Thank you to the Voltaire Foundation for this invitation. Thank you for the lovely introduction and thank you all.
Thank you all for coming. Particularly at a time when you should all be home glued to the screen, figuring out what happened.
Timing is everything, and I can't imagine a more timely day than today to discuss a momentous set of parliamentary discussions
resting above all on battles over very particular choices of words or if the absences of particular words.
So what happened to writing rights in 1789?
This question is the focus of a research project that found Edelstein and I have been doing together with some colleagues at Stanford and in Sydney.
We've been looking at the process by which the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was actually written in 1789.
And we're trying to imagine ways of tracking that process. The question is, of course, far from you.
Debates over the over the past the French followed to open this portal to the modern world have been endless.
Long may be so in the classic joust. No, to all historians of the topic,
Jelinek argued for more for a kind of ideological alter route leading from the primaeval forests of Germany via the Reformation,
through the monuments of the English and American bills of rights and back across the Atlantic to Paris and Versailles.
It may be answered with a broad map of the Enlightenment in Europe,
though principally in France that traced a variety of trails traversing a diffuse
field of natural right theories before they eventually converged in 1789.
The signature of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the citizen boot, me claimed,
belonged and I quote to the whole 18th century destroyer of all tradition, creator of natural right.
Since then, the compass of debate has continued to swing.
Frank eventually did much to demonstrate the interest displayed in Paris and indeed across Europe in the bills of rights.
The preface the American state constitutions Jonathan Israel has recently rediscovered that fact and broadcast it in his most recent book.
Marcel Gaucher and Stefan Reales, writing at the time of the bicentennial bicentennial of the French Revolution,
also made clear the presence of the American examples in the French debates over a declaration of Rights,
but pointed out how strenuously the deputies fought over whether or how to reject, adopt or transcend the Anglophone model.
Stefan Reales pointed the way toward, well, what what might well have become a consensus by concluding that the Declaration of Rights
in matter and of the citizen was the expression of what he called a diffuse Lock-In ism.
This Solomonic judgement allowed for a broad, lucky in spirit,
infusing the thinking of the 18th century that could find expression in a whole family of declarations on both sides of the Atlantic.
But the formulation soon frayed at the seam, conjoining lucky and diffuse was the spirit of the declaration diffuse or was it locked in or both?
Historians of French republicanism, led by Florence Gautier, have argued loudly for the creation of crucial importance of a very specific like unison,
an interpretation they've based largely on a significant mistranslation of a key passage from the second treaties.
Dan Edelstein, on the other hand, in a brilliant recent article, as argued instead for a diffuse tradition that is scarcely locked in at all.
He emphasises how little attention was paid in France to specific political arguments of lock second treaties,
as compared with the epistemological reasoning of the essay on human understanding.
He points to the fact that French discussion of natural rights largely veered
away from the explicitly contract Tyrion arguments of locked political theory,
hence from arguments regarding the basis of sovereignty and the right of resistance that was so central to Locke's political work.
He shows the ways rights talk in 18th century, France was also progressively infused with an Enlightenment sentimentalism that
gave it a very different colouration from the jurisprudential tradition that,
uh, that that belonged in continental natural right thinking.
In this regard, Edelstein's work and lines with Leanne Hunt's work on the sentimental, sentimental ization of human rights by the 18th century novel,
though it distances itself from her view of the novel specifically generative of that conception.
Finally, Edelstein takes note of the fact to which I'll return later in this presentation.
Namely, that French discussion of natural rights in the plural often remained embedded in the metaphysics of
natural right in the singular that still had substantial religious and metaphysical implications.
It seems significant from this perspective that the Encyclopaedia of Determined Darwin Bear offered an article on dry and natural in the singular,
the universal principle of justice intuited by all humankind, but none on the unnatural in the plural,
which is to say, rights pertaining universally to human beings as individuals.
Do you know how to name for this sense of right? Common to humanity as a whole?
He called it the volunteer general, the general wheel of the species and the common desire.
Rather than prospecting for broad influences, we opted for a different tack in this collaborative project that I'm presenting today.
