Much as religious obscurantism, narrow-mindedness, and prohibitions on free thinking arose from the economic and social stagnation inherent to the structure of agrarian enclosure, so the Declaration of the Rights of Man was largely the product of an economic innovation, namely the free circulation of goods and persons that marked the absolute victory of the bourgeoisie over aristocratic tyranny.
What happened then? The answer is that free trade, which had promised the inauguration of a free life, swiftly turned that dream into a nightmare.
It very soon became apparent that the freedom granted to trade handed profit and the avaricious spirit of “enrich yourselves” the power to reject, prohibit or hollow out the very human rights that it had helped establish.
As of 1792, the two rival factions of revolutionary power both bent their efforts to this task, each after its own fashion. The liberal Girondists had no problem conflating human and commercial liberty. And as for the statism of Robespierre and the Jacobins, liberty was the grease they used to lubricate the guillotine. Let us remember Manon Phlipon’s cry: “Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!” Nor should we forget that Olympe de Gouges was beheaded for calling for equality between woman and man.
Capitalism’s victory over the agrarian economy made the “captain of industry” the model of the new man—a Prometheus whose dynamism and technical genius were supposed to steer society toward well-being. But no sooner had capitalism smashed the shell of an archaic economy than it emerged in its turn as a hermetic structure, an immutable world where all change was confined to an enclosed field strictly hedged about by the quest for profit and the repression of whatever hindered that quest. Those who had rid themselves of agrarian despotism now found themselves under the heel of financial tyranny.
To justify the exploitation of the proletariat, industrial capitalism propagated an ideology of technical and social progress cynically identified with a frenetic growth of profit accruing to the owner class. A battery of laws favoring the freedom to enrich oneself and the destruction of a freedom to live, the cries of which had to be gagged.