Memory & history—memoire & histoire

Contemporary critics blamed Edmund Burke for condemning the French Revolution on an insufficient basis of first hand experience. Burke's observations made during his short visits to France were indeed hardly more than marginal to his view of the old regime, which, however, he saw not as the system of French government and society, but as the order of European civilisation. He therefore appreciated the example of Britain as the most successful realisation of potentials inherent in all European nations. Among his German admirers, experience in the Hanoverian administration prompted Ernst Brandes and August Wilhelm Rehberg to take more account of the anachronisms of the 'Standestaat', and to hold up Britain for imitation because it was different from the continent. It was Friedrich Gentz whose attitudes resembled those of Burke's most closely on this score, too.