Right to work (1848)
노동할 권리
The demand that the state guarantee work to every citizen, formulated by Louis Blanc and adopted by the French Provisional Government on 25 February 1848 in its decree undertaking "to guarantee the existence of the workmen by work". The National Workshops and the Luxembourg Commission were meant to carry it out, but after the June Days it was struck from the constitution of 1848 and replaced by a vague right to assistance.
In depth
In The Organisation of Labour (1839) Louis Blanc traced social evils to competition and proposed to realise the right to work through workers' producer cooperatives ("social workshops") given their first capital by the state. On 25 February 1848 armed workers crowded into the Hôtel de Ville demanding "the organisation of labour" and "the right to work", and on Blanc's motion the Provisional Government issued its decree. In the constitutional debate republicans and socialists invoked article 21 of the constitution of 1793 to have the right included, but Thiers objected that it was dangerous to promise work at all times, and Tocqueville called it the introduction of communism into France, "a new form of servitude". The final preamble put a right to assistance in its place and named "the family, labour, property and public order" as the foundations of the Republic. The Marxist Paul Lafargue later mocked, in The Right to Be Lazy (1883), the French proletarians who had proclaimed the right to work a revolutionary principle since 1848. The right to work entered article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.