Slavery, Humanitarianism, and Empire
The movement to abolish slavery began in England in 1787 with the Society for the Abolition of Slave Trade founded by the Quakers. Twenty years later parliament passed a related law. In 1833 all slaves in the colonies of the empire were freed – the abolitionists had collected more than one million signatures for a petition to parliament.
France followed this example only in the course of the Revolution of 1848. American plantation owners in the southern states were forced to free their slaves after the end of the American Civil War in 1865. Serfdom had already been abolished in Russia in 1861. By the end of the century slavery was also completely abolished in Central and South America.
Can one conceive of a more apt example of the rise and rise of human rights?
As Tocqueville had already noted in 1843, it was not the French radical tradition of human rights that had engendered the moral campaigns to abolish slavery. British abolitionists wanted to elevate the “humanity” of slaves to make them Christians.
The success of the movement had less to do with a new humanitarian sensibility for the “rights of man” than with this new evangelicalism and the political crisis of the British Empire following military defeats overseas and the loss of the American colonies (1783). In search of a moral legitimacy for the Empire, slavery and the slave trade were declared symbols of a colonial past. The reinvention of a specifically British, Protestant-colored idea of freedom provided the justification for an imperial “civilizing mission” that not only aimed to free slaves and subjects in British colonies, but was also supposed to establish Britain’s moral primacy vis-à-vis other European powers.
Later, in the era of colonial acquisition, the condemnation of slavery was also a motif and pretext for “humanitarian” interventions by European colonial powers. French republicanism, for example, saw in the idea of its own mission civilisatrice the justification for “freeing” Africans from “feudal” conditions under indigenous rulers. The abolition of slavery was thus followed by a new European expansionism, justified on humanitarian grounds, parallel and in contrast with the democratization of 19th century European civil societies. As Max Weber noted in 1906, imperial expansion constituted the historical condition for the emergence of civil liberties in Europe.
Constitutionalism and Citizenship
In the long 19th century, European constitutions avoided references to natural rights or human rights, irrespective of whether they were republics, empires, and/or constitutional monarchies. Human rights were no longer mentioned in the French Constitution of 1799 (and resurfaced only in 1946.) This was true as well for the United States, where the Bill of Rights sank into insignificance after 1800 (and was not ratified by the states of Massachusetts, Georgia, and Connecticut until 1939!).
Only the constitutions of the individual states were important for legal practice at the time. This situation did not change with the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which granted civil rights to everyone born in the United States, including black slaves. (Lincoln himself long favored the plan to deport the freed slaves to Africa.) The legal situation in the respective states, rather than the Bill of Rights, continued to be decisive for the rights of individuals.
Only after the Second World War did the Supreme Court breathe new life into the Bill of Rights. The draft constitution of St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt am Main in 1848 did include a catalog of “basic rights” (Grundrechte), as human rights were now called in German in order to provide distance from the radicalism of the French revolution. As with other constitutions of the era, however, these were civil rights tied to citizenship ( Grundrechte des deutschen Volkes ) and not universal rights. After the failed revolution, the state emerged as the guarantor of rights, which were regulated by laws. Legal positivism rather than natural law became the prevailing doctrine for granting rights, and not only in Germany.
The issue of human rights played no role at all in the constitutional conflicts of the 1860s. It was absent from the Constitution of the German Empire of 1871 not because the empire was particularly authoritarian, but because no party attributed any significance to a declaration of basic rights. Not until the Weimar Constitution of 1919 was a detailed catalog of basic rights and duties included.
In the nineteenth century, lines of political conflict within European civil societies were instead defined by the demand for social or political rights.
While early socialists did invoke the declarations of 1789 or 1793, the revolutions and civil wars in France of 1830, 1848, and 1871 emphasized collective rights (for example, of workers) or the droits des citoyens . Reference to the droits de l’homme reappeared only in the constitution of the Fourth Republic of 1946. A just society, according to the socialist utopia, would arise only by transcending capitalism and “bourgeois” rule of law. The European Left emphasized not freedom from the state, but rather freedom in and through the state, over which they thus sought to gain control. Human rights were therefore closely tied to the concept of the sovereignty of the people.
This presumed that only citizens incurred rights, not humanity in general, or, for instance, subjects in the colonies. The same was true of the women’s movement, which was organized internationally but aimed above all at political and social rights within nation-states, for instance, women’s suffrage (paradoxically this aim was often justified by reference to the special place of women in society). Only during the Dreyfus affair and the founding of the Ligue pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme at the end of the century did socialists and republicans discover the value of individual rights vis-à-vis the state, a development that was curtailed with the explosion of nationalism during the First World War.
