CEVDET PASHA’S REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE

“Reflections on the Revolution in France” is the title of the work written by Edmund Burke in 1790, which is known as the constituent text of Anglo-Saxon liberal-conservatism. Although the Ottoman political literature does not have an essay that has a similar title, it is possible to find a text that is close to this ideological position. This text is the narrative and critical of the French Revolution that is sprinkled among the volumes of Tarih-i Cevdet, the official history of the Tanzimat era, the bureaucratic modernizing period of the Ottoman Empire. Ahmed Cevdet Pasha (1822–1895), the author of the text, had mistakenly been regarded as a reactionary thinker, because of his most quoted insulting comments on French revolutionaries and his opposition to the declaration of the Kanun-ı Esasi (the Otttoman Constitution) in the late stages of his career. However, a holistic reading of Tarih-i Cevdet’s passages on French Revolution reveals that Cevdet Pasha is not attached to a reactionary position that defends the “ancien regime” unconditionally, but rather he is close to a liberal-conservative ideology which approves the establishment of a constitutional order in a gradual evolution.