Genealogy

The declaration of principles of the Movimiento Republicano is not a slogan of the moment. Each of its statements has a documented origin in the liberal republican tradition, a tradition that Venezuela did not merely receive: it wrote it, in Caracas, in 1811. This page reconstructs that genealogy.

1. Purpose

This page sets out the intellectual genealogy of the declaration of principles of the Movimiento Republicano. Its aim is twofold. Internally, to give the membership and the leadership a verifiable historical foundation for each of the statements the party upholds. Externally, to show institutional, academic and international cooperation partners that the doctrine of the Movimiento Republicano is neither an expedient of circumstance nor an adaptation of contemporary foreign party platforms, but the Venezuelan formulation of a continuous tradition that begins in 1689.

The conclusion demonstrated here is as follows: the principles the Movimiento Republicano defends today were enacted as positive law in Caracas in 1811, in the first constitution of Spanish America, which Venezuelan constitutional historiography regards as the third of the modern world. Venezuela did not receive liberal republican doctrine: it wrote it, and it did so before almost any other nation on earth.

2. The Text Under Examination

The subject of this examination is the current declaration of principles of the Movimiento Republicano, whose central statements are:

To defend what self-evidently belongs to every individual: life, liberty and private property. The restoration of the republic, where all of us are free and equal before the law. Respect for private property, the market economy and the protection of life as an essential condition for the exercise of our rights. Freedom of action, of movement within the national territory, of access to justice, of thought, of enterprise and of religion. The separation of powers and their reciprocal control, the democratic election of authorities for fixed terms, transparency in administrative expenditures and oversight of public spending. And the active participation of each one of us, grounded in respect for institutions and the defense of the rule of law.

3. The Doctrinal Chain

The statements of our declaration did not arise in isolation. They descend from a chain of founding texts in which each link takes up and refines the one before it. These links are presented below in chronological order: from London in 1689 to Caracas in 1811, with an epilogue in Paris in 1850.

3.1. John Locke — Second Treatise of Government (London, 1689)

Locke establishes the foundational formula. The natural rights of the individual are life, liberty and estate, which in section 123 he deliberately gathers under a single name: "their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property." Man is the owner of his life, of his person and of the fruit of his labor, and he is so prior to the existence of any government. From this premise Locke draws two consequences that the Movimiento Republicano adopts in full: that government exists solely to preserve those rights, and that it forfeits its legitimacy when it violates them.

Locke writes in the year of the English Bill of Rights, in the context of a monarchy that had just been limited by parliamentary means. His contribution is not the idea of liberty, which is ancient, but its grounding in the right of property in one's own person.

3.2. Montesquieu — The Spirit of the Laws (Geneva, 1748)

Book XI of the work contains the formulation from which the fourth paragraph of our declaration directly derives. Montesquieu holds that political liberty exists only when there is no abuse of power, and that to prevent this abuse it is necessary, from the very nature of things, that power should be a check to power. The expression the Movimiento Republicano uses—reciprocal control—is not a rhetorical figure: it is the technical terminology of the constitutionalism of 1748.

3.3. George Mason — Virginia Declaration of Rights (June 12, 1776)

This is the decisive document, and also the most overlooked. Drafted by George Mason between May 20 and 26, 1776, revised by Thomas Ludwell Lee and adopted unanimously by the Virginia Convention of Delegates on June 12, it precedes the Declaration of Independence by three weeks and constitutes the first bill of rights of modern constitutionalism.

Its first article declares "That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

We would do well to incorporate Mason's precision into our discourse: he does not proclaim a right to property, but a right to the means of acquiring and possessing it. The right rests not on the good itself, but on the capacity to obtain it. It is a formulation that disarms the redistributive objection at its root.

The sixteen articles of the Virginia Declaration also contain all of the remaining statements of the Movimiento Republicano: popular sovereignty and the permanent accountability of magistrates to the people (Article 2); the separation of powers and the periodic return of those who govern to private life (Article 5); free elections and the prohibition on taxing property without the consent of the people's representatives (Article 6); due process and trial by an impartial jury (Articles 8 and 11); freedom of the press (Article 12); the subordination of military power to civil power and the warning against standing armies (Article 13); the call for justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue, with a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles (Article 15); and the free exercise of religion (Article 16).

