The first French Republic

by Horace Mann Conaway

PREFACE.

The present study is one of origins. Our object is to trace from the beginning the gradual development of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, of the first written constitution in France, and to follow the movement which led to the abolition of monarchy and to the adoption of the republican form of government. In view of the complex phenomena of the French Revolutionary period, it is advantageous to our understanding of that surpassingly interesting era to view the various classes of facts from different standpoints. The Revolution was social, religious, political, and economic. While the study of any one of these phases necessarily involves the others, the best results will be secured by considering the movement now as social, now as religious, now as political, and now as economic. This paper is an investigation of the early Revolution from the political point of view. Whence arose in the minds of the French the idea of a Declaration of the Rights of Man? Where did they derive the principles therein contained? How were they led to feel the need of a written constitution? Through what series of events were they brought to suspect, to denounce and to renounce royalty, and to accept the idea of an elective executive? Such questions as these are of interest to the student of political history.

Though the primary sources for the investigation of this subject are limited in our American libraries, enough has been found to lead to an interpretation suggestive and, we believe, correct.

Recently two important books upon the French Revolution have appeared. M. A. Aulard published last year his Histoire politique de la Révolution française. In this work he has reexamined, in the light of the voluminous material at hand in France, these same questions. Prof. William M. Sloane, of Columbia University, has treated the Revolution primarily in its ecclesiastical aspects in his French Revolution and Religious Reform. The manuscript of this thesis was practically completed before either of these works came into the writer’s hands. It did not seem advisable, therefore, to make any modifications in the conclusions herein reached; they are, however, in the main in accord with those arrived at by these two authors. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the origin of the idea of a written constitution are here more fully discussed than by these writers.

H. M. C.

Sheffield, Pa., August 5, 1902.

THE DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN.

The first question that naturally suggests itself in studying the Declaration of the Rights of Man is, whence did the French derive the idea of such an instrument? It has been asserted, and an attempt has been made to prove, that both the notion of such a Declaration and its content were borrowed from the early American State Constitutions.[1] This question, however, really resolves itself into a double inquiry, i. e., whence did the French receive their notion of the guaranty of individual rights against governmental intrusion, and how far did the ideas contained in the Declaration of the Rights of Man represent the political traditions and current thought of France? Only a study of the abuses and of the political theories of pre-revolutionary France and of the facts relative to this document, as they are revealed in the writings of contemporaries and in the records of the Constituent Assembly, can at all satisfactorily answer these inquiries.

The sympathetic relation between France and the colonies during and after the American Revolution, the interest in America of some of the more radical French political theorists, such as Mably and Condorcet, and the community of ideas existing between the two countries, shown by the Jeffersonian school in America, and by the publication of American writings in France, are facts well known. Hence it may be inferred that, when a few of the cahiers asked for a Declaration, their framers were acquainted with and influenced by the American Bills of Rights.[2] But not until the States General had assumed the rôle of a Constitutional Convention were the proposals of Declarations numerous. Then it was that the Frenchmen gave abundant proof of their fondness for formulating political documents.