History of Liberty
 Long Live Liberty, a thousand gods ! Let's vomit on laws, decrees, regulations, ordinances, instructions, opinions, etc. Lets kick into the dunghill bouffe-galette, jugeurs et roussins : the pigs who prepare laws, the asses who apply them and the cows that impose them. Yes, to do what one wants, that is what's great. Félix Fénéon ( in Le Père Peinard ) In the West the modern era began with the emancipation of the individual in respect of the community of which he formed a part - village community, urban township, corporation and lineage. This liquidation of feudal society went hand in hand with the establishment of the sovereignty of the monarch within the limits of his territory. The theories of natural right preceded those of human rights. « Natural Right is the set of principles according to which men must live independently of the existence of a particular society; these principles are deduced from the living and rational nature of man » [3] These rights simultaneously established both the independence of the individual and the sovereignty of the monarch. Individuals could possess and could produce, without the hindrances of feudal privileges; subjects could belong to the sovereign without him having to refer to the Church or to share them with his vassals. Then the bourgeois revolution disembodied the principle of sovereignty by transferring it from the king to the nation. The civil rights which were then added to the « natural » rights of man guaranteed to each individual a kind of right of abstract ownership over the democratic State, which resulted not just from their concrete membership of a nation and its State, but also through a kind of universal proclamation with quite real effects : democracy is peculiar to man thus all men from now on belong to democracy. The subject of a monarch could always appeal royal decisions before divine law, the national of a non-democratic State can always seek the protection of a democracy but, as Furet wrote, « democratic law, having nothing beyond it, doesn't include any court of appeal; the obedience which is due to it does not depend at all on its contents, but only on the formal procedures which led to its promulgation ( ... ) The power of the democratic state eliminates the concept even of right of resistance, and a fortiori the old recourse to tyrannicide ( ... ) By a kind of premium which it is able to confer on any provision which emanates from it, the majority transforms into right all that it does. [4] » Pursued by the guard, the outlaw found refuge in the church. Threatened by totalitarian henchmen, the regime's opponent shelters behind the borders of the democracies. But whoever contravenes the laws of a democracy, especially whoever takes up arms against one of them, soon finds there is no asylum anywhere. « Terrorists » and « delinquents » will always learn this to their cost : outside the State of right ( état de droit ), there is no longer anything, except prison and death. In 1789, the writers of the various drafts of the Declaration of the Rights of Man based their demonstrations of the need for these rights on the primordial needs of man in the « state of nature ». The Rights of Man were founded on the fiction of a man preexistent to all social bonds. This philosophical abstraction only reflected and prepared for the real abstraction to which capitalist society returned the individual that it had just created. Notes [3] Pierre Lantz, « Genèse de Droits de l'Homme : citoyenneté, droits sociaux et droits des peuples », L'homme et la société, no 3-4, 1987. [4] François Furet and others, Terrorisme et démocratie. |