We decided to look as closely as possible at the actual process by which the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was written in the summer of 1789.
We were motivated by several considerations. A prime one was the provocation of Jonathan Israel's claim that the Declaration of the Rights
of Man and of the Citizen represented a wholesale victory for the group of intellectuals.
He gathered together under the banner of a radical enlightenment, deriving its ideas and arguments, ultimately from materialist philosophy.
Israel's argument hinges, crucially, on his assertion that when the National Assembly finally considered the precise wording of the declaration,
a new week of debate towards the end of August 1789,
the deputies took as the basis of their discussion of draught proposed by Mirabeau, whom Israel claims as a leading member of the materialist coterie.
In fact, this assertion is just plain wrong and honest to God false fact that can be demonstrated as such.
Even in this age of fakery, where falsifications of false facts can be falsified by further falsifications and in less in an end, the series.
Another consideration motivating our research was more general the appearance of a new historiography of human rights,
exemplified above all in the work of Samuel Moin, Moin is offered a sharp distinction between a modern post-World War Two conception of universal
human rights address since World War Two against the claims of the sovereign state and an older,
18th century conception of the rights of man and of the citizen,
the latter being under being emphasised intimately related to the process of not national state building.
From this perspective, then what happened to rights in 1789 becomes crucial for the question of continuity or rupture in the practise of rights talk.
We have one further motivation in this research, which was to explore what insights digitisation might bring to a very traditional question.
Digital humanities has done remarkable work to reveal the diffusion of text,
the circulation of letters and the distribution of writers across enlightened Europe.
But in this regard, its model has tended towards the sociological, the discursive and big data.
It invites distant reading in Franco-British sense of the term.
Rebecca Spang and Simon Daddy-O have recently take an approach like this and work on the achieve parlementaire that
applies text mining techniques to identify innovations in the digitised debates of the French revolutionary assemblies.
But what might be achieved achieved? We wondered, with a more concentrated approach that would allow close readings of smaller clusters of data
by capturing particular decisions and visualising specific moments of collective choice.
We were eager in this particular research to explore methods of visualisation,
asking in effect how far techniques of visualisation might throw processes of decision making into relief.
So this is the team that assembled.
Um, and you can see that there, along with myself and Daniel Stein.
Uh, there there are two colleagues from the School of Design of the University of Sydney,
Kate Sweet Apple and Jacqueline Corbett, Laura Kasun from the University of Sydney, who are the School of Design there,
and then our colleague at Stanford, Nicole Coleman,
who is a computer whiz person when it comes to visualising data and thinking about problems of doing that so that, uh, that is our team.
And so let me then turn to the action that we were trying to trying to plot.
By the time the Assembly National Assembly turned in late August 1789 to crafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,
there were several dozen draught declarations in circulation. This is how we present them.
Each of the bars is a different draught of a declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen.
They came in a variety of shapes, sizes and flavours.
There was the brief and direct summary of rights, as in the articles proposed by Lafayette in what was considered the American style.
There was a systematic exposition of principles and their implications as in the extended
rational exposition of social theory by S. I guess that was immediately dubbed metaphysical.
There was at the limit the brutal, virtually Hobbesian inversion of enlightened social theory in the formulation of
the basic conditions of political life offered by none other than Jean-Paul Mira.
This latter may or may not have been communicated to the assembly before the eventual text was decided.
It wasn't any case profoundly antithetical in spirit to the Assembly's discussions, and I mentioned only in passing as a teaser for the book.
I hope to complete before too long on Barra as a prophet of terror and as a populist martyr.
So our initial idea was to track the process by which elements of the draught declarations found their way into the declarations.
The deputies eventually adopted that turned out to be more challenging than we had expected,
largely because we found it difficult to disentangle the many formulations of what seemed to be similar ideas.
At what point did linguistic variation verge into philosophical nuance, liking Arthur to split north a lump?
We decided, in fact, to postpone analysis of the draughts as a whole corpus and to look first at the crucial debates in late August.
