Declaration of the Rights of Man
Answers
Answer:
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, set by France's National Constituent Assembly in 1789, is a human civil rights document from the French Revolution. The Declaration was drafted by the Abbé Sieyès and the Marquis de Lafayette, in consultation with Thomas Jefferson.
Answer:
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was adopted in 1789 by the French National Constituent Assembly and endorsed, grudgingly, by King Louis XVI. It failed to do any good for the tens of thousands who were guillotined under the Terror.
Even if it had been prayed in aid in what passed for the courts under the revolution the Declaration turned out to apply only to ‘active citizens’, that is to men who were French, at least 25 years old, paid taxes equal to three days work, and could not be defined as servants. More importantly, it did not apply to women at all.
In 1791 Olympe de Gouges, a self–educated butcher’s daughter and playwright, produced a pamphlet entitled, ‘Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizennesses’, which, somewhat sourly, declared that:
‘Man alone has raised his exceptional circumstances to a principle. Bizarre, blind, bloated with science and degenerated - in a century of enlightenment and wisdom - into the crassest ignorance, he wants to command as a despot a sex which is in full possession of its intellectual faculties; he pretends to enjoy the Revolution and to claim his rights to equality in order to say nothing more about it.’
It did not go down well with the revolutionaries; two years later Mme. De Gouges went to the guillotine as ‘an unnatural woman’.