8
FROM THE “GREAT FEAR” TO THE DECLARATION OF RIGHTS
August 1789
THE TRICOLOR COCKADE, MADE BY PUTTING THE WHITE COLOR OF THE Bourbon monarchy between the red and blue of Paris’s emblem in concentric circles, became the symbol of the revolutionary movement. This symbol enshrined the capital’s centrality to the Revolution’s victory. The French Revolution would not have succeeded, however, if it had been limited to Paris. The response of the rest of the country to the electrifying news of the capture of the Bastille not only consolidated the Parisians’ triumph but also accelerated the revolutionary movement, driving the National Assembly to take steps that launched France into a new world that few could have anticipated when the Estates General first met.
Unrest reached extraordinary levels in many parts of the country even before the crisis set off by Louis XVI’s dismissal of Necker and the riots at the Paris toll barriers on July 11, 1789. The number of outbreaks of collective violence, usually fewer than ten per month in calmer times, had soared to over a hundred in March and April. After falling off slightly in May and June as the public anxiously awaited action from the Estates General, the number of incidents reached its all-time peak of over a thousand incidents in July; on July 27 alone, the most troubled single day of the entire revolutionary period, there were 145 such episodes.1 The reports streaming in to royal officials and to the deputies of the National Assembly aroused fears that the very basis of social order was disintegrating.
Governmental authority had already eroded badly even before the dismissal of Necker. The transformation of city government that accompanied the storming of the Bastille, with the ousting of royally appointed local officials, the installation of municipal councils supported by the mass of the population, and the formation of citizen militias to maintain order, was imitated throughout the country. In Brittany’s capital of Rennes, news of the disorder in Paris on July 13, the day before the storming of the Bastille, set off a local revolution on July 15. Within four days, four thousand men had been enrolled in the local “national army.” “Commanded by simple townsmen, it carries out its duties as regularly as if it were under the orders of the most experienced officers,” a local pamphleteer boasted. Recognizing the force of the popular movement, he added, nobles had publicly renounced their privileges and agreed to accept the status of ordinary citizens. Meanwhile, in the larger Breton city of Nantes, rumors that foreign troops were being sent to the region provoked a massive mobilization: thirty thousand men were reported to have taken up arms to protect the city.2
The details of the local revolutions in France’s cities differed from place to place, depending on how strongly old governing elites resisted sharing their power and how militant outsiders were in challenging them. In the city of Troyes in Champagne, for example, the local magistrates, confronted on July 20 with a crowd they estimated at seven thousand to eight thousand people demanding reduced prices for bread, formed an emergency committee composed almost exclusively of judges and military officers who already held government positions. Over the course of the next two months, popular pressure, culminating in a veritable insurrection on August 28, forced them to yield power to a General Committee elected by the citizens and dominated by merchants, shopkeepers, and artisans, who had previously been excluded from power. In Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, the municipal revolution took a violent form. The English agricultural expert Arthur Young watched as a crowd invaded the local town hall and threw “a shower of casements, sashes, shutters, chairs, tables, sophas, books, [and] papers” from the building’s windows while troops stood nearby, refusing to intervene.3
As Young continued to make his way across the countryside, determined to complete the survey of French agriculture he had begun several years earlier, he witnessed the dramatic upsurge of popular activism that was transforming the peasantry. While townspeople turned against the traditional elites who had governed municipal affairs, the population of the countryside rose up against the seigneurs, the privileged landlords who had always dominated rural life. “The whole country is in the greatest agitation,” Young noted on July 26. “At one of the little towns I passed, I was questioned for not having a cockade of the Third Estate. They said it was ordained by the Third, and if I was not a Seigneur, I ought to obey.” On July 27, the day on which the number of violent outbreaks around the country reached its peak, Young added that “many chateaux have been burnt, others plundered, the seigneurs hunted down like wild beasts.” One of the noblemen he talked to summed up the situation for him: “He considers all rank, and all the rights annexed to rank, as destroyed in fact in France.”4
This wave of violence was part of what historians have come to call the “Great Fear,” a series of panics that raged across the countryside as peasants heard rumors that brigands in the pay of aristocrats hostile to the Revolution were coming to cut down or burn the crops in the field, threatening to worsen the famine from which the country was already suffering. The rumors started near Paris and other major cities in the days following the storming of the Bastille and eventually reached most of the country. Local officials in the towns helped spread these reports. In Mamers, in the Loire region, the authorities had heard that in “neighboring provinces” there were “vagabonds, men without stable jobs who, in order to trouble public security and tranquility, threaten public warehouses, tax collections, and maybe even the property of private individuals.” The rioting near Grenoble escalated when the peasants heard rumors that “the king had given permission to burn the nobles’ chateaux, but only for three days.” In reality, there were no brigands. The truth was that the frightening rumors drove peasants in one small region to band together, and that their own assemblies became the basis for distorted reports in other nearby regions, thus spreading a wave of fear. When the rumors reached the schoolteacher Delahaye’s village, he wrote that “the tocsin was sounded twice and the curé ran through the village to gather the men and boys, all armed, a few with guns, the others with pitchforks, pikes, axes, whatever each one could find.” Led by the curé, they set off to warn the neighboring villages while the rest of the population brought their valuables to the church for safekeeping.5
