Declaration Des Droits De Lhomme Et Du Citoyen Par M Mounier

Complete catalogue and index of one of the largest collections of its kind of French Revolutionary and Napoleonic newspapers pamphlets and official publications covering the years 1789-1815. Over 20,000 listings are preceded by an introduction giving a history of the collection, a survey of other notable French Revolution collections, and a biographical essay on William S. Maclure. William S. Maclure (1763-1840) was a wealthy Philadelphia merchant, a radical social reformer, and our first scientific geologist. His huge collection of French Revolutionary publications is one of the greatest libraries of its kind to be formed during the period of the Revolution. Maclure bestowed the collection on the Philadelphia Academy of the Natural Sciences in 1821, and the Academy in turn gave the collection to the Historical Society of Philadelphia, In 1949 it was acquired by the University of Pennsylvania.

“The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789” is the French Revolution’s best known utterance. By 1789, to be sure, England looked proudly back to the Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, and a bill of rights, and even the young American Declaration of Independence and the individual states’ various declarations and bills of rights preceded the French Declaration. But the French deputies of the National Assembly tried hard, in the words of one of their number, not to receive lessons from others but rather “to give them” to the rest of the world, to proclaim not the rights of Frenchmen, but those “for all times and nations.” The chapters in this book treat mainly the origins of the Declaration in the political thought and practice of the preceding three centuries that Tocqueville designated the “Old Regime.” Among the topics covered are privileged corporations; the events of the three months preceding the Declaration; blacks, Jews, and women; the Assembly’s debates on the Declaration; the influence of sixteenth-century notions of sovereignty and the separation of powers; the rights of the accused in legal practices and political trials from 1716 to 1789; the natural rights to freedom of religion; and the monarchy’s “feudal” exploitation of the royal domain.

Bentham's writings for the French Revolution were dominated by the themes of rights, representation, and reform. In 'Nonsense upon Stilts' (hitherto known as 'Anarchical Fallacies'), the most devastating attack on the theory of natural rights ever written, he argued that natural rights provided an unsuitable basis for stable legal and political arrangements. In discussing the nature of representation he produced the earliest utilitarian justification of political equality and representative democracy, even recommending women's suffrage.