JULIA KRISTEVA
97
must act for all.
The progressive and democratic aspect of that principle strikes the
commentator and yet questions him. In fact, it is within the once
constituted national grouping that all persons can remain free and equal
of right. Thus the free and equal man is,
de facto,
the citizen. In Article
VI of the
Declaration,
moreover, the term "man" that opened Article I is
replaced with "citizen" - the latter being necessarily called for after the
overview of the social and national nature of his humanity, which was
clarified and gradually introduced by the preceding articles:
Article VI. The law is the expression of the general will; all citizens
have the right to work toward its creation; it must be the same for
all,
whether it protects or punishes.
One will note the talent of the drafters: the word "citizens" appear
in a sentence where
rights
turn out to be civic
duties
-
citizens will "work
toward." And it is on account of this give-and-take of obligations and
enjoyments that
mQ/1,
having become a
citizen,
will be protected as well
as, in case of an offense, punished. The general will specific to the nation,
a phrase again borrowed from Rousseau, asserts itself here, including the
poor, workers of all stations, sex and age being indifferent ... Never has
democracy been more explicit, for it excludes no one -
except foreigners ..
In fact, "natural" man is immediately
political,
hence
national.
The
slippage in the argument was to lead, with the economic development of
western societies,
to
the creation of nation-states and, by derivation or
deviation, to the creation of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
The spreading of the French Revolution's ideas over the continent
triggered the demand for the national rights of peoples, not the univer–
sality of mankind. As for the monstrosity of national-socialism, one may
wonder if it is merely a deviation or pathological distortion of "normal"
nationalism under the pressure of economic developments, or if it is
affiliated with traditional nationalism. While emphasizing the break that
such a monstrosity represents in political thought and institutions, Han–
nah Arendt is right in thinking that the national legacy served as a guar–
antee for Nazi criminality, at the beginning at least; one was thus pre–
vented from detecting crimes against humanity under a terminology
whose previous history and tradition one thought familiar. The world of
barbarity thus comes to a head in a single world composed of States, in
which only those people organized into national residences are entitled