In the course of which the National Assembly adopted the particular text as we know it and I say,
adopted because as many of you know, it was adopted but not actually completed.
The declaration upon which the assembly had agreed by the 26th of August 1789 was explicitly left provisional.
When the following day, its language was declared subject to revision once the articles of the Constitution had been decided.
So this revision the deputies to the Constitution,
writing the deputies felt increasing pressure to turn by the time the Constitution
was constitution was given final form and transitory existence in 1791.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen had achieved a stature similar to that of the mosaic tablets,
in which case, of course, it was often represented. Our goal, then, has been to disassemble the articles of the declaration,
reducing it to its constituent elements and showing the process by which it was put together.
We've tried to visualise the crucial week of often stormy debate from the 20 20th to the 26th of August 1789,
from which the declaration finally emerged. Storm might be a weak metaphor here.
More and more a melodramatically one might imagine the scene at Versailles as a kind of ideological bomb site
littered with remnants of an old order interspersed with fragments of the munitions that had destroyed it,
or perhaps even better for a Californian.
We might envisage it as the site of an earthquake where remnants of ancient buildings that have been frequently
renovated now lay intermixed with fragments of newer construction that had scarcely been assembled.
The deputies had this to decide which bricks to pick up and how to piece them together, so to begin with a brief resumé of the story to date.
This is just a very brief timeline. Allow me to remind you that there was deep ambivalence from the very beginning of the National
Assembly's discussions over the need for a Declaration of Rights and the form it should take.
Those deputies who saw the assembly's task as fixing up a damaged monarchical constitution saw no necessity for
a prior declaration of principles on which that constitution would be founded since it had a historic basis.
They admitted, at most the possibility of a short, concise preamble to the Constitution itself.
They were profoundly wary of any declaration of abstract principles that might maybe be misunderstood by an ignorant populace,
further inflaming the passions that were shredding the social order of the countryside in the weeks following the fall of the Bastille.
Those deputies, on the contrary, who imagined the assembly's task as a more ambitious project of writing a constitution,
a new envisaged a declaration of Rights separate from the Constitution and prior to it
grounding the political identity of the nation on first principles only rational exposition,
they thought, could quiet political and social passions.
These differences became clear in the debates over over the draughts proposed
by Lafayette on the 11th of July by Shias on the 20th to the 21st of July.
By Munir on the 27th of July.
They persisted in the meetings of the 30 bureau into which the assembly had divided itself to foster more intimate and productive discussion.
The assembly, it must be remembered, comprised some twelve hundred deputies after Louis, the 16th,
had ordered recalcitrant representatives of the privileged orders to join the commoners who had declared themselves the National Assembly in June 17,
1789. This is one reason why the National Assembly had its problems making any kind of decisions
since the members were still profoundly divided by attitudes of order in a state.
It was thought that smaller groups bringing representatives together across traditional
status lines would lead to more fruitful discussion and yield more shared understanding.
This procedural innovation failed to produce the desired results and was largely abandoned by the end of July,
August opened with general discussion of the nature and desirability of a Declaration of Rights,
culminating in a momentous decision on the morning of the 4th of August.
The morning of the 4th of August. By that time, the vast majority of the clergy had joined with other conservative deputies to
demand that any declaration of Rights also include a declaration of duties.
Without the latter, they insisted restoration of social order would be impossible.
There is a risk of awakening egoism and pride, thundered the Bishop of Charge on their behalf.
The flattering expression of rights must be accompanied by duties as a corrective.
This argument for the Declaration for a Declaration of Rights and duties was rejected by the assembly
rejected by five hundred and seventy to four hundred and thirty three votes and a tense roll call vote.
But the defeat of deputies promised the victories of rights before closing the morning session of the fourth of August.
The deputies decreed almost unanimously that the Constitution would indeed be preceded by a declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen.
The stage was set then for the dramatic evening performance, the one we all know about as the night of the fourth of August,
when weeks of division and frustration within the assembly and alarm at the social
convulsions beyond it erupted into an emotional holocaust of privileges and particular isms,
ending the so-called feudal regime. It was another week before the assembly could return to the matter of a declaration of Rights.
