EDITORIAL

14 July 92

Today, we join the people of France in marking the Fall of the Bastille - an event that has come to symbolize the triumph of the French Revolution. The downfall of the French monarchy may not be directly relevant for the rest of the world, but the dissolution of the ancien regime made possible the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen - and that has been and remains a major influence on the affairs of mankind.

The first article of the declaration proclaimed the equality of men before the law and, in so doing, abolished personal servitude and abolished the categorization of the population into three orders (the nobility, the clergy and the common people), each of which had different rights and obligations.

As a consequence, every Frenchman had the opportunity to be appointed to any position in the new state. “Sons of peasants and artisans could rise to the summit of the revolutionary hierarchy...[and] it could now be truly said that ‘every soldier carried a marshal's baton in his knapsack,'” historian Jacques Godichot observed. He was quick to note, however, that this was really an exception.

He explained that in the military, a person could rise through bravery. This was not true of civilian posts, where education was a prerequisite to advancement. And so, it was mainly members of the bourgoisie that could become part of the new officialdom. Only the bourgeoisie were educated enough to hold government posts -- because they had been rich enough to acquire the requisite education in the first place.

Similarly it was the bourgeoisie that benefitted from the nationalization of the property of the clergy. The government took over the wealth of the Church with the intention of using it to pay the debts of the state. In fact, these properties were used to back assignats, a form of paper money, which the state would pay of its debts.

These asignats (which were often sold at a discount) could be used to purchase former church properties - and again, the bourgeoisie were in the best position to take advantage of this 18th-century version of the debt buy-back scheme. There was a massive land distribution, but it was to the advantage of the more prosperous.

We recall these historical details to remind ourselves that the human rights that we take for granted today were not won by the simple act of declaring them - and that the expectations of equality that the declaration aroused were not immediately fulfilled. Only a small proportion of the French population was in a position to take advantage of the declaration of the equality of all men - and when they took advantage of it, they merely made themselves more equal than others.

The point is not that it is unrealistic to seek equality. What is unrealistic is to expect that equality is achieved by the fiat expressed in a constitution, a law or a declaration. The declaration of the equality of all men merely suggests an equal opportunity to compete; it does not guarantee that people will have the same outcomes.

But people differ from one another in wealth, knowledge, skill, motivation and other traits that enable them to compete more successfully. For this reason, outcomes can never really be equal. Like liberty and fraternity, equality can only be offered. It does not become a reality unless individuals work hard at it, and even here, there is no guarantee.

There will always be inequality in this world, but this condition is tolerable if there is the liberty to pursue it and if there is a sufficient sense of fraternity that motivates the more prosperous ones among us to support the aspirations of those who are less equal than themselves.