Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (August 27, 1789) was the foundational legal document of the French Revolution, issued by the National Assembly, establishing liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression as natural rights; equal rights under law; national sovereignty; freedom of speech; and due process, becoming the template for most modern constitutions and the legal crystallization of Enlightenment political philosophy.
The Declaration emerged from the crisis of August 1789: the king's refusal to acknowledge the Third Estate, the storming of the Bastille on July 14, and the rapid radicalization of Paris. The National Assembly needed a foundational document that could legitimate their authority against the king's divine right while providing a positive vision for the new order. Drawn heavily from Enlightenment philosophy, Rousseau's general will, Locke's natural rights, Montesquieu's separation of powers, and from the American Declaration of Independence (1776), it represented the most comprehensive legal statement of Enlightenment principles yet written.
Six articles define its core contributions to modern constitutional law. Article 1 established universal natural freedom and equality, not just for French citizens but for all men, making it a universal rather than merely national document. Article 3 relocated sovereignty from the king (divine right) to the nation (popular sovereignty), the most radical constitutional shift possible in an absolute monarchy. Article 6 established the general will as the source of law, requiring citizen participation in lawmaking. Articles 10 and 11 guaranteed religious toleration and freedom of expression, revolutionary in an era of state religion. Article 17 made property an 'inviolable and sacred right,' a clause Robespierre actively opposed as protecting the wealth of oppressors rather than the rights of citizens.
Robespierre's objection to Article 17 reveals the Declaration's internal contradiction: it protected the existing property distribution even as it proclaimed equality, making it a bourgeois rather than genuinely egalitarian document. His proposed amendment, that property rights are granted by society, limited by the rights of others, and cannot justify oppression, foreshadowed the socialist critique of liberal rights that would dominate 19th-century politics. The Declaration became the template for the constitutions of France, Latin America, and ultimately the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), making it perhaps the most influential single document in the history of constitutional government.
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Frequently asked questions
What did the Declaration of the Rights of Man establish? ＋
Six key principles: (1) universal natural freedom and equality; (2) natural rights: liberty, property, security, resistance to oppression; (3) popular sovereignty, authority derives from the nation, not the king; (4) general will as the source of law; (5) freedom of religion and speech; (6) property as an inviolable right. Robespierre opposed Article 17 (the property protection) as a document for the rich, not the poor, proposing that property rights be bounded by social obligation.