Whom Did the “Rights of Man” Actually Include?

Geoffrey Chen

The Making of the Modern World: Thirty Lectures on Nineteenth-Century European History · Article 3

In August 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen proclaimed that human beings were born free and equal in rights, sovereignty belonged to the nation, and law should express the general will. The reach of these principles greatly exceeded the institutions of contemporary France. Yet the society that issued them still reserved political participation chiefly for men, derived colonial wealth from enslaved labour, and treated property as an important sign of social independence.

‘Include’ therefore carries two meanings that must be kept separate. The Declaration used universal language to describe the possessor of natural rights; revolutionary laws decided who could vote, hold office, marry, inherit, own property or be free. A human subject open in principle became a citizen bounded in practice. It does not follow that universalism was simply a fraud, nor that every later victory for equality was already contained in 1789. A more exact judgement is that the Declaration established both an exclusionary political order and a standard with which excluded people could challenge that order.

The institutional distance between ‘man’ and ‘citizen’

The Declaration protected liberty, security, property and resistance to oppression. It prohibited detention except under law and included opinion and religious belief within freedom. Its immediate target was the Old Regime's allocation of legal standing by estate. Noble and commoner should no longer face different public laws because of birth; taxation and access to office should follow common rules.

The Constituent Assembly nevertheless distinguished ‘active’ from ‘passive’ citizens. Only French men of qualifying age who paid a specified amount of direct tax could take part in elections, while a higher property threshold restricted eligibility for office. Everyone might deserve civil protection without everyone being trusted to share in making law. Servants, poor men and women were among those deemed dependent on others and therefore unable to form an autonomous political judgement.

This distinction was not merely an awkward pause between universal principle and naked prejudice. It drew upon an influential republican idea that political will required material independence. The difficulty was that dependence produced by society became a reason for withholding political voice. Property owners were better able to protect property because they could speak; people without property continued to lack power over the rules because their circumstances made them ‘dependent’.

Women entered the Revolution without entering full citizenship

Women were not spectators. They took part in subsistence protests and the October 1789 march to Versailles, petitioned, published, formed clubs and attended political galleries. Household responsibility made the price of food, wages and supply inherently political. Revolution also altered family law: marriage became a civil contract, divorce was legalised for a time, and daughters gained greater equality in inheritance. These were consequential changes.

Electoral and official citizenship nevertheless remained presumptively male. Revolutionaries frequently cast the male citizen as the rational actor of the public sphere and the woman as a republican mother: responsible for educating future citizens without exercising sovereignty herself. Olympe de Gouges's 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen followed the architecture of the 1789 text precisely to make the inconsistency visible. If rights arose from common humanity, how could sex cancel political right?

De Gouges did not represent every woman, and her execution cannot be reduced to punishment for feminism; she was caught in a broader revolutionary struggle. Her text is nevertheless clear evidence that contemporaries already understood how universal grammar could be turned against male monopoly. The closure of women's political clubs in 1793 made formal politics more explicitly masculine. Women were included as persons under law and members of the nation, but not as equal authors of sovereign power.

The colonies imposed the severest test of universality

France's Caribbean colonies, above all Saint-Domingue, produced sugar and coffee through the forced labour of enslaved Africans. White colonists, free people of colour and enslaved people occupied radically different legal positions. Once the principles of 1789 crossed the Atlantic, these groups made competing claims in the language of rights. White planters demanded local autonomy while generally defending slavery; propertied free men of colour demanded racial equality; enslaved people carried liberty to its most uncompromising meaning through action.

The slave uprising that began in Saint-Domingue in 1791 was not a passive echo of Parisian ideas. It arose from the violence of the plantation regime, African and Caribbean political cultures, organisation and war, while exploiting conflicts within the revolutionary empire. France's abolition of colonial slavery in 1794 resulted from the interaction of universal claims, military emergency and Black revolutionary power. Napoleon's restoration of slavery in 1802 showed that principle would not automatically defeat imperial interest. Haitian revolutionaries ultimately defeated the attempted restoration through independence.

