One of the best-known intellectual attacks against the French Revolution,[1] Reflections is a defining tract of modern conservatism as well as an important contribution to international theory.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature describes Reflections as becoming the "most eloquent statement of British conservatism favoring monarchy, aristocracy, property, hereditary succession, and the wisdom of the ages.

Burke served in the House of Commons of Great Britain, representing the Whig party, in close alliance with liberal politician Lord Rockingham.

The longer, second letter, drafted after he read Richard Price's speech A Discourse on the Love of Our Country in January 1790, became Reflections on the Revolution in France.

According to Stephen Greenblatt in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, "part of its appeal to contemporary readers lay in the highly wrought accounts of the mob's violent treatment of the French king and queen (who at the time Burke was writing were imprisoned in Paris...).

[10] In the Reflections, Burke argued that the French Revolution would end disastrously because its abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignored the complexities of human nature and society.

As a Whig, Burke expressly repudiated the belief in divinely appointed monarchic authority and the idea that a people have no right to depose an oppressive government.

However, he advocated central roles for private property, tradition and prejudice (i.e. adherence to values regardless of their rational basis) to give citizens a stake in their nation's social order.

[13] Although he may have been thinking of Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, Napoleon fulfilled this prophecy on the 18th Brumaire, two years after Burke's death.

Reflections on the Revolution in France was read widely when it was published in 1790, although not every Briton approved of Burke's kind treatment of their historic enemy or its royal family.

His English enemies speculated he either had become mentally unbalanced or was a secret Catholic, outraged by the democratic French government's anti-clerical policies and expropriation of Church land.

Historically, Reflections on the Revolution in France became the founding philosophic opus of conservatism when some of Burke's predictions occurred, namely when the Reign of Terror under the new French Republic executed thousands (including many nuns and clergy) from 1793 to 1794 to purge so-called counter-revolutionary elements of society.

In the 19th century, positivist French historian Hippolyte Taine repeated Burke's arguments in Origins of Contemporary France (1876–1885), namely that centralisation of power is the essential fault of the Revolutionary French government system; that it does not promote democratic control; and that the Revolution transferred power from the divinely chosen aristocracy to an "enlightened" heartless elite more incompetent and tyrannical than the aristocrats.

Despite being the most respected conservative historian of the events, Alfred Cobban acknowledged that Burke's pamphlet in so far as it "deals with the causes of the Revolution [...] they are not merely inadequate, but misleading" and that its main success is as a "violent parti pris".

[15] In 2020, Reflections on the Revolution in France was banned in China, as part of the Chinese Communist Party's wider censorship of certain books under Xi Jinping.

Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression.

All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off.Where trade and manufactures are wanting to a people, an the spirit of nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not always ill supplies their place; but if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to try how well a state may stand without these old fundamental principles, what sort of a thing must be a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time, poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, honor, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing hereafter?