Democracy's prohibitions and the compressed revolutionary timeline
They wished to have votes and _not_ to have titles.
The rejection of titles had a quite literal legislative form. The National Assembly's decree of 19 June 1790 abolished hereditary nobility and prohibited taking or bestowing aristocratic titles; it also prohibited liveries and coats of arms. Equality here required definite exclusions, just as Chesterton's preceding argument says an act of will must. But the document belongs to the National Assembly in 1790: it should not be attributed exclusively to the later Jacobin republic. The inspected French witness is the decree as collected in the Archives parlementaires, volume XVI (1883), p. 378, rather than an original 1790 printed sheet. Decree, 19 June 1790.
A closer witness to the democratic programme of the radical republic is the Constitution of 24 June 1793. Its declaration names equality, liberty, security and property as rights (article 2); its constitutional act admits French men aged twenty-one to citizenship and provides for the people's direct choice of deputies (articles 4 and 8). Thus legal equality, property and a specified electorate could belong to one positive programme. The source inspected here is the French presidency's modern transcription of the 1793 text. Constitution and declaration, 1793.
There is nevertheless an essential distinction between programme and accomplishment: the National Assembly's historical account states that this constitution was never applied. These documents therefore illuminate Chesterton's claim that democratic will has a determinate shape; they do not establish his much larger causal claim that the Jacobins created France's peasant wealth. Nor does the paragraph's cross-national pairing of Franklin and Wilkes with Robespierre and Danton describe four members of one party: it constructs contrasting temperaments within a broad revolutionary tradition. Assemblée nationale, account of the 1793 constitution.
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