1. Driven by greed, capitalism has resolved to call upon technical inventiveness to devise incomparably more perfect and docile instruments than its wage slaves. The liberty it grants to the serf-turned-proletarian stipulates by contract that it must be placed above all in the service of mechanical skills and aptitudes (the medieval Latin for a workman is mechanicus) and that it must not be dissipated or thwarted by any inclination that may deflect it from the straight and narrow path of toil. This is still the meaning embodied in the Habeas Corpus Act passed by the English Parliament in 1679, which provides guarantees against illegitimate lawsuit, arrest or imprisonment.
2. Drawn up by George Mason after the start of the War of American Independence, and proclaimed on June 12, 1776, the Virginia Declaration of Rights is the first to stipulate that “All men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” This Declaration is defined by a generosity which gives too much credit to the intellect and paves the road to the hell of necessity with good intentions. The wish that all men be ‘by nature equally free and independent’ rightly casts doubt on the vile right of the old aristocracy to pass on privileges to their offspring. But the legislator showed that he well knew to what degree family background and social condition perpetuated inequality and dependence by referring to life and safety, pleasure and happiness as subject to the appropriation and possession of assets.
3. Whatever revolutionary and emancipatory notions were discernible in the article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights which stated “that all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people; that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all times amenable to them,” have foundered on every reef of parliamentary democracy. When the representational system took its most radical turn by proposing to grant all power to the soviets, it immediately came to grief and lapsed into one of the worst tyrannies the world has ever known.
4. The techniques of advertising, propaganda, communication, information and the stage-management of lived experience, along with the impoverishment of thought, the degradation of consciousness, fearful self-censorship and the power of money, have all combined to do away with a freedom that was long a weapon against all tyrannies: that of the press, which the Virginia Declaration calls “one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty [that] can never be restrained but by despotic governments.”
5. The successive governments supposedly freely chosen by the population of the United States are a good yardstick by which to measure the present-day value of the American Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, which held “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organising its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Just as the Athenian democracy of ancient Greece did not conceive of opening the way to its freedoms for slaves and other races, the American Declaration implicitly excluded Indians and Blacks, whose full status as men is denied by that God of Calvin’s who happens to be the source of the “inalienable right” to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
6. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was adopted by the French National Assembly on August 26, 1789, its principal drafters, Anson, Mounier and Mirabeau, being inspired by the ideas of Diderot, Rousseau and Montesquieu. It put a legal end to the Ancien Régime and ushered in an era when the freedoms it evoked would incessantly sow the seeds of a subversion which be crushed just as relentlessly by the economic expansion which had sparked it. The first part of Article 1—“Men are born free and equal in rights”—rescinds forever the aristocracy’s odious claims to privilege by birthright, and this alone justifies the document’s glorious reputation. The legitimate use by both bourgeois and bureaucratic regimes of the second part—“social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good”—has also made it into a template for a shameful hypocrisy. Its radicalism had a specific outcome in the French Convention’s decree of February 4, 1794, abolishing slavery, even though this came into force only in 1848, through the determined efforts of Victor Schoelcher. The legal slavery perpetuated by waged work has not to this day been abolished.
7. In deeming the Declaration of 1789 “the credo of the New Age,” Michelet recognized a lay religion of the Rights of Man whose ritual was the duties it imposed. Sade, one of the first people in history to demand the abolition of the death penalty, was also the first person to depict that hedonism of the concentration camp which the apostates of an ascetic God would embrace, subscribing to an orgiastic cult of a God of Nature and turning hell into a paradise for themselves where their unnatural desires could be unleashed—and choke them. By returning to mankind the rights usurped by the Gods Sade instantly exposed the reality of the “laissez-faire” system promoted by commercial and industrial dynamism, in other words the freedom to oppress. “Natural” man does not, alas, behave like a wolf toward his own kind, but like a God. A fascination with horror and death results both from a powerlessness to humanise existence and from the economy’s interest in treating life as nothing but a chaotic whirlpool where whatever is created self-destructs.
8. In 1790, Condorcet denounced the patriarchal character of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in his article “Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cité” (On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship). In September 1791 Olympe de Gouges published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. Article 1: “Woman is born free and remains equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be founded only upon the common good.” Article 3: “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation, which is nothing but the union of woman and man; no body an no individual may exercise any authority which does not come expressly from it.” Article 4: “Liberty and justice consist in giving back to others everything that belongs to them, so there are no limits to the exercise of woman’s natural rights save the perpetual tyranny that man exerts against her; those limits must be reformed by the laws of nature and of reason.” Article 10: “No one should be harassed on account of their opinions, even fundamental ones; woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum, provided always that her manifestations, as laid down by the law, do not disturb the peace.” Article 13: “To the maintenance of the law enforcement and the cost of administration the contributions of woman and man are equal; she shares in all the hard labour, all the painful tasks; she must therefore share too in the distribution of positions, employment, offices, honours, and industrious activity.” It would be almost two centuries before women were recognised, not as the future of mankind, but as worthy of suffering the same alienation as men without additional oppression. This relative emancipation of women owes a good deal, it must be said, to the development of a consumer economy in the second half of the twentieth century and to the special status that the market hastened to assign her, as likewise to children, who were given over with impunity to the ravages of advertising. The memory of the economic age has not deigned to recall Olympe de Gouges, beheaded on November 3, 1793, four months after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of Year One; the same goes for Claire Demar, who died alone after publishing Appel d’une femme du peuple sur l’affranchissement de la femme (Appeal of a Woman of the People concerning the Enfranchisement of Women) in 1833; and for Táhirih, assassinated by Islam for having burnt her veil in public in the Iran of 1840 and called upon women to reject their oppression by men.
9. Drafted for the most part by Rene Cassin and published on December 10, 1948, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights gave humanist ethics a legal protection whose absolute necessity was made clear by the contempt in which women, children and men were held all over the world. Against the barbarism unleashed upon the world by Nazi and Bolshevik totalitarianism, it set up the virtuous ramparts of a parliamentary democracy which had itself, however, given birth to the monster of despotism, and which continued to nurture its seeds. The document’s generous resolutions thus came down to an attempt to protect citizens from themselves, for in their depths concrete human beings, damaged as they are by representations that abstract them from their own desires, collect all the dross of a frustration which upon the slightest pretext can overflow in hatred and ressentiment. The fact is that merely restraining and tempering the effects of barbarism is tantamount to granting it rights.