556 Chapter XXIII
nature of authority, principles so crude that they are the norms of savages, are now
called by some of us ‘metaphysical’ principles.”^23
Those of the Milanese patriciate who had resisted Joseph II, those in the diets of
Hungary and Bohemia who had upheld their ancient constitution as a protection
for serfdom, those in Poland who from devotion to “golden liberty” passed on into
the party of Targowica, those in Belgium who to defend the Joyous Entry of 1355
had made up the Statist party, those who found “the cause of all legitimate govern-
ments” at stake at Geneva in 1782, those in the Parlement of Paris who in 1776
identified the corvée with “divine institutions,” the “law of the Universe” and the
society of the Three Orders, those in England and Ireland who had been alarmed
by proposals for electoral reform, and had attributed such proposals to “system-
mongers” and to the insufferable arrogance of the human mind—such men now
saw in the French Revolution, before the year 1789 was out, a new and incompa-
rably more formidable apparition of what they had been against all the time.^24
They called its principles metaphysical, and predicted, or rather hoped for, France’s
ruin. This was the audience most warmly receptive to Burke’s Reflections on the
French Revolution, which he published in 1790, expanding the same ideas that he
had expressed in 1784 in debates over the character of the House of Commons.
Among the French, the uncompromising conservatives included the Bourbons
themselves, Louis XVI until his execution in 1793, and both his brothers, the
Counts of Provence and Artois, of whom the former began to style himself Louis
XVIII in 1795, on receiving news of his nephew’s death in a Paris prison. Louis
XVI had never approved of Artois’ emigration, and by contrast with him appeared
moderate, but in fact Louis XVI continued to adhere to the program that he had
announced in June of 1789, and hence to insist on preservation of the three es-
tates, Clergy, Nobles, and Third, as essential to the structure of French government
and society. He never accepted the constitution of 1789–1791 or the legitimacy of
the Constituent Assembly. His real view on events in France was like that of Wil-
liam V on events in Holland. After his death, and after the death of Robespierre,
there was perhaps a chance of moderate settlement under a constitutional monar-
chy with Louis XVI’s son as regent; but the death of the eleven- year- old Dauphin
was another blow to moderate expectations. The new king, or pretender, was a
source of dismay both to French monarchists and to the British. Not all French-
men who thought a king necessary to France accepted Louis XVIII. Though the
subject is obscure, some preferred the young Duke of Orleans, the son of Philippe-
Egalité and future King Louis- Philippe. A British spy, presumably a monarchist
Frenchman in France, reported on the confused pattern of French constitutional
monarchism in 1796: “it demands a foreign king, a Protestant king, a king à la
1791, a king with two chambers, a king without the return of the émigrés, a king
who does not have to avenge a brother’s death.”^25 He thought that the constitu-
tional monarchists would nevertheless prevail.
23 Quoted by G. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, 3 vols. (Milan, 1956– ), I, 169.
24 One of the main themes of Age, I.
25 J. Godechot, “Le Directoire vu de Londres,” in AHRF, No. 116 (1949), 329.