Rebecca Comay Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror

Endlessly debated and redrafted in the fateful summer of 1789, the first version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was abruptly finalized by the Assemblée Nationale on August 27. The draft was published in its truncated form with an explicit decision to suspend further discussion until the more urgent task had been achieved of ‘‘fixing’’ the French Constitution to which the Declaration itself was nonetheless to supply both the prefatory context and the integral first chapter.1 In a perfect illustration of the logic of the supplement, the Declaration was declared provisional pending the completion of a constitution that would itself in turn be incomplete without it insofar as the presence or absence of such a manifesto would mark the ‘‘only difference’’ between a radically new constitution and the prolongation of preexistent tradition.2 Released separately, in their unfinished forms, both the Declaration and the eventual first version of the Constitution to which by 1791 it had attached itself were nonetheless invested from the outset with a biblical authority conveyed by numerous iconographic allusions to the tablets of the law handed down at Sinai—by 1792 the Legislative Assembly decreed
The South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3, Spring/Summer 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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that its members would wear a tricolor ribbon bearing a medallion in the shape of two round-headed tablets inscribed with the words ‘‘Droits de l’Homme’’ and ‘‘Constitution’’ 3—an association that would in turn predictably provoke a Mosaic violence directed against the threat of the law’s own inaugural self-betrayal during the repeated revision of both documents throughout the revolutionary period. In May 1793 a copper tablet of the by-then obsolete first version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man was exhumed from its burial place in the foundation of a projected—never to be