The Rights of Man and Revolution in France Introduction

Despite the push to eradicate a class based system during the Enlightenment and events leading up to the French Revolution, it was replaced instead by classes based on property and wealth rather than nobility. Two leading figures for and against the new classes were Robespierre and Sieyes. Sieyes supported separating voting rights from human rights while Robespierre believed voting rights were inherent rights of man. Robespierre’s ideals deteriorated as he gained power. The rights of man were essentially an Enlightenment notion. Thomas Paine had written The Rights of Man in 1791 as the French Revolution was underway and he had even gone there to show his support for it; however, Robespierre had him locked away and schedule for execution, not trusting the American. In short, France was a hotbed of insurrection, chaos, mistrust, and change. The politics of governance were in flux and the French Revolution, in which Equality, Fraternity and Liberty were meant to be the ideals, would inadvertently usher in an era of Napoleonic rule.

The New Government

Montesquieu had attempted to identify the three fundamental types of government when he described the republican, the monarchical and the despotic forms. In a republic, the people (or their representatives) hold the power; in a monarchy, one man (the king) holds the power though he is constrained to some degree by law and custom; in a despotism, one man without constraint of the rule of law holds the power.[footnoteRef:2] Jones notes that in France prior to the Revolution, the rule had been absolutist monarchical with the Bourbons having “refurbished monarchical power” with a “dynastic claim to quasi divinity.”[footnoteRef:3] But this claim would not stand the test of time. By the end of the century, the king and queen would be dead, and the leaders of the nation would be regicides, arguing among themselves over how a people’s government should be formed. [2: Montesquieu. “Montesquieu on Government Systems (1748).” French Revolution, January 18, 2018. Accessed November 4, 2019, https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/montesquieu-on-government-systems-1748/.] [3: Colin Jones, The Great Nation (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 12.]

In the 18th century, the rights of man were not a matter to be taken lightly or even something that one took for granted. As Lynn Hunt points out, one of the big questions over right was the issue of voting—the distinction between political and civil rights: “Political rights guaranteed equal participation; civil rights guaranteed equal treatment before the law in matters concerning marriage, property, and inheritance.”[footnoteRef:4] Nowadays, the assumption is that people should have both civil and political rights and that these are part of their basic human rights—but such was not the notion in France. Certainly it was not the notion in America, where the test run for the French Revolution was conducted via the Declaration of Independence and the War that followed. [4: Lynn Hunt, \"Introduction: The Revolutionary Origins of Human Rights.\" In The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief History with Documents, 2nd Edition, edited by Lynn Hunt, 1-31 (Boston: Bedford, 2016), 1.]

The Influence of the Naturalists on the Notion of Class

Rousseau had helped to champion the idea of these rights, but he never moved beyond a vague, romantic idea of emancipation and freedom. Liberty was like an 18th century intellectual drug that fueled many a heady...

It was not necessarily something that anyone expected or foresaw needing to be writ down in fine, well-examined terms. Rousseau’s doctrines had helped to inspire the surge in Revolutionary ardor, but had done little in terms of developing a scholastic-like approach to the problem of governance. Those with a more scholastic-like mind, men like Abbe Sieyes, for example, demonstrated a bit more restraint in their approach to the rights of man than did Robespierre, who pushed for total equality and saw it as one of the noblest virtues of the revolution.
Natural law as summarized by Diderot in the middle of the 18th century in France had done enough to provoke outcry among the Old World political and religious classes. Like most of the Enlightenment thinkers, the idea of Original Sin was rejected, and naturalism like what Rousseau envisioned was viewed as wholly appropriate and acceptable and something that the Old World institutions blocked and opposed on principle because the leaders of the Old World knew if naturalism ever got a toehold in society, society would reject the Old World institutions out of hand.[footnoteRef:5] That was the belief of the...…casts the longest shadow on the politics and squabbles of the Revolutionaries. For all their disagreements and strife, the guillotine fell like a gavel to silence critics and eventually even to silence Robespierre when the tide turned against him. [14: Malcolm Cook, Elections in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 44.] [15: Malcolm Cook, Elections in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 44.]

The Turn

As Higonnet points out, “the fiercest anti-Jacobins were former Jacobins.”[footnoteRef:16] The arguments between the Revolutionaries and the subsequent fallout that led to the Terror was a testament to the fact that the Revolutionaries in their various quests and pursuits to achieve the perfect government out of the ashes of the monarchy had no firm basis in reality. They were playing out a fantasy in real life, but the most realistic of them would be the ones facilitating the rise of Napoleon by the end of it. [16: Patrice Higonnet, “The Harmonization of the Spheres,” The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 4, The Terror (Emerald Publishing, 1994), 118.]

Napoleon represented a return to law and order that the Revolutionaries had been unable to put into practice by the end of their rule. They had made big promises and their Idealism had attracted many, but like visionaries who could not work out the kinks in their new design, frustration set in, tempers flared, anger and resentment took hold and directed passions towards bloodletting. By the end of the French Revolution, the people were calling for a monarch—and Napoleon answered the call.

Conclusion

Robespierre had presented the romantic ideal, the noble concepts of equality and virtue serving as the heart of the new classless system. However, the idealism did not persist and the system reverted to classism based upon wealth and property, just as Abbe Sieyes believed it should. It was to some degree the sensible, restrained approach to shifting the country out from under the rubble of the monarchy into something of a hybrid state, where the Revolutionaries could espouse their Ideals and doctrines while the propertied-class still had the power to exercise their rule in government. The little people—the Third Estate—they were to be honored to a degree because without them the…