Revolution and the Republic
Page 7
‘tendentious’ to present revolutionary Jacobinism as a form of liberalism, Sa’adah nevertheless argues
that Jacobinism presented ‘a second model of liberal politics, even more wary of political power than its
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
27
Breaking with the recent revisionist account of the Revolution associated with
François Furet, Higonnet’s book amounts to a defence of the Jacobins and attempts
to attribute the descent into Terror to what he repeatedly describes as ‘instincts’ or
habits of mind rather than to the ideology of the Jacobins themselves. The Terror,
he writes, was ‘a brutalized, backward-looking gesture of despair’, drawing upon
‘long habits of absolutist politics and intolerant religion’. The ‘nobility’ of the
Jacobins’ message––described as the ‘desire to harmonize the private and the public
through purposeful and libertarian civic-mindedness’––needs to be separated from
their ‘flaws, errors and liabilities’. This has important conclusions. ‘Jacobinism’, he
writes, ‘can still be a model for modern democrats’. It puts to shame ‘our own
inactive allegiance to socially inert and pluralistic democracy’.
For all that this account of the nature of Jacobinism is both implausible and
unconvincing, it nevertheless underscores the continued importance and interest of
the events which surrounded this experience. As all those who witnessed the
Revolution realized, nothing like it had been seen before. So too they understood
that the world would never be the same again. It was not just the language of
politics that changed but its location and its actors. A whole new vocabulary of
politics came into existence. Court politics was replaced by street politics. Aristo-
crats departed the stage, to be replaced by the people and those who presumed to
speak in their name. New institutional forms of politics appeared. With this, the
style of politics, as well as the values embodied in politics as an activity, was
dramatically revised. So also were the very goals of politics. Gone were its limited
ambitions and its preoccupations with dynastic rivalries: in came a vision of politics
that placed it, for good or ill, at the centre of human existence and that saw political
activity as a means of social transformation and regeneration. All of this was to be a
source of dramatic instability and contestation, flowing beyond the borders of
France and beyond the confines of the revolutionary decade.
How might these complex patterns of thinking be studied? What form will our
analysis and discussion take? Pierre Rosanvallon has spoken of what he terms ‘a
conceptual history of politics’. The argument in this volume will take something of
this form. The structure of the book will not therefore be crudely chronological.
Nor will it work its way systematically through a list of authors and their texts.
Rather, it will focus upon a set of core concepts and ideas around which political
theory and practice have been structured in France since the eighteenth century,
acknowledging both that concepts gain their meaning from their respective histori-
cal contexts and from how they are used by historical actors. If conceptual change
during this period was extensive, the surprise (perhaps) is that a society character-
ized by such social and political instability provides evidence of considerable
conceptual continuity over time. The potential range of material that could be
covered is vast and it would be folly to aspire to anything like comprehensive or
encyclopedic coverage. Accordingly, the material under consideration is structured
around a loose, but overarching, organizational principle: namely, that political
Anglo-American counterpart’ (p. 197). In her view, Jacobinism established ‘the primacy of the liberal
agenda in France’.
28
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
thought in France can be read as a continuous and open-ended debate about the
meaning of the Revolution of 1789 and the form of republican government that it
gave rise to. The individual chapters are not ordered according to any strict
unilinear sequence––indeed, it might well be judged to be the case that they can
be read individually and out of sequence––but the book as a whole does possess a
certain narrative logic which moves the argument forward to the present day.
Having (hopefully) reached this point, the reader should not expect a series of
resounding and forthright conclusions. The aim is to provide what might be seen as
a broad conspectus of the French political tradition as it has evolved over the past
two hundred years and more. It is in the nature of such an account that it can never
be complete or definitive. The questions we ask of a political tradition change as our
own preoccupations themselves change. To paraphrase Alexis de Tocqueville,
however, it is to be hoped that the subject matter of what follows will be the object
of both admiration and alarm, and certainly not of indifference.
1
Rights, Liberty, and Equality
I
As was noted by both Pierre-Louis Roederer and Madame de Staël,1 the driving
passion of the Revolution of 1789 was that of equality. More specifically, and as
Roederer made abundantly clear, the ambition was to attain not an equality of
wealth but an ‘equality of rights’.2 The principal motivating force of the Revolu-
tion, Roederer explained, was not to free lands and persons from all servitude nor to
free industry from all restraint, but rather to put an end to privilege. Indeed, such
was the fervent hostility to privilege, and to the inequalities it was taken to embody,
that the assault upon it demanded not just the abolition of those privileges
associated with the First and Second Estates (the clergy and the aristocracy) but
also the destruction of all privileges held by cities, provinces, bodies of magistrates,
and corporations. Accordingly, on the night of 4 August 1789 the privileges of
these institutions were abolished, thus simultaneously bringing to an end what was
henceforth to be known as the ancien régime and producing for the first time an
association of equal and individual citizens living under a set of laws common to all.
