Burke’s Fears for the Future of Europe.

Scholars of Burke’s writings have sometimes seen his engagement with the French Revolution, towards the end of his life, to have been an ‘unkindness of fate’, on the grounds that a person ‘who has all his life surrounded himself with a mental paradise of order and equilibrium and belief’ was forced to confront its antithesis. Such an interpretation correlates with a view of the eighteenth century, and of Britain above any other country, as being characterised largely by equipoise, calm, and order. Burke was laying the foundations for Victorian self-confidence, and was on the side of progress in defining and defending the British constitution, and more particularly the manners it rested upon, as the great bastion against immoderation and excess, whether in the form of atheistic or democratical enthusiasm. Yet Burke’s fears about the future, and the future of Europe especially, antedated 1789. Like Gibbon too, he had long been worried about the instability of Europe, because of the gap between the military strength of small and large states, which rested in turn upon the economic ability of bigger states to exploit large markets and to create a public debt, on the basis of anticipated income from taxation, that provided revenues for war. Aspiring imperial powers, always likened to Rome, germinated in such soil, and explained events like the partition of Poland by Prussia, Russia, and Austria in 1772. The event had exercised Burke in a letter to the scion of a prominent Prussian family in 1774, and represented one of many laments for the prospects of Europe’s small states. Burke called Poland ‘but a breakfast’ (C, II: 512–14).