ABSTRACT
Edmund Burke sees the French Revolution as a radical linguistic event; he sees it as a new Babel, as a new Fall of language, and he presents a theory of language which explains both the old world and the Revolution which causes it to fall. Burke correctly identified the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution, a revolution, as he saw it, of parvenus who lacked the culture and language of the past. Burke traces the roots of the French Revolution to the subversive seeds planted in the French mind by prominent writers. Burke hostility to the French Revolution can be traced, in part, to his feeling that the new semantic vocabulary dealing with the rights of man was, in effect, a new and dangerous language which tore man from his history and his heritage, both of which were linguistic in nature.