Although peasants had at best a hazy idea of what had happened since the Estates General had opened in early May, they expected at least a reduction in the various feudal dues they owed to their seigneurs. When no changes in their situation were announced after several months, it was natural for them to assume that the nobility was blocking reforms. The jolt provided by news of the violence in Paris, in whatever garbled form it arrived, galvanized the peasants to take direct action by marching on the manor houses of the local noble landowners. In the western region of Bas-Maine, an estate manager found himself confronted by “an infinite number of individuals… armed with guns, pitchforks, pikes and other weapons,” who demanded money and “the papers and titles of the seigneurie.” Overwhelmed, and “seeing himself menaced on all sides and his life itself in danger,” he “begged to be allowed to go to the garden to relieve himself”; permitted to do so, he used the opportunity to flee, leaving the crowd to destroy the legal documents they seized.6
Few noble landowners were actually killed during the Great Fear, and the number of noble chateaux actually burned was also relatively modest. But the impact of the wave of peasant uprisings was considerable. The destruction of seigneurs’ legal documents left many of them without any proof of the basis for their claims to dues and privileges. The assaults on nobles’ homes also had a psychological impact, demonstrating that the traditional customs of deference to superiors that had sustained the hierarchical social order no longer held. Outnumbered and acutely conscious that the king and his intendants no longer had the power to intervene on their behalf, aristocrats recognized the truth of what Sieyès had said in his pamphlet: a privileged minority of two hundred thousand could not stand alone against twenty-six million commoners.
As they contemplated the reports of revolts streaming in from the countryside, the deputies were also traumatized by a shocking episode of violence in Paris itself. On July 21, a week after the fall of the Bastille, angry peasants seized a senior royal official, Joseph Foulon de Doué, who had taken refuge in a village outside the city. Foulon was accused of having engaged in speculation that had raised the price of grain. Brought to Paris, he was being held at the Hôtel de Ville on July 22 when a crowd gathered and demanded his immediate punishment. The new city leaders installed a week earlier, the mayor Bailly and the National Guard commander Lafayette, were unable to protect him. Foulon was dragged out of the city hall, hanged from a nearby lamppost, and then decapitated; his heart was cut out and put on the end of a pike. His son-in-law Louis Bénigne François Bertier de Sauvigny, the intendant of Paris, was also lynched by the crowd; before his death, he was confronted with the severed head of his father-in-law and ordered to “kiss papa.”
The witnesses to these killings included the future radical Gracchus Babeuf, who would be executed in 1797 for plotting to establish a communist regime in France. Babeuf recorded his mixed feelings in a letter to his wife: “I was both satisfied and unhappy; I said all right and too bad. I understand that the people want to execute justice, I approve this justice when it is satisfied with the annihilation of the guilty, but couldn’t it now not be cruel?” The problem, he decided, was that an unjust society had set a bad example: “The masters, instead of making us more civilized, have made us barbaric, because they themselves are.” Whereas Babeuf had some hesitations about the killing of opponents of the Revolution, Madame Roland wrote to a friend that further executions were needed to deter its enemies. “If this letter doesn’t reach you,” she added, “may the cowards who read it blush at learning that it is from a woman, and may they tremble in thinking that she might create a hundred enthusiasts who would make millions of others.”7
Madame Roland’s vehemence was not unusual. An anonymous pamphlet, typical of the cruel and mocking humor that would become characteristic of the Revolution, depicted Hell happily welcoming Foulon, Bertier, and the two earlier victims Delaunay and Flesselles: “What a superb acquisition for [the Devil] in just eight days!”8 Whereas most National Assembly members had been willing to excuse the killings of Delaunay and Flesselles, which had been committed during the excitement following the storming of the Bastille, the murders of Foulon and Bertier seemed less justifiable. The Dauphiné deputy Barnave, a major Third Estate leader, justified the killings, saying, “This blood that was shed, was it then so pure?” These words would haunt him and the revolutionary movement in general for years afterward. In a few terse words, Barnave had suggested that the stakes in the Revolution justified actions that violated ordinary norms of justice and that there were certain categories of people who might, simply by virtue of their identity, deserve punishment without trial.