The Declaration did not expressly write racial exclusion into its articles, but it was proclaimed by a slaveholding empire. Silence therefore had institutional consequences. Only by placing Paris, the colonies and enslaved actors in the same history can we see that the scope of ‘man’ was not settled once in a document. It was forced open through Atlantic conflict.

This Atlantic perspective also prevents a comforting story in which metropolitan France generously bestowed freedom on passive recipients. Colonial assemblies, free-coloured activists, enslaved insurgents, commissioners and armies altered what decisions were possible in Paris. Political agency moved in several directions across the ocean. The universal claim acquired substance through struggles that its metropolitan authors neither designed nor controlled.

It also changed France itself. Decisions presented as national legislation were tested by subjects far beyond metropolitan electoral society. Empire was not a distant exception to the history of revolutionary citizenship; it was one of the places where that citizenship's meaning was decided.

Property protected against arbitrary power and limited participation

There were compelling historical reasons to classify property as a natural and inviolable right. Arbitrary seizure, seigneurial claims and uncertain jurisdiction had tied secure possession to personal freedom. For peasants, keeping land and national property acquired during the Revolution provided a practical release from older hierarchies. For commercial society, contract and ownership supported credit and exchange.

Property was not socially neutral, however. Connecting electoral qualification to taxation converted economic position into political capacity. Employer and worker were equally free to contract in formal law while possessing unequal bargaining power. The Le Chapelier Law of 1791 attacked occupational corporations and workers' combinations. It expressed revolutionary preference for individual liberty and a unified market, but weakened collective action by labourers. Formal equality abolished privileges of estate without eliminating dependence created by wealth.

This does not prove that property and human rights are necessarily enemies. It shows that liberty has different dimensions: protection from government, command of resources needed for independence, and participation in collective decisions. The Revolution transformed the first while distributing the latter two very unevenly.

Religion, identity and the boundary of the nation

The rights debate also concerned religious identity inside the new nation. Revolution removed public privilege grounded in the Catholic estate and eventually extended citizenship to Protestants and Jews. This was a major step in releasing persons from inherited corporate standing. Yet emancipation could carry an assimilating logic: the state accepted equal individuals more readily than autonomous communities maintaining public difference.

Nationality drew another boundary. The Declaration spoke of human rights, but French institutions enforced them. Foreigners, colonial inhabitants and those later classified as enemies of the nation did not receive identical protection. Universal rights require concrete institutions, while institutions always possess a jurisdiction. One of the enduring problems of modern human-rights history begins there.

Intellectual history: why universal principles exceed their authors

Natural-rights language located legitimacy in being human rather than in membership of an estate. The idea of national sovereignty added that people subject to law should participate in authoring it. Combined, the two generated pressure. If rights were universal, why should only independent men constitute the political people? If sovereignty belonged to the nation, were enslaved colonial people outside it?

Historical analysis must distinguish textual meaning, authorial intention and subsequent use. Many deputies in 1789 probably did not envisage women's suffrage or a Black republic: evidence about intention. The Declaration's general propositions did not justify each exclusion and could logically challenge them: a feature of the text. Women, free people of colour, abolitionists and Haitian revolutionaries actually deployed rights language: historical effect. These are related, but they are not identical claims.

Whom, then, did the ‘Rights of Man’ include? In its first political operation, the Declaration treated the independent, propertied French male as the fullest model of citizenship, granting women, the poor and colonial populations unequal and unstable rights. Yet it also disabled birth privilege as a sufficient public justification, compelling exclusion to defend itself in new terms. Its universality was neither innocent nor empty. It was an unfulfilled promise and a public language in which payment could be demanded. Words did not enlarge humanity automatically. People at the margins joined principle to lived experience and forced institutions to confront their contradictions. Rights were not an inheritance delivered complete in 1789, but a continuing contest over belonging.

Sources and further reading

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