Mason drew on the English Bill of Rights of 1689, but he expressly rejected the notion of privileged classes and of hereditary offices of government. The Virginia Declaration was copied and adopted by the other colonies, and it is the direct antecedent of both the French Declaration of 1789 and the United States Bill of Rights of 1791.

3.4. Thomas Jefferson — Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776)

Jefferson, also a Virginian and Mason's colleague in the Convention, takes up the formula and introduces two changes. The first is famous: he replaces property with the pursuit of happiness, an expression Mason had already included in his first article. The second is the one that matters for our text: he opens the Declaration by holding these truths to be self-evident—that is, that they require no proof because they compel the assent of reason by their mere statement.

The statement of the Movimiento Republicano, "to defend what self-evidently belongs to every individual," is a functional translation of that formula. What is self-evident is not proven: it is defended.

In 1777 Jefferson also drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, enacted on January 16, 1786, through the efforts of James Madison, from which our freedom of religion directly derives. Of the three achievements Jefferson directed to be inscribed on his tombstone, two belong to Virginia and none is the presidency of the United States.

3.5. Adam Smith — The Wealth of Nations (London, 1776)

In the same year as the Virginia Declaration, the work that gives the triad its economic foundation was published in London. The market economy the Movimiento Republicano defends is not a later addition to the doctrine of individual rights: it is its necessary consequence. If the individual owns the fruit of his labor, the free exchange of that fruit is a right, not a concession from the State.

3.6. Constitution of the United States (1787) and Federalist No. 51 (1788)

The Philadelphia Convention turns into institutional architecture what in Mason and Montesquieu was principle. It contributes two elements that the Movimiento Republicano endorses: federalism, as the territorial distribution of power, and the structural separation of powers with checks and balances. James Madison states it in Federalist No. 51 in the sentence that sums up the entire doctrine of reciprocal control: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition."

3.7. Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Paris, August 26, 1789)

Article 2 lists the natural and imprescriptible rights of man: liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression. Article 16 declares that any society in which the guarantee of rights is not assured, nor the separation of powers determined, has no constitution. It is the European formulation of what Virginia had written thirteen years earlier.

3.8. Declaration of the Rights of the People and Federal Constitution (Caracas, 1811)

Here the chain closes, and here lies the finding that this page seeks to fix permanently in the discourse of the Movimiento Republicano.

On July 1, 1811, the Supreme Congress of Venezuela, meeting in its Caracas section under the presidency of Francisco Javier Yanes, enacted the Declaration of the Rights of the People. The jurist Allan R. Brewer-Carías places it as the third declaration of fundamental rights in the history of modern constitutionalism, and its content was taken up and expanded months later in Chapter VIII of the December Constitution.

Its first article establishes that sovereignty resides in the people and its exercise in the citizens entitled to vote, through their lawfully constituted representatives. And its preamble declares the purpose of the entire institutional edifice in a sentence that the Movimiento Republicano ought to adopt as its motto: rights are declared so that all citizens may continually compare the acts of the Government with the ends of the social institution, so that the magistrate may never lose sight of the rule of his conduct, and so that the legislator may in no case mistake the object of his mission.

That sentence, written in Caracas in 1811, is the most precise definition of citizen oversight and of the scrutiny of public spending ever produced in Venezuelan history. Our fifth paragraph—the active participation of the citizen, respect for institutions, the defense of the rule of law—is not a modern aspiration: it is the restoration of a mandate written in 1811.

On December 21, 1811, the Federal Constitution for the States of Venezuela was enacted, the first in all of Spanish America. Venezuelan constitutional historiography—Allan R. Brewer-Carías among others—regards it as the third written constitution of the modern world, after the American Constitution of 1787 and the French Constitution of 1791. Its very name declares its lineage: federal, for the States of Venezuela, on the Philadelphia model. It proclaimed liberty, equality, property and security as the fundamental rights of man, a formula that follows the French version of 1793, in which equality replaces resistance to oppression.

