The French idea of freedom

Dale K. Van Kley

"The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789" is the French Revolution's best known utterance. By 1789, to be sure, England looked proudly back to Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, and a bill of rights, and even the young American Declaration of Independence and the individual states' various declarations and bills of rights preceded the French Declaration. But the French deputies of the National Assembly tried hard, in the words of one of their number, not to receive lessons from others but rather "to give them" to the rest of the world, to proclaim not the rights of Frenchmen, but those "for all times and nations."

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