Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
Adopted by the National Constituent Assembly on 26 August 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen proclaimed seventeen principles: that men are born and remain free and equal in rights; that these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression; that sovereignty resides in the nation; that law is the expression of the general will; and that no person may be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except in cases determined by law. The text drew directly on Enlightenment philosophy — Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau — and on the American Declaration of Independence and Virginia Declaration of Rights. The Declaration's universalist language was its most revolutionary feature and its most contested: it spoke of 'men' as a universal category, but the Assembly denied full political rights to women, the propertyless, and enslaved people in French colonies — contradictions that immediately generated demands for extension. Olympe de Gouges published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in 1791 directly challenging this exclusion. In France's Caribbean colonies, enslaved people and free people of colour read the Declaration's language as applying to themselves, a reading that the colonists who had drafted it had not intended and that would contribute to the Haitian Revolution two years later.
- Year: 1789 CE
- Category: Political
