m. The American Bill of Rights emerged as a culmination of the protracted revolution against British rule of the American colonies, and it comprised the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution itself was an outgrowth of two earlier governance documents: the Declaration of Independence, written in 1776 as the justification for the revolution, and the Articles of Confederation, which was the basis for government from 1781, when the Americans won the revolution, until 1786, when it appeared that the Confederation of the United States would dissolve into states' rights anarchy. The Constitutional Convention, convened to improve the Articles of Confederation, evolved into the creation of the Constitution, and this later evolved into the process to amend and ratify the Constitution by the addition of the Bill of Rights. The French Bill of Rights was not a culmination but the beginning of a revolution, influenced by the American revolution but also assuming its own character. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, like the American and British counterparts, came about after, not before, political upheaval, with this difference: It was international and not simply national in scale.
The British Bill of Rights, passed by the houses of Parliament in 1689, was styled as an Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown. This Act had the effect of deposing one king and creating the structure under which all succeeding monarchs of England would rule. The immediate effect was that it supplanted the hated Catholic King James II with the Dutch Protestant King William of Orange, who was James's son in law and whom Parliament invited to assume the throne in place of James. The history of England immediately preceding the Act was rife with James's fanatically Catholic persecution of the Protestant majority's rights of religious worship and property. Moreover, James was wedded t...