Revolution and the Republic

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by Jeremy Jennings


  nature of man. Recognizing that of these rights it was the right to property that was

  the most contested, Roederer went on to provide an extensive defence of property

  and its hereditary possession that combined the language of Locke with that of

  social utility.

  The Lockean dimension of Roederer’s argument was clearly visible in his assertion

  that ‘it is a natural right that an object becomes the possession of the first man who,

  in order to satisfy his needs, mixes his labour with it’.101 To challenge this was to

  challenge a man’s right to live. In response to those who argued that a man required

  possession only of the product of the earth and not of the earth itself, Roederer replied

  that a man needed not only food today but also to be free of worries for the future.

  Property, in other words, provided security as well as liberty. The argument from

  utility, in contrast, asserted that common ownership was effective neither as a means of

  satisfying human needs nor of enhancing overall production. The needs of individuals

  varied and only private property could ensure the expenditure of the amount of labour

  appropriate to their satisfaction. Moreover, it was not merely a question of enjoying

  the benefits of property but of developing the means of production through industrie

  and the division of labour. The inequality of wealth, Roederer added, was not a

  necessary consequence of private property and it could in any case be diminished

  through the introduction of what he described as ‘des institutions douces’. He

  categorically denied Robespierre’s charge that private property was a source of waste

  and luxury.

  98 Ibid. 29. See ‘De la Terreur’, in Roederer, L’Esprit de la Révolution de 1789, 197–233.

  99 Pierre-Louis Roederer, Cours d’organisation sociale, in Œuvres complètes (1859), viii. 129–305.

  100 Ibid. 137.

  101 Ibid. 235.

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  Rights, Liberty, and Equality

  The argument, then, is that as the language of rights became embedded in

  Robespierrean discourse and subverted into an instrument of Jacobin dictatorship,

  men of a liberal disposition such as Daunou and Roederer found themselves

  increasingly ill at ease with a form of speech that threatened to turn an equality

  of rights into an aspiration towards both political and economic equality. One

  dimension of this––displayed with brilliance by the Abbé Sieyès––was a penchant

  for increasingly complex constitutional and electoral arrangements designed to

  place limitations upon the powers of popular sovereignty. Another was to argue

  that formal declarations of rights were superfluous and largely ineffective as a means

  of preventing the abuse of power.102 Still another was the attempt to develop a

  political economy which sought to unite patterns of industriousness––especially

  frugality––with the republican manners associated with moderate wealth and the

  absence of social hierarchy.103 More generally, in the years immediately following

  the fall of the Jacobins, the Idéologues sought to stabilize the Republic and to place it

  upon solid institutional foundations. If Roederer spoke of the need to provide a

  government which combined ‘rectitude’ with ‘strength’,104 the physician Pierre

  Cabanis argued for a government ‘capable of efficiently protecting its citizens

  without ever being able to subvert public liberty’.105 A large republic of 30 million

  inhabitants, the latter argued, needed ‘a vigorous executive power’.106 For his part,

  Destutt de Tracy developed a detailed programme, covering educational, econom-

  ic, and domestic reform, that in political terms focused upon the need to restructure

  the State and to ensure the rigorous application of ‘repressive laws’.107

  Of greater significance was the attempted development of idéologie itself. As

  conceived by Destutt de Tracy, idéologie, or the science of thought and action, was

  the fundamental building block upon which the possibility of all human advance

  rested. This, in turn, entailed an almost limitless enthusiasm for the possibilities of

  conceptual reform, a characterization of religious belief and speculative metaphysics

  as obsolete sources of ignorance, and the search for means of perfecting our

  intellectual capacities. Less clear is the extent to which Destutt de Tracy was able

  to resolve the tension arising from his need to reconcile an advocacy of limited

  government with a philosophical position pointing towards government by an

  educated elite and a conception of objective interests. Even less certain is the extent

  to which the Idéologues, when faced with the demise of civil and political liberties,

  rekindled their original enthusiasm for the language of rights. Cheryl Welch takes

  the view that the search for stable government led the Idéologues to emphasize ‘the

  utilitarian side of the revolutionary legacy’.108 Martin Staum, by contrast, asserts

  102 Jean-Baptiste Say, ‘Quelques idées sur le projet de Constitution de la Commission des Onze’,

  Décade philosophique littéraire et politique, 6 (1795), 79–90.

  103 Richard Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of

  Jean-Baptiste Say’s Political Economy (Oxford, 2001).

  104 Pierre-Louis Roederer, Du Gouvernement (1795), 14.

  105 Pierre Cabanis, Quelques considérations sur l’organisation sociale en général et particulièrement sur

  la nouvelle constitution (1799), 1.

