In the days leading to July 14th, 1789, their municipal government called on Parisians to arm themselves and form militia units to resist the professional troops ordered by Louis XVI to surround their city and Versailles. Said one elector: “in a well-constituted state, every citizen is obliged to bear arms in defense of the fatherland.”
The Parisian need to arm this militia led them to attack the Bastille prison to gain access to the gunpowder and ammunition stored there. “Seen from this perspective,” writes Noah Shusterman, “the crucial transformation of July 14, 1789, was not that Parisians took over the Bastille. Rather, it was that they took up arms and organized a militia.” One month after the Bastille’s fall, the Comte de Mirabeau addressed the deputies of The National Assembly finalizing France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. Mirabeau proposed the following article for the committee:
All citizens have the right to keep weapons in their homes, and to use those weapons for the common defense or for their own self-defense, against any illegal aggression that endangers their lives, their families, or the freedom of one or several citizens.
This is a startling elaboration of the citizen’s private right to keep and bear arms, not just because of its similarity to the expression of the private right as determined by the U.S. Supreme Court in Heller, some 220 years later, but because the article was ultimately never adopted. The summer of 1789 is also when the U.S. Congress wrote the Bill of Rights, which included our own elaboration of this private right.
France, the United States, and the entire Atlantic world have abandoned this popular, republican understanding of the right to keep and bear arms. I’m therefore pleased that the French accelerationists at RAGE have now translated some of my theoretical work in (a conservative revolutionary) defense of this understanding.
“Black Flag White Paper,” as well as my 2016 Come and Take It, are now available in translation through RAGE. With any luck they’ll soon translate my 3D2A History and Value, which is now on Amazon.
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