Despite Barnave’s attempt to justify them, most of the deputies were shocked at the violent killings in Paris and dismayed at the seemingly universal disorder in the provinces. The country had been badly shaken by recent events, and the chaos underlined the urgency of restoring order. They could not look to the king or his ministers for leadership: the royal government remained leaderless until Necker, who had gone home to Switzerland, arrived back in Versailles on July 30. It immediately became clear that Necker could not depend on the support of the Assembly: at Mirabeau’s urging, the deputies voted down his proposal to declare an amnesty for those who had helped oust him during the crisis of mid-July. With Necker paralyzed, the initiative fell to the more determined deputies, particularly the members of the “Breton committee.” Convinced that the only way to calm the unrest in the countryside was to take decisive action in favor of the peasantry, they crafted a plan for a dramatic gesture: the nobility would renounce their seigneurial rights.
On August 4, the Assembly convened for a special evening session. The vicomte de Noailles, a descendant of one of the kingdom’s most distinguished noble families, rose to move that all of his group’s tax privileges should be abolished and that peasants should be allowed to buy out the dues they owed to their seigneurs. He was immediately upstaged by the duc d’Aiguillon, who offered a more detailed and specific proposal. “In this century of enlightenment,” he told the Assembly, it was time to “establish as promptly as possible that equality of rights that should exist among all men, and which alone can assure their liberty.”9 Like Noailles, d’Aiguillon intended to assure that the nobles were properly compensated for the rights they would lose; he was careful to specify that existing payments should continue until arrangements for reimbursing them were made. Nevertheless, what struck the other deputies was d’Aiguillon’s broad reference to equality and liberty and his willingness to abandon the most fundamental privileges that had defined the noble order.
What followed Noailles’s and d’Aiguillon’s speeches exceeded anything the radical deputies had anticipated when they had planned the session. Once prominent spokesmen for the nobility had offered up their privileges, representatives of other groups competed to make similar sacrifices. Swept along by a rising tide of exaltation, deputies shouted out propositions that were endorsed so rapidly that no one was sure afterward what they had agreed to. The session continued until two o’clock in the morning of August 5. “Never, without a doubt, has any people offered such a spectacle,” wrote the Third Estate deputy Duquesnoy. “Everyone offered up, gave, laid at the feet of the nation. I’m a baron from Languedoc, I abandon my privileges;—I’m a member of the estates of Artois, I also offer my loyalty;—I’m a magistrate, I vote to make justice free of charge;—I have two clerical benefices, I vote against allowing anyone to have more than one. No more privileges for the towns; Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille give them up. Great and memorable night! We cried, we embraced. What a nation! What glory, what honor to be French!”10
It took a week for a committee to reduce the multiple propositions offered on the night of August 4 to a coherent form. The final version of the decrees began with a sweeping pronouncement that was bound to resonate with the country’s restless peasantry: “The National Assembly abolishes the feudal regime entirely.” In reality, the deputies, many of whom possessed feudal rights, did not entirely mean what they said: although they abolished rights associated with personal serfdom without indemnity, they made most seigneurial dues “redeemable.” This meant the peasants would have to compensate their landlords for the loss of payments they had been entitled to collect. It would soon become clear that, by trying to satisfy peasants without damaging the financial interests of landowners, the Assembly had created a conflict that would prove impossible to resolve peacefully.
Whereas the provisions of the August 4 decrees on the redemption of seigneurial rights reflected a reluctance to threaten the wealth of the landowning classes, other parts of the legislation were more radical. The abolition of tax privileges and the promise that “collection shall be made from all citizens and on all property, in the same manner and in the same form,” the basic issue raised by Calonne’s proposals to the Assembly of Notables at the beginning of 1787, now seemed simply a matter of course. The nobility’s monopoly on hunting was done away with, and the seigneurial courts that had given landlords so much authority over their vassals abolished. The Church lost the tithes that had provided its income and the Assembly committed itself to “providing in some other manner for the expenses of divine worship” and the welfare services the clergy provided, a promise that would propel the deputies into a sweeping reform of the country’s largest institution that would have momentous consequences.11
The declaration that “venality of judicial and municipal offices is suppressed” implied the end of the parlements and of city governments made up of men who had purchased their positions. “Since a national constitution and public liberty are more advantageous to the provinces than the privileges which some of them enjoy,” the Assembly decreed, it would put an end to all special provincial, municipal, and corporate rights and create laws “common to all Frenchmen.” Provinces that had enjoyed special tax privileges or the right to trade with foreign countries without paying customs taxes lost those rights. The royal court did not escape unscathed. The August 4 decrees promised a review of the “pensions, favors, and stipends” handed out by the king. One institution clearly inimical to the new notions of liberty and equality that did survive was slavery. Under existing French law, the slaves in the colonies were a form of property, legally purchased and paid for, and none of the slaveowning deputies in the Assembly came forward to propose to give it up. The duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt’s proposal that the Assembly at least promise “to take up this matter before it ends its sessions” was ignored.12
Even as they did away with almost all the other fundamental institutions that had defined French society for so many centuries, however, the deputies still hoped to make the king their ally rather than their enemy: as the emotion-laden session of August 4 drew to its close, they declared Louis XVI “the Restorer of French Liberty.” In the face of the disorder in the country, they still felt the need for some kind of central authority. A few of them, especially Mirabeau, privately thought the sweeping measures offered an opportunity to strengthen the monarchy, since the decrees virtually eliminated the independent power of the nobility, the parlements, the Church, and the provinces, all traditionally obstacles to royal authority. But the deputies also arrogated to themselves two customary royal privileges: “In memory of the impressive and momentous deliberations just held for the welfare of France,” they ordered the striking of a commemorative medal, and they decreed that a special Te Deum ceremony, normally reserved for military victories and the births of royal heirs, be celebrated in every church in France.
