Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 1789

This chapter investigates the genesis, the impact and afterlife of The Declaration on the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). A reflection on the relation between the distinctive local French context as well as more global and universal scales will stand central. To understand the development of the Declaration it is crucial to understand the key features of French society prior to 1789. France before the Revolution was an Ancien Regime society in which an unequal treatment of people was the norm. This implied that it had a privileged religion (Roman Catholicism) and that people who observed other faiths were repressed or half-heartedly tolerated. In that context, the Enlightenment came into being as an intellectual force that questioned this attitude towards religion, more broadly towards orthodox ideas, and the impact of France’s European and global political and military conflicts. After this pre-history, the genesis of the Declaration during the first phase of the French Revolution is explored. The Declaration was not primarily the result of or the response towards a religious conflict, but rather the result of an acute political crisis in France. Nevertheless, it came to serve as a base for a fundamental reordering of the place of religion in French society and more broadly in Europe. France evolved from a state with a privileged religion—Roman Catholicism—into a polity with a secularist approach to expressions of faith. This reordering continued well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its focus on man and the reception of it and the reaction to it by women was a case in point already shortly after its issuing. Ever since its publication, the Declaration remained a point of reference for French laicity, a new phenomenon that was born together with the Declaration.