Robespierre's Declaration of Rights – proposed as the Preamble to the Constitution
– excerpts from debate in the National Convention, April 24 1793
The State
Article 1. The object of every political association is to safeguard the natural and imprescriptible rights of men, and to develop all their faculties.
Rights
Article 2. The most important rights of men are self-preservation and freedom.
Article 3. These rights belong equally to all men, whatever their physical and moral differences. Equality of rights is a law of nature (établie par la nature). Society, far from impairing it, guarantees it against such misuses of power as make it unreal.
Freedom
Article 4. Freedom is the right of every man to exercise all his faculties as he will. Its rule is justice, its limits are the rights of others, its source is nature, its guarantee is the law. The right of peaceful assembly, and the right to publish one’s opinions through the press, or in any other way, are such obvious corollaries of freedom that the necessity of asserting them points either to the presence of despotism, or to recent recollection of it.
Article 5. The law can prohibit only what is harmful to society, and can require only what is useful to it.
Article 6. Any law which violates the imprescriptible rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.
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The Sovereign People
Article 15. The law is the free and solemn expression of the people.
Article 16. The people is sovereign, the government is its work and its property; public officials are its agents.
Article 17. No fraction (portion) of the people can exercise the powers of the whole; but any wish that it expresses should be respected, as being that of a part of the people, whose consent is needed to form the general will (volonté général). Every section of the sovereign assembly ought to have the right to express its will with entire freedom; it is essentially independent of all constituted authorities, and free to manage its own police and its own debates. The people can change its government and recall its deputies whenever it pleases.
Equality
Article 18. The law is the same for all.
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