362 Chapter XV
The Declaration, in short, simultaneously derived both liberty and authority
from the same principles, while relating both to legal equality. Defending the indi-
vidual against the state, it set up powers for the state as well. The rights it declared
were not those of “man” only, and still less those of man in a state of nature, but of
man as “citizen,” a member of an organized civil community, in which each citizen
was considered to share in the sovereignty and in the formation of that law which
alone had any rightful power of coercion. It is in this respect, for example, that the
Declaration of 1789 differs from the Declaration of the Rights of Man published
by the United Nations in 1948. A “citizen” possesses power as well as rights.
The Declaration of 1789, by laying down the principles of the modern demo-
cratic state, remains the chief single document of the Revolution of the Western
World. Printed, often on a single page, in hundreds of thousands of copies, it was
publicly posted in all parts of France. Translated into a dozen languages, it was
soon read and known in other countries, though in most of them, to be sure, it
would be audacious if not actually dangerous in 1789 to post it in public.
THE CONSTITUTION: MOURNIER AND SIEYÈSThe Assembly now proceeded in August and September to make its main deci-
sions on the constitution. These had already been prefigured in the discussion of
the American constitutions, related in Chapter IX, in which Turgot, Mably, and
Condorcet had played leading parts. The main disagreement was between those
who favored a two- house legislature with a strong independent executive and
those who preferred, like the late Turgot, a single assembly in which the national
sovereignty should be concentrated.
The two chief constitutional thinkers were J. J. Mounier and the Abbé Sieyès.
Mounier had always been one of the least known of the Revolutionary leaders
outside of France. His writings and speeches show that he was fully familiar with
the United States, which he thought had the best government in history up to that
time; and he alluded often to recent events in Britain, Holland, Sweden, and Po-
land, in favoring a balance of powers in government, and in a certain realism of
mind, Mounier was a kind of French John Adams, with much of Jefferson in him
also. The Abbé Sieyès, more abstractly dogmatic, has always been well known as
the great theorist of the Revolution of 1789. It was he, in his Tiers Etat, who trans-
lated the ideas of the Contrat social into the language of 1789. To judge by his
writings, Sieyès had no more than a slight interest in America. Yet it was Sieyès,
more clearly than anyone else, who expressed in France what I have called the es-
sential revolutionary idea of the American Revolution: the idea of the people as a
constituent power, working through a special convention conceived as outside and
prior to government, and creating, by its sovereign action, the organs of state to
which it grants a delegated authority.^13
13 See J. Egret, La Révolution des Notables: Mounier et les Monarchiens, 178a (Paris, 1950); P. Bas-
tid, Sieyès; P. Duclos, La notion de constitution dans l ’oeuvre de l ’Assemblée constituante de 1789 (Paris,
1932).