1793: The Neglected Legacy of Insurgent Universality

Insurgent universality refers to the excess of equality and freedom over the juridical frame of universal human rights. It announces a politics beyond the state. While the histories of human rights usually give ample consideration to the proto-Declaration of 1789, they do not pay enough attention to the Declaration of 1793. However, the neglected Declaration of 1793 allows us to consider the forgotten history of active struggles—most notably, that of women, the poor, and slaves—a set of struggles that, in their concrete configurations, helped to shape the Declaration's radical claims. Comparing these two declarations by examining their respective contexts and contents, this paper delineates the limits of rights declarations as juridical texts and presents a critique of their universal aspirations. At the same time, however, the paper outlines an alternative conception of universality that the 1793 Declaration brings into view in the very tension between the concepts of citizen and man that it deploys. In contrast to the juridical universalism of 1789, the insurgent universality of 1793 is one that both opens up the political form of the state and introduces possibilities for radical social and political change.