It decided on the 12th of August to appoint a committee to reduce the confusion of conflicting
proposals into a working draught that would serve as a basis for detailed deliberation.
The committee of five, named the following day, was led by Mirabeau and given the weekend to complete its task.
The work seems to have been largely entrusted to the little think tank of Geneva and exiles Mirabeau had gathered around him.
A speech.
Writers and propagandists, Jeremy Bentham, who sat with them at this work, later offered aside recollections of their intellectual prestidigitation.
The work had not gone well.
Mirabeau, the master of parliamentary shows showmanship, presented the results to the assembly on 17th of August in an unusually inept performance.
What, he lamented, could be winnowed within three days for more than a score of conflicting projects.
How could the results be rendered simple enough to be useful to the general
mass of a people ready for liberty by the force of facts and not by reasoning?
How, moreover, could universal truths deriving from human nature be distinguished from the modifications they had received, in particular societies?
How could principles of liberty be enunciated in the abstract without entering into particular details or slipping into specific legislation?
How could resentment at the abuses of despotism be set far enough aside to yield a declaration of the rights of man,
rather than a mere declaration of war against tyrants? Ideally, Mirabeau acknowledged a declaration of rights would would contain actions so simple,
self-evident and to having consequences that every constitution would flow from it.
But neither men nor circumstances were ready for that.
Even in France, perfection, he said, perfection in this matter could not be achieved instantly or for a polity that was in virtual collapse.
In the face of these difficulties, Mirabeau offer the deputies a barely coherent concoction,
combining a dose of fizzy ocracy with a dollop of Rousseau and a soup side of Lafayette.
It's 19 articles seasoned with a sequence of Wright's assertions countering specific old regime abuses.
Lengthy discussion demonstrated only the mirabilis committee has satisfied no one.
In frustration, the deputies ready themselves to vote on a motion to return to the bureau for more intensive discussion.
Each bureau would be asked to identify the existing proposal it preferred as the basis for detailed discussion,
with the assembly then reconvening to consider the most popular choice.
Article by article. Before the vote could be taken, though, Mirabeau regained the floor.
Earlier, he had argued against referring his draught to the bureau on the grounds that the procedure would simply extend the cycle of indecision.
Instead,
he'd called on the assembly to reach closure by considering his committee's draught in detail and revising its successive articles as necessary.
Now, he reversed direction completely. At this point,
he announced the assembly should merely reaffirm its decision to make a Declaration of Rights an integral first chapter of the Constitution,
and then postpone the actual composition of the declaration until other parts of the Constitution had been completed.
In effect, Mirabeau proclaimed the utter impossibility of writing rights in the existing political situation.
The speech through the assembly into turmoil. Some, yeah, some deputies embraced its conclusions.
Others repudiated them. Still, others denounced its author for his arrogance and cynicism.
His performance would have killed his committee's report had it not been already dead by that time.
His draught declaration was tabled in effect by a decision to refer it to the Bureau for further consideration.
The next day, the Assembly voted to proceed without discussing it any more to proceed.
But how arguments jumbling how to proceed with what to decide?
Continued in a mixed up state until the deputies resolved as a kind of desperate last resort to choose from the draught
declaration that had been submitted to them finally taking whichever gain the most support as a basis for detailed consideration.
Article by article The result was unexpected. Third place went to Lafayette with forty five votes, second to six with two hundred and forty.
Then an overwhelming majority of 620 votes went to a draught that had been drawn up in the
6th Bureau of the National Assembly at the end of July and barely mentioned in the debates.
Since that moment? Also formerly a member of the six bureau marvelled at this outcome,
the security said if it still existed, we'd be surprised to see its draught preferred.
Its draught was just a canvas to write on. It was stripped of details to be made more methodical and complete later.
It needs to be filled in. The relative brevity of this draught may well have been one reason for its selection by the assembly,
though it was not shorter than Lafayette's pithy text, but also got it wrong.
Rudimentary, though the six bureau draught was, it was not be filled out by the Assembly.
To the contrary, it was pared down quite dramatically.
