Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [468]
For me as a British Conservative, with Edmund Burke the father of Conservatism and first great perceptive critic of the Revolution as my ideological mentor, the events of 1789 represent a perennial illusion in politics. The French Revolution was a Utopian attempt to overthrow a traditional order — one with many imperfections, certainly — in the name of abstract ideas, formulated by vain intellectuals, which lapsed, not by chance but through weakness and wickedness, into purges, mass murder and war. In so many ways it anticipated the still more terrible Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The English tradition of liberty, however, grew over the centuries: its most marked features are continuity, respect for law and a sense of balance, as demonstrated by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. When I was questioned about what the French Revolution had done for human rights by journalists from Le Monde on the eve of my visit I felt I ought to point out some of this. I said:
Human rights did not begin with the French Revolution… [they] really stem from a mixture of Judaism and Christianity… [we English] had 1688, our quiet revolution, where Parliament exerted its will over the King… it was not the sort of Revolution that France’s was… ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’ — they forgot obligations and duties I think. And then of course the fraternity went missing for a long time.
The headline over my remarks in Le Monde ran ‘“Les droits de l’homme n’ont pas commencé en France,” nous déclare Mme Thatcher.’
It was on this note that I arrived in Paris for the Bicentennial. I brought with me for President Mitterrand a first edition of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, which he, a connoisseur of such things, loved, but which also made somewhat more elegantly the same point as my interview. The celebrations themselves were on the scale which only a Hollywood studio — or France — could manage: an almost endless procession, a military parade, an opera with pride of place in the set being given to a huge guillotine.
The G7 summit itself definitely took second place to this pageantry. Indeed, this posed a potential problem. A large number of Third World heads of government had been invited to Paris to the celebrations and there seemed some prospect of President Mitterrand suddenly seeking to relaunch another ‘North-South’ dialogue of the sort we had thankfully left behind at Cancún.* I alerted President Bush — arriving for his first G7 — to this when I had a bilateral meeting with him at the US Embassy before the summit. He said that he thought there was a problem in blocking such a move without appearing a ‘parsimonious bunch of don’t cares’. I said that this did not seem to me to be much of a problem. Nor did it prove to be. The French in the end thought better of introducing this controversial idea, preferring to rest on the level of generalities.
George Bush and I made the familiar pleas for free trade under the GATT. President Mitterrand — with some help from me — got the text of his Declaration on Human Rights (with its obvious revolutionary symbolism) accepted almost word for word. There were discussions of the environment and drugs. In fact, everyone left happy and little of note was achieved. It was the sort of occasion which in earlier years had given international summitry a bad name. But President Mitterrand’s final dinner for heads of government held in the new pyramid in the forecourt of the Louvre was one of the best I have ever eaten. Some traditions are too important for even the French to overthrow.
CABINET RESHUFFLE
I returned to London conscious of unfinished business. The European election results had no particular significance in themselves. But