Burke on the Jacobins
October 4, 2008
… these pretended citizens treat France exactly like a country of conquest … The policy of such barbarous victors [is] … to destroy all vestiges of the ancient country, in religion, in polity, in laws and in manners; to confound all territorial limits, to produce a general poverty; to put up their properties to auction; to crush their princes, nobles and pontiffs; to lay low everything which had lifted its head above the level, or which could serve to combine or rally, in their distresses, the disbanded people, under the standard of old opinion.
~~Edmund Burke. Reflections on the Revolution in France. (1789). (qtd. in Why Manners Matter by Lucinda Holdforth)
