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Just over a month after the storming of the Bastille to kick off the French Revolution, which was totally organized by ambitious middle classes sick of the crown’s mismanagement of their country and not really a popular uprising of hungry poor, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was created. Problem is, it took France a long time to start taking those rights seriously.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 26, 1789--
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of . . . Enlightenment? Revolution rarely happens with a smooth transition. And ideas that maybe we should pull our heads out of our collective sapiens sphincters took a long time to transform from thought into action. Descartes helped kick off the Enlightenment with his “I think, therefore I am” stuff in 1637, and Newton really got things moving with publishing his laws of motion in 1687. The 18th century became a time of promoting liberty, progress, tolerance, separation of church and state, and saying fuck your absolute monarchy, we want a goddamn constitution.
And those ideals generated during the previous century influenced the Declaration. So did an American who had experience with telling royalty to get fucked: Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was the primary author of the American Declaration of Independence, and he was also pals with the Marquis de Lafayette. So Lafayette said hey Tommy help me write this shit.
They were influenced by the idea of “natural rights,” which are kind of bullshit, especially when you bring “God granted” rights into the picture. Humans have no natural right to a fucking thing. Life is a brutal game of survival of the fittest, and if my nature is to kill you and your nature is to lie down and die then it just plain sucks to be you. The only real rights anyone gets are when groups of people get together and say hey this is how shit gon’ be and we’re making laws that say so and if you don’t follow the law we’ll punish your ass. Then white cops shoot unarmed Black people and no one gets punished but at least it was a nice idea, right?
Where was I? Oh, yeah. France, on August 26, 1789. That’s when the Declaration was adopted by the National Constituent Assembly, which was an interim government that formed after the revolutionaries said fuck the king and started chopping off heads. The Declaration said all that lofty shit about how we’re born free and have equal rights don’t oppress me or steal my shit, bro. Also, that my freedom to swing my fist ends at your nose kind of stuff. Plus a bunch of other shit. But it only applied to dudes, and slavery was still okay.
Of course, it was several decades before any of these ideals became anything close to reality for the typical French citizen.
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