ence. The sole
bond which connects him with his fellows is natural necessity,
material needs and private interest, the preservation of his property
and his egoistic person.

It is strange that a people who were just beginning to free
themselves, to break down all the barriers between the various members
of the community, to establish a political community, that such a
people should solemnly proclaim the justification of the egoistic
individual, separated from his fellows and from the community, and
should even repeat this declaration at a moment when the most heroic
sacrifice could alone save the nation and was therefore urgently
required, at a moment when the sacrifice of all interests of bourgeois
society was imperative, and egoism should have been punished as a
crime. This fact is even stranger when we behold the political
liberators degrading citizenship and the political community to the
level of a mere means for the maintenance of these so-called rights of
man, proclaiming the citizen to be the servant of the egoistic man,
degrading the sphere in which the individual behaves as a social being
below the sphere in which he behaves as a fractional being, and
finally accepting as the true proper man not the individual as
citizen, but the individual as bourgeois.

_The aim of every political association is the preservation of the
natural and imprescriptible rights of man._ (_Declaration of the
rights, etc., of 1791, article 2._) _The purpose of government is to
assure to man the enjoyment of his natural and imprescriptible
rights._ (_Declaration of 1793, art. 1._)

Thus even at the time when its enthusiasm was still fresh and kept at
boiling point by the pressure of circumstances, the political life
proclaimed itself to be a mere means whose end is the life of
bourgeois society.

It is true that its revolutionary practice was in flagrant
contradiction to its theory. While security, for example, was
proclaimed to be a right of man, the violation of the secrecy of
correspondence was publicly proposed.

While the indefinite liberty of the press (1793 Constitution, art.
122) was guaranteed as a consequence of the right of man to individual
liberty, the freedom of the press was completely destroyed, for
liberty of the press could not be permitted when it compromised public
liberty. (Robespierre jeune, "Parliamentary History of the French
Revolution." Buchez et Roux, p. 135.) This means that the right of man
to liber