French Revolution: Individualism, Sovereignty, and the Rejection of Historicism

Revolutions and Doctrines of Freedom

Individualism and Privatism

• Privatism: Individualism can result in an economic situation where the common political foundation is only and exclusively a contractual guarantee or mutual insurance relationship between individual owners.
• There is a possible degeneration of individualism into a voluntaristic contractual sense, where all political outcomes become dependent variables of the individual citizens' will.

The French Revolution (1788–1794)

After several events occurring between 1788 and 1794, the French Revolution was reached. We witness the formation of a culture of freedom that results from a combination of the individualistic and contractarian model and the state, deliberately leaving out the historicist vision from the political and cultural landscape.

Constitutional Values in the 1789 Declaration

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) established only two primary constitutional political values: the individual and the law as an expression of the sovereignty of the nation.

Article 2: The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and indefeasible rights of man.

Article 3: The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation. No corporation or individual may exercise authority not expressly emanating from it.

These two articles set the general coordinates for a political model that simultaneously frees the individual and the state, now expressed in terms of national sovereignty, removing the embarrassing presence of the old feudal and manorial powers.

The assertion of natural individual rights and national sovereignty were not conflicting realities in the Declaration; both were taken as products of the same historical process. For the French constituents in those historical moments, trusting in consent and historical liberties would have meant allowing the social and institutional practices of the Ancien Régime (AR) to continue exerting influence after the revolution.

Therefore, the revolutionary project was built upon a struggle against the double dimension of privilege and particularism, favoring the new constitutional values: fundamental natural individual rights and sovereignty of the nation.

Reasons for Rejecting the Historicist Vision

• Instead of an absolute veto, a suspensive veto was chosen, which the monarch was called upon to exercise outside the assembly. The executive branch was significantly weakened by the Constitution of 1791, being deprived almost entirely of self-regulatory powers and aimed only at the mechanical implementation of the law intended by the assembly.
• The possibility of introducing the aristocratic element into the constitutional model (the British solution of balanced and moderate government) was dismissed.
• The French Revolution quickly dismissed the hypothesis of historical bicameralism, which originates in the need to balance the aristocratic and democratic elements by distinguishing the methods of access to both chambers, as in the case of the Commons and the Lords.