ABSTRACT
Article 1 of the French 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen states that ‘[a]ll men are born and remain free and equal in rights’ (L’an 1 198).1
Is it not obvious that French revolutionary human rights are characterized by their ‘universalism’ (Ishay 4) or by their ‘unqualified moral universalism’ (Israel, Democratic Enlightenment 937)? Does the phrasing of article 1 not prove that the 1789 Declaration describes ‘universal human rights’ (Hunt 17) and that there is a ‘direct echo’ between the 1789 text and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Sliwinski 17-18)? If eighteenth-century men and women did not always actually experience this universal equality, is it not because the declaration should be read as ‘prescriptive’ rather than ‘descriptive’ (Douzinas 10)? Put differently: Even if they were not always applied, were the universal principles not in the 1789 Declaration, and is it not precisely these universal principles that make the Declaration a crucial document in the history of human rights?
