Burke's Opinion of the Common Man
Burke makes his opinion of the common people known in his critical prognostication of what will become of civilization should it be left to the common people to decide for themselves rather than allowing the church and well-bred members of the aristocracy to continue: people are pigs unless they wear collars or sport titles.
“Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.”
National Assembly
Burke’s view of the National Assembly is that of a sideshow designed to appeal purely for the sake of propaganda to the lowest and most base desires of those very masses he has made clear are inherently too unsophisticated to be allowed to weigh in matters of justice regardless. “They act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience; they act amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame”
Minority Report
One of Burke’s underlying arguments against the French Revolution is to challenge its legitimacy on the basis that while propagandized as a revolution of the masses, it was actually carried out and supported by only fractional minority of citizens who succeeded in shaping the image of their actions merely by having the loudest voice.
“Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number, or that, after all, they are other than the little, shrivelled, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.”
The Ever-Unchanging Moods of Political Conservatism
Burke’s opposition to the French Revolution is just one of the things which has long made him one of the foremost icons and heroes of political conservatives. Part of that minority shaping public opinion by speaking louder than the majority of which he writes were writers who published works of liberal thought which Burke claimed was fomenting rebellious opinion against the existing order. His metaphorical implication of these writings as mere “entertainment” designed to tear down traditional values with their left wing lies and smears may have the ring of familiarity despite having been written well over a century before Hollywood even existed.
“These writers, like the propagators of all novelties, pretended to a great zeal for the poor and the lower orders, whilst in their satires they rendered hateful, by every exaggeration, the faults of courts, of nobility, and of priesthood.”
Revolutionaries as Conquerors
Burke paints the end result of the Revolution not as a transformation of power from within, but in terms coincident with a country being conquered by a foreign invader. He then goes on to satirize the freedom the Revolution has brought through ironic comparison with ancient empires:
“They have made France free in the manner in which those sincere friends to the rights of mankind, the Romans, freed Greece, Macedon, and other nations.”
