A Cultural History of Democracy in the Age of Enlightenment by Michael Mosher;Anna Plassart;

Author:Michael Mosher;Anna Plassart;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

FIGURE 6.1 Jacques-Louis David, The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, 1789. David’s immediately prerevolutionary painting captures the divide between male and female stereotypes to come. Photograph by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images.

CITIZENS

So what did it mean for Mary Wollstonecraft repeatedly to demand that women should be treated like “citizens”? One answer to this question might be the revolution’s own attempt to define citizenship, the famous document known as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of August 26, 1789. This was conceived as the preamble to the new constitution that the deputies of the Third Estate had committed themselves to bring into being by the famous Tennis Court Oath of June 17, 1789. In between those two events had come the night of August 4, 1789, which had seen the Constituent Assembly destroy the regime of feudal privilege on which the Old Regime monarchy was based. Now that privilege was no longer in place, it could be replaced by rights. Rights had been debated all the way through the eighteenth century, starting with Locke and ending with the idea that human beings (“Man”) were loci for rights simply from the fact of being rational human creatures (Tuck 1992).

Unlike privileges, which could potentially be removed by whatever power had granted them, rights were innate. Ideas about rights thus tended to accompany the glorification of individual autonomy, very similar to the self-reliance and self-containment included in the Stoic ideal. They also tended to be accompanied by a wish for popular sovereignty (whatever was meant by popular), and for government as a contract between ruler and ruled, rather than a divinely sanctioned order. Diderot, for example, advising the Empress Catherine of Russia on her own project for a constitution in the 1770s, had roundly stated that the people should be sovereign: “There is no true sovereign except the nation; there can be no true legislator except the people” (Diderot [1774] 2004). These “Observations,” which Diderot began to write in 1774, were unwelcome to Catherine and were not published until 1920. (They may well have circulated in manuscript beforehand.) But Diderot never really defined the rights that should be held. In this, he was not unlike other Enlightenment thinkers. As Lynn Hunt has pointed out, even Rousseau “never precisely defined rights beyond the right of all men to participate in making the social contract” (Hunt 1996: 6). Locke defined it as the right under the law to “preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men” (Locke [1689] 1963: 366–7). Diderot also linked the sovereignty of the people with equality before the laws, as the French revolutionaries were to do (Diderot [1774] 2004: para. 20). Diderot, in his controversial article “Autorité politique” (“Political Authority”) in the Encyclopédie, had squarely stated, “No man has by nature been granted the right to command others. Liberty is a gift from heaven, and every member of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in possession of reason” (Darnton 1987).

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