The deputies hoped that their measures would bring an end to the wave of popular disorder in the country. Their rhetoric about abolishing the “feudal regime” spread the idea that France was truly undergoing a complete transformation. The entire complex of institutions that had existed up to 1789 was now stigmatized as the ancien régime, the “old regime,” with the implication that every aspect of the past had been unjust and irrational and now deserved to be replaced. The outlines of the new society were still vague, but the term ancien régime itself was a powerful weapon that could be wielded against individuals, institutions, and even patterns of behavior. Whatever the new order would look like, it would be a society that had been “regenerated,” another term that was suddenly on everyone’s lips. Carrying religious implications of purification, and biological overtones suggesting rebirth, the idea of regeneration, like that of the old regime, had a dynamic power of its own. Together, the two terms suggested an almost limitless project of transformation that would change not only society but also the very nature of the individuals who composed it.
Whether or not they saw themselves as regenerated, the French peasants, whom the decrees of August 4 had originally been intended to pacify, were certainly ready to bury the old regime and exercise their new rights. “The great news just arrived from Paris, of the utter abolition of tithes, feudal rights, game, warren, pigeons etc., has been received with the greatest joy by the mass of the people,” Arthur Young noted on August 12. Later in the month, he observed that “one would think that every rusty gun in Provence is at work, killing all sorts of birds”: country folk were taking advantage of their new right to hunt. “In the declarations, conditions and compensations are talked of,” Young added, “but an unruly ungovernable multitude seize the benefit of the abolition, and laugh at the obligations or recompense.”13 Seigneurial rights were not the only targets of the disorder, however. In Alsace, which had elected a violent anti-Semite, François Hell, as one of its deputies, peasants turned on the local Jewish population, accusing them of overcharging for the loans they provided. These riots were a warning of the passions that would be aroused by proposals to grant rights to France’s Jewish minority.
On August 10, while it was still trying to agree on the list of privileges and institutions that had been abolished on the night of August 4, the National Assembly moved to quell disorder by passing a law making the National Guard, the citizen militia improvised in Paris and other cities during the crisis in mid-July, an official military force separate from the royal army. Guardsmen were to take an oath “to be faithful to the nation, the King, and the law,” a formula that put the community of citizens above the monarch.14 Admission to the ranks of the new force was supposed to be limited to respectable property-owning citizens. “Our bourgeoisie is putting itself more and more on a military footing,” one observer wrote, going on to describe in loving detail the elegant and costly uniforms prescribed for those who joined its ranks.15 The guardsmen were intended to form a bulwark both against the king and the aristocracy and against the restless mass of the population that threatened to drive the Revolution beyond the limits to which the deputies hoped to confine it.
The August 4 session was the third major milestone of the Revolution. The first had been the session of June 17, when the deputies had named themselves the National Assembly and asserted their right to make the country’s laws; the second had been the journée, or revolutionary “day,” of July 14, when the population of Paris had stormed the Bastille and symbolically destroyed the authority of the king. In these three events, what decades of rational discussion of the need for reform had not accomplished was carried out in a surge of emotion. The changes affected not only members of the privileged orders but the entire population. Babeuf, for example, who had made his living drawing up the documents that itemized seigneurs’ rights, realized that “the profession of feudal rights specialists is over.”16 Hoping that the enthusiasm inspired by their actions, along with a combination of repressive measures and the promise of a successful new harvest, would bring the widespread disorder in the country under control, the National Assembly turned its attention to what the deputies considered to be their most important task: drafting the national constitution they had sworn to create.
The most enduring accomplishment of the National Assembly’s constitutional labors was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which was hammered out in a series of impassioned debates that stretched from the beginning of July to the end of August 1789. In these debates, the deputies struggled to translate the notions of liberty and equality that had been at the heart of political and philosophical disputes all through the eighteenth century into a single coherent statement. Most of the deputies initially thought that creating a declaration of rights would be a straightforward matter. The notion that all men were equally endowed with natural rights was basic to the thought of the Enlightenment, and it had been memorably expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the American Declaration of Independence. The debates about politics on both sides of the Atlantic had produced a broad consensus in favor of freedom of speech and expression, religious toleration, the protection of property, and the need for safeguards against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. That some form of representative government was the best way to protect these rights was also widely accepted.
