Drafted with input from Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, the seventeen-article declaration proclaimed that men are born free and equal in rights. It became a foundational document of the French Revolution and of modern human-rights law, influencing constitutions across the world for the next two centuries.
In the sweltering summer of 1789, weeks after the storming of the Bastille, deputies of the newly formed National Assembly hammered out a document meant to bury the old order of divine-right monarchy and rigid estates. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen borrowed language from the American Declaration of Independence and Enlightenment philosophy, but it was more sweeping: it asserted that rights belonged to all men by nature, not by royal grant.
The seventeen articles guaranteed liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression, and insisted that law could only prohibit actions harmful to society. Freedom of speech and the presumption of innocence appeared in stark, quotable prose. Yet the document's universalism was immediately contested — it excluded women and, in practice, colonial slaves, prompting Olympe de Gouges to publish her own Declaration of the Rights of Woman two years later.
Despite its contradictions, the 1789 Declaration reshaped political thought. It hangs today, still legally binding, as a preamble to the French Constitution, and its phrases echo in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948.