Inventing Human Rights by Lynn Hunt

Author:Lynn Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2007-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Logic of Rights: Religious Minorities

The French Revolution, more than any other event, revealed that human rights have an inner logic. As the deputies faced the need to turn their lofty ideals into specific laws, they inadvertently developed a kind of conceivability or think ability scale. No one knew in advance which groups were going to come up for discussion, when they would come up, or what the resolution of their status would be. But sooner or later, it became clear that granting rights to some groups (Protestants, for example) was more easily imagined than granting them to others (women). The logic of the process determined that as soon as a highly conceivable group came up for discussion (propertied males, Protestants), those in the same kind of category but located lower on the conceivability scale (propertyless males, Jews) would inevitably appear on the agenda. The logic of the process did not necessarily move events in a straight line forward, but in the long run it tended to do so. Thus, for example, the opponents of Jewish rights used the case of the Protestants (unlike Jews, they were Christians at least) to convince the deputies to table the question of Jewish rights. Yet in less than two years, Jews nevertheless got equal rights, in part because the explicit discussion of their rights had made granting equal rights to Jews more imaginable.

In the workings of this logic, the supposedly metaphysical nature of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen proved to be a very positive asset. Precisely because it left aside any question of specifics, the July–August 1789 discussion of general principles helped set in motion ways of thinking that eventually fostered more radical interpretations of the specifics required. The declaration was designed to articulate the universal rights of humanity and the general political rights of the French nation and its citizens. It offered no specific qualifications for active participation. The institution of a government required movement from the general to the specific; as soon as elections were set up, the definition of qualifications for voting and holding office became urgent. The virtue of beginning with the general became apparent once the specific came into question.

Protestants were the first identity group to come up for consideration, and the discussion of them established an enduring characteristic of the subsequent disputes: a group could not be considered in isolation. Protestants could not come up without raising the question of Jews. Similarly, the rights of actors could not be questioned without raising the specter of executioners, or the rights of free blacks without drawing attention to the slaves. When pamphleteers wrote about women's rights, they inevitably compared them to those of propertyless men and slaves. Even discussions about the age of adulthood (it was lowered from twenty-five to twenty-one in 1792) depended on its comparison to childhood. The status and rights of Protestants, Jews, free blacks, or women were determined in large measure by their place in the larger network of groups constituting the polity.

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