an essential part of his discourse on the relation of manners and sentiments to laws and institutions, of “public affections” to public order. Indeed, it is at the heart of his indictment of the French Revolution, which he regarded as not merely a political revolution, like the American one, but a cultural revolution—a revolution against civilization itself. A political revolution, the overthrow of one regime for another, might be partial, even transient. A cultural revolution is total and irrevocable, affecting every aspect of the individual and society as well as politics and government." 

DEC 9, 2013, VOL. 19, NO. 13 • BY GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB