Success in France, it seems, was merely the beginning of world-wide revolution. The conquest of France was a glorious acquisition. Whether its territory had a little more or a little less peeled from its surface, or whether an island or two was detached from its commerce, was of little moment to them. The leaders of that sect secured the centre of Europe and that ensured, they knew, that whatever might be the event of battles and sieges, their cause was victorious. It is not France extending a foreign empire over other nations: it is a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning with the conquest of France. It is a war between the partisans of the ancient, civil, moral, and political order of Europe against a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists with means to change them all. Whatever were the first motives to the war among politicians, they saw that it is in its spirit, and for its objects, a civil war and as such they pursued it. They saw the thing right from the very beginning. It is a dreadful truth, but it is a truth that cannot be concealed in ability, in dexterity, in the distinctness of their views, the Jacobins are our superiors. In this, Burke states with some shock value, they were superior to their enemies, as they knew what kind of war they waged. They must understand that the Revolution would never rest without conquering the entire world.
They could not pretend it was merely a political party or a new way of thinking about government. If the British failed to understand the “armed doctrine” of the Revolutionaries as a religious sect, with the French looking for nothing less than a re-doing of the most violent aspects of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, they would fail miserably to understand the movement as a whole. The grand Anglo-Irish statesman, Edmund Burke (1729-1797) spent much of his last eight years dwelling upon the French Revolution as well as trying to define its most important elements. The Revolutionaries, as Edmund Burke stressed, were radicals, seeking civil war not only in France, but also in all of Christendom.
Whatever its own stated purposes and desired ends, the French Revolution never sought to better the condition of humanity or even of France.
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