Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [71]
Not surprisingly, Thomas Jefferson is said to have had a hand in it, but this time, without the sobering influence of John Adams and the rest of the Continental Congress’s drafting committee. (The committee deleted nearly 500 of Jefferson’s words, made dozens of other changes, and added numerous references to God.)31
The coming bloodshed in France should have been obvious from the title, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In other words, the document addressed your natural rights as an individual … and your duties to the government.
From the very first sentence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man swerves off the rails from the ideas of the Declaration of Independence by stating that “the sole causes of public miseries and the corruption of governments” are “ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man.”
You could ask every signatory to the Declaration of Independence—indeed, you could probably poll every colonial American—and not one would have said the problem with King George was that the rights of man had slipped his mind. Rather, our founding fathers believed—as Madison wrote in Federalist 10—that men are more likely to oppress another than to “co-operate for their common good.” In particular, he said the power to tax created the greatest temptation to “trample on the rules of justice,” because increasing someone else’s taxes “is a shilling saved to their own pockets.”32
According to the French, King George was disregarding the rights of man. But according to Madison, he was merely following “the nature of man.”
That’s why, in our Declaration, the founding fathers cited the only authority even higher than a king. The French reeled off a series of airy “rights” that could as easily have been any other random collection of rights. A sensible reader of the French Declaration might ask, Says who?
The only demand in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which is really more of a suggestion, is that “members of the social body” compare executive and legislative acts to the principles stated in the Declaration. Or not. Whatever.
The National Assembly that drafted the French Declaration never says what it wants changed exactly, except by implication. There are, for example, assertions that all citizens should be treated equally, suggesting that they were not already being treated equally, and the demand that no one “be accused, arrested, nor detained but in the cases determined by the law,” suggesting that some men had been accused, arrested, or detained outside of the law. But who, when, or how—or what the Assembly had done about it—is left to conjecture.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen announces a slew of abstract “rights” of the sort we have come to associate with all bloodthirsty dictatorships. For example, the Declaration proclaims:
“Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others.”
“Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society.”
“No one may be questioned about his opinions, including his religious views, provided that their manifestation does not trouble the public order established by the law.”
“[A] common contribution is indispensable; it must be equally distributed between all the citizens, by reason of their ability to pay.”
This mishmash of English natural rights doctrine and Rousseauian argle-bargle was ignored ten minutes later, when the Assembly voted to confiscate church lands, decreed that the pope’s authority was null and void throughout France, and demanded that all priests take an oath to the state-controlled civil constitution of the clergy.
As a tribute to its success, just three days after the completion of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the mob stormed the Bastille.
Practically overnight, the greatest nation in continental Europe became a human abattoir. That is why the French Revolution remains an inspiration to liberals everywhere. France’s revolution-by-mob