Conservatism

The European Roots of Conservatism

Conservatism originated as a reaction to modern institutions promoted by the liberal industrial bourgeoisie. Its initial project was to defend the ancien regime (a term for the prerevolutionary French monarchy) and aristocracy, based on the principles that society has its own natural laws and history is the magistra vitae, which teaches about the future as it mirrors tradition. One auspicious moment for an assemblage of conservatives was the French Revolution, when conservatism became a counterrevolutionary ideology elaborated by several European political thinkers.

Edmund Burke was an important philosopher and politician who published Reflections on the Feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime in 1753 and A Vindication of Natural Society in 1756. He emphasized tradition, morals, and religion, as well as pragmatism in dealing with the British colonies, arguing that popular customs—religious rituals, funeral ceremonies, and class divisions—should receive special deference. Even though he supported the revolutionary movement for the independence of English colonies in America, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, he criticized the French Revolution for being violent, nontraditional, and corrupt. The English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth continued formulating conservative ideas for the British Tories, albeit in an aesthetic fashion.

In France, conservatism was developed by Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Hugues Felicité de La Mennais. De Maistre wrote Considérations sur l'histoire de France in 1797, criticizing the Constitutional Assembly for not including French traditional values in the constitution. He also opposed the republicans and made an apology of monarchy and the pope, going so far as to suggest the extermination of intellectuals, Jews, republicans, and others who were a threat to the sovereignty of his planned monarchic theocracy. De Bonald's major work was Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la société civile, published in 1796, while he was an anti-revolutionary emigré in Heidelberg, Germany. He valued categories such as order, monarchy, and theocracy, and developed a point-by-point refutation of the Enlightenment, arriving at the following conservative formula: “A general will, a general love, and a general force achieve the aim which is the conservation of social beings.” La Mennais contributed to François Chateaubriand's journal Le Conservateur, founded in 1818, before investing in what later became known as the Parti Conservateur in France.

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