where Christianity was repeatedly characterized as conveying the same message as the
revolutionary triptych of ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’.127
No one gave clearer expression of this republican attachment to equality than
socialist Louis Blanc. Liberty, ‘without equality and fraternity, its two immortal
sisters’, Blanc wrote, would only produce ‘the liberty of the savage condition’.128
This was what existed under the capitalist system of unbridled competition. Blanc’s
response, set out famously in L’Organisation du travail,129 was to recommend the
establishment of ateliers sociaux, workshops for which funds would be put forward
by government. This was not to be a system of enforced collectivization or of state-
imposed equality but one where equality would emerge through the principle and
practice of association. The end to be pursued was unambiguous. It was one where
‘all men have an equal right to the full development of their unequal faculties, the
instruments of production belonging to everyone like the air and the sun’.130
From this perspective, liberty was seen not just as a ‘right’ but as the ‘ability’ to
exercise our faculties to the full. If, therefore, Blanc recognized the importance
of those liberties that he himself listed as liberty of the press, of conscience, and of
association, he believed that our conception of liberty had to be extended so as to
embrace a range of liberties that would abolish the servitude arising from poverty
and hunger. These he described as the liberty to life, to pursue one’s aptitudes, to
choose a job, and the liberty that would arise from physical abundance. Only when
the latter had been satisfied would it be possible to speak of ‘l’homme libre’.131 By
liberty, then, was meant not just the narrow conception of the absence of restraint
but something tied to a different vision of society: the social Republic.
With the Revolution of February 1848 and the fall of the July Monarchy,
republicans for the first time saw the opportunity of establishing a Republic that
would embody not just the political equality of the ballot box but also the social
and economic demands they had campaigned for over the last decade.132 The
former goal was attained (almost without debate) through the proclamation of
direct and universal male suffrage but on the latter questions there proved to be no
126 See Marcel David, Le Printemps de la fraternité: Genèse et vicissitudes 1830–1851 (1992). See also
Michel Borgetto, La Devise ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’ (1997) and Mona Ozouf, ‘La Révolution française
et l’idée de fraternité’, in L’Homme régénéré: Essais sur la Révolution française (1989), 158–82.
127 Pierre Leroux, De l’Égalité (Boussac, 1848). This text was first published in 1838.
128 Louis Blanc, ‘La Liberté’, Le Nouveau monde: Journal historique et politique, 8 (1850), 1–12.
129 Blanc, L’Organisation du travail (1840).
130 Blanc, ‘La Liberté’, 3.
131 Ibid. 5–6.
132 See Maurice Agulhon, 1848 ou l’apprentissage de la République 1848–1852 (1973).
Rights, Liberty, and Equality
57
agreement. Work for some 100,000 people was created through the establishment
of national workshops but these, despite popular protest in support of them, were
quickly closed. At the heart of the question were the newly formulated claims to
‘the right to work’ and ‘the right to assistance’. As on previous occasions, the
passions aroused and arguments deployed over these issues were clearly visible in
the debates of the National Assembly as its members sought to define the principles
of the new constitution.133
Let us note that the deputies began by discussing whether the constitution
should be preceded by a preamble outlining general principles and rights. Despite
the familiar arguments that such a preamble would be ‘vague’, ‘obscure’, ‘theatri-
cal’, and ‘metaphysical’, serving no useful purpose, it was the proponents of a
preamble, bolstered by the rhetorical power of poet Alphonse de Lamartine, who
carried the day.134 Next, the deputies turned their attention to the content of the
preamble and specifically to the question of whether it should include the right to
work. Discussion was nothing if not animated, as all those involved recognized that
the outcome would define the character of the February Revolution itself. ‘The
rights which you have declared to date’, argued the socialist Victor Considérant,
‘are old rights, those that can be called bourgeois rights; the right to work is a new
right, it is the right of the workers.’135 If it were not granted the workers would
conclude that the revolution was over. Other speakers, such as parliamentary
deputies Ledru-Rollin and Crémieux, continued this theme, locating demands
for a recognition of the right to work within the tradition of ‘the great revolution’.
More typical was the measured response of the deputy for the Indre, Rollinat.
Responding to Alexis de Tocqueville’s charge that the February Revolution ran the
risk of making the State ‘the master of every man’, he countered that 1848 was ‘a
social revolution in the sense that it sought to secure the continuous and progressive
improvement of the physical and mental state of the people through means
consistent with the sacred right of property’.136 The workers therefore had to
accept that work was both a right and a duty and, if they did so, the State would
help them within ‘the limits of the possible’. The State, in short, would recognize
‘the right not to die of hunger’.