Taji gracing the draught got it wrong, too, in declaring that it contained no contested principles to the contrary, again,
intense discussion of these articles exposed deep ideological divisions within the assembly, unable to reconcile their differences.
The deputies eventually chose to evade them, stripping away contested principles.
They ended up saying less because they could not agree to say more.
It was easier to cut power and whittle away.
And this, it turns out, was the process that gave the text eventually adopted its laboratory character.
One might say it was this process of pairing that gave that document its stamp of universality.
So we'll turn then to the draught of the six bureau.
There it is. Twenty four articles. Um, and you see that we have coloured each article, so I need to explain the code that went into that.
It went into that colouring. And this is, uh, in effect, what we came up with,
what we tried to do was to try to code the various articles according to the scale
ranging from traditional read all the way down to libertarian traditional taking the,
uh, taking the position that religion as here is the basis of empires.
But the only possible foundation for social order conservative.
Religion is a duty for man that it can be expressed peacefully as a right kind of middle ground.
Religion being a basis for empire.
Nonetheless, no one can be harassed in his religious opinions liberal argument for tolerance, which allows everyone to practise their religion.
And the libertarian position represented alone, I think, by Mirabeau, who says, What do you mean by tolerance?
I want the most possible, most unlimited possible practise of religion.
So if we move on, then from that coding. To the draught,
I think you can see how how religious in many respects this document is the first art first 11 articles already generally very conservative.
Article five emphasises the significance of inequality as a natural phenomenon.
Article eight emphasises the double relationship between rights and duties.
Duties must always be constrained by sorry.
Rights must always be constrained by duties in order to allow for public order.
Article 12 through 15 is really a more liberal part of the document emphasising the rule of law.
Article 16 through 18 Again, very conservative about the role of religion, religion, religion and morality have to supplement the law.
Uh, the maintenance of religion demands a public practise of public colt, and there must then be a an established cult with established religion.
Uh, which citizens who don't disturb it will not be will not be harassed.
Then finally, Article seven articles 19 through articles 24 are fairly liberal.
And in fact,
these are taken almost word for word from the six bureau draught and put into the final declaration of the rights of man and of a citizen.
So if we look at that set of articles and we put them alongside the Declaration of Rights that is finally arrived at.
You can see something pretty remarkable happening here.
The articles, one through 10, are simply replaced by a very different set of formulations.
Articles 12 to 15 are wurtsmith.
To some extent, the nuance is changed, but not a remarkable change.
Article 16 to 18 disappear in favour of one very brief article that we'll talk about later on the practise on the rights of the practise of religion.
I'd like to be able to discuss each of those changes in succession, but that's going to take far too long.
So let me just pick a few high points.
This is the preamble, which is the only part of Miracles Committee's draught, which is taken over in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Um, and I think it's interesting that, uh, that draught from Mirabeau committee really is certainly more utopian than the initial six euro draught,
which is much more particular about what is what the goal is of the um of the declaration,
much more specific in its mention of contract and and much more specific in its emphasis on specific rate of liberty.
The. Pfizer Craddock Draught, essentially coming from the Mirabeau is more utopian,
certainly more universal and really quite amazing, I think in its emphasis on immediacy transparency,
that the ignorance of forgetfulness and disdain for the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of governments.
It's really an incredible formulation, and it really does go back to this idea of the the physical evidence of the natural right order,
such that everyone who is educated enough will immediately see the implications of natural right on the way in which it can
be applied in the world by comparing specific acts of legislation and executive power with the with the right of humanity.
So there is a sense in which I think already the the draught that the Assembly will end up with has generalised and universalise
this very particular task that the assembly has to that that the six bureau identified as crucial and we can go on.
I I'd like to discuss these, but I'm not going to.
This is the first three articles which are given a nuanced reformulation largely result resulting from media.
But I do want to talk about Articles four to 10. That huge block of read.
I have read articles that are excised from the, uh, from the declaration, uh, when it is finally approved it.
As I said, that formulation here, the six sixth draught is deeply conservative.
