Revolutionary rights above a revisable constitution
for altering it every month as in the early French Revolution
The revolutionary example has a precise intellectual counterpart in the Declaration of Rights prefixed to the French Constitution of 24 June 1793. Its preamble presents rights as sacred and inalienable, providing citizens with a continuing measure against which to judge government. Article 28 nevertheless reserves the people's power to revise their constitution and denies one generation the authority to bind future generations. Articles 33–35 derive resistance to oppression from those rights and make insurrection a duty when government violates them. The French presidency's transcription preserves the French text.
This is close to Chesterton's distinction between the stability of an ideal and the instability of arrangements made to realize it: political revision need not mean abandonment of every standard. It also clarifies what his joke about executing the king contributes. Rebellion, on this account, requires a claim of right superior to existing commands. The Declaration illustrates that claim; it does not show that every revolutionary action satisfied it. Nor should ‘every month’ be treated as an exact constitutional chronology. The paragraph compresses political upheaval into a contrast with permanence, while its philosophical demand concerns the continuity of the criterion used to judge change.
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