Letters on a Regicide Peace

Letters on a Regicide Peace or Letters ... on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France were a series of four letters written by Edmund Burke during the 1790s in opposition to Prime Minister William Pitt's seeking of peace with the revolutionary French Directorate. It was completed and published in 1796.

By January 1796, Burke was finishing his Letter on a Regicide Peace, and parts of it were already printed. However, the work was delayed and it was published 20 October 1796, together with the second letter, as Two Letters on a Regicide Peace. An unauthorized version, printed by John Owen, a printer who had worked on the letters earlier in the year, appeared the day before Burke's edition was published. Burke's letters were popular, and the work went into 11 editions by the end of 1796. The last of the letters written, but the third in the series, was occasioned by the inability of Pitt's ministry to make peace with France; on 19 December 1796, Britain's envoy was expelled by the French. The letter included the subtitle "On the rupture of the negotiations, the terms of peace proposed, and the resources of the country for the continuance of the war".

The fourth letter, addressed to William Fitzwilliam, was written following Burke's reading of William Eden's Some Remarks on the Apparent Circumstances of the War in the Fourth Week of October 1795. When Pitt's government tried to negotiate peace with France, Burke stopped composing the letter and instead published what became the first two letters, called Two Letters on a Regicide Peace. Burke attempted to rewrite the letter to Fitzwilliam, but he did not finish before dying. The 1812 edition of his works did include a copy of the fourth letter that was pieced together from a manuscript copy by Burke, an uncorrected manuscript, and parts of the third letter's proof sheet.

Burke, in the third letter, attacks all of the British parties that desire peace with France, because France was intent on attacking Britain:

That day was, I fear, the fatal term of local patriotism. On that day, I fear, there was an end of that narrow scheme of relations called our country, with all its pride, its prejudices, and its partial affects. All the little quiet rivulets, that watered an humble, a contracted, but not an unfruitful field, are to be lost in the waste expanse, and boundless, barren ocean of the homicide philanthropy of France. It is no longer an object of terrour, the aggrandizement of a new power, which teaches as a professor that philanthropy in their chair; whilst it propagates by arms, and establishes by conquest, the comprehensive system of universal fraternity. In what light is all this viewed in a great assembly? The party which takes the lead there has no longer any apprehensions, except those that arise from not being admitted to the closest and most confidential connexions with the metropolis of that fraternity. That reigning party no longer touches on its favourite subject, the display of those horrours, that must attend the existence of a power, with such dispositions and principles, seated in the heart of Europe.

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