It makes inequality natural. It drives it, talks about the equality of rights, but the reality of the inequality of men's fashion faculties and means,
and it emphasises a double relationship between rights and duties.
This this document, it's important to note, was actually written at the end of July.
So before the August 4th decision to take duties out of the out of the draught and then Article Ten,
the object of the law is to guarantee all rights and to assure and shore observation of all duties.
So if we look then at the declaration as the assembly arrived at it, uh, you see duties.
The connexion between rights and duties is severed. Duties disappear from the draught.
Um, duties are replaced. By the law.
By the law as a constraint upon duties, and we'll say more about that later.
And that is really the the the service aspect of the security of Draught,
which must have been a considerable attraction since 650 people voted for it.
And that is simply taken out of four of the of the draught proposed in the course of the debates in the 20th to the 26th of August.
So we'll go on then we could talk if we had time about Articles 11 to 13 and Articles 14 to 15,
which are largely rewritten in in accordance with the decision to take out all the references to duties.
And we can talk about those later. Should anyone wish to do so?
And we come to articles 16 through 18, the articles about the practise of religion and the relationship between rights, rights and religion.
And I want to talk for the rest of the time I have about that, that that article.
So as you can see, Article 16, 17 or 18 are profoundly conservative.
Religion penetrates deeper than the law. Religion requires a public form of worship, an established cult for the good order of society.
Toleration for opinions are allowed because any citizen who doesn't disturb the established practise religion,
the established court won't be harassed. But exactly what conscience?
What constitutes disturbing the established cult is still very much up for grabs.
The rewrite that the National Assembly comes up with is very succinct, and it argues,
as you can see for the entire freedom of religious opinions, no one can be harassed in their opinions.
Even their religious opinions provided through their manifestation doesn't disturb the public order established by the law.
And what's interesting about this, of course, is that freedom of religion is, uh,
the manifestation of freedom of religion cannot trouble the published order subject to the law.
The law really replaces religion here as the constraint on action.
And so the question really is how do we get from these deeply conservative articles,
from the bureau to the liberal article 10 that shows up in the Declaration of Rights and of the manner of citizen and the rights of men and citizens?
So this is how we went about trying to track that process in particular.
This is what we call what we call an annulus, and each ring is an intervention in the debate,
and this takes you think of these as an analogy to tree rings so that with the tree rings,
the outermost rings are the first to be presented and the is the the centre of the central spot is the final decision made.
So you can see the way the waves of the debate as they go from very religious to somewhat liberal back to a very religious,
somewhat liberal, back to very religious.
And you can see that this is really a very dynamic debate and causing allowing the expression of many very different opinions.
So we apply this analysis to every article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.
And you can see, um, how how fascinating this is.
Some of the discussion Article 12, for example, there is really very little debate.
Uh, there is some linguistic fine-tuning. There isn't very, very great a difference of opinion.
Article six tends to cohere pretty quickly.
Article was that Article 50 and again is largely liberal, but there are some very heated discussions articles four and five.
Article 11 and Article 10, which which is what I'd like to talk about right now.
So that's just very briefly. Try to unpack, uh, some of these, some of these rings.
We'll start this is the proposal laid before the assembly on 22nd of August,
whether to accept this set of articles and it's immediately championed by Brunel, the Bishop of Palermo, religion is the basis of empires.
It's the eternal reason the watch is on the order of things you could not find.
You cannot found a republic without a religious cult,
and therefore this has to be an essential article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the citizen.
So we go on then to the next one, which is completely the opposite.
No one must be must be disturbed.
For now, no one must be harassed, I've translated and it's arrest, no one must be harassed for his opinion,
for his religious opinions or disturbed in the exercise of his religion.
So what we have here on the slide down below is the proposal, which is Article 16, 17 and 18, and then the proposals above of each speaker.
So Castellon, in effect, is proposing to replace all three of those articles by his single article that he presents here and we go on in this way.
For quite, quite a while, so we'll go we'll run a few more slides and you'll see that the the ring gets the ring,
the analyst gets larger as the positions change and the end of the first day.
