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Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, one of the basic charters of human liberties, containing the principles that inspired the French Revolution. Its 17 articles, adopted between August 20 and August 26, 1789, by France’s National Assembly, served as the preamble to the Constitution of 1791.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- King Louis XVI of France in May 1789 convened the Estates-General for the first time since 1614. In June the Third Estate (that of the common peopl...
- The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was inspired by the writings of such Enlightenment thinkers as Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Ro...
- The Marquis de Lafayette, with the help of Thomas Jefferson, composed a draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and presen...
- The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen has a preamble and 17 brief articles. The first article contains the document’s central sta...
- Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good.
- The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of Man. These rights are Liberty, Property, Safety and Resistance to Oppression.
- The principle of any Sovereignty lies primarily in the Nation. No corporate body, no individual may exercise any authority that does not expressly emanate from it.
- Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man has no bounds other than those that ensure to the other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (French: Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen de 1789), set by France's National Constituent Assembly in 1789, is a human civil rights document from the French Revolution. [1]
- Origins
- Articles
- The Declaration in Relation to Women & Slavery
- Conclusion
The summer of 1789 was a hopeful time for France. The three estates of pre-revolutionary France had reconciled into a single National Constituent Assembly, which had dismantled the shackles of feudalism and deprived the nobility and clergy of their privileges with the August Decrees. The common people had made their own voices heard with the Stormi...
The Declaration begins with its own preamble, describing the characteristics of man's rights to be unalienable, natural, and sacred. It echoes the Assembly's previous destruction of feudalism and noble privileges while also restricting the monarchy and emphasizing the rights of all citizens to partake in the democratic process, through methods such...
Certainly, the Declaration was a watershed moment in the history of human rights, going further in scope than most of the similar documents that came before. Yet, the rights it entailed were by no means extended to everyone. At the time of its framing, active citizenship was only granted to male property owners over the age of 25 who paid their tax...
Despite its shortcomings, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was one of the most significant and enduring achievements of the French Revolution. "As far as history is concerned," writes Ian Davidson, "there is only one Declaration of Human Rights of any significance before that of the United Nations in 1948, and that is the Fre...
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was a pivotal document of the French Revolution and indeed, of modern democratic Europe. It was drafted in mid-1789 by members of the National Assembly, who crystallised Enlightenment positions on freedom, natural rights and human equality into a single document.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was perhaps the most critical document to emerge out of the French Revolution, defining its foundational principles moving...
The representatives of the French people, constituted as a National Assembly, and considering that ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public misfortunes and governmental corruption, have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man: so that by being ...
