Two Letters on a Regicide Peace

Letters on a Regicide Peace is one of the most important books on the French Revolution. Edmund Burke is a political writer whose work remains unsettlingly relevant.

Russell Kirk wrote about Edmund Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace:

In the face of death, Edmund Burke was more powerful than ever. But Britain was in grave danger as he watched his French pupils and wrote his last essays in the Gregories. The war against the revolution had gone badly. Instead of attacking France, Pitt kept a quarter of a million soldiers in England, and was conquering the French colonies in the West Indies. Even now, Pitt and Dundas were not entirely convinced that Jacobinism must be crushed to dust or rise again; they talked of coexistence. When Prussia withdrew from the war coalition against France, and Austria faltered, Pitt told Malmesbury that "as an English minister and a Christian" he intended to end the bloody and vain war. But within the Cabinet there were now the Old Whigs, led by Portland, Windham, Fitzwilliam, and Loughborough, who shared Burke's convictions in their entirety and demanded victory, whatever the cost, over the enemies of the European order.

After the fall of Robespierre, would not the brave men who had dominated the latest phase of the Revolution show reason? Could not Great Britain make them considerable concessions with a view to peace? Fox's partisans demanded a settlement with the Directory; Pitt and the Tory ministers were inclined to follow this course.

At this uncertain moment Burke began to write his final word against the ideology prevailing in France: four letters on the regicide peace, two of which were not published until his death. His predictions of the terrible course of the revolution were fulfilled almost to the letter. Marie Antoinette died on the guillotine – the heroic queen, of whom Burke wrote in 1790 that she had borne her misfortunes “with a cheerful patience, in a manner befitting her rank and birth…” The revolution had devastated Europe and devoured many of its own children, but the appetite of the revolutionaries was insatiable. Should Britain reconcile itself with the murderers and bandits who also sought to subjugate her by sabotage and conquest?
Burke's answer was poignant, and events soon justified it. In Paris the Directory merely pretended to be a constitutional government, but was in reality a tyranny. The Directors never really intended to make peace with Pitt; they were only stalling for time.

Information about the book

Circulation: 25 numbered copies

Binding handmade by Magdalena Bulanda in half leather, with case.

Book set in Monotype Bulmer, a font cut by William Martin for William Bulmer c.1790.

Volume: 196 pages printed on Zuber Rider cotton paper.

Format: 165x250 mm