Speeches of Maximilien Robespierre/Concerning the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
CONCERNING THE DECLARATION OF THE
RIGHTS OF MAN AND OF THE CITIZEN
This speech by Robespierre identifies him with the French socialism of the 19th Century. It was reprinted countless times and became the charter of the left petit bourgeois republicans in 1830, 1848, and 1870.
In the last session, I took the floor in order to make a few important additions to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It was my intention to expand your declarations of the "theory of property" by the addition of a few articles. Let the word "property" frighten no one! Filthy souls who value only your money, I will not violate your treasures, even though I know how unclean the source from which they come. … So let us establish the principles of law in good faith on property! We are obliged to do this the more, since the conception of property is enveloped in a dense mist by reason of the prejudices and the vices of men.
Ask any one of these traders in human flesh what is property; he will show you the long coffin called a ship, in which men are packed together and chained, men who seem yet alive, and he will tell you: "Look at my property; I have bought it head for head." Question this nobleman who has goods and subjects, and who believes that the world will come to an end now that he no longer possesses them, and he will expound similar ideas on property to you.
Question the members of the Capetian dynasty, and they will tell you that the most sacred property is the right of inheritance, that they have the ancient right of oppressing the twenty-five million persons now populating the territory of France, of destroying them, of treating them—legally and monarchically—according to their own royal whim.
Property has no moral principle in the eyes of all these persons. Why does your Declaration of the Rights of Man suffer from the same defect? In your defense of liberty … you have stated—and rightly so—that it is limited by the rights of one's neighbor; why have you not applied the same principle to property, which after all is a social institution? … You have increased the number of articles in order to afford the largest possible latitude to the right to one's property, and yet you have not added a word in limitation of this right, with the result that your Declaration of the Rights of Man might make the impression of having been created not for the poor, but for the rich, the speculators, for the stock exchange jobbers. To remedy these defects, I propose the following additions:
1. Property is that right held by each citizen to dispose freely of that portion of the general goods guaranteed him by the laws.
2. The right to property, like all other rights, is limited by the obligation to regard the rights of others.
3. Property may not cause any detriment to our security or to our liberty or existence, or to the property of our neighbor.
4. Every act of possession, every transaction, violating these principles, is invalid and immoral.
Furthermore, in your discussion of taxes you entirely forget to lay a basis for progressive taxation. But there is, in the subject of taxation in general no principle so well-founded in justice as that which causes the citizen to participate, in the measure of his possessions, in the expenditures of the state, i.e., according to the advantages accruing to each from society. I propose that you adopt the following articles:
1. Those citizens whose incomes are not sufficient to assure their subsistence are freed from taxation. Other citizens shall bear these burdens in the progressive measure of the size of their fortunes.
Further, the Committee has entirely forgotten to call attention to the duties of the fraternal obligations which unite all men and all nations in their rights and in their duty of mutual aid. Your Committee seems to have forgotten the bases of the eternal alliance of nations against the tyrants. One might think that your declarations had been framed for a small herd of human cattle in a remote corner of the globe, and not for the boundless family which nature has scattered over the entire earth as its habitation.
I propose that you remedy these defects by inserting several articles. These articles cannot fail to win for you the respect of nations, and they may also involve the difficulty of setting you at odds with kings forever. I admit this difficulty is not horrifying to me. Surely we—now that we have no desire to compound with kings—cannot be terrified by such a prospect. The four articles I propose are these:
1. The men of all lands are brothers and the various nations must aid each other in the same manner as must also the citizens of one and the same state.
2. Any man oppressing a nation thereby declares himself to be an enemy of all the nations.
3. Those who fall upon a nation with an army in order to prevent the advances of liberty and to destroy the rights of man must be combated by all the other nations, not as ordinary foes, but as murderers and rebellious brigands.
4. Kings, aristocrats and tyrants, whatever be the nation to which they belong, are slaves in rebellion against the sovereign of the earth, the human race, and against the Legislator of the Universe of Nature. …