Paper Summary:

This paper explains that, unlike the United States' Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of Rights was written first, as a statement to the French people of the supreme guarantee of rights and as a symbol of liberty and egalitarianism, which was modeled after the beliefs of the American Constitution. The author points out that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen ensured freedom to a society under absolute rule and outlined the basic fundamental principles enjoyed by a free society: No longer is the power invested in the king but in the people. The paper stresses that the National Assembly disjoined politics and religion because they considered the Catholic Church to be an enemy of liberty, a power that would try to revoke what the Declaration had just guaranteed.

From the Paper:

"In declaring sovereignty for the French, the declaration was a loose interpretation of what America had scripted fifteen years earlier. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, to break colonial allegiance with Great Britain. The document asserts the right to be free and independent states, where under a fair government there is a promise for man's entitlement to independence. Such beliefs have a direct correlation with what the French conveyed in their declaration. Jefferson wrote, "...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" (Brophy 190). This line is almost identical to the one found in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen."

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