This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
For most of his parliamentary career, Edmund Burke was a reformer, not a reactionary. He argued for conciliation with the American colonists rather than coercion, insisting that a government which taxed subjects it refused to represent had broken faith with them. He spent years pursuing the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the former governor-general of British India, over the abuse of power he saw in Hastings's administration. He supported relief for Irish Catholics and looser trade laws for Ireland at a time when doing so was not the safe or popular position in the House of Commons. None of this reads like the biography of the man who would become the founding theorist of conservatism.
Then came 1789. When the French Estates-General convened and the Bastille fell, most of Burke's Whig colleagues, Charles James Fox chief among them, greeted the news as the dawn of the same liberty England had secured a century earlier in 1688. Burke did not. Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, before the Terror, before the guillotine, while many English observers still saw a kindred constitutional movement, argued that the French were not reforming an old constitution but demolishing it in favor of an abstract theory of the rights of man, and that a nation which tears up its inherited institutions in one motion, trusting reason alone to design their replacement, is not securing liberty but clearing the ground for a despotism nobody yet running the revolution could see coming.
The apparent reversal was not, in Burke's own account, a change of principle. His support for the American colonists and his attack on Hastings both rested on the same conviction: that legitimate authority is a trust, bound by precedent, custom, and the constitutional inheritance of a people, and that abusing or discarding that trust, whether by a crown taxing colonies it would not seat in Parliament, a company official plundering Bengal, or a National Assembly annihilating the nobility and the Church in a season, was the same wrong committed by different hands. What changed in 1790 was the scale of the thing being torn down, and Burke's certainty, argued in one of the most influential works of political prose ever written, about where tearing it down without replacing it with anything grown from the same soil would lead. Within a decade France had passed through the Terror and was heading toward Napoleon. Burke did not live to see the Empire declared, but he had already told his readers, in 1790, roughly what shape the ending would take.