The Republic lasted seven months. On July 25, 1812, with Francisco de Miranda's capitulation of San Mateo, the Constitution ceased to have effect. What collapsed, however, was an institutional architecture, not the truth that sustained it.

3.9. Frédéric Bastiat — The Law (Paris, 1850)

The final link, and the most useful one for the polemical defense of our opening statement. Bastiat holds that life, liberty and property do not exist because men have made laws; on the contrary, it was the fact that they already existed that led men to make laws. And he adds that these three gifts precede all human legislation and are superior to it.

From this follows the thesis the Movimiento Republicano defends against all legal positivism: the State does not grant rights, it recognizes them; and when it disregards them, it does not extinguish them, but rather delegitimizes itself. Bastiat further specifies that the three rights are inseparable, because the preservation of each depends entirely on the preservation of the other two. That is precisely why our declaration affirms that the protection of life is an essential condition for the exercise of all other rights.

4. Correspondences Between the Declaration and Its Sources

Each statement in the declaration of principles of the Movimiento Republicano is linked to its documented doctrinal source:

• To defend what self-evidently belongs to every individual. Source: Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence (1776), self-evident truths; John Locke, Second Treatise (1689).

• Life, liberty and private property. Source: John Locke, Second Treatise (1689); George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights, Article 1 (1776); Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (1850).

• The restoration of the republic, where all of us are free and equal before the law. Source: Virginia Declaration of Rights, Article 1 (1776); Declaration of the Rights of the People (Caracas, 1811); Federal Constitution for the States of Venezuela (1811).

• Respect for private property and the market economy. Source: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776); Virginia Declaration of Rights, Articles 1 and 6 (1776).

• Protection of life as an essential condition for the exercise of rights. Source: Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (1850); John Locke, Second Treatise (1689).

• Freedom of action, of movement, of access to justice, of thought, of enterprise and of religion. Source: Virginia Declaration of Rights, Articles 8, 11, 12 and 16 (1776); Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786); Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789).

• Separation of powers and reciprocal control. Source: Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book XI (1748); Virginia Declaration of Rights, Article 5 (1776); Federalist No. 51 (1788); Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Article 16 (1789).

• Democratic election of authorities for fixed terms. Source: Virginia Declaration of Rights, Articles 5 and 6 (1776); Constitution of the United States (1787); Declaration of the Rights of the People, Article 1 (Caracas, 1811).

• Transparency in administrative expenditures and oversight of public spending. Source: Virginia Declaration of Rights, Article 6 (1776); Declaration of the Rights of the People, preamble (Caracas, 1811).

• Active participation, respect for institutions and defense of the rule of law. Source: Declaration of the Rights of the People, preamble (Caracas, 1811); Virginia Declaration of Rights, Article 15 (1776).

5. Conclusion

The declaration of principles of the Movimiento Republicano does not descend from any contemporary party platform. It descends from a documented line that runs from Locke, in 1689, to Mason and Jefferson in Virginia, in 1776; from there to Philadelphia in 1787 and to Paris in 1789; and from there to Caracas in 1811, where it was enacted as positive law by the Supreme Congress of Venezuela.

This point has practical consequences. When the Movimiento Republicano affirms that it defends life, liberty and private property, it is not adopting a recently imported foreign slogan: it is invoking the first article of the founding charter of the Venezuelan nation. When it demands the separation of powers with reciprocal control, the election of authorities for fixed terms and oversight of public spending, it is claiming what the Congress of Caracas had already written when barely two constitutional republics existed in the world.

In liberal republican matters, Venezuela is not a receiving country: it is a founding country. Article 115 of the current Constitution guarantees the right of property. Venezuela's problem has never been the absence of text, but the absence of will to honor it. Restoring the Republic, therefore, does not mean inventing a new country: it means completing the one that was founded in Caracas on December 21, 1811.