The Abbé Sieyès eloquently expressed the mood of the time when he proclaimed
that: ‘By their very nature, all privileges are unjust, odious and in opposition to the
supreme goal of political society.’3
This same sentiment was acknowledged by the Déclaration des Droits de
l’Homme et du Citoyen where it was affirmed that: ‘Men are born and remain
free and equal in their rights’. Article VI of the Déclaration further indicated that
the law was to be the same for all and, most importantly, that: ‘All citizens . . . are
equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, accord-
ing to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and their
talents.’ Article XIII, recognizing the injustice of the tax privileges of the nobility
and the clergy, stipulated that taxation ‘should be equitably distributed among all
the citizens in proportion to their means’. Equality, therefore, was to be achieved by
and thr
ough the law, which itself was to embody equality through its generality and
1 Pierre-Louis Roederer, L’Esprit de la Révolution de 1789 (1831) and Germaine de Staël,
Considérations sur la Révolution française (1983), 221.
2 Roederer, L’Esprit de la Révolution, 9. See pp. 52–6.
3 Emmanuel Sieyès, Essai sur les privilèges (1789), in Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État? (1982), 3. See
Roberto Zapperi (ed.), Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes: Écrits politiques (1985) and Michael Sonenscher (ed.),
Emmanuel Sieyès: Political Writings (Indianapolis, 2003).
30
Rights, Liberty, and Equality
universality. The most tangible expression of equality was that access to public
offices was to be based not upon birth but upon merit. All of these principles,
although they pre-date the inauguration of the First Republic, became part of
the heritage of republicanism and, in varied forms, have appeared in subsequent
Republican constitutions.
Several points should be noted. The first is that equality was not listed
amongst the ‘natural and inalienable rights of man’. These were restricted to
‘liberty, property, security and the resistance to oppression’. The tension be-
tween the potentially rival claims of liberty and equality was established at the
outset. Roederer’s view was that everything the Revolution accomplished with
regard to liberty followed either directly or indirectly from the desire to establish
an equality of rights.4 Next, civil equality did not entail political equality. The
promise of equal participation in the formation of the general will was quickly
withdrawn as constitutional theorists––with Sieyès foremost among them––
sought to reduce the political influence of the people with a variety of ingenious
proposals, most notably the distinction between active and passive citizens.
Finally, the attainment of civil equality did not require the imposition of
economic equality. If, following the night of 4 August and in line with the
attack upon privilege, what constituted property was radically transformed (one
could no longer own government offices as property, for example), the right to
property, and therefore the right to the unequal ownership of wealth, remained
‘inviolable and sacred’. This right could only be taken away when demanded by
‘public necessity’.
Little attention was given to the need to assess the competing demands of natural
rights and social utility. This was understandable in the circumstances. The
Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen was first and foremost a political
and not a philosophical document. However, as we now know, the doctrine of
universal natural rights could be profoundly subversive of the existing order and,
indeed, it was not to be long before this became evident to many, if not to all.
Indeed, much the same could be said of the doctrine of natural rights as Jean-Paul
Rabaut Saint-Étienne said of the Revolution as a whole: ‘it had only one principle:
that of reforming abuses; but as everything in this dominion was an abuse it
resulted from it that everything was changed’.5 If this quickly led critics of the
Revolution to categorize the language of rights as part of an unholy conspiracy
organized and led by the philosophes, it provided the supporters of the Revolution
with a set of problems which stubbornly refused to go away in succeeding years.
How, in short, could a recognition of individual rights, now proclaimed as the
bedrock of a newly fashioned political community, be given institutional expression
and be made compatible with what were to become mounting demands for the
realization of civil, political, and economic equality? To this question there were to
be innumerable, conflicting answers.
4 Roederer, L’Esprit de la Révolution, 10.
5 Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne, Précis historique de la Révolution (1792), 200.