By the fall of 1788, leaders of the patriot movement were busy drafting philosophically grounded declarations of rights based on the assumption that “all men are free and equal,” as Mirabeau put it in his own proposal. Such a declaration, Sieyès argued, would “imbue the generality of citizens with the principles essential to any human association that is legitimate, that is, free.” Condorcet agreed that citizens needed to “be aware of their rights.” He was also concerned, however, that men might have “errors or false ideas about the nature and extent of their rights.” One of his concerns was to ensure that property-owners would be allowed “to make any use of their property that is not contrary to the rights of others.” As befitted a onetime collaborator of Turgot, Condorcet saw government restrictions on the grain trade, village rules about farming, and artisan guilds as infringements on individual economic liberty, meaning that his definition of rights was bound to encounter opposition from the popular classes. On the other hand, he stressed the right of all citizens to an equal voice in the political process through participation in elections, a point that did not figure in the American bills of rights that influenced some of the French discussions.17
Another former collaborator of Turgot, the economist Dupont de Nemours, shared Condorcet’s concern about guaranteeing the freedom of economic enterprise, but the list of rights he wrote into his district’s cahier stood out because of its explicit insistence that “everyone in the state of childhood, disability, old age, illness, has the right to free assistance from others,” a call for welfare entitlements that went far beyond anything the American revolutionaries had considered. Dupont de Nemours also identified education as a basic right, on the grounds that citizens could not participate fully in civic life if they did not know how to read or write. The most “American” of the participants in the French discussions was Lafayette, who was in close touch with Thomas Jefferson. The distinctively Jeffersonian phrase “pursuit of happiness” appeared in an unpublished draft declaration that Lafayette shared with the American ambassador in June 1789.18
Even as some French revolutionaries were expanding the range of issues that might be incorporated into a bill of rights beyond what the Americans had included, others were questioning the wisdom of discussing “superfluous issues of abstract metaphysics,” as the deputy Jacques François Laurent de Visme put it. A former colonial official, Pierre Victor Malouet, pointed out that in Saint-Domingue twenty-four thousand white landowners were outnumbered by five hundred thousand black slaves. “It is therefore not permitted to a citizen to excite those five hundred thousand men and to call them to examine and exercise their rights as free men,” he insisted.19 Some Catholics also looked askance at the mania for declaring rights. Many clergy, battered for decades by the philosophes’ assaults, feared the consequences that freedom of speech and freedom of worship would have for the Church.
On July 9, 1789, the National Assembly’s constitutional committee, headed by Mounier, recommended that the constitution begin with a declaration of rights, but that the drafting of the declaration be postponed until the rest of the constitution had been completed. To give out a list of “arbitrary and philosophical ideas” before working out the other details of the constitution would open the door to demands that the Assembly might not want to adopt.20 Mounier’s report cleared the way for a legislative debate about a declaration of rights, and on July 11, Lafayette, prepared by his private meetings with Jefferson, became the first deputy to put forward an actual proposal in the Assembly. The crisis provoked by Necker’s dismissal later that day, however, sidetracked consideration of the matter for several weeks.
During this interval, proposals published by two of the most prominent deputies, Sieyès and Mounier, clarified the issues at stake in defining rights. The abbé Sieyès’s proposal was prefaced with a comprehensive treatise on the nature of society. This was in keeping with his argument that a meaningful declaration could not simply present a series of propositions as “articles of faith,” but needed to back them up with “reasoning and evidence.” His declaration distinguished between what he called “natural and civil rights,” those possessed by all members of society, on the one hand, and “political rights,” or the right to participate in making and carrying out the laws, on the other. Inventing terms that would play an important role in the subsequent course of the Revolution, he called the first category of rights “passive rights” and the second “active rights.” The latter, he argued, could only be given to those who had a real stake in society through their ownership of property. Those who should have only passive rights, in his view, included children, foreigners, and those too poor to pay any taxes. To this list he added women, “at least in the present state of things,” a qualification that suggested that their exclusion was not necessarily a fixed principle; he was one of the few male writers who even mentioned the question in 1789.21
Sieyès’s didactic proposal helped the majority of the deputies recognize what they did not want to see in such a document. They reacted more favorably to the short declarative sentences in the draft offered by Mounier, much of which would, with minor modifications, be incorporated in the final declaration. Mounier’s proposal, like Sieyès’s, was radical in its affirmations of equality. It declared that “nature has made men free and equal in rights” and said “the law should be the expression of the general will.” Its author’s caution was reflected, however, in its suggestion that government should not only protect citizens’ rights but also “prescribe duties.” Mounier’s draft included among the rights of man the “honor” that nobles prized, and it insisted that religious freedom should be allowed only insofar as it did “not trouble the public cult” of the Catholic Church.22
At the beginning of August, a four-day debate about the declaration revealed deep fissures in the Assembly. Conservatives wanted no declaration at all. The bishop of Auxerre argued that a declaration of rights might be appropriate in a society like that of the Americans, where all citizens owned property and were already equal, but that it was unsuited to France. Malouet foresaw that, in practice, laws would often have to restrict supposedly natural rights. “Why promise men the full extent of their rights when they are only allowed to exercise them within just limits?” he asked. If there was to be a declaration of rights in the constitution, many deputies insisted, it should be accompanied by a declaration of duties. Even the abbé Grégoire, one of the clergymen who was most enthusiastic about the Revolution, supported the idea. “In an insurrectionary moment when the people… recovers rights that had been invaded and is reborn to liberty, it can easily go to extremes,” he warned. “Show it not only the circle within which it can move, but also the limit that it cannot violate.”23
In the eyes of the majority of the deputies, however, the proposal to balance the declaration of rights with a declaration of duties contradicted the assertion that men, by their nature, possess natural rights, and that the laws they agree to obey are based on their own consent, not on obedience to religious maxims or blind respect for authority. During the daytime session on August 4, 1789, just prior to the evening session in which the deputies would do away with legal privileges, and following a debate so animated that at times “the speakers could not make themselves heard,” a roll-call vote took place. The final tally was 570 against a declaration of duties and 433 in favor of one.24 The debate itself, meant as a means of unifying the French nation, thus underlined the divisions that would increasingly beset the Revolution as it proceeded.
