Speech on the Right to Work

The day after the monarchy fell in February 1848, the provisional government in Paris proclaimed the right to work; seven months later, on 12 September, Alexis de Tocqueville told the Constituent Assembly that such a right could lead only to socialism. In between, National Workshops had been opened to employ the jobless and closed again in June; the workers of Paris had risen in the insurrection known as the June Days; and the draft constitution, which had promised a right to work, had been rewritten to promise only assistance. A deputy from the Drôme named Mathieu moved an amendment to put the right back, and Tocqueville rose against it. A right to work, he argued, is a promise that only a state owning and directing all labour could keep. He then defined socialism by three features — a constant appeal to material appetites, an attack on private property, and a deep distrust of individual liberty that would make the state every citizen's guardian — and denied that any of them belonged to the Revolution of 1789. Democracy and socialism, he said, shared only the word equality: democracy wanted it with freedom, socialism with constraint. He did not reject public assistance, and asked for Christian charity to be carried further into public policy, as charity rather than as a right. The radical leader Alexandre Ledru-Rollin had defended the right in the same debate; the Assembly rejected the amendment. The constitution adopted that autumn promised only to find work for the needy within the limits of the state's resources. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 listed a right to work among human rights.