Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789)

Overview

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is four pages and takes ten minutes to read, which is a reason to read the thing itself rather than summaries of it. The National Assembly adopted it on 26 August 1789, six weeks after the Bastille fell and three weeks after the night of 4 August on which the nobility renounced its feudal privileges.

It was meant as a preamble. The Assembly had been convened to write a constitution and decided to state the principles first, partly on the American model, since Lafayette drafted an early version with advice from Jefferson, who was then in Paris. The constitution took two more years; the Declaration was finished in three weeks and outlasted everything it was attached to.

The title contains the argument. Rights of man, held by everyone; and of the citizen, exercised within a particular political community. The relation between the two halves is the document’s unresolved tension and the one every later rights charter inherits.

Read it noticing what each article is aimed at. This is not abstract philosophy written in a study; almost every clause is a specific repudiation of something in the old regime.

The argument

The preamble. The Assembly states why it is doing this: ignorance, neglect and contempt of the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of governments. So the rights will be set out in a solemn declaration, constantly before all members of the social body, so that the acts of the legislature and the executive can at any moment be compared with the object of every political institution, and so that citizens’ claims may be founded on simple and incontestable principles.

That is a theory of what a rights document is for. It is a standard against which actual government can be measured, permanently on the wall.

Articles 1 to 3: the foundation. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights, and social distinctions may be founded only on the general good. The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man, which are named as liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression. And sovereignty resides in the nation, with no body or individual able to exercise authority not derived from it.

The third of these abolishes the monarchy’s claim to hold power in its own right, two years before the monarchy was abolished. The inclusion of resistance to oppression among the natural rights is also worth noticing: the document builds in the justification for the revolution that produced it.

Articles 4 to 6: liberty and law. Liberty is the power to do anything that does not injure another, and its limits can be determined only by law. Law may forbid only actions harmful to society. And law is the expression of the general will, which all citizens have the right to take part in forming personally or through representatives, and which must be the same for everyone, with all citizens equally eligible for public office according to their capacity and with no distinction except that of virtues and talents.

That last clause ended the legal privileges of birth in France, and it is the sentence that mattered most to the people watching.

Articles 7 to 9: due process. No one may be accused, arrested or detained except in cases determined by law and according to its forms. No one may be punished except under a law established and promulgated before the offence. And every man is presumed innocent until declared guilty, with any unnecessary severity in securing him punished by law. These articles are directed squarely at the lettre de cachet, the royal order that allowed indefinite imprisonment without charge.

Articles 10 and 11: conscience and expression. No one is to be disturbed for his opinions, including religious ones, provided their manifestation does not disturb public order. And the free communication of thought and opinion is one of the most precious rights of man: every citizen may speak, write and print freely, subject to responsibility for abuses defined by law. The qualifications in both articles are doing real work, and the question of who defines an abuse became urgent quickly.

Articles 12 to 17: the state and property. A public force is necessary and is instituted for the benefit of all rather than the particular advantage of those entrusted with it. Taxation is necessary, must be equally distributed according to means, and citizens have the right to determine it and to demand an account from every public agent of his administration. Any society in which rights are not secured and the separation of powers not established has no constitution at all, which is Montesquieu written into law. And property is inviolable and sacred, and may be taken only where public necessity legally established plainly demands it, and on condition of just compensation.

How to read it

Read it entire, twice, and then read the American Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights beside it. The differences are instructive: the Americans list grievances against a named king and then enumerate specific protections, while the French start from a definition of man and derive.

Read each article as an answer to something. Article 7 answers arbitrary arrest, article 6 answers venal office and noble privilege, article 13 answers a tax system in which the wealthiest were exempt, article 14 answers a monarchy that never published its accounts.

Notice what is not there. No right to work, education, subsistence or assembly. No abolition of slavery, which continued in the French colonies until 1794, was restored by Napoleon in 1802, and was ended for good only in 1848. And no women: the document’s man is ambiguous in French as in English, and the Assembly resolved the ambiguity in practice.

Read the replies. Olympe de Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen in 1791, rewriting all seventeen articles with the pronouns changed, and observing that if a woman has the right to mount the scaffold she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum. She was guillotined in 1793. In Saint-Domingue, free men of colour and then the enslaved quoted the Declaration back at the Assembly and eventually took their freedom by force.

And read Burke on the whole enterprise. His objection is precisely to this method: that rights deduced from man in the abstract are useless or dangerous when they meet an actual society.

Questions it raises

• The rights are declared, not granted. What makes a declaration of something true, and what happens when a state ignores it?
• Law is the expression of the general will. What protects anyone from a general will that has turned against them?
• Liberty is the power to do what does not injure another. Who decides what counts as injury?
• Property is called inviolable and sacred in the same document that has just abolished feudal dues. Is that consistent?
• The Declaration’s universal terms were immediately withheld from women and from the enslaved. Is that a failure of the authors or a defect in the form?
• Free expression is guaranteed subject to responsibility for abuses defined by law. Is that a right or a permission?