Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Department of History

Seminar Reading: Week 7

Inventing Human Rights

NOTE: This seminar will meet in Week 8. You have a choice to attend either of the following sessions

To be held in Week 8

Mon 10-12 in A0.14 (Social Sciences Building)

Mon 12-2 also in A0.14 (Social Sciences Building)

One of the most indelible achievements of the French Revolution was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. French revolutionaries would redraft the document in 1793 and 1795. Despite their belief that rights were 'natural', they clearly could not agree on what 'nature' meant to prescribe. They disagreed over whether rights should entail duties and whether rights should extend to socioeconomic needs and wants. Were rights 'negative' -- meaning that they should define what the state and others cannot do to the individual? (Freedom from) Or should rights specify positive powers and entitlements? (Freedom to). Who should have rights: did they extend to women, religious minorities and blacks in the colony of Saint Domingue, where slavery existed? Many of the debates over human rights in the French Revolution still persist today.

Core primary reading

abbé Sieyès, 'What is the Third Estate?', in Mason and Rizzo, FRDC, pp. 51-55

The below are found in Mason & Rizzo, FRDC

* Declarations of Rights

1789 (doc. 21)

1793 (doc. 53)

1795 (doc. 71)

* Olympe de Gouges, ‘Declaration of the Rights of Women’ (doc. 24)

 

Core secondary reading

Dan Edelstein, On the Spirit of Rights (2019), chapter 7, pp. 172-193.

Charles Walton, 'Who Pays? Social Rights and the French Revolution', in S. Jensen and C. Walton (eds.), Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History (2022), chapter 4, pp. 63-81.

 

Background

Popkin, Short History of French Revolution, ch. 3-4.

 

Questions

1. Compare the three rights declarations and identify differences. What do those differences suggest about political tensions in the Revolution?

2. How did nature and natural rights figure in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in the French Revolution? If rights were natural and self-evident, why did revolutionaries keep changing them?

3. Why did French revolutionaries -- and why have historians -- neglected social rights? What are they and what explains their precarious legitimacy?

4. Does the politics over international human rights in the UK today have any resonance with the politics of rights during the French Revolution?

 

Further primary reading

 

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1791)

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)

 

Further secondary reading

 

  • K. Baker, ‘The Idea of a Declaration of RightsLink opens in a new window’, in D. Van Kley (ed.), The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and The Declaration of the Rights of 1789 (1994), 154-196.
  • L. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (2006) [We will read this for the 'Emotions' week].
  • G. Bossenga, ‘Rights and Citizens in the Old Regime’, French Historical Studies 20: 2 (1997), pp. 217-243.
  • M. Fitzsimmons, ‘The Principles of 1789’ in P. McPhee (ed.), A Companion to the French Revolution (2013), 75-90.
  • L. Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (2006), ch. 1 ‘Insurrection and the Language of Rights’, pp. 1-30.
  • Marcel Gauchet, ‘Rights of Man’ in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Harvard: 1989). For those who read French, see his La Révolution des droits de l’homme (Gallimard, 1989).
  • Wasserstrom et al (eds.), Human Rights in Revolution (Lantham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).
  • Friedrich von Gentz, The origin and principles of the American Revolution, compared with the origin and principles of the French Revolution. Translated from the German of ... by an American gentleman (1800) [available through library’s database: Historical Texts (JISC)]
  • Thomas Paine, Rights of Man; widely available online.For a good critical edition, see the one edited by Mark Philp (Oxford, 2009).
  • Jeremy Bentham, ‘Nonsense Upon Stilts…’ in Philip Schofield et. al (ed.), Rights, Representation and Reform: 'Nonsense Upon Stilts' and Other Writings on the French Revolution (New York: OUP, 2002), 317-402.
  • Dale Van Kley (ed.), The French Idea of Freedom The Old Regime and the Declaration of the Rights of 1789 (Stanford: 1994).
  • David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston, 2007).
  • Jeremy Carroza, ‘From Conquest to Constitutions: Retrieving a Latin American Tradition of the Idea of Human Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly no. 25 (2003), 281-313.
  • Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton: 2000).
  • Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Cornell, 1988).
  • Olwen Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto: 1999).
  • Jean-Pierre Gross, Fair Shares for All: Jacobin Egalitarianism in Practice (Cambridge, 1997).
  • Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago, 2008).
  • Dan Edelstein, On the Spirit of Rights (Chicago, 2019)
  • Mark Philp, Thomas Paine (Oxford, 2007)
  • Joannes Innes and Mark Philp (eds.), Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750-1850 (Oxford, 2013).
  • W. Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The abbé Sieyès and What is the Third Estate? (1994), esp. ch. 5 ‘What is a Citizen?: The Denial of Political Equality’
  • Charles Walton, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech (Oxford, 2009).
  • Charles Walton, 'Why the Neglect? Social Rights and French Revolutionary Historiography', French History 33: 4 (Dec 2019), 1-17.
  • Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge, 2010). Compare this interpretation of slave abolition with L. Dubois’s (above).
  • Philipp Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriotis: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), especially chapter 1, which corresponds to the article below as well:
  • Philipp Ziesche, 'Exporting American Revolutions: Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Jefferson, and the National Struggle for Universal Rights in Revolutionary France', Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 26 (Fall 2006), 419-447 (same as Chapter 1 in above book).