After the night of August 4, a committee headed by Mirabeau was appointed to assemble a single proposal for a declaration of rights that could be voted on. The committee’s proposal, presented on August 17, 1789, met with almost universal condemnation. Mirabeau himself confounded the Assembly, first by proposing to postpone any further discussion of the declaration until after the completion of the rest of the constitution, and then by arguing for the right to bear arms, an idea that had not been mentioned in any of the numerous proposed declarations circulated since the start of the year, and that would not be included in the final declaration. Discouraged and frustrated, the deputies decided to scrap the Mirabeau committee’s proposal. Instead they turned to a discussion of a much shorter and less controversial proposal that had been drawn up by the Sixth Bureau, one of the groups into which the Assembly had been divided to facilitate debate. “The draft lacked energy,” the deputy Gaultier de Biauzat later remarked. “But this was a much less dangerous defect than the errors that we had seen in many other projects.”25
On the next day, the legislators began going through the proposal article by article and immediately decided that its language was too flat and uninspired. They wanted a statement that would, as the deputy Duquesnoy put it, speak “to all eras and to all peoples.”26 Suddenly, an eloquent paragraph that Mirabeau had proposed as a preamble in the committee draft took on a new appeal. “The Representatives of the French People,” it said, “having constituted themselves as a National Assembly, concluding that ignorance, forgetting, or disregard for the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of governments, have resolved to set out, in a solemn declaration, the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man.” The sonorous words clearly announced the purpose of the document. To satisfy the more religious deputies, the Assembly added a phrase stating that they were acting “in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being.” The Assembly then moved on to the basic articles defining individual rights and the role of government in protecting them.
Like Mirabeau’s preamble, the propositions adopted were clearly and forcefully worded: “Article 1: Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can only be justified if they are useful to the community. Article 2: The purpose of any political association is to protect the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. Article 3: The basis of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No group, no individual can exercise any authority that does not expressly derive from it.” Article 4 defined liberty as the right to do anything that did not harm others, and Article 5 specified the circumstances under which individual liberty might be restricted by law. In a few sentences, the declaration outlined a theory of government as an agreement among free and equal citizens, defined the rights that the constitution was to protect, and asserted that only a representative government could claim legitimate authority.
A particularly heated debate broke out over the wording of what became the declaration’s sixth article, which dealt with the crucial question of how Article 3 would be carried out. Article 3 promised that only the nation could exercise the sovereign power to make laws. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, an aristocratic bishop destined for future notoriety as Napoleon’s foreign minister, proposed a paragraph that wove together the promise of representative government and the question of equal access to government positions. His opening sentence, “The law is the expression of the general will,” echoed Rousseau’s controversial Social Contract, although the concept of “general will” was so widespread in eighteenth-century French political thought that Louis XVI himself had used it in the summary of absolutist principles he copied out as a young teenager. The article then stated that “all citizens have the right to participate personally or through their representatives” in the making of laws. By declaring themselves the National Assembly, the deputies had already asserted their right to act on behalf of the voters who had chosen them, but Article 6 held out the theoretical possibility of a direct democracy in which citizens would participate personally in the lawmaking process. The article would also be cited by colonial slaveowners, who used it to insist that no changes could be made to their rights without their consent.