Rights, Liberty, and Equality
31
I I
The Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen embodied ‘the authentic
voice of those who made the Revolution––men of property not primarily
concerned about social questions, but anxious to ensure that despotic, irresponsible
government should never again bring the country to the brink of chaos’.6 Thus, in
the numerous outline déclarations submitted to the newly constituted National
Assembly during August 1789 hopes for the regeneration of France were invariably
framed in terms of the avoidance of the abuse of power through the protection of
the rights of man.7 Likewise, the rights enunciated were deemed to be natural
rights, owing nothing to God and religion, and to be of universal validity and
application. A declaration of rights, the Marquis de Lafayette told the National
Assembly, should express ‘eternal truths’ and should ‘recall the sentiments that
nature has engraved in the heart of every individual’.8
So too the Déclaration was the product of a specific moment in French
history.9 Although it decisively rejected the claims of historical precedent, a
universalistic discourse could not hide the fact that the document finally
approved on 26 August 1789 very much reflected the necessities of the situa-
tion.10 If this was true of individual articles––Article XVII, for example, not
only sought to defend property from arbitrary abuses by the State but also covered
the need to ensure that the peasantry should indemnify their seigneurs for the loss of
their seigneurial rights which took place on the night of 4 August11––it applied
with similar force to the document as a whole where the desire to indulge in
metaphysical speculation was counter-balanced by the need to give legitimacy
to the new National Assembly and its activities in a situation where a political
void was fast threatening to engulf France in a wave of urban and rural violence.
The text itself is incomplete, as on 27 August it was decided as a matter of urgency
to move on to the more pressing task of formulating a new constitution.
The Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, then, emerged under the
pressure of a profound political crisis. Nevertheless, as events unfolded during
the summer of 1789 there appears to have been a genuine and widespread feeling
that a declaration of rights, preferably operating as a preface to a written (and
6 William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1988), 205.
7 See Christine Fauré (ed.), Les Déclarations des droits de l’homme de 1789 (1988).
8 Archives Parlementaires, 8 (1875), 221.
9 See Dale Van Kley, ‘From the Lessons of French History to Truths for All Times and All People:
The Historical Origins of an Anti-Historical Declaration’, in Van Kley (ed.), The French Idea of
Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of 1789 (Stanford, Calif., 1994), 72–113.
10 See Marcel Gauchet, ‘Droits de l’homme’, in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.),
Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française: Idées (1992), 121–38; Elisabeth Guibert-Sledziewski,
‘Raison politique et dynamique des lois dans la Déclaration’, Droits, 8 (1988), 33–9; Jacques
Godechot, ‘Les Droits de l’homme et la Révolution française’, Società Italiana di storia del diritto:
Atti del IV congresso internationale (Florence, 1982), 979–82.
11 See Jean Morange, ‘La Déclaration et le droit de propriété’, and Jean-Jacques Bienvenu, ‘Impôt et
propriété dans l’esprit de la Déclaration’, Droits, 8 (1988), 101–10 and 135–42.
32
Rights, Liberty, and Equality
monarchical) constitution, was not only required but desirable.12 Approximately
thirty such déclarations––with that of Arnaud Gouges-Cartou running to as many
as seventy-one articles13––were placed before the National Assembly, with even the
Comte d’Antraigues, a supporter of the royal veto, feeling able to remark that it was
‘absolutely necessary’ to produce a declaration of rights because ‘if one day the sky
again were to unleash the plague of despotism . . . the people would be able, by
preserving the memory of the Déclaration des droits du citoyen, to recapture it and to
create a new constitution’.14 More typical was the view, expressed by the Comte de
Castellane, that the more men knew their rights the more they would cherish
the laws that protected them.15 Equally evident was the feeling that any declaration
of rights should be characterized by simplicity and clarity of expression. I want,
the Protestant Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne announced on 18 August, ‘such
lucidity, veracity and directness in its principles . . . that everyone should be able to
grasp and understand them, that they might become a children’s alphabet, that they
should be taught in schools’.16
Nor, despite the confusion as to what they might be, did there appear to be
much doubt that these rights were ‘self-evident’. More significant was the claim,
advanced by Jean-Louis Second, that these rights were not to be discovered in
history nor in ‘the charters and archives of nations’ but ‘from within man, from
within his nature, from within the eternal archives of justice and reason’.17 Durand
de Maillane amplified this argument when, in seeking a return to the ‘true
principles of our monarchy’, he spoke of the need to reclaim the rights ‘due to
man and his nature . . . rights against which neither time nor force could do
anything’.18 The claims of prescriptive tradition and status, in short, were simply