—as though there were no need for a natural base on which to form conventional ties, as though
the love of one’s nearest were not the principle of the love one owes the state; as though it were
not by means of the small fatherland which is the family that the heart attaches itself to the large
one; as though it were not the good son, the good husband, and the good father that make the
good citizen!”
(1979, p. 363). Rousseau argues that it is through the love that one feels for one’s
family that one learns how to love the state to which one’s family belongs. The affective ties of
the family serve as the “natural base” for the “conventional ties” of patriotism and the other civic
virtues.
In the context of the British response to the French Revolution, Burke likewise launched
a caustic critique of the revolutionaries’ attempts to blur the vital practical and normative
distinctions between family and state. He reported that the Directory, in the first year of its rule
in 1795-96, orchestrated public displays of treason among family members in order to intimidate
the people into making a total commitment to the political cause of the French republic over and
against their familial loyalties. He writes, “They have sometimes brought forth five or six
hundred drunken women calling at the bar of the Assembly for the blood of their own children,
as being Royalists or Constitutionalists. Sometimes they have got a body of wretches, calling
themselves fathers, to demand the murder of their sons, boasting that Rome had but one Brutus,
but that they could show five hundred. There were instances in which they inverted and
retaliated the impiety, and produced sons who called for the execution of their parents” (Burke,
1869, p. 311). Burke believed that the Directory, by encouraging such public performances of
familial treachery, set the natural affections of the family in an inhumane competition with
patriotism. He concludes that the revolutionaries viewed the emotional ties of the family as a
serious threat to the cultivation of the patriotic loyalty necessary to preserve their new and fragile
9
Convention