{"id":279,"date":"2012-09-22T16:19:04","date_gmt":"2012-09-22T20:19:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/?p=279"},"modified":"2012-09-22T16:19:04","modified_gmt":"2012-09-22T20:19:04","slug":"differences-between-american-and-french-revolutionary-documents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/2012\/09\/22\/differences-between-american-and-french-revolutionary-documents\/","title":{"rendered":"Differences Between American and French Revolutionary Documents"},"content":{"rendered":"

By the late eighteenth century, America and France had developed a politically and socially symbiotic relationship.\u00a0 It was the tail end of the enlightenment, and France\u2019s famous Encyclop\u00e9die <\/em>had been published and read by thousands European and American citizens.\u00a0 This massive set of books contained subtextual political jabs and criticisms hidden in works from many famous philosophers.\u00a0 Their revolutionary ideas, such as Voltaire\u2019s separation of church and state and Montesquieu\u2019s separation of powers had heavy influences on their own country, as well as on the American colonists, who were becoming increasingly unwilling to cooperate with their mother country, Britain.\u00a0 Although each country\u2019s revolutionary documents (America\u2019s Declaration of Independence<\/em> and France\u2019s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen<\/em>) were written in retaliation against oppressive governments, they were written to achieve different goals.\u00a0 The former was written to highlight mankind’s right to institute a new government when its current one is corrupt, whereas the latter was written to highlight and stress the importance of inalienable and universal human rights.<\/p>\n

Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence<\/em> to unify the colonies and persuade Britain to renounce its sovereignty over America.\u00a0 The piece declares that it is the sole job of a government to protect the basic rights of man\u2014including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness\u2014 and if it fails, it is the people\u2019s right to institute a new government.\u00a0 It then lists the most prominent ways in which the British King is governing his colonies tyrannically, and urges the people of the thirteen American states to unify and forcefully emancipate themselves from Great Britain completely, thus beginning the American Revolution.<\/p>\n

France\u2019s National Assembly wrote its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen<\/em> in a similar context: a time in which over ninety percent of French citizens were being underrepresented and mistreated by their government.\u00a0 Also a precursor to a revolution, this document stressed the basic rights of every man, which should be unanimously recognized and respected.\u00a0 It lists seventeen human rights, such as liberty, security, and resistance of oppression.<\/p>\n

Although they have more similarities than differences, each document was written to inspire social and political change.\u00a0 Each group felt that its rights were being infringed upon, and the respective declarations of France and America illustrate their ideas of what they, as nations and as people, deserve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By the late eighteenth century, America and France had developed a politically and socially symbiotic relationship.\u00a0 It was the tail end of the enlightenment, and France\u2019s famous Encyclop\u00e9die had been published and read by thousands European and American citizens.\u00a0 This … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37387],"tags":[67960,54159,2588,67965],"class_list":["post-279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fys","tag-compare-and-contrast","tag-declaration-of-independence","tag-human-rights","tag-revolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}