ABSTRACT
When writing his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke was in touch with French émigrés who had fled to Great Britain. One of these refugees was the Abbé Augustin Barruel. In his book, Burke drew upon many of the arguments already developed by French anti-philosophes prior to the revolution. Interpreting the revolution as a thorough break with the past, he attacked the arbitrary rejection of experience, tradition, historical developments, religion or natural hierarchy that came with it (McMahon 2003; Aston 2004). Warning of coming upheavals, he wrote: ‘Many parts of Europe are in open disorder. In many others there is a hollow murmuring underground; a confused movement is felt, that threatens a general earthquake in the political world’ (Burke 1790: 229). In a footnote to this passage, Burke referred to the correspondence of the Illuminati Order (1787), which had been published at the behest of the government of Palatinate-Bavaria.
