Origin and Meaning of the Right to Work: Between the Right to Existence and the Right to the Fruits of Labour

Abstract

In February 1848, the provisional French government published a decree in which it committed itself to “guarantee the existence of the worker through work”. During the following months, a long and vigorous debate on the right to work took place in the National Assembly. The aim of the text is to explain the meaning of this right at this historic moment. Did it consist in the commitment on the part of the State to give a job to the unemployed? Or was it, instead, a more ambitious demand? Does the right to work of 1848 have anything to do with the idea that workers have the right to the fruits of their labour? To answer these questions we will go back to the French Revolution, when the discourse of rights burst onto the political scene, and we will trace some of its transformations in the following years.