  106 Ibid. 39–40.

  107 Destutt de Tracy, Quels sont les moyens de fonder la morale chez un peuple? (1798).

  108 Welch, Liberty and Utility, 6.

  Rights, Liberty, and Equality

  53

  that ‘the Idéologue confrontation with arbitrary power led to a resurgence of the

  language of rights’.109

  To resolve this issue we should look at the two most important treatises on

  politics provided by the Idéologues in the periods of the First Empire and of the

  Restoration: Destutt de Tracy’s Commentaire sur ‘l’Esprit des lois’ de Montesquieu,

  written in 1806–7 and first published in French in 1817,110 and Daunou’s Essai sur

  les garanties individuelles qui réclame l’Etat actuel de la société, published in 1819.111

  Daunou provided a compelling account of the iniquities of arbitrary and

  despotic government. It was a self-perpetuating system that corrupted men and

  rested upon ambition and hatred. Nevertheless, as a counter-model he spoke of the

  need for guarantees of, rather than rights to, personal liberty, domestic security, and

  the development of industrie through production and trade. Liberty itself was

  defined as the ‘full enjoyment of these individual guarantees’,112 with their safe-

  guard resting not in ‘general propositions’ but in the ‘positive rules’ associated with

  long-established practice. Amongst the desirable practices listed were freedom of

  opinion and trial by jury. ‘Nowhere’, Daunou wrote, in stark contrast to the

  position he had adopted in his Essai sur la constitution of 1793, ‘will I have resort

  to abstract principles, to the hypothesis of the social pact, to a discussion of its

  clauses, or to the anterior or natural rights that it presupposes.’113

  Destutt de Tracy’s Commentaire sur ‘l’Esprit des lois’ de Mon
tesquieu was written

  for Thomas Jefferson. In a footnote to the text he kindly commented that the

  declaration of rights presented by Jefferson’s friend, Lafayette, to the National

  Assembly on 11 July 1789 remained ‘the best that had been produced’.114 In the

  main body of the text, however, he argued that such declarations were a sign of

  political immaturity. It was far better to preface a constitution with a set of general

  principles which had their origin in ‘the observation of man’ and which, Destutt de

  Tracy believed, could be reduced to three ‘eternal verities’: governments are made

  for the governed; there should never exist in society a power that could be changed

  only by recourse to violence or that, when changed, altered the entire workings

  of society; governments should always seek to preserve the independence of the

  nation and the liberty of its members.115 In general terms, therefore, Destutt de

  Tracy recommended a system of what he termed ‘national government’, resting

  upon free but indirect elections, civil liberty (including freedom of the press and

  from arbitrary arrest), legal but not economic equality, and a society in which every

  citizen would benefit from the liberalization of commerce and industry. However,

  the limitations of his attachment to rights were amply demonstrated by his

  argument that women should be excluded from public life. ‘Women’, he wrote,

  ‘as sensate and reasoning beings, certainly have the same rights and, roughly

  109 Martin Staum, ‘Individual Rights and Social Control: Political Science in the French Institute’,

  Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (1987), 422.

  110 Destutt de Tracy, Commentaire sur ‘l’Esprit des lois’ de Montesquieu, in Œuvres (1819).

  111 Pierre-Claude-François Daunou, Essai sur les garanties individuelles que réclame l’Etat actuel de la

  société (1819).

  112 Ibid. 210.

  113 Ibid. 6.

  114 Destutt de Tracy, Commentaire, 255.

  115 Ibid. 252–3.

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  Rights, Liberty, and Equality

  speaking, the same capacities as men; but they are not called upon to assert these

  rights and to employ this capacity in the same way.’ Women, in short, were

  destined for ‘domestic functions’ and men for ‘public functions’.116 More telling

  still was Destutt de Tracy’s definition of liberty as the ‘power to exercise one’s will’.

  To be free was to be able to do what one wished.117

  This argument received its fullest expression in the fourth part of Destutt

  de Tracy’s Elémens d’Idéologie, the Traité de la volonté et de ses effets.118 The

  contention was that our needs and means, rights and duties, derived from the faculty

  of the will and this in turn was defined entirely in terms of the desire to maximize

  pleasure and to minimize pain. Liberty was understood as the power to execute our

  will, to act according to our desires, and therefore was ‘the solution to all our ills,

  the fulfilment of our desires, the satisfaction of our needs’.119 As such, liberty was to

  be equated with happiness. Our rights were equal to our needs and, consequently,

  the ‘rights of one person are nothing to do with the rights of another’.120 Our duty was

  to satisfy these needs ‘without any extraneous consideration’. Restrictions upon our

  rights only emerged with the appearance of the social conventions associated with the

  concepts of justice and injustice but this changed merely the means of implementation

  and not the substance of our duty. The goal of the ‘good society’, accordingly, was

  always to augment the power of each person by making that of others converge with

  it and by preventing them from reciprocally nullifying each other.121 Viewed thus,

  society could be described as ‘purely and uniquely a continuous series of exchanges’122

  and therefore the remainder of Destutt de Tracy’s argument focused upon an analysis

  of the mechanisms of production and distribution.