As the political tide turned against the radicals––in June 1848 an uprising by
Parisian workers was ruthlessly crushed by the army led by General Cavaignac––it
was the arguments of Adolphe Thiers against the right to work that secured the
greater audience.137 A reluctant supporter of the Republic,138 Thiers’s contention
was that all societies rested upon three fundamental principles: property, liberty,
133 See François Luchaire, Naissance d’une constitution: 1848 (1998); Piero Craveri, Genesi di une
constituzione: Libertà et socialismo nel dibattito constituzionale del 1848 in Francia (Naples, 1985).
134 Le Moniteur Universel: Journal Officiel de la République Française, 251 (6 Sept. 1848), 2333.
135 Craveri, Genesi di une constituzione, 123–4.
136 Le Moniteur Universel, 258 (14 Sept. 1848), 2458.
137 Adolphe Thiers, Discours de M. Thiers, prononcés à l’Assemblée nationale dans la discussion de la
constitution, septembre et octobre 1848 (1848): repr. in Discours parlementaires de M. Thiers (1880), viii.
57–106.
138 Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877) was one of the major intellectual and political figures of 19th-
cent. France. A liberal conservative, he later became the Third Republic’s first head of government.
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Rights, Liberty, and Equality
and competition. It was through work that one acquired property. It was though
work that one expressed one’s liberty. It was through work that one attempted to do
better than one’s neighbour. Everyone, Thiers argued, benefited from these prin-
ciples, including the worker, whose standard of living had risen steadily over the
laziness and idleness; it would bankrupt industry and bankrupt the State. Even
more seriously, it was an invitation to insurrection. Have you, Thiers asked his
fellow deputies in the phrase reminiscent of Rivarol’s argument in the 1790s,
thought of ‘the danger in which you will find yourselves when [the unemployed]
present themselves before you, armed not just with the imposing demands that
arise from their misery but also with an article of your constitution?’139 For the
State to offer help, as it should do, was not the same thing as to grant a right.140
Louis Blanc’s reply was spirited to say the least.141 Accepting that the right to
property derived from work, he insisted that the ownership of property when not a
consequence of work was ‘illegitimate’ and that work which did not result in the
ownership of property was ‘oppressive’. More to the point, he argued that if ‘man
has the right to life, by the same token he should have the right to the means to
preserve it’.142 At the level of the individual this entailed a recognition of the right
to work; at the level of society it demanded the replacement of a system of
competition by a system of association: socialism
Nevertheless, it was the argument against the right to work that carried the day,
leaving the preamble to the Constitution with no more than a recognition of the
obligation of the Republic, ‘through fraternal assistance, to secure the existence of
those citizens in need, either by providing them with work within the limits of its
resources or, for want of a family, by giving help to those who are not in a position
to work’.143
Where did this now place discussion of rights, liberty, and equality within
republican discourse? For guidance we can turn to Charles Renouvier’s Manuel
Républicain de l’Homme et du Citoyen, written in 1848 and commissioned by the
Ministry of Public Instruction as a civic catechism for the new Republic.144 If the text
itself betrays both the heated debates of the period as well as Renouvier’s conviction
that the Republic should embody ‘justice’ and ‘fraternity’, it also relied upon a formal,
legalistic definition of liberty as ‘the power to do everything that does not harm
others, everything that does not infringe upon the rights of others’.145 The ‘principal
139 Discours de M. Thiers, 50. A similar statement was made by Duvergier de Hauranne: ‘Let us
imagine that, in a situation of crisis, a million workers, or 500,000 if you wish, arrive with the article of
your constitution in their hands and ask you for work and for a wage when the coffers of the State are
empty, when taxes are not being paid, when there is no credit left: what would you do?’ Le Moniteur
Universel, 257 (13 Sept. 1848), 2419.
140 See also Thiers, De la propriété (1848).
141 Louis Blanc, Le Socialisme: Droit au Travail: Réponse à M. Thiers (1848).
142 Ibid. 78.
143 See Luchaire, Naissance d’une constitution, 219–20.
144 Charles Renouvier, Manuel Républicain de l’Homme et du Citoyen (1848). Quotations are from
the 1904 edn. See Marie-Claude Blais, Au principe de la République: Le Cas Renouvier (2000).
145 Renouvier, Manuel Républicain, 145.
Rights, Liberty, and Equality
59
liberties’ that were ‘natural’ and that it was the responsibility of the Republic to
guarantee for its citizens were taken to be ‘the liberty of conscience, the liberty of
speech, the liberty to write and to publish’. To these were then added three more
liberties: ‘individual liberty’, defined as the right not to be accused, arrested, or
detained without proper authority; ‘political liberty’, described as the right of the
citizen to obey only those laws authorized by his representatives and to pay only those
taxes to which he had consented; ‘the liberty to assemble and to associate’, where
special mention was made of the activities of religion and politics.
