The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: Birth of Modern Human Rights

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted by the National Constituent Assembly on August 26, 1789, is one of the great documents of the modern human rights tradition. The Declaration was a direct descendant of the American Declaration of Independence, and it became a basic reference for the contemporary debate about the proper foundations of human rights. This article examines the philosophical foundations, the specific articles, and the lasting significance of the Declaration.

The Philosophical Foundations

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is grounded in the natural-rights tradition of the Enlightenment, especially in the political philosophy of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The basic claim of the Declaration — that all men are born free and equal in rights, and that these rights are natural and imprescriptible — is a direct application of the natural-rights tradition.

The Declaration was drafted by a committee chaired by the Marquis de Lafayette, with significant input from Thomas Jefferson, who was then serving as the American minister to France. The American Declaration of Independence was an important source of the French Declaration, and the two documents share many of the same philosophical foundations and many of the same political principles.

The Declaration opens with a statement of the natural-rights tradition: “The representatives of the people of France, constituted as a National Assembly, considering that ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of governments, have resolved to set forth, in a solemn declaration, the natural, unalienable, and sacred rights of man.”

The Specific Articles

The Declaration contains seventeen articles, each of which articulates a specific right or principle. The most important are the following.

Article I: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good.”

Article II: “The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.”

Article III: “The principle of any sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation. No body, no individual can exert authority which does not emanate expressly from it.”

Article IV: “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 limits other than those that ensure to the other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.”

Article V: “The law has the right to forbid only those actions that are injurious to society. Nothing that is not forbidden by law may be hindered, and no one may be compelled to do what the law does not ordain.”

Article VI: “The law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to participate personally, or through their representatives, in its formation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal before it, are equally admissible to all public dignities, places, and employments, according to their capacities, and without other distinction than that of their virtues and talents.”

Article VII: “No man may be accused, arrested, or detained except in the cases determined by law, and according to the forms that it has prescribed. Those who solicit, expedite, carry out, or cause to be carried out, arbitrary orders must be punished; but any citizen summoned or seized in virtue of the law must obey at once; he renders himself culpable by resistance.”

Article VIII: “The law must prescribe only the punishments that are strictly and evidently necessary; no one may be punished except by virtue of a law established and promulgated prior to the offense and legally applied.”

Article IX: “Since every man is presumed innocent until he has been declared guilty, if it is judged necessary to arrest him, any harshness that is not required to secure his person must be severely repressed by law.”

Article X: “No one may be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious ones, provided that their public demonstration does not disturb the public order established by law.”

Article XI: “The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but he shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.”

Article XVII: “Property being an inviolable and sacred right, no one may be deprived of it, except when public necessity, certified by law, plainly requires it, and on the condition of a just compensation in advance.”

The Influence and Legacy

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen had a profound influence on the development of modern human rights. The Declaration was widely circulated throughout Europe and the Americas, and it became a basic reference for the various constitutional and revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The basic principles of the Declaration — the equality of all men, the natural and imprescriptible rights of liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression, the principle of popular sovereignty, the freedom of speech and of the press, the presumption of innocence, the right to property — have become the basic principles of modern constitutional law.

The Declaration has had an important influence on the development of the international human rights regime. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), drafted in the aftermath of the Second World War, drew directly on the language and the structure of the French Declaration, and the various international covenants and conventions that have been developed since 1948 have built on the French example.

The basic principles of the Declaration — equality, liberty, property, security, the sovereignty of the people — have become the basic principles of modern democratic politics, and the engagement with these principles is an essential part of the engagement with the political philosophy of the Enlightenment.

Further Reading

• Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982)
• Darrin McMahon, Enlightenment Contested (2006)
• Daniel Roche, The Enlightenment in the West (2010)