Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/635

THE RIGHTS OF MAN.] FRANCE 599 complete. The events of Paris and Versailles found re sponse throughout France ; national guards were organized everywhere ; the nobles, attacked by the peasantry, made for the frontiers; some laid down their privileges, and hoped to stay in France. The Assembly, backed by Paris, had all power in its hands ; the king had to recall Necker, whose vanity and shallowness were not yet found out. On the 4th of August the Assembly got to work at its business, the framing of a new constitution. With so few solid institutions as France had, with not one true constitutional tradition, with passions aroused and great underhand opposition at court, it is a marvel that so much was achieved. Privilege was at once abolished, the last relics of feudal use swept clean away; nobles, clergy, the pays d etats, cities which enjoyed local liberties and advantages, all laid down their characteristic and special privileges, and begged to be absorbed in the equality of one general French citizenship. Equality is the promi nent feature of the Revolution epoch ; it overshadows at this moment both liberty and fraternity. The practical carrying out of the principles of equality was not so easy ; many who laid down their privilege in words, clung to it in fact; it caused ugly scenes in the country; and the feudal burdens were in some places hardly removed till the very end of 1790. The Assembly next declared the king to be " the restorer of French liberties," and offended him, on the other hand, by reducing his hunting- rights to those of an ordinary landowner. The king s capitaineries, a circuit of some 40 to 50 miles round Paris, which had been felt to be very mischievous to agriculture, and connected only too closely with the famines of Paris, were much cur tailed. When these things were laid before ths king, it was seen that his heart was not with the Assembly ; on technical grounds he refused to sanction them. Then the Assembly advanced to the consideration of a great declara tion of the rights of man a general statement of the prin ciples and bases of civil society. Carlyle sneers at the re sulting document : rights, yes, but duties, where are they ? and what reference is there to might 1 Still, it is clear that, had the Assembly not occupied itself with this reasonable and logical statement, its enemies could at once have accused it of haste and inconsequence, of passion and pure love of destruction. As a fact, .the Declaration of the Rights of Man ranks, as Madame de Stael says, side by side with the English Bill of Rights and the American Declaration. This last was addressed to a people happily quite ignorant of all feudal questions, while the English Bill of Rights dealt solely with practical matters, assum ing the main principles of constitutional life to be known, whereas the French Declaration had to begin a fresh epoch to appeal to a people shaking themselves free from absolutism and feudal oppressions, to affirm the first prin ciples of civil? life, to give practical expression to opinions floating in every mind. To us the Declaration reads like a string of political commonplaces ; we are familiar with the whole row. To the French it was very different, for they were beginning a new life, and scarcely knew where to tread. This charter of the Revolution is in substance as follows. (1) All men are born and continue free and equal in rights ; social distinctions are purely conventional. (2) Society is an association of men to preserve the natural rights of men. (3) Sovereignty resides in the nation ; all authority, vested in an individual or a body of men, comes expressly from the nation. (4) Liberty is the power of doing what we will, so long as it does not injure another; the only limits of each man s natural right are such as secure the same rights to others ;*these limits are determinable only by the law. (5) The law can forbid only such actions as are mis chievous to society ; " Quod lex non vetat, permittit." (6) Law is the expression of the general will ; all citizens have a right to take part, through their representatives, in the 1789, making of the laws ; law must be equal for all ; all citizens have equal rights (according to their fitness) to fulfil all offices in the state. (7) Accusation, arrest, detention, can only be in accordance with the law, which all are bound to obey. (8) The law must be reasonable ; it must not have any retroactive force. (9) Every one is to be deemed in nocent till he has been convicted ; persons under arrest on suspicion must therefore be treated gently. (10) All men are free to hold what religious views they will, provided they are not subversive of public order. (11) Freedom of speech, of writing and printing (save in cases reserved by the law), is one of the most precious of the rights of man. (12) A public force is needed to guarantee the rights of man ; such a force is for the benefit of all, not of its own class. (13) To support such force a common contribution ia necessary ; it is to be equally laid on all citizens accord ing to their means. (14) All citizens ha?e a right to show (personally or by representatives) that such public contribu tion is necessary, to consent thereto, to arrange its applica tion, its incidence, its manner of ingathering, its duration. (15) Society has a right to demand from every public servant an account of his administration. (16) A society, the rights of which are not assured, the power of which not definitely^distributed, has no constitution. (17) Pro perty being an inviolable and sacred right, no one can be deprived of it, save when public necessity, legally esta blished, evidently demands it, and then only with the con dition of a just and previously determined indemnity. Having laid down these principles, the Assembly went on The de- to abolish such institutions as offended against the liberty and claration equality of the rights of man. "Nobility, peerage, heredi- acted on tary distinctions, distinctions of orders, feudal regime, patri monial justice, titles, denominatives or prerogatives thence derived, orders of chivalry, corporations, &c., which re quired proof of nobility or presupposed distinctions of birth," were all declared to be swept away, such distinctions alone remaining as belonged to public functionaries in discharge of their duties. Venality or hereditary succession in offices was also abolished ; all Frenchmen in all parts of the country should have equal and common rights ; no guilds or corporations should remain ; nor would the law recognize any religious vows or other engagements which might mili tate against either natural rights or the constitution. Such, from end to end, is the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Equality of all men, abolition of feudal privilege, inclusion of the monarchy under the control of the sovereign people these are the chief principles involved in it; out of these the Revolution grew. In itself the Declaration was not subversive of monarchy ; only the French monarch, with two centuries of Bourbon tradition behind him, could not stoop to take a new position in France ; Louis XVI. could not become a constitutional king. The Assembly also framed its new constitution, according to the promise of its The con- oath of the tennis court. A limited monarchy, without an absolute veto, and a single chamber having alone the right of initiation of laws, formed the chief elements of it, the nation to order, the king to execute. " The Revolution from its social side attacked the aristocracy," says La Vallde, " from its political side it attacked the monarchy ;" and the single chamber, with a royal suspensive veto which might be overruled in time, seemed to the French people best and simplest. The great danger of the Revolution lay in its simplicity : everything was to begin from a pure white basis ; there should be no checks or counterpoises ; all should be consecutive, logical. The ambitions, vices, prejudices of men were regarded as nothing ; the nation, not even educated as yet, was thought fit to be trusted with absolute power. It is indicative of the ferment and the ignorance even of Paris that the very name of veto aroused