This is a Saturday, the end of the first day. There is an impassioned debate over a motion to postpone this discussion.
Mirabeau opposes that motion, saying that all this means just the people favouring toleration will leave.
The persecutors will remain, and then there will be a St Bartholomew's Night Massacre over Mirabeau as objections.
The discussion is postponed until the following day,
and we get to a petition and petition calls for discussion of Article 16 and 17 to be postponed until the Constitution is written.
So putting on this argument is we are talking about duties here,
but these to these articles are really discussing sorry, these two articles are discussing duties, not rights.
We're not biting the Declaration of Rights for France, but for men in general.
And therefore, we should put off this particular question of the establishment of a public religion that is supported by Bush,
who argues that Article 16 17 should be postponed.
And this goes on. Emer, who is one of the traditionalists, really tries in effect to consolidate Article 16 through 18 into a single article,
really in contrast to Castellanos earlier article, and essentially emphasises the importance of religion for any kind of social order.
I think Mirabeau and um. It suggests that that motion is out of order, but the president.
Rules against Mirabal and allows a discussion of that proposal, the AMA, which is supported and then not supported until finally Bishop Taylor Wrong,
comes in and says every article of this declaration should begin with the words Every every man, any man living in society has the right to X.
Therefore, Tolerant really argues for postponing the discussion of a public court until the Constitution is written.
So he's arguing in effect for the removal of Article 16 and 17,
which is decided upon by a vote which leaves Article 18 from the six April draught still on the table, and Castellani immediately renews his motion.
No one can be arrested for his religious opinions or disturbed in the exercise of his cult.
And that again throws the assembly into total total confusion.
And one of the journals describes the scene as follows.
It's impossible to follow exactly the workings of the session dominated by extreme disorder, where partisanship took over, where the cry of nature,
the voice of reason and the rights of man were treated with contempt where
the president president able no longer to resist the cries of his conscience,
beg twice to resign. The motion was amended. Seven men divided, twisted, tangled in a hundred different ways.
So a decisive intervention in this debate.
It's a is an intervention by the Vietcong to do Malvo, the younger brother of the condemned the mirabeau,
and he announces that he will only support the first half of Castellanos proposal,
the part allowing for the freedom of religious opinion, but not the second half,
the part guaranteeing that no one would be disturbed in the exercise of his cult.
And so the question is why? Why exactly does the vehicle to Mirabeau, the younger Mirabeau,
the the religious mirabeau make this proposal to strip out the reference to disturb it in the exercise of his call?
It looks as if he Mirabeau does this because he fears that the latter clause would open the way for any religious practises.
To say that no one can be disturbed in the practise of his cult is to say that any that any cult can be allowed.
This is what Mirabeau the vehicle to Mirabeau says in permitting courts.
Would you want to make religion? A matter of circumstance, a matter of happenstance, if you like each will choose a religion.
According to his passions, the Turkish religion will be for a young man, the Jewish religion for users, the pramanik religion, perhaps for women.
This is the fantasy that the younger Mirabeau sums up at this provocation.
The elder Mirabeau entered the fracas with a lengthy harangue.
Defending lands formulation is so self-evident that anything to the contrary would be totally absurd.
In turn, the Protestant leader Riverside ITN, sensing that toleration was now in radical danger,
followed with an extended plea for the rights of non-Catholics to full and equal citizenship
until the free and entire practise of their religion freedom of religious opinion.
He argued, in effect,
could not in fact be sealed off from the practise of a cold manifestation of religious opinions had to take the form of religious practise,
which is to say, an open form of worship. How ironic, how ironic, then, that while the elder Mirabeau feared the establishment of a single cult,
his religious younger brother trembled at the prospect of emergence of too many.
How ironic, moreover, that the that the younger mirabilis proposal to exercise to exercise reference to any court from
Custom Lands Motion now received support from the mass of the Assembly's most conservative deputies.
Those who had argued most forcefully for a dominant cult now suddenly reversed their position and argued against any mention of a court at all.
Apparently, they thought it better to speak of no court than to imply acceptance of the possibility of many as a last resort.
