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¶ … Declaration of Rights of Man" (1789) and the "Declaration of Independence" (1776)
The Declaration of Independence" by 13 British North American colonies in 1776 and the "Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizens" passed by the National Assembly of France in 1789 are two of the most important documents ever written in the history of Western Civilization. Both the documents were greatly influenced by the Age of Enlightenment and the thoughts of philosophers such as the 17th century Englishman John Locke and the leading French philosopher of the time, Jean Jacques Rousseau. This essay is a comparison of the two documents.
Although The Declaration of Independence (1776) was basically a proclamation of freedom by American colonists from British rule, it was also a statement of principle about the natural and inalienable rights of men and contained a list of grievances against the British monarch of the time, King George III. The Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizens adopted 13 years later in France, on the other hand, was not a proclamation of independence from foreign...
The similarity of the two documents is not surprising. Although the main author of the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizens was Abbe Emmanuel Sieyes, French priest and revolutionary, it is widely believed that its first draft was written one month earlier by the Marquis de Lafayette with help from Thomas Jefferson, who was a personal friend of Lafayette and a U.S. minister to France at the time.
Thomas Jefferson is, of course, the main author of the Declaration of Independence.
The authors of both the documents were influenced by the ideas prevalent in the age of enlightenment in which several philosophers propounded the idea of government as a social contract between the people and their rulers. The French declaration is particularly concerned with asserting the inalienable rights of men to participate in the making of laws and rejecting the divine right of kings to rule that had been age-old basis of most governments in…
Bibliography
Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen" Article in Encyclopedia Encarta, 2002
Roberts, Dan "A Moment in Time: The Declaration of Rights of Man" ehistory. [available online] retrieved on December 20, 2002 at http://www.ehistory.com/world/amit/display.cfm?amit_id=2129
Moment in Time: The Declaration of Rights of Man [available online]
http://www.ehistory.com/world/amit/display.cfm?amit_id=2129
Besides defining what the basic role of government should be, the declaration gives citizens the ability to hold government liable for its actions. Article 6 gives all citizens the right to participate in the lawmaking process, either directly or through their representatives. Citizens are also given the right to keep public officials held accountable for the actions of their administration as stated in Article 15. Much of the declaration's principles
Declaration of the Rights of Man, written by Lafayette during the reign of Louis XVI, is quite different to that of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman created by De Gourges during the rule of the revolutionary French government. The Declaration of the Rights of Man consists of 17 short and succinct points. As we see it has been approved by the National Assembly of France on August 26,
The concept of universal human rights may have been seeded by the Magna Carta, but did not reach fruition until the United States Constitution had been drafted in the late eighteenth century. Built on the Enlightenment values of individualism and inalienable universal rights, the Constitution helped lay the groundwork for the French Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen in 1789. In fact, these two documents
5.0 Conclusion As this paper has argued, the Second Amendment was designed not only to protect the militias; it was also intended to protect an individual's right to own and bear arms. Those groups opposed to the private ownership of firearms should base their arguments on their own personal beliefs rather than a Constitutional interpretation defense. As supported by its historical background and analysis of Constitutional context and meaning, "A well
Declarations of Human Rights In 1776, the American Declaration of Independence, the document that started it all, became the first official written document to suggest that human beings had inalienable rights. The Founding Fathers stated, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" (Declaration
Hence De Gouges' of the notion of bastards, even to express the relationship of male to female in the once supposedly sacred institution of wedlock. In the social contract proposed by De Gouges, human relationships between males and females become 'in kind' or communal. "Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits