The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 brought together two streams of thought: one springing from the Anglo-American tradition of legal and constitutional guarantees of individual liberties, the other from the Enlightenment's belief that reason should guide all human affairs. Enlightenment writers praised the legal and constitutional guarantees established by the English and the Americans, but they wanted to see them applied everywhere. The French revolutionaries therefore wrote a Declaration of Rights that they hoped would serve as a model in every corner of the world. Reason rather than tradition would be its justification. As a result, "France" or "French" never appears in the articles of the declaration itself, only in its preamble.
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Enlightenment writers had paved the way for the reception of these ideas on the European continent and helped transform English rights into more universally applicable ones. They complained that in France these rights were being violated by despotic, absurd, superstitious, and fanatical institutions. Voltaire, in particular, held out English religious toleration as a model. In their criticism, Montesquieu and Rousseau moved beyond existing institutions, proposing new principles of government based on reason and comparative study.
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These and other criticisms paved the way for a more theoretical consideration of government in general. One of the most influential works of this nature was Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws (1748), which developed a comparative political analysis of the conditions most favorable to liberty. The American Founding Fathers studied this work closely. Rousseau, in his Social Contract of 1762, took the ideas of Montesquieu and also Locke a step further; he argued that all government rested on a social contract (not on divine right, not the Bible, not tradition of any kind) in which "the assembled people" (democracy) determined everything. For him, "the person of the meanest citizen is as sacred and inviolable as that of the first magistrate"; in other words, Rousseau insisted on complete equality (between men).
After all the debates, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen remained open to modification as the Revolution changed course. In 1793 the National Convention offered a new constitution, which included a modified Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The new declaration repeated many of the provisions of the first one but added an emphasis on social welfare (Article 21: "Society owes maintenance to unfortunate citizens"). Although the new constitution never went into effect (it was shelved while the country was at war), it and the declaration reflected a growing tension that would henceforth accompany the discussion of rights. Many questions remained to be answered: Should these rights be simple guarantees of legal freedom and equality, or should they encompass more ambitious prospects of social improvement and amelioration? Did rights apply just to legal and political activities, or did they also extend to the social and economic sphere of life?
