42
Rights, Liberty, and Equality
as all social conventions had to be freely endorsed, ‘every man had accordingly the
right to leave the association and to betake his person, his wife, his children, and his
property where he pleases and as he pleases’. His declaration, he believed, was in
accord with the real desires, wishes, and affections of men.
A year later Montlosier placed himself firmly on the side of counter-revolution,
bewailing what he termed the ‘altar raised by delirium, vanity and cupidity’ that
had become contemporary France and calling for the instigation of civil war.61
Nevertheless, he counselled the émigrés not to re-enter France in the spirit of
vengeance lest they be left ‘only with genealogical charts to set against the charter
of the rights of man’. A return to the monarchy and to religion, he warned, must
not be an excuse for a return to the abuses of the ancien régime. Such pleas for
conciliation were not to be found in the writings of Antoine de Rivarol. Nor was a
toleration of the language of rights.
Riverol’s earliest works––for example, the Dissertation sur l’universalité de la
langue française62––pre-date the Revolution and were to provide the philosophical
support for what was to become the most immediate, brilliant, scurrilous, and
vehement attack upon the principles of 1789. Specifically, Rivarol denied the
veracity of Condillac’s sensationalist epistemology, arguing that sentiment preceded
sensation, doubted that man either should or could be dissected into his constituent
parts, and believed that truth and wisdom were embodied in language. As in nature
everything was in harmony and proportion, so it followed that ‘the man who
analyses, whether as a chemist or as a reasoner, can only . . . decompose and kill’.63
In Rivarol’s opinion, it was precisely this ‘analytical’ spirit that inspired the
philosophes and which accounted for their numerous dangerous errors.64 They
had mistaken resemblance between men for the equality of man. They had failed
to realize that it was not ‘truth’ but ‘fixity’ that mattered and that ‘genius in politics
consists not in creating but in preserving and . . . [that] it is not the best law but the
most stable which is the good one’.65 There was no such thing, Rivarol argued, as
‘universal justice’: all judgements were ‘relative’ and reflected ‘fear and need’. Did
not animals have the same right to pleasure and life as men? Yet we hunted and
killed them. In similar fashion, ‘if nature were suddenly to produce a race superior
to ours we would be at once as culpable as the sharks and the wolves’.66 Nor was it
possible to talk of man’s original goodness. Men were born with ‘good’ physical
organs and ‘useful’ needs but as moral beings they did not exist. It was, in sum, not
‘without effort and without aiding nature that [man] becomes finally the supreme
social and rational being’. Men therefore needed government, religion, and
61 François-Dominique de Reynaud, comte de Montlosier, Des Moyens d’opérer la contre-révolution
(1791).
62 Antoine de Rivarol, Dissertation sur l’universalité de la langue française (1784). See Jean Lessay,
Rivarol (1989).
63 Antoine de Rivarol, De la philosophie moderne (1797), 5.
64 See De l’homme intellectuel et moral, in Œuvres complètes (1808), i. 1–390.
65 Rivarol, De la philosophie moderne, 21.
66 Ibid. 57.
Rights, Liberty, and Equality
43
morality to protect and elevate them. Moreover, men by nature were social, not
solitary, beings. It was the ‘solitary condition’ that was the ‘artificial condition’.
All of these arguments were brought to bear by Rivarol in an analysis of the
Revolution which from the summer of 1789 onwards––in, for example, the articles
he contributed to the Journal politique national 67––retained a remarkable level of
consistency and coherence. As events unfolded, these articles repeatedly turned
their attention to the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen. Here,
in the form of this ‘dangerous’ and ‘criminal preface’, was a text which ignored
practice and experience, confused the savage with the ‘social’ man, and mistook
‘natural independence’ for ‘civil liberty’. Why, Rivarol asked, talk to the citizen of
rights that he will never exercise? Why tell men that they are equal when it would
be better to tell them frankly that they are very unequal, that ‘one is born strong
and another weak’? Why precede a constitution with a statement of ‘metaphysics’
that earlier legislators had had the good sense to hide from public inspection?
Furthermore, the people, ‘la vile canaille’, would not understand such a declara-
tion of rights. ‘Philosophy’, Rivarol wrote, ‘being the product of lengthy meditation
and an entire life, ought not and cannot be presented to the people who are always
at the beginning of life.’68 They worked for six days and on the seventh day had
time only for rest and religion. They imitated truth with as much conviction as they
were likely to be seduced by error. In the hands of the people, therefore, what had
been formulated as a ‘defensive arm’ would quickly become a means of offence.
