See the frequently developed theme, notably following Proudhon: Rousseau and the French revolutionaries substituted the people for the king of “divine right” without touching the idea of sovereignty, or “archy.”
In the Cahiers de doléance of 1789, one sees the peasants legitimize, by the fact that they are men, the claim to equality that they raise: to become citizens (notably by the suppression of the fiscal privileges and seigneurial rights). See Regine Robin, La société française en 1789: Semur-en-Auxois (Paris: Plon, 1970).
Pierre Richelet, Dictionnaire de la langue française, ancienne et moderne (Lyon, 1728), s.v. “citoyen.” Cited by Pierre Rétat, “Citoyen-Sujet, Civisme,” in Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, 1680–1820, eds. Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988), 9:79.
(Anon.), La liberté du peuple (Paris, 1789). Cited by Rétat, “Citoyen-Sujet, Civisme,” 91.
Maximilien Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, trans. John Howe, ed. and intro. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2007), 5–19.
See Rene Fedou, L’État au Moyen Âge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), 162–63.
See the discussion of apathy evoked by Moses I. Finley, Democracy, Ancient and Modern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985).
See Saint-Just, “Discours sur la Constitution de la France” (April 24, 1793): “The general will is indivisible … Representation and the law thus have a common principle.” Discours et rapports, ed. Albert Soboul (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1977), 107.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, 1, 6, in Oeuvres complètes, eds. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1964), 3:362.
Ibid., I, 7, Oeuvres complètes, 3:362–64.
During the revolution, a militant grammarian will write: “France is no longer a kingdom, because it is no longer a country in which the king is everything and the people nothing … What is France? A new word is needed to express a new thing … We call a country sovereignly ruled by a king a kingdom (royaume); I will call a country in which the law alone commands a lawdom (loyaume).” Urbain Domergeue, Journal de la langue française, August 1, 1791. Cited by Sonia Branca-Rosoff, “Le loyaume des mots,” in Lexique 3 (1985): 47.
Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Jean-Louis Carra, Annales patriotiques, January 18, 1791. Cited by Rétat, “Citoyen-Sujet, Civisme,” 97.
Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, Fragments d’institutions républicaines, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Michele Duval (Paris: Éditions Gérard Lebovici, 1984), 978. Cited by Rétat, “Citoyen-Sujet, Civisme,” 97.
The Declaration of Rights of 1789, First Article, immediately following “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” continues: “Social distinctions can only be founded on common utility.” Distinctions are social, and whoever says “society,” “social bond,” says “distinctions” (and not “inequalities,” which would contradict the principle). This is why freedom and equality must be predicated of man, and not of the citizen.
Maurice Blanchot, “Insurrection, the madness of writing,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 217–29.
Instead of reciprocal action, today one would say “communication” or “communicative action.”
Du contrat social, I, 6, Oeuvres complètes, 3:361.
Ibid., I, 5, 3:359.
I am entirely in agreement on this point with Robert Derathé’s commentary (against Vaughn) on the adjective “moral” in his notes to the Pléiade edition of Rousseau (Oeuvres complètes, 3:1446).
See Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 1:292. “The product [of the worker’s labor in his workshop
See Étienne Balibar, “Spinoza, l’anti-Orwell: La crainte des masses,” Les temps modernes 470 (September 1985): 353–94.
As Louis Sala-Molins does in Le Code Noir ou le calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987).
See Yves Benot, La révolution française et la fin des colonies (Paris: La Découverte, 1988).
Let us note that this thesis is not Kantian: the accent is placed on the citizen and not on the ends of man; the object of the struggle is not anticipated but discovered in the wake of political action; and each given figure is not an approximation of the regulatory ideal of the citizen but an obstacle to effective equality. Nor is this thesis Hegelian: Nothing obliges a new realization of the citizen to be superior to the preceding one.
Pierre-François Moreau, Le récit utopique: Droit naturel et roman de l’État (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982).
