THE BILL OF RIGHTS AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN
Two historic declarations of human rights were approved in the summer and fall of 1789, less than a month apart -- France's Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen on August 26, and America's Bill of Rights on September 25. Both drew upon the doctrine of natural rights and other philosophical wellsprings of the Enlightenment at a time when French and American attitudes were close and compatible. But their paths were soon to diverge.
The early Franco-American relationship was complex and not without ironies. At the time of the American Revolution in 1776, France was both the center of Enlightenment thought and home to Europe's most powerful monarchy, the Bourbons, with its resplendent court at Versailles. France nevertheless forged a military alliance with the rebellious American colonies to defeat their mutual enemy, Great Britain. For French critics of the Old Regime, America came to represent, accurately or not, their Enlightenment ideal of freedom from censorship, natural rights, and the rational reform of government.
A decade later, Americans eagerly supported the opening phase of the French Revolution -- the convening of the Estates General, the storming of the Bastille, and the creation of a National Assembly. But the cheering stopped with the execution of Louis XVI and the coming of the Reign of Terror. The conservative Federalist government in Washington was appalled at the violence: "Dragon's teeth have been sown in France and came up monsters," observed the second U.S. president, John Adams.
The emerging political opposition in the United States, however, led by Thomas Jefferson, continued to support French republicanism. "Here is but the chapter of the history of European liberty," wrote Jefferson. The earlier idealization of America by French reformers and revolutionaries had been transformed into the idealization of France by American republicans in the 1790s.
In a letter to Jefferson, the French Enlightenment figure Mme. d'Houdetot wrote: "The characteristic difference between your revolution and ours is that having nothing to destroy, you had nothing to injure." Their revolutions may have differed dramatically, but in the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, France and America produced enduring affirmations of individual rights that have resounded through the years -- from the Polish constitution signed on May 3, 1791, to national constitutions being drafted today.
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