Rights of Man and Class Conflict in the French Revolution

Introduction

Despite the push to eradicate a class-based system during the Enlightenment and the events leading up to the French Revolution, the old hierarchy was replaced not by true equality but by classes based on property and wealth rather than nobility. Two leading figures who stood on opposite sides of this debate were Robespierre and Abbé Sieyes. Sieyes supported separating voting rights from human rights, while Robespierre believed voting rights were inherent rights of man. Robespierre's ideals, however, 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 traveled to France to show his support for it. Nevertheless, Robespierre had him imprisoned and scheduled 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 Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were meant to be the guiding 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 power; in a monarchy, one man holds power though constrained to some degree by law and custom; in a despotism, one man holds power without the constraint of the rule of law. Jones notes that in France prior to the Revolution, the rule had been absolutist and monarchical, with the Bourbons having "refurbished monarchical power" with a "dynastic claim to quasi-divinity."¹ 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.

In the eighteenth century, the rights of man were not a matter to be taken lightly or something one took for granted. As Lynn Hunt points out, one of the central questions over rights concerned 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."² Nowadays, the assumption is that people should have both civil and political rights as part of their basic human rights — but such was not the prevailing notion in France, nor indeed in America, where the experiment that preceded the French Revolution was conducted through the Declaration of Independence and the war that followed.

The Influence of the Naturalists on the Notion of Class

Rousseau had helped to champion the idea of natural rights, but he never moved beyond a vague, romantic idea of emancipation and freedom. Liberty was like an eighteenth-century intellectual drug that fueled many a heady debate in many a salon. It was not necessarily something that anyone expected or foresaw needing to be set 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 approach to the problem of governance. Those with a more systematic mind — men like Abbé Sieyes, for example — demonstrated considerably 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 mid-eighteenth century in France had done enough to provoke outcry among the Old World's political and religious classes. Like most Enlightenment thinkers, Diderot rejected the idea of Original Sin, and the naturalism Rousseau envisioned was viewed as wholly appropriate and acceptable — something that Old World institutions blocked and opposed on principle, because their leaders recognized that if naturalism ever gained a foothold in society, society would reject those institutions outright.³ That, at any rate, was the belief of the Romantics and Revolutionaries, of Rousseau and his intellectual offspring. Sieyes, who had become a Catholic priest (though his actual belief in the tenets of Catholicism is another matter), held a more reserved opinion, which emerged in his own arguments about how the rights of man should be observed by the new French Republic being constructed on the corpse of the monarchy.

If there was any commonality among the Revolutionaries, it was at least on the matter of liberty. When the revolutionaries took over in France, the first principle they put forward echoed Rousseau's doctrine in The Social Contract. Rousseau had written that man is born free and yet everywhere he is in chains. The National Assembly in France in 1789 declared: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility."⁴ In reality, the idea did not play out as practically as the revolutionaries had envisioned. Political enemies were slaughtered by the thousands. Freedom and equality, it turned out, could not abide criticism or objection.

Conclusion

Robespierre had presented the romantic ideal, with 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 Abbé Sieyes believed it should. This was, to some degree, the sensible and 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 retained the power to exercise its influence in government. The common people — the Third Estate — were to be honored to a degree, for without them the country was nothing, but ultimately it was the wealthy who wanted and kept the vote.