  There was much of merit in Destutt de Tracy’s argument, not least his fulmina-

  tions against the desire for luxury displayed by les oisifs and his determination to

  defend the merits of the various categories––be they manufacturers or merchants––

  who comprised la classe laborieuse. This entailed, first, a rejection of the physiocratic

  notion that agriculture was the primary source of wealth and, second, a repudiation

  of the attachment of the physiocrats to a centralized state as a vehicle of economic

  progress. At issue was a fundamental disagreement about the nature of productive

  activity, Destutt de Tracy wishing to argue that to produce was to give to things a

  utility that they did not previously possess and, therefore, that all labour from

  which utility arose was productive. But his text does indicate how far the utilitarian

  equation of liberty with the satisfaction of individual desires left him with the

  troubling conclusion that what made one form of social organization preferable to

  another was only the extent to which it enhanced the happiness of its members.

  The argument was not framed in terms of the protection of rights––be they natural,

  civil, or political––and the actual form a government took––beyond the distinction

  between ‘national’ and ‘special’ governments––was not considered to be over-

  important. The government that governed best, that maximized our liberty, was the

  116 Destutt de Tracy, Commentaire, 193.

  117 Ibid. 154.

  118 Destutt de Tracy, Elémens d’Idéologie, iv. Traité de la volonté et de ses effets (1815).

  119 Ibid. 110.

  120 Ibid. 130.

  121 Ibid. 137.

  122 Ibid. 144.

  Rights, Liberty, and Equality

  55

  government that made us the happiest.123 This was a far cry from the sentiments

  informing the debates of the National Assembly in 1789.

  V

  It would take a mind of far greater subtlety than that possessed by any of the

  Idéologues to appreciate the dangers of this unwillingness properly to discriminate

  between the claims of utility and those of rights. ‘Right’, Benjamin Constant

  recognized, ‘is a principle, utility is only a result’ and to subject the former to the

  latter was like subjecting ‘the eternal rules of arithmetic to our daily interests’.

  Nothing could excuse a man who assisted a law he believed to be iniquitous, a judge

  who sat in a court he knew to be illegal, or a henchman who arrested a man he knew

  to be innocent in order to deliver him up to the executioner. To justify that

  statement, Constant not only outlined what he took to be the ambiguities inherent

  in the concept of utility (especially as it had been set out by Jeremy Bentham) but

  also fell back upon a position that, in his view, had been the guiding thread behind

  the aspirations of 1789: ‘all citizens possess individual rights independently of every

  social and political authority and any authority that violates these rights becomes

  illegitimate’. For Constant, these rights were summarized as the rights to individual

  and religious liberty, freedom of speech, the possession of property, and protection

  from arbitrary interference. Most importantly, they were to be enjoyed by all and

  could not therefore be abrogated in the name
of some utilitarian calculation.124

  That the restored Bourbon monarchy proved itself unable to honour even the

  modest concessions made to such a doctrine in the Charte of 1814 was itself

  testimony to the limited appeal of the language of rights. Much the same occurred

  with the advent of the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe. The Charte of 1830, like

  its predecessor, reaffirmed many of the basic principles of the declaration of 1789––

  equality before the law, the equal eligibility of all for civil and military posts, the

  inviolability of property––but did so without speaking of the rights of the individ-

  ual citizen.125 This was probably sufficient to guarantee France further years of

  political turmoil.

  Other pressing matters were on the horizon. During the revolutionary decade,

  what was understood by property was essentially land. Suggestions for the redistribu-

  tion of private wealth, for example, usually took the form of demands for periodic

  redivision of landed property––the Jacobins opposed primogeniture for this reason––

  rather than the socialization of the means of production. This began to change in the

  early decades of the nineteenth century as it became increasingly obvious to some that

  the bourgeoisie appeared to be the principal beneficiaries of the emerging industrial

  123 Destutt de Tracy, Commentaire, 161.

  124 See Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven,

  Conn., 1984), 125–7 and Biancamaria Fontana, Benjamin Constant and the Post-Revolutionary Mind

  (New Haven, Conn., 1991), 114–17.

  125 See Pierre Rosanvallon, La Monarchie impossible: Les Chartes de 1814 et de 1830 (1994).

  56

  Rights, Liberty, and Equality

  system. This was a view that received dramatic confirmation with the uprising by

  starving workers in Lyons in 1834. The eradication of pauperism, as it became

  known, called for radical measures. To these demands were then added, especially

  from 1840 onwards, a secularized religious impulse that saw the attainment of

  equality as being the key component in the advance towards the rediscovered goal

  of fraternity.126 A good example of this style of thinking is Pierre Leroux’s De

  l’Egalité, where equality was described as ‘a divine law’ anterior to all others and

 

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