ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Controversies about the right to work (Paris, 1848)
Author: Diatkine Daniel
Controversies about the right to work (Paris, 1848) Article 23-1: Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UNO, 1948) During the seventies or the eighties, according to Soviet Union, mass unemployment was a severe infringement to the Article 23 — 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was easy to conclude that Human Rights was not Universal at all. If we want to escape this conclusion, why engraving right to work as a part of Human Rights? This debate is not new. The aim of this communication is to study the first controversies which occured, one century before the Universal Declaration, of engraving the right of work in the French Constitution (Assemblée Nationale, spring, summer and fall 1848). I will show that: 1) This engraving was criticized because it was redundant with the engraving of the right to property (Tocqueville, Duvergier de Hauranne, Thiers) 2) This engraving was criticized because, if it was not redundant with the right to property, it means the right to wages. And the right to wages is nothing but “socialism” (according to Tocqueville, Dufaure and, in a provocative way, Proudhon). 3) This engraving was approved because it implies not the right to work, but the governmental duty to give full employment (Marrast). This duty engraves in the Constitution policies of full employment. The government must use all the means as his disposal to meet this goal; however it is not guilty if this task is not achieved. This point is perhaps the first formulation of welfare policies. 4) All the participants in the debates at the Assemblée Nationale (and also K. Marx) were persuaded that the right to work was demanded, not only by socialist thinkers (Fourier, Blanc) but also and above all, by the Parisian workers who, on the 25th of February, the following day of the proclamation of the Republic, invaded the Hôtel de Ville of Paris, and “dictated” the right to work to Louis Blanc (“Marche, a worker, dictated the decree by which the newly formed Provisional Government pledged itself to guarantee the workers a livelihood by means of labor, to provide work for all citizens, etc.” [Marx, The class Struggle in France]). However, testimonies by Lamartine, Louis Blanc and Lord Normanby (the British Ambassador in Paris), who were present at this moment at the Hôtel de Ville, show that the right to was not exactly what workers really required. The workers didn’t ask for the right to work. They ask for socialism, in a different sense that Tocqueville understood it, and not for the right for wages. To conclude: 1) Marx states that the violence of the conflict in June 1848 (the struggle made at least 6000 casualties in one week in Paris) was necessary in order that the Parisian working class lost his illusion about the right to work. I suggest that this working class did not share those illusion. 2) The good understanding of the right to work is Marrast’s one: it implies (as the right to education, health, housing) the quasi constitutional obligation to put in practice welfare policies.
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