Having been granted civil equality, the people would demand the absolute equality
of ownership. A hatred of rank would become a hatred of all authority. ‘With this
declaration in their hands’, Rivarol announced, ‘the negroes in our colonies and the
servants in our houses could chase us from our inheritance.’69 As for the soldier told
to defend private property, he would reply that the earth belonged to all men and
that he wanted his fair share. ‘What would you say’, Rivarol asked, ‘to this sophist
armed with your declaration of rights and a gun? He would take your goods as a man
of nature, enjoy them as a citizen and defend them as a soldier.’ In brief, if you
encouraged the ignorant to believe that rights should be equal, the result would be
‘blood, ruin, and death’.
Behind Riverol’s charge that talk of natural rights in a society grounded in
social and economic inequality was foolish and incautious nonsense lay the belief
(or realization) that civilization, constantly threatened by the barbarism lurking
beneath it, was only ever a fragile construction. Equally, if Rivarol accepted that
the Church and the royal court were in part responsible for France’s current ills,
he nevertheless remained convinced that only a monarchy and an hereditary
aristocracy, combined with the institutions of private property, the family, and
an established religion, could restore order. Inspired by a hatred of the rich, a
misplaced enthusiasm for the sovereignty of the people had effectively dissolved the
body politic, producing a ‘reign of terror’, the guillotine, and an altogether new
67 Rivarol, Œuvres complètes, iv. 1–390; repr. as Journal politique national (1989).
68 Rivarol, De la philosophie moderne, 15.
69 Rivarol, Journal politique national, 113.
44
Rights, Liberty, and Equality
species of revolutionary government which, like a ‘hungry tyrant’, devoured the
; people of France. The blame lay with the philosophes for having undermined the
foundations of the ancien régime.
In these ideas, and indeed in others voiced by Rivarol, one can see prefigurations
of the central themes raised by theorists of the counter-revolution from the 1790s
onwards.70 The Revolution was the product of a conspiracy organized and led by the
philosophes. It was an expression of atheism, of Protestantism, and of individualism.
It was an act of Providence and a display of divine displeasure with a sinful France.
All republics, all political systems resting upon a spurious and unrealizable doctrine
of popular sovereignty and natural rights, were doomed to collapse. The Revolution
had brought into existence an entirely new form of government whose destructive
powers and potential knew almost no limits. Only a restored and purified monarchy
could terminate this anarchy. It was Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald who
turned these disparate positions into a coherent doctrine of reaction and who,
in Considérations sur la France71 and Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la
société civile, démontrée par le raisonnement et par l’histoire,72 gave them their classic
expression.
Of the two, the writings of Maistre are the more vivid and elegant. Rarely
however do they focus directly upon either the doctrine of natural rights in general
or the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen in particular. Rather, like
Rivarol, Maistre used the metaphor of the ‘revolutionary chariot’ to characterize an
event which he took not only to be ‘satanic’ and ‘radically bad’ but that he also
believed to be beyond the control of men. In the works of man, Maistre contended,
‘everything is as wretched as their author’: all comes to naught when the chains
which bind us to the Supreme Being are broken. Accordingly, man’s efforts at
constitutional reform were foolhardy. The removal from power of the Jacobins
amounted to no more than a few scoundrels killing a few other scoundrels. This
profound scepticism took a multitude of forms. It meant, importantly, that Maistre
did not share the enthusiasm of many for the example of the American constitu-
tion. Not only would the American republic not last but, he wagered, Washington
would be neither built nor become the capital city! His views on the doctrine of
natural rights followed from these conjectures. If all new constitutions were vain
monuments to folly, all talk of rights was abstract nonsense. As Maistre lucidly
announced: ‘The Constitution of 1795, like its predecessors, was made for man.
But there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen
Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one
70 See Jacques Godechot, The Counter Revolution (London: 1972), 32–4.
71 Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France (1797) in Œuvres (2007), 175–289. See Richard
Allen Lebrun, Throne and Altar: The Political and Religious Thought of Joseph de Maistre (Ottawa,
1965); Richard A. Lebrun, Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant (Kingston and Montreal, 1988);
Owen Bradley, A Modern Maistre: The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre (Lincoln, Neb.,
and London, 1999).
72 Louis de Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la société civile, démontrée par le
raisonnement et par l’histoire (1796) in Œuvres complètes (1864), i. 121–954. See David Klinck, The
French Counterrevolutionary Theorist Louis de Bonald (1754–1840) (New York, 1996).
