Bicentenary of a Declaration: A Time for Challenge?*
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1990.tb01800.x |
| Author | Nicole Questiaux |
| Published date | 01 March 1990 |
| Date | 01 March 1990 |
THE
MODERN
LAW
REVIEW
Volume
53
March
1990
No.
2
Bicentenary
of
a
Declaration:
A
Time
for
Challenge?*
Nicole
Questiaux**
When I received your invitation to deliver this lecture in
1989
I felt unexpectedly moved.
As though a hand was stretching across the Channel, beckoning us to share our Bicentenary
with the British people. Now we have had reason to think, since Burke and Wellington,
that they have not always been convinced of the significance of the events we are now
commemorating, nor by the ways and means the French nation used to carry the idea
across Europe.
Yet the fact is we have now come, most officially, to share most
of
these ideas, by
recognising their universal value in
1948’
and by ratifying the European Convention
which is directly inspired by ideas which in the French Constitution appear only in a
Preamble.
Why then a time for challenge?
The words came to my lips quite naturally when you asked me for a title. Immediately
with the emotion, I felt a pang of envy. This is no uncommon feeling for us, men and
women of the twentieth century when we look back to the Age
of
Enlightenment. How
did they do it? How did they dare? Why was it that the ink from their pen has not faded?
They surely made a first breakthrough by using a language, a common language echoing
across the boundaries of nation and class. The proof is that if I want to summarise what
we are celebrating, I can without qualms refer to Paine. Your Paine, to quote Carlyle,
‘rebellious staymaker, unkempt, who feels that he a simple needleman did by his Common
Sense Pamphlet free America; that he can and will free all this world, perhaps even the
other
. .
.
’.*
Our Paine,
DeputPffQncuis:
What we now see in the world, from the revolutions of America and France, are a renovation
of the natural order
of
things, a system of principles
as
universal
of
truth and the existence of
man, and combining moral and political happiness and national prosperity.
I.
Men are born and always continue free, and equal in respect of their rights. Civil distinctions
therefore can be founded only on public utility.
11.
The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible
rights of man and these rights
are
liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression
. . .
~ ~~~
*The Eighteenth Chorley Lecture delivered
at
the London School
of
Economics,
7
June
1989.
**The author is a Conseiller d’Etat and President
of
the Section
of
Public Works at
the
French Conseil d’Etat.
In
the
United
Nations Universal Declaration
of
Human
Rights,
G.A.
Res.
217A,
UN
Doc.
A1811 (1948).
Thomas Carlyle,
The French Revolution.
A
History
(1837).
Thomas Payne, ‘The Rights
of
Man’ in
The Thomas Puyne Reader
(Penguin Classics,
1987).
1
2
3
139
The Modern Law Review
53:2
March
1990 0026-7961
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