RIGHTS OF MAN AND OF THE CITIZEN, DECLARATION OF THE

French Declaration Des Droits De L'homme Et Du Citoyen, one of the basic charters of human liberties, containing the principles that inspired the French Revolution. Its 17 articles, adopted between Aug. 20 and Aug. 26, 1789, by France's National Assembly, served as the preamble to the Constitution of 1791. It also served as the preamble to the Constitution of 1793 (retitled simply Declaration of the Rights of Man) and to the Constitution of 1795 (retitled Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and the Citizen). Click here for the text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The basic principle of the Declaration was that all men are born free and equal in rights (Article 1), which were specified as the rights of liberty, private property, the inviolability of the person, and resistance to oppression (Article 2). All citizens were equal before the law and were to have the right to participate in legislation directly or indirectly (Article 6); no one was to be arrested without a judicial order (Article 7). Freedom of religion (Article 10) and freedom of speech (Article 11) were safeguarded within the bounds of public order and law. The document reflected the interests of the bourgeois who wrote it: property was given the status of an inviolable right, which could be taken by the state only if an indemnity were given (Article 17); offices and position were opened to the middle class (Article 6). The Declaration was derived from the constitutions of certain North American states, such as Virginia and New Hampshire. Its notion of the separation of powers came from Montesquieu, its doctrine of natural rights from the Encyclopdie and John Locke, its theory of the general will and of the Sovereignty of the nation from Jean-Jacques Rousseau. From Voltaire came the idea that the individual must be safeguarded against arbitrary police or judicial action and from the Physiocrats the doctrine of the inviolability of private property. The whole Declaration is characteristic of 18th-century French thought, which strove, before making practical rules, to isolate and specify principles that are fundamental to man and therefore universally applicable. On the other hand, the Declaration is also explicable as an attack on the pre-Revolutionary monarchical regime. Equality before the law was to replace the system of privileges that characterized the old regime. Judicial procedures were insisted upon to prevent abuses by the king or his administration, such as the lettre de cachet, a private communication from the king, often used to give summary notice of imprisonment. Despite the limited aims of the framers of the Declaration, its principles (especially Article 1) could be extended logically to mean political and even social democracy. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen came to be, as was recognized by the 19th-century historian Jules Michelet, the credo of the new age.