Rights, Liberty, and Equality
45
can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he
exists he is unknown to me.’73
It was in the writings of Louis de Bonald that the Déclaration des Droits de
l’Homme et du Citoyen was subjected to the most searching criticism. Bonald’s
thought was built around a series of improbable tripartite divisions and proceeds by
way of deduction and analogy from a set of first principles––for example, that one
cannot speak about man without speaking about God––to what are taken to be a
set of ‘fundamental axioms of politics or of the science of society’. Thus a properly
ordered society is one with ‘a will which commands, a love which directs and a force
which executes’, whilst at the same time it is taken to be axiomatic that ‘in a
situation where all men wish to dominate . . . it is necessary that a single man
dominates or else all men destroy each other’. What Bonald wished to establish
through the use of this conceptual paraphernalia was that there were certain
relationships between men that were ‘necessary’ and that, if respected, they formed
the basis of what he termed a ‘constituted society’, a society that secured the
primary goal of the mutual preservation of its members through the protection of
men and of their property.
The prime example or ‘model’ of a ‘constituted society’ provided by Bonald was
that of ancient Egypt. Here was a form of government incorporating a public
religion, a monarchy respecting fundamental laws, and hereditary distinctions. It
was to be contrasted with Asiatic despotism and with the unstable systems charac-
teristic of classical Greece and Rome. If it had a modern equivalent, it was to be
found among the German tribes that had destroyed the Roman Empire. The
dominant trait of a ‘constituted society’, however, was that the will, love, and
force within it were always ‘general’ and not ‘particular’. ‘I agree’, wrote Bonald,
‘with a theology which posits an uncontrolled will, a disproportionate self-love, a
depraved or criminal action as the source of all our disorders and the origin of all
our ills.’74 For a society to survive, it was necessary that a general love of others
should prevail over a private love of self.
Explicitly stated was Bonald’s conviction not only that there existed only one true
form of constitution for a political society but also that to negate its fundamental laws
was to ensure social disintegration and decline. So, in a republic––where by definition
the entire natural order was upturned and where God was dethroned––there no
longer existed a general body but a collection of individuals. Individual pleasure and
happiness, not general well-being, became the goal. All laws were arbitrary and not
even an effective army or police force could survive. In republics, Bonald affirmed,
‘the present is everything: they have no thought for the future’.75
It was precisely in this context, in a ‘non-constituted society’, that legislators,
perceiving the ‘radical vice’ of their own legislation, committed the further error
of seeking to complement fundamentally erroneous laws with ‘preliminary declara-
tions of imagined rights and alleged duties’.76 The clearest example of such
73 Maistre, Considérations, 235.
74 Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir, 142.
75 Ibid. 204.
76 Ibid. 161.
46
Rights, Liberty, and Equality
stupidity masquerading as truth, in Bonald’s opinion, was, not surprisingly, the
Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen of 1789.77 It was a series of
indet
erminate maxims and propositions in which only ‘the logic of the passions’
was clearly visible. No sooner had its ‘double-meanings’ been promulgated than
France awoke from sleep into convulsion and it was through this ‘distorting light’
that everyone examined their position in society. Men in high office were ashamed
of having usurped authority, those of inferior rank of having prostituted their
allegiance. Wealth, even to the property owner, seemed a wrong and poverty an
injustice. No one was contented with their lot and society as a whole became
divided ‘like two armies face-to face’ about to begin a senseless and ungodly battle
in which ‘success could only be a calamity’. Those who appealed to the last article of
the Déclaration affirming that property was a sacred and inviolable right were
countered by those who appealed to the first article affirming that men are born and
remain free and equal. Finally, ‘after many lengthy and bloody errors’, people began
to realize that one should talk less of man’s rights and more of his duties. But this
was not sufficient to stop the carnage: France had already returned to a ‘barbarous’
and ‘savage’ condition.
Thus, Bonald’s charge was that, in a situation where the idea of law had been
consistently secularized and in which a total transformation of society had been
carried out in its name, a declaration of the rights of man was singularly incapable of
putting a break upon human passions. Not without irony, Bonald denied that the
1789 declaration was an example of metaphysics and this for the good reason that it
was so manifestly defective and in error. He doubted that the language of rights
could ever be used in a precise and expedient manner. Right, he argued, meant rule,
from dirigere, but used indiscriminately it had come to express all relationships,
even the most contradictory. If therefore this ‘many-headed expression’ was conve-
nient for everyday conversation, ‘in politics it expresses nothing of worth and had
been deadly’. Equally, Bonald concluded that the words ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ had
been misunderstood, with the result that the philosophes had incorrectly associated
natural right and natural law with the nascent and original state of man and society.
‘The true nature of society’, Bonald argued by contrast, ‘was the highest state
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