360 Chapter XV
refused compensation because, having emigrated, they worked instead for rein-
statement in their old positions through a victory of the counterrevolution.^11
The same session of August 4 decreed the abolition of tithes, pluralism in church
appointments, and the annates paid to the court of Rome. A revolution was thereby
initiated in the financial substructure of the church, and was carried much further
in the following November, when all property of the church was confiscated, on
the ground that it was not really private property anyway, and that, if it was sold off
to new owners, the proceeds could be used to pay the royal, or now public, debt.
Naturally some churchmen who had accepted merger of the orders in June, and so
contributed to the Revolution, were repelled by these high- handed developments,
but the loss of property and income was never the basic issue in the conflict of
church and state during the Revolution, and even in 1791 there were still ninety
priests in the Assembly considered to be on the Left. The “irreligion” of the first
two years of the Revolution was more apparent to its political enemies, French and
foreign, than to the French Catholic clergy as a whole.
The resolutions of the night of the 4th were worked out in detail in a series of
August decrees of the ensuing weeks. The King showed great hesitancy in accept-
ing these August decrees, but meanwhile, in a sense, they wiped clean the slate on
which the outlines of a new France might be drawn. The way seemed open for the
great work of regeneration so fervently expected. That there would be a new con-
stitution was now certain. The Assembly prefixed it, on August 26, 1789, after a
month of discussion, with a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.
Most of the arguments since levied against this famous document were heard in
the Assembly that enacted it: that the concept of natural rights was dubious any-
way, that men should be reminded also of their duties, that a ringing declaration
would arouse expectations that could not be fulfilled, that the constitution, when it
came, would seem drab and disappointing in comparison with the promises of this
initial announcement. The Assembly overruled all such objections. Doubtless many
were carried away by political excitement, but there were practical considerations
also. The Declaration, far from being the work merely of a debating society, was a
political act of the first magnitude. Its purpose was to raise a highly visible stan-
dard, to hold and rally a country aroused by the uprisings of preceding weeks, to
keep alive the sense of struggle toward a goal, pending the long and disputatious
process of constitutional and institutional change. The Declaration was no law
book, but rather, in Lefebvre’s phrase, a direction of intention, advertising to the
country and to the world the shape that the new laws were to have. It was primar-
ily an ethical affirmation, denying the moral foundation of the old order, vindicat-
ing the forcible overthrow of authority that had already occurred, and justifying in
advance what was yet to come. If it was the death certificate of the Old Regime, in
the words of Lefebvre and Aulard, it was also a birth certificate for the new.
It is probable that the idea of listing rights, in a numbered series, in a document
distinct from the constitution itself, was suggested to the French by what they
knew, which was a good deal, of the American bills of rights.^12 There was in fact a
11 H. Carré, La fin des parlements (Paris, 1912), 260.
12 See for example O. Vossler, “Studien zur Erklärung der Menschenrechte,” in Historische