Who Pays?: Social Rights and the French Revolution

This chapter traces the rise and fall of social rights in the French Revolution. In 1789, economic liberals proposed them, but failed to persuade the National Assembly to include them in its Declaration of Rights. Nevertheless, invocations of them persisted. Their advocates, however, imagined achieving them through the voluntary means of free markets and charity; the state might manage charitable endowments, but it was not to finance them with taxes. The latter prospect eventually gained ground by 1793. Still, the National Convention declared ‘society’ to be the duty-bearer of social rights in its new rights declaration, not the state. During the Terror (1793–4), officials frequently conflated charity and taxes in their efforts to finance social assistance, creating a sense of arbitrariness. Social rights, now associated with the Terror, were suppressed in the rights declaration of 1795. Henceforth, the Revolution’s fundamental problem of obligation was often recast as the problem of social rights.