Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
Seventeen articles that turned subjects into citizens
Adopted by the National Constituent Assembly at Versailles on 26 August 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen set out in seventeen short articles the principles of the new France: that men are born free and equal in rights, that sovereignty belongs to the nation and that the law is the expression of the general will. It left women and the enslaved people of the colonies outside its promises, and the king accepted it only under the pressure of the October Days. It is still part of French constitutional law today.
26 Aug1789
Adopted
26 August 1789
A Wednesday; the articles were debated from 20 August
In the glossary's timeline: marker
Ring: a step along the way
In the glossary's timeline: tone
Accent: the main story
Place
Versailles
the Hall of the Menus-Plaisirs, where the Assembly sat
The representatives of the French people, formed into a National Assembly, considering that ignorance, forgetfulness or contempt of the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of governments, have resolved to set forth, in a solemn Declaration, the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man, so that this Declaration, constantly present to all members of the social body, may remind them unceasingly of their rights and their duties […]. In consequence, the National Assembly recognises and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and of the citizen.
Rights are not granted but “recognised”: natural, inalienable and sacred, they come before any government.
Art. 1
Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
The end, in principle, of the society of orders: rank by birth gives way to equal rights (nobility itself was abolished in 1790).
Art. 2
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.
Political society exists to preserve rights that men already have; weeks after the fall of the Bastille, resistance to oppression is counted among them.
Art. 3
The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body, no individual may exercise any authority which does not expressly emanate from it.
Sovereignty passes from the king to the nation: even the king’s authority must now come from it.
Art. 4
Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others: thus the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no bounds other than those which ensure to the other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights. These bounds may be determined only by law.
Freedom stops only where it harms others, and only the law may draw that line.
Art. 6
The law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to take part, personally or through their representatives, in its making. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in its eyes, are equally eligible to all dignities, public positions and employments, according to their capacity, and without any distinction other than that of their virtues and their talents.
It takes Rousseau’s “general will” as the source of law, and opens public office to talent rather than birth.
Art. 7
No man may be accused, arrested or detained except in the cases determined by law, and according to the forms it has prescribed. Those who solicit, issue, execute or cause to be executed arbitrary orders must be punished; but any citizen summoned or seized by virtue of the law must obey at once: he renders himself guilty by resisting.
It condemns arbitrary arrest, such as the lettres de cachet by which the king could imprison without trial.
Art. 9
Every man being presumed innocent until he has been declared guilty, if it is judged indispensable to arrest him, any rigour that is not necessary to secure his person must be severely repressed by law.
The presumption of innocence becomes a principle of French law; even a lawful arrest may be no harsher than necessary.
Art. 10
No one may be troubled for his opinions, even religious ones, provided that their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.
Religious freedom, hedged: a compromise after a stormy debate protects opinions “even religious”, but says nothing of freedom of worship.
Art. 11
The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: every citizen may therefore speak, write and print freely, save that he must answer for the abuse of this liberty in the cases determined by law.
Freedom of speech and of the press becomes “one of the most precious rights of man”, though the law may still punish its abuse.
Art. 16
Any society in which the guarantee of rights is not assured, nor the separation of powers determined, has no constitution.
The guarantee of rights and Montesquieu’s separation of powers become the very test of whether a society has a constitution.
Art. 17
Property being an inviolable and sacred right, no one may be deprived of it, except when public necessity, legally ascertained, evidently requires it, and on condition of a just and prior indemnity.
The only right the Declaration calls “inviolable and sacred”; yet in November 1789 the Church’s property was put at the nation’s disposal.
Timeline
11 Jul 1789
Lafayette lays the first draft of a declaration before the Assembly
4 Aug
The Assembly decides the constitution will open with a declaration of rights
17 Aug
Mirabeau presents the committee of five’s draft; it pleases almost no one
19 Aug
The draft of the sixth bureau is chosen as the basis for debate
20 Aug
Article 1 — the preamble and the first three articles adopted
23 Aug
After a stormy debate, religious opinions are protected within public order
26 Aug
Adopted — the seventeenth and last article, on property, is voted
5 Oct
Under pressure from the Women’s March, the king accepts it without reserve
The Declaration had no single author: its articles were drafted, amended and voted one by one by the whole Assembly.
