Declaration of the Rights of Man & Citizen

In 1789, when the deputies of the National Assembly in France composed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the goal was to establish once and for all solemn declaration" of the "natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man (Hunt 77)." These rights, universal, immutable and self-evident, were intended to advance the cause of personal liberty and stem the tides of tyranny. In this, the National Assembly was applying the wisdom of the Enlightenment to concrete matters of governance, advancing the legacy of the philosophes that had flourished throughout the 18th century. One such political theorist was Baron de Montesquieu, whose seminal work The Spirit of the Laws lays out a canopy of human laws and social institutions and attempts to explain them. Montesquieu's thinking on matters of liberty, security and democracy are at once conducive and contradictory to the assertions enumerated in the Declaration.

To begin, Montesquieu understood that of the three forms of government republican, monarchical and despotic the republican

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Category: Government - D