Beyond this, there is an inalienable right to resistance, grounded in a common human nature. We are a free people; and now you have planted in our country the title deeds of our future slavery. You are neither god nor demon. Who are you then to make slaves?
And why? Because you have set foot there? You are both children of nature. What right do you have over him that he does not have over you? I have not been dazzled by the splendour of your deeds. Their success has not obscured their injustice … if I cease for one moment to see you as so many flocks of cruel and ravenous vultures, with as little morality and conscience as those birds of prey, may this work and my memory … become objects of the utmost contempt and execration.
The Enlightenment also saw the emergence of an unprecedented figure, one that was henceforth celebrated before being erected as a dogma: the rational and critical individual possessing inalienable natural rights, whose outlines and content John Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, and Diderot continued to write about and debate.
From the right to life, protection, freedom of movement, opinion, and religion to the right to property in particular, Enlightenment Europe forged a grammar of notions and rights that the revolutions of the end of the century trumpeted with emphasis.
While the Italian Cesare Beccaria retained long-standing arguments in his On Crimes and Punishments , he formulated this program in a new light in an effort to apply it to criminal law, by submitting the judicial system to the principles of reason and charging it with the mission of preserving the social contract. Finally, a handful of salons and nascent public opinion sometimes echoed this as well.
Yet despite a few daring essayists, women, children, and slaves were excluded from these rights. Faced with the irreducible reality of a war of all against all, as well as a general history of the continent marked by the decadence of empires and morals, the temptation to define Europe as a civilization ultimately emerged. Hidden behind the ironic comparison of Europe with the customs and worship of India, China, or the Tartars was a methodology of relativization.
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