Confucius in post-Robespierrian France?

François Jullien sees a Confucian moment (“Could there have been an influence?”, he asks) in the post-Robespierrian 1795 Declaration of Rights & Duties of Man & Citizen, where we read: “No one is a good citizen unless they are a good child, a good father, a good brother, a good friend, a good spouse.” This Enlightenment-republican catalogue seems, to Jullien, to “amazingly recall the Confucian ‘five relations’.”

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