They were prepared to leave the question of an established court to future constitutional decision.
The decision, of course, with. Unanticipated results when the assembly came around to deciding about the practise of natural.
Of the national religion. So.
Castellanos argues back pounds back against the traditionalists,
reiterating that natural right allowed all men to serve God according to their
conscience without harassment from their opinions or disturbances of their practises.
But to no avail as the opponent, as the opponents of a multiplicity of courts shouted for the truncation of his most of his motion.
The Archbishop of Paris when I called for a vote. And at this point, Castellon caves and allows that he will take out the latter part of his motion,
leaving the phrase No one shall be harassed for his religious opinions.
Then, interestingly enough, a supplement was adopted to the effect that no one must be harassed for his opinions,
even religious was therefore emphasising again the freedom of religious opinion.
But then? Bishop Gabel. Offers another supplement which is provided their manifestation, not troubled public order established by the law.
With this Sub Amendment accepted, the assembly prepared to vote.
At the last minute, though, what's tution? At the last minute, though.
Sorry, I'm I'm I'm going ahead to France. What what Gabel proposes is that no one be disturbed for his opinions,
even religious ones provide if the manifestation doesn't trouble the public order.
That is what the assembly is ready to accept.
But then there is this last minute sub clause established by the law, which is thrown in by and in an anonymous member.
So this unnamed deputy then through this established by the law in as a sub
amendment and we wonder why he did that had he recognised that this addition
could open the way to had he recognised that Goebbels formulation provided the manifestation of religious opinions not be disturbed by the law?
How do you recognise that this, in fact, allow opened the way for arbitrary repression by governmental authorities or even by private individuals?
Because anyone could claim that they were acting capriciously in the name of the law to counter any particular religious practise?
Or had this anonymous deputy realised the force of rebels argument that
manifestation of religious opinion necessarily extended to the practise of a court.
The last minute addition there, as established by the law, suggests a degree of panic amongst the deputies.
No man must be harassed, harassed for his opinions, even religious ones,
provided that their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by the law.
Freedom of religion of religious opinion was to be was to be allowed.
Yet religious practise could not disturb public order.
But how was a breach of public order to be identified and by whom?
In the face of this uncertainty, the assembly hastily accepted the further provision that the public order not be breached,
that it had to be established by the law.
With this addition meant to to ease the anxieties of liberals or libertarians who feared that a breach of public order could be arbitrarily declared
at any moment by persons hostile to freedom of religious opinion in principle or to any particular expression of religious opinion in practise.
Or was it the opposite, a panicky conservative falling back on the power of the law to constrain actions that had otherwise become untethered?
In the absence of any established court or any stipulation of duties, in either case, the division between extremes was to be filled by the law.
Upon that, almost everyone could agree. The key point, however,
is that religious and metaphysical language of the six bureau draught have been entirely pared
away by the time the National Assembly had arrived at its formulation of new Article 10.
The profound divisions amongst the deputies left them with a lean, common denominator approximating universality.
Failing to agree for France, they ended up declaring for humankind,
they articulated rights but reduced one another to silence regarding the metaphysical foundations of these rights.
Or what? Or the practise that would come to express them.
Duties were effaced. But what then was left to control the passions?
The answer, of course, was the law. Religion no longer to be declared the essential basis of empires was replaced by the law.
The law, of course, was to be the expression of the general will,
and its abrupt ascendancy within the Declaration of Rights throws us back upon Samuel Moyane's
assertion that 1789 offered the rights of man essentially as grounding the rights of citizens.
It declared the rights of states the right to a state, the rights of citizens within states rather than the rights of humanity against them.
But much depends here on which conception of the general will we imagine invoked by the French deputies in the declaration of 1789?
Was it Russo's general will of a body of citizens or detras sense of natural right felt by all men or by all humankind?
The choice may have leaned towards Rousseau in August 1789,
but was the issue entirely resolved between Rousseau in general will indeed arose conception of natural right?
There was some unfinished business here that would divide possibly the 0nd and the Jacobins.
Three years later. Thank you.