This Day in French History (“Declaration of the Rights of Man” Adopted as New Model for Revolutionaries)

August 26, 1789—Before it degenerated into war, terror, reaction and dictatorship, the French Revolution reached its zenith when the newly formed National Constituent Assembly formally adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

Certain words and phrases spring out at you in both the French declaration and the one that inspired it, America’s Declaration of Independence: “free,” “equal,” “liberty,” “sacred,” and “nature/natural.” 

The American "self-evident" principles become the French "simple and incontestable" ones. 

Another word from the French document, “imprescriptible" (rights prior to the state, government and society), is a more intense version of the American “inalienable” (rights that not only cannot be taken away but cannot be given up).

If it sounds at points like the French document echoes America’s, two reasons might explain it:

* Both documents reflected Enlightenment philosophers’ thinking on the relationship between liberty and the state.

*France’s declaration involved two people deeply associated with the United States: the Marquis de Lafayette, onetime general under George Washington, now part of the 30-member committee that drafted the French declaration; and Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, now the American minister to France—and a keenly interested reader of the new document.

And yet, there are signal differences between the two. 

Start with length: the American document is more than 1,300 words, while France’s was merely 300—short enough to fit on one side of a single paper, virtually guaranteeing that it would be disseminated not only in France, but in every major European language.

Second, France’s declaration reads as a more impersonal document. No person is held responsible for the poverty and lack of freedom that produced the storming of the Bastille the month before, largely because many leaders of the Revolution still believed that, if they could sever King Louis XVI from ministers offering bad advice, they could maintain a functioning constitutional monarchy. (This proved to be a forlorn hope when Louis plotted to escape from France to his royal cousins to the east.)

In contrast, despite a stated need to keep in mind “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” (a necessity, given that it wanted to secure France as an ally in the struggle against the crown), the Continental Congress spent more time reviewing the middle part of their document—King George’s “long train of abuses”—than the now far more famous preamble (“we hold these truths to be self-evident…”).

Though products of revolutions, both documents were written by men who were anything but the have-nots of society. 

For every aristocrat like Thomas Jefferson in the Continental Congress, there was a self-made man such John Adams or Ben Franklin, middle-class bourgeois who bitterly resented the encrusted privileges and corruption of a British elite.

Similarly, the Declaration of the Rights of Man was imbued with an upper-middle-class sensibility. It even mentions a word left out of the list of rights enumerated in the American document: property. (Ironically, it did not matter at first to the great majority of Frenchmen, most of whom owned no property when the Bastille fell.)

There are other rights not enumerated in the French document, either: to employment, women’s suffrage, subsistence, public relief, or education. 

Neither slaves nor freed blacks are mentioned (indeed, though slavery was outlawed in France in 1794, it was re-introduced under Napoleon, and was not finally abolished in the nation and its possessions until 1848.)

The American Revolution, for all the stunning change it introduced in North America, did not influence Europe as decisively as France’s. The National Constituent Assembly produced not just a change in governance, but the overthrow of an entire social order—one based on feudalism and manorial privilege. The great sweep of this change posed a threat to every European monarch.

A powerful document, the Declaration of the Rights of Man was the high point of classical liberalism—a movement that stressed the sanctity of property, individualism, and the universality of its principles. 

But, as the French were about to learn, in more ways than one, so much depends on execution.

This Day in French History (Birth of Talleyrand, Machiavellian Statesman)

February 2, 1754—Observers of the Continental diplomatic scene believed, watching his machinations, that he had nine lives, but Charles Maurice Talleyrand-Perigord began the only one actually allotted to human beings as the scion of a family of nobles. 

Physically lame, he had demonstrated, by the time he breathed his last 84 years later, perhaps the most remarkable political and moral nimbleness of any politician of his time.

Somewhere, I heard it said in a spate of dark jesting, that the only creature that would survive a nuclear apocalypse would be the cockroach. Well, in his amazing survival instincts, Talleyrand might have been the closest human equivalent of the cockroach.

At first, I thought that Talleyrand’s longevity might have been surpassed by the Soviet Union’s V.M. Molotov, who lived to age 96. 

But most of the Communist diplomat’s career was spent in the service of Joseph Stalin, and once removed from power by Nikita Khrushchev, he had the good sense to live quietly in retirement as something of a U.S.S.R. “nonperson.”

Consider the following different masters Talleyrand served:

* His aristocratic parents sloughed him off on the Catholic Church once they became convinced he was not made for their life.

* Rising from priest to bishop, he was among the clergy at the Estates-General called by King Louis XVI to consider what to do about the worsening domestic situation in 1789.

* He ingratiated himself with the revolutionaries by a) proposing that the French assembly assume ecclesiastical lands, and b) accepting the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. For his pains, Talleyrand was excommunicated. (Over a decade later, the Church rescinded the excommunication—though Talleyrand remained laicized).

* While in England in 1792, negotiating on behalf of the young republic, the French monarchy was overthrown. When matters became too hot in France, Talleyrand journeyed to England as a private citizen. He wasn’t out of France long when he was branded an émigré—a designation that, at the time, was often assigned to monarchists. It wasn’t a comfortable class to which to belong, and the former aristocrat decided to bide his time.

* The English, not trusting him, forced him out in 1794, compelling Talleyrand to journey across the ocean to the U.S. There he remained for more than a year.

* With the Reign of Terror over, Talleyrand managed to work his way back into the good graces of the five-member Directory, which, in need of an experienced foreign-policy hand (even if that experience had been only for a few years), appointed the returned diplomat as foreign minister.

* Later in 1799, Talleyrand resigned his post—but his shrewd recognition of the coming power in the land, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the latter’s coup resulted in Talleyrand resuming his old ministerial portfolio.

* Talleyrand plied his arts with Napoleon, and for awhile they got along because they needed each other. But a very public reconciliation between Talleyrand and an old enemy led the man who, by now, had gotten himself named Emperor, to wonder if the two might be conspiring against him. In 1809, at a meeting of the privy council, Napoleon launched into a half-hour harangue, climaxing with a denunciation of Talleyrand as “dung in a silk stocking.” Talleyrand didn’t say a peep, before or afterward. The emperor continued to consult with him, but for all intents and purposes Talleyrand had lost much of his influence.

* At the Congress of Vienna, with Napoleon overthrown, Talleyrand represented post-imperial France in a diplomatic assemblage of reactionaries whose guiding spirit was Prince Metternich.

* Napoleon’s return from Elba resulted in Talleyrand resigning again. The wily old diploat waited, then waited some more. It looked as if his diplomatic career was over.

* Er, not quite yet. In the July Revolution of 1830, Talleyrand persuaded Louis Philippe to accept the offer by that year’s group of radicals to become King of France. The grateful new sovereign tried to get the old diplomatic dog to become foreign minister again, but Talleyrand said that minister to England would do fine. He held that last post for four years before taking leave of government, this time for good, in 1834, four years before his death.