The complications began to arise when Renouvier considered liberties associated
with the right to property. ‘The most important outcome of a well-ordered
Republic’, he wrote, ‘is to guarantee for each citizen the protection of his person,
of his rights and of everything that belongs to him.’146 This included a citizen’s
property, described as ‘the fruits of a man’s work’. Accordingly, Renouvier con-
cluded that a law taking away the right to property ‘would very much diminish the
liberty of man, would place the citizen in a position of too great a dependence upon
the Republic’.147 Property was a stimulant to work and a cause of material progress.
What did this mean for an understanding of equality? Renouvier’s starting point
was that all men were ‘born equal in rights’ and that this was affirmed through ‘the
empire of law’. The emphasis therefore fell upon the civil equalities declared in
1789: ‘The law of the Republic does not accept any distinction between citizens
based upon birth or any hereditary possession of power. Civil and political func-
tions can never be held as property.’148 The law, in terms of both protection and
punishment, was the same for all. Equality of conditions, however, was to be
rejected because ‘it could be established only by depriving citizens of their liberty’.
How, then, could equality be made compatible with liberty? Renouvier’s answer,
in true quarante-huitard fashion, was to call upon the sentiment of fraternity. ‘It is’,
he wrote, ‘fraternity that leads citizens, brought together through their representa-
tives in parliament, to reconcile all their rights, in such a way that they remain free
men whilst, as far as possible, becoming equals.’149
What substance could be given to this aspiration? Renouvier was clear that the
rights of property were not without limits and that industry and commerce could,
to an extent, be subject to public regulation. Unfettered competition had led to
abuses and exploitation. He therefore specifically recommended that the State
should provide cheap credit, that associations of workers should be allowed to run
factories and workshops, and that land should be redistributed more equally. The
interesting part of Renouvier’s argument, however, lay elsewhere. If Renouvier
went further by embracing what he termed ‘the right to work and to subsistence
through work’, he gave a similarly prominent place to what was to become one of
the great republican leit-motifs of the future: ‘the right to receive an education’.150
This education was to be the same for all. It was to be not merely a technical
education but also a moral and civic education. Its aim was ‘to elevate the soul’.
Henceforth, it was to be education, rather than the pursuit and implementation
146 Ibid. 161.
147 Ibid. 169.
148 Ibid. 203–4.
149 Ibid. 206.
150 Ibid. 207.
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Rights, Liberty, and Equality
of demands for economic equality, that would be the motor of republican
equality.151
Renouvier’s text, therefore, tried its best to produce a synthesis of republican
thinking that would preserve the radical aspiration
towards greater equality
whilst seeking to avoid the rhetorical excesses of those who challenged the very
right to property. It is intriguing to note that, when faced with the hypothetical
situation of there being too many people for the number of jobs available,
Renouvier’s response was not to contemplate further assaults upon the right of
property but rather to suggest that the Republic should establish a colonial empire.
‘The earth’, he wrote, ‘is vast and still largely unpopulated. Could we not, if the need
arose, create new Frances overseas?’152 Similarly, Renouvier’s text was imbued with
the desire to reconcile Christianity with the cause of the Republic: fraternity was
nothing but ‘the application to society of the doctrine of Christ’. In this his position
was not much different from that of such liberals as Alexis de Tocqueville who, while
opposing the right to work, regarded the act of helping the poor as ‘Christianity
applied to politics’.153 Moreover, the descent of the Second Republic into a revived
and modernized form of Bonapartism left Renouvier bitterly disillusioned and
recognizing that the philosophy of the Republic had to be grounded on more than
vague humanitarian sentiment. On this project, beginning with the Essais de critique
générale and ending with Science et la morale, he was to spend the best part of the next
twenty years.154
Nor was Renouvier to be alone in this, as there can be no doubt that a significant
transformation in the thinking of republicans took place during the years of
Napoleon III’s Second Empire. Moreover, that transformation was diverse in
both content and intellectual inspiration, republicanism drawing upon a wide
variety of ideological and political influences.155 By way of illumination, we can
turn our attention to the writings of Jules Barni as a guide to what arguably became
the dominant republican position on the related issues of rights, liberty, and
equality.156
Like Renouvier, Barni spent a significant proportion of these years engrossed in
the study of Immanuel Kant, producing a series of commentaries and translations
of his major works. He did much of this during the 1850s in what amounted to
self-imposed internal exile––having resigned from his teaching position following
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