Thinking Like a Historian: The Rights of Which Men?

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The Rights of Which Men?

In August 1789 the legislators of the French Revolution adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, enshrining full legal equality under the law for French citizens. Who exactly could become a citizen and what rights they might enjoy quickly became contentious issues.

1 Robespierre on the distinction between active and passive citizenship. In a November 1789 letter, Maximilien Robespierre denounced the decision to limit political participation to those with a certain amount of wealth. In 1792 a new law installed universal suffrage, but wealth restrictions returned under the Directory in 1795.

image No doubt you know that a specific sum of money is being demanded of citizens for them to exercise the rights of citizens; that they must pay a tax equivalent to three days’ work in order to participate in the primary assemblies; ten days’ to be a member of the secondary assemblies which are called departments; finally 54 livres tax and possession of landed property to be eligible for the national assembly. These provisions are the work of the aristocratic party in the Assembly which has not even permitted the others to defend the rights of the people and has constantly shouted them down; so that the most important of all our deliberations was taken without discussion, carried off in tumult. . . .

[I]t seems to me that a representation founded on the bases I have just indicated could easily raise up an aristocracy of riches on the ruins of the feudal aristocracy; and I do not see that the people which should be the aim of every political institution will gain much from this kind of arrangement. Moreover I fail to see how representatives who derive their power from their constituents, that is to say from all the citizens without distinction of wealth, have the right to despoil the major part of these constituents of the power which they have confided to them.

2 Petition of the French Jews. After granting civil rights to Protestants in December 1789, the National Assembly began to consider the smaller but more controversial population of French Jews. Eager to become citizens in their own right, the Jews of Paris, Alsace, and Lorraine presented a joint petition to the National Assembly in January 1790.

image A great question is pending before the supreme tribunal of France. Will the Jews be citizens or not?. . .

In general, civil rights are entirely independent from religious principles. And all men of whatever religion, whatever sect they belong to, whatever creed they practice, provided that their creed, their sect, their religion does not offend the principles of a pure and severe morality, all these men, we say, equally able to serve the fatherland, defend its interests, contribute to its splendor, should all equally have the title and the rights of citizen. . . .

Reflect, then, on the condition of the Jews. Excluded from all the professions, ineligible for all the positions, deprived even of the capacity to acquire property, not daring and not being able to sell openly the merchandise of their commerce, to what extremity are you reducing them? You do not want them to die, and yet you refuse them the means to live: you refuse them the means, and you crush them with taxes. You leave them therefore really no other resource than usury [lending money with interest]. . . .

Everything is changing; the lot of the Jews must change at the same time; and the people will not be more surprised by this particular change than by all those which they see around them everyday.

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3 Free men of color address the National Assembly. In the first years of the Revolution, debate raged over the question of political equality in Saint-Domingue. In October 1789 a group of free men of color appeared before the National Assembly to present an appeal for political rights for themselves (but not for the enslaved).

image [C]itizens of all classes have been called to the great work of public regeneration; all have contributed to writing complaints and nominating deputies to defend their rights and set forth their interests.

The call of liberty has echoed in the other hemisphere.

It should certainly have erased even the memory of these outrageous distinctions between citizens of the same land; instead, it has brought forth even more appalling ones. . . . In this strange system, the citizens of color find themselves represented by the white colonists’ deputies, although they have still never been included in their partial assemblies and they have not entrusted any power to these deputies. Their opposition interests, which sadly are only too obvious, make such representation absurd and contradictory. . . . The citizens of color are clearly as qualified as the whites to demand this representation.

Like them they are all citizens, free and French; the edict of March 1685 accords them all such rights and guarantees them all such privileges. . . . Like them they are property owners and farmers; like them they contribute to the relief of the state by paying the levies and bearing all expenses that they and the whites share. Like them they have already shed their blood and are prepared to spill it again for the defense of the fatherland. Like them, finally, though with less encouragement and means, they have proven their patriotism again and again.

4 The Colonial Committee defends colonists’ autonomy. In March 1790 the Colonial Committee—dominated by slaveholding plantation owners—recommended that colonial assemblies be given the right to make their own laws. This meant that any laws passed in France on the abolition of slavery or the enfranchisement of people of color would not affect the colonies. A member of the committee summarized its views.

image It would be a mistake as dangerous as it is unforgivable to envisage the colonies as provinces, and to want to subject them to the same regime. . . . [A] land so different from ours in every way, inhabited by different classes of people, distinguished from each other by characteristics unfamiliar to us, and for whom our social distinctions offer no analogy . . . needs laws which might be called indigenous. . . . [I]t belongs only to the inhabitants of our colonies, convened in the colonies themselves, to gather to elect the body of representatives to work in virtue of its powers and without leaving its territory, to create the constitution, that is to say the form of the internal regime and local administration which is most suited to assure colonials of the advantages of civil society.

5 Etta Palm d’Aelders on the rights of women. During the Revolution, Dutch-born Etta Palm d’Aelders became one of the most outspoken advocates for women’s rights. In her Address of French Citizenesses to the National Assembly in 1791, she addresses the National Assembly in opposition to a proposed law reserving for husbands the capacity to seek legal redress for adultery.

image It is a question of your duty, your honor, your interest, to destroy down to their roots these gothic laws which abandon the weakest but [also] the most worthy half of humanity to a humiliating existence, to an eternal slavery.

You have restored to man the dignity of his being in recognizing his rights; you will no longer allow woman to groan beneath an arbitrary authority; that would be to overturn the fundamental principles on which rests the stately edifice you are raising by your untiring labors for the happiness of Frenchmen. It is too late to equivocate. Philosophy has drawn truth from the darkness; the time has come; justice, sister of liberty, calls all individuals to the equality of rights, without discrimination of sex; the laws of a free people must be equal for all beings, like the air and the sun. . . .

[T]he powers of husband and wife must be equal and separate. The law cannot establish any difference between these two authorities; they must give equal protection and maintain a perpetual balance between the two married people. . . .

You will complete your work by giving girls a moral education equal to that of their brothers; for education is for the soul what watering is for plants; it makes it fertile, causes it to bloom, fortifies it, and carries the germ productive of virtue and talents to a perfect maturity.

ANALYZING THE EVIDENCE

  1. Both the active-passive citizenship distinction discussed by Robespierre in Source 1 and the petition by the Jews of France in Source 2 raise the issue of the relationship between economic status and citizenship rights. What is this relationship in each case, and how do the relationships differ from each other?
  2. Compare the arguments made by the free men of color in Source 3 and Etta Palm d’Aelders on behalf of women in Source 5. Why did the free men of color insist on the strong contributions they had already made while d’Aelders emphasized women’s weakness and humiliation? What do these rhetorical strategies tell you about contemporary ideas about masculinity and femininity?
  3. In Source 4, what arguments does the Colonial Committee advance in favor of legal autonomy of the colonies? Why would autonomy favor the position of colonial landowners?

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Using the sources above, along with what you have learned in class and in this chapter, write a short essay exploring how different groups drew on the events, language, and principles of the French Revolution to make their claims. Keep in mind both differences and similarities in their rhetorical strategies as well as any additional sources of legitimation they employed.

Sources: (1) John Hardman, The French Revolution Sourcebook (London: Arnold, 2002), pp. 120–121; (2) Excerpt from pp. 93, 95–97 in The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lynn Hunt; (3) Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006), pp. 68–69; (4) Frédéric Régent, “Slavery and the Colonies,” in Peter McPhee, A Companion to the French Revolution (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), p. 401; (5) Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795 (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), pp. 75–77.