Principles first
From Lafayette’s draft to the vote
The deputies who had sworn in the Tennis Court in June not to separate until France had a constitution soon agreed that the constitution should open with a statement of the principles it served. The example came from America, where Virginia had adopted a Declaration of Rights before its constitution in 1776, and other states had followed.
On 11 July 1789 the Marquis de Lafayette, a veteran of the American war, laid the first draft before the Assembly. He had shown it to his friend Thomas Jefferson, then the American minister in Paris, who suggested changes. Other drafts followed, among them a long, closely reasoned one by the abbé SieyèsFigure: Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès. The abbé whose pamphlet opened the Revolution and whose coup closed it. On 4 August, the day that ended in the famous night session, the Assembly decided that the constitution would be preceded by a declaration of rights, and turned down a proposal to add a declaration of duties.
A committee of five, MirabeauFigure: Comte de Mirabeau. The Revolution's great orator, and the court's secret adviser among them, produced a text on 17 August that pleased almost no one. Two days later the Assembly took instead the draft of one of its sections, the sixth bureau, as a basis, and from 20 August debated the articles one by one, amending them on the floor. On 26 August it adopted the seventeenth, on property; the next day it put off any further articles until the constitution was done. They were never added.
Seventeen articles
What the Declaration says
The Declaration opens with a preamble: ignorance, neglect or contempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of governments. Then comes its most famous line.
“Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.”
— Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Article 1
The natural rights of man, Article 2 says, are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression. Sovereignty lies in the nation, not in the king (Article 3). Liberty is the freedom to do whatever does not harm others, and only the law may set its limits (Article 4). The law is the expression of the general will; every citizen may take part in making it, in person or through representatives, and all are equally eligible for public office, on their abilities alone (Article 6).
The next articles protect the person: no one may be accused, arrested or held except as the law prescribes, no one may be punished under a law passed after the offence, and everyone is presumed innocent until declared guilty (Articles 7–9). No one may be troubled for his opinions, even religious ones, as long as they do not disturb public order (Article 10), and the free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man (Article 11). Taxes must be shared among citizens according to their means and consented to by them or their representatives (Articles 13–14). A society without a guarantee of rights or a separation of powers has no constitution at all (Article 16). The last article calls property an inviolable and sacred right, of which no one may be deprived except for a public necessity, legally established, and with fair compensation paid in advance.
The king’s assent
The Declaration was the Assembly’s work, but it still needed the king’s assent, and Louis XVI held back. When he finally replied, in a letter read to the Assembly on the morning of 5 October, he said that its principles could be applied and interpreted in different ways and that he could judge them only once the constitution was complete. The same day, the women of Paris set out for Versailles. That evening, with the crowd at the palace gates, the king accepted the Declaration and the first articles of the constitution without reserve. Two years later it was placed at the head of the Constitution of 1791Document: Constitution of 1791. A king under the law, for eleven months, which Louis swore to uphold.
Who was left out
Women, the enslaved, the poor
The Declaration spoke of “men” and “citizens”, and in practice its authors meant fewer people than its words suggested. Within months the Assembly divided citizens into active ones, men who paid enough tax to vote, and passive ones, who enjoyed the rights but had no vote. Women had no vote at all. Protestants won the right to hold any office at the end of 1789; Jews were made citizens only in 1790 and 1791.
In September 1791 the playwright Olympe de Gouges answered with a Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, dedicated to the queen, which rewrote the seventeen articles to include women. A woman, she wrote, has the right to mount the scaffold; she must also have the right to mount the rostrum. She was guillotined in November 1793. French women voted for the first time in 1945.
Nor did the Declaration touch slavery in the colonies, where hundreds of thousands of enslaved people worked the sugar plantations of Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe. Only after the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue did the Convention abolish slavery, on 4 February 1794. Bonaparte, as First Consul, restored it in 1802, and it was abolished for good in 1848.
Why it matters
No other text is so closely tied to the Revolution. The Republic rewrote it twice, in 1793 and 1795, but it was the version of 1789 that lasted. The constitution of the Fourth Republic, in 1946, reaffirmed it in its preamble, and the constitution of 1958, still in force, proclaims the French people’s attachment to the rights of man as defined by the Declaration of 1789. Since 1971 the Constitutional Council has treated that preamble as binding, and it has since struck down laws that broke the Declaration’s articles. Its language echoes in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, whose first article also begins with people born free and equal.