Talleyrand’s Article 6 continued by declaring that the law “must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes,” thereby barring any return to the special laws and privileges that had characterized the old regime. The last sentence of the article was the most contentious. It promised that, since all citizens were now legally equal, they would all be “equally eligible for all honors, appointments, and public positions, according to their capacities, and without regard to any distinction other than that of their virtues and their talents.” The sticking point for many deputies was the phrase “according to their capacities,” put forward by Mounier. Did it simply mean that no one should be eligible for a public office unless he had the ability to perform its functions, or was it a way of reintroducing a form of aristocracy by requiring a certain background or level of wealth for some appointments? “No motion suffered so many amendments, no session was ever so stormy,” one chronicler commented.27 After much sound and fury, the article was approved with Mounier’s amendment, but the violence of the debate showed how easy it would be to rouse fears about a return of special privileges that would violate the ideal of equality.
There was much less controversy about the next three articles of the declaration, which laid down guidelines concerning arrests, judicial procedures, and punishments. A main goal was to rule out arbitrary practices such as the lettres de cachet that Mirabeau had famously denounced before the Revolution. Suspects could only be indicted or arrested if they had violated a law that existed at the time of the supposed offense. They were to be presumed innocent until found guilty, and punishments were limited to what was “clearly and obviously necessary.” The deputies also declared, however, that “any citizen summoned or seized according to the law must obey immediately”: they did not intend to undermine respect for law and order.
If there was consensus about judicial rights, there was none with regard to the next two articles, which dealt with religious freedom and freedom of expression. The draft declaration from the Sixth Bureau strongly endorsed the necessity of religion and of a “public cult” or state-supported church. Its grudging concession to the idea of religious liberty provided only that “any citizen who does not disturb the established cult should not be restricted.” Advocates of religious freedom vehemently opposed this wording. The comte de Castellane proposed replacing the Sixth Bureau’s article with a single sentence: “No one should be harassed for his religious opinions, or restricted in the practice of his religion.” Mirabeau denounced the notion of toleration itself as “tyrannical… since the existence of an authority with the power to tolerate violates the liberty of thought, since what it tolerates, it might also not tolerate.” “It would be hard to imagine the cries, the murmurs, the intrigues, the declamations that this project excited,” the deputy Duquesnoy wrote in his journal.28
The debate continued more vehemently than ever during a long session on the following day. One deputy, the marquis de Clermont-Lodève, insisted that “without religion, it is useless to make laws, rules[;] one simply has to commit one’s life to chance.” In the longest speech of the debate about the declaration, the Protestant spokesman Rabaut Saint-Étienne replied that there could be no distinction between the rights of the majority and those of religious minorities. “Your principles are that liberty is a common good, and that all citizens have an equal right to it,” he said. “Liberty must then belong equally and in the same manner to all the French.” Going beyond the issue of his own group, he made the first appeal in the Assembly for rights to be granted to the Jews, “this people torn out of Asia, always wandering, always proscribed, always persecuted for almost eighteen centuries.” Rabaut’s views failed to carry the day: his colleagues instead adopted what Duquesnoy called a “detestable” and “absurd” article stating that “no one should be disturbed because of his opinions, even about religion [même religieuses], provided that their practice does not disturb the public order established by the law.” The word for “even” (même) seemed to suggest that religious ideas did not really deserve the same protection as others. Although Duquesnoy regretted the article’s timidity, he admitted that one reason the majority had voted for it was that “the tolerators made their demands with a heat and an activity that was a little intolerant.”29 As his comment suggested, the eagerness of some revolutionaries to establish complete religious freedom risked convincing the Catholic Church and its supporters that the Revolution was a campaign against them.
Deputies concerned about the limits on religious freedom in Article 10 were somewhat mollified by the wording of Article 11, which established freedom of the press but made it “subject to responsibility for abuse of this freedom in cases determined by law.” An intervention by the young lawyer from Arras, Maximilien Robespierre, made it into the parliamentary record: “You should not hesitate to emphatically declare the freedom of the press. Free men are never permitted to pronounce their rights in an ambiguous manner.” His colleagues would soon learn to recognize Robespierre’s uncompromising devotion to his principles. Many Catholics did not see freedom of the press in such a positive light. “How much has religion suffered from the attacks that licentious writings have made on it!” the bishop of Amiens exclaimed.30 On this point, however, the conservative members of the clergy found themselves isolated, and the article passed easily.
Having defined the individual freedoms that citizens were to be guaranteed in the constitution, the deputies now turned to a series of articles justifying certain constraints on them. Article 12 declared that “the protection of the rights of man and citizen requires a public force.” Article 13 drew the logical consequence that taxes were necessary to pay for that protection and for other government functions, so long as the burden was “shared equally among the citizens, according to their means.” When one deputy proposed wording that cast taxes in a negative light, by calling them “a portion taken away from private property,” Mirabeau replied that taxes were “the price you pay to possess your properties.”31 Article 14 gave the citizens “the right to ascertain, by themselves or through their representatives… the necessity of the general tax, to freely consent to it, to know how it is used, and to decide on its rate,” thus asserting the principle that there should be no taxation without representation. Article 15, which said that “society has the right to require every public official to account for his administration,” provided a legal basis for citizens to hold members of the government accountable if they violated the laws.
