The King’s Virtual Body: Image, Text, and Sovereignty in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France

FOLLOWING EDMUND BURKE’S 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, counterrevolutionary writing of the late eighteenth century entrenched itself in opposition to the speculative political programs emanating from revolutionary France. For Burke and his inheritors, such as Joseph de Maistre and Novalis, the driving force behind the “the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle” was not the biological needs of the Parisian multitudes but what Burke calls the “naked reason” of Enlightenment rationality.1 Opposing these abstractions, especially the new political theories outlined in La déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, Burke insists that politics must ground itself on concrete historical realities. While the Glorious Revolution of 1689 was a mere “deviation” within an otherwise normal historical continuity, France was in the midst of a “complete revolution,” trying to remake the nation in conformity with such newly fashioned concepts as the universal rights of man.2 What ultimately distinguishes these two revolutions, however, is a point that will remain a central tenet of Burke’s later counterrevolutionary