After nearly a week of sessions devoted to the declaration, the deputies were eager to finish the job. Their working document included an article on the separation of powers, a reflection of the ideas of Montesquieu and the American constitution-makers. The Assembly adopted the proposed wording as Article 16: “Any society in which the protection of rights is not assured, or the separation of power is not determined, has no constitution.” This statement barred any return to the principles of absolutism that Louis XV had so memorably enunciated in the “flagellation session” at the Paris Parlement in 1766.
At this point, many of the deputies were ready to turn to other aspects of the constitution. Some of them, however, still wanted to insert other articles into the declaration. Only one of them succeeded: the parlementary magistrate Adrien Duport, who proposed declaring that property was “an inviolable and sacred right.” Article 17’s defense of property led many critics, particularly the nineteenth-century socialist Karl Marx and his followers, to criticize the Declaration of Rights for elevating economic rights over other aspects of liberty. Duport’s article, however, also made property the only right of which individuals could be deprived: it included a provision for eminent domain, the appropriation of private property for “public necessity,” with appropriate compensation. At the time, the Assembly’s decision to cut off discussion of the declaration on August 26 was not meant to preclude the addition of other articles. On August 27, the deputies voted to “recognize that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen is not finished,” with a promise that they would consider adding to it when the rest of the constitution was completed.32
Although the deputies thought they would revisit the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen later on, the preamble and seventeen articles they had approved immediately took on a life of their own. Quickly translated into other languages and distributed throughout Europe and North America, the document became the authoritative statement of the principles of the French Revolution. By the time the Assembly finally completed the rest of the constitution in August 1791, the thought of changing it had already become inconceivable. According to the deputy Jacques-Guillaume Thouret, “this declaration has acquired… a sacred and religious character. It has become the creed of all the French, it is published in every format, it is posted on the walls in all public places and even in the homes of peasants; it has been used to teach children to read.”33
DECLARATION OF RIGHTS: In this allegorical engraving, the National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen separates the sunlit world of liberty from the dark realm of feudal rights and privileges. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Once uttered, the words of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen changed the world. Although the course of the Revolution would lead legislators to replace the original declaration with not just one but two modified versions, a more radical one in 1793 and a more conservative one in 1795, the basic principles articulated in 1789 endured. All three declarations taught Frenchmen to regard themselves not as subjects obligated to obey a superior authority, but as rights-bearing citizens equal to one another and entitled to a voice in making the laws under which they lived. Once this idea had been broadcast as an official pronouncement in the name of the nation, rather than simply philosophical speculation, it proved impossible to eradicate entirely from the minds of people around the world. Both for the French and for the inhabitants of other countries, it became a definitive statement of natural rights. The declaration’s seventeen articles explicitly contradicted the basic premises underlying absolute monarchy and the hierarchy of social privileges that had characterized the old regime. Even those who rejected constitutional government and individual freedom, such as the conservative monarchs of nineteenth-century Europe and the totalitarian dictators of the twentieth century, would have to come to terms with it, publicly refuting its premises rather than simply ignoring them.
At the same time, the Declaration of Rights forced its own supporters to confront new questions. That the document’s wording would encourage claims the deputies had not considered became clear even before its drafting was completed. On August 26, 1789, the Jews of Paris became the first group to cite the language of the declaration to seek rights for themselves. Addressing the deputies, the petitioners asserted that “in returning man to his original dignity… you have not meant to make any distinction between one man and another; this title belongs to us as to all other members of society; the rights that derive from it thus belong equally to us.” Representatives of the free men of color in the French colonies made similar arguments, and the doctrine of natural rights clearly threatened the basis of slavery. The issue of women’s rights was never mentioned in the debates, given the all-male body of legislators, but women were among the spectators in the galleries at Versailles, and some of them no doubt thought that they, too, deserved equal rights. Satirical pamphlets inspired by the declaration raised questions about sexual freedom: one, claiming to speak in the name of the prostitutes of the Palais-Royal, argued for their right “to do anything they want with their bodies,” and therefore to practice their trade openly; another cited “the success of the Rights of Man” to defend homosexual acts.34
The issue of how inclusive the declaration’s definitions of “man” and of “rights” were was only one of the questions the document raised. The deputies had been concerned to maintain a balance between the affirmation of individual liberty and the need for order. But would the citizens whose freedom they had promised to protect be ready to acknowledge laws passed by their representatives as expressions of their own will that needed to be obeyed? Or would they cite their right of “resistance to oppression” to justify opposition to laws they did not like? In a society with such a yawning gulf between rich and poor, would the mass of the population accept the document’s emphasis on property rights, or would the poor insist on the “right of subsistence” that had already been spoken of during the flour war in 1775, but that was not mentioned in the declaration? Even as it fixed the principles of the new order that would replace the old regime, the Declaration of Rights opened new issues for debate.